by Nora Ephron
I’m going to be a newspaper reporter forever
It’s 1963. I’ve written a piece for a parody of the New York Post during a long newspaper strike. The editors of the Post are upset about the parody, but the publisher of the Post is amused. “If they can parody the Post, they can write for it,” she says. “Hire them.” When the strike ends, I’m given a one-week tryout at the Post. The city room is dusty, dingy, and dark. The desks are dilapidated and falling apart. It smells terrible. There aren’t enough phones. The city editor sends me to the Coney Island aquarium to cover the story of two hooded seals who’ve been brought together to mate but have refused to have anything to do with each other. I write a story. I think it’s funny. I turn it in. I hear laughter from the city desk. They think it’s funny too. I am hired permanently. I have never been happier. I have achieved my life’s ambition, and I am twenty-two years old.
I may not be a newspaper reporter forever
One night I go to a bar near the Post with one of my fellow reporters and the managing editor. It’s been raining. After quite a few drinks, the managing editor invites us to his home in Brooklyn Heights. When we get there, he tells me to stand on the stoop in front of the house. There’s an awning over one of the windows. As I step into position, he lowers the awning, and about ten gallons of water drench me from head to toe. He thinks this is hilarious.
My life changes
I write a magazine article about having small breasts. I am now a writer.
What my mother said (2)
I now believe that what my mother meant when she said “Everything is copy” is this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.
I think that’s what she meant.
On the other hand, she may merely have meant, “Everything is copy.”
When she was in the hospital, dying, she said to me, “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes.” It seems to me this is not quite the same as “Everything is copy.”
My mother died of cirrhosis, but the immediate cause of her death was an overdose of sleeping pills administered by my father. At the time this didn’t seem to me to fall under the rubric of “Everything is copy.” Although it did to my sister Amy, and she put it into a novel. Who can blame her?
How she died: my version
My mother is in the hospital. Every day, my father calls and says, this is it, they’re pulling the plug. But there is no plug. My mother comes home. Several days pass. One day my father says, I’m going to give the nurse the night off. Late that night, he calls to tell me my mother has died. The funeral home has already come and taken away her body. I go to their apartment. It’s four in the morning. I sit with my father for a while, and then we both decide to take a nap before the next day begins. My father reaches into the pocket of his bathrobe and pulls out a bottle of sleeping pills. “The doctor gave me these in case I was having trouble sleeping,” he says. “Flush them down the toilet.” I go into the bathroom and flush them down the toilet. The next morning, when my sisters arrive, I tell them about the pills. My sister Amy says to me, “Did you count the pills?”
“No,” I say.
“Duh,” she says.
I was married to him for six years
My first husband is a perfectly nice person, although he’s pathologically attached to his cats. It’s 1972, the height of the women’s movement, and everyone is getting a divorce, even people whose husbands don’t have pathological attachments to their cats. My husband is planning for us to take a photo safari through Africa, and I say to him, “I can’t go on this trip.”
“Why not?” he says.
“Because it’s very expensive and we’re probably going to split up and I’ll feel horribly guilty that you spent all this money taking me to Africa.”
“Don’t be crazy,” my husband says. “I love you and you love me and we’re not getting a divorce and even if we do, you’re the only person I want to go to Africa with. We’re going.”
So we go to Africa. It’s a wonderful trip. When we come back, I tell my husband that I want a divorce. “But I took you to Africa!” he says.
You can’t make this stuff up
I’m working on a magazine story about a woman who was fired from her job as president of Bennington College. I have read a story about her in The New York Times that says she’s been fired—along with her husband, the vice president of Bennington—because of her brave stand against tenure. I suspect her firing has nothing to do with her brave stand against tenure, although I don’t have a clue what the real reason is. I go to Bennington and discover that she has in fact been fired because she’s been having an affair with a professor at Bennington, that they taught a class in Hawthorne together, and that they both wore matching T-shirts in class with scarlet A’s on them. What’s more, I learn that the faculty hated her from the very beginning because she had a party for them and served lukewarm lasagna and unthawed Sara Lee banana cake. I can’t get over this aspect of journalism. I can’t believe how real life never lets you down. I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.
