(AP) NEW YORK \u2013 Among the injustices about the death of Nora Ephron is that she isn\u2019t around to tell us about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was so, so alive,\u201d says her friend Carrie Fisher. \u201cIt makes no sense to me that she isn\u2019t alive anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ephron, the essayist, author and filmmaker who challenged and thrived in the male-dominated worlds of movies and journalism and was loved, respected and feared for her devastating and diverting wit, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 71.<\/p>\n
Born into a family of screenwriters, a top journalist in her 20s and 30s, then a best-selling author and successful director, Ephron was among the most quotable and influential writers of her generation. She wrote and directed such favorites as \u201cJulie & Julia\u201d and \u201cSleepless in Seattle,\u201d and her books included the novel \u201cHeartburn,\u201d a knockout roman a clef about her marriage to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein; and the popular essay collections \u201cI Feel Bad About My Neck\u201d and \u201cI Remember Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was tough on others _ Bernstein\u2019s marital transgressions were immortalized by the horndog spouse in \u201cHeartburn,\u201d a man \u201ccapable of having sex with a Venetian blind\u201d _ and relentless about herself. She wrote openly about her difficult childhood, her failed relationships, her doubts about her physical appearance and the hated intrusion of age.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all look good for our age. Except for our necks,\u201d she wrote in the title piece from \u201cI Feel Bad About My Neck,\u201d published in 2006. \u201cOh, the necks. There are chicken necks. There are turkey gobbler necks. There are elephant necks. There are necks with wattles and necks with creases that are on the verge of becoming wattles. \u2026 According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at 43 and that\u2019s that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even within the smart-talking axis of New York-Washington-Los Angeles, no one bettered Ephron, slender and dark-haired, her bright and pointed smile like a one-liner made flesh. Friends from Mike Nichols and Meryl Streep to Calvin Trillin and Pete Hamill adored her for her wisdom, her loyalty and turns of phrase.<\/p>\n
As a screenwriter, Ephron was nominated three times for Academy Awards, for \u201cSilkwood,\u201d `\u2019When Harry Met Sally \u2026\u201d and \u201cSleepless in Seattle,\u201d and was the rare woman to write, direct and produce Hollywood movies. Fisher and Meg Ryan were among the many actresses who said they loved working with Ephron because she understood them so much better than did her male peers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI suppose you could say Nora was my ideal,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cIn a world where we\u2019re told that you can\u2019t have it all, Nora consistently proved that adage wrong. A writer, director, wife, mother, chef, wit _ there didn\u2019t seem to be anything she couldn\u2019t do. And not just do it, but excel at it, revolutionize it, set the bar for every other screenwriter, novelist, director.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNora Ephron was a journalist-artist who knew what was important to know; how things really worked, what was worthwhile, who was fascinating and why,\u201d said \u201cSleepless in Seattle\u201d star Tom Hanks. \u201cAt a dinner table and on a film set she lifted us all with wisdom and wit mixed with love for us and love for life.\u201d<\/p>\n
The eldest of four children, Ephron was born in New York to screenwriters Harry and Phoebe Ephron, who moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., when she was 4 years old. Words, words, words were the air she breathed. Regular visitors included \u201cCasablanca\u201d co-writer Julius J. Epstein, \u201cSunset Boulevard\u201d collaborator Charles Brackett, and the team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who worked on \u201cThe Thin Man\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople who were not in the business were known as civilians,\u201d Ephron wrote in \u201cI Remember Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the best humor is born out of sadness, then Ephron was destined for comedy. She was 15, she recalled, when her mother became an alcoholic, finishing off a bottle of scotch a night. Her father, too, was a heavy drinker, \u201csloppy, sentimental,\u201d although \u201csomehow his alcoholism was more benign.\u201d<\/p>\n
Determined by high school to be a journalist, Ephron graduated from the single-sex Wellesley College in 1962, moved to New York and started out as a \u201cmail girl\u201d and fact checker at Newsweek. A newspaper strike at the end of the year gave her a chance. Victor Navasky, the future editor of The Nation, was then running a satirical magazine called the Monacle. He was working on a parody of the New York Post, \u201cThe New York Pest,\u201d and asked Ephron for a spoof of Post columnist Leonard Lyons.<\/p>\n
She succeeded so well that the newspaper\u2019s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, reasoned that anyone who could make fun of the Post could also write for it. Ephron was asked to try out as a reporter. Within a week, she had a permanent job and remained there five years. The Post, she later wrote, was a \u201cterrible paper,\u201d and she envied her peers at The New York Times and elsewhere who had more time to work on stories and had better access to people they wanted to interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the point is this. I was better off \u2026\u201d she wrote in the introduction to the essay collection \u201cWallflower at the Orgy, published in 1970. \u201cI learned to go through the clips, find the names of people from the subject\u2019s past, hunt them up in old telephone books, track them down, and pull out anecdotes they knew. What I\u2019m saying may seem obvious; but one of the things that stuns me is how seldom reporters do this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ephron began writing for Esquire and The New York Times and developed a national following as a throwback to the prime of Dorothy Parker and S.J. Perelman and a worthy peer of such new and hip journalists as Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. She covered political conventions, the feminist movement and Wellesley, which she labeled a factory for \u201cdocile\u201d women. Part of her gift was her fresh takes on such traditional subjects for women as food and fashion, like in the essay \u201cThe Food Establishment: Life in the Land of the Rising Souffle (Or Is It the Rising Meringue?)