Nora Ephron: A Born New Yorker - Part 2
Nora and New York 101
Thank you for your patience in waiting for Nora Ephron: A Born New Yorker - Part 2. If you are after a refresher of Nora’s New York story so far, here is Part 1:
And now on to Part 2!
As mentioned at the end of Nora Ephron: A Born New Yorker - Part 1, part 2 of college-aged Nora’s New York wishes (to date and/or marry a writer) came true when she met and married author and humorist Dan Greenburg. He was the author of the 1964 book“How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual”, and was also a humorist for magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair. In her essay The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less, Nora described Dan Greenburg as “a perfectly nice person, although he’s pathologically attached to his cats.” (Charlie, his fictionalised Heartburn counterpart was pathologically attached to hamsters).
Nora and Dan, at the respective ages of 25 (and 11 months) and 30, were married on April 9th, 1967 in The Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center (which later served as the location of Annie and Walter’s Valentine’s Day breakup in Sleepless in Seattle). At the time Nora considered herself to be very old, and recounted in Heartburn (as Rachel Samstat) that she was relieved to be getting married before she was “twenty-six and washed up”.
Sally Quinn, a long term friend of Nora’s and a journalist for The Washington Post, remembers that the couple’s New York apartment was lavender, and also housed several cats, “Lavender and cats! I had never liked either one — who knew they were going to be the next hot things?”. Already a dinner party queen, Nora had no qualms about approaching celebrities such as Joan Didion at parties and inviting them to dinner at her and Dan’s apartment. In Erin Carlson’s I’ll Have What’s She’s Having, Dan recalled that “Nora would go up to celebrities she had never met and say, ‘Hi, my name is Nora Ephron; if I invited you to dinner at my house, would you come?’ And she was so adorable and so appealing that I don’t think anybody ever said no.” According to Sally Quinn, “Nora directed her dinner parties as though they were movies.”
Far from being washed up over the age of 26, Nora left The New York Post in 1968 at 27 years old to write for magazines such as New York and Esquire. Her first book Wallflower at the Orgy was published in 1970, and is a collection of magazine articles from the 60s. Nora considered that her big break as a writer came in the form of her 1972 Esquire essay, A Few Words About Breasts. Looking back on this essay in The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less, Nora stated “I have written an article about having small breasts. I am now a writer.” Susan Seidelman, director of films such as Smithereens, Desperately Seeking Susan, She-Devil, and the Nora Ephron/Alice Arlen penned Cookie, read the essay when she was in college and recalls that it “had a really smart feminist point of view, but it was also really funny and personal.”
In the same year as her breakout Esquire essay, Nora’s marriage to Dan Greenburg was nearing it’s end, “It’s 1972, the height of the women’s movement, and everyone is getting a divorce, even people whose husbands don’t have pathological attachments to their cats.”. On returning from an African safari, Nora asked Dan for a divorce (their breakup is described in The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less). Their separation was amicable, so amicable in fact that, according to Dan in a 2021 interview, they continued to date up until she met journalist Carl Bernstein in 1973. Nora and Dan’s divorce was finalised in 1974. Exit Dan Greenburg (and his cats).
Enter Carl Bernstein - college dropout, The Washington Post journalist, and ladies man. At the time of Nora and Carl’s meeting, in December 1973, at a party at the New York home of investigative journalist Marie Brenner (Nora’s friend, and Carl’s ex), Carl, and his fellow journalist Bob Woodward, had hit the big time for breaking the Nixon Watergate scandal (thanks to their anonymous source Deep Throat a.k.a FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt). Both divorced writers with big personalities, Nora and Carl seemed like a perfect match, and were instantly smitten. Of their meeting Carl said “I was dazzled, and I did not really know who [she] was in terms of her work. We had this amazing conversation. I said I would call her in a few days. And I didn’t wait a few days. I called her the next day.” Marie Brenner recalls that Nora called her immediately to confirm that she and Carl had definitely called it quits “Oh yeah, long ago”. She also recalls that “they were just absolutely, at that period, made for each other.”.
Despite being instantly dazzled by each other, their relationship was not smooth sailing and throughout the years they were dating Carl, who had a reputation for having a wandering eye, was also seeing other women. On finding out about this Nora broke of their relationship, but eventually took him back based on promises that he’d remain faithful. Rachel Samstat describes this period of their relationship in Heartburn, saying “I honestly believed that Mark had learned his lesson. Unfortunately, the lesson he learned wasn’t the one I had in mind: what he learned is that he could do anything, and in the end there was a chance I’d take him back.”.
Things in her personal life may have been rocky, but Nora’s professional life was still going strong. She was still working as a columnist for various magazines, and was also an associate editor at Esquire. Her second book Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women was published in 1975, and is a collection of her magazine articles on, you guessed it, women and the women’s movement from the 70s.
Nora and Carl were married by Judge Millard L. Midonick in a civil ceremony on April 15th, 1976. In an April 16 article about their wedding in The New York Times, Nora was quoted as saying “This wedding had to be wedged in between interviews about the book” (the book in question was The Final Days, the sequel to Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men). Apart from the judge everyone present at the ceremony was either a journalist or an editor, with the ceremony being witnessed by Carl’s investigative partner Bob Woodward and his journalist wife Francie Barnard, and by Nora’s friend columnist Richard M. Cohen (author of the 2016 book She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron), and his editor wife Barbara Cohen. The reception was held at The St. Regis New York on East 55th Street.
