How To Repossess A Life: NORA EPHRON

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Her mother named her Nora after Ibsen's feminist in A Doll's House, and she certainly slammed the door noisily when leaving her first two marriages. But she and her current husband Nicholas Pileggi are more like Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora -- for one thing, they have been making much of their living off of crime.

This is more obvious in Pileggi's case, since he wrote the book Wiseguy, about the federal witness-protection program, as well as the Martin Scorsese movie based on it, GoodFellas. Nora, meanwhile, did two comic riffs on the same theme -- screenplays for Cookie (with a Bobby Kennedy imitator as prosecutor) and My Blue Heaven (in which constricted FBI men learn from expansive Italian mobsters how to live). Ephron herself is critical of these movies, which ran into casting and directing troubles; but they are typical of her unexpected blindside tackles of ideology: How many movies have you seen in which the FBI foolishly does the bidding of the Mafia?

Ephron is better known for the screenplays that won her Oscar nominations, Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally , or for Heartburn, based on her breakup with Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. Yet she came late and reluctantly to her mother's craft, having seen how little happiness it brought that tortured role model. Phoebe Ephron and her husband Henry were prolific and successful screenwriters in the 1940s and '50s, getting credit for at least one masterpiece, The Desk Set. Nora says her mother did the actual typing, while "my father did the pacing up and down" -- roughly the same job division as in childbirth. Henry wrote a charming memoir of the couple's life together, We Thought We Could Do Anything, leaving out most of the bleak parts -- the alcoholism, the bitter fights that made their daughters beg the two to get a divorce, both parents' descent into mental illness. It was enough to make Nora, the eldest of the pair's four daughters, vow to put Hollywood, movies and screenwriting a full continent away from her own life. She became a journalist, a remote enough calling that "I thought it was like taking up carpentry."

But even in New York City she had a circle of old family friends to fall back on, since her parents had written first for Broadway. As a young reporter at the New York Post, Ephron presumed on her mother's acquaintance with her boss, the paper's owner, Dorothy Schiff, to present fellow reporters' complaints about filthy working conditions at the Post. Schiff gave her the runaround -- a dangerous thing to do to Ephron. Though she had been doing fluffy "women's items" at the Post, Nora discovered her real (and deadly) talent when she deftly beheaded Schiff in an Esquire article.

After that she became the wittiest journalistic headhunter of the '70s. The list of her victims is long, but the names matter less than the grounds for their execution. Like all good essayists, she was basically a moralist, sketching types of irresponsible privilege (Schiff), proprietary righteousness (Betty Friedan), oracular emptiness (Theodore White), poses of profundity (Gail Sheehy) and head-over-heels self-infatuation (Brendan Gill).