Word: nora
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...mother named her Nora after Ibsen's feminist in A Doll's House, and she certainly slammed the door noisily when leaving her first two marriages. But she and her current husband Nicholas Pileggi are more like Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora -- for one thing, they have been making much of their living off of crime...
This is more obvious in Pileggi's case, since he wrote the book Wiseguy, about the federal witness-protection program, as well as the Martin Scorsese movie based on it, GoodFellas. Nora, meanwhile, did two comic riffs on the same theme -- screenplays for Cookie (with a Bobby Kennedy imitator as prosecutor) and My Blue Heaven (in which constricted FBI men learn from expansive Italian mobsters how to live). Ephron herself is critical of these movies, which ran into casting and directing troubles; but they are typical of her unexpected blindside tackles of ideology: How many movies have you seen...
...Bernstein. Yet she came late and reluctantly to her mother's craft, having seen how little happiness it brought that tortured role model. Phoebe Ephron and her husband Henry were prolific and successful screenwriters in the 1940s and '50s, getting credit for at least one masterpiece, The Desk Set. Nora says her mother did the actual typing, while "my father did the pacing up and down" -- roughly the same job division as in childbirth. Henry wrote a charming memoir of the couple's life together, We Thought We Could Do Anything, leaving out most of the bleak parts -- the alcoholism...
...mother's acquaintance with her boss, the paper's owner, Dorothy Schiff, to present fellow reporters' complaints about filthy working conditions at the Post. Schiff gave her the runaround -- a dangerous thing to do to Ephron. Though she had been doing fluffy "women's items" at the Post, Nora discovered her real (and deadly) talent when she deftly beheaded Schiff in an Esquire article...
...When Nora went to Wellesley, she and her disintegrating mother exchanged bantering letters that the mother turned into a hit play, Take Her, She's Mine, holding off the dark for a while with Broadway glitter. The family's appropriation of one another's lives in print looks like exploitation; but it was more an attempt to contain one's life, as it spun out of control, by telling it as a story. When Nora took personal troubles to her, Phoebe would say, "It's all copy," a lesson repeatedly preached by Kavner to her children in This...