by Nora Ephron
By the way, one of the things you hope for when your movie hasn’t gotten good reviews is that some important critic will eventually embrace it and attack all the critics who didn’t like when it opened. I mention this for two reasons: first, so that you’ll understand how truly pathetic you become after a flop; and second, because, astonishingly, this actually happened with a movie I wrote called Heartburn. Heartburn flopped when it opened. A year later, Vincent Canby, the eminent movie critic for The New York Times, saw the movie for the first time and wrote an article calling it a small masterpiece. Those were not his exact words, but close. And he claimed to be mystified that other critics hadn’t seen how good it was. But this was cold comfort, because I couldn’t help wondering if things might have been different had Canby reviewed the movie in the first place. I’m not suggesting that the movie would have sold more tickets, but a good review in The Times cushions the blow.
One of the saddest things about a flop is that even if it turns out to have a healthy afterlife, even if it’s partly redeemed, you remain bruised and hurt by the original experience. Worst of all, you eventually come to agree with the audience, the one that didn’t much like it to begin with. You agree with them, even if it means you’ve abandoned your child.
People who aren’t in the business always wonder if you knew it was going to be a flop. They say things like, “Didn’t they know?” “How could they not have known?” My experience is that you don’t know. You don’t know because you’re invested in the script. You love the cast. You adore the crew. Two or three hundred people have followed you into the wilderness; they’ve committed six months or a year of their lives to an endeavor you’ve made them believe in. It’s your party, you’re the host. You’ve fought hard to improve the on-set catering. You’ve flown in frozen custard from Wisconsin. And everyone is having the most wonderful time.
I now know that when you shoot a movie where the crew is absolutely hysterical with laughter and you are repeatedly told by the sound guy that you are making the funniest movie in history, you may be in trouble.
The first time this happened, I had no idea. The crew loved it. They were on the floor. The camera operator and focus puller were stuffing Kleenexes into their mouths to keep from laughing. And then we cut the movie and it tested poorly. Let me be more explicit: it tested in the way many comedies do, which is that the audience laughed at the jokes and nonetheless didn’t like the movie. This is the moment when you ought to know you are approaching flop, but you don’t; you think you can fix it. After all, they laughed. That must mean something. And there are so many stories about movies that were fixed after they tested badly. There is anecdotal evidence. They fixed Fatal Attraction. Not that your movie is remotely like Fatal Attraction. Still, it gives you hope.
So you recut. And you reshoot.
And it still tests poorly.
At this point, you surely know you’ve got a flop. You’d have to be a fool not to know.
But you don’t. Because you hope. You hope against hope. You hope the critics will like it. Perhaps that will help. You hope the studio will cut a trailer for the movie that will explain the movie to the audience. You spend hours on the phone with the marketing people. You worry over the tracking figures. You pretend to yourself that test screenings don’t matter—although they do, they absolutely do, especially when you make a commercial movie.
And then the movie opens and that’s that. You get bad reviews and no one goes to see it. You may never work again. No one calls. No one mentions it.
But time passes. Life goes on. You’re lucky enough to make another movie.
But that flop sits there, in the history of your life, like a black hole with a wildly powerful magnetic field.
By the way, there are people who have positive things to say about flops. They write books about success through failure and the power of failure. Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from a failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.
My biggest flop was a play I wrote. It got what are known as mixed reviews—which is to say, it got some good reviews, but not in The New York Times. It puttered along for a couple of months, and then it died. It lost its entire investment. It was the best thing I ever wrote, so it was a particularly heartbreaking experience. If I think about it for more than a minute, I start to cry.
Some plays flop but go on to have a life in stock and amateur productions, but not this one. No one performs it anywhere, ever.
You’d think I would have given up hoping that anything good would ever happen to this play, but I haven’t: I sometimes fantasize that when I’m dying, someone who’s in a position to revive it will come to my bedside to say good-bye, and I will say, “Could I ask a favor?” He will say yes. What else can he say? After all, I’m dying. And I will say, “Could you please do a revival of my play?”
How pathetic is that?
Christmas Dinner
We have a traditional Christmas dinner. We’ve been doing it for twenty-two years. There are fourteen people involved—eight parents and six children—and we all get together at Jim and Phoebe’s during Christmas week. For one night a year, we’re a family, a cheerful, makeshift family, a family of friends. We exchange modest presents, we make predictions about events in the coming year, and we eat.
