Lucking Out (13 page)

Apart from
1900
, the screenings held especially for Pauline were the most enjoyable because we could chat among ourselves without heads snapping and shushes coming from scholars trying to concentrate. Even then there could be repercussions once the studio spies reported back to the brass. I recall a screening of
Bobby Deerfield
at which Toback was one of the invitees. Toback, not just a writer, director, and actor, but a gambler, storyteller, and heat-seeking sausage of hit-and-run legend whose pickup tactics would make him a familiar
Spy
target in the eighties, was the most conspicuous fireball in Pauline’s orbit. (Not that he didn’t have a lot of other orbits in which he moved, as a friend and collaborator of Warren Beatty’s—Toback did the screenplay for
Bugsy
—and a disciple of Norman Mailer, whose improvisational bad-vibe weekend-party pseudo-documentary
Maidstone
he had covered for
Esquire.
Toback went even more white Negro than Mailer dared, playing Jewish-intellectual sidekick to the football great Jim Brown, his personal guide into the vectors of soul power and black studhood. In
Jim
, Toback’s “self-centered memoir” of his friendship with Brown, they end up in a big bed with a couple of hot chicks, balling in bonding syncopation.) It was easy to see what Pauline saw in Toback as a person, what all of us did: his glistening presence, radio hum of energy, self-deprecating humor, constantly refilling trove of jaw-dropping anecdotes about Hollywood trespasses, and ebullient outgoingness—a high-voltage extroversion that made those of us who stuck to the word trade feel like fabric samples. He was out there banging while the rest of us played spectator, or so it seemed. As the opening credits of
Bobby Deerfield
began to roll, Toback supplied a running commentary on the names presented on-screen, supplying capsule descriptions such as “useless,” “totally useless,” “completely pathetic,” “former Teamster,” “drug addict,” “Warren slept with her once,” “I thought he had retired,” “completely unacceptable,” “met her by the pool once,” “what’s he doing here?” and, as Al Pacino’s Bobby Deerfield emerged, an immaculate placard of focus and integrity in a motorized circus of competitive uproar, the greeting “Nice jacket, Al.” The churchly, hunting-dog nobility of Bobby Deerfield only liberated Toback even more, his sit-down stand-up routine more entertaining than anything on-screen, until eventually he too became subdued by the leaden import of the tedious plight of a race driver’s conscience and church mice we all became. But word got back to those concerned, as it would later when a small knot of us dared take Alain Resnais’s
Providence
(a meditation on death and creativity endorsed by Susan Sontag, swinging her incense ball) less than solemnly, and, finked out by someone in the projection booth, we found ourselves publicly chided in the press for sullying cinema.

Screening chatter didn’t entirely run into negative territory. That wasn’t the norm. Once Pauline invited me to tag along to a screening of a movie that the studio didn’t seem to know what to do with, set in Baltimore, 1959, and featuring a large, shiny cast of mostly unknowns. Mark Johnson, who, I believe, lived near Pauline in the Berkshires (or perhaps his mother did), was one of the producers of the film and hoped Pauline could rescue it from being dumped at the dog pound, should she have any enthusiasm for it. Since I had grown up near Baltimore, conversant with its local customs and dialect, Pauline figured I’d be interested in the film and could serve as tour guide. The movie was, of course,
Diner
, directed by Barry Levinson, an ensemble scrapbook in which the memories seemed slightly blackened at the edges, vignetted by the passage of time. The movie seemed weirdly ajar at first, with a car accident staged as a prank that made Pauline wonder aloud where this thing was heading, but when the male buddies took up their familiar positions in the diner booth and began razzing each other, exchanging insults and riffing like a handful of young comics after hours, Steve Guttenberg and Daniel Stern sparring as if they were going to be doing this for the rest of their lives until they ended up on parallel cabana chairs in Miami Beach, Pauline was helplessly laughing, and in thrall. “What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?” she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. “Gravy.” “They put gravy on French fries?” “Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is also an option.” The classic diner that I had gone to as a teenager at the corner on Route 40 (banally replaced by a McDonald’s) served gravy over fries, and I just assumed growing up that it was the national custom. I filled Pauline in on the supreme importance of every particular regarding the Baltimore Colts—who Gino was (Gino Marchetti), and what made the play-off game with the Giants so epochal—and the mythic tackiness of the Strip, where so many of Maryland’s young men had lost their innocence and wished they could get it returned, along with the money they had wasted. “Where did she come from?” Pauline wondered in amazement as Ellen Barkin bared her first crooked smile, and Mickey Rourke, who had shone in a small, instrumental part in
Body Heat
, proved he had the murmurous charm and insinuation of a romantic, applying little touches to his scenes with Barkin reminiscent of Brando trying on Eva Marie Saint’s white gloves in
On the Waterfront.
Pauline wouldn’t be the only critic to praise
Diner
, but her going to bat for it before anyone else had seen it kept it from being bottom-drawered as just another coming-of-age film, a nice try. Absent that screening,
Diner
would have died an obscure death, rediscovered for its qualities only after its rediscovery was too late to do anybody any good.

