The Unspeakable (24 page)

Nora Ephron was a friend and mentor to me. I use these terms proudly but also loosely, as she was a friend and mentor to dozens if not hundreds of other young female writers of roughly my generation and sensibility. When she died unexpectedly in the summer of 2012, we all seemed to come out of the woodwork like mistresses at the funeral of a raging yet irresistible philanderer, churning out paeans to her in any publication that would let us and sizing one another up as if saying, “She took
you
to lunch, too?” Even before then, I knew I was far from the first rung of Nora acolytes. We had lunch a few times, once or twice in New York (“Next time I'll invite Joan to join us!”) and again once or twice in L.A., where on one occasion she told me to meet her at Fred Segal and, not realizing it had a restaurant, I loitered around the store for twenty minutes before figuring things out and rushing to the café, where, to my great shame, I'd kept her waiting.

A movie producer Nora knew was seated at a nearby table and she introduced us. This was during the time when I was still going through the motions of trying to be a screenwriter, a venture Nora seemed eager to help with. Returning to our table, she said to me, “You are going to call him tomorrow and he will take a meeting with you and he will love you and you'll do a project together and it will work.” She said things like this all the time—to just about everybody.

Anyway, this is where the real story begins. I did not get it on tape, obviously, so I can't claim to be telling it verbatim. But I'm recounting it to the best of my ability, and if at any time I appear to be exaggerating, you can be assured that I am not. This was no cartoon. This was live action all the way.

One day Nora e-mailed and said she wanted to invite me to a party “for a games kind of thing.” Though I loathe games of just about any sort, I of course accepted the invitation. A short time later her assistant faxed me the directions to her house, which included a map and also instructions to bring a written list of objects or titles or names that were linked in some fashion; for instance,
A League of Their Own
,
Field of Dreams
,
The Natural
, which are all movies about baseball. I spent no less than twenty hours working on my list, revising it endlessly, changing the theme multiple times, and just generally fretting about the party. I ended up with a list of rock bands that had birds in the name: the Eagles, the Yardbirds, A Flock of Seagulls, and so on. But that's not really relevant to the story.

When I arrived at Nora's house there were only a handful of cars in the driveway—a Lexus or two, a Range Rover, some BMWs—and very few parked on the street. This surprised me, as I assumed it would be a large gathering. Otherwise, why in the world would I have made the cut? I rang the doorbell and Nora answered, greeting me warmly as always. Though she lived most of the time in New York, she was in L.A. directing the movie
Bewitched
, and the house, which I think she was renting with her husband, Nick Pileggi, was grand if also fairly modest in scale—a baby grand. She showed me into the living room, where about twenty people, drinks and hors d'oeuvres in hand, were standing around in small conversational huddles.

These people included the following: Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan, Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Larry David, Arianna Huffington, and David Geffen. Others included the spouses or partners of these people, for instance Laurie David, who was still married to Larry at the time, and Steve Martin's lovely young girlfriend and future wife, the former
New Yorker
fact-checker Anne Stringfield. There was a smattering of various producers and moguls I didn't recognize, plus, of course, Nick Pileggi, a famed author and screenwriter in his own right. There was also a small dog, and some stealth hired hands in the kitchen.

Nora introduced me to Nicole Kidman. The way she did this was to say, “Nicole, this is Meghan Daum. Meghan, this is Nicole Kidman.”

Then she brought me over to Rob Reiner and did the same thing. Another guest pulled her away and I was left standing there with Rob Reiner, who seemed to be listing to the side in an effort to return to his previous conversation. He said nothing to me. I couldn't think of one appropriate thing to say to him. Obviously I couldn't ask what he did for a living or how he knew Nora. Everyone in the world knew he was a famous director and anyone with a scintilla of movie trivia knowledge knew that he went back with Nora at least as far as
When Harry Met Sally
, for which she wrote the script.

“Do you live nearby?” I asked finally.

“Kind of,” he said.

“Have any trouble getting here?”

“No,” he said.

We stood there a little longer. Rob Reiner didn't ask if I lived nearby or how I knew Nora or what I did for a living. He asked me nothing. I excused myself to get a drink.

Clutching my wine, I scanned the room for anyone remotely approachable. Steve Martin. I walked over and said hello. More precisely, I walked over and said hello to Anne, who then made it okay to say hello to Steve. He was friendlier than Rob Reiner, though no doubt this was because of Anne, who I'd never met but who at least occupied the same social galaxy as I did—or at least she had before she went and realized the fantasy of every woman who ever majored in English or worked in publishing: to land a major movie star who also plays the banjo and writes Shouts and Murmurs columns for
The New Yorker
.

Steve Martin had a weird little mustache. It turned out he was in the middle of shooting a remake of
The Pink Panther
, playing Inspector Clouseau, and couldn't shave it off. Larry David was standing with him and I tried to talk to him, too, but his gaze soon shifted to some person or object behind me, registering the bored irritation of a wedding guest trapped next to someone's mentally ill relative.

Mercifully, Nora clanked a glass and announced that dinner was ready. She'd cooked everything herself: baked ham and green beans and salad. The food sat on the kitchen counter in giant aluminum pans and we were instructed to file through and serve ourselves. Out in the main room, the seating was haphazard, with guests spread out over several tables that had been pushed together at strange angles. The spots were getting snapped up rapidly and I grabbed one where I could, which turned out to be next to Meg Ryan. We said hello with maximum brevity and she proceeded to start a conversation with the guy on the other side of me. Like just about everyone else, they were talking politics. Weeks earlier, George W. Bush had been elected to a second term. They were very distraught about this. At the other end of the table, Rob Reiner was booming with indignation about voting booth fraud. Arianna Huffington was gesturing wildly as though debating someone on a talk show. Meg Ryan and her friend were in deep discussion about how best to go after the Bush administration for war crimes. When I piped up, if only to lessen the awkwardness of our seating arrangement, they gave no indication of hearing me.

