From being rejected by Newsweek because she’s a woman to a napkin-eating Hollywood agent, a celebrated writer discusses her journey to success in the worlds of print and cinema. Excerpted from “Nora Ephron,” November 21, 2010.

NORA EPHRON, Film Director, Sleepless in Seattle; Screenwriter; Author, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing

In Conversation with JANE GANAHL, Author; Co-founder, Litquake

 

GANAHL: It’s so strange to me that memory can make us remember the most minute details.

EPHRON: The most horrible, trivial details, and all the important ones are gone and there is no retrieving them most of the time. I met Eleanor Roosevelt when I was a political intern in college. She certainly was the person who, if you asked me at that point who I most wanted to meet, I would have said her. But all I can remember was that there were drapes and that we got lost on the way. So the sense that my life has been wasted on me is very acute. I will tell you something that just happened the other day – and I do not tell you this to drop a name; I just want to give you an idea of what it’s like when you get to a certain age. I was reading Lady Antonia Fraser’s book about her marriage to Harold Pinter, and I get to about page 180 and discover, to my shock, that she has been to my house for dinner, and I have no memory about it at all. I called up my friend Richard, who was a friend from the days in Washington when she apparently came to my house, and said, “Do you have any memory of it?” He said, “Yes, I do. There  was a fight between Harold Pinter and somebody who was there, who was really good at getting into fights with people, and he got up and stormed out of the party. It was all we talked about for months.” I had this, kind of, “Yeah, I kind of remember that.”

GANAHL: Are you sure she wasn’t just dropping your name?

EPHRON: She didn’t drop my name. She dropped the name of my ex-husband [former Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein].

GANAHL: So really, as great a life as you’ve had, it may actually be greater than you know.

EPHRON: It may be even more fabulous.

GANAHL: Is this a memory thing, or is it that as you get older, you discover that you really don’t have to know everything?

EPHRON: You might have to know more than we know. There are certain things that I’m just refusing to know certain things about in the hopes that they will go away. You know, where it’s like, “Where is this country? Do I have to learn who its leaders are?” I might just stop. That’s how I feel about the Kardashians and Glenn Beck.

GANAHL: Why do you think young people care about popular culture more than we do at this age? Why is it more important to the young to be on top of all this?

EPHRON: I think we were like that. I have friends who can sing the themes to every television show from the ’60s and the ’70s, when fortunately I was too old to watch any of them. But I can certainly do the entire repertoire of all the people who were singing when I was growing up in the ’50s. I know every standard. When I came to New York, there were things you had to do in order to be a citizen of the metropolis. You had to read Catch-22 and you had to have your copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or you couldn’t be in the conversation.

GANAHL: You also say something similar about staying technologically current.  I love what you said about how Twitter was just invented to make us seem old.

EPHRON: That’s how I really feel about it. I was on the cutting edge. When e–mail came, I was absolutely the seventh or eighth person to do it. I was on America Online so early that I got my own name on it without a four digit number after it. It was so divine in the beginning when you had seven or eight friends who were on e–mail, and when that voice said, “You’ve got mail,” your heart leapt. It was something that you were actually interested in reading. It wasn’t from the Democratic National Committee or the Williams-Sonoma people; it was mail. It wasn’t like, “You want lunch?” I wrote You’ve Got Mail and I directed it and I was a believer in e-mail and now I feel about it like how you feel about an ex-boyfriend, like, what was the matter with me?

GANAHL: It’s very rare in this day and age for writers to be famous. You’re a household name at this point. What would you say is the weirdest upshot of fame? Is it “Nora’s Meatloaf” at the restaurant?

EPHRON: That’s the nice part.

GANAHL: Who would have thought they’d have a meatloaf named after them?

