Remembering Ephron and her Palm Beach daze
“IT’S certain that fine writing women eat a crazy salad with their meat,” wrote William Butler Yeats.
ONCE upon a time, I went to Palm Beach, as a typical lowly aspiring reporter. I didn’t know anybody who was rich and/or famous. Yet here I was trying to cover the rich and famous as an outsider.
The only person I knew in Palm Beach was The New York Times’ ace correspondent Charlotte Curtis. We just happened to be there at the same time. She was a first-class name for the Times, eventually vaulting to the top of publishing and the editorial pages. Back then in the ’60s, Charlotte took a shine to me and also took pity on me. She liked to teach and frequently corrected me. (“Liz, in Palm Beach, people don’t wear blue jeans or Levi’s as ‘informal wear!’”) She introduced me around and also encouraged so-called “Society’s” much-feared and acerbic Jerome Zipkin to adopt me. (Thereby, I was given “access” to certain circles I could never have received on my own. For instance, in the far off future, Zipkin’s backing meant that I’d creep into the Nancy-Ronnie crowd.)
It amused Mr. Zipkin to force other uppity souls to accept me. He himself was so critical that he once criticized the Colony Hotel, forcing them to tear down and replace closets so that they no longer crushed the shoulders of his suits. When it was done, Jerry sniffed and never patronized the hotel again.
With this tiny basic foundation, I began to write a bylined column for an unassuming publication named The Palm Beach Social Pictorial. This was a local little publication that used lots of pictures and pleased advertisers and people who were, I guess, climbing. (I should explain that this slim beginning gave me the eventual boost to land a runaway real column in The New York Daily News.) I was lucky enough to reap the whirlwind of its Hearst founder Walter Winchell. (This fame as a byline lasted 40 years.)
It may be all ancient history, but just the other day I was weeding books out of my library. I picked a bestseller from the early ’70s by my pal Nora Ephron titled “Crazy Salad.” The book was only the beginning of Nora’s wicked witty output. It ended with her untimely death in 2012. This, after she’d become a successful screenwriter, movie director and world-class social critic.
In “Crazy Salad,” Nora examined The Palm Beach Social Pictorial. That was the last word from Nora on the playground of the rich, now reverberating down the years at Mar-aLago — the current pres- ident’s winter White House.
Oh, if only Nora Ephron were alive today to give us her 2017 viewpoint.
However, I do want to print the end of Nora’s chapter on Palm Beach — I wish I could reprint the entire thing, but that would be three columns, and I try to resist being quite that lazy! Here’s Nora:
“The rich are different from you and me; we all know that even if some people in Palm Beach don’t. But it is impossible to read the Social Pictorial without suspecting that the rich in Palm Beach are even more different. One of my friends tells me that Palm Beach used to be a rather nice place and that now it has become a parody of itself; I don’t know if she’s right, but if she is, the Social Pictorial reflects this perfectly. If there were more communities like it, I don’t think I would find The Palm Beach Social Pictorial so amusing. But there aren’t, so I do.”
READING: Late in noting this article, but please go and find it online. I mean Lauren Collins’ big story on the child refugee crisis in Europe. (Kids fleeing war-torn Mid-East for Europe, trapped in miserable camps — but still hoping for a better life.) This appeared in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker. I have been haunted ever since by the ghastly sweep of the piece, and one boy, Wasil, from Afghanistan. I hope to read, at some point, the rest of Wasil’s story. I hope it’s a happy ending. Dr. Michael Fox
Question: I just got an 8-week-old golden retriever, and I have a couple of questions. I would really like to make his food but am not sure of the following:
■ Should the recipe be changed at all for puppies? I thought large-breed puppies should maybe have a different formula.
■ How often and how much should I feed my puppy?
My sister makes your dog food recipe for her senior lab, and it works great. — M.B., Miami
Answer: After a puppy has been weaned and is eating solid food, I advise giving the pup a variety of different kinds of food with different ingredients. Every three to four days, offer him a different main protein such as eggs, then chicken, then cottage cheese, along with various fruits, vegetables and a small quantity of whole grains such as brown rice, amaranth and quinoa. My home-prepared diet includes this consideration. It is not so much that variety is the spice of life as food variety early in life can help reduce the