TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012792/0127520.000

Text File | 1992-08-30 | 9.7 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 62

How to Repossess A Life

Witty NORA EPHRON takes control by telling her story her way, as
a novelist, screenwriter and now as director of a touching new
movie

By GARRY WILLS


    Her mother named her Nora after Ibsen's feminist in A Doll's
House, and she certainly slammed the door noisily when leaving
her first two marriages. But she and her current husband
Nicholas Pileggi are more like DaHammett's Nick and Nora -- for
one thing, they have been making much of their living off of
crime.

    This is more obvious in Pileggi's case, since he wrote the
book Wiseguy, about the federal witness-protection program, as
well as the Martin Scorsese movie based on it, GoodFellas. Nora,
meanwhile, did two comic riffs on the same theme -- screenplays
for Cookie (with a Bobby Kennedy imitator as prosecutor) and My
Blue Heaven (in which constricted FBI men learn from expansive
Italian mobsters how to live). Ephron herself is critical of
these movies, which ran into casting and directing troubles; but
they are typical of her unexpected blindside tackles of
ideology: How many movies have you seen in which the FBI
foolishly does the bidding of the Mafia?

    Ephron is better known for the screenplays that won her
Oscar nominations, Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally , or for
Heartburn, based on her breakup with Watergate journalist Carl
Bernstein. Yet she came late and reluctantly to her mother's
craft, having seen how little happiness it brought that
tortured role model. Phoebe Ephron and her husband Henry were
prolific and successful screenwriters in the 1940s and '50s,
getting credit for at least one masterpiece, The Desk Set. Nora
says her mother did the actual typing, while "my father did the
pacing up and down" -- roughly the same job division as in
childbirth. Henry wrote a charming memoir of the couple's life
together, We Thought We Could Do Anything, leaving out most of
the bleak parts -- the alcoholism, the bitter fights that made
their daughters beg the two to get a divorce, both parents'
descent into mental illness. It was enough to make Nora, the
eldest of the pair's four daughters, vow to put Hollywood,
movies and screen writing a full continent away from her own
life. She became a journalist, a remote enough calling that "I
thought it was like taking up carpentry."

    But even in New York City she had a circle of old family
friends to fall back on, since her parents had written first
for Broadway. As a young reporter at the New York Post, Ephron
presumed on her mother's acquaintance with her boss, the
paper's owner, Dorothy Schiff, to present fellow reporters'
complaints about filthy working conditions at the Post. Schiff
gave her the runaround -- a dangerous thing to do to Ephron.
Though she had been doing fluffy "women's items" at the Post,
Nora discovered her real (and deadly) talent when she deftly
beheaded Schiff in an Esquire article.

    After that she became the wittiest journalistic headhunter
of the '70s. The list of her victims is long, but the names
matter less than the grounds for their execution. Like all good
essayists, she was basically a moralist, sketching types of
irresponsible privilege (Schiff), proprietary righteousness
(Betty Friedan), oracular emptiness (Theodore White), poses of
profundity (Gail Sheehy) and head-over-heels self-infatuation
(Brendan Gill).

    That was the time of the "new journalism," but Tom Wolfe,
presiding over the movement, did not notice that Ephron was
writing some of the best reportorial prose of the era (he
predictably singled out, in his anthology of new journalism,
Joan Didion). It was a period of burgeoning feminism, but some
feminists closed ranks against a woman who admitted, as Ephron
did, that she still had fantasies of being raped. Yet
everything valid in The Beauty Myth was said in Ephron's famous
essays on breast size and vaginal perfumes, and male oppression
is nowhere better described than in her article on women in the
magazine world. She was portraying betrayed women -- Pat Loud
on TV, Barbara ("Bootsie") Mandel in the Maryland Governor's
mansion -- long before she became one.

    But then a funny thing happened to Ephron -- or one she
hoped she could turn into a funny thing. After criticizing
celebrity journalists, she married one of the leading celebrity
journalists, Bernstein, and found out, after others knew about
it, that her husband was having an affair with the British
ambassador's wife.

