The Coded Message in Olivia Wilde's Salad Dressing Recipe
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below."
It was the question on the minds of every overly online person this week: What is Olivia Wilde’s salad dressing recipe?
This query is just the latest wrinkle in a titanically rough year for the Don’t Worry Darling director. Fresh off the heels of the disastrous press tour for the film, Wilde’s former nanny gave the kind of typically explosive interview that former nannies tend to give, alleging, among many other things, that Wilde made a salad and accompanying dressing for Harry Styles while still living with ex-fiancé Jason Sudeikis. Sudeikis was so outraged by this that, according to the nanny, he lay under Wilde’s car to prevent her from leaving. “She made this salad and she made her special dressing and she’s leaving with her salad to have dinner with” Styles, Sudeikis allegedly told the unnamed nanny.
As has been her wont over the last several months, Wilde remained silent about the latest revelations. The former couple released a joint statement decrying the interview and calling it the latest attack in an 18-month-long harassment from their former employee. But then Wilde (like so many before her) took to her Instagram stories and revealed the source of that “special dressing.”
Reader, that salad dressing is from Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s roman a clef about her messy divorce from Carl Bernstein.
We hope that Wilde (who has called Ephron "a huge reason" why she wanted to direct) really does use that remarkably simple recipe. But there’s also the chance that she’s sending out a coded message about how she’s handling the dissolution of her relationship: by finding solace in another bitter, contentious breakup. Long before Ephron became the patron saint of ‘90s rom-coms, she was famously married to Watergate hero Bernstein—and then, even more famously, divorced from him.
The story of their marriage and its crumbling thanks to an affair is told in Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, published just over three years after Ephron left him. The book became a 1986 film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. But a lot happened between those two releases.
Chief among them: Ephron and Bernstein had the kind of sprawling divorce that feels like something out of Postcards From the Edge. Upon publication of Heartburn, Bernstein said, “Obviously I wish Nora hadn't written the book. But I've always known that Nora writes about everything that happens in her life. And I think the book is just like Nora—it’s very clever." Not long after, Bernstein changed his tune, prompted by the sale of the movie rights.
Nichols snapped up the film rights in 1983, and Dustin Hofman—the big-screen Bernstein in All the President’s Men—was the name bandied about to play the role of Mark, the cheating husband in Ephron’s story.
That’s when Bernstein began to make things difficult, at one point threatening to prevent filming entirely. Throughout divorce proceedings, he harped on the husband character in the pending film adaptation of Heartburn. According to The Washington Post, by the time he and Ephron finally divorced in 1985 (after five-and-a-half-years), an agreement was reached in which “Nichols, Ephron and Paramount Pictures Corp. state that Bernstein may read the screenplay and any subsequent drafts written for the movie, view one of the first cuts of the film and submit any concerns.”
Additionally, Ephron added, “The father in the movie 'Heartburn' will be portrayed at all times as a caring, loving and conscientious father in any screenplay prepared or executed with my name attached to it.”
On the heels of the agreement, Bernstein released a statement expressing dissatisfaction with the latest script, which he claimed “continues the tasteless exploitation and public circus Nora has made out of our lives and what should have been our family's private sadness. Nonetheless, I hope we can resolve this situation quietly and without further court actions.”
Among the things ultimately addressed in the screenplay and final cut was the character’s name. Dubbed “Mark Feldman” in the book, the character became Mark Foreman per Bernstein’s request. In retrospect, it’s clearly because “Mark Feldman” was an acid kiss-off to Bernstein and his much-ballyhooed refusal to name Deep Throat, Mark Felt. And Karen Akers’ performance as Mark’s mistress was ultimately reduced to little more than a cameo.
What’s fascinating about contemporary accounts of both the divorce and the book is how ambivalent everyone seems to have been about it, before Ephron and Heartburn were seemingly canonized. Ephron herself gave columnist Liz Smith the scoop about leaving Bernstein shortly after giving birth to their second son in 1979. “Carl’s a rat,” Ephron told Smith, and the full story of Bernstein’s affair during the latter part of Ephron’s pregnancy came spilling out.
Much later, a New York Magazine profile of Ephron published prior to the book’s publication (an article she allegedly forbade the writer, Jesse Kornbluth, from doing) painted a very different portrait of both writer and book than we’re accustomed to today. When asked about Heartburn, her first husband, Dan Greenburg, said, “Nora is a much classier person and a better writer than is evident in this book.” Elsewhere, an erstwhile friend (anonymously) snapped, “I want to see her crawl over broken glass.”
Even Smith had concerns about Heartburn, telling Kornbluth, “I’m 100 percent for her having written the book, but I’m a little in awe of how she’s not too worried what the effect’s going to be. I think she’s probably made a problem for herself.”
Smith was wrong, as the years have proven. Ephron emerged from the Heartburn hullabaloo to embark upon her second act as the writer and director behind Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Julie & Julia, with the growing reputation of Heartburn only burnishing Ephron’s own.
Hopefully, Wilde is taking comfort from Ephron’s story of Rachel and Mark and the catharsis of throwing a key lime pie—and in how Ephron herself found catharsis in writing about it all. In the meantime: “Mix 2 tablespoons Grey Poupon mustard with 2 tablespoons good red wine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly with a fork, slowly add 6 tablespoons olive oil, until the vinaigrette is thick and creamy.”
You Might Also Like
