Nora Ephron Passes
It’s scary when people you knew and considered your (rough) contemporaries start dying.
I didn’t know Nora Ephron well, but we were friendly acquaintances in the 1980s when we shared the same agent and would bump into each other at parties. I even remember meeting her father Henry — also a screenwriter and director — at an Edgar Award ceremony in 1986 when I was nominated and lost. They graciously came up and congratulated me anyway. It was the best part of the evening for me.
Naturally, I followed Nora’s career after we drifted apart. How could you not? She was a shooting star, one of those incredible people who could do everything well — write journalism, write novels, write screenplays, direct movies, even blog (well, that’s maybe not so hard).
And then there was the notoriety that came from her sometimes-difficult private life, the breakup with Carl Bernstein, which led to her novel Heartburn and the movie that followed, directed by Mike Nichols. Talk about taking lemons and making the proverbial lemonade. That was followed by When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and, recently, that foodie fun Julia & Julia – not to mention numerous others in between. Nora was not a lazy woman.
Now she’s dead at 71, an age you’re not supposed to die at anymore. You’re also not supposed to get leukemia. Maybe in the not-so-distant future people won’t. But that cure wasn’t soon enough for Nora, unfortunately.
May she rest in peace.
One other thing:
Nora died during a period of intense polarization in our country, maybe the most intense in our lives. Many old relationships have drifted apart. When I knew Nora, I was a liberal on her side of the fence. We never spoke after I made my political change, well over a decade ago now. It’s been that way for me with a lot of people, except for a few of my best and oldest friends.
Roger, thank you for this very moving tribute. It’s a reminder of the things that really matter to us.
RIP Nora.
Well said Rog’.
Aldous Huxley’s fame rested largely upon his novels, such as Brave New World, in which he examined humanity’s choice between a fully human life and the mechanized servitude of the anthill.
In his sixties he admitted, “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’”
The Little Brown Book of Anecdotes
God rest her soul in peace, and thank you for you writing.
Nora Ephron — her body of work is quite remarkable. Not wanting to speak ill of the dead here, but I must say this: “Heartburn” has the distinction of being the only movie I have ever walked out on. Sorry, Nora.
Rest in peace, sweet child.
Perspective…It’s easily lost in bitter times.
71 yrs is not ” far to young ”
71 yrs is old.
The life expectancy at birth of the world is 67.2 years (65.0 years for males and 69.5 years for females) for 2005–2010, according to United Nations World Population Prospects .
Your uncanny gift for the unimportant trivial remark is quite possibly unrivaled. What was your point ? Do you regularly perform this Cliff Claven party trick in person or do you reserve this for websites ?
You must be in great demand at funerals.
Victor, you miss a great point in life statistics. The most relevant life expectancy for any individual is not the life expectancy from birth, but the years they should expect from today.
Live through this year and you’ll get some more.
Please do some research and tell us the number of years that a 71 year old woman should imagine in her future. It’s something like 16 to 20 years.
Now you know what the world will miss.
Many happy years to you, starting tomorrow.
Yes, Victor, 71 IS far too young. The life expectancy of a 65-year old woman is about 20 maybe 22 years. We all plan for a long, healthy retirement. In the private sector (that’s non-government workers Victor) we have to save and invest and hope we have enough to live comfortably after working about 42 years. Alas, we support the govt workers and their rolls-royce benefits and much shorter and cushier careers. So we save and hope, and hope for more than 6 years in retirement after working 42 years. So, yes, 6 years after 65 is incredibly short and unfortunate. Anyway, that’s my perspective, and I’m 56.
Thank you, Roger.
Jamie
Well said. RIP Nora.
Victor, I would ask you to make your comments not entirely worthless, but I know you are not listening. That is not your way.
Just for the record, the United States is not the world. Yes, in Mozambique or Ankara or wherever hosts the slime pool that vomited you forth, perhaps 71 is a good long time. This here ain’t that there.
