Nora Ephron (1941-2012)

"The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death."

-- Nora Ephron

by Ken

In a newyorker.com blog remembrance, "Nora Ephron: Everyone's Arch and Insightful New Best Friend," Ariel Levy writes (after explaining that she first encountered Ephron's writing at 22 in a bookstore in Kathmandu):

Ephron's voice was funny, frank, self-effacing but never self-pitying, and utterly intimate: "That's how bourgeois I am: at the split second I picked up the pie to throw at Mark, at the split second I was about to do the bravest -- albeit the most derivative -- thing I had ever done in my life, I thought to myself: Thank God the floor is linoleum and can be wiped up." She was telling a tale of woe -- the story, I didn't realize at the time, of her famous marriage to Carl Bernstein and its unravelling -- but it was somehow deeply comforting: hers was a world where humor always trumped loss.

Levy concludes:

[F]or many of her readers and fans, this will surely feel like a personal loss. That sense she gave me back in Kathmandu of suddenly having an arch and insightful new best friend, under whose spell everything would come out all right in the end, was a gift she kept giving to strangers -- women in particular -- throughout her life, from her early essays about her small breasts to her best-selling lament on aging, "I Feel Bad About My Neck." "The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming," she wrote in that book. "Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death."

I probably should have gone farther out of my way to read Ephron's writing, because whenever I crossed paths with it, it delighted me. I was so enthralled by the theatrical entertainment, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, which she and her sister Delia fashioned out of a large number of clothing-related life remembrances they gathered from a wide range of sources (incorporating most artfully the remembrances in the book of that name by Ilene Beckerman), that I went back and was even more enthralled the second time. Not surprisingly, it was hilarious, but it was also profound, and profoundly moving.

"MY LIFE AS AN HEIRESS"
(including the five "stages of inherited wealth")

And there was a New Yorker "Personal History" piece from October 2010, "My Life as an Heiress." If you haven't read it, you should -- you really should. I'm going to hit some highlights here, but they're no substitute for the real thing. (I probably shouldn't, but on one point I'm going to tip you off: There's a surprise twist at the end.)

The story concerns Ephron's Uncle Hal, her mother's brother, who was presumed to be leaving his presumably sizable estate to be divided equally among Nora and her three sisters. I'm skipping over all the deliciously wacky family stuff to leap to the point.

[O]ne summer day in 1987, as I sat at my desk struggling with a screenplay I was writing in order to pay the bills, the phone rang; it was an administrator at a Washington, D.C., hospital, calling to say that Hal was dying of pneumonia and I should, as his next of kin, be prepared to make an end-of-life decision. I hung up, stunned, and the phone rang again. It was Fredda Lautkin, wife of the radiologist [radiologist Artie Lautkin was a Washington cousin of Nora's mother], calling me for the second time in my life, to say that Hal's apartment in Washington was full of extremely valuable rugs and art and I should have it padlocked immediately or else Louise the housekeeper might run off with everything in it. I told Fredda that I seriously doubted Louise would do anything of the kind, but that she'd worked for Hal and Eleanor for most of her adult life and she was welcome to run off with anything she wanted. The phone rang again. It was the hospital. Hal had died.

And Nora's life as an heiress has begun.

I kept estimating, and dividing by four, and mentally spending the money. My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we'd ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several trees. I ripped out the scraggly lawn and imagined the huge trucks of sod I would now be able to pay for. I considered a trip to the nursery to look at hydrangeas. My heart was racing. I pulled my husband away from his work, and we had a conversation about what kind of trees we wanted. A dogwood, definitely. A great big dogwood. It would cost a small fortune, and now we were about to have one.

I went upstairs and looked at the script I'd been writing. I would never have to work on it again. I was just doing it for the money and, face it, it was never going to get made, and, besides, it was really hard. I switched off the computer. I lay down on the bed to think about other ways to spend Uncle Hal's money. It crossed my mind that we needed a new headboard.

Thus, in fifteen minutes, did I pass through the first two stages of inherited wealth: Glee and Sloth.

Nora's father calls with the news of Uncle Hal's death, which of course she already knows about. But he has more news.

"He was leaving his money to the four of you," my father went on, "but I told him to cut you out of the will because you already have enough money."

"What?" I said.

He hung up. [Nora's father, we've been told, habitually hung up as soon as he considered a phone conversation concluded.]

I looked outside at the lawn. So much for the sod.

I called Delia. "Wait till you hear this development," I said, and told her what had happened.

"Well, we'll just even it out," Delia said. "We'll each give you whatever percentage of what we inherit and that will make it fair."

"One-fourth," I said.

"You were always better at math," she said. "I will call the others."

She called the others, and called me back.

"Amy is willing," she said. "Hallie is not."

I couldn't believe it. The four of us had always had an agreement that if any one of us was cut out of my father's will the others would cut her back in. Surely that applied to Uncle Hal.

The day was not even over, and we had entered the third stage of inherited wealth: Dissension.

It turns out that everyone's reckonings have been wrong. First, Nora had not been cut out of the will. Second, it turned out that the four sisters' share was only half of Uncle Hal's estate; the other half was to go to his housekeeper, Louise. ("I was happy for Louise. She deserved the money.") Third, the estate turned out to be a whole lot smaller than everyone was imagining.

What was left, divided by eight, would buy sod, but it was not going to rescue me from the screenplay I was writing.

"The good news," the lawyer said, "is that if you inherit less than seventy-five thousand there's no estate tax."

So Nora "went upstairs and turned on my computer and went back to work."

The fourth stage of inherited wealth, "the Possible Masterpiece in the Closet," came and went in the form of a painting discovered in Hal's closet that "might be a Monet." ("I probably don't need to tell you that it was not a Monet.")

Finally comes this. (I hope you've been paying attention to that dreaded screenplay Nora was working on.)

In the end, the four of us inherited about forty thousand dollars each from Uncle Hal.

So I never did enter the fifth stage of inherited wealth: Wealth.

I finished the screenplay and it got made. I am quick to draw lessons from my own experience, and the lesson I drew from this one was that I was extremely lucky not to have ever inherited real money, because I might not have finished writing "When Harry Met Sally . . . ," which changed my life.

We bought a dogwood. It's really beautiful. It blooms in late June, and it reminds me of my sweet uncle Hal.

It isn't possible to add anything to that, is it? Except the bleedingly obvious: that Nora Ephron is going to be dreadfully missed.

#