Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (15 page)

Sibling stuff got in the way on
Hanging Up
.
Hanging Up
was my novel. I remember Nora phoning—she read it on her way to Los Angeles and called as soon as the plane landed to say she loved it and we should do it as a movie. This meant we would adapt the book together and she would direct, and we would do it at Sony with Larry Mark (whom we both loved) producing. I was thrilled. Another
studio was interested, which meant a different creative team, but for me there was no contest.
Hanging Up
, based on my relationship with my dad, was the story of three sisters coming to terms with the death of a difficult father. The heroine was, like me, a middle child. The minute we began, we were crankier than usual. We had never adapted anything that belonged to one of us originally.

Hanging Up
, I discovered, was too personal to me for a writing collaboration. Our father had died when Nora was shooting a movie (
Sleepless
). Nora was away, Hallie in Boston. The responsibility and burden had been primarily Amy’s and mine. That history played out when we began writing. I was edgy, harboring resentment, and she was territorial as always, but also she needed this to be her story—it was her father, too. Whose dad was it, whose story, whose way? At some point after completing the first draft, we disagreed about the script so much that we stopped speaking for at least a month—or at most we spoke when necessary. This was the only time in our lives that such a thing happened. We were both miserable.

We ended up deciding, for the sake of our sisterhood, that we needed another director. Diane Keaton came on.

Today, missing Nora as much as I do, I find it sad that
we couldn’t negotiate our way through this so she could direct, and yet I still find it inevitable that we ended up in a struggle.

All longtime collaborations eventually or occasionally get thorny. That’s my guess. Given ego, talent, investment, life—at some point you and your writing companion are not going to be on the same page.

Because Nora began shooting
You’ve Got Mail
, I wrote the final draft of
Hanging Up
. Diane Keaton gave great script notes, which helped in doing a draft that everyone loved and having Meg Ryan commit (a dream come true), but the movie itself, the final result, doesn’t feel as if it belongs to me or Nora. I didn’t recognize the tone. It was much broader than our script. Tone is such a powerful element. And visually the world of the movie wasn’t what I imagined, either. To complicate things, the shoot was compromised—Walter Matthau got sick and couldn’t complete the movie as written. It had to be edited to accommodate the fact that he was missing. Keaton didn’t enjoy collaboration the way Nora and I did. Like many directors, once she was in preproduction—from then on through shooting and the editing process—she didn’t consult the writer.

Because Keaton was the director, the movie became
hers. It made me very happy that I had written
Hanging Up
as a novel. It also exists my way.

Flash forward.

Love, Loss, and What I Wore
, Nora’s and my last baby, was based on the small, powerful, illustrated memoir by Ilene Beckerman. It was the story of her life told through the clothes she wore, and the awesome thing about the book was that even though it was completely specific (about her life and her clothes), reading it opened a floodgate of memories about what-you-wore-when.

Nora found the book and fell in love with it. And she knew it was a play, a
Vagina Monologues
sort of thing. And I am eternally grateful, because it was pure joy. Eventually.

We always called it
The Vagina Monologues
without the vaginas, but then we got a message from
The Vagina Monologues
people that we should stop, although, hello, free speech, we kept on. And could not fathom why they didn’t consider it a compliment.

We optioned the book in 1996, and the play opened Off-Broadway in 2009. Fourteen years later. The world’s longest birth.

The play was based on this simple idea: If you ask women about their clothes, they tell you about their lives.
To make this history short, because it wasn’t, we knew that Ilene Beckerman (Gingy, as she is called) would be only one story in the play. The rest would be ours and our friends’. We sent out e-mails to all our girlfriends—tell us about your clothes. And they did. We shaped their stories, adapted, or, in some cases, did very little. We separately interviewed to find other dramas we needed and added our own. Then we had a weeklong workshop. That’s when you develop the play with actors—gathering in a rehearsal space (in this case a room like a dance studio) to explore the material and characters, rewrite, and on the last day invite friends and possibly backers to attend a read-through. A read-through should tell you if the play works—if it’s funny, moving, cohesive, dramatic. Our play was only occasionally those things, and our friends were not impressed.

Nora and I continued to work on it sporadically and had another workshop and reading—I’m not certain of the time, but a year later at least. Again a disappointment. Especially the character of Gingy. We couldn’t nail her. She was charming and inviting in the book (and in person as a matter of fact), but not in our play, not onstage.

We gave up and let the option lapse.

Several years later, Nora phoned and said she was doing another workshop, directed by Shira Piven, in Los
Angeles, please come. I did. The workshop, a week in a small theater on Pico Boulevard, concluded with a single performance. Everyone we knew in Hollywood, or so it seemed, was crammed into that little theater for that performance. The play was terrible. Worse than it had ever been. We walked out of the theater and never said a single word to each other about it.

However, the biggest laugh in the play went in during that workshop. Contributed by an actor, the late Stephanie Mnookin: “When you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well say, ’I give up.’” And one writer friend called afterward with a note. To my memory this is the only friend who called, but that is surely wrong as I have lovely, polite friends. His note was to fix the opening—make it clearer what the audience is in for, what the play is about. I thanked him and told him the play was d-e-a-d.

Time passes, I mean years—it’s the summer of 2008—and a theater director, Karen Carpenter, calls. She had read the play long ago at the San Diego Old Globe, where it was vegetating. She had been lugging it around with her ever since. She had an opportunity to do a workshop and public performance/reading at the East Hampton Town Hall. Could she do our play? With Linda Lavin as Gingy, said Nora or Karen, depending on whom you asked. Linda Lavin agreed.

