Nora Ephron's life is the raw material for her best selling books, Oscar-nominated films and razor-sharp blogs. Now the ageing industry has got her goat, she tells Emma Brockes
Before she became a magazine writer, and long before she was a screenwriter and a Hollywood film director, Nora Ephron did five years hard labour as a reporter on the New York Post. It was her first writing job out of college and - this was the Post in its pre-Murdoch days - it provided a sort of grungy foundation for the rest of her career.
Over the past four decades she has been nominated three times for an Oscar, written five bestselling books, and directed John Travolta, Nicole Kidman and Tom Hanks, among others. But the air of the hack remains about Ephron; that is, of someone standing off to one side, alive to the absurdity of it all and with slightly messy hair.
I Feel Bad About My Neckis her first book in 23 years and people are still talking about the last one. Heartburn, the fictionalised account of her then-husband Carl Bernstein's infidelity with Margaret Jay, traumatised a generation of Washington men so profoundly that a male writer at the Washington Postsaid to me only recently: "You really don't want Nora Ephron calling you a jerk in one of her books, because" - and here he lowered his voice to an agonised whisper - "people are going to read it."
The new book is a collection of essays about ageing that takes on, with characteristic brio, what Ephron considers to be the medicated smiliness of most volumes on the subject. At 65 she was sick of reading about how life post-menopause is one long party, how the appropriate response to getting older is unalloyed joy and - the orthodoxy that irritates her most - how she should currently be having the best sex of her life: "To which you go, are you nuts?"
Her eyes widen in mock amazement. "I finally figured out that if there are circumstances in which you can have the best sex of your life in your 60s, they would be if you had never had sex before."
We are in a cafe near her apartment in New York, and it is a mark of both the neighbourhood and Ephron's place within it that, halfway through the interview, Scott Rudin, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, comes over to our table and has an animated discussion with her about the Oscar nominations, which have come out that morning. (General gist: "Larry must be devastated.")
Ephron was nominated in 1984 for her screenplay of Silkwood, in 1990 for When Harry Met Sally, and in 1994 for Sleepless in Seattle, and she has written five screenplays since then, most recently Bewitched.
Before the new book came out, people would occasionally ask when she intended to get back to "real writing" - "as if writing a movie isn't something", she snorts - but there is a perceived contrast between the bite of her prose and the slightly more indulgent tone of her movies that fans of the former resent.
It was in the 1960s and 1970s, in magazines such as Esquireand New York, that Ephron made her name as someone who could deflate pretensions with the kind of assurance that made it hard to imagine how her targets could ever have been taken seriously.
She did it in 1975 to Dorothy Schiff, then owner of the New York Postand her former boss, who she called "silly", "frothy" and the proprietor of a "terrible newspaper". She did it at the height of the women's movement, when she called Betty Friedan "thoroughly irrational" for pursuing a vendetta against Gloria Steinem. She even managed, in 1968, to excite a threat of legal action out of Women's Wear Daily,for sending it up across the pages of Cosmopolitan.
Her assassinations were never at the expense of warmth or humour, and she was as unsparing of herself as of others. In that same piece about the women's movement, Ephron turns her satirical gaze inwards when Steinem, after being let down by George McGovern, unexpectedly bursts into tears: "I try to offer some reassuring words, something, but everything I say is wrong; I have never cried over anything remotely political in my life, and I honestly have no idea what to say."
It was her mother, Phoebe, who told her that "everything is copy", and she has observed the rule - up to a point. Her parents were successful Hollywood screenwriters who moved from New York to LA and brought up their four daughters in a household where everyone was expected to turn a fine phrase.
Ephron's letters home from college were used as the basis for a play, Take Her, She's Mine, and the parents were in time cannibalised by the offspring. Ephron's sister Amy described in a novel the circumstance of their mother's death, from cirrhosis, aided by sleeping pills administered by her father. "My father basically killing my mother," says Ephron, a fact she didn't write about until this last book.
Of her father, Henry, she says: "He was very charming and he just loved his girls. I remember I said to my therapist that we were four girls and the therapist said, 'oh, your poor father', and now I realise that she was completely wrong: it was my poor mother."
When she thinks of her family, Ephron sometimes imagines "a lion that has killed a zebra and all the lions are feeding on it and the coyotes and the jackals and these rings of people. That is sometimes how I think of us."