Each of us brings part of the dinner. Maggie brings the hors d’oeuvres. Like all people assigned to bring hors d’oeuvres, Maggie is not really into cooking, but she happens to be an exceptional purchaser of hors d’oeuvres. Jim and Phoebe do the main course because the dinner is at their house. This year they’re cooking a turkey. Ruthie and I were always in charge of desserts. Ruthie’s specialty was a wonderful bread pudding. I can never settle on just one dessert, so I often make three—something chocolate (like a chocolate cream pie), a fruit pie (like a tarte tatin), and a plum pudding that no one ever eats but me. I love making desserts for Christmas dinner, and I have always believed that I make excellent desserts. But now that everything has gone to hell and I’ve been forced to replay the last twenty-two years of Christmas dinners, I realize that the only dessert anyone ate with real enthusiasm was Ruthie’s bread pudding; no one ever said anything complimentary about any of mine. How I could have sat through Christmas dinner all this time and not realized this simple truth is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.
A little over a year ago, Ruthie died. Ruthie was my best friend. She was also Maggie’s best friend and Phoebe’s best friend. We were all devastated. A month after her death, we had our traditional Christmas dinner, but it wasn’t the same without Ruthie—life wasn’t the same, Christmas dinner wasn’t the same, and Ruthie’s bread pudding (which I reproduced, from her recipe) wasn’t the same either. This year, when we opened negotiations about when our Christmas dinner would take place, I told Phoebe that I’d decided I didn’t want to make Ruthie’s bread pudding again because it made me feel even worse about her death than I already did.
Anyway, we settled on a night for the dinner. But then Ruthie’s husband, Stanley, announced that he didn’t want to be there. He said he was too sad. So Phoebe decided to invite another family instead. She asked Walter and Priscilla and their kids to join us. Walter and Priscilla are good friends of ours, but four years ago Priscilla announced that she didn’t like living in New York anymore and was moving, with the children, to England. Priscilla is English and therefore entitled to prefer England to New York; still, it was hard not to take it personally. But she and the kids were coming to Manhattan to join Walter for Christmas, and they accepted the invitation to our Christmas dinner. A few days later Phoebe called to tell me that she’d asked Priscilla to do one of the desserts. I was thunderstruck. I do the desserts. I love doing the desserts. I make excellent desserts. Priscilla hates doing desserts. The only dessert Priscilla ever makes is trifle, and when she serves it she always announces that she hates trifle and never eats it.
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“But she will make her trifle,” I said.
“She won’t make her trifle,” Phoebe said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“I will tell her not to make her trifle,” Phoebe said. “Meanwhile, are you good at mashed potatoes?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Bring mashed potatoes,” Phoebe said, “because Jim and I don’t have any luck with them.”
“Fine,” I said.
Several days passed while I thought about what desserts I would bring to Christmas dinner. I read the new Martha Stewart baking book and found a recipe for cherry pie. I went on the Internet and ordered pie cherries from Wisconsin. I bought the ingredients for the plum pudding that no one eats but me. I was thinking about making a peppermint pie. And then a shocking thing happened: Phoebe e-mailed to say that since I was doing the mashed potatoes, she’d asked Priscilla to make all the desserts. I couldn’t believe it. Stripped of the desserts and downgraded to mashed potatoes? I was a legendary cook—how was this possible? It crossed my mind that Phoebe was using Ruthie’s death to get me to stop making desserts. She’d probably been trying to do this for years; it was only a matter of time before I would be reassigned to hors d’oeuvres, displacing Maggie, who would doubtless be relegated to mixed nuts.
I took a bath in order to contemplate this blow to my self-image.
I got out of the bathtub and wrote an e-mail in reply to Phoebe. It said, simply, “WHAT?” I thought it was understated and brilliant and would get her attention.
Minutes later the phone rang. It was Phoebe. She wasn’t calling about my e-mail at all.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I just got an e-mail from Priscilla in England saying that she’s not making dessert. Instead, Walter has gone to London and bought mince pies. He’s bringing them to New York. I hate mince pies. I absolutely hate them. Didn’t you once make a mince pie that no one ate?”
“It was a raisin pie,” I said. “And I liked it.”
“Mince pies!” Phoebe said. “Who’s going to eat mince pies?”
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“I’ve already done it,” Phoebe said. “I e-mailed her back and told her the mince pies were out of the question and that she should order a Yule log and a coconut cake from Eli’s and just have them delivered to me. Mince pies. Really.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I think we must be talking about the cruelest woman on the planet.”
“Who?” Phoebe said.
“You,” I said. “Why am I not doing the desserts? I liked doing desserts. Last year my peppermint pie was a huge hit.”
“I remember that pie,” Phoebe said.
“This year I ordered cherries from Wisconsin,” I said. “The shipping alone cost fifty-two dollars.”
“If you want to bring dessert, bring dessert,” said Phoebe.
“But we don’t need dessert because there are mince pies and a Yule log—”
“And a coconut cake,” said Phoebe. “We’ve got to have a coconut cake. But you can bring anything else you want.”
