Nora Ephron

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Nora Ephron – CHJ Humanist of the Year

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A profile of multi-talented Nora Ephron, with an emphasis on her family roots and her personality

Transcript of Nora Ephron

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Nora Ephron – CHJ Humanist of the Year

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Nora’s father, Henry Ephron, was a very successful Hollywood screenwriter

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Nora’s mother, Phoebe Ephron, was also a very successful Hollywood screen writer. Back then this was highly unusual. Ideas about a woman’s role in a marriage and in the world were very different from now. When Nora was born, in 1941, we had come a long way from early ideas about feminine beauty.

But not about a woman’s role in the home

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Housekeeping

Actress Zsa-Zsa Gabor, who was married 9 times, said that she was a great housekeeper –“Every time I get a divorce I keep the house!”

Phoebe Ephron hated housekeeping. She had a live-in cook and also a nanny for the girls. She also hated to shop. Her daughter Nora was also not big on housekeeping. In Nora’s will she left $100,000 to her personal assistant.

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Phoebe Ephron had a very strong work ethic. There are very few photos of Phoebe in domestic settings. Nora and her sisters grew up in a household that was not at all typical back then, with two very successful professional writers. Her parents cast long shadows and it is no wonder that the 4 Ephron girls became screenwriters and authors themselves. They had a different kind of role model as well – Nora’s parents fought constantly, were alcoholics (especially Phoebe), and Henry was a real ladies man. Nora herself had 3 marriages.

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Henry and Phoebe believed that everything was grist for the writer’s mill, however personal and from within the family. Their Broadway play and film Take Her, She’s Mine was based on 22 year old Nora’s letters home from college (which she probably assumed were private, within the family). Later in life Nora would take her own bitter divorce and use it as material for her novel, and film Heartburn. With the Ephrons, the apples did not fall far from the tree. Henry wrote a book about his glamorous days in Hollywood and Nora was used to seeing many film celebrities up close.

Henry and Phoebe were AWOL as parents and Phoebe’s version of mothering was to “let them make their own mistakes”

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Phoebe and Hallie, her 3rd daughter

Early family portrait

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Early in life as well as later on, Nora was close to her sister Delia. Their mother, Phoebe, hated to shop, didn't do housework, and never chatted on the phone or met friends for lunch. She worked and that was how she defined herself. Tellingly she named her first child, Nora after the main character in Ibsen’s “The Doll House” The Ephron sisters sort of raised themselves and that may have led to an unusual closeness.

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When Phoebe went into labor with her third child she and Henry were working on the script of the last scene of one of their Broadway plays. They did not drive to the hospital until Phoebe had typed “The End”. With a strong role model like this it is no wonder that Nora planned from an early age to be someone. Phoebe read stories to her young daughters about fictional girls with strong characters, like Eloise, Madeline, and Dorothy of Oz. Later on Phoebe gave each girl an adult novel that had the message “you are only a victim if you let yourself be”The 4th daughter, Amy was named after the 4th sister in Little Women.

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Nora at age 34, one year before her first divorce – from Dan Greenberg (author of the 1964 best selling book How to be a Jewish Mother) and after 9 years of marriage to him she then immediately married journalist Carl Bernstein, in 1976.

Nora graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1958 and Wellesley College in 1962. She was briefly an intern at JFK’s White House. She worked as a reporter at the New York Post and covered RFK’s campaign. Then she wrote a column on women’s issues at Esquire. She wrote that Wellesley College had turned out “a generation of docile and unadventurous women” Very many years later she gave the commencement address at Wellesley.

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Nora had two children by Carl Bernstein. When he was in the midst of the breaking stories about Watergate, she figured out who Deep Throat was. She saw the initials M.F. in one of Carl’s notebooks (he claimed that it stood for My Friend (A.K.A. Deep Throat) but actually it stood for Mark Felt of the FBI, the true identity of Deep Throat. After their very acrimonious divorce (he was sleeping with their mutual friend) Nora told everyone who Deep Throat was. Nobody believed her.

