When author Nora Ephron talks, she looks you squarely in the eye, luring you with intensity into her far-flung orbit of experience. You sense that not one detail escapes her, that she might even be reading your mind.
She has the serene self-assurance of someone who is well aware of her talents, who knows what she wants and how to get it. And her razor-sharp wit keeps her laughing along the way.
The Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of ”Silkwood” and ”When Harry Met Sally,” Ephron, 50, seems comfortable with her latest career debut as film director. Her just-released movie about combining work and motherhood, which she co-wrote with her sister, Delia, is a comedy, ”This Is My Life.”
The Twentieth Century Fox film traces the rise to stardom of Dottie Ingels, an aspiring standup comic, played by Julie Kavner, who works in the cosmetics department at Macy`s in Queens, N.Y. and the effects of her newfound celebrity on her 10- and 16-year-old daughters, played by Samantha Mathis and Gaby Hoffmann.
Not coincidentally, ”This Is My Life” has many emotional similarities to Ephron`s own life.
”It`s not autobiographical,” Ephron says. ”But I responded to it on several levels, as a sister, a working mother and the child of a working mother.”
While the film, which is based on a novel, ”This Is Your Life,” by Meg Wolitzer, is billed as a comedy, it presents a serious dilemma faced by all working mothers: how to balance children with a career.
”Some of us can`t survive without our work; we would cease to be who we are,” says Ephron, herself a mother of sons Jacob, 13, and Max, 12. ”The women`s movement didn`t prepare us for our children, who really are the loves of our lives. But the question is how to handle both responsibilities well.” And the answer, as the movie makes clear, is that there is no easy answer.
”You just do it and find out that it`s not simple,” Ephron says.
”People have been pretending for years that children are happy if their mother is happy. But the truth is that children are happy if their mother is there. I`m luckier than Dottie, who`s alone. My kids spend time with my ex-husband (former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein), who`s their father, and they also have a stepfather.”
When producer Lynda Obst, Ephron`s friend, approached her with Wolitzer`s book and proposed the movie project, Ephron knew she wanted to write the screenplay. And while she says she never set out to be a director, once she wrote it, she knew she had to direct the film.
”While I was reading the book I was so overwhelmed with memories,” says Ephron, whose parents, Henry and the late Phoebe Ephron, were screenwriters of such films as ”There`s No Business Like Show Business,” ”Carousel” and
”What Price Glory?”
”It describes, on some level, my experience growing up with three younger sisters in a (show business) family,” she says.
Ephron was born in New York and grew up in Beverly Hills, Calif., where, she says, her working mother was an exception to the norm.
”One thing that was an enormous advantage to me was that my mother raised each of us to believe that we were going to have careers,” Ephron says.
”She asked the question that most mothers didn`t ask their daughters in the `50s and `60s, which was `What do you want to be when you grow up?` And my father always treated us like thinking tomboys.”
Phoebe Ephron also taught her daughters how to make art out of life, a lesson that eventually would become Ephron`s modus operandi.
”My mother always used to say, `Take notes. Everything is copy,`
managing simultaneously to relieve herself of the necessity of being remotely sympathetic (toward the children),” says Ephron, who nevertheless has fond memories of family dinners enlivened by rounds of singing, charades and clever conversation.
”I thought it was a lot of fun,” she says. ”But my sister, Delia, thought it was grotesquely competitive.”
Ephron graduated with a bachelor`s degree in political science from Wellesley College in 1962 and soon after began working as a mail girl at Newsweek magazine. She landed a chance to try out as a reporter for the New York Post, which hired her in 1963.
In the late `60s she left the Post and made a name for herself as a free- lance magazine journalist, writing reports and humorous personal essays for New York, the New Yorker, McCall`s and Cosmopolitan magazines, among others.
In 1972 she became a columnist for Esquire, where she wrote on women`s topics ranging from breasts, beauty and feminism to feminine hygeine spray, Linda Lovelace and the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest. By the late `70s she was writing a column on media personalities in her characteristic wry style.
”I decided to become a newspaper reporter at 13,” Ephron says. ”I didn`t want to have anything to do with the movie business. It was quite a shock to me to have achieved my life`s ambition at 22.”
