Exclusive Interview With Nora Ephron

Nora ephron is 69, known for such books as "Heartburn" and "Crazy Salad," and for the movies "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Julie & Julia." She is a parent and grandparent settled in a long-term marriage with her third husband, author Nicholas Pileggi. As middle age became a certain age, the laughs have turned darker and the joke has increasingly been on her. Same for Cary Grant, Dorothy Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt. Nora ephron marched on Washington in 1967 to protest the Vietnam War and remembers only the sex she had in her hotel room. 




As a reporter for the New York Post, she interviewed the much-censored Lenny Bruce several times.

One old friend, author-humorist Calvin Trillin, spoke of Ephron as a great wit and a colorful "Auntie Mame" figure to his daughters. "I don't exactly remember when I met her," adds author-journalist Pete Hamill, whose friendship with Ephron dates to when both worked at the Post. "It's not that I don't need to remember things, I just don't remember them," she says.

"I do little things with the mnemonics and then I can't remember the mnemonics. The other day I couldn't remember the name of the extremely nice person who blows out my hair when I'm in LA. Born in New York in 1941, Ephron, the daughter of screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron, spent much of her childhood in Beverly Hills, Calif. As she writes in her new book, regular visitors included "Casablanca" co-writer Julius J. Epstein, "Sunset Boulevard" collaborator Charles Brackett, and the team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who worked on "The Thin Man" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

Ephron was asked to try out as a reporter. The book was so close to her life that Bernstein threatened to sue. The memory of the book's birth is easily summoned.

In "The O Word," an essay from her new book, she anticipates growing too old to make jokes about her age. Ephron writes of summers in the Hamptons on Long Island when her children were little, of fireworks on the Fourth of July and picnics on the beach.


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