by Nora Ephron
Friedman, of course, is not just a columnist for the world’s most powerful newspaper—he’s something else. He’s a panelist. There’s an entire population of panelists today, mostly guys, who make a living in some way or another but whose true career consists of appearing at conferences like this. Some of these panelists are players and some are merely journalists, but for a brief moment, the panel equalizes them all. The panelists perform in front of audiences that include ordinary people, but their real performances are for one another at places like the Foursquare Conference in New York and Herbert Allen’s summer CEO-fest in Sun Valley; the panelists’ job is to put into perspective whatever conventional wisdom happens to apply at the moment, and to validate it.
In fact, these conferences tend to be validating in every way, and it’s no surprise that at the last two I attended, there were representatives from Walmart who appeared onstage and were never once asked about their public-relations difficulties over pesky things like the way they treat their employees. (At both conferences, though, the men from Walmart were cheerfully asked about their company’s policy of requiring executives to fly tourist and sleep two-in-a-room on business trips. Both times the men from Walmart cheerfully replied. Both times the audience cheerfully chuckled along.)
Anyway, it interests me that every time I go to one of these conferences, there’s a piece of absolutely unarguable conventional wisdom about the Internet that seems sooner or later to turn out to be wrong. It’s not easy to be wrong about the Internet—the Internet consists of pretty much everything in the universe. So pretty much anything you say about it is going to turn out to be partly true in some way or other. Nonetheless, it turns out not to be.
For example, when I started going to these conferences, it was a given that the Internet was going to set everyone free; this was back in the day, when we understood the Internet to mean e-mail. The world was full of executives and panelists who took the position that it was much simpler to return twenty e-mails than ten telephone calls. But executives now return hundreds of e-mails every day, and life is not remotely simpler. They return e-mails day and night. They never go home from their e-mail. What’s more, they absorb almost nothing that happens, because the minute it does, their BlackBerrys are blinking at them.
Then the dot-com boom began, and a new piece of conventional wisdom emerged: the dot-coms would make us rich. This was true. They did. And then, suddenly, the dot-coms crashed. So not quite true.
Time for a new piece of conventional wisdom: there was no money in the Internet. This was confounding: it seemed that an amazing, unheard-of, completely mystifying episode had occurred in the history of capitalism. A huge business had emerged, but there was no profit in it. Warren Buffett, who is the king of the panelists, the überpanelist, the second-richest man in America, the sage of Omaha who plays online bridge with the first-richest man in America, gave a speech during this period, and reminded all his acolytes that between 1904 and 1908 there were 240 automobile companies in business; by 1924, 10 of them accounted for 90 percent of revenues. This sentence was quoted as if it had come straight from the Mount, although no one was entirely sure what it meant. Was everyone going to go out of business, or just almost everyone? The guys who’d started in garages would make money, of course—they’d already made money. The guys who’d invented the technology and the software would be rich. But everyone who’d come afterward would be doomed.
Many panels were held on this point, and many panelists were thoughtful and interesting (and puzzled) about the bleak future ahead. But one thing was clear: there was no money in the Internet. And advertising was not the answer: advertising would never work because the people using the Internet would never ever accept it. The Internet was free. The Internet was democratic. The Internet was pure. Ads would never fly. What’s more, in the TiVo world we now live in, the ads would be blocked by Internet users who would never stand for them.
Which brings me to this conference on the Internet I attended last week, where, it will not surprise you to hear, there was a new piece of conventional wisdom: there were billions of dollars to be made in the Internet. It had suddenly become clear that there was a lot of advertising money out there, and all you had to do was provide content so that the ads had something to run alongside of. It crossed my mind that the actual definition of “content” for an Internet company was “something you can run an ad alongside of.” I found this a depressing insight, even though my conviction that all conventional wisdom about the Internet turns out to be untrue rescued me somewhat from a slough of despond on the subject.
And by the way, the world is not flat. There are walls everywhere. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq, where everybody crapped out, not just Tom Friedman.
I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup
The other day I felt a cold coming on. So I decided to have chicken soup to ward off the cold. Nevertheless, I got the cold. This happens all the time: you think you’re getting a cold; you have chicken soup; you get the cold anyway. So is it possible that chicken soup gives you a cold?
Pentimento
I met Lillian Hellman just before her memoir Pentimento was published in 1973. I was working as an editor at Esquire and we were publishing two sections from the book, one of them called “Turtle.” It was about Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. I’d never seen any of Lillian Hellman’s plays, and I’d struggled with Hammett’s mysteries, but I read “Turtle” in galleys before we printed it, and I thought it was the most romantic thing ever written. It’s a story about a vicious snapping turtle that Hellman and Hammett kill. They slice its head off and leave it in the kitchen to be made into soup. It somehow resurrects itself, crawls out the door, and dies in the woods, prompting a long, elliptical, cutthroat debate between Hammett and Hellman about whether the turtle is some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.
