I Must Say (35 page)

I was in an upbeat mood that week because the weekend before, my youngest, Henry, had graduated from Notre Dame. It had not been an easy road for Henry after his mom died, but he figured it out, worked hard, and got the job done. Lots of people came up to me at the graduation ceremony and said, “What a wonderful job you did raising Henry”—and while I appreciated the sentiment, I found myself replying, “Well, let's just be clear here. While I was filming a picture in Acapulco, Nancy was up at 5:20 a.m. taking him to hockey practice.”

The day I did double duty on
Live with Kelly
and
Today
, I dashed straight from ABC, where the former was filmed, to NBC, where the fourth-hour hosts, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, awaited me.

I know Kathie Lee a little, dating back to when she hosted the morning
Live
show with Regis Philbin, and I was a guest, and she'd also bravely subjected herself to the Jiminy treatment the first season I did
Primetime Glick
. So I bounded into
Today
's studio on Rockefeller Plaza, wearing the same outfit and makeup I'd worn on
Live with Kelly
, got my mic clipped on, and commenced the
Madagascar 3
plugfest.

In the course of our chitchat, we started talking about Henry's recent college graduation and how wonderful an occasion it had been for my family. Thus prompted, Kathie Lee said, “You and Nancy have got one of the greatest marriages in show business. How many years now for you guys?”

That sounded odd: How many years
now
? I fumbled for a reply: “We, uh . . . married thirty-six years.”

“But you're still, like,
in love
,” Kathie Lee said. Okay, now I realized that she was actually unaware of Nancy's death. If we had been taping, I would have simply stopped the interview and told her that Nancy had died two years back. But we were live, and in the moment, I decided that it would embarrass Kathie Lee if I corrected her on the air. Let it pass, I thought. We'll move on.

“Madly in love, madly in love,” I responded to her, truthfully. And that, I assumed, was the end of it. Only it wasn't.

“Why?” Kathie Lee asked.

I tried to wrap it up in a bow. “Cute! I'm cute.”

“And you make each other laugh, right?”

Oh, dear, this is becoming a thing, I thought. Was it possible she thought we were taping a rerun?

We went to commercial right after that, and I gently told Kathie Lee that Nancy had died in August 2010. She was mortified, but I bore not an ounce of malice toward her. She does a zillion interviews a week, and she got confused.

In the course of rushing from one morning program to another, I'd neglected to shut off my cell phone, as real professionals do when appearing on live television. The phone started vibrating as soon as I exited through the door of the
Today
studio. It was Paul Shaffer. “Did I just hit my head?” he said, stifling his Paul laugh. “What was . . . I can't . . . What I just saw . . . It really couldn't have happened, could it?”

As soon as I hung up with Paul, the phone buzzed again. Steve Martin. He was cracking up with laughter. “Okay,” he said, “I'm reading a transcript of this thing. I haven't seen it, but there's already a transcript online.”

A transcript online? That was the first time I came to
understand how social media can make things go crazily out of control. Suddenly, Kathie Lee's allegedly “cringeworthy” gaffe was all over Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. The next day I had to do a junket for
Madagascar 3
, sitting for one five-minute interview after another, and every single interviewer was asking me about Kathie Lee. I had to tell the DreamWorks people to make them stop, because no one was asking any questions about the movie.

Besides, Kathie Lee wasn't wrong. Nan and I
did
have one of the greatest marriages in show business. And I
do
think of my late wife in the present tense, as a way of keeping her memory alive. I just usually do this internally, in the comfort of my own home . . . not out loud, on live national television.

T
here was a missing voice in the blitz of phone calls I received in the immediate aftermath of the Kathie Lee episode: Nora Ephron's. No one got on the phone faster after such episodes than Nora, and her take was always the cleverest and most perfectly distilled of all. Nora had been such a boon to me and the kids since Nancy's death. That first Thanksgiving, I assigned each kid to handle a different part of the meal preparation so that the dinner would remain a family affair. Henry was in charge of dessert, and it was Nora, on the phone from New York, who offered him step-by-step guidance on baking the perfect apple pie. I could hear her through the receiver telling him, “First of all, don't do anything your father tells you, and go to Gelson's and buy the Pillsbury pie crust, because no human being can do one better!” She phoned Henry ninety minutes later to remind him to take the pie out.

