Profiles JULY 6, 2009 ISSUE
Nora Knows What to Do
The filmmaker foodie pays homage to Julia Child.
BY ARIEL LEVY
Size matters. If you are over six feet tall, solidly built, and female, your height is not a detail. “I mean, it’s like having a clubfoot!” is how Meryl Streep puts it. In Nora Ephron’s new movie, “Julie & Julia,” Streep plays Julia Child—the looming emissary of French cooking, who, upon arriving for the first time at Le Havre, as a “six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian,” feared that France was a nation “where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures,” as Child wrote in her memoir. Child’s tallness was crucial to Streep as she developed the character. “It was a real unusual thing for a woman to be that height, and I think it had an enormous impact,” Streep said. “It was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world into which she was born, in Pasadena, where women went East to school to get a husband.” Julia Child, whose epic contribution to American culture was “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” was a sensuous giant. Who knows who she would have been if she’d come out delicate and married a Republican banker, as her father had expected. We might never have heard of hollandaise.
Nora Ephron came of age three decades after Child, in a house “full of apples and peaches and milk,” in Beverly Hills. Size still mattered. In a 1972 essay called “A Few Words About Breasts,” Ephron wrote, “If I had them, I would have been a completely different person.” Perhaps this is so. If Nora Ephron had been born buxom, what else besides that article might she not have written? Harry might never have met Sally. “Sleepless in Seattle” might mean nothing but Northwestern insomnia.
Ephron is more petite than ever. She is five-six (“or I used to be”), and, at sixty-eight, she is as slight as a sparrow. She loves food, but she eats very, very carefully. (“I watch her eat and I watch me eat and it’s like a heavenly princess and a barbarian,” Steve Martin, Ephron’s friend and the star of one of her early movies, “Mixed Nuts,” says.) “I’ve been in the Zone for a long time,” Ephron informed a group of women who had come to see her speak at the 92nd Street Y a few years ago, “and I’m tired of it.”
When she is sitting, Ephron folds in on herself—she crosses her legs and holds her chin in her hand—and becomes very compact, a little origami of a person. “She was utterly composed,” Ephron’s younger sister Delia Ephron wrote in her novel “Hanging Up,” describing a character she based on Nora. “She kept still, her arms very close to her body, and although she wasn’t tall, she seemed to be looking down at everyone, even when she was sitting.”
Ephron isn’t cold, but she is queenly: a Jewish dame. Recently, she participated in a panel discussion about “The Future of Filmmaking.” After Ephron had unloaded some tart observations, the moderator turned to the actress Anne Hathaway and asked if she had anything to add. “Oh, my God,” Hathaway said. “I was intimidated to get onstage with Nora Ephron. You want me to follow her?”
Because of her ladylike bearing and her extraordinary comic timing, people tend to experience Ephron as jaunty and fresh. That does not mean that they are not often slightly afraid of her, too. “I don’t know if my first impression was just because she seems like the quintessential New Yorker,” Meryl Streep, who met Ephron when they collaborated on “Silkwood,” in 1983, said. “She always wears black and she’s so cool and she always has the perfect bon mot to toss off just effortlessly. I mean, who can be like that? Anyway, I was intimidated.”
“She will ask you a question: ‘Well, what do you think of so-and-so,’ ” Tom Hanks told me. “And I always have a little voice inside me saying, ‘If she doesn’t agree with me, I’m going to be a little crushed.’ Because she might say, ‘You are insane.’ Or she might say, ‘Exactly.’ ” Hanks was the star, with Meg Ryan, of Ephron’s second film, the 1993 hit “Sleepless in Seattle,” which made Ephron famous as a director. She was already famous for a number of things.
Ephron first became well known in the late nineteen-sixties, as a magazine journalist who wrote features about cultural institutions and media celebrities. Ephron’s pieces were vivid and cunning and crackling with her personality; she began an eviscerating profile of Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the New York Post, where she had worked for a time, with the words “I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.” In the early nineteen-seventies, Ephron wrote a column in Esquire about developments in the burgeoning women’s movement. She was the funniest feminist, or pseudofeminist, depending on whom you ask. (Pretty much everyone admits that she was funny.)
Ephron became even more famous in 1976, when she married Carl Bernstein, just a few years after he and Bob Woodward, as reporters for the Washington Post, exposed the Watergate scandal. When Ephron wrote “Heartburn,” a best-selling roman à clef about walking out on Bernstein after discovering that he was having an affair while she was seven months pregnant with their second child, she grew more famous still. Then she was nominated for an Oscar, with Alice Arlen, for their screenplay for “Silkwood,” a film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep.
