I'll Have What She's Having

CHAPTER 1

It Was a Sign

Was the script trying to tell her something? Suddenly it all made sense. Her husband, she suspected, had been having an affair. She, Nora Ephron, had been duped.

"Read this," said Jay Presson Allen, the Academy Award–nominated writer, offering a screenplay by Frederic Raphael, who wrote the 1965 drama Darling. "You'll like it."

Nora was in New York, her adopted hometown, to meet Allen, a sharp-witted Texan who wrote her way out of her ho-hum first marriage to win prestige credits on scripts for Fosse's Cabaret, Hitchcock's Marnie, and the Broadway and big-screen adaptations of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which scored Maggie Smith her best-actress Oscar in 1969. (Quoth Allen: "Male characters are easier to write. They're simpler. I think women are generally more psychologically complicated.") In 1979, the year Nora's second marriage went bust, she had started the transition from esteemed, if not handsomely paid, magazine writer to hired-gun screenwriter, a credit for a made-for-television movie called Perfect Gentlemen under her belt. "It was so awful," she said of the crime caper starring Lauren Bacall as one of three cash-strapped women outlaws who hold up a hotel safe. Its 1978 premiere had Nora, then expecting her first baby, paralyzed with fear and "really worried that this child was not going to live through this television screening."

Later, a silver lining developed upon discovery that the Bacall debacle inspired an older woman to rob a bank in Newton, Massachusetts. Nora's humiliation turned to bliss: "Forget journalism—that's power."

She cracked Raphael's script on the short flight home to DC, where she and her other half, Watergate hero Carl Bernstein, had an apartment at the Ontario, a Beaux Arts building that outlasted their crumbling relationship. He liked Washington; she loathed it. He was a notorious flirt who had vowed before marrying Nora to keep on the straight and narrow; she, caught up in Carl, willed away skepticism to instead look toward the future, thinking he'd changed. He had not. There she was, however many miles up in the air, absorbing the uncanny parallels between her life and the plot unfolding before her on page 8 of this screenplay she was reading.

"It began with a married couple at a dinner party," she later wrote. "I can't remember their names, but for the sake of the story, let's call them Clive and Lavinia. It was a very sophisticated dinner party and everyone at it was smart and brittle and chattering brilliantly. Clive and Lavinia were particularly clever, and they bantered with each other in a charming, flirtatious way. Everyone in the room admired them, and their marriage. The guests sat down to dinner and the patter continued. In the middle of the dinner, a man seated next to Lavinia put his hand on her leg. She put her cigarette out on his hand. The glittering conversation continued. When the dinner ended, Clive and Lavinia got into their car to drive home. The talk ceased, and they drove in absolute silence. They had nothing to say to each other. And then Lavinia said: 'All right. Who is she?'"

All right, Carl. Who is she?

Nora Ephron, 38 years old and seven months pregnant with their second child, saw her carefully manicured world falling apart. She beelined from the airport to Carl's drawers, uncovering confirmation in the form of a "book of children's stories"—the audacity!—in which the Other Woman had scrawled "an incredibly stupid inscription about their enduring love." The Other Woman was Margaret Jay, the blond, doe-eyed daughter of Britain's former prime minister James Callaghan and wife of UK ambassador Peter Jay. Salt, meet wound.

She would write her way out of this. Maybe a book—one for adults, not children.

Nora fell hard for New York City, and distance made the heart grow fonder. Even then it was clear that she could never live anywhere else. She didn't belong anywhere else. She felt discombobulated when her parents moved the family out of claustrophobic Manhattan, where she was born on May 19, 1941, and into a strange new world populated by strawberry blondes: Beverly Hills. Her five-year-old self wondered, What am I doing here?

What Henry and Phoebe Ephron were doing there: making it in showbiz. In 1943, the married screenwriting team landed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox amid the success of their play Three's a Family, a comedy about a miserable young mom who moves into her parents' West 110th Street apartment. Phoebe's idea. While she wasn't ha-ha funny, an irony observed by daughter Delia (who is ha-ha funny), Phoebe showed a comedian's instinct for spinning wackiness from unhappiness. She used her relatives as fodder. Her work became her identity. Speaking to a journalist during the couple's professional heyday, Phoebe proclaimed: "I don't go in the kitchen very often, except for ice cubes for a drink."

The Phoebe and Henry Ephron production Three's a Family lasted 497 performances on Broadway; Henry directed the stage show, but not the movie adaptation. Their creative collaboration had taken off when Phoebe—a restless stay-at-home mom who lived with Henry, baby Nora, and her parents in an apartment on 110th Street—became her husband's official writing partner.

