Sleepless in Seattle

I often talk about a moment at Saint XXXX when a bolt of lightning hit me. I was watching a colleague. She was addressing the third graders, and she was telling the tale of her summer visit to Kenya. It was like something Angelina Jolie or Madonna would say. Beatific, sporting tall, tall heels, rail-thin, my colleague rattled on about the saintly people of Kenya, about how they owned little and yet exuded joy at all times. I promise this was the content of her speech. My colleague claimed to have been humbled by the experience--though not humbled enough to have traded in her tall, tall heels. She came back to Manhattan empowered by the Kenyans, ready to live like them, ready to spread their message to the wealthy children of Saint XXXX. You can't bullshit a bullshitter. Takes one to no one. I so strongly identified with my colleague, because I had made the same kind of falsely inspirational speeches in other contexts, at other times. And I suddenly thought I could start writing about deep, mortifying, personal failure--stories in which no one "grows," in any obvious way--and that this interest alone could get me through the entirety of the rest of my life. All this was before I studied Nora Ephron's life, but Ephron's voice must have been humming along somewhere in the back of my head. How could the facts be otherwise? Ephron had (in part) written "Sleepless in Seattle."

There are many things I love about Ephron's career. Here's number one. She didn't follow a formula. She shape-shifted. Life handed her a great story: the dissolution of her marriage to the famous cad, Carl Bernstein. So she laughed at the pain and dreamed up a novel, and then a Meryl Streep movie. But she didn't wait for catastrophic life events to hand her other bits of material. She heard the story of Karen Silkwood, and she didn't think she could make anything of it, until she learned that Silkwood had once flashed her boyfriend on the factory floor. Ah, thought Ephron, this woman was not a saint. And then suddenly a story for Silkwood began to sketch itself in Ephron's mind. (I love bits of trivia like that--concerning the genesis of a famous idea.) Ephron hadn't lived the plot of "When Harry Met Sally," but she *had* been taken to task for the crazy over-precision with which she ordered food at a restaurant, and she *had* once announced she'd never marry a bartender, even Humphrey Bogart from "Casablanca." And she had Rob Reiner in her life--and Reiner gave her gems. "I think I'm not ready for a relationship. When you're as depressed as I am....If the depression was lifted, I would be able to be with someone on my level. But it's like playing tennis on a windy day with someone who's worse than you are. They can do all right against you, they can win a couple games, but there's too much wind? You know what I mean?" Ephron took bits and scraps from her life and from the lives of her friends--and realized she had a story. My favorite Ephron is the Ephron of the personal essays--where she doesn't have to provide a Hollywood ending, and she doesn't have to puff up stories so they cover a length greater than the one they're meant for. "Advice: Never marry someone you wouldn't want to be divorced from." "If you have teenagers in the house, always own a dog--because it's important that someone at home is happy to see you when you get back from work." "There's a ridiculously expensive body lotion--and the jar tells you to use just a small amount--but I use the whole damn container. I get myself as slick as a seal. I coat myself in that lotion--and, somehow, this one product gets me through. And I'm going to do that now." (Ephron almost certainly wrote that line with the knowledge that she was dying--something she shared with no one, or basically no one--so the body-lotion purchase becomes all the more poignant, in hindsight.) "When you're wide awake at 4 AM, it's because of the second glass of wine." "There are no secrets."

Ephron had a legendary work ethic. "Everything is copy," she said. "When something terrible would happen to me, I'd smile, because I knew I could get a good story out of it." And: "When you slip on a banana peel, you're the victim. When you narrate the event for others, you become the hero of your own story." And to graduates at Wellesley: "Don't be the victim. Be the protagonist in your own life." (Lena Dunham, a friend of Ephron's, cites these words as pivotal in her own career. She also describes, with fondness, Ephron's "willingness to lay it on the line.") Ephron was nominated for an Oscar and didn't tell anyone--didn't tell her son, Jacob. She just made herself presentable and hopped in her own car, and drove to the ceremony, and came right back and kept on working. She has been called a proto-Taylor Swift--because she recognized the money-making potential in a diaristic account of romantic betrayal. (It strikes me that a Curtis Sittenfeld observation is appropriate here. Sittenfeld said, of Swift, "She's known for dating all these men, but obviously the most compelling relationship in her life is her bond with her own talent, her bond with her work." It seems to me that you could say the same thing about Ephron--a writer of sentimental comedies who was, in fact, anti-sentimental and fully aware, at all times, of the health status of her own checkbook.)

There's so much important stuff in "I'll Have What She's Having." Debra Winger was considered for the role of Sally, but here's what her agent said: "Debra is still unsure she wants to do the part in Officer and a Gentleman, and that movie happened three years ago. Just forget about her. Move on." Meg Ryan suggested faking the orgasm, then needed a bit of coaching to get as loud as the director wanted. Meg Ryan lost the part in "Princess Bride" because the princess was meant to be "the most beautiful girl in the world." (If the description had read "most adorable," Ryan would have won the role over Robin Wright.) If you watched Ryan on-set, you might think she wasn't doing much--because so much of her performance happened in her eyes. So people on-set were actually surprised to see the final product--to discover that the thing they'd labeled a competent performance was actually sort of iconic. And Ephron had a way of making sure Ryan stole the show. She knew that many men in Hollywood didn't care about female characters. She wrote Harry as richly and as closely to Reiner's own life as she could; if Reiner were fully invested in Harry's story, he'd be less likely to butcher Sally, to make her less specific, less idiosyncratic. Harry needed a Jane Austen-ish smartypants to play off of. Ephron got her way. (And did you know that Cher--for "Moonstruck"--was the first woman to win a Best Actress Oscar in a romantic comedy since Diane Keaton, from "Annie Hall"? And Holly Hunter, star of another rom-com, "Broadcast News," might have won, if the movie had had a conventional ending. Hunter chooses neither of her men. This ending may have been experienced as a downer by some voters in the Academy.)

More tomorrow. Do you have Ephron thoughts? What's your favorite part of "I Feel Bad About My Nick"? I really would love to hear from people! Working on making that more of a regular thing.