- You sit there writing it and you know they're gonna be angry at you and they are.

And if you can't handle that, you probably aren't gonna be a very good journalist.

(gentle music) - Hello, I'm George Plimpton and our guest today on "Writer's Workshop" is a journalist who, among her many other accomplishments, came up with probably one of the liveliest titles in contemporary times.

Her name is Nora Ephron.

And that marvelous title was given to a collection of her essays, "Wallflower at the Orgy."

She also wrote a book called "Crazy Salad," and when it became a bestseller, she couldn't convince herself that it wasn't because the readers thought they were buying a cookbook.

But aside from such astonishing modesty, Nora Ephron also has a world of experience in a field which is still very much open to beginning writers, that field is newspaper reporting.

And Ephron believes that one of the most valuable experiences a writer can have is to go through what she did as a reporter on the New York Post.

Among other things, while she was having a wonderful time covering murders and imagining herself as Lois Lane or Brenda Starr, she was also discovering an antidote for the most noxious poison that can get into a writer's system, a thing called writer's block.

Because when you work for a newspaper, you either get your writing done one way or another, or you're finished.

There's no opportunity for you to pamper yourself or feel sorry for yourself or indulge in any of those other luxurious emotions that writers go to grief over.

She found a way to get on with it.

And now Nora Ephron is getting into more ambitious forms of writing, such as plays and screenplays and fiction.

And I think the important thing for her and for us is the idea that she can carry her newspaper experience over into any field of writing she attempts, as we'll hear her discuss with William Price Fox and the students on "Writer's Workshop."

- Oh, Jesus, there's nothing like a monitor.

Never look at a monitor when you're on television, never.

- I'm looking over here.

This is the Spring Writer's Series from the University of South Carolina.

I'm Bill Fox, and on my left is Nora Ephron from Washington.

I thought I'd started off by asking her the obligatory, how did you start writing?

- How did I?

- How did you get into it or?

- Well, I always, I mean, I had a great journalism teacher in high school.

- Where was this at?

- Beverly Hills High School of all places.

And he left the teaching of journalism almost immediately to open a chain of record stores and was never seen again, as far as I know.

But he was a great, great journalism teacher.

His name was Charles Sims.

And I had thought I wanted to be a journalist 'cause we had vocational training, little things where movie stars would come and speak to you about being a movie star.

And directors would come and speak about being directors.

- Who would come?

I wanna know the names.

- Oh, people like, you know, Tony Martin, things like that.

It was Beverly Hills High School, it was weird.

But they had a journalism thing.

So I had read about that, it sounded like fun.

And I started taking this course and the first day he was teaching us how to write a lead the way all teachers teach you, they read you a set of facts and then you sit at the typewriter and you write the first paragraph of the story.

So this was the set of facts he dictated.

He said, "The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a conference on new teaching methods.

Speaking there will be Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, Margaret Mead and Nipsey Russell," who knows, right?

The third person.

So we all sat down and we wrote almost exactly what he said, upside down.

We said, Margaret Mead, Robert Major Hutchins, and the third person will address the faculty on Thursday.

And we turned it in and he rippled through all of our stories and he looked up and he said, "The lead to the story is there will be no school Thursday."

(audience laughs) And it was the most wonderful moment I ever had in a classroom.

It was like the cartoon of the electric light bulb going on, because suddenly I realized the whole thing was about the point, that all that stuff about who, what, where, why, when, and how didn't mean anything if you didn't take the facts and figure out what the point of the story was.

And the whole year that I was in his class, every single day was like that, every single day there was a trick, every single day there was something hidden underneath that you had to find, that you had to figure out.

And it was fabulous, it was wonderful.

- I would just like to hear a bit about the beginning of your career on the newspaper and how it was breaking in as a reporter and that whole situation, that scene.

- Well, when I went there, I mean the New York Post has never been a great paper, but I was not there in what are called the great days of it, although now they probably look pretty good.

I always have this habit, I was at Esquire also, in not what are called the great days, but now people look back on them with great nostalgia.

The Post was a very silly newspaper.

It had been a wonderful sort of left wing, Jewish in feeling publication, it had a high percentage of Jewish readers, it probably still does.

And it had been one of the few papers to attack Senator McCarthy.

And when we, in fact, did our parodies of the New York Post and the Daily News for Monocle Magazine the headline on the New York Post, which became far more famous than anything about the parody, was, "Cold wave hits New York, Jews, Negroes Suffer Most."

And that was the classic New York Post bleeding heart liberal thing.

