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When I was a kid, I wanted very badly to be

the president's daughter,

'cause I thought you would get a lot of dates that way, you know?

(audience laughing) Sure, sure.

Now, every so often, I'm just sitting in the house

and I think, I really want to be the first lady.

I want to be sort of a cute Eleanor Roosevelt.

You know? (audience laughing)

(intro music playing) (children chattering)

Nora Ephron: We all grew up with this thing

that my mother said to us over and over and over and over again,

which was, "Everything is copy."

You know, you'd come home with some thing

that you thought was the tragedy of your life--

someone hadn't asked you to dance,

or the hem had fallen out of your dress

or whatever you thought was the worst thing

that could ever happen to a human being--

and my mother would say, "Everything is copy."

I now believe that what my mother meant is this:

When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you,

but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel,

it's your laugh, so you become the hero

rather than the victim of the joke.

I think that's what she meant.

On the other hand,

she may merely have meant,

everything is copy.

♪ ♪

Jacob Bernstein: My mom, Nora Ephron, was a writer.

I'm also a writer, though a very different kind.

I'm a journalist, whose job it is

to take myself out of the equation.

Agnosticism is at the heart of what I do.

She was an essayist and a screenwriter

whose own life became her central inspiration.

Certainty was a hallmark of her brand.

After she died of leukemia in 2012,

I began to think a lot about what it means to be a writer.

Where were the limits for her?

What is the cost of "everything is copy"?

Did my mom really believe this mantra of hers?

Do you think Nora would be happy that you're doing this?

It was her philosophy in a certain way.

But she said, "What is there left to say?

I've said everything."

But of course, that's never true.

I mean, it's actually naive.

I mean, I never would say Nora was naive,

but that's actually naive,

to think that you could put out your version of the story

and that that is the only version to tell.

That's not true.

David Remnick: She was a very, very smart,

comic, filmmaker, writer, reporter.

It was all of a piece,

and the voice is quite unified.

Really terrific, true comic writing

is impossibly hard, and she had it.

Rob Reiner: Men and women and how they are with each other,

that's what she knew best, that's what she did best.

"Sleepless in Seattle"?

That's what she called him on the show because he can't sleep.

Becky: And now 2000 women want his number.

There are things that you sort of know that men think.

Charlie Rose: Right. Um, things like,

"How long do I have to lie here and hold her

before I can go home? Is 30 seconds enough?" You know?

Mike Nichols: A contemporary romantic movie,

it's one of the things you go to the movies for.

And she made it happen again

when we had lost it completely.

Meryl Streep: She hid all these little human interactions

inside witty, funny things.

She understood love, I think.

(singing) Nora: Meryl did Karen Silkwood

and the Polish person and the Danish person. Blah, blah, blah.

But the true stretch,

if I do say so, was playing me...

(audience laughing) in Heartburn.

She was the best essayist I've ever read.

Her essays are just riveting.

I mean, she created a new form.

Richard Cohen: But Nora was bigger

than somebody who wrote best-selling books.

She was bigger than somebody who directed movies or wrote plays.

She was like a combination of all of that, plus.

Nichols: I think more than anybody I've ever known,

she knew what she wanted and she went and got it.

Or went and did it, which is more to the point.

Bryan Lourd: She had the ability to go back the typewriter

and write herself out of trouble,

and she was very adept and facile

at shape-shifting.

Amy Pascal: She was everything that every girl like me

wished they could be--

smart, insightful, witty,

sexy without trying, ambitious in all the good ways,

and she was a great girl, too. She was a great girl.

Bob Gottlieb: I think for many women, she became a feminist icon.

She broke through a lot of glass ceilings.

That meant a lot to women I know.

So it made sense that for many, many people,

her death was personal, people who didn't know her.

Joel Schumacher: When Nora died, I remember one of my friends

said, "It's like a light went out in New York."

Like so many friends, I never knew that Nora was ill.

Jacob: Did you have a sense anything was wrong

those last six years?

You know, that's the thing that was so, um, shocking,

is to find out that Nora had been sick.

Jacob: Did you have any sense she was sick?

Not at all.

Did you have any idea? No, no. No, no.

You knew early on. She hadn't told us.

Yeah, she hadn't told you.

And Mona said, "You have to tell the kids

'cause they're not kids. They're grown-ups."

Jacob: For decades, my mother put her private life

front and center,

writing about her feelings of physical inadequacy,

the indignities of aging,

and the breakup of her marriage to my father.

But at the end of her life,

she chose to stay silent about the blood disorder that killed her.

Why after being so open about everything else

did she choose not to address

the most significant crisis of her life?

You know, I think this was a story that she couldn't control.

You know, the other stuff, she could control.

She told it her way.

Nora: The Legend.

I grew up in Beverly Hills,

in a Spanish house in the flats.

My parents had a large group of friends,

almost all of them transplanted New Yorkers

who were in the business.

That's what it was known as, the business.

The men were screenwriters or television writers.

Their wives did nothing.

Our mother was different. She worked.

This was long before the concept of having it all,

but my mother had it all.

When I was a kid, I went to the movies,

and I not only didn't believe there was a Hollywood,

I can't imagine that there could be anyone who could grow up out there

and then become a reasonably normal person besides, you know?

And you did. It's quite a thing.

Well, I did not have the kind of Hollywood childhood

that, you know, some-- My parents were screenwriters,

which was already getting sort of dignified.

I mean, we didn't have a projection room in the house,

which there were people who had, you know?

Nora: I was born in New York. Rose: Right.

And I had been completely happy in New York

till I was five, when I was ripped

out of New York City and plopped

into Beverly Hills by my parents,

who went out there to become screenwriters.

Rose: And did!

Nora: They got credits on 15 or 16 movies.

I once counted it up. It's somewhere in that vicinity,

including Daddy Long Legs

and Carousel and The Desk Set

and a whole bunch of movies.

There eventually were four daughters.

And, you know, my sister Delia got her head stuck

between the banister rails in our house,

and the Beverly Hills Fire Department

had to come and cut the wrought iron away

so that she could be extricated.

Child: Daddy? Shh, shh, quiet.

Daddy, I'm stuck.

Nora: And less than a year later,

in a movie called The Jackpot came out,

with Jimmy Stewart.

My parents just took it and recycled it,

just like that.

Delia: Their story of falling in love

was that my father and mother met at a party

and he asked her out on a date,

and by the end of the date, he said, "Will you marry me?"

And she said, "Can I read your work?"

And we were told that story over and over again.

And they just loved it, and they thought it was like the most romantic story.

And it wasn't until I got older that I thought,

that is really weird, you know?

Amy Ephron: My dad had written a bunch of plays,

and I think Mommy got tired of his plays not selling.

And she said, "I'll write one with you."

And it was sort of a hit, and then they moved to LA.

And I think Mommy thought, and rightly so,

that she had broken some kind of glass ceiling.

Was it good to have a mother like that?

What was she like as a mother?

Weird. She wasn't...

Warmth was not really up her alley.

Hallie Ephron: I once asked her about friends of theirs.

I had liked the wife very much,

and I said to her, "What does she do?"

And my mother said, "Her nails."

(ripping sound)

Delia: To me, everything in our family began

at the dining room table.

That was where you were groomed

to be the writer that you became.

I mean, that was when every time I said something funny,

my dad said, "That's a great line. Write it down."

Hallie: The thing about my mother was she loved words.

She would recite poetry at the dinner table.

She read to us. She certainly read to me.

Maybe less to Amy. Probably Nora got read the most to.

Nora got the most of everything.

Well, tell me what your first memory is of my mom.

My first memory is of her biting into a tomato

in such a perfect way as to squirt juice in my eye.

That's it-- that's what I remember,

perfect sibling moment.

She really took charge of me in a very sort of bossy way.

I think I was an opportunity.

♪ ♪

Barry Diller: We met definitely at school.

I think we met when I went to Beverly High as a freshman,

and Nora was, I think, junior.

Jacob: And what was she like?

