Nora Ephron: Everything is Material

NORA EPHRON, born in New York City in 1941 and raised in Beverly Hills, California, never quite got Manhattan out of her system. She was a gifted and successful writer, screenwriter and Hollywood director. She was also a loyal, generous and amusing friend, with a scathing tongue.

Nora Ephron

When Nora was a girl, her mother said ‘Nora, you’re smart and funny and your writing and storytelling go over well.’ She also said ‘Life is hard, relationships can be brutal, and everything is material. Even your worst moments can make art or comedy. ESPECIALLY your worst moments.’

Nora worked her way up from writing for the Wellesley College News, to being a “mail girl” at Newsweek, to being a columnist, a writers of essays, a novelist, a screenwriter and finally a film director.

In 1962, she lived in a “completely dreary” apartment at 110 Sullivan Street in New York and worked for the New York Post. When she later wrote a quite critical piece about Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the Post, Ephron included in her story the line, “I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.”

Then she did it, anyway.

Nora, the young journalist

She was enormously curious about how things worked, and never afraid to explore. Journalism was her first profession, and she never stopped noticing things and asking questions: How do people in a certain industry talk? How do people get what they want from others?

She began writing screenplays and Nora and her writing partner Alice Arlen were nominated for an Oscar for their screenplay for “Silkwood,” which Meryl Streep starred in and Mike Nichols directed.

Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood

Nora would tell people, ‘Screenwriting is all about revision.’

‘When do you stop revising?’ someone would ask, and she’d say, ‘When shooting’s about to begin.’ Screenwriting was a long, involved process, but it reassured her. ‘The movie must be alive because the script keeps improving.’

She married Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, a raffish, once-obscure journalist who’d turned himself into a world-famous journalist and bestselling author because of his and Bob Woodward’s reporting on the Watergate scandal. Woodward and Bernstein had become the most famous print journalists in America because the President of the United States, a highly intelligent man, had seemed determined to screw up, installing a tape recording system in the White House, recording himself and his aides saying all sorts of awful, indefensible things, then preserving the incriminating tapes instead of destroying them.

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

There were people at the Post who thought the reason Carl Bernstein had done such a brilliant job of tracking President Nixon’s bizarre behavior was that Bernstein, too, had a need to screw up. Whenever the trail grew cold, Bernstein could ask himself: “What would I have done here, if I were President Nixon?”

Nora had some misgivings about marrying Carl Bernstein, but he could be sweet when he wanted to be — and he was a great noticer, too. She got swept up a little in his celebrity, they married, and had a child together. When Nora was seven months pregnant with their second child, she discovered Bernstein was having an affair. He hadn’t even bothered to cover his tracks.

She hated being a victim. Be the heroine of your life, she told friends, not a victim. Heartbroken and furious, she fell back on the childhood lesson: “Everything is material.” So she wrote “Heartburn,” a novel about being cheated on, and it became a movie.

The making of the film version of “Heartburn” was a replay of “Silkwood”: Nora wrote the screenplay, Mike Nichols directed and Meryl Streep played the female lead. Nora liked to say, “I recommend having Meryl Streep play you.” She’d say, “If your husband’s cheating on you with a carhop, if you get rear-ended in a parking lot, if the dingo eats your baby, call Meryl. She plays all of us better than we play ourselves.”

Nora watched carefully as Mike Nichols directed the film of “Heartburn,” and decided ‘I want to direct movies, too.’ She was proud of her screenwriting but aware that, as a screenwriter, you can’t succeed without finding a good director for your work. And you can’t find a good director without finding a way to convince them that the movie is, in some way, about THEM. If you can’t convincingly make that case, no good director will invest 18 months of their life shooting, editing and promoting the movie.

But Nora realized ‘If I could direct my own screenplay, then I wouldn’t have to spend time and psychic energy trying to find a director, and sign them up under false pretenses.’

“This is My Life” (1992), the first movie Ephron directed, was not a hit. Julie Kavner plays an aspiring comedian who moves from the New York suburbs into New York City, playing little comedy clubs and trying to make it, ignoring her children more than is ideal, but it works out in the end because Mom’s much happier.

Nora was careful to make her movie cheaply, so it DID make money — which gave her the chance to direct again. When aspiring directors asked for advice, she always said: ‘Make sure the first time you get real financing, the film makes money.’

Later, she would watch “This is My Life” and say “Why didn’t I move the camera?”

She was hard on herself, and kept learning

When she shot “Sleepless in Seattle,” Tom Hanks noticed that while he and others in the cast and crew were buying lattes at this new place called Starbucks, Nora was buying stock in Starbucks. She sensed this little coffee chain was going to be big.

She could be intimidating, wearing black clothes, tossing off tart remarks. She loved her rent-stabilized apartment at the Apthorp Building at 390 West End Avenue in Manhattan, between 78th and 79th Street. Meryl Streep thought of Nora as the quintessential New Yorker.

Ephron adored food but had a slight build, and was determined to stay slim so she was fanatic about what she would and wouldn’t eat. Steve Martin said: “I watch her eat and I watch me eat — and it’s like a heavenly princess and a barbarian.” She was not a food snob. She loved a great tuna sandwich — or Krispy Kremes, out of the box. She often said her last meal on earth would be a hot dog on a bun — with mustard and Golden’s relish.

Tom Hanks noted that Nora would ask him “What do you think of …?” and as he was responding, he knew Nora might reply “You are insane!” or she might reply “Exactly!” and he was always aware of very much hoping for “Exactly!”

Tom Hanks craved Nora agreeing with him

Nora knew the children of movie actors hate having to share their parents with a movie director over a long, boring film shoot. She could feel the kids’ resentment distracting their parents, and creating a negative vibe around the film. So Nora began to write little scenes for the children to be in, if they wanted.

She shot them quite seriously and told each child, “I can’t promise that your scene will be in the final cut of the movie — but I promise you’ll get a videotape of it that you can always keep.” She enjoyed passing out those videotapes, and sometimes the scene DID end up in the final cut.

She knew that no matter how well she directed, her big movies didn’t make money without the leading actors doing that mysterious magic which only they can do on screen. There wasn’t time for her to develop the entire plot through dialogue; the stars of her movies had to be able to exude emotion, to convey much more than they said, with a grin, a frown, a little squint in the eyes.

Much of their best work is unspoken

When a movie was over, Nora’s stars got fruit trees. Nora told them, with her characteristic mix of boldness and generosity: ‘A man is going to come plant a tree at your house…’ The actor could choose pears or oranges or pomegranates, but they couldn’t opt out of getting a tree; the tree would be planted because Nora loved to give trees as a parting gift.

Small fruit trees were a gift Nora loved to give

In 2012, when she died in New York City of pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, she left behind many people who ached to think what life would be like without Nora. For some, there was a slight relief because she could be so tough on people she cared about.

The journalist Richard Cohen wrote a book about Nora called “She Made Me Laugh.” She had indeed made him laugh, for which he gave her credit.

But Richard Cohen also noted, “She was so charming, so smart, so witty and so sweet that if she turned cold, it was more than an emotional rebuff, it was a failure: You had flunked Nora.”