Next came the film version of “Heartburn,” also with Nichols and Streep; Ephron wrote the screenplay. It took more than five years for Ephron and Bernstein to negotiate the terms of their divorce, and for about half that time the central issue was Bernstein’s demand for script approval on “Heartburn,” in which he was played by Jack Nicholson. Harper’s ran an excerpt of a document entitled “Attachment A to the Marital Separation Agreement between Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein.” A pseudonymous column in Vanity Fair accused Ephron of “indecent exploitation” for making a record that her children could one day read and watch of their parents’ bitter end. (“Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse. It is no contest.”) It is difficult to imagine anyone caring much about a pair of divorced journalists now, but theirs was a different era: Carl and Nora were the Brad and Jen of the early eighties.
In the early nineties, Ephron started directing her own movies. Her most successful since “Sleepless” was “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), another Hanks-Ryan vehicle, loosely based on the Ernst Lubitsch movie “The Shop Around the Corner.” In 2006, Ephron managed the almost impossible feat of becoming an It girl yet again, in her sixties. She published the collection “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” which became a No. 1 best-seller. Remarkably, she enhanced her own glamour by writing about the distinctly dowdy subject of aging. “When we were young . . . the amount of time we spent making ourselves look good bore some correlation to the number of hours we spent having sex (which was, after all, one of the reasons for our spending so much time on grooming). But now that we’re older, whom are we kidding?” The book sold more than a million copies.
“I think people think I am much smarter than I know I am,” Ephron said one afternoon over lunch at Payard, on Lexington Avenue. She was wearing sunglasses and sitting in a corner banquette eating a Cobb salad very slowly, in small, tidy bites. “I have a huge number of friends who’ve managed to change their lives,” she continued, “women way more than men. Certainly in part because so many women of my generation are not the main breadwinners, so they have slightly more flexibility. It’s sort of the silver lining of things not quite being fair: it’s not as big a deal if you say, ‘I’m going to take a salary cut and see if I can be something else. A night-club singer.’ ”
Ephron grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of two screenwriters. “It was so clear there were no women in show business,” she said. “It was so clearly not a place for a person like me.” Female screenwriters, like Ephron’s mother, Phoebe, almost always had a husband they collaborated with, and “woman director” was an oxymoron. Since childhood, Nora Ephron had been “athletic, ambitious, outspoken, competitive,” as she has written. But she was also practical. So when she graduated from Wellesley, in 1962, and went to New York City, her fantasies had settled on becoming Dorothy Parker, not Preston Sturges.
Over the years, she has managed to shoot for a bit of both. About half of Ephron’s movies have been firmly rejected by both critics and audiences, but the other half have become mainstays of their genre. “We always knew when I was at network television that there are certain movies, no matter if they’ve been out for a while and people have seen them already or rented the DVD—if it’s Valentine’s Day and it’s on, you’re going to watch ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ ” Ephron’s friend Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Corporation, says. “You’re going to watch ‘When Harry Met Sally.’ ” For that, Ephron received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, in 1990. These films—along with “You’ve Got Mail”—seem to be in a constant loop on TV, and not just in February: you could probably recite whole chunks of them if you tried. They are deeply comforting comedies, and they have made Ephron, at least by some measures, the most successful female director working in this country.
“We don’t think of things that way and I’m not,” she told me firmly, putting her fork down on the table. “I think Nancy Meyers”—who directed “Something’s Got to Give”—“is more successful. But it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that it just seems like a sad thing to be called.”
Or one could take it as an enormous compliment. “It’s a very male business,” as Ephron herself put it in “Dreams on Spec,” Daniel J. Snyder’s documentary about screenwriters breaking into Hollywood. “Vast portions of it . . . might as well be the United States Army in 1943.” She continued, “Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they’re going to direct has something to do with them, and this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. . . . You look at a list of directors and it’s all boys; it certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, I’m just going to become a director and that’ll make it easier.”
Ephron detests whining: you can acknowledge a problem, but only in the service of solving it. “Nobody really has an easy time getting a movie made,” she said. “And furthermore I can’t stand people complaining. So it’s not a conversation that interests me, do you know? Those endless women-in-film panels. It’s, like, just do it! Just do it. Write something else if this one didn’t get made. It’s my ongoing argument with a whole part of the women’s movement.”
When Ephron finished her salad, she reapplied rose-colored lipstick. She was wearing black pants and a black shirt with a striped scarf, and a Jil Sander jacket, and her makeup and her manicure and her hair were just so. She never does her own hair if she can help it. Instead, twice a week she goes to the beauty parlor to have it washed and blow-dried. “The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming,” she has written. “Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”
“But you’re so good-looking! I don’t know what you’re talking about,” a woman Nora Ephron had never met before said to her as the two of them stood in front of an avalanche of oysters at the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards, the Oscars of the food world. It is possible that the woman was thinking of the title or the content of “I Feel Bad About My Neck” when she said that, or she might have been referring to a comment Ephron made earlier in the evening, when she got onstage to introduce a clip of “Julie & Julia” to the culinary establishment. Ephron approached the lectern and said, “I would like to say to whoever is running the camera: just stay back,” which made everyone laugh.