Well, Nora has always been Nora.

So I don't know that there's-- that there's much, though...

She fired me,

or she says she didn't, but she definitely fired me

from the high school newspaper.

I mean, four or five times, we had this discussion.

I say, "Nora, you fired me." "I did not fire you.

"I didn't do it because of this, this, that and that.

And I was not there when you were there at this exact time."

I said, "Nora, I promise you, I was 14 years old.

I hadn't been fired before. I remember."

Wendy Goldberg: She always, even at that young age,

had an attitude.

It wasn't always, like, the friendliest attitude.

She was more of a brainy girl.

And I was more of, like, the cheerleader girl.

And I think she had a little disdain for that.

We were 309 people

when we graduated high school,

and Nora was number one.

Gave the valedictorian speech.

Diller: But there was not a lot of feminine

about Nora during that period.

And at the time, she had one eye

that was kind of unevenly closed, or open.

I don't think Nora was that well-endowed.

I think that was a little something that she wasn't thrilled about.

Lena Dunham: A Few Words About Breasts. Esquire, 1972.

"Here's some things I did to help:

"Bought a Mark Eden Bust Developer.

"Slept on my back for four years.

"Splashed cold water on them every night

"because some French actress said in Life magazine

"that that was what she did for her perfect bustline.

"Ultimately, I resigned myself to a bad toss

"and I began to wear padded bras.

"And my girlfriends, the ones with nice, big breasts

"would go on endlessly about how their lives

"had been far more miserable than mine.

"Their bra straps were snapped in class.

"They couldn't sleep on their stomachs.

"They were stared at whenever the word 'mountain'

"cropped up in geography.

"I have thought about their remarks,

"tried to put myself in their place,

"considered their point of view,

and I think they are full of shit."

I don't think Mom ever said to any of us,

you know, "You're so beautiful. You're adorable."

Any of that stuff. And we were all pretty cute kids.

And we were all-- but even if we weren't,

we were her daughters, you know?

So I think if your mom never tells you that,

how would you ever know it?

Rose: You graduate from Wellesley College

and you want to live in New York. You come to Manhattan.

You get a job as a researcher for Newsweek magazine?

Nora: Mail girl. Mail girl.

Mail girl. There were no mail boys, actually.

Yeah, 'cause mail room is where a lot of people

like Barry Diller and others started at the agencies.

At the agencies, yes, where there were no mail girls, by the way.

If you were a mail boy at an agency,

you would eventually become an agent.

If you were a mail girl at Newsweek,

nothing ever really happened to you

except that you kind of continued to serve men forever.

And at some point along this road,

there was a strike, a New York newspaper strike.

Right.

This is a copy of the New York Post,

an 84-day-old copy of the last edition

to be printed before the strike began.

Buried inside was the story of a federal...

Victor Navasky: During the strike, we got the idea

of publishing parodies of the four main newspapers.

And Nora thought of doing a parody

of Leonard Lyons, who was the leading columnist

of the New York Post, which we called the "Pest."

Nora: The editors of the Post wanted to sue.

But the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said, "Don't be ridiculous.

"If they can parody the Post, they can write for it.

Hire them."

And that's how I got a try-out at the New York Post.

Rose: And so you're now writing and you're now a reporter.

Yes.

I loved the Post.

Of course, it was a zoo.

The editor was a sexual predator.

The managing editor was a lunatic.

Sometimes it seemed that half the staff was drunk.

I can't tell you, it was the most wonderful job.

I thought I was Brenda Starr or Lois Lane

or any one of those, and I was.

I adored it. I covered murders.

I always felt that I was going to be arrested for the murder

because I felt so guilty

about having so much fun on the story.

You know? I mean, someone was dead

and I was getting front-page stories from it.

Gay Talese: I didn't know how good she was, though.

You can't tell on a daily newspaper often

how good a writer can be.

I mean, when she started writing those pieces for Esquire,

those essays, as a columnist,

or sometimes just an essayist, she had that voice.

She had such a deftness, that she could use the first person.

"I feel sorry for what I'm about to do."

She somehow heard a voice that worked

and she was able to do something completely,

really revolutionary.

Jacob: My mom was dangerous too.

She didn't have any trouble going after people--

people who had helped her, people she'd dated,

people she'd worked for.

It was part of the fun of reading her.

Meg Ryan: Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post. Esquire, 1975.

"I feel bad about what I'm going to do here.

"What I'm going to do here is write something about Dorothy Schiff,

"and the reason I feel bad about it

"is that a few months ago, I managed to patch things up with her,

"and now I'm going to blow it.

"Dorothy Schiff has a right to run her paper

"any way she likes. She owns it.

"But it seems never to have crossed her mind

"that she might have a public obligation

"to produce a good newspaper.

"Gail Sheehy quite cleverly compared her with Scheherazade,

"but it would be more apt, I think,

"to compare her with Marie Antoinette...

as in, let them read schlock."

I mean, she had a-- you know, a luminous smile,

and she had a very easy way of introducing herself,

but she had a razor in her back pocket.

She might have been cruel and wicked,

and she always was pretty cruel and pretty wicked on one level.

As long as you weren't the recipient of her wrath,

you were pretty happy about it.

And she was funny about it.

I thought she was very funny and very mean.

And at one point, she was mean about me.

And then I just had to remember

that she was funny.

It was part of her whole Dorothy Parker thing

to cut people to the quick.

(laughing)

You can be malevolent, can't you?

Oh, sure. It's kind of fun to be malevolent.

No, I mean-- I tell you something you were malevolent in.

In your piece on Julie Nixon.

You have a soft spot for Julie Nixon. I like Julie, yes.

Well, I don't.

I think she's a chocolate-covered spider.

Remnick: Look, her voice in print really replicated her voice,

almost, in life,

and in life, she could be a little mean

and a little wicked,

and-- what's the word we're never allowed to say-- judgmental.

Nora was tough. Nora was very, very, very tough.

But, you know, tough is good.

There's nothing wrong with tough

any more than there's anything wrong with ambition.

Nora would have done nothing had she not been ambitious,

and she would not have succeeded at everything had she not been tough.

Delia: She came of age in journalism

at that moment when magazine journalism

was really coming alive, and so you had Tom Wolfe

and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,

and you had Gay Talese,

and they're writing amazing journalism.

Talese: Esquire at that time was doing

that kind of literary journalism or new journalism.

But it had an extraordinary editor-- Harold Hayes.

When you worked for him, if he liked you or liked your work,

you could do almost anything you wanted.

Nora: They offered me a column.

Harold called up and said, "Well, what is it you want to write about?"

It was one of those sort of Harold moments

of, "I've offered you the moon."

And I said, "Women."

And I don't think I knew it until that moment.

Delia: She writes these columns for Esquire

and she becomes a star.

I mean, a real star. She breaks out from the pack,

and from the pack of women as well as men.

Nora: I said, "There's this thing happening,

"the women's movement,

"and nobody's really writing about it

with any edge or humor or anything."

Remnick: I didn't know anything about feminism

when I was 13 years old,

and I read her columns, and they were telling me

about Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan

and breast size and all the rest,

and it was all expressed in a kind of wised-up

New York...

comic... seriousness.

Nora was able to sort of publicly discuss,

like, her imperfections, her anxieties,

the complexity of being female, the way she both--

She wasn't coming down on the side of pure feminism--

burn your bra, don't run a comb through your hair--

and she also wasn't Helen Gurley Brown

telling you to, like, you know, hide the fact that you had anxiety.

She was able to say, "I want all the things

"that women are supposed to want,

and I also hate all the things that women are supposed to want."

Gaby Hoffman: Fantasies. Esquire, 1972.

"I am somewhat liberated by current standards,

"but I have in my head this dreadful, unliberated sexual fantasy.

"I have never told anyone

"the exact details of my particular sex fantasy.

"It is my secret and I am not going to divulge it here.

"Anyway, without giving away any of the juicy parts,

"I can tell you that in its broad outlines,

"it has largely to do with being dominated

"by faceless males who rip my clothes off.

