NORA EPHRON – REMEMBERING WITH LOVE AND LAUGHTER!
Shirley Gilbert
Recap of Nora Ephron’s Life Monday, September 24, 2012
Thanks Kathy for that excellent introduction.
And thank you so much for coming tonight to talk about an extraordinary and very very funny woman — Nora Ephron.
It’s not often that you smile, laugh out loud (LOL) and even giggle when you read an obituary.
But that’s what happened when I researched the many obits that were written after Nora Ephron’s death on Tuesday, June 26th.
Nora died of acute myeloid leukemia that was complicated by pneumonia.
Only her closest friends knew about it. She didn’t believe in complaining or whining. One of her mottos was: “Just suck it up.””
What strikes you when you read about her is how talented she was — and in so many directions.
She was a journalist, a blogger, an essayist, novelist, playwright, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, movie director and a great and kind friend.
How did she get to be all those things?
Well Nora was born on May 19, 1941 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
And while we think of Ephron as being the quintessential New Yorker, she moved to California when she was 4, grew up in Beverley Hills and graduated from Beverley Hills High in 1958.
It’s no surprise that she became a writer because writing is the family business.
Her parents, Phoebe and Henry, were screenwriters. They wrote films like: Carousel; There’s No business Like Show Business and Captain Newman, M.D.
Her mother told her: “Nora…take notes. Everything is copy.”
Nora was the eldest of four sisters all of whom became writers.
In terms of college Nora went to Wellesley and wrote for the school paper.
While at school she wrote letters home and this resulted in her parents writing her into a play,later a movie entitled Take Her, She’s Mine. It starred Sandra Dee and Jimmy Stewart.
I don’t think Nora liked that: she never, never wrote about her own two children.
In the summer of 1961,Nora was an intern in the Kennedy White House. She claims she’s the only intern in history that John F. Kennedy never hit on.
She graduated in 1962 and moved to New York and looked for a job as a journalist.
She was hired by Newsweek and started as a “mailgirl” and fact checker.
Later she started working as a writer — and there weren’t many women writers in Newsweek at the time.
At Newsweek she wrote a parody of New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons that so impressed the Post’s publisher Dorothy Schiff, she hired her.
She worked at the Post for five years covering stories like the Beatles, the Star of India robbery at the American Museum of Natural History and a pair of hooded seals at the Coney Island aquarium that refused to mate.
In the late ’60s Nora turned to magazine writing — she wrote for Esquire and New York Magazine. These were funny personal essays about the smallness of her breasts, profiles of Ayn Rand, Helen Gurley Brown and Rod McKuen.
Nora was married three times.
She first married the writer Dan Greenburg and that ended in divorce.
She later married Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame in 1976.
And by the way that’s how she got into script writing. Bernstein didn’t like the script for All the President’s Men so he and Nora rewrote it. Their version wasn’t used. Her first successful screenplay was Silkwood, about Karen Silkwood who died under mysterious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant. Mike Nichols directed the movie and he loved the script.
In the meantime, Nora discovered, when she was pregnant with her second child, that husband Bernstein was having an affair and that resulted in another divorce.
The divorce and his cheating devastated her. In fact later she came up with the idea of a divorce section of the Huntington Post. “Marriages come and go,” she said, “but divorce is forever.”
When Nora was sad — she wrote. And the book about her divorce was entitled Heartburn. In fact she was so vitriolic about Bernstein in the book, Bernstein threatened to sue.
“That man,” she wrote, “is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”
Heartburn was made into a movie with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson which didn’t do all that well.
Her next film in 1989, When Harry Met Sally, was a great hit.
It was the start of her brand of old fashioned romantic movies done in a new, amusing way.
In 1998 she wrote and directed a remake of the old Ernst Lubitsch film: The Shop Around the Corner — that was You’ve Got Mail. And incidentally it was filmed around the corner from my daughter’s apartment in the Upper West side.
Nora once said her prime motivation for directing was because she believed in making movies by or about women. She once said about movie moguls: “A movie about a woman’s cure for cancer is less interesting than a movie about a man with a hangnail.”
In 1992 she directed a movie called This Is My Life, about a single mother trying to become a standup comedian. Sad to say, it wasn’t a huge hit.
But then came a great success, Sleepless in Seattle, in 1993. Lucky Numbers in 2000, Bewitched in 2005 and her last and greatest reviewed movie Julie and Julia in 2009.
Nora won three Oscar nominations for best screenplay for Silkwood, Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally.
And her books: I Feel Bad About My Neck; and I Remember Nothing were best sellers.
In 1987 Nora married Nicholas Pileggi, the author of Wiseguy; and Casino and she said of this long-lasting marriage: “The Secret to life — marry an Italian.”
Her son Jacob Bernstein is in the family business — he’s a journalist and her other son Max is a rock musician. He’s an anomaly for sure.
What is so amazing about this very funny lady is that she was so fabulous in real life. Wrote one friend: “Sitting at a table with Nora was like being in a Nora Ephron movie. She was brilliant and funny.”
And one of her book editors noted that the private Nora was even more remarkable than the public one. “She was always there for you with a full heart plus the crucial dose of the reality principle.”
So that’s a short story of remarkable Nora Ephron.
Reading her life history convinces me that Nora is someone I would love to invite to dinner because while she was brilliant and hilarious she was also so warm and human.
And what I really feel bad about — is that I can no longer do that.
What I really feel good about is what’s coming up next.
We are all in for a treat.
Jean Hofacket, Director of the Alameda County Library, will talk about the Legacy of Nora Ephron.
I know you’ll smile when you read Jean’s biography on the flyer that you received.
She is a southern lady with a huge heart and a delightful – sometimes wicked — sense of humor.
She works hard to overturn the old adage that librarians are boring. Jean doesn’t have a boring bone in her body.
She points to the movie It’s A Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and shudders. For when they show life without George Bailey, the Jimmy Stewart character, his wife, God help her, degenerates into becoming a librarian, faints and has a terrible life. And who can forget Marian the Librarian before the Music Man saves her from that boring life.
As a southerner Jean has many south of the Mason Dixon line heroes like Ann Richards, 45th Governor of the State of Texas and the late humorist and columnist Molly Ivins. However, she says one of her few Yankee heroes is Nora Ephron.
So here is Jean to talk about one of her heroes.