A Five-Decade-Long Friendship That Began With A Phone Call

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NPR’s Nina Totenberg with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2018.





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Rebecca Gibian/AP





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Image from Nina Totenberg





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Image from Nina Totenberg





Image from Nina Totenberg

They fought over ideology, respectfully, laughed lovingly about experiences shared, and let the audience see how two brilliant justices of different views could love each other despite those differences.

Some of the interviews I did with her were hilarious, or revealing, especially, when we chatted for a few minutes the day before, and I let her know what I was thinking of asking. Thus armed, she told me at the Sundance film festival about her first experience with sexual harassment, at Cornell, and she was so furious that she faced down her professor, telling him, «How dare you, how dare you! Can you imagine? She was 18 years old, if that, and fearless even then.

Then too there was the interview I did with her for a group of doctors when I asked her to tell the story of her second pregnancy, 10 years after her first child was born. She had never expected to get pregnant again because of Marty’s extensive radiation treatments for testicular cancer when they were in law school. So, not only was she surprised, so was the doctor, because after telling her she was about to become a mother for a second time, he asked her, «May I know who the father is? P.S. James Ginsburg looks exactly like Marty.

Some of the interviews I did with her, especially toward the end of her life, were mainly me asking her to retell the many stories I had heard from her over the years. I called them «Ruth’s Greatest Hits. But I could never get over what a performer she was.

No matter how lousy she felt, she rose to the occasion. Whether the audience was a small gathering at an embassy or a music or opera group, or a packed arena filled with 16,000 spectators who gobbled up every ticket within hours of them being posted online in Little Rock, Ark., she was always the inimitable RBG.

An 85-lb Gourmand

She loved her wine. Confined to one glass a day, she rebelled when my husband, David, brought her a giant glass filled half way up at break fast on Yom Kippur. «David, she instructed, «fill it up to the top?

She had a wonderful sense of humor. When she spiked a high fever in July and her doctor told her she just had to go to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, right away, her response was: «Well, they have good crab cakes there.

Ruth loved food. She may have been 85 pounds soaking wet towards the end of her life, but she loved to eat. Slowly, very slowly. But God help you if you tried to take her plate way before she had eaten every last morsel of food on the plate.

Of course, she had been spoiled by the love of her life, her husband, Marty, the best of gourmet chefs. My husband, and her daughter, Jane, and granddaughter Clara tried to live up to that. But nobody was quite like Marty.

Anyone reading this will know from my pieces and from the documentary RBG about that last poignant letter Marty wrote to her at the end of their 56 years together. Before the movie, though, I asked her to bring the letter with her to an interview we were taping. It was the last thing I asked of her that day, to read the letter. It was the only time I ever saw her cry.

Heating Instructions

Few know how hard she tried to take care of Marty, all by herself in the last year of his life. I called one day to ask if we could bring food. No, she said. But she sounded so down that I asked if she would like David to come over and examine Marty. «Oh yes, came the reply. I stayed in the living room while David went to the bedroom.

Ruth had not slept all night. She was trying to take care of her darling husband, who was considerably bigger than she was, help him to the bathroom, giving him sponge baths. David did what he could to make Marty comfortable and he discussed the situation with the two of them, finally telling her, «Ruth, I have Medicaid patients who have more help than you do.

There was one hilarious moment on that day, however. We had brought some food in an aluminum tin that she could heat up. My husband, David, ever knowledgeable about human behavior, said to her, as we were about to leave, «Ruth, do you know how to heat that up? Yes, she assured him, just put it in the microwave. «NO, he said firmly, that will short out the electricity. «You need to heat it in the oven. There must have been something about the look in her eyes, because he quickly followed up, «Do you know how to use the oven? After some hesitation, the venerable justice admitted she did not. And so, David gave Ruth Bader Ginsburg a lesson on how to use the oven in her apartment.