Steve too was used to hearing from Nora on a regular basis, and by the end of May 2012, he was getting concerned that she had
neither called nor responded to his e-mails. “Have you heard from Nora?” he finally asked me.

“I just had dinner with her and Nick about ten days ago,” I replied.

“Oh, good,” Steve said. “But can you do me a favor? Can you look in your datebook and verify that it was ten days ago?”

I looked, and I was wrong. It had been more like four weeks since I'd dined with the Ephron-Pileggis.

Our whole circle of friends was worried. But I remembered that in 2006, when I was in New York doing
Fame Becomes Me
, she'd briefly been on the drug prednisone for some reason or other. She never really opened up about it, and I instinctively respected that, so we didn't ask questions. I had wondered back then if she had lupus, but before I knew it, Nora had roared back to health as if nothing had ever been wrong, writing two more plays and directing
Julie & Julia
. At that point I reassured myself that Nora would be okay, just like last time.

What I didn't know, and virtually none of her friends did, was that Nora had been diagnosed with a rare blood disorder back in 2006, and had been prescribed the prednisone to stabilize her condition. It had worked remarkably well, as I would later learn when her son Jacob Bernstein wrote about the full extent of her medical ordeals in the
New York Times Magazine
. But right around Memorial Day weekend 2012—again, I only learned this after the fact—the blood disorder developed into aggressive leukemia.

When Nora didn't show up at the annual Shakespeare in the Park fund-raiser at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, held that year on June 18, the alarm bells started ringing in everyone's heads. Nora relished that night, the de facto beginning of summer for cultured NYC types, and always bought a table or two. She still had the tables, but she and Nick weren't at them. A week later
Jacob called to deliver the devastating news that his mom was gravely ill and wasn't going to last much longer. And oh, by the way, he said, Nora had left specific instructions for her memorial service in a file carefully marked
EXIT
on her Mac desktop. I, per Nora's instructions, was to be the first speaker. “Don't hesitate to be funny,” Jacob said.

I was stunned.
Be funny? When one of my rocks of sanity is crumbling?

Then I took a breath and realized that this was not the first time I had been in such a situation. Four years earlier, in the summer of 2008, my beloved Buddha of a manager, Bernie Brillstein, had passed away at the age of seventy-seven, and Lorne Michaels and Bernie's former business partner, Brad Grey, had deputized me to be master of ceremonies at
his
memorial, at UCLA's historic Royce Hall. As saddened as I was then, I rallied and came up with material that resonated with the comedian-heavy crowd:

A man who enjoyed the success of others. . . . A man who didn't have an enemy in the world. . . . A man who never said an unkind word about anyone. . . . It would be so much easier tonight if we were memorializing a man like that.

      
Bernie Brillstein was an integral part of Hollywood and show business. Many of us use expressions today that Bernie created—expressions like “Go fuck yourself,” and “How about
you
go fuck yourself?”

      
This is such an ironic evening for me, because Bernie always used to say, “Kid, I'm going to get you a gig at Royce Hall if it
kills
me.”

And on and on it went. So, okay, I could handle doing Nora's memorial. But first I had to break Jacob's news to my kids, who
adored Nora and would never forget how she had been there for them, so it felt like a replay of their mother's death. Telling them was hard, and as I expected, they all cried. Three days after Jacob's call, Nora was gone.

Nancy and Nora: two brilliant, tough, funny women, so simpatico in life and so fascinatingly private in their approaches to death. As Deb Divine said after Nora died, “I think it's getting more interesting on the other side.”

I remember Nora sitting with us in our house in August 2010, hearing me go on about how, per Nancy's wishes, we weren't going to have a proper funeral.

