The Tiramisu Scene, and Other Nora Ephron Pleasures

Scenes from her movies. Her favorite romances. Dousing Carl Bernstein with a bottle of red wine.

Most every moviegoer of a certain age has a favorite scene from a Nora Ephron film. Here’s mine:

It’s from Sleepless in Seattle, which she co-wrote and directed. Rob Reiner and Tom Hanks are having food in a diner, talking about dating women. The character Hanks is playing is a widower who is very uncertain about getting back into the dating game after being away from it for so long. Reiner is his buddy in the film, and his advice for him boils down to one word:

Tiramisu.

Nothing more about the scene is memorable to me except for that one idea: That the key to getting into the good graces of women is a rich Italian dessert. It always makes me think of my friend Gary Grillo who walked out of the theater after seeing Sleepless and decided his one course in life was to learn how to make a delicious tiramisu.

Gary sold textiles for a living and made money at it. He lived in a three-story white house with a remodeled kitchen and a deluxe brand-name fridge in the trendy Silver Lake section of L.A. Punk rocker Adam Ant lived nearby. Gary has thick eyebrows, a ponytail, and until they passed on goofy likable dogs that left you with little gifts of hair when they brushed up against your pants when you tried to pet them. Being of Italian heritage, whose mother made spaghetti to die for, Gary likes to cook. Every year for Christmas he made cheesecakes in his fancy kitchen to give as presents to friends and family. Tiramisu became his next big baking project.

It’s not easy to make a good one, I know that. It takes time and it’s complicated to get it right. But he did it. He put in the time and got it right. I know because I tasted one or two of them at the dinner parties he held at his house where you could stand on the back deck and look out at the lights of other houses glowing like tiny stars against the darkness of the hills. I don’t know if Adam Ant ever came to one of his parties but single women did. Attractive single women. Rob Reiner was right. Just ask Gary. Women do apparently appreciate a man who can make a good tiramisu.

So that’s my favorite Nora Ephron movie memory. What’s yours? Shoot me an email at kevinnelson@substack.com. I’d love to hear it.

The Fake Orgasm Scene

Nora Ephron died a dozen years ago after a full life of writing, making movies, cooking beautiful food, hosting famous dinner parties in New York and Washington D.C., marrying three times, and raising two sons. The movie for which she will always be remembered is When Harry Met Sally... She wrote the screenplay, Rob Reiner directed, and anyone who has seen the film vividly remembers the fake orgasm scene.

Favorite movie scenes can be very personal. There are smaller scenes that speak directly to you for whatever reason (like me and tiramisu.) Then there are the big, show-stopping scenes that everybody loves, like when Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) are eating at a diner. They’re friends; sex hasn’t complicated their relationship yet. Their talk turns to orgasms. Billy, representing clueless males everywhere, maintains that women do not fake orgasms during sex and if they did their lovers would surely know. Meg’s character says “Oh yeah?” and proceeds to show him and all the rest of the astonished diners what a woman in the throes of a colossal pretend orgasm looks and sounds like.

As revealed in Everything Is Copy, a charming documentary film about Ephron made by her son Jacob Bernstein that is now running on Max (formerly HBO), contributions by the two stars helped make that scene what it is. In Ephron’s original script faking the orgasm was only discussed, not demonstrated. It was during the read-through that Meg Ryan suggested actually doing it—not just talking about it but putting on the show right there, in the diner, with everyone looking on in stupefied amazement. It’s a bravura performance. Seated at the next table is an older woman who, after Meg does her thing, is asked by the waitress what she’d like to order. “I’ll have what she’s having,” she says, thereby bringing down the house in every theater where When Harry Met Sally... was ever shown.

Billy Crystal came up with that line. It was his idea to end the scene that way.

The Pie in the Face Scene

Some scenes work, some don’t. A Nora Ephron scene that falls into the latter category is from Heartburn; she wrote the screenplay based on her bestselling novel of the same name. The book is a scathing and witty roman à clef based on her disastrous—disastrous except for their two children—marriage with Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter best known for breaking the Watergate break-in story and bringing down the Nixon presidency. The two were among the most famous couples in Washington D.C. They had a little toddler and Nora was pregnant with their second child when Bernstein, who evidently was quite the “playa,” struck up an extramarital affair with Margaret Jay, the wife of Peter Jay, the former British ambassador.

Ephron and Bernstein were at a dinner party with some other Washington A-listers when the painful realization came over Nora that yes, her famous husband was a two-timing shit and she was no longer going to be a good girl about it. So she stood up from her seat, asked the host for a bottle of red wine, and walked over to where Carl was sitting. Sally Quinn, like Bernstein a star Post journalist, was agog at what happened next:

“She took the bottle and walked behind Carl and she started pouring the red wine on top of his head,” she recalled. “The wine ran down all over his clothes and he just sat there. He didn’t move. And she just kept pouring, glug, glug, glug.” And not long after that their brief marriage did the same. Went glug, glug, glug and was over.

In the movie Heartburn, however, the bottle of red wine is gone, replaced by a cream pie. Meryl Streep, playing Nora, smashes it into the face of Jack Nicholson, who is the Carl character. How many times have we seen pies pushed into people’s faces in the movies? It’s a slapstick bit as old as time and the scene, like the film, falls flat.

Nora’s Favorite Movie Romances

Not long before her passing Ephron wrote a retrospective piece on the romantic films she most loved and that had provided inspiration for her own work. Even serious movie buffs may not have seen them all. Here they are:

It Happened One Night. 1934. “Starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, it was made in those long-ago days when women looked like women and men looked like men,” she wrote wistfully.

The Thin Man. 1934. William Powell and Myrna Loy, the first in a Thin Man series of five.

The Lady Vanishes. 1938. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. “In addition to everything else he did,” said Ephron, “Hitchcock made great romantic movies.”

His Girl Friday. 1940. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell.

The Palm Beach Story. 1942. Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea.

Casablanca. 1942. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman.

The Apartment. 1960. Directed by Billy Wilder. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine.

Charade. 1963. “Once again,” wrote Ephron, “there’s a plot, which always helps. This is a mystery and a love story.” Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn.

Splash. 1984. Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks (who was a close friend of Nora’s and starred in two of her most successful films, “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”)

Hannah and Her Sisters. 1986. Ephron especially liked the scene between Woody Allen and Dianne Wiest in Tower Records at the end of the film. “One of the greatest falling-in-love scenes ever filmed,” she called it.

Sense & Sensibility. 1995. Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant in an Ang Lee-directed adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. “Everything works,” said Nora. Kinda like with When Harry Met Sally...