EPHRON: I would have imagined that. We used to play a game called “What would you like named after you?” So I have given a lot of thought to it. I go to those delicatessens where they have sandwiches named after people, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a sandwich named after you. So when I opened the menu of the Monkey Bar in New York and saw the words “Nora’s Meatloaf,” I was not surprised; I was thrilled. Even though it was not my meatloaf. I’ve never made meatloaf that way, but I had told the owner that he should make meatloaf, and he very sweetly named it after me. It was a fabulous experience, because then people went to the restaurant and wrote me e-mails saying, “Had your meatloaf last night and it was great.” And I did not say to them: “I had nothing to do with it; it is not my recipe.” I said, “Thank you! It is good, isn’t it?” I did hardly any work that day, because I felt I already had this meatloaf out there.

GANAHL: Talk about what you called the institutional sexism you encountered at Newsweek.

EPHRON: I just saw Diane Sawyer interview Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor at Maria Shriver’s fabulous party in Long Beach. They both graduated from law school and didn’t get a job offer. It wasn’t that long ago.

I came to New York in 1962 determined to be a journalist, and I went to an employment agency on 32nd Street and said, “I want to be a journalist.” The lady said, “Do you want to work at Newsweek?” I said, “OK.” So she sent me to Newsweek, and they said, “Why do you want to work at Newsweek?” I didn’t want to work at Newsweek; I just wanted to be in journalism in some way. So I said, “Because I want to be a writer,” and the man interviewing me said, “Well, women aren’t writers at Newsweek.” It would never have crossed my mind to say that was a sexist remark, because we had not invented that word yet. That was the way the world worked; we all knew that. It’s what Ginsburg and O’Connor said, that the world works in a certain way. Then there’s me. It wasn’t in a general sort of way where you get a bunch of women together and just sue, which is what happened at Newsweek. I just said, “I’ll go somewhere where maybe that’s not true.” But the thing that’s weird about it is that there was a woman writing at Newsweek. She was hired during World War II, when they had to hire women because they ran out of guys, and they were never making that mistake again. So he said there were no women [writers] at Newsweek and totally ignored the fact that there was one.

Back then, you were in a track, and I was in the girl track. I was a mail girl, and then I was a clipper, which meant I clipped newspapers and used my brilliant bachelor of art degree to know that a story about a cure for cancer should probably get to the medicine department. Then I became a researcher, it was called. The men would write the pieces and the women would make sure every word in them was correct. It was so institutionalized and yet it was the way the world was. Years later, when the lawsuit was filed at Newsweek and I was long gone, the editor at Newsweek told the Times, “We don’t have a policy here; it’s just the way we’ve always done it.” I got angry and wrote a letter to Katharine Graham, the head of The Washington Post, which owned Newsweek, and said, “I don’t know you, but I want you to know that that is not true. There was a policy and it was articulated and they knew it perfectly well.”

GANAHL: Did you ever get angry at the time?

EPHRON: No, because I was moving on. I got out of there. Weirdly enough, it was a pretty good job to have. I was six months out of college and I was a researcher in the Nation department. I was a political science major, I loved politics. That wasn’t a bad job to have six months out of college.

Then, at that very moment, the 100-day newspaper strike began in New York. All the New York papers closed, all seven of them at the time. My friend Victor Navasky, who was an editor of a humor magazine, got $10,000 from Arthur Frommer to do parodies of the New York newspapers. All kinds of great people worked on it; Calvin Trillin worked on it and a bunch of other names you might recognize. It was one of those 48 hours of this is why I live in New York giddiness and then they came out. Nobody really knew what they were; The [National ] Lampoon and The Onion had not prepared anybody for what this thing was. Many people bought it thinking the strike was over and then complained immediately that it didn’t have the stock tables in it.

So it didn’t sell a lot of copies, but the editors of the Post read it and they wanted to sue. But the publisher of the Post, Dorothy Schiff, said, “Don’t be ridiculous; if they can parody the Post then they can write for it. Hire them.” I was offered a tryout at the New York Post, which was then the least of the seven newspapers, but a great place to work. It was liberal; it had a solid circulation of 340,000 people that were going to buy it day in and day out. It was the smallest staff of any New York paper. They had about 50 reporters, but at least 15 or 20 of them were women. It was a sob sister tradition, an afternoon position, and they trained me, and I learned how to write a newspaper article.