There could not have been a better audience for the clip that Ephron showed, of Meryl Streep, as Julia Child, zealously mastering the art of onion chopping. Many of the people present at the Beard Awards had known Child, and they were dazzled by Streep’s performance. (“Meryl doesn’t do an imitation of Julia Child,” Mike Nichols told me. “She is Julia Child. Now, we know that’s not possible, but we see it.”) It was one of the more engaging segments of the ceremony, which dragged on for more than three and a half hours. There were awards for the best graphic design for a restaurant, the best newspaper writing about food without recipes, the best cookbook on a single ingredient (fat), the best new restaurant, the best old restaurant, and so on. Everyone was starving. At what felt like four in the morning, one of the hosts, Stanley Tucci—who plays Julia’s husband, Paul Child, in Ephron’s film—begged winners to “just say thanks.”
The theme of the evening was Women in Food, and the dominant color was pink.
“Isn’t this great?” Ephron asked as she made her way to a tasting table where tiny cups of a broth made from coral were being distributed, along with little sea-urchin sandwiches. “I’m going to eat a lot.”
The restaurateur Drew Nieporent came over, a big bear in a tuxedo. “I can’t wait to see the movie!” he said. “I want to do a party for the movie—I will do it wholesale, if you know what I mean. Tell Sir Howard.” He meant Howard Stringer, who is, ultimately, the person in charge of all financial decisions at Sony, the distributor of “Julie & Julia.”
“Julia Child ate at Nobu once,” Nieporent continued. “She’s sitting there, she’s looking at the sushi, she goes like this”—Nieporent mimed falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, laughed, and walked away.
Ephron moved along, stopping to eat something that looked like a slice of glycerin soap. “It’s like grass Jell-O,” she said, swallowing a piece of Charlie Trotter’s Fava Bean and Onion Surprise, and then made her way upstairs to the V.I.P. dinner.
Ephron was seated next to a man named Len, a Washington lawyer, who said he’d done work for Oprah. “You know, we’ve had dinner together,” he told her.
“Did we date?” Ephron replied.
“No,” Len said, and laughed. “In your Carl days. During Bob Woodward’s divorce.”
“Which one?” Ephron asked, and glanced at her menu. “Oh, my God, this is tragic!” she said, realizing that there would not be any beef marrow on mustard croutons making its way to the table. Stanley Tucci was seated across the table, and she asked him, “Stanley, did you already have the beef marrow downstairs?”
“No. I went with the D’Artagnan lady”—the head of a foie-gras-and-meats company. “I had a piece of her duck sausage,” Tucci said. “And then I had a stroke.”
Ephron decided that the only thing to do was to go back downstairs. There were more admirers at the marrow table, a pair of food bloggers. “Have you tried the marrow at Minetta Tavern?” she asked them. “It’s unbelievable. They serve it with crisp bread and it is just extraordinary.”
“Um, I’d need you to get me into Minetta Tavern,” one replied, which made Ephron smile.
She felt that these particular morsels were not as hot as they ought to be, but still she loaded a napkin with half a dozen of them to bring back to Len and the rest of her tablemates.
“I love you, you’re fabulous, I’ve loved you from the beginning,” a woman named Harriet told Ephron before she could make it back. Harriet looked to be in her late sixties. She had a perfect white Louise Brooks bob and she was wearing a low-cut, sequinned Ferragamo outfit. “I listened to the neck book on tape. My daughter was driving back from Madison. I said, ‘Go with Nora!’ How are your kids? They turned out O.K.?”
“Just great,” Ephron said.
“What are you writing now?”
“A play,” Ephron told her.
“I’m a divorce lawyer,” Harriet said. “Which you know from. Well, you did what you had to do, right?” Harriet thought about it for a second, and then said, with real feeling, “What a shit!”
It has been more than a quarter century since “Heartburn” was published. Despite the fact that Ephron has been married for twenty-two of those years to the writer Nick Pileggi, her third husband, she remains the patron saint of women scorned, the poster girl for divorce. Which is ironic. Because in a Nora Ephron movie it’s very easy and painless to break up with someone. In “Sleepless,” Meg Ryan’s character tells her fiancé, “I can’t do this,” long after he has had his proposal accepted, met her parents, set a date for the wedding, planned the menu, given her his mother’s ring, and picked out china. “Annie, I love you,” he replies. “But let’s leave that out of this. I don’t want to be someone that you’re settling for. I don’t want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it.” People tend not to be quite so reasonable and easygoing when you break their hearts and destroy their dreams. Ephron has acknowledged as much. In the director’s commentary for “You’ve Got Mail,” another romantic comedy in which a breakup involves the same level of anguish one generally associates with selecting a flavor of ice cream, Ephron said, “I suppose it’s very rare that this happens, that people break up with one another and it’s such a relief. But we all like to think it’s possible.” People need sarcasm, Ephron seems to think, but they also need fairy tales.