And no, I had little use for Nora Ephron while she was alive. However, I have no use for unproductive insects either, so go to, sirrah.
Nicely said, sir.
Not to mention the fact that life expectancy statistics include infant mortality, so that adults have an expectation of living at least a few years longer. But as you imply, Nichevo, one should never reply to Victor as if he were an honest poster. He long ago established himself as malevolent and dishonorable. His claim to be an American when he is in fact a Turk shilling for Erdogan’s Islamist regime is just one of his many frauds.
Sad news. She was a talented woman who will be missed.
I think “You’ve Got Mail” is still the best romantic comedy made since the Golden Age of Hollywood.
I hope her family can take comfort in the work she’s left behind, in knowing we appreciate it.
It may be observational bias, but in almost all the stories I know of friendships broken over politics, it’s the liberal who breaks it off with the conservative, seldom the other way around. One reason, I think, is that leftists tend to have a lot of psychological need to feel the rush of self-righteousness that liberalism brings. So when you attack their opinions you’re doing more, you are attacking their basic personalities. Disagreement is seen as an assault on personhood.
Excellent point, and something I’ve seen over and over with my lefty friends. They are liberals because of a need to address some kind of deep self-loathing or guilt; being for “social justice,” etc., makes them feel good about themselves in a way that maybe nothing else can. Bringing up the disastrous consequences of lefty policies has no import to them whatsoever, because they didn’t become lefties to solve external problems but internal ones.
Thank you Roger for this moving tribute.
My politics differed from Nora Ephron, but I loved some of her movies. As a mediocre cook, I loved Julie & Julia. I bought it and watched it a couple of times, and will watch it several times more.
RIP Nora Ephron.
I understand Roger. I recently moved to California. A friend of mine from elementary school told me another friend of ours was now a Deputy Controller for the State of California. I looked her up and sent her an email. She was thrilled to hear from me and said she couldn’t wait to get together (her husband’s family is in the area I moved to). Before we could get together, she sent me a friend request on Facebook and I, of course, accepted. I never heard from her again, despite several attempts to email her. I have decided that she took offense at some of the organizations I support (including the Tea Party) and was willing to throw away a 40 year old friendship (albeit interrupted for awhile) because she disagreed with me politically. I would have never mentioned politics in talking to her because I know how you get into leadership in CA state government, and conservatives need not apply. But I would have been happy to have talked about everything and anything else. I finally decided that it’s fear–fear that someone they might like could dash their contrived reality and anti-Republican, anti-Conservative bigotry to bits if he/she didn’t have fangs, claws, and an insatiable blood lust. It’s sad. But I guess that’s the only way they can manage their alternate reality.
Excellent commentary Roger.
Thank you for such class and decency.
Age 71 is a fine age to come down with various types of nasty leukemias, chronic or acute. 71 is not young biologically. Don’t kid yourselves.
Poets have taken note of the tragedy of life.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
What did Hamlet say to Yorick’s skull?
Get thee to my lady’s chamber
And tell her, though she paint her face an inch thick
Yet to this favor she must come.
Make her laugh at that.
About politics dividing us. I find empty headed liberals/Democrats/Progressives just too boring to talk to. They know nothing. They glory in their ignorance, and take comfort that none of their friends know anything.
Well joel; I don’t know your age, but as it approaches dear Ms Ephron’s, you mayen’t be so sanguine about that “fine age to get leukemia”, as you put it.
Never saw any of her work, I figured she was a commie, but RIP anyway, you useful idiot.
Cool way to live your life… pure (I don’t disagree, to each his/her own)
Her script gave Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal a chance to really show their stuff. Thanks, Nora.