"That's just about all they have to do.

"Stare at me in this faceless way,

"go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off.

"It's terrific.

"In my sex fantasy,

nobody ever loves me for my mind."

For better or worse--

she might say for worse,

but at the time, it seemed for better--

I introduced her to her first husband,

to Dan Greenburg.

He was a very funny writer.

Dan Greenburg: She and I hit it off.

I mean, she's a very witty person,

and I love a witty person.

We were both very ambitious,

and we were both doing very well.

At that point, my book, How to Be a Jewish Mother,

was number one on the bestseller list.

We would have dinner parties,

and Nora would go up to a celebrity she had never met

and say, "Hi, my name is Nora Ephron.

If I invited you to dinner at my house, would you come?"

And she was so adorable and so appealing,

I don't think anybody ever said no.

So we got to run with a very vast crowd.

We had Mike Nichols over to dinner,

we had Buck Henry, Joan Didion.

Barbara Walters: Nobody entertained better.

Not just the food, which was so wonderful,

which Nora somehow did with her left hand,

but she also had the most interesting collection of people.

There would be opinions, and there would be conversation,

and there would be laughter.

Ken Auletta: I always felt that Nora was kind of like a magnet

and that people were just drawn to her.

I know some of the ingredients that magnetized her.

I mean, she was really interesting, she was really smart,

she was really funny, she was really engaged in other people's lives.

But I had this terrible secret thing.

Sometimes I wish

my husband were dead.

I think it's-- Life would be more--

--a universal thing. No, it's not a serious thing.

You don't really wish he were dead.

I mean, I'm-- Mm-hmm.

The thing is that

everyone sort of wonders, if I hadn't married

the person I married, who could I marry?

Yeah? And it's sort of a vague infidelity fantasy.

You know? Who would I like to have an affair with?

But I am so guilty about infidelity

that the only way I can get into the fantasy

is to kill my husband for a couple of minutes, you see?

I see. And so, he's, like, on this plane--

it's terrible-- and then I get to marry Mike Nichols.

In your fantasy? Yeah.

Dan was a nice guy, but I think we were all glad

when Nora moved on.

"My first husband was so neurotic, he kept hamsters.

"They all had cute names, like Arnold and Shirley.

"I felt really sad when Arnold died

"because Charlie was devoted to Arnold

"and made up a lot of hamster jokes

"he claimed Arnold had come up with.

"mostly having to do with chopped lettuce.

"Also, and I'm sorry to tell you this,

"Charlie often talked in a high squeaky voice

"that was meant to be Arnold's.

"And I'm even sorrier to tell you..."

(laughs) "...that I often replied in a high squeaky voice

"that was meant to be Shirley's.

"I mean, what are you supposed to do

"with a first husband like that?

I'll tell you what. Divorce him."

Greenburg: I want to make this very clear.

There has never been a hamster.

I have never dressed up anybody in adorable outfits.

If I had a hamster, I wouldn't dress--

it wouldn't occur to me to dress it up

in adorable little outfits, okay?

Cats? That might be different.

Writers are cannibals. Yes.

They really are.

They'll eat their own and whatever.

They are predators, and if you are friends with them

and you say anything funny at dinner,

or if anything good happens to you,

you are in big trouble. And you know from where you speak.

Well, I do.

Marie Brenner: When I would see your mother from time to time,

she was usually either talking about Mildred and Bernie,

as she called them, or she was with Mildred.

Mildred Newman was a hugely popular psychoanalyst in New York

at that time, and she practiced with her husband.

Amy: There was this whole thing that went on in New York then,

which is a kind of first-person journalism.

And Mildred and Bernie were all about "me."

"How to Be Your Own Best Friend."

Their whole philosophy I think did more

for our generation than any kind of

burning of bras on Fifth Avenue.

And it was basically, "You don't have to be responsible

for anyone else but yourself."

Mildred and Bernie specialized in creative people.

Tony Perkins, Neil Simon, Mike Nichols.

And Nora and Rex Reed

and all of the rest of them.

Some people thought it was kind of comical.

You know, all these people getting together with Mildred and Bernie,

who got involved in their lives in ways

that people thought was maybe inappropriate

for therapists or psychiatrists.

Amy: But I think that Mildred and Bernie were very good

at instilling a kind of confidence in people.

I mean, your mom had a way of finding, ultimately,

the things that she needed.

Jacob: My mom learned as much from self-help

as she did from Dorothy Parker.

And I think Mildred got her to understand

that you are not your parents and you don't have to be.

And just because they screwed it up

doesn't mean you're going to.

Delia: There was a tipping point when I was 11

when the house went from being

sort of a very joyful place

and everyone-- all our friends loved to be there too

and the dinners were great,

to suddenly a place where both my parents became alcoholics.

Jacob: Do you think that the drinking was part

of why they lost the work, or do you think

they lost the work and it somehow fueled the drinking?

Hallie: I think it was a lot of things that contributed

to a vicious circle.

Jacob: Also he was having--

There were affairs, weren't there?

I didn't believe it when-- at the time,

but I think so now.

And it was so cruel of him not to admit it, I think.

Because as kids, we thought she was crazy.

Delia: I feel Nora sort of had the golden age of childhood

in this family.

She was 14 when things got really difficult at home.

So it became for me-- and I was 11--

it became a very, very-- oh, terrible--

I mean, I was just scared all the time.

But it is very powerful

to have a mother who goes to pieces to that extent.

And my mother did die of cirrhosis.

I mean, she did die of drink.

Reese Witherspoon: The Mink Coat. Esquire, 1975.

"My mother would moan with pain,

"and the nurse would reach under her,

"move her slightly, and the sheets would fall away,

"and I would catch a glimpse of her legs,

"her beautiful legs,

"now drained of muscle tone, gone to bones.

"The hallucinations went on.

"Then one day suddenly, she came into focus,

"knew exactly who I was

"and, like a witch, what I was thinking.

"'You're a reporter,' she said to me.

'Take notes.'"

Jacob: My grandmother said everything was copy,

but in the end, she only wrote superficially

about the things that happened to her.

Is that part of why she wound up being

less successful than my mom?

In AA, they say you are as sick as your secrets.

Did my grandmother's failure to acknowledge

slipping on the banana peel hasten her demise?

Did my mom's need for control

stem from her mom's loss of it?

Nora: The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less.

My mother died of cirrhosis,

but the immediate cause of her death

was an overdose of sleeping pills

administered by my father.

At the time, this didn't seem to me

to fall under the rubric

of "everything is copy."

Although it did to my sister Amy

and she put it into a novel.

Who can blame her?

I think that, you know, Mommy was in some kind of state

where there really wasn't any there there.

I think that it was some act of not being able

to see her like that anymore.

I think that contributed to his craziness.

I think one of the things we got from them

in a sort of backhanded way

is that we got kind of survivor tools.

Watching them not have the equipment

to reinvent themselves

fueled the kind of reinvention

that certainly Nora had.

A kind of-- not even a coping mechanism.

It's something way beyond that.

It was like, "You're not going to knock me down."

Lynda Obst: Marie Brenner was giving a series of parties

in New York.

And she had given a party at which I met

my then-husband, David Obst,

who was the agent for Woodward and Bernstein,

and at which Nora met Carl, your dad.

I see your dad leaning intently

in on your mother,

and I watched him take down her phone number.

And I thought, hmm, that's interesting.

I was dazzled.

Um, and I did not really know who your mother was

in terms of her work.

We had this amazing conversation.

I said I would call her in a few days,

and I didn't wait a few days, and I called her the next day.

The next day, your mother called me

and said, "Are you really, really finished?"

She said, "Have you really-- that's it?"

I said, "Oh, yeah. Long ago."

So that was how they met.

Jacob: And when had you dated my father?

Well, I began dating your father

before Watergate, a month before.

May of '72.

And I remember a phone call from Carl saying,

"I can't come up to New York this weekend."

"Oh, why is that, Carl?"

"Oh, because I'm working on a story.

