The Times Magazine 59A few months later, in March 2017, Ephron
went for her six-month check-up and learnt
that she had leukaemia. She had watched
her sister live under this diagnosis for six
years, keeping it secret, considering a bone
marrow transplant that might have cured her
(Ephron herself was found to be a match) but
eventually deciding against it given the odds
and the ghastliness of the treatment. Gail
Roboz, director of the leukaemia programme
at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, had
looked after Nora in her last years and was
Delia’s doctor too. In her book, Ephron says
she chose Roboz partly because she looked
almost like a member of the family: “Dark
hair, brown eyes, slender, Jewish... beautifully
dressed under her white doctor coat.”
“You are not your sister,” Roboz told Ephron.
“We both had AML [acute myeloid
leukaemia],” Ephron says. “But under a
microscope, AML looks different in different
patients. Each marrow is different.”
Still, it was a hard lesson to learn.
“I spent my whole childhood just wanting
to do everything [Nora] did,” she says.
Their parents, Henry and Phoebe, were
screenwriters in Beverly Hills who turned
out romantic comedies and raised their four
daughters to do the same. Delia was the
second child. “Every time I said something
funny my dad shouted, ‘That’s a great line.
Write it down.’ ”
Phoebe was even more businesslike. “The
great thing about my mother was that she just
believed that we would have serious lives, all
of us,” Ephron says. Phoebe grew up poor
in the Bronx and “she was the only working
mother I knew”. But she was not particularly
warm. Nora “was my big sister, and my
mother was not a loving person, and so
Nora really took it over”, Ephron tells me.
“I know what she thinks about everything,
even if she’s not here, because she spent her
life advising me, raising me.”
Nora was also a hard act to follow: a
national treasure, credited with reinventing
the romantic comedy. Delia spent much of her
life “trying to be different from Nora in some
way”, she says. So it was true, as the doctor
said, that she was not her sister. “But at that
moment it felt like a betrayal,” she says. “It
was both traumatising and empowering. It
was a very powerful and difficult thing.”
Before she began chemotherapy, Peter
proposed to her. They married in a private
dining room in the hospital and, after the
cake, she received her first infusion of an
experimental new drug. He followed her
progress, monitoring her numbers: he was
after all a doctor. Delia preferred not to know
what they were. “I didn’t want to follow my
progress, my ups and downs,” she says.
Nora had researched everything very
thoroughly, but Ephron discovered that thiswas not her style. Nora had also kept her
illness secret. “That didn’t work for me,”
Ephron says. “But being really famous and
telling people you’re sick is very different...
Because if she had, every time she left the
house somebody on the corner would say,
‘Oh, I’m sorry you’re sick.’ She would never
get a moment without it. Plus, she wouldn’t
be able to direct anything because she
wouldn’t get insurance.”
Ephron was freer in this respect. She
published an article about her treatment and
the drug that put her cancer into remission.
“For me, I needed to have people on the
journey with me,” she says.
For seven months her cancer was in
remission. Travelling with her new husband
to Oregon to see a total eclipse of the sun,
she watched Earth’s small moon blotting out
a giant star and felt it was rather like her
story – of triumphing against the odds. In
Wales she saw Tintern Abbey and found
herself identifying with the ruin. Then, in
November 2017, the cancer came back.
It had come back quickly, and Roboz
didn’t think more drugs would work. Her only
option was a bone marrow transplant. Ephron
said she didn’t have a matching donor – she
knew this because when Nora was looking for
a donor, Delia was the only one they could
find. But there had been advances since then.
She would receive a transplant from two
donors who were not quite a match for her:
one from an adult, another from a newborn
baby, the blood from an umbilical cord
donated by a mother after birth.
“This cord blood is immensely adaptable,
which is helpful when the match isn’t perfect,
but there is not much of it,” Ephron writes. A
particularly unpleasant round of chemo would
clean out her marrow. Stem cells from the
adult donor’s blood would then hold the fort,
as it were, while the baby blood cells “migrate
to my empty marrow” and take root andmultiply. The adult cells then fall away, and
the baby’s stem cells take over.
A Belgian doctor named Koen van
Besien, the head of the hospital’s transplant
programme, described this miraculous process.
“Your odds of this working are 20 per cent,”
he said, telling her she had a week to decide
whether or not to do it.
“Peter and I just fell in love,” Ephron
told him.
Years ago, a friend of mine with leukaemia
was given the same odds. He’d had a bone
marrow transplant the year before and was
in remission for several months. During
this time, his fiancé broke up with him. We
thought she must have waited until then, until
he was in the clear, and there was no blame
attached – the heart wants what it wants, and
all that. Then he had a relapse and his doctor
gave him a 20 per cent chance with another
round of chemotherapy. He decided to stop
having treatment and died a few months later.
I tell Ephron about him and ask if she
would have had the transplant if she hadn’t
fallen in love.
“If Roboz had just told me I had to do it,
I would have done it, I think, because Roboz
could really boss me around. She’s just great
at it. She just always believed... Well, at least
she made me feel that way. I think I would’ve
probably done it. I don’t think I would’ve
made it, because having somebody there with
you...” she trails off. “I don’t think anyone
could have done the time that Peter did and
take the kind of care that he did of me. I think
it’s critical. I actually believe that it was love
and medicine.”
She was at this time frantic, she says.
That afternoon, in the lobby of her building,
she bumped into a neighbour she knew only
slightly, a psychotherapist named Gail.
“I just corralled her,” Ephron says. Bringing
Gail up to her flat she said, “If I do this, will
you help me?”
Walking her to the lift afterwards, she told
Gail, “It’s very important that you love me.”
Ephron doesn’t remember it.
“I said, ‘I could not have said this,’ but she
said I did,” she tells me. “She said, ‘You were
in pure, undefended terror.’ ” She was putting
together a crew. “I knew what I needed. That
I did know,” she says. “I knew I needed Gail.”
Back at the hospital a week later, van
Besien told her he thought she should do it
and that she had a 40 per cent chance.
“I don’t know why he ups my odds,”
Ephron writes. “It’s not like he acknowledges
he’s upping them. He doesn’t say, ‘I said
20 per cent last time, but now I think it’sThey had the same cancer. ‘I spent my childhood
just wanting to do everything my sister Nora did’
Delia and Nora Ephron on the set of their 2005 film
Bewitched with Michael Caine and Nicole KidmansHUtteRstOCK