Two new books delve into the 20th century’s wittiest women
By Tom Ryan
HOLLYWOOD
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood
Gail Crowther
Gallery Books, $52.99
Nora Ephron at the Movies
Ilana Kaplan
Abrams, $69.99
In terms of their life trajectories, Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Nora Ephron (1941–2012) have much in common. However, as these two books show, the lives they led were very different. Perhaps the contrast stems from the timing of their arrivals on the planet, Parker the product of an era in which women had to struggle to be heard, Ephron’s early-adult years coinciding with the rise of an exciting new wave of feminism. But perhaps other factors were also at work.
Both were New Yorkers, born and bred. Even if Ephron spent her formative years in Hollywood, Manhattan was in her DNA and her return there was inevitable. Although her playwrights-turned-screenwriters parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron (There’s No Business Like Show Business, Desk Set), had moved to Tinseltown for work in the mid-1940s, she yearned to return to her beloved NYC and to follow in Parker’s footsteps.
Which she eventually did, displaying the same kind of acidic wit and social acumen in her writings for influential magazines there, such as The New Yorker, as Parker had done more than a generation earlier. After which, like her idol, she began to write for the movies, although, whereas Parker moved west permanently to do so, Ephron stayed put.
She had a hand in several impressive studio releases – as the writer of Silkwood, Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally… in the 1980s, and afterwards as the writer-director of This Is My Life, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia – although most of her others are best forgotten. And Parker, often working in collaboration with second husband Alan Campbell, was the co-writer of eight features as well as a script doctor on many more. Her most noteworthy efforts were the original A Star Is Born (1937), for which she was Oscar-nominated, Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), and Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), leading to a second nomination.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in the romcom When Harry Met Sally.
Both women have, to varying degrees, been romanticised over the years. Ilana Kaplan’s book about Ephron provides a perfect example. Rather than offering a measured account of her life and work, it’s constantly guilty of gush, as in its celebration of the writer-director as the sole saviour of the modern-day romantic comedy (because of her work on When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail), rather than simply as someone who made astute incursion into an established genre.
Kaplan’s lavishly illustrated book would certainly catch the eye on anyone’s coffee-table (although the captioning of the pictures is eye-rollingly literal and sometimes just plain wrong). But much of her commentary about Ephron reads like marketing hype.
“Think of her as the fairy godmother of modern-day rom-coms,” she urges. “After years of a genre lying in wait, she waved her magic wand and penned dazzling scripts, equivalent to charming ball gowns for women who wouldn’t take any shit.” And her afterword – in which she confesses that “Nora’s trio of groundbreaking genre films had shaped (her) core beliefs of finding true romance” – is simply embarrassing. And it’s “Nora” throughout, even though she never knew her.
Dorothy Parker, the wittiest woman of her time, in 1958.
She’s alert to the primary focus of Ephron’s work: “Each project focuses on women who were three-dimensional and who had something to prove – either to themselves or to the world at large.” She also attends to her public persona – her humour, her fashion sense, her love affair with food – and to how her mantra that “everything is copy” fuelled her work, especially her 1983 novel, Heartburn, a thinly disguised account of the collapse of her marriage to famed Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein.
But she never looks far beyond the surface, relying far too heavily on others’ observations or assessments and coming up with few insights of her own. Jacob Bernstein’s 2015 documentary about his mother, Everything Is Copy, is much more illuminating. Only in the book’s final chapter, made up of interviews with some of those who worked with Ephron on her films, does Kaplan seem on more solid ground.
By way of contrast, British academic Gail Crowther’s fluently written book about Parker is much more revealing, attentive to detail and interested in what might lie beneath the surface. She easily dispenses with the most dominant myth regarding Parker: that she was a bouncy, carefree soul, tossing witticisms across the famous Round Table with her illustrious peers in the literary world (among them Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood and Donald Ogden Stewart) at New York’s Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s, before heading off to Hollywood where real money beckoned. Her account instead fixes on the collision between two early 20th-century phenomena, Parker and Hollywood, neither nice to be around, despite the surface glitter attached to both.
Author and director Nora Ephron.
Like Crowther’s 2021 book, Three-Martin Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, her portrait of Parker ponders what went wrong, what made this professionally successful woman so mean, why she seemed to be forever sabotaging herself, why she repeatedly attempted suicide, why she suffered such a sad, lonely death.
Intrigued, compassionate and affectionate at the same time as she keeps her distance, Crowther hones in on Parker’s “mix of helplessness and viciousness” as she situates her biography in the social circumstances of the time. Significant events swirl in the background: the “Roaring ’20s”, the Great Depression, the imposition of the Hays Code to counter Hollywood’s perceived debauchery, the general oppression of women in the social hierarchy, the rise of the “Red Threat” and the establishment of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Commission) to deal with it.
Meanwhile, in the foreground, her Parker is a restless figure, struggling to make her way in a world that has no serious interest in anything she has to offer aside from her reputation, suffering the consequences of her alcoholism, dealing with the torture of miscarriages and failed relationships, discovering a political cause and finding herself blacklisted.
Curiously, Crowther largely sidesteps the possibility that traces of Parker’s personality might be found in her work, whether on the page or the screen. But otherwise thorough in her research, she draws intelligently on her sources pointing to the gaps in their examinations and recognising that, perhaps inevitably, everyone’s inner life is, finally, fated to remain a mystery.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
Most Viewed in Culture
>read more at © Sydney Morning Herald
Views: 0