GANAHL: Given your love of journalism, has it been painful for you to see so many newspapers fold and staff downsized?

EPHRON: Yes, she said hesitantly. But when you watch papers like the tragedy of the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, which are bought by someone whose only qualification for owning a newspaper is he’s rich – you know he’s an idiot, Sam Zell, he’s a complete idiot and he bought this paper full of vows that it was about excellence, and immediately they began cutting back. We all know that The New York Times is still a great newspaper, as good as it’s ever been. But these other papers get less and less good, and then there are a lot of papers that fold, and that is really sad.

GANAHL: You’ve written that you didn’t think you found your voice until your thirties in terms of your writing. Why do you think they continue to give columns and platforms to twenty-somethings? I do think it takes a while in the journalism business to get your voice to what it requires to be.

EPHRON: Yes, but then, there are some people who get there much sooner than I did. I always feel sorry for people who tell good stories, and then they sit down to write it and don’t have the craft to do it. I always think, then don’t write about yourself, write about other things, report on other things. Learn to acquire the craft.

I feel very lucky that I didn’t try anything until I was almost pretty much ready to do it, because I could have no better written a screenplay at the age of 20. I see these kids from film school. Some kid the other night stood up and said, “I’m having trouble with my screenplay.” Twenty-two years old. I said, “Of course you’re having trouble with your screenplay. Why should you be able to write a screenplay at 22? Write a short, write a scene.” These schools that give these kids some hurdle to jump over, that is way too soon. What is he going to write a screenplay about? I’ll tell you what: summer camp. That’s why there are so many movies about summer camp, by the way.

GANAHL: You made the jump from writer to screenplay writer, and non-writers may think if you write one thing you can write another, but it’s a very different craft. It’s like going from nonfiction to fiction.

EPHRON: My first movie was my seventh screenplay. I wrote one script that became a horrible television movie, but because it got made I got assignments to write other scripts. But I couldn’t get another movie made until Silkwood, and Silkwood got made in large part because Meryl Streep wanted to make it. I mean, I wrote scripts that were also good, but they didn’t come together in the way that that did.

GANAHL: Where are those now? Sitting in a vault someplace?

EPHRON: In the very sad place called my closet. That’s the big difference between print and movies. All the time in print, people would call and say, “We’re doing something. Do you have anything in the closet? Do you have anything in the famous trunk that no one has anymore?” If I write something I can get it printed.

GANAHL: What made you decide to become a director?

EPHRON: Many, many things. One was, I was getting older for the movie business. I was in my late forties. Right before I was going to direct my first movie, my sister and I had written what we thought was a hilarious script about the Archie comics. The executive at Warner Brothers said, “How would you feel about bringing in a younger, hipper writer?” By then I was astute enough to just cut him off at the knees at that moment, unlike the man that interviewed me at Newsweek. But he was saying what the truth is. If you direct a movie, if you direct your script, then you have a better chance of it getting made.

Another reason was, I wanted to write about women. One of the hardest things when you write a script is getting a director to commit to your movie. The way I learned to do it is you try to invest whoever you’re working with to the point where you’ll use his most recent divorce in it, just anything to make him feel the movie’s about him. We put Mike Nichols’ break-up with one of his girlfriends in Silkwood, and in When Harry Met Sally I based that character completely on Rob [Reiner]. I thought, he’ll actually make the movie if I do this. The other reason, a movie like When Harry Met Sally, I knew when I wrote that script that it was a good movie for someone’s first movie; it wasn’t hard in terms of where the camera was supposed to be and things like that. But then Rob directed it, and it was so much better than what I could have done.

