Two new books delve into the 20th century's wittiest women

Sydney Morning Herald

22-04-2025

Kaplan's lavishly illustrated book would certainly catch the eye on anyone's coffee-table (although the captioning of the pictures is eye-rollingly literal and sometimes just plain wrong). But much of her commentary about Ephron reads like marketing hype.
'Think of her as the fairy godmother of modern-day rom-coms,' she urges. 'After years of a genre lying in wait, she waved her magic wand and penned dazzling scripts, equivalent to charming ball gowns for women who wouldn't take any shit.' And her afterword – in which she confesses that 'Nora's trio of groundbreaking genre films had shaped (her) core beliefs of finding true romance' – is simply embarrassing. And it's 'Nora' throughout, even though she never knew her.
She's alert to the primary focus of Ephron's work: 'Each project focuses on women who were three-dimensional and who had something to prove – either to themselves or to the world at large.' She also attends to her public persona – her humour, her fashion sense, her love affair with food – and to how her mantra that 'everything is copy' fuelled her work, especially her 1983 novel, Heartburn, a thinly disguised account of the collapse of her marriage to famed Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein.
But she never looks far beyond the surface, relying far too heavily on others' observations or assessments and coming up with few insights of her own. Jacob Bernstein's 2015 documentary about his mother, Everything Is Copy, is much more illuminating. Only in the book's final chapter, made up of interviews with some of those who worked with Ephron on her films, does Kaplan seem on more solid ground.
By way of contrast, British academic Gail Crowther's fluently written book about Parker is much more revealing, attentive to detail and interested in what might lie beneath the surface. She easily dispenses with the most dominant myth regarding Parker: that she was a bouncy, carefree soul, tossing witticisms across the famous Round Table with her illustrious peers in the literary world (among them Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood and Donald Ogden Stewart) at New York's Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s, before heading off to Hollywood where real money beckoned. Her account instead fixes on the collision between two early 20th-century phenomena, Parker and Hollywood, neither nice to be around, despite the surface glitter attached to both.
Like Crowther's 2021 book, Three-Martin Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, her portrait of Parker ponders what went wrong, what made this professionally successful woman so mean, why she seemed to be forever sabotaging herself, why she repeatedly attempted suicide, why she suffered such a sad, lonely death.
Intrigued, compassionate and affectionate at the same time as she keeps her distance, Crowther hones in on Parker's 'mix of helplessness and viciousness' as she situates her biography in the social circumstances of the time. Significant events swirl in the background: the 'Roaring '20s', the Great Depression, the imposition of the Hays Code to counter Hollywood's perceived debauchery, the general oppression of women in the social hierarchy, the rise of the 'Red Threat' and the establishment of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Commission) to deal with it.
Meanwhile, in the foreground, her Parker is a restless figure, struggling to make her way in a world that has no serious interest in anything she has to offer aside from her reputation, suffering the consequences of her alcoholism, dealing with the torture of miscarriages and failed relationships, discovering a political cause and finding herself blacklisted.
Loading
Curiously, Crowther largely sidesteps the possibility that traces of Parker's personality might be found in her work, whether on the page or the screen. But otherwise thorough in her research, she draws intelligently on her sources pointing to the gaps in their examinations and recognising that, perhaps inevitably, everyone's inner life is, finally, fated to remain a mystery.