Part of her gift was her fresh takes on such traditional subjects for women as food and fashion, like in the essay "The Food Establishment: Life in the Land of the Rising Souffle (Or Is It the Rising Meringue)." She covered political conventions, the feminist movement and Wellesley, which she labeled a factory for "docile" women. Perelman and a worthy peer of such "new" and hip journalists as Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. Within a week, she had a permanent job and remained there five years.Įphron began writing for Esquire and The New York Times and developed a national following as a throwback to the prime of Dorothy Parker and S.J. Ephron was asked to try out as a reporter. She succeeded so well that the newspaper's publisher, Dorothy Schiff, reasoned that anyone who could make fun of the Post could also write for it. He was working on a parody of the New York Post, "The New York Pest," and asked Ephron for a spoof of Post columnist Leonard Lyons.
Victor Navasky, the future editor of The Nation, was then running a satirical magazine called the Monacle. A newspaper strike at the end of the year gave her a chance. Her father, too, was a heavy drinker, "sloppy, sentimental," although "somehow his alcoholism was more benign."ĭetermined by high school to be a journalist, Ephron graduated from the single-sex Wellesley College in 1962, moved to New York and started out as a "mail girl" and fact checker at Newsweek. She was 15, she recalled, when her mother became an alcoholic, finishing off a bottle of scotch a night. If the best humor is born out of sadness, then Ephron was destined for comedy.
"People who were not in the business were known as civilians," Ephron wrote in "I Remember Nothing." Epstein, "Sunset Boulevard" collaborator Charles Brackett, and the team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who worked on "The Thin Man" and "It's a Wonderful Life." Regular visitors included "Casablanca" co-writer Julius J. Words, words, words were the air she breathed. The eldest of four children, Ephron was born in New York to screenwriters Harry and Phoebe Ephron, who moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., when she was 4 years old.
Meg Ryan was among the many actresses who said they loved working with Ephron because she understood them so much better than did her male peers. " and "Sleepless in Seattle," and was the rare woman to write, direct and produce Hollywood movies. Friends from Mike Nichols and Meryl Streep to Calvin Trillin and Pete Hamill adored her for her wisdom, her loyalty and turns of phrase.Īs a screenwriter, Ephron was nominated three times for Academy Awards, for "Silkwood," ''When Harry Met Sally. Even within the smart-talking axis of New York-Washington-Los Angeles, no one bettered Ephron, slender and dark-haired and armed with a killer smile.
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