    Ephron took her two babies to New York, where her
hospitalized father kept an apartment, and began to put her
life back together, writing screenplays (the thing she had
sworn never to do) for some fast money, and -- in three annual
work periods -- telling her story her way in the novel
Heartburn. "It saved her life," Pileggi says of the book. How
so? "Well, for one thing, she was broke." But there is more to
it than that. The humiliation described in the novel is that
she, the witty observer of other people's lives, was unaware of
what was going on in her own. The book was her way of ending up
more knowing than anyone else who knew about the matter. The
struggle is for a tone so wry and detached that revenge gives
way to the work of reappropriating one's life. To
psychoanalytical formulas about choosing the wrong partner, she
responds with a cleansing comic nihilism: "Let's face it,
everyone is the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved
with."

    The novel is a long comic monologue, closer to Portnoy's
Complaint than to the higher-class Peyton Place that Mike
Nichols made of the movie. "I have spent more sleepless nights
wondering how I might have saved that movie," Ephron says.
Probably she lost it the minute her first-person voice was
removed from the script.

    She began to realize she could not control her scripts
unless she became a director -- which she has just done, in the
witty and poignant This Is My Life, which opened the Sundance
Film Festival last week and will be released commercially Feb.
21. The script, which she wrote with her sister Delia, treats a
comedian (Julie Kavner), caught between the conflicting demands
of career and kids, who uses her daughters' lives in her
routine. This kind of family cannibalism is something the
Ephron sisters grew up with.

    When Nora went to Wellesley, she and her disintegrating
mother exchanged bantering letters that the mother turned into a
hit play, Take Her, She's Mine, holding off the dark for a while
with Broadway glitter. The family's appropriation of one
another's lives in print looks like exploitation; but it was
more an attempt to contain one's life, as it spun out of
control, by telling it as a story. When Nora took personal
troubles to her, Phoebe would say, "It's all copy," a lesson
repeatedly preached by Kavner to her children in This Is My
Life. When Phoebe came out of the shadows for a lucid moment on
her deathbed, she said to Nora, "You're a journalist, take
notes."

    Sister Delia says, "Our mother was not the warmest person,
but she established our world. I think of her as a security
blanket without the warmth. She had an opinion on everything,
and we ((daughters)), who are just as opinionated, did
everything she told us to. The Ephron girls do not join
sororities or any organized religion." Each daughter had to
take two years of Latin and three years of French in high
school. "God forbid we should have anything to do with science,"
Delia recalls. Delia grew up resisting the idea of writing
altogether: "Nora had staked that out." But when she did
eventually start writing magazine articles, Nora's only
criticism was that she quoted too many other people. "What do
you think? Never write without knowing what you think," Nora
told her. "That," says Delia, "is just what Mother would have
said."

    Phoebe Ephron produced a busy sisterhood of scribblers. Amy,
the youngest, a novelist, admits, "I wasn't exactly encouraged
to be a landscape painter." Only Hallie, the third daughter, has
not tried her hand at fiction. (She is a computer programmer.)


    Nora began her directing career as she did her reporting
days at the Post, tapping her circle of influential friends. She
interviewed successful directors for practical advice --
Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Rob Reiner. Reiner, with
whom Nora had collaborated on When Harry Met Sally , wrote a
detailed director's commentary on the shooting script of This Is
My Life and gave advice on the editing. "Everyone told me how
fatiguing it would be, how I should get into shape before
shooting started," says Ephron. "They didn't tell me how great
it would be. I couldn't wait to get back to the set. I was
learning more in a week than I had learned in my whole life."

    Pileggi says she had total control of the process, down to
what food was being served by the commissary. "It's all like one
big typewriter for her." He sees a pattern in the way Nora
circled back, almost despite herself, to the life she had fled.
"She certainly had no grand career plan to do this. Her grand
career plan is usually how to get all the ingredients together
for next Thursday's dinner party."

    But people could say of Ephron now, at age 50, what
Katharine Hepburn once said of her feminist mother -- that she
managed to have it all, career, husband, family and fame. One of
the themes of Heartburn the novel, Ephron's best work so far, is
that no one can have it all, that life unravels faster than you
can weave it back together -- another lesson she learned from
her haunted mother. But if, when her movie is released, the
critics attack it, that will no doubt be used in future
projects to control her life at that stage. It's all copy.