This was, of course, not the first time she pushed the envelope of her own endurance. She did the same for work too. And so it was that I learned early in our friendship not to call the Ginsburg household until after noon on the weekends. Ruth would come to dinner at our house or go to the opera, or go to any of the many other events she enjoyed participating in, and when she got home, she would start to work again.

An Inspiration

Ruth really did love being «the notorious RBG. At the opera, when her tiny figure, wrapped in a coat and babushka, would enter the Kennedy Center opera house from a side entrance, I don’t know how, but people would see her, and the roar would begin, soon followed by a standing ovation, and loud cheering.

And amid Covid, she took to wearing a mask, with her tiny face printed on it.

She was an inspiration to so many women, especially young women. She often would come to our twice-a-year big parties, attended by lots of doctor friends, journalists, and lawyers. She always came late when she knew the crowd would have thinned to a relative few. But there almost always were a bunch of surgical residents and a few of my former interns still there. It was such an amazing thing to see how they stood back, in awe of her, as I chatted with her, and she ate, undisturbed by the fact that we had 15 or so listeners. Even then, she was, in a sense a performer.

Her memory was so prodigious. At one party, we were talking about how she had met actor Martin Sheen—they were in the same natural child birth class—he with his wife, she with Marty, about 50 years or earlier. She recalled that he was in his first Broadway play back then, and she paused to remember the name, «The subject was roses. My husband couldn’t believe it and googled it on the spot. As usual, she was right.

Covering A Friend

I sometimes was asked how I could remain such good friends with RBG at the same time that I covered her as a reporter.

The answer was really pretty simple. If you are lucky enough to be friends with someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you both understand that you each have a job, and that it has to be done professionally, and without favor.

I think the only time that she told me anything she wasn’t supposed to was a mistake. After the coronavirus outbreak and lockdown, our house was about the only safe place Ruth could go, and so from mid-March until the end of July, she came to us for dinner every Saturday night, except a few where we brought dinner to her. Periodically, she would get this evil grin on her face, and say something on the order of «You are going to be a very busy person this week. Translation: lots of big opinions for you to cover.

Then, one Sunday I called her about something else, and she said, «How did you like that Electoral College decision? I couldn’t believe my ears. My friend was human. She had, like the rest of us in these Covid times, gotten her days mixed up. She thought it was Monday. I paused and said, gently, «Ruth, it’s Sunday, not Monday.

She gasped. She was horrified. Beside herself at her indiscretion. Of course, she hadn’t told me anything about what the court had decided, only that I would find out in about 12 hours. But still, she was lashing herself for her mistake. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Truth be told, though, being her friend did get harder toward the end of her life. But even then, she understood.

At the end of 2018, she called on my husband David, to help her navigate the onset of lung cancer. For some six weeks, he knew what was going on, supervised her biopsy, and talked with RBG and her family. But I knew nothing of what was transpiring. I was kept in the dark.

As it happened, the biopic about RBG, On the Basis of Sex, was premiering in December, and over the course of a couple of weeks, she was to make a bunch of appearances in Washington, and New York. I was the interviewer for all of these, and we ended up in New York, where unbeknownst to me, Ruth and my husband David were meeting at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with an array of doctors and Ruth’s daughter, Jane, to make plans for her surgery and treatment. At the last of these appearances, I remember cutting a short interview even shorter than planned because when I looked into her eyes, she looked so terribly tired.

The night before the surgery, David sat me down to tell me what was going to happen the next morning. I confess I cried.

The next day, I followed her example and did my job, as the court announced the operation. When I finished for the day I met David for dinner as I prepared to do a TV shot, and as we sat in the restaurant, at abut 8 p.m. my cell phone rang. It was Ruth. She was «sitting up in a chair eating a consomme soup that is far better than I had any right to expect. She was calling me, she said, because she wanted me to know why she had forbidden David to breathe anything to me about what was going on.

As she memorably put it, «I just didn’t want you to be trapped between your friendship for me and your obligations as a journalist.