Read Online I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nora Ephron
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chicken soup to ward off the cold. Nevertheless, I got the cold. This happens all the time: you think you’re getting a cold; you have chicken soup; you get the cold anyway. So is it possible that chicken soup gives you a cold?
Pentimento
I met Lillian Hellman just before her memoir
Pentimento
was published in 1973. I was working as an editor at
Esquire
and we were publishing two sections from the book, one of them called “Turtle.” It was about Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. I’d never seen any of Lillian Hellman’s plays, and I’d struggled with Hammett’s mysteries, but I read “Turtle” in galleys before we printed it, and I thought it was the most romantic thing ever written. It’s a story about a vicious snapping turtle that Hellman and Hammett kill. They slice its head off and leave it in the kitchen to be made intosoup. It somehow resurrects itself, crawls out the door, and dies in the woods, prompting a long, elliptical, cutthroat debate between Hammett and Hellman about whether the turtle is some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.
I have no excuse for my infatuation with this story. I was not stupid, and I was not particularly young, both of which might be exculpatory. Like many people who read
Pentimento
, it never crossed my mind that the stories in it were fiction, and the dialogue an inadvertent parody of Hammett’s tough-guy style. I thought it was divine. I immediately called
The New York Times Book Review
and asked if I could interview Hellman on the occasion of
Pentimento
’s publication. They said yes.
Hellman was already on her way to her remarkable third act. She’d published
An Unfinished Woman
, a memoir, which had been a best seller and National Book Award winner, and now with
Pentimento
she was on the verge of an even bigger best seller. She turned up on talk shows and charmed the hosts as she puffed on her cigarettes and blew smoke. With her two successful books, she’d eradicated the memory of her last few plays, which had been failures. Eventually the most famous story from
Pentimento
, “Julia,” was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, the brave anti-Nazi spy whom Hellman claimed she’d smuggled $50,000 to in Germany in 1939, in a fur hat. The end of Hellman’s life was a train wreck, butthat came later. I wrote a play about it, but that came even later.
Lillian was sixty-eight when I met her, and by any standard, even of the times, she looked at least ten years older. She had never been a beauty, but once she’d been young; now she was wrinkled and close to blind. She had a whiskey voice. She used a cigarette holder and one of those ashtrays that look like beanbags, with a little metal contraption in the middle for snuffing out the ash. Because she could barely see, the question of whether the perilously ever-lengthening ash would ever make it to the ashtray without landing in her lap and setting her on fire provided added suspense to every minute spent with her.
But in some strange way that you will have to take my word for, she was enormously attractive—vibrant, flirtatious, and intimate.
I went to see her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which sat on a rocky beach near Chilmark. The interview is an embarrassment. I did not ask a tough question, and, by the way, I didn’t have one. I was besotted. She was the woman who had said to the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s patterns.” She had loved the toughest guy there was, and although he had been drunk for almost their entire time together, he loved her back. Now it turned out she had practically stopped Hitler.
In the afternoon after our first interview, I went fora walk down to Lillian’s beach. I’d been there no more than a few minutes when a man turned up. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was older, gray-haired, fleshy. He asked if I was staying with Lillian.
Pentimento
I met Lillian Hellman just before her memoir
Pentimento
was published in 1973. I was working as an editor at
Esquire
and we were publishing two sections from the book, one of them called “Turtle.” It was about Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. I’d never seen any of Lillian Hellman’s plays, and I’d struggled with Hammett’s mysteries, but I read “Turtle” in galleys before we printed it, and I thought it was the most romantic thing ever written. It’s a story about a vicious snapping turtle that Hellman and Hammett kill. They slice its head off and leave it in the kitchen to be made intosoup. It somehow resurrects itself, crawls out the door, and dies in the woods, prompting a long, elliptical, cutthroat debate between Hammett and Hellman about whether the turtle is some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.
I have no excuse for my infatuation with this story. I was not stupid, and I was not particularly young, both of which might be exculpatory. Like many people who read
Pentimento
, it never crossed my mind that the stories in it were fiction, and the dialogue an inadvertent parody of Hammett’s tough-guy style. I thought it was divine. I immediately called
The New York Times Book Review
and asked if I could interview Hellman on the occasion of
Pentimento
’s publication. They said yes.
Hellman was already on her way to her remarkable third act. She’d published
An Unfinished Woman
, a memoir, which had been a best seller and National Book Award winner, and now with
Pentimento
she was on the verge of an even bigger best seller. She turned up on talk shows and charmed the hosts as she puffed on her cigarettes and blew smoke. With her two successful books, she’d eradicated the memory of her last few plays, which had been failures. Eventually the most famous story from
Pentimento
, “Julia,” was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, the brave anti-Nazi spy whom Hellman claimed she’d smuggled $50,000 to in Germany in 1939, in a fur hat. The end of Hellman’s life was a train wreck, butthat came later. I wrote a play about it, but that came even later.
Lillian was sixty-eight when I met her, and by any standard, even of the times, she looked at least ten years older. She had never been a beauty, but once she’d been young; now she was wrinkled and close to blind. She had a whiskey voice. She used a cigarette holder and one of those ashtrays that look like beanbags, with a little metal contraption in the middle for snuffing out the ash. Because she could barely see, the question of whether the perilously ever-lengthening ash would ever make it to the ashtray without landing in her lap and setting her on fire provided added suspense to every minute spent with her.
But in some strange way that you will have to take my word for, she was enormously attractive—vibrant, flirtatious, and intimate.
I went to see her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which sat on a rocky beach near Chilmark. The interview is an embarrassment. I did not ask a tough question, and, by the way, I didn’t have one. I was besotted. She was the woman who had said to the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s patterns.” She had loved the toughest guy there was, and although he had been drunk for almost their entire time together, he loved her back. Now it turned out she had practically stopped Hitler.
In the afternoon after our first interview, I went fora walk down to Lillian’s beach. I’d been there no more than a few minutes when a man turned up. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was older, gray-haired, fleshy. He asked if I was staying with Lillian.
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