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Gertrude Elion
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Gertrude Elion: It really wasn't until I got out of college and started looking for a job. And it really hit me because I had done well in school, graduated summa cum laude, and I thought, well, you know, there is no reason somebody won't give me a try. But wherever I went -- it was a depression time, it was a time that there weren't many jobs to begin with, and what there were, they couldn't see any reason to take a woman. They would interview me for long periods of time, but then they would say, "Well, we think you'd be a distracting influence in the laboratory." Well, I guess I was kind of cute at the age of 19, but I can't imagine that I would have been a distracting influence. I would have been so busy working that -- you know. But anyway, it was very discouraging.
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Gertrude Elion
Nobel Prize in Medicine
I said, "Well, I'm going to have to earn a living. I guess I'd better go to secretarial school." And so I started secretarial school. And I worked. I went for six weeks. And just at that point someone offered me a job as a lab assistant in a school of nursing for three months. It was a trimester. So I dropped secretarial school and took this three month job, and then I was out of a job again. But once I tried secretarial school, I knew that I couldn't -- I wouldn't -- ever stay there. It was only six weeks, which was about as much as I could take.
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Nora Ephron
Humorist, Novelist, Screenwriter and Director
Nora Ephron: It wasn't a really commercial movie. It would have been more commercial had it had a more commercial cast, but I didn't have a very commercial cast. In fact, I had Bette Midler who wanted to do it, and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney would not let her out of her contract to do it. I think the movie would have done better if Bette had been in it. I loved Julie Kavner in it, but I begged Jeffrey Katzenberg to let (Bette Midler) out of her contract, or for him to make it, and he simply had no interest in the subject matter of that movie and told me so. He had no interest in what it was about, which was balancing a career and work. It was about a woman stand-up comic, who had two children. It's a very funny script, and a good script, and Jeffrey isn't really interested in women. His wife is a housewife. He just wasn't there, and it was heartbreaking to me. I went through -- it seemed like forever -- trying to get it made, and then suddenly one day a guy named Joe Roth at Fox said, "I'll make this movie with Julie Kavner," and he did it.
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Nora Ephron
Humorist, Novelist, Screenwriter and Director
There were magazines that didn't have a lot of women writing for them, but if you wanted to write for them and you were any good at all, you could. But The New York Times Magazine, the first assignment I got from them in 1968 or '9 was a fashion assignment, and I had never written about fashion in my life. I knew nothing about fashion. I cared less, but I thought, "Well, I'll do this. I'll write this, and then they'll see I can write for them, and then I won't have to write about fashion anymore," and I never did.
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