We implemented the note I’d received years before and not forgotten, probably because it rang true. It simply involved taking something at the end of the play and moving it to the beginning. I remember the afternoon we put the change in. We were working at my apartment, in the bedroom where my desk was. Nora had been sick now for two years, and collaborating was precious in a way that it hadn’t been before. And just before or just after we did that note, Nora gave me a present, her enamel pansy ring, which I treasured.

The note helped the play, but mainly it was Linda Lavin. She was a brilliant Gingy.

There are many lessons in this. One: Never give up. We did. We shouldn’t have. Thank you, Karen. Two: Sometimes the right actor makes all the difference. Three: Always be open to a note, and a subset of this, writers give great notes. Four: Luck can change when you least expect it.

Daryl Roth wanted to produce the play, and from then on everything went right and with great speed. Now I think of it as a perfect collaboration. The structure of the play, women’s stories, gave Nora and me each breathing room. We rewrote our separate pieces and together we sharpened ensemble pieces. We worked
together beautifully. It was truly about sisterhood: our own and the shared experiences of women. Every month we changed the cast and five new amazing actors performed it. Eventually 120 did it in New York City. I became friends with many of them.

Playwrights are respected, deeply respected. The intimacy and creativity of rehearsals, the excitement of women coming to see it was thrilling. The connection between the women onstage and the women in the audience was palpable. Personal.

Sometimes men came to see our play. We were happy to have them—they even laughed, but we never cared if they did. “Ninety-eight percent women tonight,” our associate general manager, Jodi Carter, might report. Ninety-eight percent women. Fantastic.

What I loved most was that so many of our friends contributed. The play celebrates Heather’s high heels, Amanda’s wedding dress. That’s Amanda who is Alice’s daughter—Alice whom I went to high school with and who is still a close friend. It has Joy’s black cigarette pants, Nancy’s gang sweater, the underwire bra my friend Meredith gave to my friend Geralyn, Rosie’s mother’s bathrobe, Annie’s paper dress, Gail’s raincoat, Nora’s purse, my lime-green winter coat.

The play is a patchwork of friendship, and friendship is collaboration, the best kind. The give-and-take of close friendship is collaboration on life.

•  •  •  •

I dreamt about Nora last night. For the first time since she died. It made me happy because she was alive in the dream. A dream is a visit, a conjuring, the only way you might have a conversation with someone who has died and believe it is real. At least believe it while you’re asleep (which may not be believing it).

Nora was on a single bed, not sick, just resting on a bed. We talked. I told her that I heard her new play was wonderful. I hadn’t yet seen
Lucky Guy
. It was in previews. We were going to the opening together, the whole family. It was comforting to be able to tell her that
Lucky Guy
was wonderful. Her not being alive for it had been making me heartsick.

She said we should go right now and see “pieces of it.”

That’s an expression we always used about our own play. Over the two years it ran, we would stop by the theater and stay for a few pieces. And I would call her or she
would call me and say, “I stayed for a few pieces,” and give a report.

And then in the dream—the way, in a dream, one image is replaced by another—Nora was standing up now, wearing a party dress—a spectacular strapless taffeta party dress, gray (the prettiest bright gray), just the sort of dress a woman might remember every detail of and write about in the play we collaborated on, the play we colloquially referred to as
Love Loss
.

“We should go see pieces,” she said to me in the dream.

And we did. We went off together.

I
f it weren’t for Trish Hall of the
New York Times
, I would never have begun this writing journey. My gratitude as well to Dorothy Rabinowitz of the
Wall Street Journal
. Deena Goldstone and Joy Horowitz—devoted friends and wonderful writers—read endlessly for me. I am in their debt. Also my thanks to Larry Mark, who is always generous with advice, now and over the years. A shout-out to all their dogs for undoubtedly raising their owners’ spirits and sensitivities each day, and I have benefited from that: George, Simon, Bailey, Coral, Sadie, and Danny. My editor and publisher, David Rosenthal, does not have a dog. Otherwise he is perfect. I am blessed to have him. In fact, none of the amazing people
at Blue Rider Press have dogs, which is a mystery, but they are brilliant nevertheless: my editor, Sarah Hochman; Aileen Boyle; and Brian Ulicky. To my agents . . . I can never thank Lynn Nesbit enough—her support makes my writing life possible—and to Dorothy Vincent, my sincerest appreciation. Also to Joel Mason for being so generous with his talent, I owe you. Joel has two cats—Emma and Woody. Dorothy Vincent has two as well: Peter Washington Taub and Pedro Eugenio Borges Taub. While I don’t totally get cats, I respect that others do.

The wisdom and heart of my husband, Jerome Kass, always guide me. And thank you, Honey, for inspiration. Right now she is probably where she isn’t supposed to be, on the living room couch. My love to my sisters Hallie and Amy, and to the comforting memory of Nora.

Delia Ephron is a bestselling author and screenwriter. Her movies include
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
,
You’ve Got Mail, Hanging Up
(based on her novel), and
Michael
. She has written novels for adults and teenagers, including her most recent,
The Lion Is In
; books of humor, including
How to Eat Like a Child
; and essays. Her journalism has appeared in the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
,
O: The
Oprah Magazine
, and
More
. Her hit play,
Love, Loss,
and What I Wore
(cowritten with Nora Ephron), ran for more than two years Off-Broadway and has been performed all over the world, including in Paris, Rio, and Sydney. She lives in New York City.