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Nora’s 4 year marriage to Carl Bernstein ended when his affair with the wife of the British Ambassador, when Nora was 7 months pregnant, led to a very bitter divorce. This became the source of Nora’s best selling thinly disguised novel Heatburn, also made into a movie.

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Her screenwriter mother Phoebe taught her to manipulate her experiences: “If you came to her with a sad story, she had no interest in it whatsoever. ‘Turn it into a funny story. Get back to me. I will be interested.’”By writing her novel Heartburn, based on her divorce, she turned life into art – a constant theme in Nora’s life.

Nora was blindsided by Carl’s affair and devastated by the breakup of her marriage.

Phoebe

My religion is 'Get over it,'" says Ephron. "And I was raised in that religion. That was the religion of my home — my mother saying, 'Everything is copy; everything is material; someday you will think this is funny.' My parents never said, 'Oh you poor thing.' It was work through it, get to the other side, turn it into something. And it worked with me."

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Nora credits her parents with teaching her to focus on the funny side of even the saddest things."My mother (taught) me a very fundamental lesson of humor, which is that if you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but if you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your joke," explains Ephron. "And you're the hero of the joke because you're telling the story."

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During this time Nora’s mother Phoebe died, at age 57, from years of world class alcohol abuse. Everyone had seen this coming. At a death bed meeting Phoebe told Nora, who was 30, “You’re a writer. Take notes”. So to the very end Phoebe felt that everything in life was copy. Nothing personal was to be left untouched, if you are a writer. The youngest of the sisters, Amy, rebelled against this and kept her inner life to herself. It wasn’t until she was 50 that she started to tap these family experiences and now has 8 novels published .

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“My mother was not one to go in for superstition or miracles — godlessness was for her a form of religion, a belief in self-sufficiency above all else . . . "

Nora’s son Jacob Bernstein became a style writer for the New York Times. He wrote a touching piece about her last days in the hospital. She had told few of her very many friends that she was sick and many were shocked when she died.

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Nora said she thought of herself “as a Jew, but not Jewish.” She wasn’t in denial about her Jewish identity, just indifferent to it: “At this point, it doesn’t make the Top 5 of what I would say about myself. And it probably never did.” She bristled at being pegged as a Jewish director, just as she cringed at being described as a “woman director:” “It seems like a narrow way of looking at. what I do.” She went to Wellesley College in 1958, when the school had a quota on Jews. After she was admitted, she received a housing form on which she was supposed to put her religious preference. “I thought that leaving it blank was sort of the right response,” “And I got a letter back saying I wouldn’t be given a room assignment till I told them my religious preference. So I wrote them a letter saying that I was an atheist but I had been born a Jew, and sent it off. I suddenly realized that whether I thought of myself as a Jew or not, other people thought of me as a Jew, and I had to come to terms with what that was.” She was relieved her two boys didn’t request bar mitzvahs. “First of all, because of my feelings about religion, and second of all, because they’re so expensive, and third of all, because nothing is more awful than a divorced bar mitzvah.” (She was divorced from their father, Carl Bernstein, the second of her three husbands.)

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“I grew up completely in the (Jewish) culture, not the religion. I was raised in a family against religion in any way. I think I was raised in a sect of writers.” (The closest she got to a religious hymn was her father's recurring phrase: "That's a great line, write it down.") There is no way I can wrap my brain around this (religion). It requires a leap of faith. A leap of faith conflicts with my religion. It's not that I am 'not Jewish enough,' but I am too Ephron to ever acknowledge it

Nora Ephron wrote in 2010. “We were taught that organized religion was the root of all evil and that Adlai Stevenson was God.”

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Answer: Yes, from 1893 to 1897 as the Vice President of Grover Cleveland. He was the grandfather of Adlai Stevenson, both with the same name) who we all know from the 1952 and 1956 election campaigns.

A total digression here, completely out of context – did Adlai Stevenson ever serve, however briefly, as Vice President? This is a good one to pull on your political junkie friends.

