Film critic and author Marsha McCreadie remembers an afternoon spent with the late Nora Ephron discussing life, filmmaking, and the industry for her book The Women Who Write the Movies.
So how did I actually get to interview Nora Ephron, who died at the age of 71 two days ago in Manhattan? I had put in requests in the usual fashion, for a book I was writing on women screenwriters. But what sealed the deal was cornering Ephron in the woman’s room of the Loew’s 84th Street movie theater on her beloved upper west side of Manhattan, setting for You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally..., the topic of the latter — can a woman and man be friends without or with having sex? — having spawned innumerable rom-coms.
Ephron laughed, said O.K. As a former journalist she must have taken pity instead of bolting herself in a stall or calling a guard. A better question might be why she was at a public screening. But as a confirmed New Yorker who was frequently seen on the streets of the city making a movie, she was as much a fixture to the neighborhood as its inhabitants were to her. "It’s just Nora making another film" was a typical comment on Columbus Avenue, tolerating the inconvenience of having crews on the block. By then Ephron was directing, too. "It isn't entirely the boys keeping women writers out. It's smart women realizing the real power is in directing," she said later. Ephron directions include Bewitched, You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, Mixed Nuts, Julie and Julia.
The thrice Academy Award-nominated Ephron (scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally..., Sleepless in Seattle) never wanted to be screenwriter, or in the movie business at all. "I wanted to be Dorothy Parker," Ephron told me the afternoon I spent with her, in her apartment at the Apthorp, before she decamped to the Upper East Side due to rising rents (and describing the end of her "love affair" with her famed apartment building in a June 2006 essay for the New Yorker).
Born in New York, but raised in Beverly Hills by her screenwriter parents Phoebe and Henry Ephron (Daddy Long Legs, Desk Set) she grew up among the witty, literate screenwriters from the 1930s and early 1940s. Some of the parties and Hollywood lore are detailed in Ephron's I Remember Nothing, an essay collection published two years ago. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1962, Ephron was a fact-checker for Newsweek, then a reporter for the New York Post. She freelanced personal essays, mainly on women's topics, often with an acerbic take on the women's movement, and even on some women — "I hate myself for what I’m going to do" was a super clever lead to a piece critical of her then-boss Dorothy Schiff of the Post. A breakthrough was her personal piece "Why I Hate My Breasts" for Esquire, ending with the line about women who complain their breasts are too big: "I think they are full of shit."
Ephron said she segued to scripts in the late 1970s because it was the vogue in New York then, and ironically, "I'm nothing if not a follower." Shortly after, while she was pregnant and living in Washington D. C. with then-husband journalist Carl Bernstein, the father of her two children, Jacob and Max, she said it was easier to write scripts than to leap around making journalistic deadlines.
Marriage number two — she rarely mentioned the first to writer Dan Greenberg — ended, resulting in Heartburn, her screenplay based on her own novel about the marriage. And especially after Silkwood, with Meryl Streep as real-life activist Karen Silkwood, Ephron became known as a screenwriter of women's parts, and about women's topics. Directed by Mike Nichols, Ephron wrote Silkwood with Alice Arlen. Another occasional co-writing partner has been her sister Delia, one of four Ephron sisters, first for This is My Life in 1992 (also Ephron's first direction), then Mixed Nuts and You’ve Got Mail.
Sleepless in Seattle was a career highlight: "Everything fell into place. The cast of my dreams. A very fast shoot. And the movie went through the roof. I’m sure I'll pay for it the rest of my life." Not really — a recent success was Ephron's 2009 Julie & Julia (with Meryl Streep as Julia Child), Ephron writing and directing, and reflecting her own "foodie" status. "Please, have some chicken," she pressed me during our interview. "I just cooked it. It's the only thing I'm really good at."
She never left New York City after the split with Bernstein, an ugly, much litigated divorce even by celebrity standards. In fact, Ephron is said to have come up with the idea for the "divorce" section of the Huffington Post, edited by her friend Arianna Huffington. But by all accounts, especially her own ("I love my marriage") her third marriage to journalist and screenwriter Nick Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) has been a great success.
Still, it's always all about women — in journalism, movies, theater. With Delia again, she wrote the play Love, Loss, and What I Wore, about women and their wardrobes in 2010.
So it was a surprise to get her uncliched response to questions about women's struggles in the movie business, the crux of my interview with her. At the time of my talk with her the Writers Guild was listing 33 women and 1500 men screenwriters. (Today the official number is 19% females.) Ephron's teaching example: When Harry Met Sally. "Once I took a brief hiatus from the film and when I came back there were suddenly sixteen scenes about Harry. Then I had to even it out. In film as in fiction, it's very rare that you get a Henry James who writes about women... maybe James Brooks and Lawrence Kasdan. It's not that the roles for men are so great. There's just more of them."
Is the industry responsible in any way? "It's not that the studios conspire to not have good parts for women. It's that if women don't write movies there aren’t going to be that many good roles for women."
And even more startlingly: "I myself haven't experienced discrimination. Ageism, yes. Not sexism. In the 1940s when my parents went out to Hollywood, there were some women writers but they were mostly married to men writers. Some were friends of my parents, like Fay and Mike Kanin, or Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Then there weren't any, paralleling all of America, right? After World War II? When women were pushed out of the job market."
Nora Ephron died after a six year struggle with leukemia, one of the few personal topics she did not write about (see I Feel Bad About My Neck, book-ending the youthful "Breasts" piece.) She even wrote about her about her own mother's death, saying most famously — some say apocryphally — that Phoebe Ephron ordered on her deathbed "Take notes, Nora. It's all copy."
I wouldn't presume to guess what Ephron would have said of her own death (though she gave a hint in the "Things I'll Miss" [when I'm gone] section of I Remember Nothing). But I would share the tongue-in-cheek inscription she wrote on the inside flap of the copy of When Harry Met Sally... which she gave me, sending me off — the much lesser known and important — to write my version of Ephron's place in film, and women and film.
"'To Marsha — Be kind' Nora." Nice, but with an edge. Typical Nora Ephron.
Marsha McCreadie has written four books on women and film, including The Women Who Write the Movies (Birch Lane Press). She was the staff film critic at the Arizona Republic for many years, currently reviews for Film Journal International, and her film articles have been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Film Comment, sensesofcinema, and many other publications.
[Photo: Nora Ephron receives an award at the 2011 Directors Guild Of America Honors, via Getty Images]