Lucking Out (9 page)

Pauline thought the theater invaluable and exciting because it was where you saw actors at their most uninhibited and unhindered, unchopped into edited bits. I once went with her to see Blythe Danner in
The New York Idea
, Danner being one of those actresses Pauline adored. (Especially her husky, inimitable voice—“That voice has levels in it; it’s a French 75—you get the champagne through the chipped ice and cognac,” she wrote of her plucky performance in
Hearts of the West.
) She never quite got the breaks and vehicles that vaulted her into major stardom, unlike her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, who enjoyed the sunburst of
Shakespeare in Love.
Meryl Streep was a proficient technician, but Danner had the lyrical splendor of a Margaret Sullavan, a delicacy of touch and inflection that didn’t seem mentally penciled in beforehand. She was radiant in the uneven
Lovin’ Molly
, an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel that took a poison dart to the neck when McMurtry published an article in
New York
magazine just before the opening railing against the film for coarsening and low-browing his original work. Pauline resented how all the effort by the cast and crew got mud-spattered by a disgruntled author, giving audiences an excuse to stay away. Onstage, Danner had poise and projection, unlike a Madonna (in David Mamet’s
Speed-the-Plow
) or even a Julianne Moore (in David Hare’s
Vertical Hour
), both of whom stood glued as if they had lost the use of their arms, which hung dead. After the play we ran into a top editor at
Newsweek
and his wife, who invited us back to their Manhattan town house for drinks. Dominating the living room was a huge rectangular glass coffee table with sharp edges, ideal for splitting your head open to bleed to death after a fall. The long couches on which we reclined had such a steep slant that Pauline and I had to dig in our heels so as not to slide under the glass table and become specimens, like characters in
The Glass Bottom Boat.
The only item, or rather the only prominent item, placed on the glass plate was a copy of Joan Didion’s then-latest novel,
A Book of Common Prayer.

“So what do you think of it?” asked Pauline during a conversational lull, conversational lulls being rare when Pauline was around. The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: “It’s full of resonance.” Thinking he was kidding, I almost snickered, having been an expert snickerer since high school, biting the inside of my mouth when I realized he was in earnest. I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance.

“I didn’t realize editors actually talked that way,” I said once we were outside.

“The ones in nice offices do,” Pauline said.

“Maybe he was trying to provoke you, given what you think of Didion.”

Reviewing Frank Perry’s screen adaptation of
Play It as It Lays
, Didion’s austere autopsy of sun-whitened anomie and depraved indifference along the intestinal freeways of Los Angeles, Pauline had not only panned the movie but had the audacity to make fun of Didion’s epigrammatic, ivory-mask prose, which she called “ridiculously swank,” the writerly equivalent to designer chic, “the sparse words placed in the spiritual emptiness of the white pages.” Lines so many book reviewers had caressed as talismanic for our times—such as the opening chord, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask”—gave Pauline a hoot, and she got a bigger hoot out of a pull quote from an interview with Didion where she laid bare, “I am haunted by the cannibalism of the Donner Party.” Every day for Didion was the dawn of the dead. By pinning the bony tail of Didion’s pretensions, Pauline’s mockery shook the foundations of Didion’s literary pedestal—like those of Sontag and Joyce Carol Oates, Didion’s mystery cult was so without humor that it didn’t know what to do when humor came knocking. A lifelong antipathy was the product of that review, with Pauline deprecated by Didion and her husband, the novelist, screenwriter, and journalist John Gregory Dunne, as a hopeless outsider peddling inside dope. Dunne, who did the dirty work in the marriage in the scores-settling department, launched a counteroffensive against Pauline with a piece in the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
(“That may have been the review,” Pauline told me, “where they used a drawing of me that looked like something out of
Der Stürmer
”) that opened with her holding court in front of the TV at an Oscar night party, “in a Pucci knockdown and orthopedic shoes,” bad-mouthing winners and losers alike. Dunne also disclosed that he had it on good authority that Pauline didn’t content herself with heckling
Play It as It Lays
in private, she also gave free concerts for the public: “Wilfrid Sheed had reported her reading it aloud derisively on the beaches of Long Island.” Despite that, Dunne professed personal fondness for Pauline in the untidy flesh, to borrow a phrase of Gore Vidal’s, but lamented that she embarrassed herself sexually by rhapsodizing over “entertaining rubbish” such as
The Godfather.
Oh,
that
entertaining rubbish.

