When news broke that Nora Ephron was dying in June 2012 — she died on June 26 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital — the entertainment world was stunned. No one knew she was sick, with acute myeloid leukemia that led to the pneumonia that killed her. Ephron simply hadn’t told anyone outside of her inner circle.
Even then, Ephron, who wrote “When Harry Met Sally . . .” and directed “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail,” had been vague about how sick she was. In the documentary “Everything Is Copy,” showing this month at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Ephron’s friends puzzle over receiving the bombshell news. Amy Pascal, the former head of Sony Pictures, said she considered herself a close friend and was told nothing. One friend didn’t realize anything was up until, she said, Ephron suggested over lunch that the pair have some cheesecake. Ephron never ordinarily ate dessert. After that, the friend added, Ephron quietly asked for help getting a cab to go home — which was only a couple of blocks from the restaurant. Just days after that, she entered the hospital where she died.
Another showbiz friend recalled that she’d said only that Ephron had once told him she was fighting a health issue, that it was a blood thing, and that he wasn’t allowed to ask about it. She warned him, “We never had this conversation.”
Jacob Bernstein — Ephron’s son with longtime Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who, with Bob Woodward, helped win the paper a Pulitzer Prize for covering Watergate — directed the documentary about his mother, which is showing Sept. 29 and Oct. 3 at the festival and will later air on HBO. In it, the younger Bernstein interviews his father and such actors at Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan and Meryl Streep — all frequent Ephron collaborators and fans.
In the end, Ephron was “a control freak,” notes a friend interviewed by Jacob — Ephron cheerfully had admitted that she herself, including her nutty way of ordering a meal in a restaurant, was the model for Sally in “When Harry Met Sally . . .” Yet Ephron’s illness was something she couldn’t control, so she pretended it wasn’t there.
It was an ironic final twist for a woman whose motto was that “Everything is copy” — that all life events, no matter how embarrassing, sordid or tragic, supply material for a writer. Ephron capitalized, for instance, on the dissolution of her marriage to Carl by retreating to the home of her editor Bob Gottlieb with her children, writing up the whole mess and turning it into the best-seller “Heartburn,” the movie version of which starred Streep and Jack Nicholson as a philandering sleaze obviously based on Carl.
For the most part, the doc is a celebration of Ephron’s life and her irresistible appeal. During the New York newspaper strike of 1963, she published a spoof of then-New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons, and the paper’s own Dorothy Schiff dismissed claims that The Post should file suit. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “If they can parody The Post, they can write for it.”
Schiff hired Ephron, who went on to be an acclaimed Post features writer and then a columnist for Esquire before finally breaking into movies with “Silkwood,” the 1983 drama directed by her friend Mike Nichols that starred Streep. Ephron scored an Oscar nomination for the film. More personal work like “When Harry,” “Sleepless” and “Mail” followed. Lena Dunham, in an interview for the doc, summarizes Ephron’s career like this: “I want all the things that women are supposed to want, and I also hate all the things that women are supposed to want.”