Ephron's parents were alcoholics, but she is not "a child of alcoholics", as the thriving abuse-based sector of the publishing industry might term it. This is partly because she was the oldest and missed the worst - "my sister had a much darker experience as a child than me" - and partly because it is not her style. "Our family style is make 'em laugh."
In any case, she believes "whoever you are as an adult is way more than simply that your parents were X or Y. I have an unbelievably irritable friend - she breaks all known irritability indexes - and her family who loves her attributes it to the fact that she's the child of Holocaust victims. And I think she's just a really irritable girl; she's one of those irritable New York girls who is always in a bad mood and always yelling at cab drivers, and I do not think this can be taken all the way back to Adolf Hitler."
Ephron went to Wellesley College, a single-sex university in Massachusetts, which she savaged 10 years after leaving, for turning out a generation of docile and unadventurous women. She moved to New York, got a job in a mail room, and one day wrote a parody of the New York Postthat came to the attention of the newspaper's publisher. He was amused and hired her.
Ephron was 22. She became a member of the grievance committee and complained about the terrible state of the newsroom and generally behaved in a way not recommended by Wellesley College. She married Dan Greenberg, a writer, and six years later they divorced. In 1976 she met Carl Bernstein and married him.
All the President's Men,Bernstein's book with Bob Woodward about their exposure of the Watergate scandal, was being made into a film around that time, and the script had been written by William Goldman. "Carl and Bob weren't happy with it," she says, "and decided they should redo it, which was not something they should have decided. So Carl and I rewrote William Goldman's script."
Ephron had grown up reading scripts, but this was her first attempt at writing one. "It was a great way to learn, because Goldman was such a great screenwriter that just typing his stage directions taught me a huge amount." The script she and Bernstein wrote wasn't used in the end, but someone in Hollywood read it and offered her a job - "a horrible television movie. But it was the beginning of my being paid as a screenwriter."
Ephron needs variety: reporting, columnising, blogging on the Huffington Postand making movies - "oh well, movies are so much fun. I mean it's nice to be fluent in more than one language."
After her marriage to Bernstein dissolved, she sat down to write Heartburn. It took her two years to finish. She'd do 70 pages and break off to write a screenplay because she needed the money. She'd make enough from it to devote another three months and 70 pages to the novel, then run out of cash and do another screenplay. This cycle was repeated three times before she finished the book.
"Now: what I believe is that if I had somehow not needed the money, it would've have taken me exactly that long to write it. You have to recharge your batteries, you can't just - well, you can be Joyce Carol Oates and write 18 books a year under your own name and several pseudonyms - but I'm not that person. You can't just sit there and do one thing."
Heartburn was published in 1983 and made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. It was phenomenally successful. I have always wondered if any of the characters on which it was based threatened to sue. "Yes, Carl did." He didn't go through with it, "but he made my life a misery". She shrugs. "But so what." For the last 20 years she has been married to Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the films Casinoand Goodfellas. Her two sons by Bernstein are in their 20s.
Arianna Huffington first asked Ephron to write a blog for her when Mark Felt was revealed to have been Deep Throat."So I tossed something off and got this huge response, and it was fun to do." In the two years since then, she has blogged roughly once a fortnight, on politics and the media and whatever is happening in her life at the time.
"I learned that this is a different way of writing - you have to do it really fast, and if you don't do it fast, you're making a mistake. If I'm working on anything for more than an hour, I say, this is not a blog, I have to stop right now, cos I'm writing a column or something else."
What's the difference? "The function is different. The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news - did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? - has a kind of fun appeal."
She would like, for the 2008 presidential elections, to go back to reporting (she hated Hillary Clinton's support of the Iraq war, but in other ways admires her) and there are more blogs and screenplays to write. The fact that I Feel Bad About My Neckdid so well is consolation, perhaps, for the petty and not-so-petty deteriorations it catalogues, but even if it isn't, Ephron is a self-confessed Pollyanna.
She looks on the bright side by laughing at the facts rather than denying they exist, and the effect is more uplifting than the traditional rictus of self-help literature. Initially, she says, the publishers rejected the title. "They thought it wasn't cheerful enough and that people wouldn't buy it. But the truth is people saw the title and went, 'yes, I feel bad about my neck'. You know? Finally."
