Barbara Walters and the other ladies of "The View" paid an emotional tribute to their dear friend Nora Ephron on Wednesday.
Ephron, a legendary screenwriter and director, passed away on Tuesday from leukemia. She was 71. Walters remembered her close friend the next morning.
"Nora was wonderfully funny and so honest," she said. "My heart goes out to her husband Nick Pileggi... and her two sons Jacob and Max."
Walters listed some of Ephron's accomplishments, and recalled some of their great times together. She said that Ephron was a masterful cook and that they got together with friends every month to "dish about other people's facelifts."
Ephron was diagnosed with leukemia in 2006, but had not made her illness public. Walters described her reaction to the news, saying, "Most of us didn't know that she was ill and it was such a shock yesterday when we heard that she had died."
She replayed a clip of Ephron on "The View" talking about the pleasures of aging (not having to shave as often, among others) and referred to the writer's own reflections about death in her memoir "I Remember Nothing." "All of us will miss her more than words can say — forgive me, I'm not quite as clear about this as I should be," Walters said.
Co-host Joy Behar also chimed in with some of her stories about Ephron. "Don't piss her off cause she could verbally, just with a smile, take you apart," Whoopi Goldberg remembered with a smile. "She was quite a broad."