Propelling her rapid rise through the magazine business was her no-nonsense, get-the-job-done attitude and distinct writing style. Ephron has never been shy of speaking her mind.
”I learned a long time ago that it never hurts you professionally to stand up for yourself,” she says. ”If someone edited one of my pieces without telling me, I yelled about it. Then it would never happen again. I have no interest in being anyone`s victim.”
In 1970, she published her first collection of essays, ”Wallflower at the Orgy,” which relates her experiences growing up in Beverly Hills. Her next collections, ”Crazy Salad” (1975) and ”Scribble, Scribble” (1978) and her first novel, ”Heartburn” (1983), for which Ephron wrote the screenplay for the 1986 movie, were best sellers.
”Heartburn” is a fictional account of Ephron`s highly publicized, failed three-year marriage to Bernstein, co-author of the Watergate expose,
”All The President`s Men,” and the father of her sons.
”I love `Heartburn,` ” Ephron says without remorse. (She successfully fended off Bernstein`s lawsuits to block the movie`s release.)
”It`s a comic monologue that shows how you can take something very painful in your life and make in into a funny story, if you can just figure out how to write it. Even if I hadn`t written it, I would suggest to anyone that they read it on the occasion of a divorce.”
Her first husband, humorist Dan Greenburg, and current husband, Nick Pileggi, also are writers. (Pileggi co-wrote the screenplay for
”GoodFellas,” the film based on his best-selling book, ”Wiseguy.”) But Ephron discounts any speculation that her marriages fizzled under the pressure of professional competition. Often portrayed by the media as ruthless, volatile and difficult, Ephron holds her ground.
”Most people who know me don`t find me particularly difficult,” she says. ”The honest-to-God`s truth is that I don`t care.”
Despite her vow made early in her career to avoid the movie business at all costs, Ephron found herself writing her first script at the suggestion of a friend. The result was the 1978 television movie, ”Perfect Gentlemen,” a bank heist movie starring Ruth Gordon.
Five years later, Ephron broke onto the big screen with ”Silkwood,” a film starring Meryl Streep about the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood, a plutonium-plant worker who was attempting to expose hazards at work.
Ephron`s subsequent screenplays-”Heartburn,” which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and ”When Harry Met Sally,” with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan-established her as one of the industry`s top screenwriters. Her other screenwriting credits include ”Cookie” and ”My Blue Heaven.”
Early in her career, Ephron says she didn`t delude herself into believing she could direct films. It wasn`t until Obst presented her with the right opportunity and the right film that she decided to direct her own screenplay. Being a screenwriter, Ephron says, means giving up control over your product. And she doesn`t like to operate that way.
”There`s no pride of ownership after the first draft,” she says. ”It`s a different script by the time the movie studio is finished with it.”
And female screenwriters with scripts about women face an uphill battle, she says. That`s because most film executives are men who aren`t especially interested in women`s lives and are reluctant to cast men in parts that are either equal to or smaller than those played by women, she says.
Not surprisingly, Ephron, who is a renowned ”controller,” says she prefers directing.
”Being a director is a much better job than being a screenwriter. It`s very hard, but a lot of fun. And you get to make the decisions. You don`t have to lobby on behalf of the script. But you can`t be so controlling that you close off opinions from others. A movie is always a collaboration.”
Obst, who has considered Ephron her mentor since the mid-`70s when Ephron encouraged Obst to become an editor at the New York Times Magazine, says that the intimate nature of the film was just right for Ephron.
”Nora directs from anecdote,” she says. ”She gives you wonderful snippets from her own life. I would compare her vision to Rob Reiner`s and Woody Allen`s because she focuses on all the characters simultaneously. The crew couldn`t believe that this was the first movie she had made. They were astonished at how much in control we were and how bossy we were. We`re both pretty bossy.”
Ephron takes it all in stride and with good humor.
”I was fortunate in that I didn`t choose to direct my first movie about the Crusades or the Peloponnesian War,” she says.
”People make movies they care about. I couldn`t imagine a man wanting to direct this film. I felt that if I didn`t get to make this movie there would be a sadness in my life.”