And I said, "Oh, yes, Carl. Sure you are. Sure."

Man: Much of the exhausting and aggressive investigation

on Watergate was done by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward,

who went from local reporting on the Post

to the Pulitzer Prize in one year.

Jacob: What was he like to go out with?

He was fun. He was so fun.

He was intense. He was passionate.

He was driven by outrage, which I loved,

'cause I too was driven by outrage--

political outrage. It was exciting.

Mm-hmm. And he...

He was hard to tie down, I think.

What are you trying-- what are you trying to ask me?

(laughs) No! Sounds like--

Let's play one of your mother's charade games.

Are you trying to find out if he was wildly unfaithful

and would try and call my friends from my apartment

to go out with them at the same time?

Is this what you're asking me? Well, did he?

I don't remember that. (laughs)

She had to know this going in,

a little bit, didn't she?

Your dad was

so intense

in his aura

that you would be swept away kind of

in his ferocity,

in a kind of enchanting way.

I don't think she questioned it.

I think they fell madly in love.

They were just absolutely, at that period,

made for each other.

Carl: As happens in great love affairs,

you want the other person to know who you are

at the most intimate and deepest levels.

I think we came very quickly

to a deep understanding of who the other person was.

Liz Smith: I-- I just loved him.

He was fun to be around.

We were all star-struck.

Carl was a star.

Whatever else he was, he was a star.

It was like a celebrity marriage.

They were a celebrity couple,

which clearly they allowed to happen,

or perhaps they wanted it to happen.

If she had a failing,

for me, it was her overwhelming need

to have success.

Maybe that had to do with the fact

that her parents got there, but didn't get there,

and maybe she felt that that's what

tipped them into whatever drinking problems they have.

But it wasn't going to happen to her.

Nora: I'd left New York City to move to Washington, DC,

for what I sincerely thought would be the rest of my life.

She was not a Washington person. She was a New York person.

Washington was not her natural habitat.

I don't-- I don't think she liked it.

She did not like Washington.

She hated Washington.

Jacob: To her, the city was a burg,

a place where ideas went to die

and diversity existed mainly as a campaign slogan.

She had to find a way there, you know?

Well, she's very good at that.

She managed somehow to import New York to Washington.

And then they had that incredible house in Bridgehampton, Trees.

And I would come back from London and go out

and visit them at that house,

and there would be your mother cooking,

and there was your mother pregnant,

and suddenly, there you were in a stroller,

and there you were in a playpen,

and there you were always by-- with her.

There was this one incredible letter

that I got from her.

She wrote to me the most beautiful description

of what it meant for her to be your mother

and to see her little baby.

And she said, "I just stare at Jacob all day long.

"He is a dish of ice cream.

"Nothing ever I've done has given me the happiness

that this has."

One night when your mother was pregnant,

and she waddled down to our house in Bridgehampton with Carl,

and just the four of us had dinner in the kitchen,

sitting around a round table.

And they left late, I remember,

you know, it was after 11:00,

um, and they walked home, and Binky and I looked at each other

and said, "Boy, are they happy."

And literally a month later, the marriage went kaput.

When they split up, I was dumbfounded.

I was shocked.

I-- I know about you and Thelma Rice.

I know everything. It's all here. Shit.

You didn't even have the decency to hide the evidence.

You just threw it in a drawer.

Hotels, motels.

Oh, shit. You couldn't even pay cash,

like a normal philanderer.

You charged everything. I mean, look at this.

Flowers-- look at all these flowers that bought for her!

And you occasionally brought me home a bunch of wilted Zinnias.

How can you do this? If I'm such a bitch, then tell me!

Don't do this. We have a baby, Mark!

We have another baby coming!

Don't you even care about them?

I-- I almost fainted

when she said, "I want you to print this,

that Carl and I are divorcing."

I think-- I think she wanted it to be final.

Carl: A little while later,

I went to the G7 summit

and got upstairs to the room

and I called your mom and said,

"Why don't you get on a plane

"and come here and let's see what we can do here?

I don't think we really want to go this way."

And, um, she said no.

Gottlieb: When your brother Max was born,

she and you

and Max and his nurse

all moved into this house

and stayed here for about, I don't know,

four, five, six weeks.

In fact, you used to be in this very room.

You were last in this room, I think, 33 years ago.

So we all lived together

in a very emotional moment in her life,

and she was very vulnerable.

She didn't want people to know how hurt she was.

That was not her way.

So she determined to put a good face on it and she did.

She was coming back, rebounding, to become Nora,

and looking at it the way the person who wrote Heartburn

came to look at it.

Well, now Nora Ephron's first novel Heartburn

has gossips and book critics alike asking,

"Nora, is this your life?"

You know, every novelist-- I'm not much of a novelist,

I just have written one novel.

But everyone uses his or her own life.

She had detachment, so that she was able

to be her own helicopter pilot,

flying up when she was in front of her typewriter

and getting it down without feeling

the need to vomit her problems all over someone.

Very, very few, if any, people

that I can think of

have ever survived being publicly cuckolded.

Nora being the exception that it's like

those photographs of cats that somebody took

in which they've decided to change direction in mid jump.

'Cause what she did is in mid jump,

she moved to the Gottliebs' house

and cried for six months

and wrote it funny.

And in writing it funny,

she won.

And betrayed women all over the world knew it

and cheered.

Nora: I had gotten on the shuttle to New York

a few hours after discovering the affair,

which I learned about from a really disgusting inscription to my husband

in a book of children's songs she had given him.

Children's songs.

"Now you can sing these songs to Sam"

was part of the disgusting inscription,

and I can't begin to tell you how it sent me up the wall,

the idea of my two-year-old child, my baby,

involved in some dopey inscriptive way

in this affair between my husband,

a fairly short person,

and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person

with a neck as long as an arm

and a nose as long as a thumb,

and you should see her legs, never mind her feet,

which are sort of splayed.

Uh, but I mean, isn't that an ugly circumstance?

Doesn't that strike you as being just awful?

Well, but sort of funny, really, when you think about it.

Oh, boy, I don't know.

Seven-and-a-half-months pregnant

and the heroine here discovers

her husband is out with Thelma. Yes.

Oh, I don't know.

And seeing the same psychoanalyst

at the family rate with Thelma.

See, this is ugliness. Yes.

This is just... (audience applauding)

Jacob: Do you think she had ambivalence at all

about writing the book?

Cohen: She was going to do this

and it was all going to be okay.

And people who worried about the consequences of it

didn't understand who she was

and how she was going to handle it.

Well, to love someone so much, or to think that you--

Streep: When we were making Heartburn,

they got Jack Nicholson to play the husband.

And Mike was asking Nora,

"Well, don't you think we need a little bit more

of an understanding of him?"

And she was like, steam coming...

And I said to Mike, "I think, you know,

"I think it's really that this is about

"the person who got hit by the bus.

It's not about the bus."

When the dream breaks into a million tiny little pieces,

which leaves you with a choice,

you can either stick with it, which is unbearable,

or you can just go off and dream another dream.

Jacob: The divorce between my parents went on for years...

Can I have the, uh, car keys, please?

...and like many celebrity breakups,

had less to do with heartbreak

than a mutual obsession with reputation.

They fought over custody and child support

and the movie adaptation of Heartburn.

For my mother,

Heartburn was her central act of resilience.

To my father, it was steeped in revenge.

Carl: It was really about how

you would be affected

by a huge Hollywood movie coming out

when you were six years old,

and whether it would become a circus.

And I said, "If you want to make this movie so badly,

"you have to give me joint custody.

"Also, at no time will there be any depiction

"of the father in the movie shown as anything

but a loving and caring parent."

And she agreed. Those are the terms of the divorce.

And Mike Nichols was a signatory

to the divorce-- it's the craziest divorce ever.

Jacob: In retrospect,

the feud between them seems less a question of right and wrong

than the unfortunate untangling of two people

who took up way too much space

to ever be right for each other.

When the movie came out,

it was not the success the book was.

