How To Repossess A Life Witty NORA EPHRON takes control by telling her story her way, as a novelist, screenwriter and now as director of a touching new movie

By GARRY WILLS

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).

That was the time of the "new journalism," but Tom Wolfe, presiding over the movement, did not notice that Ephron was writing some of the best reportorial prose of the era (he predictably singled out, in his anthology of new journalism, Joan Didion). It was a period of burgeoning feminism, but some feminists closed ranks against a woman who admitted, as Ephron did, that she still had fantasies of being raped. Yet everything valid in The Beauty Myth was said in Ephron's famous essays on breast size and vaginal perfumes, and male oppression is nowhere better described than in her article on women in the magazine world. She was portraying betrayed women -- Pat Loud on TV, Barbara ("Bootsie") Mandel in the Maryland Governor's mansion -- long before she became one.

But then a funny thing happened to Ephron -- or one she hoped she could turn into a funny thing. After criticizing celebrity journalists, she married one of the leading celebrity journalists, Bernstein, and found out, after others knew about it, that her husband was having an affair with the British ambassador's wife.

Ephron took her two babies to New York, where her hospitalized father kept an apartment, and began to put her life back together, writing screenplays (the thing she had sworn never to do) for some fast money, and -- in three annual work periods -- telling her story her way in the novel Heartburn. "It saved her life," Pileggi says of the book. How so? "Well, for one thing, she was broke." But there is more to it than that. The humiliation described in the novel is that she, the witty observer of other people's lives, was unaware of what was going on in her own. The book was her way of ending up more knowing than anyone else who knew about the matter. The struggle is for a tone so wry and detached that revenge gives way to the work of reappropriating one's life. To psychoanalytical formulas about choosing the wrong partner, she responds with a cleansing comic nihilism: "Let's face it, everyone is the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with."

The novel is a long comic monologue, closer to Portnoy's Complaint than to the higher-class Peyton Place that Mike Nichols made of the movie. "I have spent more sleepless nights wondering how I might have saved that movie," Ephron says. Probably she lost it the minute her first-person voice was removed from the script.

She began to realize she could not control her scripts unless she became a director -- which she has just done, in the witty and poignant This Is My Life, which opened the Sundance Film Festival last week and will be released commercially Feb. 21. The script, which she wrote with her sister Delia, treats a comedian (Julie Kavner), caught between the conflicting demands of career and kids, who uses her daughters' lives in her routine. This kind of family cannibalism is something the Ephron sisters grew up with.

When Nora went to Wellesley, she and her disintegrating mother exchanged bantering letters that the mother turned into a hit play, Take Her, She's Mine, holding off the dark for a while with Broadway glitter. The family's appropriation of one another's lives in print looks like exploitation; but it was more an attempt to contain one's life, as it spun out of control, by telling it as a story. When Nora took personal troubles to her, Phoebe would say, "It's all copy," a lesson repeatedly preached by Kavner to her children in This Is My Life. When Phoebe came out of the shadows for a lucid moment on her deathbed, she said to Nora, "You're a journalist, take notes."

Sister Delia says, "Our mother was not the warmest person, but she established our world. I think of her as a security blanket without the warmth. She had an opinion on everything, and we ((daughters)), who are just as opinionated, did everything she told us to. The Ephron girls do not join sororities or any organized religion." Each daughter had to take two years of Latin and three years of French in high school. "God forbid we should have anything to do with science," Delia recalls. Delia grew up resisting the idea of writing altogether: "Nora had staked that out." But when she did eventually start writing magazine articles, Nora's only criticism was that she quoted too many other people. "What do you think? Never write without knowing what you think," Nora told her. "That," says Delia, "is just what Mother would have said."

Phoebe Ephron produced a busy sisterhood of scribblers. Amy, the youngest, a novelist, admits, "I wasn't exactly encouraged to be a landscape painter." Only Hallie, the third daughter, has not tried her hand at fiction. (She is a computer programmer.)

Nora began her directing career as she did her reporting days at the Post, tapping her circle of influential friends. She interviewed successful directors for practical advice -- Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Rob Reiner. Reiner, with whom Nora had collaborated on When Harry Met Sally , wrote a detailed director's commentary on the shooting script of This Is My Life and gave advice on the editing. "Everyone told me how fatiguing it would be, how I should get into shape before shooting started," says Ephron. "They didn't tell me how great it would be. I couldn't wait to get back to the set. I was learning more in a week than I had learned in my whole life."

Pileggi says she had total control of the process, down to what food was being served by the commissary. "It's all like one big typewriter for her." He sees a pattern in the way Nora circled back, almost despite herself, to the life she had fled. "She certainly had no grand career plan to do this. Her grand career plan is usually how to get all the ingredients together for next Thursday's dinner party."

But people could say of Ephron now, at age 50, what Katharine Hepburn once said of her feminist mother -- that she managed to have it all, career, husband, family and fame. One of the themes of Heartburn the novel, Ephron's best work so far, is that no one can have it all, that life unravels faster than you can weave it back together -- another lesson she learned from her haunted mother. But if, when her movie is released, the critics attack it, that will no doubt be used in future projects to control her life at that stage. It's all copy.