Nora Ephron - Nora Ephron: and Other Conversations

INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL S. LASKY

WRITERS DIGEST

APRIL 1974

At thirty-two, Nora Ephron is everywhere and it didnt take her very long to get there. To interview her for even just a few hours can be nearly as impossible as typing with your elbows.

Nora is elusive these days. If she isnt in California or in Houston, covering Bobby Riggss tennis matches for Esquire, New York, or Oui, then she is off to France for a one-week spree of the best Michelin three-star restaurantsall expenses paid. Then again, if she isnt in France or California or in her sparsely furnished New York apartment, she is probably in Israel covering the Mideast turmoil, or in Las Vegas for the fun of it.

She began her rise to journalistic success fresh out of college as a copy girl and articles clipper at Newsweek, which she says was the worst job in the world and I was actually good at it. She moved quickly and assuredly, though, onto writing features for the New York Post and then as a full-time freelancer.

In 1970, Viking Press published a collection of her felicitous writing under the apt title, Wallflower at the Orgy. At the time, writer Rex Reed readily noted that her writing was great chunky spoonfuls served in tasty style by a fresh, inventive observer who stalks the phonies and cherubs alike, sniffing them out like a hungry tiger, clamping her pretty teeth down in all the spots where it hurts the most, then leaving all her victims better off than they were before they met Nora Ephron.

In recent years, Nora has been a lively columnist and writer for Esquire but presently works in the same capacity for New York magazine, which made her an offer she couldnt refuse. (Her column at both magazines has gone under the same name: simply, Women.)

I interviewed Nora Ephron on one of the rare days when she was at home with her cat in her New York Midtown apartment that overlooks the Ziegfield Theatre, a porno moviehouse, and a Chinese restaurant. She wedged me between some morning activities and a late-afternoon appointment at the beauty parlor, where she gets to catch up on all the womens magazines.

As we headed down the noisy New York streets at the end of the interview, she described herself at my request: I am skinny and have a long face, long chin, and dark hair and a snaggletooth that Ive worked very hard to get. My hair droops over my left eye so no one will notice that my left eyelid droops.

Now that you have some idea of what she looks like, we can find out what she has to say.

LASKY: How did you get started in freelance writing?

EPHRON: I was a reporter at the New York Post for about three years where I had been producing feature stories. I got a call from Helen Gurley Brown. She had just started working at Cosmopolitan and needed stories written quickly, for which news reporters have a reputation. I did a crappy little piece for her on the life of a Copacabana showgirlthat was my first real freelance money. I had tried to get articles printed before, though, but they were all rejected. This was before I had even started working at the Post. Some of these were rudely rejected, I might add.

LASKY: What do you mean, rudely?

EPHRON: One article I had submitted to Glamour was returned with a note that just about said never submit anything to us again it will be fine if we never hear from you again. I think you could call that rude. But to go on, as I continued my work at the Post over the years, I met people and my byline became familiar, so I got some freelance offers like Cosmo, The New York Times Book Review. And when I left the Post to freelance full-time

LASKY: What prompted you to do that?

EPHRON: Well, there were two things. For one, I wasnt really growing as a writer I got as much from newspaper writing as I thought I could. Another thing was I had gotten married. Being married to someone who made a certain amount of money meant that I could take the gamble on my first year as a freelance writer. If I didnt make as much as I did when I was a reporter, there was someone who was going to take up the slack. I was pretty sure that I could make that $10,000 figure, and I just about did. As a matter of fact, until this year I never made more than that.

LASKY: How much money can you or do you make, now that you are a full-time freelancer on your own? Do you reach a necessity threshold or one for a style of living that you were used to?

EPHRON: Both. There is the necessity threshold and then there is the Henri Bendel threshold. If you dont write books I dont really see making more than $25,000, and I think that is rough-going to make even that. Most of my women friends who do it make somewhere in the $15$18,000 bracket and that includes doing a certain amount of hooking. Prostituting yourself writing for Womans Day and supermarket-type magazines. I say hooking because these women realize they are writing under their level. I just think that there are free subjects that I want to cover that I could handle at the level