Most people remember Nora Ephron as the the director of funny movies, the writer of funny screenplays. Everyone has a favorite scene, among the many replayed on the Internet after Ephron’s death Tuesday at age 71. Most likely the favorite is “I’ll have what she’s having.”
“When Harry Met Sally” (1989), “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) were her best-known movies. But long before she took to the screen, Ephron was a a journalist and essayist, a 1970s exemplar of what was called the “new journalism,” (although she disdained the title) bringing wit and warmth to a previously drier form.
The Manhattan-born, Wellesley-educated, dedicated Upper West Side New Yorker In an essay titled “Considering the Alternative,” she left specific instructions for her funeral — finger sandwiches and champagne. Mostly it was an essay about avoiding thinking too deeply about death or, as she put it, “the d-word.”
Her style, evident in early essay collections “Crazy Salad,” “Scribble, Scribble” and “Wallflower at the Orgy,” was clever, funny and not terribly deep. In Ephron’s wit some saw a modern Dorothy Parker, and Ephron wrote of her ambition to become that sage “only woman at the table.” But unlike Parker, Ephron was a product of the TV age. It is possible to see Ephron’s influence in current generations of female comedy writers and directors, from , who similarly deal in self-deprecating humor, albeit of a post-feminist bent.
Ephron alluded to bigger questions in discussing the changing roles and desires of women, but contented herself with cracking wise. Adultery, abandonment, aging… she always had a quip.
Even when her topics were as frothy as manicures and wrinkles, notably in the collection of essays “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” Ephron cleverly, gently hinted at something more painful or profound. Her focus was mortality, the battle of the sexes, personal vanity or the state of womanhood. The dark and frightening undercurrents were relegated to the background. She stuck to what she was good at, ie. the gag.
On the subject of hair dye: “Highlights, you probably know, are little episodes of blondness that are scattered about your head. They involve peroxide. They extend the length of time involved in hair dying from unbearable to unendurable.”
On using life’s tragedy for comedy: “I now believe that what my mother meant when she said, ‘everything is copy’ is this: 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.”
On child rearing: “A successful parent is one who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis.”
“Heartburn,” her autobiographical novel about her shock at the dissolution of her second marriage to Carl Bernstein (of Watergate journalism fame), became a movie. It was reliably humorous, but lacking in depth. “We really want her to achieve a glimmer of self-understanding,” a 1983 New York Times book review said.
Her most serious work was the 1984 drama “Silkwood,” about the anti-nuclear activist, that won an Oscar nomination for Ephron’s writing as well as for Meryl Streep as best actor and Mike Nichols as best director. More often, she kept it light: with her sister Delia Ephron, she captured her bittersweet touch in the title of their play, “Love, Loss and What I Wore.”
Who else could have landed a first job at the New York Post by writing a parody of the paper?
Ephron’s style was cheeky, fresh and freeing, leaving the deeper political and social concerns of the era to the likes of Susan Sontag, Kate Millet, Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller. They may have struggled more to reach revealing truths in their writing, but only Ephron made us laugh so consistently for so long.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