William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a book that essentially was a journal of a week in his life (was it “Cruising Speed”?). In the paperback re-issue, Buckley answered his critics, and the results were hilarious, as usual. One of his critics was Ms. Ephron, who waxed wroth against Buckley’s limousine, the focal point of her apparent hatred of well-to-do Republicans. Buckley feigned chagrin, wondering why she had chosen that particular object on which to vent her spleen — it was actually quite useful, as Buckley pointed out. A Cadillac limousine (at the time) only cost about twice as much as a contemporary Cadillac, and while being driven from his home in Connecticut to his workplace in New York City, he could do a lot of his writing and correspondence. Buckley wondered why she hadn’t focused instead on his yacht, or even his grand piano (which in Buckley’s view was much less useful, more expensive, and took more abuse).
Joe Sobran sent Buckley a condolence note, something to this effect: “Don’t worry about Nora, Bill. I wouldn’t talk about my worst enemy the way she talks about her ex-husband.” Bob Woodward, if memory serves.
Carl Bernstein.
My best friend and her husband, both extremely liberal, have shunned me ever since I said I didn’t know who I was going to vote for in the 2008 election (I ended up not voting). Not only have they shunned me, they’ve shunned my entire family, and a mutual friend. What makes this especially galling is that these two were considered family members, and were involved in all of our gatherings and celebrations for decades.
Recently, I ran into the woman in a office building hallway. Our elevators opposite each other opened at the same time. When I saw her I said, “Hi —-.” She said, “Oh, hi,” and shut her elevator door in my face.
I’ve heard stories about other people being shunned by Obama supporters. Did the Obama team tell them to do this to non-believers? It’s like something from the Scientology playbook.
A friend in the States, whom I considered to be my closest and oldest friend, recently voiced to me her support for the Occupy Wall Street crowd. We had our political differences in the past, but even after I sent her a list of the damage these OWS nuts had done in every city and what they believed in, she still supported their cause. I was actually shocked at her reaction when I opposed them. I not only lost respect for her, I lost her friendship as well.
These stories are so sadly and drearily typical: I also have “tolerant, diversity-loving”, well-heeled ignoramuses, who are friends–or were. What’s the problem? I’ve informed them, especially about Obama: their default position is to support him, though they have not a clue about him. E.g., Fast and Furious? Never heard of it. So I inform. At present, I haven’t heard another word from these “friends” whom I’ve known for decades. My transgression? I imparted far more truth than they were willing to hear. And these are basically good people . . . I even said I’d welcome questions or challenges to the information I’d provided. Of course, they have none because their reasonably intelligent heads are altogether empty of the facts.
At this point, I’m honestly not too concerned about losing this kind of friend: yes, it’s sad, but who wants to hang around with people who can’t accept the truth with grace or talk about crucial issues in an open, intelligent manner? I guess the hardest part is that I thought these people were actually mature and caring enough for me to be able to share what I really think: like others here, I regularly self-censure. Anyway, if it’s come to the point where I have to do that with them, I’d rather “wipe the dust off my feet” and move on without worrying about their thin skin and opprobrium. (And it gives me more time to hang out at places like PJMedia!)
Also, I think 71 is too young to die, so I feel badly for Nora and her loved ones. However, it sounds like she had a fine life. RIP, Nora.
But, I didn’t disagree with my friends or say anything about Obama. I wouldn’t have done that, knowing how they felt. I simply said that I didn’t know how I was going to vote. It could have been for the Man in the Moon, for all they knew, as I had always in the past (as they were well aware of) voted for obscure presidential candidates.
Having never been shunned before, I was shocked by their cruel behavior, and depressed for a long time. If they showed up at my door today and apologized, I wouldn’t let them in. I don’t wish them ill; on the contrary, I wish them well. But, they’ve proved themselves false, fair-weather friends, and forevermore untrustworthy. Such are the besotted minions of Barry von Münchhausen.
Even worse when they are family. I self-censor to keep the peace. So does my sister–her youngest daughter is not just leftist, but raving. Still, we want to keep peace in the family.
Florida, I altogether understand where you’re coming from: fairweather friends, indeed. And my friends and I aren’t even American! But the political correctness plague is world-wide. The leftists natter on about how brave they are, speaking “truth to power”. NO WAY: now that they’ve hijacked the narrative in virtually all of our institutuions, it’s now their political opponents, people like you and I, who are speaking truth to power. Of course, the “progressives” will never get this: it’s about time we stopped letting them get away with it.