On another occasion a screening was set up for Pauline of a film that was causing much deeper jitters for those concerned, one that was far more unpeggable and unsynopsizable; she assembled a larger posse for this sneak peek because she thought it would be fun. It didn’t start out fun. A severed ear in a grassy field, where the ants seem to be having a picnic. The deceased owner of that missing ear tied to a chair, the squawk of his suddenly come-alive walkie-talkie making everyone jump in the screening room. A ritualized sado-mazzy episode witnessed through the bright crack of a closet door. Given how pre-chewed every movie is now, with scripts leaked to the Internet and bootleg footage popping up on popular sites, enabling bloggers and tweeters to condemn a film as DOA even before baptism, it’s difficult to convey the dread, drawing-in power of a film about which you know nothing in advance, which belongs to no genre (though it would inseminate its own genre), where you have no idea where the next scene is going because you have no idea what’s yet to unravel in the scene still playing. To be a
Blue Velvet
virgin was to have your consciousness porously flooded with invasive forces that subsequent audiences were slightly spared, having read the reviews and having had the violet nightscape prepared for their arrival. We were unprepared, which elated those who loved the film and pummeled those who were less intoxicated, me being in the latter camp, the sight of a naked, bruised Isabella Rossellini staggering across the lawn crossing a line into exploitation, as if she were meat that had climbed off the hook. But unlike at
1900
, I questioned my own squeamishness more here, and shared the transporting moment of Roy Orbison on the soundtrack, his skying lamentations part of the soundtrack of my youth, a portal into a higher plane. Pauline’s response was pure elation spiked with relief and vindication, since she had been instrumental in David Lynch’s getting hired as director of
The Elephant Man
, perhaps the most tender exploration of Otherness, of the spark of divinity embedded in even the most deformed, ever achieved on film. It was a freak show that panned up to the firmament, at the forgiving stars, which may have been more than reviewers and audiences expected, given their grudging responses. After the garish disarray of
Dune
, which I saw with Pauline and of which I remember mostly giant worms and warts,
Blue Velvet
proved that Lynch hadn’t lost his idiosyncratic eye and nerve. Once we were out on the sidewalk, reacquainting ourselves with reality after being held lidded inside the warped glass of Lynch’s strawberry preserve jar, Pauline said, “It might make a wonderful date movie. I wonder what was in Dennis Hopper’s inhaler.”

“Insecticide,” said Veronica Geng, a
New Yorker
humorist and editor who was scarily, sexily talented and thinky, an electrical storm waiting to happen.

We repaired to wherever we repaired, and afterward, back at her hotel room, Pauline let the film’s publicist know how much she loved the film. Later the phone rang. It was the publicist reporting that she had told Lynch of Pauline’s reaction and Lynch had said, like Red Skelton signing off on his variety show, “God bless.”