But when I got there, they had changed.

Dorothy Schiff had decided that the thing to do is to be very frothy and giddy and women-oriented, this was her notion.

I'm not saying that that's what women are, but that was her notion.

And also not for the right reasons, the New York Post, although it had the smallest staff of any New York paper, had more women reporters than any New York paper.

Not more in percentage, more in numbers, partly because we were cheap labor.

I cost them $98 a week.

I was an inexperienced journalist and I came in at the zero level of experience and I was a better hire than some guy riding in from out of town who needed 148, 'cause he'd had three years experience out of town.

So they did that a lot.

They took a chance and knew they had a tradition of sob sisters at The Post, which is a glorious journalistic tradition, by the way.

I don't mean to be at all condescending using that term.

And they let you do, I mean, it was a paper of all features, really, it was an afternoon paper and afternoon papers tend to be features written off the morning news, and I loved it.

I mean, they let me cover all the things I wanted to cover.

I covered froth, endless amounts of froth.

They tried to get me to cover politics, but I really didn't want to, particularly, I thought New York politics were very dreary, and I still believe that.

And they just gave you byline after byline.

I can't tell you.

I mean, you had four bylines a week in the paper and you didn't have a lot of space, but you could make a joke.

You learned that, you wrapped the fish, it didn't matter that much, if you just got one nice line a day, it made you feel good.

It's quite different from magazine writing where I think you worry much more, as you should, about every paragraph and every connection and this paying off later and introducing something, all that stuff that comes into magazine writing, technique and craft.

But I can't tell you, it was the most wonderful job.

I thought I was Brenda Starr or Lois Lane or any one of those.

And I was, I really was, I mean, in my own, you know, I adored it, I covered murders, which are fabulous to cover.

They make you feel, I always felt that I was gonna be arrested for the murder because I felt so guilty about having so much fun on the story.

I mean, someone was dead and I was getting front page stories from it, it just made you feel awful.

The other fabulous advantage about the New York Post was that because it was the least important paper in the city, you got the least time with famous people who came to town.

If you were doing a page feature on the man in the news, or the woman in the news, which were weekend features in the Post, they probably weren't going to see you because they were gonna see The Times.

So it was wonderful training because you had to learn to report around the perimeter of a story.

You had to call up someone they'd been to college with, or was someone that you knew had gone to that college who might know someone who'd been there at the time of the person who was there.

You'd pull the clips out, if it was an actress, you'd see all the credits they'd had and tried to reach a director from something three or four years ago.

It's a kind of training that fewer and fewer journalists get as there are fewer and fewer papers.

And it becomes easier and easier to see people who want publicity.

It's one of the oddest things to me when people ask you about doing interviews, what they're asking you about is how do you interview Mary Tyler Moore?

Well, you can't get a good interview out of Mary Tyler Moore.

Or if you're interviewing someone who's easy to get a good interview out of like Burt Reynolds, there's no trick to that.

The trick is interviewing the people around them so that when you go into the interview with them, you know what the questions are.

- I'd like you to tell us a little bit about in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, you made reference to spending three years not writing a book about the liquor business, I believe.

- Oh God.

Well, actually I really spent three years writing it, I just never finished it.

In about 19, right after I'd become a magazine writer, people start calling you up and asking you to do books.

And mainly what they do is ask you to do a book on what you've just done a magazine piece about 'cause editors aren't very creative.

And it's very frustrating because if you'd wanted to do a book about it, you wouldn't have written 3000 words on it.

You would still be writing, presumably.

So I went to a lot of lunches with editors, which were fun, I should have gone on doing that.

But instead, an editor came in with an idea that was really interesting to me.

He said, "Why don't you do a book on the American liquor industry?"

And I spent three years going nearly blind in the New York Public Library and interviewing all these really old distillers, all of whom remembered everything kind of wrong.

Especially when you're interviewing people about very famous in that field business tycoons who do sort of legendary tycoon-like things like force their minions to watch them go to the bathroom and stuff like that.

Really, I mean, this is a thing that tycoons instinctively do, all of them do this.

And smash the tops of desks and throw ashtrays and all that.

The stories tend to, it's sort of like the telephone game.

Instead of throwing an ashtray, they're throwing entire statues out the window.

And so it was a lot of hard work getting the memories down to scale.

Anyway, I then started writing it and I wrote 160 pages of it, and it was only 1920, I hadn't even gotten prohibition started.

And I was 30 years old, which felt like 100.

