A Most Memorable Woman

Nora Ephron and I met cute. On the first day Lynda Bird Johnson came to work for me at McCalls in 1966, I found Ephron, a reporter for the New York Post, wandering the corridors and threw her out of the building.

When she started free-lancing for magazines, I sent her to interview Henry Kissinger who, between war crimes, was dating starlets and bimbos in his "Power is an aphrodisiac" days. Her piece eviscerated him.

That's why it's sad now to see Nora Ephron's new book at age 69 being reviewed as leftovers from a great career as a satirist, screenwriter and movie director. Even the title, "I Remember Nothing," is elegiac.

Throughout her working life, Ephron remembered everything, a legacy from a mother who cautioned her to use whatever happened to her, however bad, in her writing: "It's all copy."

And so she did. The daughter of a screenwriting team, Nora went from a lead essay on her breasts at puberty in a first collection to mining her marriages for "copy."

Husband No. 1, a genial writer, was immortalized as so paranoid he erased entries in his appointment book at the end of each of day. But that was only a prelude to her second marriage to Carl Bernstein of "Woodward and..."

She wrote a novel about that splitup, describing him as someone "who would have sex with a venetian blind." Harper's managed to get hold of and publish their divorce agreement, much of it devoted to how Bernstein would be portrayed in the movie version. As a result, he morphed from Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men" to Jack Nicholson in "Heartburn."

From there, Ephron went on to her true calling, writing and later directing romantic comedies such as "When Harry Met Sally," "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," too easily dismissed as "chick flicks" but just as artful as the Hollywood classics of the 1930s.

Now that I have a teenage granddaughter who is showing an Ephronish flair, I'm going to give her a copy of Nora's "Crazy Salad." As a budding writer, she couldn't have a better role model.

Mastering the Art of Marriage

Nora Ephron's new movie recalls the morning Julia Child burned my breakfast toast.

In the 1970s, her husband Paul and I were in their Cambridge kitchen talking heatedly about politics while Julia sort of tended the broiler but was more interested in leaning over to hear what we were saying. When smoke started pouring from the oven, she pulled out a tray and dumped the charred contents into the sink.

"Ah, well," she said smiling and slicing more bread, just like the French Chef dropping a chicken on TV, brushing it off and telling viewers: "Don't forget, if you're alone in the kitchen, no one will know."

Now, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are reenacting their lifelong love story in "Julie and Julia," the kind of marriage new generations know from old black-and-white movies like "The Thin Man" mysteries, with a couple totally devoted to each other in a life of good food, good drink and good times with friends

In a decade as Julia's editor when she wrote for McCalls, I knew the childless Childs, although they didn't look like movie stars (she towered over him), as the real thing. They didn't solve murders as a sideline, like Myrna Loy and Wllliam Powell, but they had had an adventurous life, meeting during World War II while working for the precursor of the CIA, the OSS, he as a cartographer and she helping cook up a shark repellent for underwater explosives to keep them away from bombs meant to blow up German U-boats.

It's part of the Julia Child legend that she learned to cook to please him after they married when Paul was working in Paris for the State Department. She spent the rest of her life cooking and pleasing him.

Even our professional parting was involved with the closeness of their marriage. When Paul suffered the first of a series of strokes that would result in enormous medical bills until his death more than a dozen years later, Julia stopped writing columns for me after nine years to lend her name to a Sunday supplement offering a king's ransom for it.

When we met again in her last years, she was still the tireless, life-affirming Julia Child, but part of her heart was gone.

Memo to Meryl Streep, Re: Julia Child

The news from Hollywood is that Meryl Streep will be playing Julia Child in a new movie to be written and directed by Nora Ephron, which seems fair enough since Streep played Ephron in "Heartburn," an autobiographical account of a food writer's disastrous marriage.

I can horn in on this inbred arrangement with advice to Streep and Ephron, who wrote for me when we were both magazine people, about my decade of working with the woman who lifted American cooking above burgers and fries: Play her big but modest.

One morning in the 1970s, Julia burned my breakfast toast. Her husband Paul and I were in their Cambridge kitchen talking politics while she tended the broiler, leaning over to hear what we are saying. When smoke started pouring from the oven, she pulled out a tray and dumped the charred contents into a sink. "Ah, well," she said smiling, just like the French Chef dropping a chicken on TV, brushing it off and grinning at her viewers: "Don't forget, if you're alone in the kitchen, no one will know."

Eating out with Julia was like being in Restaurant Heaven--no scowling maitre d's, no long waits to be seated, no sloppy service or mediocre food at high prices. In Boston, a restaurateur came to the table, imploring her to taste his latest creations. As a stream of plates went by, he studied her face as she took a bite from each. At the end of the meal, the check for what we actually ordered was less than if we had gone to Burger King.

At one of New York's snootier French restaurants, it was like turning up with God as your dinner companion. She told the hovering captain "the remoulade was quite good," and a parade of beaming people came out of the kitchen, from the head chef to the apprentice who chopped the celeriac, to hear her repeat the compliment.

Julia Child was the antithesis of the magazine editor diva Streep played in "The Devil Wears Prada," but I'm sure America's most honored actress and Ephron will do her justice.

Cheney's Don't Ask, Don't Tell

In one of her books, Nora Ephron wrote about a man so paranoid that, at the end of each day, he would erase the entries in his appointment diary. Such furtiveness did not shock Ephron who, while married to Carl Bernstein, never learned from him the Secret of the Century, the identity of “Deep Throat.”

But the author of “When Harry Met Sally” had never met Dick Cheney, who in this century has been setting new records for secrecy.

Soon after taking office, he refused to reveal the names of those who advised him on energy policy while oil company executives denied any part in the process. It took four years to unearth a White House document that showed they were lying about what Cheney was hiding.

Recently the New York Times reported that “Mr. Cheney's office ordered the Secret Service last September to destroy all records of visitors to the official vice presidential mansion--right after the Washington Post sued for access to the logs. That move was made in secret, naturally.”

In the Christian Science Monitor, Daniel Schorr reports, “The Secret Service recently ended the practice of keeping logs of visitors to the president and the vice president.”

In what remains of Bush’s and Cheney’s terms, no bothersome names like Jack Abrahamoff will turn up in the records. The New York Times recently noted “that Mr. Cheney is in step with the times. He has privatized the job of vice president of the United States.”

Congressional Democrats might go further after their continuing struggles to find “missing” e-mails and compel testimony from reluctant officials to claim that Bush, Cheney and Rove have privatized the entire Executive Branch.

In January 2009, will they move out of office under the cover of darkness?