And one thing critics debated was which was worse:

The parent who cheats

or the parent who essentially tells her two children about it?

Carl: Look, there's no question.

I did not want that movie made.

I'm sure there's some self-interest in it

about the way I would be portrayed,

but I thought this would really interfere

with how you would regard your father.

And for a while, it did.

Well, that's really interesting, what you say.

There you go-- "And for a while, it did."

Jacob: So who do you think it was harder on, him or her?

Auletta: I think it was harder in the long run on him.

Any time you walk around thinking people

are talking about you,

whispering about you, making fun of you,

um, it's hurtful.

At one moment, he was this world-famous hero

and the next minute, he was this goat.

And it was-- it was a very painful period.

And it lasted for him, I think, longer than it did for Nora.

Nora: Moving On.

In February, 1980,

two months after the birth of my second child

and the simultaneous end of my marriage,

I fell in love.

I was looking for a place to live,

and one afternoon, I walked just ten steps

into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan

and my heart stood still.

Ten steps in and I said, "I'll take it."

I honestly believed

that at the lowest moment in my adult life,

I'd been rescued by a building.

Delia: I mean, the great thing about Nora,

she just refused to go down, ever, and then she comes back,

and she had no money, by the way.

She had no money, and she wrote Heartburn.

And so, I'm sure she just infuriated--

that's my speculation-- the entire community of journalists

who thought she was getting hers back.

And instead, she not only

does she write a bestseller,

but then it gets bought for the movies,

and the next thing you know, she's a screenwriter,

which is the move that so many journalists wanted to make,

and she made it.

Nora: When I had my children,

I thought, well, I can't go on

doing journalism 'cause I have a baby,

and I can't go and do these long reporting pieces

that I was doing in Esquire.

And I thought, well, I'm going to write screenplays now

because I need the money, and thank goodness I write screenplays.

Even if they aren't being made into movies,

it pays a lot better than journalism.

Then one of them got made by Mike Nichols,

and he invited me and Alice Arlen,

whom I wrote it with, to Texas

to watch him make Silkwood.

That was really interesting.

And that was when I think I truly became a screenwriter.

(static, alarm sounding)

Nichols: I knew big time

that this charming, brilliant writer

wants to be a movie director and will be,

'cause she was out and out studying it.

Mike Nichols, who, because he was originally

a theater director, was very welcoming to screenwriters,

always wanted them there, always wanted their input.

So I was suddenly watching something

that I knew nothing about,

and I was riveted.

How'd that plutonium get in my house?

Did you put it there? Did I what?

What are you, crazy?

Jacob: As my mom moved into writing screenplays,

her work became less autobiographical,

but she continued to find herself in the characters she wrote.

You know, the first time we met, I really didn't like you that much.

I didn't like you. Yeah, you did.

You were just so uptight then. You're much softer now.

You know, I hate that kind of remark.

It sounds like a compliment, but really it's an insult.

Nora: When Harry Met Sally was Rob's idea.

Rob said one day in a meeting,

"Let's do a movie about a man and a woman

who become friends

and don't have sex because it will ruin the relationship,

and then they have sex and it ruins the relationship.

That's what we started with.

So I interviewed Rob and his producing partner

and they told me the secrets of men.

So she interviewed us, took all these notes,

and then went back and crafted a screenplay.

Nora: From my script for When Harry Met Sally.

Harry: "Why don't you tell me the story of your life?"

Sally: "The story of my life?"

Harry: "We've got 18 hours to kill before we hit New York."

Sally...

The story of my life isn't even going to get us out of Chicago.

I mean, nothing's happened to me yet.

That's why I'm going to New York.

So something'll happen to you? Yes.

Like what?

Like I'm going to journalism school to become a reporter.

So you can write about things that happen to other people.

Nora: So I started with Rob as Harry.

And, you know, in that sort of mathematical way,

if-- if he is gloomy, she is cheerful,

and so that gave me Sally.

I happen to be a fairly cheerful person, so...

Sally is more or less me.

I am as big a nightmare

when ordering in a restaurant as she was.

I'd like the chef's salad, please,

with the oil and vinegar on the side

and the apple pie à la mode.

Apple... à la mode.

But I'd like the pie heated,

and I don't want the ice cream on the top, I want it on the side.

And I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it.

If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream,

but only if it's real. If it's out of a can, then nothing.

Not even the pie?

No, just the pie, but then not heated.

Uh-huh.

There was a really particular rhythm on the page--

very, very short sentences that people didn't--

we didn't-- there wasn't a lot of dialogue,

but it was rapid and rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat.

Okay, there's this guy.

What's he look like?

I don't know. He's just kinda faceless.

Faceless guy, okay. Then what?

He rips off my clothes.

Nora: There are parts of When Harry Met Sally

that feel as if they are essays,

just like the essays I used to write,

only they're-- they're stuck in this movie

in their own little dialogue ways.

That's it?

A faceless guy rips off your clothes

and that's the sex fantasy you've been having since you were 12?

Exactly the same?

Well, sometimes I vary it a little.

Which part? What I'm wearing.

The great scene about, you know, faking the orgasm.

Right. Yeah, was that scripted by you?

Well, no.

Um, you mean the best scene in this movie?

What that was, was I asked them

about their lives as single men.

And then they said to me, okay, we've told you

some secrets about men. Yeah.

Now tell us something we don't know about women.

And I said, "Women fake orgasms."

"No, that's not possible! That's not true. Women, really?"

It's just that all men are sure it never happened to them,

and most women, at one time or another,

have done it, so you do the math.

You don't think that I could tell the difference?

No. Get out of here.

So out of this conversation

came this scene.

Well, then we did it in a read-through

and Meg Ryan said...

"Well, why don't I just do it?"

And they said, "Would you do that?"

Ooh.

Oh.

Ooh.

Are you okay?

(moaning)

Meg, I think, had the idea of doing it

in an incongruous place like a deli,

and that gave birth to the scene.

Oh, God!

Oh, yes!

Yes, yes, yes!

Yes, yes!

Ahh! Oh, yes!

Yes, yes! Oh!

Yes, yes! (banging table)

Yes, yes, yes, yes!

Oh, oh, oh!

Oh, God.

Oh.

Meg Ryan: And then Billy came up with that--

that topper.

I'll have what she's having.

Your mother was one of the greatest observers

of men and women

and how men and women are with each other,

and her movies reflected that.

Woman: Do you find that people think

you're an expert on relationships?

I don't know that people think I'm an expert in relationships,

but I definitely am.

I am. You are?

So people can come up to you and--

They don't come up to me, you understand,

but if they were to, I would be glad

to counsel them at any given moment.

Total strangers could come up to me

and I would be glad to give them advice about their relationships.

You know, little things that come up in life,

whether it involves a career, a relationship or whatever,

and she would always have, you know, "Dear Abby."

She was always-- she always had the best answer

to your "Dear Abby" question.

You wanted a straight answer, you went to Nora.

You wanted to test something that you were unsure of,

you went to Nora.

And she was certain about her opinions.

Jacob: Yes.

Which a lot of people are not.

She had such strong opinions that they would just come out.

I mean, she really felt, I think, a certain responsibility

to set us all straight.

Jacob: Did you get the judgment with her?

Endless.

"You can't do this. You mustn't do that.

I would rethink this. You can't do that. You can't..." Yes.

She was controlling in a way, but not without her charm.

But she was in charge of certain things,

and she was in charge of your life when you were with her.

A mark. Man: B mark.

Joanne...

Auletta: She came to realize,

if she's going to have control,

which I think her life was in part about--

gaining control--

she had to be a director.

Nora: Mike Nichols always says this thing

that I love-- he says that

when you're a director, it's like making love

in that you always want to say,

"Is this how other people do it?"

(man laughing)

Trust me, Jessica...

Nora: But I knew that if I was going to direct something,

I needed a collaborator on the script.

So I then write it with my sister Delia.

The reason we both loved the book

and wanted to make a movie about it

was that it had so many emotional overlaps.

