I Remember Nothing (6 page)

I couldn’t believe it.

I looked outside at the lawn. So much for the sod.

I called Delia. “Wait till you hear this development,” I said, and told her what had happened.

“Well, we’ll just even it out,” Delia said. “We’ll each give you whatever percentage of what we inherit and that will make it fair.”

“One-fourth,” I said.

“You were always better at math,” she said. “I will call the others.”

She called the others and called me back.

“Amy is willing,” she said. “Hallie is not.”

I couldn’t believe it. The four of us had always had an agreement that if any one of us was cut out of my father’s will, the others would cut her back in. Surely that applied to Uncle Hal too.

The day was not even over, and we had entered the third stage of inherited wealth: Dissension.

The next day I got a phone call from Hal’s lawyer. My father had turned out to be wrong: Hal had not cut me out of his will after all. He had left half his estate to the four of us, and the other half to Louise the housekeeper.

I was happy for Louise. She deserved the money.

As for me, I was down to one-eighth. Not as good as one-fourth, but if the estate turned out to be four million dollars, it was still a bundle of money.

“How much money is there?” I asked the lawyer.

“Not much,” he said.

“Not much meaning what?” I said.

“Less than half a million,” he said.

Way less than a half million, it turned out. Thanks to Irwin the dentist, Hal had lost almost all his money in the Puerto Rican adventure. What was left, divided by eight, would buy sod, but it was not going to rescue me from the screenplay I was writing.

“The good news,” the lawyer said, “is that if you inherit less than sixty-eight thousand dollars, there’s no inheritance tax.”

I called Delia and Amy and told them. I didn’t call Hallie. I was never speaking to my sister Hallie again.

I went upstairs and turned on my computer and went back to work.

The next week my sister Amy called to say that she had heard from Hal’s lawyer that there might be a Monet. There was a painting in the closet, and they
were sending it to the appraiser. By then, I had ceased hoping, but it didn’t stop Amy from entering the fourth stage of inherited wealth: The Possible Masterpiece in the Closet.

I probably don’t need to tell you that it was not a Monet.

In the end, the four of us inherited about $40,000 each from Uncle Hal.

So I never did enter the fifth stage of inherited wealth: Wealth.

I finished the screenplay and it got made. I am quick to draw lessons from my own experience, and the lesson I drew from this one was that I was extremely lucky not to have ever inherited real money, because I might not have finished writing
When Harry Met Sally
, which changed my life.

When Harry Met Sally
was a huge hit and it even went into profit. We bought a dogwood. It’s really beautiful. It blooms in late June, and it reminds me of my sweet Uncle Hal.

We went to the movies the other night. We live in New York City, where it costs $13.00 to see a movie, which doesn’t include the $1.50 surcharge for buying the tickets ahead of time online. I love buying tickets ahead of time online. One of the genuine miracles of modern life, as far as I’m concerned, is that moment when you enter a movie theater and stick your credit card into a machine, and it spits the exact tickets you ordered straight out at you. Every single time it happens, I just want to say, “I don’t believe it! This is great!! Wow!!!”

On the other hand, it turns out that there’s a new
technological advance in the buying-tickets-ahead-of-time department that takes all the fun out of it: you can now print out your confirmation at home, skip the machine, and go straight to the ticket taker. The ticket taker then scans your printout and prints the tickets right at the entrance to the theater, thus holding up all the people behind you on the ticket line and entirely eliminating the one miraculous moment you used to be able to count on when going to see a movie.

But the other night, as it turned out, we didn’t have to give our printout to the ticket taker, because when we walked into the theater, there was no ticket taker. The entrance to the theater was completely empty of personnel. The other customers just walked right in without giving their tickets to anyone, and we did too. We trooped two flights downstairs to Theater 7, expecting to bump into a ticket taker on our way to the theater, but we never did. We had also hoped to buy something at the refreshment counter, but the lower-level refreshment counter was closed and the popcorn was just sitting there, getting stale, in a big cold pile.

I should probably say at this point that the theater we went to was the Loews Orpheum 7, which is located at Eighty-sixth Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. I should probably also say that the Loews Orpheum 7 is owned by AMC, but it used to be owned by Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation, and when it was, I was on the board of directors of Loews. This was a sad experience in my life, because I had modestly hoped, in my role as a board member, to do something about the
unbelievably low quality of the food sold in movie theaters. As it turned out, no one at Loews cared about what I thought about the food sold in movie theaters. So I dutifully attended the board meetings and was subjected to a series of PowerPoint presentations that were meant to validate the company’s then-policy of building costly, large cineplexes, most of them conveniently located right across the street from other costly, large cineplexes being built by rival theater companies.

One day, about two years into my tenure, I was staying in Los Angeles, in a hotel, and I attended a Loews board meeting by telephone; it was so boring that I decided to put the call on hold and go get a manicure downstairs. When I got back to my room, only twenty minutes later, and picked up the receiver, everyone was screaming at one another. I didn’t want to admit that I had left the room—and by the way, no one had even noticed—so I listened for a while and realized that while I’d been out having my nails done, the company had gone bankrupt.