Instant feedback didn’t always produce abundant thanks. I remember sitting with Pauline through
The Savage Is Loose
, a Robinson Crusoe tale of primitive survival with an incest angle that was directed by George C. Scott, who shared campfire duties with his real-life wife, Trish Van Devere, whose name reminded me of silk slippers skipping down the foyer and whose demure beauty and dimples seemed designed for ingenue comedy. Unfortunately for her, us, and anyone else watching, Lubitsch humor had no place in this Darwinian allegory that was like
Gilligan’s Island
goes
Lord of the Flies;
Scott suffered, Van Devere suffered, we all suffered, the movie a loud, grueling lecture-demo where each apprehension you had about the plot and characters was fulfilled on schedule with a thud. Afterward, we were worn-out, eager for the solace of something poured into a glass over ice, when a publicist approached Pauline before we reached the hallway to the elevator. It was a violation of protocol to waylay Pauline or any reviewer immediately after a screening to pry out a response, but the young woman obviously had her instructions.

“Miss Kael, Mr. Scott is eager to know what you thought of the picture. Is there anything I can tell him?”

“Tell him to bury it,” Pauline said without hesitation or glint of hostility, the bell-like chime of her voice more damaging than any wrecking ball.

The publicist smiled, pricklings of panic at the corners of her eyes, as if her mind were checking to make sure she had heard right. One did not envy her task. It would not be fun playing messenger and telling General Patton that he was being advised to cut his losses and dig an unmarked grave. But Scott had invested too much blood, guts, sweat, and tears (especially sweat) in this personal statement to submit meekly to such drastic counsel. Instead of burying the film, he propped up the corpse and kept it up for public viewing. He rented a movie theater on East Fifty-eighth Street that showed
The Savage Is Loose
for months, an expensive gesture of defiance that failed to germinate a cult but may have salved his ego, who knows. I would sometimes walk by and see the ticket taker staring out into the street, there being no tickets to take, the box office an Edward Hopper exhibition of marooned human mannequins.

After a screening we would often decamp to a restaurant where informality, elbow room, and a tolerable decibel level made animated conversation possible.

“Let’s go for a drink, like civilized people,” Pauline would say.

One favorite destination was Un Deux Trois on Forty-fourth Street, where you could doodle and write on the paper tablecloths with crayons like carefree Picassos. The downside of Un Deux Trois was that it could get too loud when the theater crowd made like an anvil chorus, laying on the gusty laughter and drowning our nifty comebacks to each other as soon as they left our mouths. So it was usually to the Algonquin that we mended, which was conveniently across the street from the Royalton, where Pauline stayed when she was in town. Before its Ian Schrager–Philippe Starck minimalist makeover in 1988 (ah, those waterfall urinals), after which the staff was costumed in sleek-fitting ninja black and the dining room became the unofficial commissary for Condé Nast (with Tina Brown queen-beeing it at one of the power tables), the Royalton had a history of being a haven for
New Yorker
writers who couldn’t afford rooms at the Algonquin. Robert Benchley, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, maintained a small suite at the Royalton. (And Pauline, as I recall, only stayed at the Algonquin when the Royalton was full.) We favored the Algonquin not for its Round Table lore but because of the unpretentious, unobstructed open-airiness of its main room, with its islands of couches and tiny tables with bells attached to summon a waiter. Or at least that was the wishful idea. It was William Shawn, whose delicate stomach restricted him to a regular diet of warm milk and shredded wheat, who had immortally said with a sigh: “You ring and ring, but no one ever comes.” So Samuel Beckett! Pauline was less orphaned, one or two of the waiters greeting her with a kindly “What can we get for you, Miss Kael?” but there were times when the button would be pressed and the bell wouldn’t sound, as if the ringer had been removed. This, too, added to the existential tone. If anything, service was even more Samuel Beckett–ish in the Blue Bar, which was then a small, dark cove located to the right of the main entrance, so dark that it was difficult to see the James Thurber drawings that hung on the walls even after one’s eyes adjusted to the mole light. It was a room that seemed to be designed for bourgeois adultery befitting a Cheever or John O’Hara story, and Pauline mentioned spotting a prominent literary critic nesting in the corner with a woman not his wife who later became his wife after the woman who had been his wife got wise and cut the cord. In the Blue Bar there were no table bells to ring, leaving you sitting stranded, making little hand wriggles to attract the attention of waiters who struck neoclassical poses at the bar like chipped pieces of statuary, to borrow an image from the novelist Anthony Powell. Once drinks did arrive, however, a sense of sanctuary unknotted all tensions and concerns, the outer world kept at bay.