Nora Ephron was a year over her Biblical allotment, but she died young. Of course, if you’re more or less in the same chronological boat, then anything short of four score feels like a cheat. But Nora Ephron’s death is especially bewildering. She is—was—not the sort of person who dies before she’s good and ready.
I knew her—not particularly well, but for a long time. We met sometime in the mid-nineteen-sixties, via our mutual friend George Trow, my college classmate and eventual New Yorker colleague and weekend housemate. The two had become acquainted at Newsweek, where they briefly had low-level summer jobs. George was a connoisseur of women who had what he called “interesting syntax.” Nora was among the first he befriended, a group that eventually included Jamaica Kincaid, Veronica Geng, Alison Rose, Jacqueline Onassis, and Diana Vreeland.
Nora’s “syntax” was indeed interesting, as her readers well know, but what was downright mesmerizing was her voice. It was deliciously liquid. It had a steady rhythm that gave it a quality located somewhere between deliberation and laughter. It was intimate and confident—the perfect vehicle for her deadpan wit and sense of fun.
Most of Nora’s movies—not just “When Harry Met Sally” and “Heartburn”—had a character she based on herself. She was one of those rare people (Ben Bradlee is another) who are more charismatic than the stars who portray them. She liked to write about herself as mousy and insecure, but that was a persona she adopted for sound professional reasons. Or so I’ve always believed. I saw her as glamorous, almost royal. In the late nineteen-seventies, when she lived in Washington with her then-husband Carl Bernstein, the two of them often entertained in their enormous apartment, a comfortable, cushion-filled sprawl of many oddly shaped rooms at odd angles. Versions of that apartment appeared in my dreams for years afterward. She and Carl made it an island of urbanity in a town dominated by crew cuts and sweater sets.
With her dark bob, fair skin, slender frame, and billboard smile, Nora had a Louise Brooks-ish beauty. She was always “young-looking,” but that doesn’t quite capture one of the reasons that her death—few of her friends seem to have had a sense of its rapid approach—is such a shock. It’s that from her early twenties through her late sixties and beyond, physically and spiritually, Nora always seemed to be exactly the same age—say, thirty-six. I’d always unconsciously imagined that she would simply stay that way until further notice. Eventually, she would decide to become a magnificent, white-haired old lady. But that was supposed to be a long way down the road.
(In an interview, televised a year ago tomorrow, Nora Ephron talks about old age.)
Ray Howard/AP Photo.