"My dad had written a bunch of plays and I think Mommy got tired of his plays not selling and she said, 'I'll write one with you,'" Amy, the youngest of their four girls, relayed in the Nora-centric documentary Everything Is Copy, directed by Nora's son, Jacob Bernstein. "And it was sort of a hit. And then they moved to LA. And I think Mommy felt, and rightly so, that she'd broken some kind of glass ceiling."

They wrote the screenplay for the 1944 romantic comedy Bride by Mistake, starring Laraine Day as Norah Hunter, an heiress who pretends to be a secretary in order to fool gold-digging prospective suitors. Among their splashiest credits: the 1956 movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, featuring Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones as doomed but vocally gifted lovers, and 1957's Desk Set, a stylish battle-of-the-sexes romance that reunited Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as an IBM engineer and the equally brainy supervisor of a TV network's old-school research department at Rockefeller Center. Kate fears that Spencer, a productivity pro who means to install a computer in the office, will make her job irrelevant. It's no small thing, putting a nice lady out of business. Most inconveniently, an attraction grows.

Given Phoebe's disregard for traditional gender roles during a period when women were expected to stay home (and out of the workforce), it's fitting that she chose to name Nora after the iconoclastic heroine of the 1879 Henrik Ibsen play A Doll's House, which tells the saga of a soul-searching, independence-seeking wife who packs her bags and leaves her family behind. Phoebe, a Jane Austen fan, preferred that her young daughters read books about plucky female protagonists—Eloise, Madeline, and Dorothy Gale—and she passed down their stories like heirlooms. Nora's first memory of Phoebe was her mother teaching her how to read—and Phoebe's joyous response when she actually could.

In Beverly Hills, the Ephrons lived in a Spanish stucco home with 14 rooms on Linden Drive, just down the street from the property where gangster Bugsy Siegel was gunned down—a bit of trivia that fascinated Delia, the second eldest. Dinner was served nightly at six thirty, with the siblings swapping stories that entertained their parents. "That was when every time I said something funny, my dad said, 'That's a great line. Write it down,'" Delia wrote.

Phoebe, who recited poetry at the table, imparted a litany of rules: "Never buy a red coat." "Don't worship celebrities." "Don't join sororities."

Nora paid witness to Henry and Phoebe's insider-y parties, which drew boldfaced names like Dorothy Parker, the sharpest of the wits, as sparkling conversation and cocktails flowed.

Cut to 1957. Nora's prophetic interaction with the actor who practically invented the word debonair, the Mid-Atlantic accent, and the essence of George Clooney. The event: An Affair to Remember.

"My mother took me to a screening in Westwood, and I just lost it," Nora said. "There I was, a hopeless teenage girl awash in salt water, and we stood up to leave, and my mother introduces me to Cary Grant. I blubbered that this was the greatest movie I'd ever seen. I now look at this movie and say, 'What was I thinking?' But I could play the last 10 minutes of that movie for you now, and we'd be crying."

That was also the year Nora saw Funny Face, a romantic comedy that cast Audrey Hepburn as a winsome bookstore clerk turned model and Fred Astaire as an opportunistic fashion photographer. The 1950s prized hourglass shapes as a feminine ideal; Nora, the insecure 15-year-old Beverly Hills High School girl so desperate for bigger breasts that she once purchased something called a Mark Eden Bust Developer, was coming of age in a town where looks—the right look—meant absolutely everything.

She'd catch a matinee every Saturday around noon. She watched Marilyn. Doris Day. Jane Powell. She'd sit there thinking: This breathy-voiced bombshell isn't me. This flaxen-haired ingénue isn't me. Enter Audrey. "She was as close as you could get to someone who was interesting and quirky and smart," said Nora. "You saw her in that bookstore, in Funny Face, in that little black turtleneck sweater, and it was the most compelling article of clothing anyone wore in a movie when I was growing up."

Nora had a side job at a local bookstore (Martindale's, earning 75 cents an hour, once gift-wrapping a book for Cary Grant) and dreamed of lofty things. As the class of 1959's "Most Likely to Succeed"—she graduated number one out of 309 students—Nora wielded enough clout at her school newspaper to fire future billionaire Barry Diller, who would go on to run Paramount; launch a fourth broadcast TV network, Fox; and marry wrap-dress fashion icon Diane von Fürstenberg. Who knew?

Diller was 14 years old at the time. As an adult, he recalled, "There was not a lot of feminine about Nora… she had one eye that was kinda unevenly closed. Or open."