Back at the table, two kinds of red wine and four kinds of white had been served. There was Fiore di Nonno burrata on bulgur crackers with artichokes and green olives. There was Bolinas goat tongue with Meyer-lemon-fenugreek-mint-and-tomato chutney. And there were veal cheeks with a spring-vegetable-and-quinoa salad that the New York chef and restaurateur Lidia Bastianich had concocted for the occasion. Ephron told Bastianich, who was also seated at her table, that she went to one of Bastianich’s restaurants on her first date with Nick Pileggi. “Good, good,” Bastianich said. “And the marriage is O.K.?”
“So far, so good.”
In the car ride home, Ephron said she was pleased that she hadn’t brought her husband to the Beard Awards. “Nick has some insane position about not eating standing up,” she said, and started rummaging through the gift bag from the dinner, which included mojito mix and an in-flight menu from Delta, a Beard sponsor.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a vibrant picture of airplane food. “This looks so delicious. I think we should go directly to J.F.K.”
“I swear to God I’m not doing this to extend my control of this movie,” Ephron said one day to Paul Levin, her post-production supervisor. Levin was setting up a clip for her to watch in a midtown screening room.
“I know you’re not,” Levin said.
“You do not,” she said, and Levin laughed.
“Do you want to see the video master?” he asked her.
“How should I know?” Ephron replied, and Levin laughed some more. She was there to see a scene from the beginning of “Julie & Julia” in which Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci arrive at a restaurant, supposedly in Rouen. Ephron shot it in Paris, and the buildings visible on the way into the restaurant looked too fresh and new, so they had been digitally dirtied up. But it was overdone. “You know, most people are seeing the credits at that moment, and not the too much dirt on the buildings,” Ephron said, with a shrug. “But it bothered me.”
Levin played the clip and Ephron was pleased with the grime reduction.
“It still looks a little bit like a set,” she whispered in the dark. “But that’s Paris. What can you do?”
Streep and Tucci were now inside the restaurant, and on the screen was a closeup of the golden sole meunière that Child described in her memoir as “the most exciting meal of my life.” Ephron smiled. “That filet of sole is my proudest achievement as a director,” she said. “There is nothing I’m more proud of.” You could practically smell the butter browning. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Ephron went on. “Every time I watch this movie, I’m hungry.”
Ephron wrote the screenplay based on two books about women and food and marriage: Julia Child’s memoir “My Life in France,” which traces her evolution from spirited Embassy wife to revered foodie; and the blogger Julie Powell’s book about cooking her way through every recipe in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in a single year. Powell’s blog echoed Ephron’s own experience in the kitchen when she was in her twenties, cooking “at least half the recipes in the first Julia,” as she has written, and having “imaginary conversations” with Child in the process.
Ephron’s alter ego in “Heartburn” is a food writer, and she and her cad of a husband and their best friends have “a friendship that was a shrine to food.” There are recipes in “Heartburn” for cheesecake, bread pudding, and bacon hash. The protagonist worries that she has focussed excessive attention on cooking, which is an issue that appears again in “Julie & Julia.” (“Too much food, not enough sex,” Powell’s husband complains in the movie, though all the cooking and eating does not seem to get in the way of Julia and Paul Child’s ardor.) “I’ve written about cooking and marriage dozens of times,” Ephron writes in “Heartburn,” “and I’m very smart on the subject, I’m very smart about how complicated things get when food and love become hopelessly tangled.”
When Ephron knows that she knows something, or knows that she wants something, she does not hesitate to say so. She is like Meg Ryan’s character in “When Harry Met Sally.” “I just want it the way I want it,” Sally tells Harry, about her habit of ordering, say, a piece of apple pie à la mode with the ice cream on the side, strawberry instead of vanilla if it’s an option, and, if it’s not, then whipped cream, but only if it’s real.
To be a director, it is important to know what you want; it is also important to like being in charge. Ephron has never had a problem with either of these things. “There is nothing that she didn’t feel was her responsibility to tell me,” Delia, the second-oldest of the four Ephron sisters, said. Just after Nora graduated from college and moved to New York City, she fixed Delia up on a date with a reporter she’d met on an assignment for the Post. “He told me he met her because there was a murder somewhere, and all the reporters were downstairs arguing about who would get to go up in the elevator first,” Delia recalled. “And Nora organized them. She divided them up; she said that the afternoon reporters would go first . . . and you can imagine what this group of reporters was like. And she was just in her twenties.”