I hung up the phone. I was reeling. To make matters worse, I’d already gone out and bought four pints of peppermint stick ice cream for the peppermint pie I was now not going to make unless I wanted to prove that I was the all-time world champion in the can’t-take-a-hint department of life. I stood there, missing Ruthie desperately. If she were alive, none of this would ever have happened. She was the glue, she was the thing that gave us the illusion that we were a family, she was the mother who loved us all so much that we loved one another, she was the spirit of Christmas. Now we were a group of raging siblings; her death had released us all to be the worst possible versions of ourselves.
I went to my computer and pulled up the pictures from the last Christmas we’d all been together. There we were, so happy, crowded together, overlapping. There was Ruthie. She had the most beautiful smile.
The next day, Walter called. He’d just arrived in New York with fourteen mince pies, and he was bringing them to Christmas dinner come hell or high water. “I love mince pie,” he said. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without mince pie.”
I know how he feels.
Ruthie’s Bread and Butter Pudding
5 large eggs
4 egg yolks
1 cup granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 quart whole milk
1 cup heavy cream, plus 1 cup for serving
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Twelve ½-inch-thick slices brioche, crusts removed, buttered generously on one side
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a shallow two-quart baking dish.
Gently beat the eggs, egg yolks, granulated sugar, and salt until thoroughly blended.
Scald the milk and cream in a saucepan over high heat. Don’t boil. When you tip the pan and the mixture spits or makes a sizzling noise, remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. STIR GENTLY, don’t beat, into the egg mixture until blended.
Overlap the bread, butter side up, in the prepared baking dish and pour the egg mixture over the bread. Set in a larger pan with enough hot water to come halfway up the side of the dish. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until the bread is golden-brown and a sharp knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. The bread should be golden and the pudding puffed up. This can be done early in the day. Do not chill.
Before serving, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar and place under the broiler. Don’t walk away; this takes only a minute or so. Or you can use one of those crème brûlée gadgets to brown the sugar.
Serve with a pitcher of heavy cream.
The D Word
The most important thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true. I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.
Of course, there are good divorces, where everything is civil, even friendly. Child support payments arrive. Visitations take place on schedule. Your ex-husband rings the doorbell and stays on the other side of the threshold; he never walks in without knocking and helps himself to the coffee. In my next life I must get one of those divorces.
One good thing I’d like to say about divorce is that it sometimes makes it possible for you to be a much better wife to your next husband because you have a place for your anger; it’s not directed at the person you’re currently with.
Another good thing about divorce is that it makes clear something that marriage obscures, which is that you’re on your own. There’s no power struggle over which of you is going to get up in the middle of the night; you are.
But I can’t think of anything good about divorce as far as the children are concerned. You can’t kid yourself about that, although many people do. They say things like, It’s better for children not to grow up with their parents in an unhappy marriage. But unless the parents are beating each other up, or abusing the children, kids are better off if their parents are together. Children are much too young to shuttle between houses. They’re too young to handle the idea that the two people they love most in the world don’t love each other anymore, if they ever did. They’re too young to understand that all the wishful thinking in the world won’t bring their parents back together. And the newfangled rigmarole of joint custody doesn’t do anything to ease the cold reality: in order to see one parent, the divorced child must walk out on the other.
The best divorce is the kind where there are no children. That was my first divorce. You walk out the door and you never look back. There were cats, cats I was wildly attached to; my husband and I spoke in cat voices. Once the marriage was over, I never thought of the cats again (until I wrote about them in a novel and disguised them as hamsters).
A few
months before my first husband and I broke up, I had a magazine assignment to write about the actors Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom and their fabulous marriage. I went to see them at their Fifth Avenue apartment, and they insisted on being interviewed separately. This should have been some sort of clue. But I was clueless. In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about fifty years old. Anyway, I interviewed the two of them in separate rooms. They seemed very happy. I wrote the piece, I turned it in, the magazine accepted it, they sent me a check, I cashed the check, and a day later, Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom announced they were getting a divorce. I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had they gone forward with a magazine piece about their marriage when they were getting a divorce?
But then my own marriage ended, and about a week later a photographer turned up at my former apartment to take a picture of my husband and me for an article about our kitchen. I wasn’t there, of course. I’d moved out. What’s more, I’d forgotten the appointment. The reporter involved with the article was livid that I hadn’t remembered, hadn’t called, hadn’t told her, and was no doubt angry that I’d agreed to do the interview about my marital kitchen when I had to have known I was getting a divorce. But the truth is you don’t always know you’re getting a divorce. For years, you’re married. Then, one day, the concept of divorce enters your head. It sits there for a while. You lean toward it and then you lean away. You make lists. You calculate how much it will cost. You tote up grievances, and pluses and minuses. You have an affair. You start seeing a shrink. The two of you start seeing a shrink. And then you end the marriage, not because anything in particular happened that was worse than what had happened the day before, but simply because you suddenly have a place to stay while you look for an apartment, or $3,000 your father has unexpectedly given you.