Lookout, I’ve given up. These fanatics cannot be reached by logic, reason, friendship, or anything else. It’s their way or the highway. All the historical facts one can gather to refute their fantasy mean nothing. They’ve replaced everything with ideology. They only read leftist newspapers and magazines, only visit leftist Web sites, only watch leftist news programs. Right-wing fanatics make the same mistakes on the opposite side.
Barry von Münchhausen is an evil man: a pathological liar, a pompous windbag and blowhard, a rabble-rouser, a political agitator, a war-monger, a pseudo-intellectual, a thief, a criminal, a malicious gossip and tale-bearer, a back-stabber, a fame-seeker, a megalomaniac, a bully, a crackpot, a poseur and impostor, a literary fraudster, a hedonist, a gourmand, a libertine, and a premeditated murderer. Yet, tens of millions of people adore him, most oblivious to his evil. Could they grovel any lower?
This is the result of PR duplicity and media-marketing debauchery carried to their logical extreme. The advertising industry has invented Obama out of raw sewage, and foisted him on the most gullible of publics. Who can counter the forces of professional mass deception?
Don’t blame all liberals; I wouldn’t have shunned you.
Actually, it’s some that runs a little deeper. In today’s world, being an elite simply means you have been trained into sneering, illiterate idiocy.The same holds true to lesser extent for liberalism’s camp followers.
This is why you cannot even begin to have a reasonable debate with these people. We’re a hair’s breadth away from a descent into violence and savagery that will take everyone by surprise. Why would this be the case? Because those with the leftist worldview have invested their entire existence in what amounts to a fundamentally insane and downright evil premise: that your life doesn’t belong to you.
Chantal Delsol, in her landmark Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century has an excellent perspective on this refusal to face reality:
In other words, no one wants to admit that the premises upon which one has constructed their entire raison d’être amount to an empty, shrieking fraud. But it’s a lesson that will go unlearned by most of them until it is far, far too late.
Balint Vasonyi, author of America’s Thirty Years War: Who is Winning? observed that, “The communists have learned to their rue (one hopes) that it is a great mistake to kill millions of people.”
This, I believe is a vain hope and is thus one of the great unlearned lessons of the twentieth century. Vasonyi suggests that communists belatedly realized that they were killing off their most productive people. I seriously doubt that, for not only did they not care, but that the deliberate slaughter of the ‘productive classes’ was an act completely consistent with a worldview built upon the will to power. In the revolutionary communist degringolade, the society they rule devolves quickly from a high-trust to a low-trust, to a no-trust one – as it must. Because the destruction of trust, the dissipation of what Francis Fukuyama terms ‘social capital’ is necessary if one wishes to reduce people to chattel. A double-edged sword, to be sure. When trust is is everywhere destroyed, those who hold power must also live in fear.
Further thoughts:
Many of the dupes and useful idiots on the left claim that they are all for ‘social justice’ but most of them have no real idea of what that term really entails. ‘Social justice’ as it the term is used today is a con game used by the clever to advance their personal wealth and egos, and by the ruling class as an instrument to destroy trust. In fact, when successfully applied, ‘social justice’ destroys a great deal more than that. It is a linchpin in the process of dehumanization, a process that plays into and feeds upon the the aims and desires of will to power driven monsters – killers without conscience.
Monsters and motives aside for the moment, the chief problem with ‘social justice’ is that it is based upon a defective notion of human rights. ‘Human rights,’ after all, are the chief argument made by its advocates for the imposition of social justice and the redistribution of wealth. Chantal Delsol, in Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century argues that, in order to avoid conflict, what she calls ‘modernity’ has reduced the the concept of rights to the merely biological and the material. This is a low-rent way for the smug and the self-righteous to assert their assumption of moral superiority, as it neatly dodges – and in fact destroys – the larger questions of human dignity and aspirations. As Delsol puts it:
As I see it, ‘modernity,’ as Delsol defines it, has striven to achieve not so much as the Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’ as the devaluation of all values. The great irony is that it has left the latter to the will to power driven monsters and the former to those whose job, witting or not, is to reduce us all to chattel.