When you turn 30, you really think this is it, you have to make some decisions.

And I suddenly realized I would spend the rest of my life writing about the American liquor industry, I would never get to 1950 even, right?

So it was very depressing.

Meanwhile, in order not to have to work on the book and in order not to feel like I was dead, because there's nothing like you know, if you start as a daily journalist, then you become a magazine writer, you think you're dead between bylines, you think people forget you and that you cease to exist.

So I started writing personal stuff and taking an assignment here and there.

And I began to be able to write in a way that I didn't know I could write.

I began to write more humor and essays and things like that.

So meanwhile over here I was doing one thing, and over here I was writing a book that essentially any number of people could have been writing, none of whom I wanted to be.

So I thought I'd better stop.

So I paid them the money back.

So anyway, about a month ago, the New York Times called and said, would I review a book on one of these liquor people that my book was about?

And I took this 160 page book and I condensed it into 750 words.

So it wasn't a total loss.

Oh dear.

- Do you ever feel squeamish when you call someone like Julie Nixon Eisenhower, a chocolate covered spider?

I mean, does it ever make you feel a little funny when you typify people like this?

- Well, not in that case, no.

But is what you're ask, I mean, I think you're asking something, I may be wrong, but I think you're asking something else, which is how do you learn to live with the fact that people might get angry at what you write?

Is that what you're asking?

- Right on.

- Yeah.

Well, I think it's very hard to get used to, and I think it's one of the really seriously grown up things about me, that I do understand that.

The first couple of times it happens that someone you have written something about, sees you and is rude to you.

It takes a little time to say to you, I mean, 'cause who likes to be have people be rude to you, right?

It takes a little time to remember that you struck first and that they're absolutely right.

And I mean I basically, this is getting into really serious bromides from me, I can go right into Norman Vincent Peele.

But I think one of the things about being a grownup as opposed to being a child, is understanding that what you do has consequences.

And there are have been moments when I have been writing things that I have known perfectly well that I was going to have terrible trouble, particularly writing about the media, you know, The Women Column.

I wasn't so much a part of the Women's Movement and what I was writing about often didn't even have anything to do with it.

I would go to the Pillsbury Bake-off.

Well, I didn't have to worry about bumping into someone from the Pillsbury Bake-off again.

And in any case, I don't think I really hurt anyone's feelings, particularly there, I hope I didn't 'cause I liked all those women.

But the press thing was a constant thing where the minute you wrote it, you bumped into the person.

And in fact, the Daniel Schorr piece in the book, the week I completed it, I was invited to the Grid Iron Dinner, one of the more disgusting events that the media puts on once a year.

And there were, I think, 950 people in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel, and I was seated next to Daniel Schorr.

So that would happen.

And I'm not telling you this to pat myself on the back, I mean, that's what happens.

You sit there writing it and you know they're gonna be angry at you, and they are.

And if you can't handle that, you probably aren't going to be a very good journalist because if you try to please the person you're writing about, you will probably fail because they'll get angry at something that it never crossed your mind was going to irritate them.

And people hate being written about.

And I once wrote a piece that's in "Crazy Salad" that I thought was the most unabashed mash note to Gloria Steinem, I worshiped her.

I thought she was fabulous, that she was a heroine.

I wrote this piece of trash, she was furious at me because I said she used to wear Pucci dresses in it.

And I said it in the context of saying that she had changed.

I don't even think there's anything wrong with it.

I would've loved one.

So you realize you can't please anyone, and you might as well please yourself, or please whoever your ideal reader is.

- I have two questions, would you like to write another column?

And if so, what about?

- [Nora] I don't know.

- And what would you consider your worst piece is?

Would you tell us?

- Oh, well, some of them aren't in the books, you see, they're the ones I left out.

There was a piece I did on being made over by Cosmopolitan Magazine that I cringe over, that is in "Wallflower at the Orgy."

And it's just awful.

Now, I should be more benign toward it because it's something that I wrote when I was the person who wrote that piece.

But I don't like that part of me anymore, so I don't like the piece very much.

It's kind of cute, as in the Cosmopolitan style.

There are a couple things I did for Cosmopolitan, in fact, that if anyone ever dragged them out, I would pay them to put them away.

A couple pieces on how to start a conversation and how to meet a man.

And... The first one I ever sold is a real winner on how they chose the line at the "Copacabana," the chorus line.

Whew, you have to start somewhere.

So we have to remember that.

The piece I did on Barbara Streisand and motherhood, in Good Housekeeping Magazine is a turkey of the first proportion.

