by Nora Ephron
Journalism: A Love Story
What I remember is that there was a vocational day during my freshman year in high school, and you had to choose which vocation you wanted to learn about. I chose journalism. I have no idea why. Part of the reason must have had to do with Lois Lane, and part with a wonderful book I’d been given one Christmas, called A Treasury of Great Reporting. The journalist who spoke at the vocational event was a woman sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times. She was very charming, and she mentioned in the course of her talk that there were very few women in the newspaper business. As I listened to her, I suddenly realized that I desperately wanted to be a journalist and that being a journalist was probably a good way to meet men.
So I can’t remember which came first—wanting to be a journalist or wanting to date a journalist. The two thoughts were completely smashed up together.
I worked on the school newspaper in high school and college, and a week before graduating from Wellesley in 1962 I found a job in New York City. I’d gone to an employment agency on West Forty-second Street. I told the woman there that I wanted to be a journalist, and she said, “How would you like to work at Newsweek magazine?” and I said fine. She picked up the phone, made an appointment for me, and sent me right over to the Newsweek Building, at 444 Madison Avenue.
The man who interviewed me asked why I wanted to work at Newsweek. I think I was supposed to say something like, “Because it’s such an important magazine,” but I had no real feelings about the magazine one way or another. I had barely read Newsweek; in those days, it was a sorry second to Time. So I responded by saying that I wanted to work there because I hoped to become a writer. I was quickly assured that women didn’t become writers at Newsweek. It would never have crossed my mind to object, or to say, “You’re going to turn out to be wrong about me.” It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule. I was hired as a mail girl, for $55 a week.
I’d found an apartment with a college friend at 110 Sullivan Street, a horrible brand-new white-brick building between Spring and Prince. The rent was $160 a month, with the first two months free. The real estate broker assured us that the South Village was a coming neighborhood, on the verge of being red-hot. This turned out not to be true for at least twenty years, by which time the area was called SoHo, and I was long gone. Anyway, I packed up a rental car on graduation day and set off to New York. I got lost only once—I had no idea you weren’t supposed to take the George Washington Bridge to get to Manhattan. I remember being absolutely terrified when I realized that I was accidentally on the way to New Jersey and might never find a way to make a U-turn; I would drive south forever and never reach the city I’d dreamed of getting back to ever since I was five, when my parents had thoughtlessly forced me to move to California.
When I finally got to Sullivan Street, I discovered that the Festival of St. Anthony was taking place. There was no parking on the block—they were frying zeppole in front of my apartment. I’d never heard of zeppole. I was thrilled. I thought the street fair would be there for months, and I could eat all the cotton candy I’d ever wanted. Of course it was gone the next week.
There were no mail boys at Newsweek, only mail girls. If you were a college graduate (like me) who had worked on your college newspaper (like me) and you were a girl (like me), they hired you as a mail girl. If you were a boy (unlike me) with exactly the same qualifications, they hired you as a reporter and sent you to a bureau somewhere in America. This was unjust but it was 1962, so it was the way things were.
My job couldn’t have been more prosaic: mail girls delivered the mail. This was a long time ago, when there was a huge amount of mail, and it arrived in large sacks all day long. I was no mere mail girl, though; I was the Elliott girl. This meant that on Friday nights I worked late, delivering copy back and forth from the writers to the editors, one of whom was named Osborn Elliott, until it was very late. We often worked until three in the morning on Friday nights, and then we had to be back at work early Saturday, when the Nation and Foreign departments closed. It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly come to believe that you are living in the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.
There were telex machines in a glass-enclosed area adjacent to the lobby, and one of my jobs was to rip off the telexes, which usually contained dispatches from the reporters in the bureaus, and deliver them to the writers and editors. One night a telex arrived concerning the owner of Newsweek, Philip Graham. I had seen Graham on several occasions. He was a tall, handsome guy’s guy whose photographs never conveyed his physical attractiveness or masculinity; he would walk through the office, his voice booming, cracking jokes and smiling a great white toothy grin. He was in a manic phase of his manic depression, but no one knew this; no one even knew what manic depression was.
Graham had married Katharine Meyer, whose father owned The Washington Post, and he now ran The Post and the publishing empire that controlled Newsweek. But according to the telex, he was in the midst of a crack-up and was having a very public affair with a young woman who worked for Newsweek. He had misbehaved at some event or other and had used the word “fuck” in the course of it all. It was a big deal to say the word “fuck” in that era. This is one of the things that drives me absolutely crazy when I see movies that take place in the fifties and early sixties; people are always saying “fuck” in them. Trust me, no one threw that word around then the way they do now. I’ll tell you something else: they didn’t drink wine then. Nobody knew about wine. I mean, someone did, obviously, but most people drank hard liquor all the way through dinner. Recently I saw a movie in which people were eating take-out pizza in 1948 and it drove me nuts. There was no take-out pizza in 1948. There was barely any pizza, and barely any takeout. These are some of the things I know, and they’re entirely useless, and take up way too much space in my brain.
