They may not have written anything quite like “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” but America has its own version of Britain’s celebrated Bronte sisters.
They go by the name of Ephron–as in Nora, Delia, Amy and Hallie Ephron–and as in the books “Heartburn,” “Hanging Up,” “Funny Sauce,” “A Cup of Tea” and Delia’s just published comic/romantic/mystery novel “Big City Eyes” (Putnam Publishing Group, $23.95).
“That’s flattering,” Delia said, when the comparison with England’s fabled literary trio was made over tea on a recent Upper West Side Manhattan afternoon.
Her derisive tone, however, indicated she thought the analogy just a bit overblown.
There are, to be sure, some differences. Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849) Bronte all perished at romantically tragic young ages, of such Dickensian ailments as consumption and pneumonia.
The Ephron sisters are all thriving–hitting their streaks, as it were, in what nowadays we inexactly call “a certain age.”
But there are some compelling similarities.
Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” sister Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and sister Anne’s “Agnes Grey” are classics that have not only withstood every literary test of time, but, in the cases of “Eyre” and “Wuthering,” have been big box office movies that continue to be remade.
Their books may or may not become literary classics, but Ephron films “When Harry Met Sally,” “Hanging Up” and “You’ve Got Mail” were boffo at the box office as well.
And, sister Nora’s book and movie “Heartburn” had a British connection. It was a thinly disguised fictional account of her former Watergate reporter husband Carl Bernstein’s extra-curricular fling with the wife of a British ambassador.
There was Meryl Streep, portraying wronged-wife Nora up on the big screen, ridiculing the high-ranking Englishwoman as someone who “walks like a penguin.”
Actually, Charlotte Bronte might have enjoyed that line herself.
But what the two sets of sisters mostly share is a seemingly genetic compulsion to write, a thoroughgoing grasp of human nature and a penchant for following in siblings’ footsteps.
“Everybody started one after the other,” Delia said. “My sister Nora started writing right out of college. She had the specter of my parents (legendary Hollywood screenwriters and playwrights Henry and Phoebe Ephron). I had the specter of Nora and my parents. Amy had our example, and Hallie started after that.”
Like Nora, Delia is multimedia, writing not only for the big screen and book cover, but for television and the Broadway stage. Amy, a former movie studio executive who counts “Out of Africa” among her credits, has written four novels, including “A Cup of Tea.” Hallie, an education consultant, writes for the computer industry, among other fields.
“There was something about growing up in a home of four sisters, particularly our home,” Delia said. “My mother had really big ideas for her daughters. We would all have careers, and we would leave Los Angeles and we would go to New York. It gave us a lot of dreams.”
As one of Hollywood’s most successful husband and wife screenwriting teams, the sisters’ parents set a formidable example for their daughters to follow, having collaborated on such movie masterpieces as “Desk Set,” with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; “Daddy Long Legs,” with Fred Astaire; and “Carousel.” Their Broadway hit of 1962 “Take Her, She’s Mine,” later made into a movie with Jimmy Stewart and Sandra Dee, was based on daughter Nora’s letters home from college.
Theirs was not a typical Hollywood home, though the Ephron girls grew up in Beverly Hills.
“It was a small town, then,” Delia said. “It wasn’t a glitzy town. It was a protective town. It had its own police force and fire department. Though we were in the middle of Los Angeles, we had the sense we were in an oasis. We were not unlike any other upper-middle-class family in America. I didn’t have many friends whose parents were in the movie business.”
The sisters’ writerly inspiration came in large part from their mother’s love of good books.
“She loved reading, and she always brought great books home,” Delia said. “She gave me this book, `The Blue Castle,’ by L.M. Montgomery. I remember it still. Reading transported me.”
It was only natural that eldest sister Nora should be the first to turn to writing, she said.
“It’s a lot easier when nobody else (among the siblings) is what you want to be, and you don’t have to worry about competing or anything like that,” Delia said.
But it was no coincidence for the others that much of their original material was drawn from the same family relationships.
“To some degree, writers always write about something they know and, to some degree, we’re all picking over the same bones,” she said, “though I personally believe that every child has a different parent.”
Nora started as a reporter for the New York Post in the 1960s and, later, a columnist for Esquire and New York magazine. Her first books, including “Crazy Salad,” were collections of her essays and columns. “Heartburn,” published in 1983, was her first novel. “Silkwood,” released that same year, was her first movie screenplay.
Delia launched her career with children’s books. As befits a lady who likes a nice chocolate pudding with her afternoon tea, her first was 1979’s “How to Eat Like a Child: And Other Lessons in Not Being a Grown-up”–an examination of childhood from the child’s point of view that later became a musical.
In 1981, she wrote “Teenage Romance, Or, How to Die of Embarrassment,” a backward glance at girlhood. Divorced and remarried to writer Jerome Kass, she dealt with the issues of broken and remade homes with 1986’s “Funny Sauce: Us, the Ex, the Ex’s New Mate, the New Mate’s Ex, and the Kids.” Her 1993 “The Girl Who Changed the World” tells how a little girl learned the value of family ties through seeking revenge on her older brother for squashing a fly on her head during a piano recital.
Her witty 1995 grown-up novel “Hanging Up” drew on her family background. It’s about an irascible, profane and increasingly demented old Hollywood writer who carries on compulsive telephone conversations with his three highly comedic daughters. It was made into a well-received movie, released earlier this year, which starred Walter Matthau as the father and Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton and Lisa Kudrow as the daughters.
Delia and Nora collaborated on the screenplay, as they did on the script for the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks 1998 hit “You’ve Got Mail,” which Nora directed along with the 1993 hit “Sleepless in Seattle.”
“I felt that Delia would tell me the truth,” Nora recently told another interviewer in explaining their sisterly collaboration, “which, I’m sorry to say, she frequently does.”
Delia’s new book, “Big City Eyes,” is something of a departure.
Instead of setting it in glib L.A. or the sophisticated Big Apple, she’s laid her brisk plot in a Northeastern seaside town that combines elements of Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Long Island–before the arrival of Hamptons’ glitz.
But her heroine is a hip big-city woman who relocates to the coastal village, collides with the local culture and customs, falls in love with the local police chief and helps solve a murder.
“I have very little experience in anything anyone would call the country,” Delia said, explaining that the idea for the book grew out of reading the local newspaper while visiting friends in a similar small town.
“I was reading the crime column, and I think someone’s underpants had been stolen from a dryer in a laundromat. And they reported it! I couldn’t believe they reported it. Another item was three Dr. Peppers taken from a refrigerator at the Chicken Ranch (restaurant). I was just so taken. I knew I had my next novel.”
Research included spending long lonely times off-season at friends’ houses in various locales in the Northeast.
“I remember one night at a friend’s house in Maine,” she said. “I was just sitting in the living room. I was just immobilized. I became a character from every scary movie I ever saw. Because I really wasn’t listening to the silence. I was listening for someone to break the silence. I got so unnerved that I went to the police station and had an accident in the police station parking lot. I ended up an item in the police blotter myself.”
Delia, who also has a TV series and new musical comedy in the works, is hopeful that a movie will be made of “Big City Eyes.” A big-name director (not Nora) has been lined up, and ideas for casting are under discussion.
But, the success of “Hanging Up” aside, she insists she doesn’t fashion her books to be made into films. “You always dream your book will be a movie,” she said. “I write books because it’s the place where I’m most who I am. Books and movies are totally different things. The great thing about books is that they are yours.”