And.... - [Student] Do you like writing screenplays?

- Well, I like writing them, but I had one done on TV last year.

It wasn't supposed to be on TV, it was supposed to be a movie, but it didn't sell to the movies, it sold to television.

And when I saw it, I don't know if any of you has, probably not, I don't know if you've ever been so frightened that your stomach started moving, but that's what happened to me.

It was so awful, it was so terrible.

And I in fact was just pregnant, and I was really worried that this child was not gonna live through this television screening.

- [Student] It was a screening or when it aired?

- Well, I went to a screening before it aired.

I couldn't watch it when it aired, it was so dreadful.

Now this is not because they did not shoot my script, this is not because they went and changed all the lines.

Part of it was my fault, part of it was also the fault of the director who was really bad and one of the actresses who was really terrible.

But the point is, I had a wonderful time writing this script.

And then when it came out, the experience was so different from the writing experience, I cannot tell you.

And that of course, makes it so different from journalism and fiction writing, because the experience when it comes out ought to be fairly much the same.

No one else gets in the way unless they drop a paragraph.

It was really bad, I can't tell you.

But one good thing happened from it, it was about four women who hold up a hotel safe.

And the day after it was aired and old lady walked into a bank in Newton, Massachusetts and held it up successfully, and the sheriff blamed my television show.

And it was bliss, right?

I thought, that is power.

Forget journalism, she hit it twice, she hit it again, actually, got away with it twice.

- Nora is there anything going on now.

Magazines like People now are coming out and Us, and they're crowding up the news stands with this kind of stuff and pushing Harper's and Atlantic to the side, i get that impression now.

Is that what's going on, do you think?

- Well, I think there are a couple of things going on.

One is that one is certainly gossip and sort of endless preoccupation.

And the other are these special interest magazines like Jogger's World and that sort of thing, which appeal to advertisers so much because the reader of them is a guaranteed purchaser of a certain amount of sporting equipment.

- [Will] Like Golf Digest.

- Yeah, and you know, in the meantime, in the middle, I think the serious magazine that publishes long journalism is totally being squeezed.

Rolling Stone has gone back almost totally to entertainment stuff, they used to do more serious journalism than they do.

And Esquire is printing shorter things now.

Milton Glaser has a wonderful metaphor that he has where he talks about how cars, the design of cars has always reflected whatever means of transportation was dominant.

So that when cars started, they looked like carriages, and then in the '20s, they looked like trains, they looked like locomotives.

And then in the '40s when the car was dominant, you had your great era of car design when cars were their most car-like, and now they look like airplanes.

And Milton gave this as an example of what's happened in magazines because when magazines began, they looked like newspapers.

And then in the '30s you had the great era of magazine design, and now magazines look like television.

And what he means by that is that it's all little short bursts.

The assumption is that you aren't gonna wanna spend a long time with something, you want little pieces of things, boxes, New York Magazine, Milton was one of the first people to box a tremendous amount of stuff, pull stuff out of an article, make a little box out of it, so that if you couldn't get the reader to read all that print, there'd be a nice easy way for him to get into the article.

- Now where are the writers for the magazines that work for Harper's, Atlantic, where are they going after when crunch keeps coming though?

- Well, the ones who can't go to The New Yorker, and many of them can't, will have to write books, we're just all gonna have to think of books to write.

It's too bad for us, I mean, for those of us who like writing nice magazine pieces, but I suppose we have to grow up someday.

- Do you have any last minute advice for students coming up right now, finishing school, going into journalism?

- Well, my main advice for kids going to journalism is go get a job in a newspaper, whatever kind of journalist you wanna be, go and get that thing where you learn to write every single day on a deadline.

One of the most glorious things about being trained as a journalist is that you almost never get writer's block.

Because if you work at a newspaper, it is not tolerated.

You have writer's block, you get fired, no one thinks it's charming or artistic, or that it makes you more creative or terrific.

And I just think it's the best training you can have with any kind of thing where you keep writing every day.

But don't go work on a house organ at an insurance company where you write every day.

Go work in journalism so you can see how reporters' minds work, how editors' minds work, so you can see what a story is.

So you can learn to think that way.

It's a terrible thing where people think something is a story and it's not, or that it's an idea to do a piece on the China Syndrome, that is not an idea.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, everybody has most the same ideas.

- This is George Plimpton, thanking you for participating in our "Writer's Workshop."

Please join us again next time.

(upbeat music) (gentle music)