This was a shock to me and to everyone else on the board. I never did find out why the news hadn’t been mentioned earlier in the board meeting, but that, of course, was one of the reasons everyone was screaming at one another: there were people on the board whose companies owned shares in Loews Corporation who had just found out that they’d lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of a bankruptcy no one had even had the courtesy to warn them about. It wasn’t even on the agenda!

A few months later, a Canadian businessman bought Loews Theatres at a bargain-basement price and then sold it to AMC, which as far as I can tell has done nothing whatsoever to improve the food sold at the refreshment counter or anything else. I mean, it used to be so romantic to go to a movie—to sit in a great big theater that had a balcony, and boxes, and fabulous gilt trim on the walls, and a big red velvet curtain. Now we go to horrible unadorned gray rectangles where the sound bleeds in from the gray rectangle right next door. It’s sad.

Anyway, the other night. We passed the shuttered refreshment counter, went into the theater, and sat down. The ads were already playing. There was a diet cola ad that was so in love with itself that it actually recommended going to a special Web site that explained how the ad had been made. There was an ad for buying tickets ahead of time online. Then, suddenly, the sound turned off and the screen went completely dark. Several minutes passed. The theater was three-quarters full, but no one moved. In some strange and inexplicable way, I felt responsible. I stood up and went two flights upstairs. A ticket taker had materialized and was now taking tickets. I told her that the system in Theater 7 had shut down. She looked at me blankly. I asked her if she would tell someone that the system had shut down. She said she would and went on taking tickets. After a couple of minutes, when the customers had all passed through, she yelled out, “Projection, is
there something wrong in Theater Seven?” I went back downstairs.

The system started up again. A trailer began to play. I noticed that there was a large band of white light across the bottom of the screen, and that the images of the actors that were being projected were all cut off in the middle of their eyeballs.

I left the theater and walked upstairs again. The ticket taker was still there, taking tickets. I asked her if she would ask the projectionist to reframe the movie. Once again she looked at me blankly, so I asked again. She promised she would. I waited until she walked off in the direction of the unseen projectionist. By the time I got back to my seat, the image on-screen had been reframed, although not perfectly, but by then I was too exhausted by my heroism to complain further.

The movie began. It was out of sync, but hey, it was a good movie. And it was only
slightly
out of sync. Besides, there was a huge amount of cutting and action, so you could sort of live with its being out of sync. Then, in the last twenty minutes, the movie became unbelievably, noticeably, extraordinarily out of sync. But it was almost over. And I didn’t want to leave my seat for fear I might miss something.

Afterward, on my way out of the theater, I asked if I could speak to the theater manager. She turned out to be on maternity leave. I asked if I could speak to the assistant manager. There was no assistant manager on duty. So I ended up with my old friend, the ticket taker,
who was, as you can imagine, thrilled to see me again. I told her that the last reel of the movie we had just seen was out of sync and that they might want to fix it before the next show began. She promised me they would.

1. Journalists sometimes make things up.
   
2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong.
   
3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir.
   
4. Beautiful young women sometimes marry ugly, old rich men.
   
5. In business, there is no such thing as synergy in the good sense of the term.
   
6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
   
7. Nothing written in today’s sports pages makes sense to anyone who didn’t read yesterday’s sports pages.
   
8. There is no explaining the stock market but people try.
   
9. The Democrats are deeply disappointing.
   
10. Movies have no political effect whatsoever.
    
11. Men cheat.
    
12. A lot of people take the Bible literally.
    
13. Pornography is the opiate of the masses.
    
14. You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own.
    
15. People actually sign prenuptial agreements.
    
16. Mary Matalin and James Carville are married.
    
17. Bagels don’t taste as good as they used to.
    
18. Everybody lies.
    
19. The reason it’s important for a Democrat to be president is the Supreme Court.
    
20. Howard Stern is apparently very nice in person.
    
21. In Manhattan a small one-bedroom apartment that needs work costs $1 million.
    
22. People look like their dogs.
    
23. Cary Grant was Jewish.
    
24. Cary Grant wasn’t Jewish.
    
25. Larry King has never read a book.
    

There’s a new book out about diet, and it apparently says what I’ve known all my life—protein is good for you, carbohydrates are bad, and fat is highly overrated as a dangerous substance. Well, it’s about time. As my mother used to say, you can never have too much butter.

For example, here’s how we cook steak in our house: First you coat the steak in kosher salt. Then you cook the steak in a very hot frying pan. When it’s done, you throw a huge pat of butter on top of it. That’s it. And by the way, I’m not talking about sweet butter, I’m talking about salted butter.

Here’s another thing it says in this book: dietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I’ve known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I’m sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?

Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I’m forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they’re doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to
The New York Times
, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they’re the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that’s repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn’t. (Why isn’t it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.) In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors
but the people I know who’ve been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you.

So this is my moment to say what’s been in my heart for years: it’s time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don’t want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it’s also time to put a halt to, but I don’t seem be able to do anything about the war, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.

You don’t make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks in. A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.