Philip Graham’s nervous breakdown—which ended finally in his suicide—was constantly under whispered discussion by the editors, and because I read all the telexes and was within earshot, even of whispers, I was riveted. There was a morgue—a library of clippings that was available for research—at Newsweek; morgues are one of the great joys of working in journalism. I went to it and pulled all the clips about Graham and read them between errands. I was fascinated by the story of this wildly attractive man and the rich girl he’d married. Years later, in Kay Graham’s autobiography, I read their letters and realized that they’d once been in love, but as I went through the clips, I couldn’t imagine it. It seemed clear he was an ambitious young man who’d made a calculated match with a millionaire’s daughter. Now the marriage was falling apart, before my very eyes. It was wildly dramatic, and it almost made up for the fact that I was doing entirely menial work.
After a few months, I was promoted to the next stage of girldom at Newsweek: I became a clipper. Being a clipper entailed clipping newspapers from around the country. We all sat at something called the Clip Desk, armed with rip sticks and grease pencils, and we ripped up the country’s newspapers and routed the clips to the relevant departments. For instance, if someone cured cancer in St. Louis, we sent the clipping to the Medicine section. Being a clipper was a horrible job, and to make matters worse, I was good at it. But I learned something: I became familiar with every major newspaper in America. I can’t quite point out what good that did me, but I’m sure it did. Years later, when I got involved with a columnist from The Philadelphia Inquirer, I at least knew what his newspaper looked like.
Three months later, I was promoted again, this time to the highest rung: I became a researcher. “Researcher” was a fancy word—and not all that fancy at that—for “fact-checker,” and that’s pretty much what the job consisted of. I worked in the Nation Department. I was extremely happy to be there. This was not a bad
job six months out of college; what’s more, I’d been a political science major, so I was working in a field I knew something about. There were six writers and six researchers in the department, and we worked from Tuesday to Saturday night, when the magazine closed. For most of the week, none of us did anything. The writers waited for files from the reporters in the bureaus, which didn’t turn up until Thursday or Friday. Then, on Friday afternoon, they all wrote their stories and gave them to us researchers to check. We checked a story by referring to whatever factual material existed; occasionally we made a phone call or did some minor reporting. Newsmagazine writers in those days were famous for using the expression “tk,” which stood for “to come”; they were always writing sentences like, “There are tk lightbulbs in the chandelier in the chamber of the House of Representatives,” and part of your job as a researcher was to find out just how many lightbulbs there were. These tidbits were not so much facts as factoids, but they were the way newsmagazines separated themselves from daily newspapers; the style reached an apotheosis in the work of Theodore H. White, a former Time writer, whose Making of the President books were filled with information about things like President Kennedy’s favorite soup. (Tomato, with a glop of sour cream.) (I ate it for years, as a result.)
At Newsweek, when you had checked the facts and were convinced they were accurate, you underlined the sentence. You were done checking a piece when every word in it had been underlined. One Tuesday morning, we all arrived at work and discovered a gigantic crisis: one of the Nation stories in that week’s Newsweek had been published with a spelling error—Konrad Adenauer’s first name was spelled with a C instead of a K. The blame fell not to the writer (male) who had first misspelled the name, or to the many senior editors (male) and copy editors (male) who had edited the story, but to the two researchers (female) who’d checked it. They had been confronted, and were busy having an argument over which of them had underlined the word “Conrad.” “That is not my underlining,” one of them was saying.
With hindsight, of course, I can see how brilliantly institutionalized the sexism was at Newsweek. For every man, an inferior woman. For every male writer, a female drone. For every flamboyant inventor of a meaningless-but-unknown detail, a young drudge who could be counted on to fill it in. For every executive who erred, an underling to pin it on. But it was way too early in the decade for me to notice that, and besides, I was starting to realize that I was probably never going to be promoted to writer at Newsweek. And by the way, if I ever had been, I have no reason to think I would have been good at it.
The famous 114-day newspaper strike (which wasn’t a strike but a lockout) began in December 1962, and one of its side effects was that several journalists who were locked out by their newspapers came to Newsweek to be writers, temporarily. One of them was Charles Portis, a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune whom I went out with for a while, but that’s not the point (although it’s not entirely beside the point); the point is that Charlie, who was a wonderful writer with a spectacular and entirely eccentric style (he later became a novelist and the author of True Grit), was no good at all at writing the formulaic, voiceless, unbylined stories with strict line counts that Newsweek printed.
By then I had become friends with Victor Navasky. He was the editor of a satirical magazine called Monocle, and it seemed that he knew everyone. He knew important people, and he knew people he made you think were important simply because he knew them. Monocle came out only sporadically, but it hosted a lot of parties, and I met people there who became friends for life, including Victor’s wife, Annie, Calvin Trillin, and John Gregory Dunne. Victor also introduced me to Jane Green, who was an editor at Condé Nast. She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too. She introduced me to my first omelette, my first Brie, and my first vitello tonnato. She used the word “painterly” and tried to explain it to me. She asked me what kind of Jew I was. I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely pleased about it. I had no idea it mattered. (And by the way, it didn’t, really; those days were over.)
