In 1983, the celebrity world was rocked when Nora Ephron chose to expose the bitter breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein over his fidelity in the thinly-veiled novel “Heartburn.” Three years later, when director Mike Nichols turned the bestseller into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, critics were divided between an admiration for Ephron’s decision to bare such a nasty episode in public and the deleterious impact that it might have on the couple’s two young sons, Max and Jacob.Now 37, Jacob Bernstein has answered that and many other questions about his mother in the fascinating new HBO documentary “Everything is Copy,” which airs tonight. In one of the film’s soul-baring moments, Jacob admits to Carl Bernstein that the novel and the movie had indeed affected for several years their father-son relationship. “Well, there you go,” says the elder Bernstein of the emotional cost exacted by the couple’s obsessive regard for their public reputations.The title of the documentary itself explains why Ephron would go there in the first place, a mantra handed down to Ephron and her three sisters — Amy, Delia, and Hallie — from their mother, Phoebe, as a salve to whatever disasters might befall them. If you owned it, then you could turn yourself from a victim into a hero. Phoebe, along with the girls’ father, Henry, had done that very thing as a successful Hollywood screenwriting team. Ephron took the advice to heart, drawing from her own experiences to craft a successful career that encompassed essays, novels, plays, and hit films such as “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” But the writer reached her scorched-earth best in the exhibitionistic “Heartburn.”“Very few people can survive a public cuckolding,” says Nichols in the documentary. “She’d won, and every betrayed woman in the world knew it.” While “Heartburn” supplies much of the heat in the documentary, on the other end of the scale is the ironic and tender counter thesis of Bernstein’s film: Everything is copy — except when it isn’t. Ephron drew the line at her own mortality. When she was diagnosed with a blood disease in 2006, she kept it secret from everyone for the next six years until just before her death in June of 2012 at age 71. Bernstein, a journalist, wrote movingly, if astringently, about his mother’s death in a 2013 New York Times Magazine piece titled “Nora Ephron’s Final Act.” His film expands on the article to place her death within the wider context of a dazzling life recounted by those who loved — and sometimes feared — her. Those include Bernstein himself, his aunts, Ephron’s ex-husbands, Meryl Streep, Meg Ryan, and Tom Hanks. Also among the talking heads is a New York literati Rat Pack. Gay Talese, Ken Auletta, Richard Cohen, Robert Gottlieb, and Marie Brenner are part of a neo-Algonquin Roundtable of which Ephron styled herself the witty and wicked reincarnation of Dorothy Parker. If Ephron had to win, as Nichols says, it was because she grew up in Beverly Hills with parents who’d grabbed the brass ring and then lost it, descending into alcoholism, infidelity, and depression. She wasn’t about to let that happen to her. That determination developed into steeliness and control as a smart, tough, and ambitious young Ephron set out to conquer the world. In the ’70s and ’80s, she was one of the boys in a male world writing honestly and self-deprecatingly about women’s issues in such publications as Esquire and the New Yorker. What also made her damned entertaining is that she subscribed to writer Janet Malcolm’s dictum that every good writer betrays his or her subject.Writers are “predators” and “cannibals,” says Ephron by way of explaining why she so blithely attacked even those who had given her a helping hand. She compared Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the New York Post, where she’d gotten her start, to Marie Antoinette. (“Let them eat schlock.”)“She could be mean,” recalls Barbara Walters. “And when she attacked me, I had to remember… she was funny.” Another colleague says, “She had a razor in her back pocket.”“My mother was dangerous,” says Bernstein in the film. “She was both loved and feared.”Opinionated and ruthless, Ephron could easily show the door to anybody who offended her sensibilities or who couldn’t measure up. Tom Hanks, who starred in Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle,” says that he was aghast when she fired the child actor who was to play his son after Ephron had spent months grooming and working with him. Colleagues called it “the red dot,” the imaginary bindi on her forehead when she was in her take-no-prisoners mode.If she brooked nothing less than success that is because failure was anathema to her. In a wry moment in the documentary, she opines that there is nothing to be learned from failure. “The only thing you can learn from failure is that you can possibly have another.” When it came to her fatal diagnosis, she simply opted out of the game she’d heretofore played all her life. It was something that she could not control and so she chose to ignore it, to believe that it didn’t exist, and never to write about it openly. And she kept her big secret almost to the end. Nonetheless, her existential struggle surreptitiously informed the last thing she would ever write, the Broadway play “Lucky Guy.” The show, produced posthumously in 2013, starred Tom Hanks as Mike McAlary, the hard-nosed journalist whose greatest scoop — the Abner Louima scandal — came on the cusp of his succumbing to cancer at the age of 41. While Ephron was undergoing chemotherapy, she was writing about McAlary’s own fight.Hanks and George Wolfe, who directed the play, puzzle in the documentary over why Ephron would want to write about a man and subject that seemed so removed from her life. Ephron herself claims a certain bond with McAlary when she tells Wolfe that it is “about a man who has more luck than talent.” That is, until the luck runs out. Few would agree that Ephron, given her boundless and original oeuvre, was luckier than talented. But Wolfe adds that the play is also about a man “who replaced ambition for grace.” And indeed, nearly all of her family, friends, and colleagues observe that once Ephron married the writer Nick Pileggi, her harsher edges were sanded down. In the last six years of her life, she became not only extraordinarily prolific but also more tender and vulnerable, and much less judgmental.Bernstein, in following his grandmother’s dictum that everything is copy, has managed to make manifest that transubstantiation in his mother’s life through his brutally honest, and ultimately redemptive, film.
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