I have no excuse for my infatuation with this story. I was not stupid, and I was not particularly young, both of which might be exculpatory. Like many people who read Pentimento, it never crossed my mind that the stories in it were fiction, and the dialogue an inadvertent parody of Hammett’s tough-guy style. I thought it was divine. I immediately called The New York Times Book Review and asked if I could interview Hellman on the occasion of Pentimento’s publication. They said yes.
Hellman was already on her way to her remarkable third act. She’d published An Unfinished Woman, a memoir, which had been a best seller and National Book Award winner, and now with Pentimento she was on the verge of an even bigger best seller. She turned up on talk shows and charmed the hosts as she puffed on her cigarettes and blew smoke. With her two successful books, she’d eradicated the memory of her last few plays, which had been failures. Eventually the most famous story from Pentimento, “Julia,” was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, the brave anti-Nazi spy whom Hellman claimed she’d smuggled $50,000 to in Germany in 1939, in a fur hat. The end of Hellman’s life was a train wreck, but that came later. I wrote a play about it, but that came even later.
Lillian was sixty-eight when I met her, and by any standard, even of the times, she looked at least ten years older. She had never been a beauty, but once she’d been young; now she was wrinkled and close to blind. She had a whiskey voice. She used a cigarette holder and one of those ashtrays that look like beanbags, with a little metal contraption in the middle for snuffing out the ash. Because she could barely see, the question of whether the perilously ever-lengthening ash would ever make it to the ashtray without landing in her lap and setting her on fire provided added suspense to every minute spent with her.
But in some strange way that you will have to take my word for, she was enormously attractive—vibrant, flirtatious, and intimate.
I went to see her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which sat on a rocky beach near Chilmark. The interview is an embarrassment. I did not ask a tough question, and, by the way, I didn’t have one. I was bes
otted. She was the woman who had said to the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s patterns.” She had loved the toughest guy there was, and although he had been drunk for almost their entire time together, he loved her back. Now it turned out she had practically stopped Hitler.
In the afternoon after our first interview, I went for a walk down to Lillian’s beach. I’d been there no more than a few minutes when a man turned up. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was older, gray-haired, fleshy. He asked if I was staying with Lillian. I immediately became nervous. I stood up and made some sort of excuse and walked as quickly as I could over the rocks and back to the house. Lillian was sitting out on the patio in a muumuu.
“How was the beach?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Was anyone else there?”
“A man,” I said.
“Older?” she said. “Fat?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That does it,” she said.
She stood up and took off toward the beach.
A few minutes later she came back. The intruder had vanished. She was in a rage. She was apparently in an ongoing war with the man. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stay off her beach. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stop trying to have conversations with her friends. She would tell him again, if he ever dared to come around and she caught him lurking there. She was furious that he’d disappeared before she’d had the chance to order him away. I couldn’t believe it. She was dying for a fight. She loved confrontation. She was a dramatist and she needed drama. I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.
After my very bad interview with her appeared in The Times, Lillian and I became friends. “Friends” is probably not the right word—I became one of the young people in her life. She wrote me letters all the time, funny letters, mostly typed, and signed Miss Hellman. She sent me recipes. She came to my apartment and I went to hers. It was hard to imagine Lillian had ever been a Communist, I have to say that. I’d grown up knowing a lot of left-wing people in Hollywood who lived well, but there was no trace of the Old Left in Lillian’s apartment at 630 Park Avenue—no Mexican art, for instance, or Ben Shahns; it was furnished in a style that fell somewhere between old WASP and German Jewish—brocade sofas, small tables made of dark wood, oil paintings of the sea, Persian rugs.
She held small dinners for six or eight, and she always had rollicking stories to tell that I now realize were exaggerated, but which at the time were hilarious. She’d had a run-in with a saleswoman one Sunday in the fur department of Bergdorf Goodman. Jason Epstein had set her kitchen on fire making Chinese food. Lillian was fun. She was so much fun. She had a great deep laugh, and she always had a subject for general conversation. “My great-uncle has died,” she said one night at her table, “and the lawyer called to say, ‘He has left you a pleasant sum of money.’ How much money do you think is a pleasant sum of money?” What a game! What a wonderful game! We eventually agreed, after much debate, that $675,000 was our idea of a pleasant sum of money. She said we had guessed it on the nose. Was it true? Was any of it true? Who knows? I listened, enthralled, as she told me how Hammett had once run off with S. J. Perelman’s wife, how Peter Feibleman (to whom she eventually left her home on the Vineyard) had hurt her feelings by trying to make a date with one of her good friends, how she’d once seen a young woman she thought might be Julia’s daughter. This last episode took place on a cliff, as I recall. Lillian and Dashiell Hammett had been standing on a cliff when a young woman came up to her, touched her arm, and ran away. “I’ve always wondered,” she said. “Because she looked so much like Julia.”