\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe typical member of the Food Establishment,\u201d she wrote, \u201cis given to telling you, apropos of nothing, how many souffles he has been known to make in a short period of time. \u2026 He gossips a good deal about his colleagues, about what they are cooking, writing, and eating; and whom they are talking to, about everything, in fact, except the one thing everyone else in the universe gossips about _ who is sleeping with whom.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the 1970s, she had met Bernstein, who teamed with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon. They married in 1976, and had two children, but love soon turned to hate _ and matured into art. Ephron was pregnant with their second child when she learned Bernstein was having an affair, a betrayal that had its rewards, once she stopped crying.<\/p>\n
She wrote \u201cHeartburn,\u201d later a film starring Streep and Jack Nicholson and directed by Nichols, with whom she collaborated often. The book was so close to her life that Bernstein threatened to sue. Decades later, the memory of the book\u2019s birth was easily summoned.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, totally, completely, absolutely, sitting at the legendary and long-gone Smith Corona electric typewriter that I once had,\u201d she told The Associated Press in 2010. \u201cI was working on a screenplay and wrote the first 10 pages of a novel, and I knew the title, knew there were going to be recipes in it. This I remember, exactly where I was, working and knowing, `Oh, I see, enough time has passed that I\u2019m ready to do this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Another perk from her time with Bernstein: She sussed out that \u201cDeep Throat,\u201d the unnamed and unknown Watergate source, was in fact FBI official Mark Felt. She would allege that she told countless people about Felt, who did not acknowledge his role until years later.<\/p>\n
Her screenwriting credits included \u201cHeartburn,\u201d the nuclear power drama \u201cSilkwood\u201d and the romantic comedy \u201cWhen Harry Met Sally \u2026\u201d She twice directed the team of Ryan and Hanks, in \u201cSleepless in Seattle\u201d and \u201cYou\u2019ve Got Mail,\u201d and also worked with John Travolta (in the fantasy \u201cMichael\u201d), Steve Martin (\u201cMixed Nuts\u201d) and Nicole Kidman (\u201cBewitched\u201d).<\/p>\n
Ephron had a great nose for nonsense, but was enough a citizen of Hollywood to fall, and fall hard, for a happy ending. \u201cSleepless in Seattle,\u201d in which Ryan and Hanks play long-distance admirers who meet at film\u2019s end, was not only a remake of the weeper \u201cAn Affair to Remember,\u201d but a tribute to how movies might tell us how to live. Ryan and her best pal, played by Rosie O\u2019Donnell, are seen watching \u201cAffair to Remember,\u201d which inspires Ryan to suggest to Hanks that they meet _ like Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr _ on top of the Empire State Building, on Valentine\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a chicks\u2019 movie,\u201d Hanks\u2019 character says when he learns about the film\u2019s plot.<\/p>\n
Ephron was married three times: to Dan Greenburg, Bernstein and, quite happily, to \u201cWiseguy\u201d author Nicholas Pileggi, whose book was adapted into the Martin Scorsese film \u201cGoodfellas.\u201d Sisters Delia, Amy and Hallie Ephron also are writers and Nora and Delia collaborated on such films as \u201cThis Is My Life\u201d and \u201cSleepless in Seattle.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her essay \u201cThe O Word,\u201d Nora Ephron anticipated growing too old to make jokes about her age. She would be \u201creally old,\u201d beyond sex in a hotel room, or even a frozen custard at Shake Shack. It would be nice if she believed in a higher being, but the phrase \u201ceverything happens for a reason\u201d is a sermon that only annoys her.<\/p>\n
Ephron wrote of summers in the Hamptons on Long Island when her children were little, of fireworks on the Fourth of July and picnics on the beach. She loved the sound of geese in mid-July _ \u201cone of the things that made the summers out there so magical.\u201d As she aged, the geese reminded her that summer will end, and so will everything else.<\/p>\n
\u201cI especially began to hate their sound, which was not beating wings _ how could I have ever thought it was? _ but a lot of uneuphonious honks,\u201d she writes. \u201cNow we don\u2019t go to Long Island in the summer and I don\u2019t hear the geese. Sometimes, instead, we go to Los Angeles, where there are hummingbirds, and I love to watch them because they\u2019re so busy getting the most out of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
VIRAL POST:<\/strong> Posted at: 06\/27\/2012 1:36 PM (Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ephron died at 7:40 p.m. at New York Presbyterian\/Weill Cornell Medical Center, her family said in a statement Tuesday night. She died of leukemia. (AP) NEW YORK \u2013 Among the injustices about the death of Nora Ephron is that she isn\u2019t around to tell us about it. \u201cShe was so, so alive,\u201d says her friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-empower-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":184,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/viralblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy HILLEL ITALIE<\/p>\n