Everything is copy
I’m seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He’s the British ambassador to the United States. I’m not kidding. He happens to be the kind of person who tends to see almost everything in global terms. He suggests lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”
“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”
I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.
I was married to him for two years and eight months
I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”
On the other hand, perhaps you can make this stuff up
So I write a novel. I change my first husband’s cats into hamsters, and I change the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and I give my second husband a beard.
One of the saddest things about divorce
My sister Delia says this, and it’s true. When we were growing up, we used to love to hear the story of how our parents met and fell in love and eloped one summer when they were both camp counselors. It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love.
But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing.
And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.
A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula
Alice Arlen and I have written a script for the movie Silkwood. It’s based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, who worked at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma; she died in a mysterious automobile accident while on her way to meet a New York Times reporter to talk about conditions in the plant. Mike Nichols is going to direct it; he was supposed to direct a Broadway musical instead, but it all fell through because he was betrayed by a close friend who was involved with the show. We will call the close friend Jane Doe for the purposes of this story.
So we all start to work together on the next draft of the script, and Mike keeps suggesting scenes for the movie that involve Karen Silkwood’s being betrayed by a close woman friend. He has a million ideas along these lines, none of which really bear any resemblance t
o what happened to Karen Silkwood but all of which bear a resemblance to what happened between Mike and his friend Jane. I finally say, “Mike, Jane Doe did not kill Karen Silkwood.”
“Yes,” Mike says, “I see what you’re saying. It’s the peninsula story.”
And he tells us the peninsula story:
A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula. The man’s mother comes to stay with them, and the man goes off on a business trip. The woman takes the ferry to the mainland and goes to see her lover. They make love. When they finish, she realizes it’s late, and she gets up, dresses, and rushes to catch the last ferry home. But she misses the boat. She pleads with the ferryboat captain. He tells her he will take her back to the peninsula if she gives him six times the normal fare. But she doesn’t have the money. So she’s forced to walk home, and on the way, she’s raped and killed by a stranger.
And the question is: Who is responsible for her death, and in what order—the woman, the man, the mother, the ferryboat captain, the lover, or the rapist?
The question is a Rorschach, Mike says, and if you ask your friends to answer it, they will all answer differently.
Another lightbulb moment.
This one marks the end of my love affair with journalism and the beginning of my understanding that just about everything is a story.
Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly
“I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.”
From my script for When Harry Met Sally
HARRY
Why don’t you tell me the story of your life?
SALLY
The story of my life?
HARRY
We’ve got eighteen hours to kill before we hit New York.
SALLY
The story of my life isn’t even going to get us out of Chicago. I mean, nothing’s happened to me yet. That’s why I’m going to New York.
HARRY
So something can happen to you?
SALLY
Yes.
HARRY
Like what?
SALLY
Like I’m going to go to journalism school to become a reporter.
HARRY
So you can write about things that happen to other people.
SALLY
That’s one way to look at it.
HARRY
Suppose nothing happens to you? Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anyone, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway?
A guy walks into a restaurant
I’m having dinner at a restaurant with friends. A man I know comes over to the table. He’s a famously nice guy. His marriage broke up at about the same time mine did. He says, “How can I find you?”
We can’t do everything
I’m sitting in a small screening room waiting for a movie to begin. The room fills up. There aren’t enough seats. People are bunching up in the aisles and looking around helplessly. I’m next to my friend Bob Gottlieb, watching all this. The director of the movie decides to solve the problem by asking all the children at the screening to share seats. I watch in mounting frustration. Finally, I say to Bob, “It’s really very simple. Someone should go get some folding chairs and set them up in the aisles.”
Bob looks at me. “Nora,” he says, “we can’t do everything.”
My brain clears in an amazing way.
Nora. We can’t do everything.
I have been given the secret of life.
Although it’s probably a little late.
And by the way
The other day I bought a red coat, on sale. But I haven’t worn it yet.
The Lost Strudel or Le Strudel Perdu
Food vanishes.
I don’t mean food as habit, food as memory, food as biography, food as metaphor, food as regret, food as love, or food as in those famous madeleines people like me are constantly referring to as if they’ve read Proust, which in most cases they haven’t. I mean food as food. Food vanishes.