Their dating life had taken place across New York and Washington (where Carl was based) via the Eastern Shuttle, but after they were married Nora left her beloved New York for the second time in her life and moved to Washington, which she hated (“Not that I complained. I can work anywhere, I said bravely.” - Heartburn). In her essay Moving On, Nora described her feelings about New York when you become a visitor “Whenever you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a visitor, the city seems to turn against you.”. She also went on to say “Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don’t mind when you live here; when you live here, it’s part of the caffeinated romance of this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, you experience change as a betrayal.”.
During her time in Washington, Nora continued her work as a columnist and began to branch out into the world of screenwriting. Her third book Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media was published in 1978, and is a collection of her magazine articles on the media from 1975 to 1977. Nora’s first film as a screenwriter, the made for TV heist comedy Perfect Gentlemen starring Lauren Bacall, Sandy Dennis, Lisa Pelikan and Ruth Gordon, debuted on March 14 1978 on CBS. While no where near as polished as her later screenplays, it is definitely worth a watch for the Nora Ephron completists and is available on YouTube (the visual/audio quality isn’t great, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles). She and Carl also worked on a (never produced) screenplay for The Eastern Shuttle, a romance based on the early days of their relationship.
By all accounts Nora and Carl were happy in their marriage, but his ladies man tendencies were still apparent, with him openly (and often in front of Nora) flirting with women at parties and events. One such occurrence was captured on film, in the now iconic photo taken by Ron Gallela, at an Amnesty International Benefit held at New York’s Tavern on the Green in 1977. The picture is definitely worth a thousand words, as it shows an embarrassed Nora with her back to Carl with a mystery woman seated on his lap (see photo below). In their second year of marriage, Nora gave birth to their first child Jacob Bernstein on August 22, 1978. Jacob followed in his mother’s footsteps and became a director, directing the 2015 documentary Everything is Copy - Nora Ephron: Scripted and Unscripted.
Looking back on the move to Washington in Heartburn, Rachel says “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes. There I was, a regular at the Thalia, a connoisseur of the latest goat cheeses, an expert on alternate routes to Long Island - there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel”. She also goes on to recall trips back to New York to see her therapist Vera, “I would tell her I was okay, really I was, I was working hard, things were good with me and Mark, the baby was wonderful. She goes on to lament the differences between New York and Washington saying “..and then, after the session, I would walk back to Balducci’s and there would be the arugala and radicchio and fresh basil and sorrel and sugar snap peas and six kinds of sprouts, and I would think to myself: Even the vegetables in New York are better.”.
Things were going well in their marriage, until they weren’t. Seven months into her second pregnancy in 1979, Nora discovered that Carl was having an affair with Margaret Jay, a British politician who, at the time, was married to the Ambassador to the United States Peter Jay. Nora found out about the affair after finding a children’s book Margaret had given to Carl, complete with a romantic inscription. Nora described the fallout of her discovery in The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less, saying “I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same again. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”.
Nora returned to New York and went into premature labour, giving birth to their second child Max Bernstein on November 16, 1979 at Mount Sinai Hospital. After Max was born, Nora returned to Washington on promises that Carl would end things with Margaret. However, on learning that the affair was still going strong Nora called her journalist friend Liz Smith and spilled the beans “One day Nora rang me up and said in her characteristic determined kind of way: “Liz, I have a story for you. Carl and I are going to divorce! Please write it.”. Liz Smith dropped the story a few days before Christmas 1979.
Nora packed up and left Washington for the final time, taking Jacob, Max and their nanny to New York. Her friend Sally Quinn recalls “Nora moved to Washington, but she was a New York girl all the way; the minute she and Carl split up, she moved back to New York.” On her return, Nora was offered sanctuary at the home of her friend and editor at Knopf Publishing Robert Gottlieb and his wife Maria Tucci (no relation to Stanley). Though heartbroken, with her life falling down around her, Nora was finally back in her beloved city of New York.
“The little dance my heart was doing as I looked out the window…. was not exactly a polka, but at least I was where I wanted to be.” - Rachel Samstat, Heartburn
Join me in the third, and final, part of Nora Ephron: A Born New Yorker for more on her return to New York, The Apthorp and The Upper West Side, her marriage to Nicholas Pileggi, The Upper East Side, and how her love of New York is reflected in her films.
In exciting news, the lovely Ilana Kaplan has written a Nora book! Nora Ephron at the Movies, the first illustrated monograph on Nora, with a foreword by author Jason Diamond, “offers an unfiltered look at Ephron as a champion of the rom-com and as a feminist Hollywood trailblazer. It explores her life and work by pairing detailed criticism with exclusive interviews with Ephron’s key collaborators to add color and nuance to her life and legacy.” - Abrams Books
Nora Ephron at the Movies is out on October 29th (hello Nora Ephron/Meg Ryan Fall 🍂🍁), and is available for pre-order here
Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87 - Glenn Rifkin, 2023
Heartburn - Nora Ephron, 1983, Alfred A. Knopf
The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less in I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron, 2006
Sally Quinn shares memories of her friendship with Nora Ephron - Sally Quinn, 2012
I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron's Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy - Erin Carlson, 2017, Hachette Books
Susan Seidelman (Interview) - The Podcast Around the Corner: The Nora Ephron Podcast, July 2024
Notes on People - Bernstein, co-author of Nixon books, weds - The New York Times, April 16, 1976
Moving On in I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron, 2006
The Podcast Around the Corner is available on Buzzsprout, and wherever you get your podcasts. You can find the show @TheNoraPodcast on Twitter and Instagram.
Love!!
Brilliant. I am thoroughly enjoying this series of articles Shawnee and you knowledge is astounding. Can’t wait for Part 3……and soon your own book I hope.