“The epigraph for this whole thing would be ‘Nora Knows What to Do,’ ” Mike Nichols said. “She can tell you who the doctor is for what you’ve got. She can tell you when to forget something, let it go. Where the best food is. What the greatest new idea for cooking this or that is. She knows.” She knows things, and she knows people. Name a famous person. Chances are Ephron used to be her neighbor (Cyndi Lauper). Or interviewed him as an up-and-comer (Bob Dylan). Or went to high school with him (Barry Diller). Or has had him to one of her dinner parties (Carl Sagan). Or dated him (Mort Zuckerman). Or vacations on his yacht (David Geffen). Or has rented her house in East Hampton to her for a reported two hundred thousand dollars a month (Heather Mills, Paul McCartney’s ex-wife).
Delia Ephron sounded one cautionary note on the subject of her sister’s expertise in all matters, large and small. “Ten per cent of the time, Nora’s wrong,” she said. “And you never know what the ten per cent is and it’s really scary—you know, ‘Could this be it?’ ”
Ephron has made some duds. “Michael,” starring John Travolta as a fallen angel who smokes and drinks and hides his enormous feathered wings under a trenchcoat, is tough to get through. “Bewitched,” the film she made before “Julie & Julia,” starring Will Ferrell as a narcissistic movie star who falls in love with a witch (Nicole Kidman), has some very funny bits. (Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Michael Caine all play supporting roles.) But critics hated it. The Times said that Ephron “forgot that a gimmick is no substitute for a screenplay, never mind a real movie.” The Washington Post called it “dismal.” The rap on Ephron from her detractors has always been that her cinematic vision is too schmaltzy, too eager to soothe and please. A line in “Heartburn” anticipates such complaints decades before they were made. “What they say about me,” Ephron wrote, is “I don’t have an original point of view, and I am a sellout. (This last accusation always makes me cross, because I would love to be a sellout if only someone would ask.)”
Ephron’s aspiration is to make something like new old movies. It’s not that she’s creakily nostalgic; she loves the Internet (she blogs, but she does not Tweet), and made one of the first films starring e-mail. But she has great reverence for the clarity of classic romantic comedies. “You look at Lubitsch, movie after movie after movie,” she said, “and you find yourself slowly sinking into your pillow because it’s so daunting, what he did. It’s like the Olympic dive where they don’t do anything at all: they just dive into the water. It looks easier than the one with all the twists. But it’s actually not.”
It is no small thing to get studio backing after you’ve lost money on a movie, especially if you are over a certain age. (In Hollywood, that age is approximately twenty-seven.) “It is hard,” Ephron said. “I think I’ve managed it partly because Amy Pascal”—the co-chairman of Sony Pictures—“keeps giving me work.” It can’t hurt, either, that Pascal’s boss is Howard Stringer; Ephron is Stringer’s son’s godmother. But a writer-director who comes up with something wonderful always has a chance, especially “if, like Nora, you have a long track record of having made money for the company,” as Michael Lynton, the chairman and C.E.O. of Sony Pictures, put it. This is the talent that Ephron has always relied upon to resuscitate her, whether from “the catastrophe, the great fiasco, of my second marriage,” or from the loss, domestically, of more than twenty million dollars on “Bewitched.” “If you’re a writer,” she said, “you can write your way back.”
For a long time, Ephron kept a picture of the mobster John Gotti on her desk, taken during the trial that sent him to prison for the rest of his life. “He was walking out of the courthouse in the most perfect suit, and he looked so great,” Ephron told me. To her, it symbolized a spunky defiance that she could appreciate: self-confidence in the face of humiliation and defeat.
Many of Ephron’s best friends experience her as impervious to regret or, at least, wildly resilient. “I’ll tell you one thing about Nora: she really knows how to pick herself up and turn herself around and start over,” Joan Didion, who has been Ephron’s close friend for more than four decades, said. “I’ve never been aware of Nora in a low mood; she doesn’t show them.” Didion added, “I don’t think she gets a lot out of guilt. Whatever secondary gain the rest of us get out of it, Nora doesn’t; she just leaves it alone. Isn’t that good?”