I’m talking about cabbage strudel, which vanished from Manhattan in about 1982 and which I’ve been searching for these last twenty-three years.
Cabbage strudel is on a long list of things I loved to eat that used to be here and then weren’t, starting with frozen custard; this delectable treat vanished when I was five years old, when my family moved to California, and my life has been a series of little heartbreaks ever since.
The cabbage strudel I’m writing about was sold at an extremely modest Hungarian bakery on Third Avenue called Mrs. Herbst’s. I initially tasted it in 1968, and I don’t want to be sentimental about it except to say that it’s almost the only thing I remember about my first marriage. Cabbage strudel looks like apple strudel but it’s not a dessert; it’s more like a pirozhok, the meat-stuffed puff pastry that was a specialty of the Russian Tea Room, which also vanished. It’s served with soup, or with a main course like pot roast or roast pheasant (not that I’ve ever made roast pheasant, but no question cabbage strudel would be delicious with it). It has a buttery, flaky, crispy strudel crust made of phyllo (the art of which I plan to master in my next life, when I will also read Proust past the first chapter), with a moist filling of sautéed cabbage that’s simultaneously sweet, savory, and completely unexpected, like all good things. Once upon a time I ate quite a lot of cabbage strudel, and then I sort of forgot about it for a while. I think of that period as my own personal temps perdu, and I feel bad about it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it never crossed my mind that my beloved cabbage strudel would not be waiting for me when I was ready to remember it again.
This is New York, of course. The city throws curves. Rents go up. People get old and their children no longer want to run the store. So you find yourself on the East Side looking for Mrs. Herbst’s Hungarian bakery, which was there, has always been there, is a landmark for God’s sake, a fixture of the neighborhood, practically a defining moment of New York life, and it’s vanished and no one even bothered to tell you. It’s sad. Not as sad as things that are truly sad, I’ll grant you that, but sad nonetheless. On the other hand, the full blow is mitigated somewhat by the possibility that somewhere, somehow, you’ll find the lost strudel, or be able to replicate it. And so, at first, you hope. And then, you hope against hope. And then finally, you lose hope. And there you have it: the three stages of grief when it comes to lost food.
The strudel was not to be found. I spent hours on the Internet looking for a recipe, but nothing seemed like the exact cabbage strudel I’d lost. At a cocktail party, I lunged pathetically at a man named Peter Herbst, a magazine editor who my husband had led me to believe was a relative of the Herbst strudel dynasty, but he turned out not to be. I spoke to George Lang, the famous Hungarian restaurateur, who was kind enough to send me a recipe for cabbage strudel, but I tried making it and it just wasn’t the same. (The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.)
About two years ago, when I had landed in what I thought was the slough of despond where cabbage strudel was concerned and could not possibly sink lower, my heart was broken once again: the food writer Ed Levine told me that the strudel I was looking for was available, by special order only, at a Hungarian bakery named Andre’s in Rego Park, Queens. Ed hadn’t actually sampled it himself, but he assured me that all I had to do was call Andre and he’d make it for me. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately called Andre. I dropped Ed Levine’s name so hard you could hear it in New Jersey. I said that Ed had told me Andre would make cabbage strudel if I ordered it, so I was calling to order it. I was prepared to order a gross of cabbage strudels if necessary. Guess what? Andre didn’t care about Ed Levine or me. He refus
ed to make it. He said he was way too busy making other kinds of strudel. So that was that.
But it wasn’t.
This week, I heard from Ed Levine again. He e-mailed to say that Andre’s Hungarian bakery had opened a branch in Manhattan, on Second Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street. It was selling cabbage strudel over the counter. You didn’t even have to order it, it was sitting right there in the bakery case. Ed Levine had eaten a piece of it. “Now I understand why you’ve been raving about cabbage strudel all this time,” he wrote.
The next day my husband and I walked over to Andre’s. It was a beautiful winter day in New York—or my idea of a beautiful winter day, in that you barely needed a coat. We found the bakery, which is also a café, went inside and ordered the cabbage strudel, heated up. It arrived. I lifted a forkful to my lips and tasted it.