But I wrote a couple of movies that weren’t better than the script, and I thought,  “I could have screwed that up just as well as the person that did and made a lot of money.” So I thought that might be fun. I am really, as any of you know, a little bossy, which is a really good thing for a director.

I was very lucky to get the script [for This Is My Life] made, though. I was asked to do it by a woman named Dawn Steel, who was running a studio. She was fired, and the script was left with the men who were left at the studio and took it over. One of whom was a very famous person named Jon Peters, who was a hairdresser who then went out with Barbra Streisand. I had a meeting with him; I think it was the low point of my life in the movie business, and there have been a lot of them. He said to me, “I’ve made 68 movies and I have never read a script. I don’t need to read a script. What’s yours about?” I looked at him and thought, “This is going to be really interesting to him: a movie about a woman balancing her career and children.” But fortunately he had a girlfriend named Vendela. He pulled her into the room – because she was a woman and someday she might have children. It was really, really grim and sad.

So it kind of sat at that studio for a while. I thought that it was sort of a dot on the horizon and I was never going to get there. I had a great agent named Sam Cohn, who was just one of the great legendary figures in the movie business, who would call me up every month and say, “I dreamed you directed your movie and it’s going to happen.” It was incredible sweet of him, because we had actually modeled a character in the movie after Sam. Sam was very famous for, among other things, when you ate lunch with him he would eat the napkin. It was so weird, I could not tell you. Anyway, we had a character that Dan Aykroyd eventually played, a person who eats paper. A man who ran Fox, Joe Roth, bought the script and let me make it. That’s how I got really lucky with being a director.

GANAHL: How do you find the courage to write and reflect on the relationship with your mother?

EPHRON: It took me a long time to write. I‘ve written about my mother in varying ways. There is a section in Heartburn that’s kind of my mother but not. There are pieces in the book about that thing where you have a very powerful parent who then becomes an alcoholic, in my mother’s case, or becomes anything else other than that person you adored. She was a screenwriter. She wanted all four of her daughters to be writers, and all four of us are writers. She really knew how to turn us into writers, and she did it. She had a 1948 Studebaker that 10 years later when she sold it had something like 6,000 miles on it. The only place she ever took it was to the secondhand bookstores on La Cienega in Los Angeles, where she would buy us the books she read as a kid or the books she thought we had to read.

She was so powerful and so unlike other people’s mothers, because she worked and because of this thing she had that I always tell everyone about. If you came to her with a sad story, she had no interest in it whatsoever.  She would say, “Everything’s copy, everything’s material. Someday you will think this is funny. I know you don’t believe me, but this is true.” It’s a very cold kind of mothering. It’s almost counterintuitive as a mother. I find it amazing because as a mother your instinct is to go, “Aw honey, I feel bad that happened to you.” Not my mother. “Turn it into a story, turn it into a funny story.”

It’s not a bad lesson to teach kids, that you can get over things and that at some point something else will happen. So there was that person, and then there was that person she became, a nightmare alcoholic. It was utterly confusing, because nobody had a mother like this. I knew a lot of women who were in her age bracket who were out traveling around the country. My parents were home every single night for dinner. They went out maybe once a week. Dinner was our religion growing up: 6 o’clock in the den and then dinner. Three courses and conversation, and it better be good.

GANAHL: How hard is it to get back up off the mat and keeping slugging after you’ve gotten bad reviews or didn’t get good business?

EPHRON: It’s not easy, and they’re probably a little more willing to wash you out completely if you’re a woman. I’m not a victim-y sort of person, but I think that’s just a true thing. I felt lucky because I’m a writer, so I always felt I could write my way back if I could just get the next assignment. There’s a piece in the book about failure and about how much more of your brain that failure takes up – and by the way, this isn’t true just about movies. It’s true about relationships, friendships, jobs and all those things. Success is something you barely ever think about. You might pop a champagne cork and say, “This is great,” but with failure you brood. It has become easier for two reasons: One is that you realize that the only person that thinks about it is you, and the other reason is Ambien.