Here is a letter she wrote me about delicatessens, my father, Henry Ephron, and me:
I am sitting in P. J. Bernstein’s Delicatessen, a place I visit about once a month. I have long been sentimental about middle-aged ladies who have to use their legs and several of the waitresses, being Jewish, have pounded on this unspoken sympathy. One of them knows that I do something, but she does not know exactly what I do; that doesn’t stop her from kissing me as I order my knockwurst.
A few days ago, when she finished with the kissing, she said, “You know Henry Aarons?” “No,” I said, “I don’t.” She pushed me with that Jewish shoulder-breaking shove. “Sure you do,” she said, “his daughter.” “Maybe,” I said, my shoulder alive. When she returned with the knockwurst, she said, “His daughter, some fine writer, eh?” I said I didn’t know, my shoulder now healed. She said, “What kind of talk is that? You don’t know a fine writer when you hear a fine writer?” “Where does Mr. Aarons live?” I said, hoping to get things going in a better direction. “Do I go there?” She said, “He comes here.” Well, in the next twenty minutes, by the time I had indigestion, it turned out it was your father she was talking about who, by coincidence, two hours later, called me to say that he had seen Julia.
I don’t know why I tell you this, but somewhere, of course, I must wish to make you feel guilty.
It’s a delightful letter, isn’t it? I have a pile of her letters. When I look through them, it all comes back to me—how much I’d loved the early letters, how charmed I’d been, how flattered, how much less charming they began to seem, how burdensome they became, and then, finally, how boring.
The story of love.
Here was a thing Lillian liked to do: the T.L. Most people nowadays don’t know what a T.L. is, but my mother had taught us the expression, although I can’t imagine why.
T.L. stands for Trade Last, and here’s how it works: you call someone up and tell her you have a T.L. for her. This means you’ve heard a compliment about her—and you will repeat it—but only if she first tells you a compliment someone has said about you. In other words, you will pass along a compliment, but only if you trade it last.
This, needless to say, is a strange, ungenerous, and seriously narcissistic way to tell someone a nice thing that has been said about them.
“Miss Ephron,” she would say when she called, “it’s Miss Hellman. I have a T.L. for you.”
The first few times this happened, I was happy to play—the air was full of nice things about Lillian. She was the girl of the year. But as time passed, the calls became practically nightmarish. Everything was starting to catch up with her. She’d written another book, Scoundrel Time, a self-aggrandizing work about her decision not to testify before HUAC, and followed it with her somewhat problematical decision to pose for a Blackglama mink ad. People were talking about her, but not in any way that gave me something to trade. Not that I was hearing much of it—I was living in Washington, and people in Washington don’t talk about anyone who doesn’t live in Washington, and that’s the truth.
But there she was, on the other end of phone, waiting for me to come up with my end of the T.L. My brain would desperately race trying to think of something I could say, anything. I had to be careful, because I didn’t want to get caught in a lie. And if I made up a story, I had to be sure I was quoting a man, because despite her warmth to me, Lillian didn’t care about nice things women said about her. And I couldn’t say, “I’m in Washington, no one here is talking about you.” So I would eventually make something up, usually about how much my husband adored her (which was true). But it never really satisfied her. Because what Lillian really wanted to hear, T.L.-wise, was that I’d just spent the evening with someone like Robert Redford (to pick an imaginary episode out of the air) and that he’d confessed that he desperately wanted to sleep with her.
When my marriage ended and I moved back to New York, Lillian was shocked. She couldn’t imagine why I’d left him. She called and asked me to reconsider. She said I ought to forgive him.
Neither my husband nor I had the remotest interest in our getting back together, but Lillian was determined, and she kept pressing me. Can’t you forgive him? I took the moment to slip out of her life.
I told myself that I could never have gone on with the friendship because of the way Lillian had reacted
to the divorce.
Then, about a year later, a woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a book about her life as a spy before World War II, and it became clear that Hellman had stolen her story. There was no Julia, and Lillian had never saved Europe with her little fur hat.
I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because Lillian had turned out to be a pathological liar.
Then Lillian sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar.
And I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because I could never respect someone who had turned against the First Amendment.
I actually did. I actually told myself that.
But the truth is that any excuse will do when this sort of romance comes to an end. The details are just details. And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends.
If the younger woman is a writer, she eventually writes something about the older woman.
And then years pass.
And she herself gets older.
And there are moments when she would like to apologize—at least for the way it ended.
And this may be one of them.
My Life as a Meat Loaf
A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage.
