THREE AMIGOS: The late Nora Ephron on the town with her husband, Nicholas Pileggi (left), and columnist buddy Richard Cohen. (Patrick McMullan)
What Nora almost left Harry . . . was a lot nicer than a wagon-wheel coffee table.
In her will, “When Harry Met Sally” writer Nora Ephron fondly remembered one of the inspirations for the Harry Burns character in her will.
She left all of her personal property to her husband, author Nicholas Pileggi, but said that if he were to die first, her valuable 1938 drawing by Henri Matisse should go to columnist Richard Cohen.
Cohen, a close pal who has described himself as a one-time foe of Ephron’s, was one of the people the former Post reporter said she drew upon for the character in the beloved 1989 romantic comedy.
Cohen declined comment on the April will or Matisse, calling it “a strictly personal matter.”
Asked if he was indeed “Harry,” he said, “I don’t think so. As far as I know, I wasn’t.”
The will was signed almost three months before the “Sleepless in Seattle” writer died of complications from leukemia at 71.
It estimates her estate to be worth about $15 million, and leaves numerous cash gifts for her relatives, including $500,000 for her sister Delia, $100,000 for her sister Amy, and $25,000 to a third sister, Hallie Ephron Touger.
The will also gives Ephron’s share of royalty payments from the play she co-wrote with Delia called “Love, Loss and What I Wore” to Delia.
The writer/director also left cash bequests to two of her longtime employees — John Sacha was left $100,000, while Teodolinda Diaz was left $25,000.
Virtually everything else goes to Pileggi, a bestselling author and former crime reporter for The Associated Press who was Ephron’s husband of 25 years.
Pileggi, whose book “Wiseguy” was the inspiration for the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas,” got a $500,000 cash bequest, plus $35,000 to give to Ephron’s favorite charities, including the Public Theater of New York and the Motion Picture Television Fund Foundation.
The “You’ve Got Mail” writer also left him the rest of her property, with the “hope that Nick will distribute certain items of my jewelry among my friends and relatives in accordance with wishes that I have made known to him.”
Her sons from her previous marriage, to legendary Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, have been provided for in a separate trust and will also inherit any money of their mom’s left over after Pileggi’s death, the court papers say.
It was through Bernstein that Cohen and Ephron became friends.
In a column after Ephron’s death on June 26, Cohen said that the first time he met her, she “turned on me with a cold fury” because he’d written something about her that she hadn’t liked. Months later, she came over to his house with her then-boyfriend Bernstein, who sat next to Cohen in the office.
“This is going to be like the movies. We start as enemies and end as friends,” he quoted her as saying.
They remained close for the next 40 years, “intense platonic lovers of another in a way that Harry or Sally never could appreciate,” Cohen wrote.
Despite his denial that he was the inspiration for the character made famous by Billy Crystal, Cohen’s fellow Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn, in an interview this year on MSNBC, said Ephron had ID’d her as Sally and Cohen as Harry to staffers at the paper.
The movie’s director, Rob Reiner, has said much of the “Harry” character was based on him, and his interactions with his close pal Crystal.