It was about a mother

who used the material of her life as material,

which is what our parents did.

How dare you? How dare you use things

that you know about me in public?

Delia: It's about everything we knew.

It was about sisterhood.

It was about working mothers.

It was about a single mother. It was about ambition,

which we totally got.

All artists use things from their lives, Robin,

and I am no exception.

Delia: But This Is My Life was not a hit.

So was she going to get another movie?

She then did a rewrite on the Sleepless script

and got hired as the director on it.

Woman on radio: If you've just tuned in,

we're talking to Sleepless in Seattle.

You called a radio station?

Christmas Eve, he phones in one of those radio call-in shows,

tells them... His dad needs a new wife.

I heard it. This kid calls up and says, "My dad needs a wife."

Get out here. Come on.

Now, I'm not going to go through this alone.

Delia: The thing about movies is,

you have to make the tough decision,

and often somebody got fired,

and I was very happy to be her sister,

(both laughing) so it was not going to be me.

Kid needs a mother.

Delia: 'Cause we did replace the actor on Sleepless,

and thank God, the young boy who came in

was just perfect and wonderful.

The kid that we spent all of this time auditioning

and getting ready and we loved and he was so great,

freezes when he sees Tom Hanks. He can't act.

Phew! Man! When she came and told me--

She didn't ask me, "What do you think if we replace so-and-so?"

She just said, "Listen, we're making a change.

It's not working out." And I said, "You're gonna fire the kid?"

She'd give you that look,

and we called that look the red dot.

Your mother would look-- if she got a double look,

it was like you had the-- you know, a laser from a gun

on our forehead and you were about to get whacked.

People got cut all the time.

They wouldn't read a new draft,

and then you were done.

If you talked about building the barn over here

that was taken out two drafts ago--

"Window or aisle?" (crew laughing)

That's all I can tell you, you know?

"Morning or afternoon flight?"

"Could I have a word with you?"

I don't know the exact number of assistants before me.

I feel like it's around 10, maybe a dozen.

She spoke to actors sometimes

in a way that some people perceived as hostile,

but I didn't. I knew her and I loved her,

and I was never afraid of her.

I always wanted to please her,

but that's very different than being afraid.

And the thing is, she counseled people--

she gave counsel to people, you know?

I mean, she really helped people.

You know, I mean, way beyond their career.

When you got to know her, you could almost ask her anything.

Her advice had, like, a deep practicality to it.

It was like a feeling, like confiding in a friend

and having them say, "I understand."

Man: Cut! Cut it!

Rita Wilson: I always felt like I never had a mentor,

but I had that in Nora.

Kind of from Sleepless in Seattle on,

she sort of was my mentor.

Jacob: My mom was kind and she was generous,

really generous.

She was also stern and unfailingly honest,

and the combination of those things made people seek her approval.

It is very powerful to be someone who is both loved and feared.

Jacob: Did she zing people?

Meg Ryan: Yeah, it was a little irresistible.

'Cause I feel like her allegiance to language

was sometimes more than her allegiance to someone's feelings.

It was just too good of a setup

sometimes for her, you know?

Man: 99-Jackson-1 marker.

Steven Spielberg: I always wanted her to like me.

I wanted her approval. Mm-hmm.

I wanted her respect. I wanted to make her laugh.

That was the big one.

Spielberg: I probably made Nora laugh a handful of times

in the 21 years I knew her,

but it was just like winning an Oscar.

It's now or never.

Nora: One of the things I always tell the actors

as we work on this movie

is that it isn't a movie about love,

it's a movie about love in the movies.

Both (mouthing): Winter must be cold

for those with no warm memories.

For many of us, a great deal of what we feel about love

has been shaped completely by movies.

Rose: Tell me about love, though.

I mean, is it unrealistic

to think of love like Annie does?

That somehow there is magic and you can have that

in your life and--

I think people go back and forth their whole lives.

They start out believing in this very pure, simple, stupid way

about destiny and how there's one person out there

and you're going to meet that person,

and then things happen,

and eventually, finally, after many mistakes

that you thought were destiny,

you find someone who was your destiny

and you say, "Oh, I see.

"I had to go through all the false destinies

to get to the real destiny."

Sam.

It's nice to meet you.

♪ One smile that cheers you ♪

♪ One face that lights when it nears you ♪

♪ One girl, you're ♪

♪ You're everything to... ♪

Gottlieb: I think there was a side of her

that was romantic,

and she believed in true love,

and she thought she had it.

I don't know, I don't remember,

we never talked about it, whether she thought

she had it with Dan Greenburg.

She certainly thought she had it with Carl.

And she knew she had it with Nick.

Talese: The man she married in the last 20-plus years,

Nick Pileggi, is a cousin of mine.

I really am very close to Nick,

and I never had a brother. Nick was my brother.

When he met Nora, she gave him a place

where he could feel secure.

Bob Balaban: Nick wasn't afraid for her to be the star.

She got to have a relationship,

she didn't have to spend the whole time questioning.

He wasn't going to wake up and be a drunk at some point

or cheat on her, or do any of the things

that people do to disappoint you.

Reiner: He wrote about guys

who were street-tough guys,

who were, you know, Mafia types.

She wrote about love and romance and all that.

And in real life, he was a very soft soul and she was tough.

Diane Sokolow: I don't think she ever realized

that she would be in that life,

going to Vegas and having dinner

with Shorty or Lefty or Louie.

So she was having a different kind of fun

that she never even assumed would come her way.

Delia: I always thought that

she was the don and Nick was the consigliore.

He tipped everyone in her path

so that her life would be better.

And I'm surprised he never tipped you or he never tipped me.

He did. Oh, he did tip you?

The first date. He had a-- yeah, he'd gotten us a soap boat,

and it was this boat made out of soap.

And so he was fine.

Meg Ryan: He's such a guy,

and she was such a lady around him.

I remember him saying to me, "God, she's got the greatest gams.

Wow, the gams on this broad."

I'm like, wow.

You know, she felt pretty and loved.

Since Nick, almost everything changed.

Softer, less guarded,

uh, happy.

You know, that was a great love,

and you felt it.

Jacob: As my mom got happier,

things between her and my father improved.

There was at least a sense of détente between them.

Carl: Despite all the difficulties through the divorce,

we were really great

about what was going on with the two of you.

And the results of that, I think we both

thought were pretty great.

(all chattering)

Woman: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, America's now king and queen

of romantic comedies, sort of, with your help.

What is it about them-- if you could pinpoint it,

what is it that-- Two great brains

and the fact that they look like they're from the same food group.

JJ Sacha: When the movie came out

and it opened well,

she said to me, "Remember this moment

because it's a hit and they don't come along very often."

Jacob: But even the big hits got mixed reviews.

Lourd: I think there was a disconnect in a way

for many critics in that they knew her

from her columns and from her books.

And when these romantic movies showed up

that were boy-meets-girl,

boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl,

and it's all beautiful and big on the Empire State Building,

people expected something bad to happen,

and it didn't,

and they didn't know what to do with her, in a way.

How dare she not continue this persona?

Jacob: In fact, there were attempts...

You should stay with Steve

and then let the snowman come in at the end.

...ones with grittier material,

the kind that recalled her early essays.

There was this period of two, three, four movies,

like kind of one after the other,

that just didn't work for one reason or the other.

Mixed Nuts, the Nora Ephron bomb.

"Hey, how bad could it be?" Very bad.

It's bad. It's bad. Ooh, is it bad.

I mean, I don't know-- It's really, really bad.

You know, in the ads, it's going to say,

"From the director of Sleepless in Seattle,"

so here's our warning. Roger Ebert: This movie isn't sleepless,

it's not in Seattle and it's not any good.

There you go. Ahh!

Jacob: Her career was in some trouble.

Yeah, she was in movie jail, I think.

Nora: Well, everybody has flops.

No one likes to talk about them.

27! The truth is,

I don't think you really learn anything from failure.