“No funeral,” Nora said, her hand to her chin. “Interesting idea!” And of course I now realize she'd been taking notes, figuring out her own plans.

O
n July 9, 2012, I fulfilled my late friend's request to be the opening act at her memorial service, which was held in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The other speakers included Tom and Rita, Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, Rosie O'Donnell, and Nora's two boys, Max and Jacob. I won't give you the whole speech (especially since Nora's sister Delia good-naturedly claimed authorship of a brilliant line I attributed to Nora, “Hazelnuts are what's wrong with Europe”), but here's how I kicked it off:

Oh, Nora. Darling, lovely Nora.

      
How is it possible for me to put into words what we have been feeling these last long weeks?

      
When Nora's son Jacob asked me to speak today, he said,

“Don't be hesitant to impersonate my mother.”

      
And I thought to myself: I can't impersonate your mother,
because
right now I'm having the best pink cake from Amy's I've ever had in MY LIFE. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

      
For whenever I heard Nora's voice, I always just delighted in that subtle, original, hilarious delivery of hers.

      
And I always thought, You know
, I
have that!

      
But then I thought, Oh, yeah . . . she had
content.

      
I loved to talk to Nora, and I always found myself calling my friends afterward to tell them something Nora had said. I remember last March, Nick and Nora came to an evening for the Roundabout Theatre, honoring Rob Marshall. And Rob's sister Kathleen heard that they were attending, and quickly sent Nora an e-mail asking her if she would go onstage and read a letter from Mayor Bloomberg.

      
Nora's e-mailed response was, “Oh, Kathleen . . . How could I ever say no to you—and yet I have.”

M
y life has been defined by round numbers. I was born in 1950, was orphaned at the age of twenty (in the year 1970), and was widowed at the age of sixty (in the year 2010).

The forty years bracketed by those last two events constitute the better part of my adulthood. They were an extraordinary four decades, throwing more experiences at me than that unusual boy in the Whitton Road attic could ever have imagined: success, failure, friendship, first love, true love, marriage, fatherhood, fame, fortune, misfortune, euphoria, grief.

When I look back on my life—and, by the way, if I do say so myself, I have a pretty remarkable memory; or, as I said to someone the other day, “I remember where I was in the third month of my twenty-seventh year, just like that
Taxi
actress renowned for her ‘super-memory,' Marilu . . . um . . . uh . . . what's her name?”—I see moments where it might have been understandable had I turned to drugs or ice cream.

But I never succumbed. My natural tendency, no matter what difficult period I'm going through or have been through, is to be happy. No doubt this is a trait coded in my DNA, a likely inheritance from my mother. I must also give credit to my blessed, sweet, lunatic siblings. They too have the happy gene, so, being the youngest, I've also been the beneficiary of trickle-down happiness. My sister, Nora, and my brothers Michael and Brian maintained their positivity after David and my parents passed, and they've remained beacons of support and love every moment since. To this day, when the four of us are together, we love nothing more than to drink rum and Cokes, play card games (Oh Hell being our favorite), and laughingly taunt each other, going way too far under the protective guise of “Only kidding!” Hanging with my brothers and sister is still one of my greatest joys.

Scott Wittman likes to joke that, of all the comedy people he knows, and he knows many, I am “the only one who's truly
laughing
on the inside.” But my upbeat nature is also a function of resilience: a firm belief in what I told my son Henry that night before Nancy died—that tough experiences Teflon-coat you and strengthen you against further adversity. This lesson is, I suppose, a major reason I wrote this book: because along the way I've picked up the wisdom that bad things happen, and yet the sun still comes up the next day, and it's up to you to carry on living your life and keeping your setbacks in perspective. You also have to understand that on some level, these horrible and sad things happen to everyone; the mark of a man is not just how he survives it all but also what wisdom he's gained from the experience. My cheerfulness on TV talk shows isn't faked, but it is also far from the product of a life gone perfectly.