“One of the things I love about Nora is that she is a force—she’s unstoppable,” Delia Ephron said. “She was really a well-known journalist and she was really successful at it and a lot of people were jealous of that. And then, lo and behold, Carl, you know, that awful thing happened when she was pregnant, and people thought, Oh, she’s just gonna go down. And they were all very excited about it. People do get excited about things like that, especially when it’s a woman who’s gotten uppity.” There is a scene in Delia Ephron’s “Hanging Up” in which the two younger sisters gossip with gleeful horror about a rumor that their oldest sister is going to get fired from her job as a magazine editor. Shortly thereafter, the big sister calls to say that she is going to be the editor-in-chief of her own magazine.
“If you want to be successful and you are a woman, you have to understand that there’s all kinds of horrible stuff that comes with it, and you simply cannot do anything about it but move on,” Ephron told me matter-of-factly one afternoon, sitting on a white Jacquard couch in the living room of her apartment, on the Upper East Side. It is a big place and has a vaguely Parisian feel (“It is a little Froggy in here,” she said), with wood panelling in the living room and doors that open out onto a balcony lined with pots of orange nasturtiums. The Chrysler Building punctuates the view and the décor: Ephron and Pileggi have hung old picture postcards of the tower on their walls, and a collection of little crystal and pewter Chrysler Buildings is set up on a silver tray on the coffee table.
I asked Ephron if she had any idea what it’s like to feel like a failure. She looked stricken. “God, yes. Are you kidding? Are you kidding? Well, sure,” she said. “Especially with a movie that didn’t work, because people sort of follow you into the water and expect that they won’t drown. If you are lucky as a director, actors feel very safe with you. And then it turns out they weren’t. You know, that’s terrible. There are probably people who don’t feel that, but, oh, my God. Are you kidding me?”
So Ephron has feelings. But she has been working on her John Gotti imitation all her life. Ephron and her sisters were brought up with the knowledge that moaning and complaining were . . . boring. Their parents “simply had no interest whatsoever in your sorrows,” Ephron said. Her mother, Phoebe, “might as well have been Ben Bradlee, it was so pull-up-your-socks.” (To understand this, all you really need to know about Bradlee, who was the executive editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era, is that Jason Robards played him in “All the President’s Men,” and that it was very good casting.) “It was so ‘Someday this will be a funny story,’ ” Ephron continued, “so ‘I’m not interested. I’m having a drink and smoking a cigarette, and what else is new?’ I think if you learn over and over from your parents that you do not get love from wallowing in heartbreak or failure, then you don’t really have much of a habit of doing it.”
When Nora was a child, the tone in the Ephron household was upbeat; she has said that she feels as if she’d grown up in a sitcom. But with time the environment deteriorated. Henry Ephron, Nora’s father, was in and out of mental hospitals in his later years, and attempted suicide. Phoebe Ephron became an alcoholic, and died of cirrhosis, at the age of fifty-seven, in 1971. “But the immediate cause of death was an overdose of sleeping pills administered by my father,” Ephron wrote in 2006, in an essay called “The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less.” For weeks, while her mother was dwindling in the hospital, her father kept insisting that the doctors “pull the plug.” But there was no plug to pull. On the night of her mother’s death, Ephron went to her father’s apartment after he called her with the news:
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.”. . . 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 asked Ephron why this incident wasn’t a bigger deal. “You mean, was I angry at him for doing that?” she asked. She was not being sarcastic. “At that point, we had all been through real hell with my parents, our parents. And come out the other side.” She thought about it for a minute. “I mean, I was upset that my mother had died, don’t get me wrong. But she had been dying for a while.” She thought about it some more. “And when that happened, I don’t know how to say this except . . . it was a moment of almost comic relief. It seemed entirely possible, in character, understandable, and I think we all filed it under Will I Ever Be Able to Use This in Anything?”
This is a family coping mechanism that was explicitly instilled. “Everything is copy,” their mother used to say, which was related to her expectation that all suffering be reconfigured into a funny story before it was brought to her attention. “Take notes,” she directed Nora, from her deathbed.
“In our family, we were expected to be writers,” Delia Ephron told me. “My mother was a working woman when no mothers were—that is the critical thing—and she had this idea that we were the Ephron Sisters. I mean, what is that? It’s nuts. But that was what she thought.”
Since all four sisters eventually fulfilled their mother’s wish and became writers, there is no shortage of literature based on the Ephrons. (Hallie, the second-youngest, writes mysteries that have nothing discernible to do with the family.) Nora’s rendition is madcap and bouncy. In most of her writing, life with her parents is depicted as only slightly more unnerving than the version that Henry and Phoebe Ephron presented themselves, in their play “Take Her, She’s Mine,” which was based on Nora’s letters and visits home during her time in college. (It was later made into a movie, starring Jimmy Stewart and Sandra Dee.) The young protagonist is precocious, driven, and irrepressible, as the Ephrons brought up their oldest daughter to be. “Oh, I’m not really marred,” she tells them after a bad date. “Takes more than that to mar me. By the time I get back to school I’ll reappraise it and it’ll be a hilarious story to tell the girls.”