I could go on endlessly about the things I learned from Jane. She told me all about de Kooning and took me to the Museum of Modern Art to see pop art and op art. She taught me the difference between Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. She’d gone out with a number of well-known journalists and writers, and long before I met them I knew, because of Jane, a number of intimate details about them. Eventually, I went to bed with one of them and that was the end of my friendship with her, but that’s getting ahead of things.
One day after the newspaper strike was about a month old, Victor called to say he’d managed to raise $10,000 to put out parodies of the New York newspapers, and asked if I would write a parody of Leonard Lyons’ gossip column in the New York Post. I said yes, although I had no idea what to do. I’d met Lyons—he appeared nightly at Sardi’s, where my parents often had dinner when they were in New York—but I’d never really focused on his column. I called my friend Marcia, who’d recently babysat Leonard Lyons’ son’s dogs, and asked her what the deal was with Lyons. She explained to me that the Lyons column was a series of short anecdotes with no point whatsoever. I went upstairs to the morgue at Newsweek and read a few weeks’ worth of Lyons’ columns and wrote the parody. Parodies are very odd things. I’ve written only about a half dozen of them in my life; they come on you like the wind, and you write them almost possessed. It’s as close as a writer gets to acting—it’s almost as if you’re in character for a short time, and then it passes.
The papers Victor produced—the New York Pest and the Dally News—made their way to the newsstands, but they didn’t sell. Newsstand dealers really didn’t understand parodies in those days—this was long before National Lampoon and The Onion—and most of them sent them back to the distributor. But everyone in the business read them. They were funny. The editors of the Post wanted to sue, but the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said, “Don’t be ridiculous. If they can parody the Post they can write for it. Hire them.” So the editors called Victor and Victor called me and asked if I’d be interested in trying out for a job at the Post. Of course I was.
I went down to the Post offices on West Street a few days later. It was a freezing day in February and I got lost trying to find the entrance to the building, which was actually on Washington Street. I took the elevator to the second floor and walked down the long dingy hall and into the city room. I couldn’t imagine I was in the right place. It was a large dusty room with dirty windows looking out at the Hudson, not that you could see anything through the windows. Sitting in a clump of desks in the winter dark was a group of three or four editors. They offered me a reporting tryout as soon as the lockout was over.
There were seven newspapers in New York at that time, and the Post was the least of them, circulation-wise. It had always been a liberal paper, and it had had glory days under an editor named James Wechsler, but those days were over. Still, the paper had a solid base of devoted readers. Seven weeks into the lockout, Dorothy Schiff bolted the Publishers Association and reopened the paper, and I took a two-week leave of absence from Newsweek and began my tryout. I’d prepared by studying the Post, but more important, by being coached by Jane, who’d worked there briefly. She explained everything I needed to know about the paper. She told me that the Post was an afternoon newspaper and the stories in it were known as “overnights”; they were not to be confused with the news stories in the morning papers. They were feature stories; they had a point of view; they were the reason people bought an afternoon paper in addition to a morning paper. You never used a simple “Who What Where Why When and How” lead in an afternoon paper. She also told me that when I got an assignment, never to say, “I don’t understand” or “Where exactly is it?” or “How do I get in touch with them?” Go back to your desk, she said, and figure it out. Pull the clips f
rom the morgue. Look in the telephone book. Look in the crisscross directory. Call your friends. Do anything but ask the editor what to do or how to get there.
I arrived for my tryout expecting the city room to look different from the way it had on that dark winter day I’d first come there, but except for brighter lighting, it didn’t. It was a relic, really—a period set for a 1930s newsroom. The desks were old, the chairs were broken. Everyone smoked, but there were no ashtrays; the burning cigarettes rested on the edges of desks and left dark smudge marks. There were not enough desks to go around, so unless you’d been there for twenty years, you didn’t have your own desk, or even a drawer; finding a place to sit was sort of like musical chairs. The windows were never cleaned. The doors leading into the city room had insets of frosted glass, and they were so dusty that someone had written the word “Philthy” on them with a finger. I couldn’t have cared less. I had spent almost half my life wanting to be a newspaper reporter, and now I had a shot at it.
I had four bylines my first week. I interviewed the actress Tippi Hedren. I went to the Coney Island aquarium to write about two hooded seals that were refusing to mate. I interviewed an Italian film director named Nanni Loy. I covered a murder on West Eighty-second Street. On Friday afternoon, I was offered a permanent job at the paper. One of the reporters took me out for a drink that night, to a bar nearby called the Front Page. That’s what it was called, the Front Page. Later that night, we took a taxi up Madison Avenue and we passed the Newsweek Building. I looked up at the eleventh floor, where the lights were ablaze, and I thought, Up there they are closing next week’s edition of Newsweek, and nobody really gives a damn. It was a stunning revelation.
