It was Nora Ephron’s alcoholic mother who taught her the most important lesson: everything in life is just raw material for dramatic fiction. The writer of Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally — famous for its fake-orgasm scene — admits to following her scriptwriter mother’s advice — “everything is copy” — to the letter by mining her own life and those of people close to her, including her unfaithful husband and his mistress, for snappy commercial film plots.
Ephron is the archetypal smart New York Jewish female with a whip-crack wit who started out as a confessional journalist, only to end up as one of the most successful creative women in Hollywood. Her latest tour de force, Julie & Julia, which she has not only written but also directed and produced, is drawn from life, too , but this time it is not her own.
A double biopic of two different women from different eras, linked by a single passion, this is also the first movie made from a blog and a gastronomic treat that is being hailed as the “ultimate chick flick”.
Julie & Julia — which is also a study of women’s lives pre and post-feminism — could yet gain Ephron the screenwriting Oscar she has thrice been nominated for but failed to win. Nikki Finke, the Los Angeles film business guru who writes the influential Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, has declared 2009 to be “the summer of Nora”. Even Meryl Streep, who plays Julia Child in the film, is in awe: “She always wears black, and she’s so cool and always has the perfect bon mot to toss off just effortlessly. I mean, who can be like that? Anyway, I was intimidated.”
Streep produces an extraordinary evocation of the 6ft 2in, large-boned and decidedly plain Child, the wife of a diplomat in post-war Paris who learnt all she could about French cuisine and later passed her insights on to American housewives in a monster 1961 cookbook entitled Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Child is to America’s culinary legacy what Elizabeth David, Fanny Cradock and Delia Smith combined are to Britain’s. On television in the early 1960s, her sign-off “Bon appétit” became a nationally recognised catchphrase.
The New Yorker, in its review of the film, commented that if Child had been “delicate and married a Republican banker, as her father had expected ... we might never have heard of hollandaise”.
Ephron, who once reflected characteristically on the subject of breasts, “If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person”, wrote her script by fusing Child’s memoirs with a contemporary online blog.
The blog details the attempts of Julie Powell, a New York housewife, to create all her heroine’s dishes over a year while struggling with her day job. Her daily jottings eventually became a bestselling book in their own right, entitled Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Dishes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.
The food on screen — and there is lots of it — reflects Ephron’s passion for gastronomy. She is a devoted cook, favouring dishes such as creole mussels with provençal tomatoes, but considers herself a gourmand rather than a gourmet chef.
However, it is not just French food that Julie & Julia celebrates. Ephron, perhaps unsurprisingly given her screenwriting history, has also shocked US audiences with a celebration of middle-aged sex between the ungainly, unattractive Child and her smaller, equally unprepossessing husband — complete with naked bubble baths and twanging trouser braces.
Ephron is not so much making a statement, though, as just showing people what the unromanticised human body is really like. She believes that anyone who says they can have the best sex of their lives during their sixties or seventies “obviously never had sex until they reached their sixties or seventies”. Now 68, she has no qualms about admitting her age, even though she has taken pains to express publicly — and profitably — just how much she hates it: “There comes a certain point in your life when you get older and notice you’re not looking in the mirror.”
Despite her success in Hollywood as both writer and director, Ephron retains a love and an instinct for the “hack” journalism of pithy columns, near-the-knuckle observations on the human — particularly female — condition and no-nonsense put-downs.
Her much-loved 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck started out as an article but turned into a series of witty, poignant and hilarious musings about life, the ageing process and women in society, which became a surprise bestseller.
Much of its success was down to her uncompromising confrontation of the facts of ageing and the efforts made to conceal them: “One of my biggest regrets — bigger even than not buying that apartment on East 75th Street, bigger even than my worst romantic catastrophe — is that I didn’t spend my youth staring lovingly at my neck.”
Her book struck a chord with women “of a certain age” precisely because it jarred with both the cult of eternal youth and those who wrote eulogies about accepting age gracefully. Her message, cut short, is: getting old sucks — live with it.
There is no suggestion of Ephron ageing gracefully. She admits to getting her hair done (including colouring it) at least once a week because “it’s a more intelligent investment than psychoanalysis”, and says: “Not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside of death.” Cosmetic surgery, however, she sees as people simply “buying themselves a few more years before they have to confront what ageing is”.
Ephron’s marital history was littered with false starts: a first marriage to Dan Greenburg, a writer, went nowhere fast, while her second in 1976 to Carl Bernstein, the celebrated Watergate journalist, ended dramatically when she found he was having an affair at a time when they had one small son and she was expecting another.
All the time Bernstein had been secretly sleeping with Margaret Jay, the daughter of Jim Callaghan, the British prime minister, and the wife of Peter Jay, the British ambassador to Washington.
Ephron got her own back with Heartburn, a bitchy book about their break-up in which she described the Jay character as “a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed”.
The Bernstein figure, she said, was “capable of having sex with a venetian blind”. One of the conditions of their tortuous divorce was his demand for script approval and for years afterwards he threatened to sue her.
Ephron took a further slice of cold revenge by telling anyone who asked that Bernstein’s infamous anonymous Deep Throat source for the leaks behind the Watergate story was Mark Felt, the former FBI agent. Bernstein claimed he never told her, but she said she had worked it out from his contacts list and references to “my friend” in his notebooks.
Ephron’s mother had made sure that her daughter understood what “everything is copy” meant early on. Her parents, both Hollywood scriptwriters, had used her letters and personality in her early twenties as the basis for a character in the romantic comedy Take Her, She’s Mine, made into a film starring James Stewart, with Sandra Dee in the Nora role.
Although Ephron was born in New York, her parents’ trade meant she and her three sisters — all of whom became writers — grew up in Los Angeles. She went to Beverly Hills high school before going on to the allfemale Wellesley college in Massachusetts. Wellesley had no reason to rejoice in its graduate’s success when she blasted her way into Manhattan journalism via the New York Post (having been told by Newsweek that it “didn’t have women reporters”), eventually slamming her old college for producing generations of “docile women”.
“Docile” was never a word for Nora. When her mother, by then an elderly alcoholic, died of an overdose of sleeping pills almost certainly abetted by her equally alcoholic husband, she admitted wondering to herself: “Will I ever be able to use this in anything?”
Her sisters clearly come from the same nest. Hanging Up, a book written by Delia Ephron and subsequently made into a movie starring Diane Keaton, famously has two younger sisters gossiping excitedly about the imminent sacking of their elder sibling.
Marriage, in the end, has apparently turned out well for Ephron, who is marking 22 years of seeming wedded bliss with her third husband, Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote Casino and Goodfellas. Ephron describes him as “a famously nice guy”.
Her close friend Mike Nichols, who directed the film of Heartburn, says that although Julie & Julia is plucked from other people’s lives rather than her own, it is still a reflection of herself: “Nora is stronger, funnier, sexier than ever. You do feel this movie is plugged into the life she’s living.”
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