But it’s not as if this pack of smug elitists and their applauders and enablers didn’t have a choice. They all did. They simply refused to reckon with the fact at the end of the road they’ve chosen to travel lies madness, atrocity and slaughter. Another unlearned lesson of the twentieth century.
This is perhaps one of the most erudite posts I’ve read on any site. THANK YOU for your scholarly insight. Very illuminating.
Ward:
Wonderful post. I had to read it twice to take it all in.
She was a beautiful writer with an insight into the human condition of relationships. She will be missed.
Thank-you for this tribute. Memory Eternal, Nora.
Nora Ephron was without question, an excellent writer. Certainly she lived on a hinge in history, but she employed it far less than other writers might have. RIP.
Florida, at #18, contradicting myself, I know what you mean about giving up: in most cases, I say nothing. The possibly ex-friends I actually informed lately are people I actually trusted to be open to the facts. It seems not, though their silence MIGHT infer consent—I don’t hold my breath! I’d rather be friends, but, as I said, if I have to self-censure all the time, what’s the point? Family is different . . .
Florida, you wrote, “They only read leftist newspapers and magazines, only visit leftist Web sites, only watch leftist news programs. Right-wing fanatics make the same mistakes on the opposite side.” Actually, as right wingers are in enemy territory day in and day out, re virtually all institutions and the consensus media having hijacked the agenda, there’s almost no way that those of us who disagree with the progressives don’t know A LOT about them. Left-wing propaganda 24/7 often ruins one’s day!
I don’t know… I read PJMedia, NewsBusters, Townhall, TheDailyCaller, ConservativeByte, VisionToAmerica, a lot of the conservative medical blogs (there are a lot of them), sometimes I’m in agreement on some aspects. So, don’t give up, Conserv’s, it might be working.
Much of this thread reflects our tribalism. It’s everywhere; it’s what our politics are about. (I, too, have been dismayed to lose liberal friends over politics.) The writer of The New York Times’s obit on Ephron, Charles McGrath, chose to write this (asterisks for emphasis are mine) in the penultimate paragraph of the piece: “Ms. Ephron’s collection ‘I Remember Nothing’ concludes with two lists, one of things she says she won’t miss and one of things she will. Among the “won’t miss” items are dry skin, **Clarence Thomas**…”
In response I posted these comments, which apparently didn’t make it past the site moderator:
“I count myself among those who will miss Nora Ephron’s work very much. She has been a favorite of mine since I started reading her work in the ’70s.
“That said, I have to say to Mr. McGrath: Shame on you for the gratuitous inclusion of Clarence Thomas among the things Ms. Ephron won’t miss, in an otherwise excellent piece.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight: It’s not OK to speak ill of the dead, but it’s OK to quote the dead speaking ill of the living if it serves to score cheap, partisan political points.
“I get it, Mr. McGrath. I know which herd is yours, and by your insinuation you’ve told me it’s not mine. And I have two questions for the editor who hit “print” on this piece, his boss, and the person at the top, Mr. Sulzberger: Is there no end to the The New York Times’s partisanship in the battle of Left vs. Right? Is there any space left in The New York Times where people can just be people, irrespective of political affiliation or views?
“Your smugness is nauseating.”
Thank you for this.
And I guess the answer, that you’ll never actually get from the NYT, is a firm “NO”. These people are arch hypocrites–and toadies!
Phil_in_VA, I appreciate your comments too.
There are intelligent and well-informed liberals who can argue their case. But there are certainly many liberals whose liberalism is basically just emotion — to them, it’s just the logical consequence of being a nice person.
