A Sister Finds Her Own Voice

Amy Ephron is doing what she does--she’s telling a story. This one is about an unusual family of writers. The parents are a pair of noted screenwriters, and all four of their daughters write. So wouldn’t it make sense if the parents had named their brood after stars of stage and novel?

“I always thought Nora was named after [the heroine of] ‘The Doll’s House,’ ” Ephron is saying as she pours balsamic vinegar into a small bowl of olive oil in her Brentwood kitchen. The famous family she’s talking about is, of course, her own, and she’s linking the name of Henrik Ibsen’s showstopper to that of her oldest sister, writer-director Nora Ephron.

As for how Amy became Amy, “I’ve never really known, but I suspect I was named after the fourth daughter of ‘Little Women,’ don’t you think?”

In the world of make-believe, or at the very least embellished reality, a visitor’s guess is as good as Ephron’s. She is moving about the headquarters of her wide-ranging imagination, a low-slung home surrounded by trees, quiet and deer where she raises three children and writes novels and screenplays.

Her just-published fifth novel, “White Rose: Una Rosa Blanca” (Morrow), travels far from the Hollywood turf with which the Ephrons are associated. Most of the action takes place in 1897 Cuba, where Evangelina Cisneros, the beautiful daughter of a Cuban rebel, has been jailed by Spanish authorities. American newspaper magnate William Hearst has sent New York Journal reporter Karl Decker to Havana to break her out of jail. Hearst wants Cisneros to urge the U.S. Congress to send troops--and boost his newspaper’s circulation in the process. Against that exotic backdrop, Cisneros and the married Decker fall in love.

An Affinity for Period Fiction

The animated Ephron, who draws pictures in the air as she talks, is writing the screenplay for director Luc Besson and producer Mark Canton. And now with “White Rose,” which is based on actual events, the youngest Ephron sister lays claim to literary territory that is distinctly her own. Unlike the work of famously funny sisters Nora and Delia, whose next film collaboration is the family-inspired contemporary comedy “Hanging Up,” Amy’s work is sober, spare, sometimes tinged with darkness, and often set in historical periods.

“You’ve got the politics of Cuba,” she said of her latest endeavor, “the politics of America, and two people who are trapped in a love affair, involved in something so much bigger than themselves.

“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘All love stories are tragic.’ And I said, ‘No, they’re not. But when they’re not tragic, they call them romantic comedies.’ So I write love stories, because they have tragic moments.”

Ephron, 43, said she’s not deliberately avoiding romantic comedies to distinguish herself from Nora and Delia, who both had a hand in such romps as “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

“From the time I had some notion of who I wanted to be as a writer, I was writing kind of odd Edith Wharton, Jane Austen things that had a contemporary voice. It wasn’t really a fashionable thing to do. And it was only out of some deep conviction of art that I finally said, ‘This is what I’ve always wanted to do, so I’m going to do it.’ ”

Her last book, “A Cup of Tea” (Morrow, 1997), was also a period piece. The novel is based on a Katherine Mansfield short story set in the 1920s, although Ephron relocated the tale from London to New York. She’s polishing the screenplay for producers Linda and Jerry Bruckheimer, who have lined up director Bille August and actress Liv Tyler, who’ll play an impoverished woman who’s taken up by a society matron until the wealthy woman’s husband admires her beauty.

Ephron is also dipping into romantic comedy after all. She’s rewriting a script for Disney with “The Two of Us” writer and producer Alan Zweibel. The project is tentatively titled “After Grace.”

“It will either be her first romantic comedy or my first tragic love story,” said Zweibel, one of the original “Saturday Night Live” writers. “It depends on who screams louder.”

Adding a Touch of Realistic Darkness

Indeed, Amy Ephron’s take on romantic comedy is unlikely to be confused with that of any other Ephron. Zweibel said that her serious bent is likely to color anything she does.

“I think I’m more optimistic,” said Zweibel, who met Ephron in New York two decades ago, when she was dating the late comedy writer Michael O’Donoghue. “I tend to at least strive for happy endings. Amy’s probably a little warier of such things than I am. She does bring a bit of darkness, a realistic darkness, to things. I enjoy that, but I also emerge from it eventually. I think that makes for a good combination.”

When Amy was growing up in Beverly Hills, the Ephron dinner table was great training for her literary ambitions. Her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, penned a raft of successful films, including “Carousel,” “Desk Set” and the Fred Astaire classic “Daddy Long Legs.” The Ephrons nurtured signs of creativity among their children. (A fourth sister, Hallie, who lives in Massachusetts, just sold her first mystery novel.)

“They had a way of getting a story out of us,” Ephron said. “We also read poetry at the dinner table. Sometimes at the end of dinner, they would get out Louis Untermeyer’s collected poems. And Mommy gave me Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems for children.”

But some of the challenges the late Ephrons presented their daughters were painful. Both parents were alcoholics, and Ephron propelled herself solo into the real world at a young age.

“I had my own little tiny studio apartment in New York City when I was 15 years old, and I was working for the parks department in public relations,” she said. “My parents were so nuts at that point that I very much wanted to be on my own, so I put myself on my own probably a little too young.”

Ephron was on summer break from a boarding school in Vermont, which she began attending when her parents moved to New York the year before. At 17, she got a receptionist job at Scanlan’s, a now-defunct magazine in New York, and decided to blow off college.

She learned a lesson from skipping college, and her children--Maia, 15, Anna, 13, and Ethan, 9--won’t be given that option. (They’ve been living with Ephron since she split up with her ex-husband, “The Doors” producer Sasha Harari, almost five years ago.)

“I wish I’d had the four years other people had to read things that I wouldn’t otherwise have read. Now I read books about quasars and black holes. I’m nuts. I read about the history of anything. At the moment, I’m Marco Polo-obsessed. I’m not sure why.”

After Scanlan’s, Ephron worked in New York in the products division of the Children’s Television Workshop. Later, a producer friend in California asked her to scout for books to option, and soon she was reading scripts.

Still a mere pup in her mid-20s, Ephron moved to L.A. to be a vice president of production at Columbia Pictures, where she put “Out of Africa” into development and campaigned for the release of Roman Polanski’s “Tess.” But she wasn’t cut out for studio life. When she was 25, she left Columbia to finish her first novel, “Cool Shades.”

“I think I probably really always wanted to write, and I couldn’t actually sit down in a chair long enough until I was 25 to commit to anything. In a weird way, I think it’s taken me longer to find my own voice and my own audience, because sometimes people expect me to be like my sisters, and my work is very different from theirs.”

Ephron went on to write novels about neurotic contemporary California--”Bruised Fruit” (1988) and “Biodegradable Soap” (1988). But Ephron figures she hit her stride with “A Cup of Tea.”

“Luckily for me, it all started to work about two years ago. It’s not that I didn’t support myself in some way, but it really wasn’t until the success of ‘A Cup of Tea’ that I felt on any kind of real solid ground with myself as a writer or an artist.”

Irene Lacher can be reached by e-mail at irene.lacher@latimes.com.