I never thought I'd say this, but the words “now we're going to divide into teams and play charades” filled me with indescribable relief. Nora told us to get out our lists and drop them in a hat that was being passed around. Then she explained that this was a special kind of charades called “running charades.”

“It's much more fun than regular charades,” she said.

“So what you're saying, then,” said Steve Martin, “is that it's
sort of
fun.” He said this neither loudly nor quietly, though few seemed to hear him in any case.

We broke into teams, each of which was assigned a captain. Rob Reiner was ours and he explained the rules, which essentially involved trying to elicit as many correct answers as quickly as possible. The clues were the lists, meaning someone would stand up and act out every item on it—the Eagles, the Yardbirds, A Flock of Seagulls—until the theme was identified. Then they'd move on to another list. The first team to work through all the lists was the winner.

Rob Reiner was a taskmaster. “Let's go!
Let's go!
” he bellowed while we flailed around trying to convey titles such as
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
and
The Crying Game
(it seemed almost everyone had brought in lists of movies) only to be met with shouts of
“A Beautiful Mind!”
and
“Boogie Nights!”
I couldn't help but notice that Anne and I and a few of the other nonactors were in heavier pantomime rotation than the professional performers in the room, namely Nicole Kidman, who had confessed early on that charades “is not my forté” and was now sitting on an ottoman in the corner, seemingly trying to avoid notice. Which is of course a fruitless endeavor if you are Nicole Kidman.

I need to pause now to say a few things about Nicole Kidman. First of all, she is stunningly beautiful. She is beautiful in a nonhuman way. She is an ethereal willow tree of a woman, with skin by Vermeer and hair by Botticelli. The other celebrities were of course also much better-looking than normal people. Arianna Huffington was tall and sleek in jeans and a crisp shirt. David Geffen, who I couldn't think of as anything but the “Free Man in Paris,” after the song Joni Mitchell wrote about him, was fit and tan and affable-looking. But Nicole Kidman was in another league entirely. Her flawless skin was dusted with flawlessly applied makeup, her hair a cascade of shiny blondness that managed to be at once tousled and perfectly in place. If she didn't also happen to look very real, you'd think she must be fake—she was that gorgeous.

The second thing I need to say about Nicole Kidman is that I actually had a connection to her. I actually
had business
with her. The novel I'd published based on my prairie adventure, the one for which I'd written the screenplay, had been sent to various actresses to gauge their interest in attaching themselves to the project. Nicole Kidman, apparently, was among those actresses and apparently she liked the book. In fact, she didn't just like it. She was, I'd been told, “madly in love” with it, not least of all because the narrator's relationship with a soulful if substance-abusing redneck “resonated” with her vis-à-vis her marriage to a certain country star who'd entered drug rehab not long after their wedding. Though the project had been on the usual Hollywood stop-and-go course for more than a year, my agent regularly placated me with assurances along the lines of “Nicole wants to meet you” and “Nicole feels a kinship with you” and even, mind-blowingly, “Nicole wants to play you in the movie.” By “you” they meant the character in the novel that was loosely based on me, a character who happened not to be anything close to a willowy Vermeer. But all that could be worked out later.

And now here we were. And as confused as I was about how to comport myself at this party, one unspoken rule seemed crystal clear:
Do not talk about business.
Even though, I was beginning to realize, this was in many ways a business party—Nora was directing
Bewitched
, which Nicole Kidman was starring in—I had not heard a single word exchanged about deals or pitches or award contenders or agents. It was clearly uncouth to so much as ask someone about his job, much less try to get them to play you in a movie.

So, excruciating as it was, there was no way I could walk up to Nicole Kidman and tell her who I was (clearly my name alone had not rung a bell). Such a move, at the very least, would have been disrespectful to Nora, who by inviting me to this party was showing she trusted me not to behave like a starstruck careerist. At the worst, it would have produced the awkward moment to trump all other awkward moments of the night. Nicole Kidman would have looked down at me, a stranger easily six inches shorter with cropped hair and skin splotched in the places the sunscreen missed, and thought, I'm
going to play
you?

So, I said nothing. As the evening wore on I said less and less to anyone, not out of insecurity but actually out of a strange peace. I entered a kind of zen space, a pact with my ego in which I realized that, as bizarre and slightly awful as this evening was, it was also a dream come true. I was, in effect, invisible. I was the human embodiment of a fly on the wall. Who among us has not wished for that experience? How many of us wonder what it would be like, if only for an hour or two, to observe a situation both in person and at a vast distance? A situation, no less, involving movie stars waving their hands around while people shouted,
“The French Lieutenant's Woman!”
“Grease!” “Schindler's List!”

One problem with the charades game, at least among our team, was that no one listened to anyone and therefore when someone did call out the right answer it often went unrecognized. This happened to me as I yelled “
Gorky Park
” at least three times until Steve Martin spoke on my behalf and the message was received. The event dragged on and on, Rob Reiner and Larry David growing so impatient with many of the players that they finally gave in and assumed the bulk of the evening's remaining pantomime duties.

“I don't know what this is!” Larry David said, looking at a clue and throwing up his hands as if it were written in hieroglyphics. I thought for a moment that he'd gotten my list and didn't know where to start with the Yardbirds, but that was impossible since we were only using lists supplied by members of other teams.

Larry David began jumping around, stomping on the floor and covering his ears as though shielding them from a loud noise.

“Flashdance,”
we cried out.
“Footloose!”

“All That Jazz!”
Rob Reiner roared.
“Arthur!
My Left Foot
,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind!
Come on, people! Just keep them coming!
Let's go!”

Finally, someone got “thunder.”