Still, she impressed the judges at an LA junior essay competition, winning first prize: a pair of tickets to the premiere of a movie starring Doris Day, that paragon of postwar conservatism.

While Phoebe's daughters swooned at the movies, she was making them. She took pride in an atypical path and urged the sisters Ephron to follow suit. Delia summed up Phoebe's ideology: "You will have a career like me. You will work. You will be a writer. You will leave Los Angeles. You will go to New York City. You will work. Career, career, career." Phoebe would repeat: "Everything is copy."

If everything was copy, then it had to be sugarcoated, scrubbed clean of self-pity, and played for laughs—or risk Phoebe's rejection. "If you came back to her with a sad story, she had no interest in it whatsoever," Nora said. "'Turn it into a funny story. Get back to me. I will be interested.'"

Nora studied, then mastered, the Tao of Phoebe: "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."

She provided inspiration (and free material) for Henry and Phoebe's zippy 1961 play Take Her, She's Mine, which debuted to stellar sales at New York's Biltmore Theatre on 47th Street and referenced her letters home from Wellesley College. Precocious coed Mollie Michaelson, Nora's alter ego, proclaims: "He doesn't know it yet, but I have met a boy from Harvard who's going to marry me."

Not everything was fit for print. Concerned with decorum (the table had to be set just so) and loath to show weakness, the emotionally distant Phoebe did not choose to make "copy" of her marital woes and self-destructive slide into alcoholism while Nora was in her teens. These could not be mined for laughs. Things got worse after Nora left the nest. Late at night, Phoebe and Henry (also a drinker) waged bitter verbal battles, traumatizing Delia, Hallie, and Amy (all of whom, like their big sister, became writer-subscribers to the "Everything is copy" mantra, in one form or another). "When she found out my father was fooling around with other women, she didn't walk out on him like Ibsen's Nora," said Hallie, writing in O magazine. She stayed, and stewed. "Alcohol ignited her anger, and sometimes they fought from midnight to dawn," Hallie continued. "By the time Delia and I were both in college, things got so bad that Amy ran away and ended up moving in with Nora and her first husband in an apartment near Central Park."

Henry and Phoebe returned to New York. Six years after the curtain fell on Take Her, She's Mine, the 1968 spectacle of Hair—a free-love, pro-nudity, antiwar rock musical—lit up the Great White Way. The Ephrons and their PG-rated collaborations were going out of style. "It was hard to change forty years of thinking that sex is a private thing," Henry wrote of himself and Phoebe in his memoirs. All the drinking wrecked Phoebe's liver. She died on October 13, 1971, when Nora was 30 and Amy 18; she was hospitalized with cirrhosis—immediate cause of death: an overdose of sleeping pills administered by Henry—and had remarked to Nora, "You're a reporter. Take notes."

The next decade, Nora took those words very seriously while chronicling the demise of her own messy marriage to a cheating partner in a roman à clef, Heartburn, which deployed comedy to share a painful personal story. "The truth is that if my father weren't my father, he would be one of the men he hates; he is incorrigibly faithless and thoroughly narcissistic, to such an extent that I tend to forget he's also capable of being a real peach," she wrote.

By 1993, Nora, partnering with Delia on Sleepless in Seattle, would undergo a decidedly unintentional rebrand as a specialist in the lost art of fairy-tale romance. Meg Ryan seemed an ideal mother figure and Tom Hanks the perfect father; together they embodied the kind of joie de vivre that Henry and Phoebe might have prolonged had darker realities not intervened.

"My sister Delia says this, and it's true," Nora recalled. "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."

The retelling of their first date ended with a punchline.

Henry: Will you marry me?

Phoebe: Can I read your work?

While attending Wellesley, Nora Ephron outlined requirements for her ideal husband: Loyal Democrat? Check. Reads the New Republic? Check. Plays tennis? Check. Speaks French? Check, check, and check.

A few years later, she fell under the spell of Dan Greenburg.

Twenty-five years and 11 months old, Nora said "I do" for the first time. Can you imagine if she waited one more month? It was 1967, and from Nora's perspective (which she'd grow to regret), a 26-year-old bride might as well be a 100-year-old bride.

Let's talk about the groom: early 30s. Chicago-born beta male. Acerbic, dry sense of humor. Magazine editor. Successful author. Unabashed cat lover. Catnip to a rising star New York Post reporter who had dreamed about (a) moving back to New York City, (b) becoming a journalist, and (c) dating a journalist, too.