All I think you learn from failure-- honest to God--

is that it's entirely possible you could have another one.

Jacob: Hanging Up also didn't work,

and that was her attempt

to take her family's more complicated story

and put it onscreen.

Sacha: It's fictionalized,

but it's certainly the story of the sisters,

and Nora's life is part of that story.

Hanging Up was my novel,

and it's based on my relationship with Dad.

And it stars a middle child--

The Duke said, "Your mother and dad make a hell of a writing team."

Remember, Evie? I didn't want her changing my material.

So it just started to get more difficult at that point.

They got thorny for a moment or two,

and I believe it was because the material was so close to home

in every way, and so close to the bone in every way.

My father had died and Nora was shooting,

I think, Sleepless,

and the problems of his death

really were Amy's and mine.

Nora wasn't there.

I mean, I had resentment for that.

So when we started to work on Hanging Up,

I was-- I was upset about that,

and she was trying to make it hers.

Something wrong? I can't believe what you did.

What did I do? And you always do it.

What do I always do? You take my life and you use it.

I'm the one who's been here and not you.

Well, wait a minute! When did I take your life--

They were sisters. It was about being sisters,

and it was about one sister overshadowing the other sister,

and that was hard.

I'm sure she thinks I was mean about it.

I thought she was mean about it.

And, um, then, you know, we made up.

But it was horrible, actually,

for each of us. I mean, just...

I mean, we've been together our whole lives, you know,

and there we were not speaking over a piece of material.

In retrospect, how stupid is that?

Jacob: Nevertheless,

Delia left it out of Hanging Up

that my mom hadn't gone to my grandfather's funeral.

Delia was protecting her,

which seems to me to be an essential difference

between the two sisters.

Had the positions been reversed,

I think Mom probably would have used it.

Do you remember when she told you?

That she was sick? Yeah.

Yes, of course I do. I mean--

I had been in Paris for the holidays,

and I got home and I remember picking up the phone

and there was a message from Nora.

And it was, "Are you home yet? Call me."

And I knew immediately something was wrong,

and we went out that night to see her and Nick,

and we were all just terrified.

And at that point, you know, they said,

you know-- they had said six months.

When did you first find out?

Jacob: I remember that she called me,

and I went over to dinner.

Um, and she said, "I have this thing."

She said that she had a variation on it.

She didn't want to tell me the name.

And she said, "You'll Google it and then it won't be good,

and you'll think that I'm about to die and I'm not."

She was trying not to lie to you,

but she was trying not to tell you the truth.

Yes, that's right. She didn't want to worry you.

Jacob: Why do you think she didn't want people to know?

Well, probably there were some professional reasons,

because by now, she was a famous filmmaker,

but I think also she didn't want people

uh, openly concerned about her or asking her.

The idea of physical frailty was an anathema,

and I don't think she wanted to have anyone witness that.

Oh, it was epic!

You ask why she did it?

She did it because she was a control freak.

Lourd: We had a very specific phone call.

She said, "I'm dealing with some things to do with my blood

"and with an illness.

"And you're not allowed to ask me about it

or reference it, and we didn't have this conversation."

And she was very pointed,

in the way that she could be.

She didn't talk about it, but every once in a while,

she would say something about, "didn't necessarily have much time left.

"Couldn't necessarily complete this project,

and another project." All of a sudden,

her-- you could feel that her life was being compressed.

But she-- she was determined to go on.

I'm Julia Child.

Bon appétit!

(thinking) "The Julie/Julia Project."

365 days,

524 recipes...

Ooh, c'est tres chaud!

Nora: I love food.

As you know, I'm obsessed with food.

I think about it constantly.

And I had become a grown-up in New York

cooking from Julia's cookbook,

so I just loved working on it.

Don Lee: From the beginning of Julie & Julia,

I was worried about her 'cause she's always so energetic.

I said to Delia, "I know something's up,

"but I'm not going to ask any more

because if Nora wanted me to know, she'd tell me."

Okay? All right. And...

But she kicked in, like, you know, the end of the second week,

beginning of the third, and I said, "Oh, we're good."

(all cheering)

Pièce de résistance!

The movie involved all sorts of passions of Nora's--

New York, Paris,

food...

Jacob: Did you sense how personal it was to her?

Well, I mean, you couldn't miss the parallels

between Nick and her

and Stanley's and my character.

This is really about love.

It's really about marriage.

It's really about a kind of marriage

that actually exists.

Um, thank God it does,

or people would have accused me of making this up.

But there are guys who really do take enormous pleasure

in their wives' growth.

It's the most deeply emotional work that she did, I think.

There aren't very many movies

that are about a romantic marriage.

Amy Pascal: The whole movie was about her and Nick.

When he says, description of what butter is like...

Julia, you are the butter to my bread

and the breath to my life.

I love you, darling girl.

To me, that was just Nora talking about Nick.

Happy Valentine's Dad. Woman: Happy Valentine's Day.

And that perfect place two people can be with each other.

Ahhh! Ahhh!

Mark: I also think it was the story of the two sisters,

of Delia and Nora.

The only scene we ever reshot

in the entire movie was this tiny, tiny scene

you may recall in front of the mirror

where the two of them are getting ready

for the party.

And they each look at each other in the mirror,

look at both in the mirror,

and at one point, Meryl says...

Pretty good.

She wanted to get it perfect.

But not great.

Did you have any idea that she was sick

during the making of it?

No. No.

As a matter of fact, no, absolutely not.

Did you have any sense working on Julie & Julia

anything was wrong with her health?

No.

She never sat down.

She had so much energy.

And happy.

Truly happy when we were shooting that.

Rita Wilson: Considering the Alternative. 2006.

"When I turned 60, I had a big birthday party in Las Vegas,

"which happens to be one of my top-five places.

"It seemed to me that the only way to deal with a birthday of this sort

"was to do everything possible to push it from my mind.

"Nothing else about me is better than it was

"at 50 or 40 or 30,

"but I definitely have the best haircut I've ever had.

"I like my new apartment.

"And as the expression goes, 'Consider the alternative.'

"I am dancing around the 'D' word,

"but I don't mean to by coy.

"When you cross into your 60s, your odds of dying,

"or of merely getting horribly sick

"on the way to dying, spike.

"Death is a sniper.

"It strikes people you love,

"people you like, people you know.

"It's everywhere. You could be next,

"but then you turn out not to be,

but then again, you could be."

The essays in the last two books are...

first of all, they're informed by a big secret.

Especially the last book. They're informed by the knowledge,

"Mortality is upon me."

Jacob: Those two books,

suddenly she was the fountain of wisdom on aging.

I mean-- She got very famous in the end.

Really famous.

Jacob: My mom did a huge amount of work

the last six years she was alive.

There were over 100 blog posts.

There were pieces in The New Yorker and Vogue.

There were two movies, a play on Broadway,

a play Off-Broadway.

There were the two essay collections.

She just kept going.

The book is called, I Remember Nothing,

which is not true. She remembers everything.

I was there for the Beatles. I'm like Zelig.

I was there when the Beatles came to America.

I was writing about them, and I couldn't hear anything,

and that's what I remember.

Nora: Reading books that said how fabulous you were

in your 60s,

how you could have the greatest sex of your life.

I-- I just--

I thought, are these people on crack?

I feel so nostalgic about the days

when all I felt bad about was my neck.

Because your neck is like the canary in the mine.

The neck is the thing that is saying,

"Don't kid yourself. You can do--

you can put spackle on your face," basically.

But this is the thing that is saying,

"Uh-oh, uh-oh."

You know, and if our elbows faced forward,

we would all shoot ourselves. You know.

Announcer: The play is called Lucky Guy.

Tom Hanks is playing Mike McAlary,

a real-life reporter and columnist

who bounced around the rough-and-tumble world

of New York's tabloid newspapers

from the 1980s through his death in 1998.

Jacob: Lucky Guy was the last thing she wrote.

It was not autobiographical,

though the parallels to her own life

would later become apparent to everyone.