Delia’s “Hanging Up” is funny, but has a darker cast, dissecting their father’s selfishness and irascibility as he, too, descends into alcoholism and, ultimately, dementia at the end of his life. (Delia and Nora wrote a screenplay based on the book, which Diane Keaton made into a movie. The sisters have collaborated on five other scripts, including “You’ve Got Mail.”) And then there is “Cool Shades,” the first novel by Amy, the youngest sister. “My parents would argue five nights out of six and I would awake to the smell of scotch and cigarettes and the sound of their screaming,” she writes. As a teen-ager, the narrator moves out of her parents’ house, as did the author. It is no comedy.
Nora Ephron’s parents didn’t really come unglued until after she had made it safely to late adolescence. Maybe because of this, or maybe because of her genetic gifts, or for whatever reason, Nora has been the most successful of the sisters at molding their parents’ instability into a world of entertaining wackiness. (“I’m very into denial,” she told an audience who came for an evening of “Advice for Women” from Ephron and her friend Arianna Huffington a couple of years ago. Everybody clapped.) Her urge to put a happy ending on every story is what her critics dislike and her fans depend upon. And her corresponding refusal to succumb to self-pity is what people envy and resent: it is a quality you don’t often see in women, or, for that matter, men.
“I don’t mean that you can’t have your feelings hurt or that you can’t sit at home and feel sorry for yourself—briefly,” Ephron said that afternoon in her living room as the sun set on the Chrysler Building. “But then I think you have to just start typing and do the next thing.” She winced. “I just don’t want you to think I’m so bizarrely inhuman that I don’t have moments of thinking, Oh, God, that didn’t work and I feel horrible about it. If my friends don’t know that I feel that, then either they have no imagination or I’ve been really good at being John Gotti.”
Ephron used to make a lot of jokes about men not being able to keep it in their pants. In “Heartburn,” she wrote that Mark Feldman, the character based on Carl Bernstein, “was capable of having sex with a venetian blind.” In “Mixed Nuts,” a shrill character (played by Madeline Kahn) says, “Men could have sex with a tree.” But that was then. The men in “Julie & Julia” are nearly flawless. There is a scene in the film in which Julie Powell has a fight with her husband because he is sick of her calling him “a saint” on her blog.
Ephron has a different point of reference now. She is the mother of two grown sons and the wife of Nick Pileggi, “a famously nice guy,” as she has put it. “It’s interesting when you have boys,” she said. “Because boys are so sweet. Little boys, they are just great, and it was completely fascinating to me to see that. But the problem with men is not whether they’re nice or not. It’s that it’s hard for them at a certain point in their lives to stay true. It just is. It’s almost not their fault. But it feels like it’s their fault if you are involved with any of them. And then you get older and almost all the men I know just seem as sweet as the boys I once had.”
When Ephron and Pileggi started dating, he “instantly caught pinkeye” from her children, who were three and four at the time. Within a month, he had moved into her apartment, on the West Side, “and that was just that,” she said. They have been together for twenty-six years. “I have never, ever seen them have a fight,” Ephron’s son Jacob Bernstein, who writes for Women’s Wear Daily, said.
Pileggi is “not the difficult person in the marriage,” Ephron said. “Although he is the crazy person! No one knows that, everybody thinks I’m the crazy person, but he’s the crazy person. But he will just laugh if you say it to him.”
When Nick Pileggi got home, he was in a good mood, as usual. He is very calm, very charming and wears his hair in a modified Benjamin Franklin: sparse on top, long behind the ears. He is the author of the book “Wiseguy,” which Martin Scorsese made into the film “Goodfellas,” in 1990. Pileggi has been working in films as a writer and producer ever since.
Pileggi’s first marriage ended about the same time that Ephron and Bernstein broke up. “I think when we got married we were both nervous. We were young and it was—”
“Young?” Ephron shrieked. “We were so not young!” (She was forty-six and he was fifty-four.)
“I thought of myself as young at the time.”
“Younger,” Ephron said.
They sat down to dinner at the round marble table in their dining room. Ephron had made some excellent shrimp sautéed in butter and Cajun spices from a recipe by Paul Prudhomme, which she served with Provençal tomatoes and crispy rice baked in a copper casserole.
“This is good, isn’t it?” she said. “A big mess of tastes! I’m not a serious cook—I’m a feeder.”
“You like to cook so that people will sit at a table and you can bring out all these things and everybody can talk,” Pileggi said. “I mean, no better day does Nora have than you get up at eight in the morning and you start getting ready to do things—”
“My only regret—well, no, it’s not my only regret about our wedding—”
“And she still talks about it!”
