Legacies: An honest, confident voice set Nora Ephron apart

When Nora Ephron died June 26 at age 71, the news prompted an outpouring of grief and admiration from a remarkably diverse array of high-profile names. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, movie veteran Albert Brooks, hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons and novelist Salman Rushdie mourned her passing on Twitter, while TV star-writer Mindy Kaling issued a statement proclaiming: “I want to live every day as if every word or action was penned by Nora Ephron.”

In a postscript in the New Yorker, editor David Remnick described her as “an influence greater than she knew.” In retrospect, it appears that Ephron was, in her brief lifetime, an influence greater than perhaps any of us knew.

In recent years, Ephron’s name had become virtually synonymous with the witty yet unabashedly sentimental movies she wrote and later directed, like “When Harry Met Sally …” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” But this reputation belies the true breadth of her legacy: As well as a purveyor of beloved romantic comedies, Ephron was a trailblazing journalist, filmmaker and feminist, an astonishingly accomplished woman who generously shared her hard-won wisdom with younger writers.

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To many, Ephron’s unlikely career trajectory — from “mail girl” at Newsweek to bestselling essayist to top-earning screenwriter and director — seemed like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. In 1962, Victor Navasky, currently the publisher emeritus of the Nation, hired Ephron, fresh out of Wellesley College, to contribute to a New York Post satire he put together during the city’s infamous newspaper strike. Despite her tender age, Ephron “understood the conventions of the press and was able to make fun of them,” he says. Her spoof was so spot-on that the Post’s editor, Dorothy Schiff, quickly hired her. From there, Ephron rapidly ascended to the top of the city’s media world, publishing wry essays and incisive profiles in New York and Esquire. Her distinctive, highly personal voice meant she was one of the few women writers associated with the decidedly macho “New Journalism” movement.

Ephron was also something of a rarity in that she was an unapologetic feminist who wrote with candor and gravity about supposedly “light” subjects, like her too-small breasts and the aging process. “It’s a cliché of the feminist movement, but in her work everything was personal,” Navasky says. “She cared about being a woman in a sort of old-fashioned way but also in a political way.”

It’s this stubborn insistence on writing about what was important to her that endeared Ephron to a generation of women.

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“She didn’t care whether the literary world thought those were serious topics worthy of a writer’s consideration,” says bestselling novelist Jennifer Weiner. As a result, Ephron’s essays empowered women “to be open and honest and funny and smart about what mattered to them instead of trying to don the literary equivalent of a man’s suit when it came time to write.”

Later, as a screenwriter and director in the overwhelmingly male world of Hollywood, Ephron was, yet again, a pioneer — even if the label irked her. Indie film producer Christine Vachon recalls a frustrated panel conversation about “women and film” that included her, Ephron and fellow writer-director Nancy Meyers. “These days, any woman who gets behind a camera is a groundbreaker. It’s galling,” she says.

Ephron’s real power might have been her ability to tell stories that transcended genres. Even Vachon, best known for producing gritty, provocative dramas like “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Far From Heaven,” calls herself a fan of Ephron’s sparkling romantic comedies.

Perhaps this is because Ephron’s films, which nearly always deliver a happy ending, are stories of resilience and determination beneath their shiny, bourgeois veneer.

“They are about a pretty world where some extremely unpretty things happen,” argues Rebecca Traister, journalist and author of “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

As a woman in Hollywood, Ephron led by example, creating female characters who were ambitious, finicky and vexing — but who were recognizably human, unlike the one-dimensional bridezillas who populate so many romantic comedies. “Her movies took interesting, complicated, difficult women and treated them like they were subjects worthy of having movies made about them. That in and of itself is a rupture in the space-time continuum,” claims Traister, only half-joking.

In the numerous fond remembrances that popped up last week, a portrait emerged of Ephron as a generous mentor to young writers and filmmakers, especially women. On the New Yorker website, “Girls”creator Lena Dunham movingly recounted her brief but formative friendship with Ephron, who reached out to the budding auteur after seeing Dunham’s movie,”Tiny Furniture.” “Her advice” — on everything from bathroom tiles to the pitfalls of being a female filmmaker — “was unparalleled,” Dunham wrote. In an equally heartfelt column in The Times, Meghan Daum described Ephron as “a sort of literary mother hen with a cashmere-clad wing outstretched.”

Many other filmmakers and writers who weren’t befriended by Ephron felt the influence of her career.

“I think she affected me invisibly because she changed the landscape,” suggests Liz Meriwether, creator of Fox TV series”New Girl.””She’s influenced other women to not write an idea of what a woman is according to studio executives.”

Nicholas Stoller, writer and director of “The Five-Year Engagement,”praises Ephron as the “standard bearer” for romantic comedy, along with Woody Allen, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. “I think love is the most interesting subject matter no matter the art form, but it takes a deft writer to find something novel,” he says. “She did it again and again, writing and directing movies that were absolutely hilarious while being deeply truthful.”

Although she was raised in Los Angeles, Ephron was more strongly identified with New York, the city where she lived for most of her adult life and which she chronicled so lovingly in her work. With her rambling, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment and star-studded dinner parties, the sharp-tongued Ephron seemed to embody a bygone literary New York. She was like a more domesticated version of Dorothy Parker, a wit who preferred a perfectly rendered pot roast to a stiff gin and tonic.

“She personified a kind of New York Jewish woman I’ve always wanted to be — a really fun person to be around who generates this social energy,” says Julie Klausner, performer and author of the humorous memoir “I Don’t Care About Your Band.” “There’s something very Manhattan about her that will be missed.”

In the end, the most obvious explanation for Ephron’s wide-ranging influence is that she brought her bright, bracingly honest voice to so many mediums — to films, of course, but also to novels, essays, plays and even blog posts. As New York Magazine’s Noreen Malone put it in her admiring obituary for Ephron, “She wasn’t just good at endings, she was good at it all.”

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