No One Figured Out Who 'Deep Throat' Was ... Except For Romcom Director Nora Ephron
"Deep Throat" was a weird chapter in our national history, possibly the most powerful person in the world who was ever known primarily by a pornographic nickname.
Uh, we're not going to embed the clip from the other movie.
People speculated for decades on the identity of the informant who contributed so heavily to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's reporting on the Watergate scandal like he was the political equivalent of the subject of "You're So Vain," except if Carly Simon's husband kept saying "It's Mick Jagger. I've told you 1,000 times."
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According to Nora Ephron, the screenwriter who created Meg Ryan's career and married Bernstein shortly after the publication of All the President's Men, she figured out the identity of Deep Throat immediately from her husband's notes. He never confirmed it to her, but that didn't stop her from telling everyone she could over the next few decades, from her children to entire rooms full of hundreds of people. In 1999, a full six years before former FBI agent Mark Felt revealed himself as Deep Throat, a teenager who went to day camp with one of the couple's sons told reporters that Jacob Bernstein told him Deep Throat was Felt all the way back in 1988.
Why wasn't this huge news? Because no one believed her. All the officials kept denying it, so right up until the reveal, people speculated to her face that it was someone else or even, in the case of one truly ballsy journalist, that Deep Throat didn't really exist. "I tried to explain to him that Bob Woodward would never have invented anything, much less a composite character, but as I say, no one listened," she said.
To be fair, the creative mind behind Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, for all its strengths, is probably not the most trustworthy source of political secrets. Still, you'd think being exactly one degree of Kevin Bacon away from the source itself would lend her some credibility. But, she was dismissed for decades on the sole basis of "women be gossiping."
"The studio made me cut the monologue where Meg Ryan was going to reveal everything."
Manna be gossiping on Twitter.
Top image: Columbia Pictures/Warner Bros./Columbia Pictures