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Nora was Jewish but not religious and said “ You can never have too much butter – that is my belief. If I have a religion, that's it,"

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Nora said "My religion is 'Get over it.'")

Nora on death - "You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday," she says. "If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it."

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Nora felt that life is what you make of it. There is nothing after this, so we must try to live our lives to the fullest.

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Her sister, Delia, gets $500,000, while her two other sisters, Amy and Hallie, get $100,000 and $25,000 respectively. Each of her nieces and nephews get $10,000 and her assistant John Sacha got $100,000.

When Nora died of leukemia in 2012, at the age of 71, she left the bulk of her $15 million estate to her 3rd husband (screenwriter Nick Pileggi) and her two sons (by Carl Bernstein)

Sounds like there’s an untold story here about her relationship with Hallie.

She was the last person I’d call if I needed a shoulder to cry on,” her sister Hallie wrote in an article last spring. “She’d say, ‘Deal with it.’”)

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Nora Ephron’s romantic comedies often had a theme about the inherent differences between men and women and how that affects their relationships. In her movie When Harry Met Sally, for example, she addresses the question – can men and women just be friends, or does sexual attraction make that impossible?

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EPHRON: When I was young, I had this list of things that I wanted in a husband. I knew what he should read and what sports he should like and blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, that the list was a shocking mirror image of me. You want to marry yourself when you are young. That's what I love about all the personal ads. "Wishes to meet: non-smoker, skier, Democrat ... " Whatever it is, it's who they are.

NORTON: "Single white male seeking single white female version of self."

EPHRON: Exactly. All the things you think are so urgently important, when you get older, you discover they don't have anything to do with love.

NORTON: [Rainer Maria] Rilke said when you are young, you perceive a relationship as a fusion. When people come together too young, they try to become one person. As you get older, you realize that you don't want to become one person because then you lose the person you are. Rilke's whole idea was that a good relationship is two people who stand guard at the gates of each other's solitude or singularity.

Nora and film maker/actor Edward Norton talk

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Nora and her sister Delia worked together on many film projects.

My parents were collaborators, I ended up collaborating with my sister," Ephron laughs. "Look how far I've come, I'm right back in my family mold."But it's exactly that closeness that Ephron discovers is required for a successful collaboration, or as she explains in the essay "Collaboration," "collaboration, I discovered, is a kind of marriage."

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Nora’s romantic comedies like these two explore the idea of a man and woman trying to connect over a gulf of distance (Sleepless in Seattle) or anonymity (You’ve Got Mail). The striving for connection gives the tension that drives the plot.

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It is a little odd that Nora Ephron would pen a line like this when she herself would be the first to disavow the idea of fate, a higher power, etc. But it makes for a great romantic theme for a movie – our “destined mate”.

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This is the real Nora talking, not a scripted movie character.

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One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”— ‘96 Wellesley commencement address.

“…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”― I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Funny Nora Serious Nora

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Nora Ephron’s films

Essay collections and other works•Wallflower at the Orgy (1970)•Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975), •The Boston Photographs (1975)•Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media (1978), •Heartburn (1983, a novel)•I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006)•I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (2010)

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Unlike her mother Phoebe, Nora had a few regrets later in her life about her life. At 69, two years before she died, she said that accepting the job of directing a movie in the late 1980s, when her sons were 11 and 10, was not ideal for parenting. “It would have been better for them if I hadn’t done the movie,” she said. “I can’t pretend it’s better for your kids to go off to Toronto for eight weeks. You have to decide for yourself.” And she admitted that she has been “more careless than I should be” in writing about loved ones. “The horrible truth is you hurt people, and there are some things I really regret.”

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Phoebe, who did not live to see most of Nora’s career, would have been proud of her journalist, screenwriter, playwright, film maker, novelist, essayist, early feminist, live-life-to-the-fullest daughter. But would probably not say it.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVCfFBlKpN8&list=PLNg4flNgkxe0x_UQEF9jqaAX2cqoVrSKM&index=5

Nora Ephron’s 1996 Wellesley commencement address.