Dan had a strong jaw, wide smile, and expressive, watchful eyes with Paul McCartney bedroom lids. If an actor were to play him in a romantic comedy, it might be a young Hank Azaria or Alan Alda, somebody who projects intelligence and quirk. In 1970, he went on The David Susskind Show and said he felt "anthropomorphic about things like wastepaper," so instead of throwing out wastepaper ("a rejection"), he saved sheets of it. Copy that for cardboard, string, and manila envelopes.

"I've always liked odd and interesting-looking men because I'm odd and interesting-looking myself, and I always figured I had a better shot at them than the conventionally good-looking ones," Nora revealed in Heartburn, spending several pages lampooning a Dan-inspired first husband character (Charlie) as a "low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters" (instead of cats) and had one cryogenically frozen when it died (correction: Dan never froze a cat—or a hamster for that matter). Charlie, according to narrator Nora, "slept with my oldest friend Brenda." (Hmmmmm.)

Dan and Nora got married in the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center in a ceremony officiated by a rabbi. They shared a lavender apartment and several cats around whom they spoke in high-pitched voices. (This was before cats ruled the internet, and speaking to one's cat in a high-pitched voice was deemed generally acceptable, if not encouraged.)

Dan wrote the 1964 humor book How to Be a Jewish Mother, which also happened to be the bestselling nonfiction book of 1965, an accomplishment that most certainly appealed to Nora. It was easy to succumb to the charm of an interesting (and interesting-looking) male writer, a Clark Kent to her Lois Lane, who thought being smart was sexy.

"We would have dinner parties," Dan said, "and Nora would go up to celebrities she had never met and say, 'Hi, my name is Nora Ephron; if I invited you to dinner to my house, would you come?' And she was so adorable and so appealing that I don't think anybody ever said no. And so we got to run with a very fast crowd. We had Mike Nichols over to dinner. We had Buck Henry. Joan Didion."

Writing features and essays for Esquire and New York, Nora rode the wave of New Journalism that swept up Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese, voice-y writers who flouted the traditional who-what-when-where-why rules of news reporting and made themselves part of the story. What Nora had in spades that many of her equally driven peers did not was a point of view that engaged (and sometimes enraged) the reader; an unrelenting itch to shake things up, cause trouble, and undo emperors and empresses whom she found to have no clothes; a voice demanding to be heard that people actually wanted to listen to. Hers was simultaneously warm and icy, winking and withering. She could be brutal, eviscerating her subjects with wry detachment—and if she suffered fools in person, she rarely suffered them on the page. As a cultural and media critic, she spared no one, no woman: an Esquire profile of Helen Gurley Brown stung the pioneering Cosmopolitan editor as oversensitive, "Almost but not quite tasteless," yet also celebrated Brown as totally genuine in her motivation to help women succeed as she had. Post publisher Dorothy Schiff, her ex-boss, was "silly," "frothy," and "giddy." Dorothy Parker, whose fame she sought to emulate early in her career, had an "almost unbearably girlish sensibility." While Gloria Steinem represented "the only remotely chic thing" about the women's movement, Betty Friedan threatened to undermine it through her petty, "thoroughly irrational hatred of Steinem."

Among Nora Ephron's biggest targets: Nora Ephron. In May 1972, she achieved what she considered her breakthrough as a real Writer with a capital W—a confessional, self-deprecating, angry, funny column in Esquire that lamented the small size of her chest and zinged women who whined about their fuller busts. "A Few Words about Breasts" described an obsession that had its roots in adolescence. "If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person," she wrote.

In July of that year, she informed the magazine's predominantly male readers that she had a rape fantasy involving "faceless" men tearing her clothes off. The startling, shock jock–ish confession riled second-wave feminists fighting the good fight but drew attention to a gray area that confused Nora: "So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds."

She slipped on banana peels, telling everyone.

"I am skinny and have a long face, long chin, and dark hair and a snaggletooth that I've worked very hard to get," she banana-peeled to a writer doing a profile on her, writing a physical description for him. "My hair droops over my left eye so no one will notice my left eyelid droops."

It's hard to believe in this age of digital overshares, but such candor was deemed radical. People on the outside of clubby New York media circles began to care what this young, fearless writer had to say about women's issues, about other women, and, especially, about herself.

In the meantime, she and Dan had drifted apart. As her Heartburn doppelganger would divulge, those "Charlie" quirks had begun to grate. She wrote, "At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn't. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral."

She initially tested the bit on The Dick Cavett Show, looking glamorous in a black jumpsuit and deflating Dan in her nasally drawl: "He's like on this plane—it's terrible—and then I get to marry Mike Nichols!"