Tom Hanks: I remember asking her specifically,

"What's so fascinating about Mike McAlary?

Did he write great columns?"

And she said, "Some, but not particularly."

I said, well, you know,

"Was he a crackerjack writer that you absolutely had to read?"

And she said, "No, not really."

And George Wolfe at one point said,

"Well, Nora, why-- why are you telling this story?"

The whole thought process was about,

"What is this damn play about?

"Why are you-- why are you writing this play?

Why are you-- why, why, why?"

Hanks: Why are you telling this story about this guy

who wasn't quite so good, but rose up to the top

and fancied himself the biggest

and for a while was the highest-paid columnist

in New York City? He didn't really deserve

all this attention or this acclaim.

And to George, she said, "Well..."

Wolfe: She said, "This play is about somebody

"who has more luck

than talent."

She said, "And I know something about that."

When George and I talked about it,

I was, you know, somewhat aghast.

And George said, "I know!" It's the last sort of thing

that you would think you'd get from Nora.

It's said of Orwell

that one of the reasons why so many love him

and live by him is that he was not a genius.

I don't think Nora Ephron was a genius,

and that made her available to us.

Wolfe: There's something really fascinating

about Lucky Guy.

McAlary, he was on chemo when he's doing the story,

and she's on chemo while she's working on the play.

There was this incredible sense of time table

and this sense of urgency and this sense of grace.

To me, at the end of the day,

I think that what Lucky Guy is about

is-- is about a human being

who replaces ambition for grace.

Geffen: You know, many of us noticed

the difference in Nora,

how she had mellowed.

Never put two and two together

and came up with that there was a reason.

She was more, uh... more forgiving.

More tolerant.

And I think she acquired that

with the bad news.

She was easier and easier and easier

about, um, her own flaws, about mine,

about other people's. She laughed easier about things.

She just got so porous.

The last couple years, she'd been much more tender with me,

um, and happier, somehow.

Nora would reach out to people near the end

and sort of be emotionally--

you know, and I remember getting an email

about six months, eight months before she died,

and she said, "Just sitting here in LA today

thinking I miss you and I love you."

Lee: She invited me to dinner.

She was drinking and she liked the wine we picked.

And we had a nice dinner at Locanda.

Though she thought the garlic chicken wasn't up to par that night.

But I think now, I think in hindsight,

she invited me to dinner to say goodbye.

Nichols: It was really her

at her most characteristic self,

except there were odd silences,

and I was too stupid to realize

that it was a goodbye lunch.

Brenner: We had a long four-hour lunch,

and at the end of the lunch, she said,

"I don't feel like going home yet."

She said, "Can we go have cheesecake?"

Now, your mother never ate dessert,

or she would eat two bites. This was very unusual.

I don't even want to start.

I'm going to get emotional even thinking about this.

So we ordered this huge piece of cheesecake,

which we split, and then she said,

"Would you take me home in a taxi?"

She lived three blocks away and it had stopped raining.

That's when I-- You know, it was like, something...

And so I said, "Of course."

So I dropped her, like, three blocks,

and then she hugged me and then three days later,

two days later, she went into the hospital.

Jacob: "I'm having a little health crisis."

That's how she put it when she called me

to tell me her MDS had turned into leukemia.

Cohen: We were talking about what to tell people,

and I said, "Tell 'em you have leukemia.

"This is not, you know, a venereal disease.

"There's nothing to be ashamed of.

You have leukemia and you're going to beat it."

She said, "Well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know."

And the next day, there was a line,

and I don't know where it came from,

which was, "Not telling anybody."

I was horrified

'cause I saw what was happening,

and that nobody was going to acknowledge it

or explain it.

Jacob: The chemotherapy didn't work.

The days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into pneumonia.

Eventually, she began shutting down

and I started calling her friends.

Well, the people that knew her best were upset.

Well, at first, it was weird, right?

'Cause you think, well,

wait, I'm close-- I'm really close to her.

Like, I know her, like, really.

There was definite anger

about this plan she'd executed.

I felt I was close enough to her

to go to a hospital.

What the hell is Richard Cohen doing there, is what I thought.

That doesn't sound very generous, does it?

It was very hard.

Because-- because it was an ambush.

It was almost like she was in a car accident, you know?

I remember you called me and you said, "Oh, I have bad news about mom."

And I'm thinking, well, what the hell could it be? You know?

Like, it didn't enter my mind

that she could be dying, you know?

I think people who resented the fact

that she didn't tell them are a little self-absorbed.

It was her business how she chose to die, not their business.

But how interesting it was, Jacob,

that at the end of her life, where everything,

your mother's mantra, your grandmother's mantra--

"Nora, this is all material. Nora, this is material"--

at the most powerful moment of her life,

when she was facing her death,

it was not material, it was not a story.

Jacob: I think at the end of my mom's life,

she believed that everything is not copy,

that the things you want to keep are not copy,

that the people you love are not copy.

That what is copy is the stuff you've lost,

the stuff you're willing to give away,

the things that have been taken from you.

She saw "everything is copy"

as a means of controlling the story.

Once she became ill, the way to control the story

was to make it not exist.

And ultimately, she was super private,

and all the stories and short stories

and everything else,

she really kept her private self really private.

She's the one who said,

"There is no privacy.

Forget privacy. It's gone."

And this is the most fascinating thing

in the whole world to me,

because she achieved a private act

in a world where

the most superficial parts of the most intimate acts

are everywhere, and sold.

They're sold.

Delia: I used to do the days,

and then you and Max and Nick

would do nights.

I would get home around 5:00 or 6:00,

and I remember walking into the house and just saying to Jerry,

"I have to go back."

That at that point, I just couldn't be away.

And Jerry came back with me,

and we ended up playing hearts.

And she taught me how to play hearts.

And that was, I think, two days before she died, or three.

Two days before we died--

"We died." Do you believe that?

Oh my God.

Cohen: I talked to her and she talked to me

with the understanding that she was dying.

She was very brave.

I would talk to her about how much she was loved,

and she could feel it.

Nora Ephron was one of the best

and most famous American writers of our time.

She died last night of leukemia at the age of 71.

Kate Dahlgren: Few even knew that Ephron was sick,

causing some confusion

when word of her illness broke

and even some premature reports of her death,

something those close to Ephron say she would have found funny.

(reporter speaking Russian)

(reporters speaking different languages)

It's hard for me because I so much wanted her to like me.

Mmm. And I so much wanted her to think

that-- that I was as interesting as she was.

Lee: I was riding up in the elevator,

after your mother died with Mike Nichols,

and he just looked at me and we said,

you know, "Who..."

(sniffling)

Sorry.

"Who's going to tell us what to do?"

Nora: It's very important to eat your last meal

before it actually comes up.

When you are actually

going to have your last meal,

you either will be too sick to have it,

or you aren't going to know it's your last meal

and you could squander it on something like a tuna melt.

The thing I'm going to miss...

Yes? Yes? ...after I'm dead

is bacon.

Nora: What I Will Miss.

My kids.

Nick.

Spring.

Fall.

Butter.

A walk in the park.

Dinner with friends.

Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives.

Paris.

Next year in Istanbul.

Pride and Prejudice.

The Christmas tree.

Thanksgiving dinner.

One for the table.

The dogwood.

Taking a bath.

Coming over the bridge to Manhattan.

Pie.

♪ Love is the sweetest thing ♪

♪ What else on earth could ever bring ♪

♪ Such happiness to everything ♪

♪ As love's old story? ♪

♪ Love is the strangest thing ♪

♪ No song or birds upon the wing ♪

♪ Shall in our hearts more sweetly sing ♪

♪ Than love's old story ♪

♪ Whatever hearts may desire ♪

♪ Whatever life may send ♪

♪ This is the tale that never will tire ♪

♪ This is the song without end ♪

♪ Love is the strongest thing ♪

♪ The oldest ♪

♪ Yet the latest thing ♪

♪ I only hope that fate may bring ♪

♪ Love's story to you ♪

♪ Love is the sweetest thing ♪