Nora Ephron – Robert Cromie, Bookbeat – Discussing Crazy Salad – September 6, 1975 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Nora Ephron is interviewed by Robert Cromie on the NET series Bookbeat from September 6, 1975. She discusses her latest book, Crazy Salad and her career as a Journalist.
To quote Nell Minow’s 2016 appreciation via Roget Ebert’s website:
“Nora was the oldest daughter of screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (their story is told in Henry’s memoir, We Thought We Could Do Anything). They were New York City playwrights lured west to adapt established works like “Carousel” and “Daddy Long Legs” for Hollywood. Their four daughters grew up in Beverly Hills while the Ephrons worked on films like “Desk Set,” starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” with Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe and “Captain Newman, M.D.,” with Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis. Phoebe wrote to Nora at camp describing the scene outside her office on the studio lot: a special effects crew creating the parting of the Red Sea for “The Ten Commandments,” using blue Jell-O.”
“Nora was in the right time and place when two great upheavals came together in the 1970’s: the feminist movement and the arrival of “new journalism”—vital, opinionated, very personal writing that powered popular and influential magazines like Clay Felker’s New York Magazine. This was the perfect place for her distinctive, confiding voice. Her essays were deceptively self-deprecatory—her first collection was called Wallflower at the Orgy and one of her best-known pieces describes her insecurity about having small breasts. But Nora’s columns, especially the series about women collected in Crazy Salad and the series about media in Scribble Scribble, are fierce, confident, devastating takedowns of those she found pretentious, hypocritical, or smug, including her former boss at the New York Post and the President’s daughter, whom she described as “a chocolate-covered spider.”
Here is that complete episode of Bookbeat featuring Nora Ephron from September 1975.