“Well, my wedding dress. Just this appalling dress. And I looked terrible in it. It looked like ‘101 Dalmatians.’ I don’t know what I was thinking or who I thought I was. But the worst thing was that everyone said I couldn’t cook because it was my wedding.”
“And to be getting married that day and cook,” Pileggi said, between shrimps.
“It was too . . . the sort of thing I might do,” Ephron said. “So we had a caterer—I think it’s practically the only time in our life. And I had nothing to do all day. I had no idea what I was supposed to do.”
They invited about forty guests to a dinner party and then surprised them by getting married at it. “You could have easily done it,” Pileggi said. “Though I think I was against it at the time.”
“Yes, you were,” his wife said.
“I just thought, You’re getting married on that day, do you really want to be in the kitchen cooking stuff while you’re getting dressed and the guests are coming and you don’t know what other stuff is going to come up that you don’t know about?”
“Anyway,” Ephron said.
There is a restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Nora, which was very popular while Ephron was married to Bernstein, and she still gets worked up remembering her friends’ being fed by another Nora. “People would say, ‘Let’s go to Nora’s,’ and I could not stand it—I could not stand it!” Ephron said, silently banging her skinny fist on the table. “I always used to say it was one of the reasons I had to leave Washington. Because I was so used to being—”
“The only Nora,” Pileggi finished, beaming.
When Julia Child moved to France, in 1948, she was not the Julia Child that Nora Ephron or, later, Julie Powell fell in love with and took on as a culinary guardian angel. She was the daughter of the “staunchly conservative” John McWilliams, who had hoped that she would “settle in Pasadena to live a conventional life,” she wrote. “Instead, I had married Paul Child, a painter, photographer, poet, and mid-level diplomat who had taken me to live in dirty, dreaded France. I couldn’t have been happier!” The Childs took a rambling apartment on the Rue de l’Université—which they dubbed Rue de Loo—and, as Paul Child worked on exhibitions at the Embassy, Julia hosted glamorous cocktail parties. They socialized with John Kenneth Galbraith, Ernest Hemingway’s ex-wife Hadley, and Alice B. Toklas. They ate in grand restaurants and poky cafés, where “my tastes were growing bolder,” Child wrote. “I had never thought of eating a snail before, but, my, tender escargots bobbing in garlicky butter were one of my happiest discoveries!”
Despite being “giddy” about living in Paris, Child was unsatisfied. “I wanted to look chic and Parisian, but with my big bones and long feet, I did not fit most French clothes,” Child wrote. She tried to read “Serious News Articles,” though she worried that her “sievelike mind didn’t want to lock away dates and details; it wanted to float and meander.” There is a scene in Ephron’s movie in which the Childs are having dinner at a glowing Paris bistro and Julia asks her husband, “What should I do, do you think?”
“About what?” he replies.
“All the wives here don’t do anything. That’s just not me.”
What Child did, of course, was learn to cook, at Le Cordon Bleu, where her romance with food and France deepened into true love. Child’s memoir and Ephron’s film celebrate not just the thrilling life of Julia Child, with its remarkable adventures and success, but the pleasure of finding the thing you are best at, and devoting yourself to it with abandon. If you make a mistake, learn from it, then forget it. “I don’t believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make,” Child wrote. “Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed—eh bien, tant pis! ”
Don’t complain, don’t explain: that is the motto of Julia Child and Nora Ephron, two women who love butter and making dinner for their husbands. “You never get to see that on the screen,” Meryl Streep said. “Because drama is conflict. So we only see the bad stuff. But we’re all sustained by good marriages, to the extent that we are.”
I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. But the truth is, “Julie & Julia” is not a fair fight. For half the film, we are in Paris with Julia Child played by Meryl Streep. It is pretty transcendent. For the other half, we are stuck in Long Island City, Queens, with the “lowly cubicle worker” Julie Powell, a character who is immature, self-pitying, and frazzled (which is to say, an average human being). Powell is played by Amy Adams, who is a talented actress, but she is up against the queen herself. When Adams, as Julie, is on the screen, it necessarily means that Streep, as Julia, is not, and you come to resent her for this.
It is possible that the film would not have worked if it were simply a bio-pic of Julia Child—that it derives its narrative thrust and commercial potential from the interplay between a young woman idolizing and relying upon Child in the more or less present and the splendid story of Julia Child’s past. Perhaps Child is able to emerge from this film as an almost mythical creature because she is presented in contrast to a mere mortal.
But there may be another reason the Julia Child portions of “Julie & Julia” are so irresistibly vivid and the Julie Powell bits feel a little flat. It is possible that Nora Ephron no longer understands half as well what it’s like to be ordinary as she understands being remarkable.
How would she? ♦
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