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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
"Heartburn," her 1983 novel, was "loosely based" (that is to say, closely based) on what happened to her when her first son was a baby and Ephron was pregnant with her second. That was when she discovered her second husband, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, was having an affair with journalist (now Baroness) Margaret Jay, who was then married to the British ambassador Peter Jay. Describing her fictionalization of events, Ephron writes in "I Feel Bad About My Neck" that she took care to "change my first husband's cats into hamsters ... the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and ... give my second husband a beard." The book could have been a drippy, sudsy downer. Instead, it was a riot. At lunch, Ephron pointed to "Heartburn" as an example of how a writer always holds back some part of a personal story, noting that it was "so not the whole truth about the end of that marriage, just a comic monologue about it." And while that may be, its acidly funny retailing of the breakup showed her gift for leavening the most maudlin and maddening of situations without abandoning the truth or tacking on a mushy resolution. In life as in fiction, Ephron left Bernstein and moved back to New York, the single mother of two baby sons.
All three of Ephron's sisters -- Delia, Hallie and Amy -- have published novels, including "Hanging Up" -- a book loosely based on the relationship between the sisters and their alcoholic father -- by Nora's frequent collaborator, Delia. (The two sisters also adapted it into a film starring Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton and Lisa Kudrow.) And while the journalists played by Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle" are not strictly autobiographical, let's just say that if you've read Ephron's journalism, you'll recognize the sex fantasy Sally's been having since she was 12. In short, Nora Ephron's life and times have been cannibalized for page, stage and screen with roughly the same frequency as Joan of Arc's.
And now there is this book about her wrinkles and her nails and her teeth and her friends' deaths and the contents of her purse. Does having so much of her life available for public consumption ever make Ephron feel exposed? "No, never," she said. "Because we were raised in a house where the expectation was that everything was up for being written about ... [There was the] knowledge that if anything happened, it could turn up in one of my parents' scripts." Ephron soon returned the favor. She recalled the first time she wrote about her parents while they were still alive, in an essay about how her folks had had their home redecorated by the production design team at Twentieth Century Fox, ruining the "integrity" -- Ephron's conversational quotation marks -- of their Spanish house in Beverly Hills. "Looking back on it, it probably wasn't a very nice thing that I wrote," she said. "But my mother never said 'boo' about it, and I know it was because she knew that was the deal. On some level that was what she had meant to teach us."
In fact, her mother's lesson on this point, the assertion that "everything is copy," is a steady drumbeat throughout Ephron's work. Phoebe Ephron appears in Ephron's fiction and nonfiction as a smart, unsentimental Hollywood career woman whose marriage to Nora's father became stormy and booze-soaked in its later years. Phoebe's deathbed exhortation -- "You're a reporter, Nora. Take notes" -- has been recounted in print by both Nora and her father, in his memoir. And indeed, Phoebe's slow death from cirrhosis has appeared often in Ephron's writing as a kind of primal scene. One of the most memorable moments in "Heartburn" comes when the heroine's expiring mother exclaims, "I just screwed Darryl Zanuck on the remake!" and drops dead, only to revive and move to Mexico with a guy named Mel. In reality, Ephron writes in "I Feel Bad About My Neck," her mother had been hovering on the brink of death for some time when her father hastened her demise by administering an overdose of sleeping pills, the remainder of which he later asked his unsuspecting daughter to flush down the toilet. "At the time, this didn't seem to me to fall under the rubric of 'Everything is copy,'" she writes. "Although it did to my sister Amy, and she put it into a novel."
But if Ephron is unfazed by the amount of her own personal and family baggage available for sale on Amazon, it's because she knows she had it pretty good. "You read people who are writing about childhoods that are just shocking and genuinely difficult. What were the difficulties of my childhood? I had two parents who became crazier as they got older but who were pretty sane when I was young and pretty great when I was young. Of all my sisters I got the highest fraction of good years compared to bad. And then they drank. And then they were terrible. But I'm not talking about poverty. I'm not talking about incest. I'm not talking about child abuse. I'm just talking about the problems of a very lucky young woman who grew up in Beverly Hills, California."
Ephron was careful not to write much about the childhoods of her sons, Jacob and Max Bernstein, now a reporter and a musician, respectively ("Though if I'd had a newspaper column twice a week, God help them," she said), or about third husband Nick Pileggi ("and neither would you if you were married to him"), whom she wed in 1987. As part of the family "deal," she's aware that at any moment, her offspring, especially Jacob, could turn their pens on her. When she saw the 2005 Noah Baumbach movie "The Squid and the Whale," about two boys suffering through their parents' messy 1970s divorce, Ephron said she shrank in her seat at the familiar horror. She loved the movie, she said, because it dealt honestly with the emotional brutality of divorced family life, including the inescapable revelation that single parents have sex lives. "I called Jacob right after that and said, 'Oh God, I thought of you all the way through it, and are you ever going write anything like this? It wouldn't surprise me at all!'" According to Ephron, her son said he wasn't planning on it. "I hope that's true," she said, and then shrugged. "But he might."
Still, even if she escapes becoming the subject of her child's tell-all, Ephron has not slipped through her career unscathed. In recent years, she has been the recipient of some nasty movie reviews. When I made reference to a pan of "Bewitched" that described how "Nora Ephron took her writerly New York sharpness to Hollywood as the director of sentimental hits" and started using her smarts to make deals instead of quality films, Ephron said she hadn't read it because she didn't want her feelings hurt. She explained that she sometimes protects herself from the harsh criticism because she "knows a certain amount" of what it will say, a peculiarly self-insulating reflex in someone who transforms so many of life's bummers into laughs. But what does she think about the smart-to-schmaltz version of her career?
"I just think it's one way to tell the story," she said. "I wish that the movies that didn't get good reviews had gotten better reviews. There's no question." In part, she said, that's because of the amount of time and energy and number of people involved in making movies. If a book flops, "you really haven't taken six months of anyone's life or convinced two or three hundred people to follow you into the Gaza Strip." That said, she maintained, "I actually like a lot of the things in the movies that people didn't like, and I actually don't think my movies are stupid or as schmaltzy as people say, so there it is."