They don’t feel the need to think deeply about issues, and certainly so no value in hearing the other side. (If I told you that there was a case to be made for cold-blooded mass murder, would you bother to listen?)
When this sort of liberal encounters a conservative who is also a nice person, and perhaps an intelligent and well-informed one — perhaps someone they have known well in the past — this creates terrible cognitive dissonance. They require conservatives to be selfish and stupid. The only response is to deny the reality, by shunning the source of their psychological disturbance.
Ephron was a very talented writer, though (and as is the case with a lot of those in New York literary circles who also hold the ‘proper’ political beliefs) not as talented as the media hype made her out to be at the pinnacle of her East Coast fame, when she and Carl Bernstein were considered the journalistic power couple. Unlike Carl, though, Nora reinvented herself as a screenwriter of accomplishment in the 1990s (part of the praise for her work in 1983′s “Silkwood” was as much about the anti-nuclear slant of the subject matter as it was about the handling of the story). And at least she didn’t go out with “Bewitched” as the final film on her resume.
I recommend her essay “Breasts” for laugh-out-loud funny early Ephron work. I remember it in an Esquire anniversary issue circa September 1973 with a Sergeant-Pepper-type parody cover painting with all the authors they’d printed over the years. Her entry was the funniest. RIP Ms. Nora Ephron
aardunza
I have that magazine somewhere in the basement! I knew I kept it for a good reason. I’m going to dig it up and find that essay.
Thanks for the reminder.
Yeah, the liberals are not reachable with facts. An old liberal acquaintance told me I was a bully because I argued with facts. Another, after being shown he knew nothing of a particular historical incident on which he had an opinion (The Battle of the Little Bighorn) just said, “In the end, there is no objective truth.” Or the Democrat I know who talked about how important it was to control CO2 in the atmosphere (He bought a Prius, which got wrecked. He took a big lost and bought a regular car later.). I asked him how high CO2 was in the atmosphere. This university grad and high school math teacher had never thought about that. He answered “10%”. This means his circle of liberal friends, all Obama supporters, have no idea how low CO2 is in the atmosphere. (390 ppm.)
Having strong opinions without any facts to back them up is a mark of an uneducated person. Their degrees mean nothing.
I think the reason they shun us is because they are:
1. Just too ashamed to meet people who know more, make more money, and have different views.
2. They are typical intellectuals described in Sowell’w book, Intellectuals and Society. Their self image would be destroyed if they faced the truth. The truth is, they are nothing special.
They avoid us because they suspect the truth.
Since they know nothing, and don’t think, I don’t miss their company.
This was courtly and magnanimous of you, Roger. We could use a lot more of that these days, so good on you.
Politics aside, Ephron was exceptionally talented and productive, and by all accounts was a wonderful friend who possessed a great zest for life—and “I’ll have what she’s having” is still one of the wittiest movie lines of my lifetime.
I was also happy for her to read that, despite two failed marriages, she had the courage to try once more, and was rewarded with 25 apparently very happy years with her surviving husband, Nicholas Pileggi. It tickled me to read (as the NYT reported), that “Her contribution to “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure,” edited by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, reads: “Secret to life, marry an Italian.”
All’s well that ends well—so good on her, too!
Her obit mentioned that her parents worked on the screenplay for Captain Newman, M.D.
I can remember as a child walking down to the water tower to watch them film the water tower scene where Col. Bliss (Eddie Albert) took his leap.
She was a wonderful writer and she did know how to communicate with women. I was married to a cheater and felt like I was not alone when I saw her movie about Bernstein. I am a conservative and her digs at conservatives did nothing for the movie Julie and Julia. She probably knew it was gratuitous BS, but she did it anyway because she could. I don’t know what to make of that except it took something away from her. It seems everything in Hollywood is some sort of drivel against republicans. I now vote with my pocket book, by not going to the movies. She died of an insidious, cruel disease, of which I am truly sorry for her and her family. I hope she did not care a whit about democrats and republicans when all was said and done.