So, I hypothesized, by holding up
A Book of Common Prayer
as if it could ward off evil, the editor with the glass table was razzing Pauline—giving her the business, as they used to say on
Leave It to Beaver.

“No, he’s not that Machiavellian,” Pauline said, “Machiavellian” being a dirty word in her vocabulary, the paw mark of mendacity. “There was nothing ulterior going on. He was quite sincere.”

(An episode that reminded me of something Pauline later said about the revelation she had after moving to New York from San Francisco:

On another occasion Pauline invited me to an evening of one-acts written by Wallace Shawn, one of William Shawn’s sons, whom I imagined having grown up inside a grandfather clock, thick carpets muffling every other sound. (The other son, Allen, is a composer and the author of a study of Arnold Schoenberg and memoirs about his agoraphobia and his twin sister.) This was early in Shawn’s career, so early that he didn’t as yet truly have a career; his rebellious incursions against his father’s cloak of reticence and soft persuasion in
Aunt Dan and Lemon, My Dinner with André
(his conversational duet with André Gregory), and
The Designated Mourner
(the film version of which Pauline thought was a supreme feat of self-portraiture on Mike Nichols’s part, revealing his calculating worminess) lay ahead, along with those gnomic appearances in everything from
The Princess Bride
to
Clueless
to
Gossip Girl.
The playlets were not well received. The audience was seated on long wooden benches, designed for maximum puritan discomfort, and the monologues were so vacuum-sealed and off-putting—a fireman baroquely boasting about items he had stolen from arson sites (“That’s a terrible way to libel firemen, as a bunch of scavengers, the volunteer department here are total sweeties,” Pauline said), and, in another, a hospital patient ruminating aloud as if already dead while a mute nurse attends to duties—that one by one, then in accelerating numbers, audience members began bailing, too impatient to wait for intermission, the benches scraping loudly as we maneuvered our legs and buttocks to let the defectors pass. What kept us in our seats was the knowledge that, unbeknownst to the audience, Wally himself was seated several rows back, witnessing the exodus. Pauline felt bad for him, even though the one-acts weren’t to her liking either. “He does have talent,” she said afterward, “that’s the damned thing.” Talent wasn’t the great exonerator, but it needed to be defended, in Pauline’s view, because everything was arrayed against it. Regarding Hollywood, she would say, “Never underestimate how much those in power resent those with talent—talent being the one thing they can’t buy for them
selves.
But they never tire of fucking with it, that’s
their
talent.”

“Is she expecting you?” asked the editorial receptionist at
The New Yorker
when I visited Pauline at her office in the afternoon.

This may have been the receptionist whom Pauline referred to as Morticia, a chalky apparition with a remarkable ability to misplace phone messages or relay them after they were useless, to whose desk older male writers and editors were drawn, attracted to this inviting mixture of Pre-Raphaelite muse and sitting duck. In time, Morticia would write an erotic memoir of the married and single men she bedded with at
The New Yorker
(“bedded” being an inclusive verb, since some of the erotic action had taken place on the carpet), racking up an impressive scorecard for someone so inanimated. After enough visits qualified me as a semi-regular, she stopped asking if I was expected, simply buzzed me through. Whatever male writer or editor she was talking to would pause until I was safely out of range and then resume his erudite sales pitch.

“Hi, c’mon in,” Pauline would say, standing half-in, half-out of her office door. These were the days when
The New Yorker
’s offices were on West Forty-third Street and, in their beige palette, faint melancholic air of apathy, and stoic indifference to having the upholstery repaired, were usually compared to the faculty department of a small agricultural college or an insurance firm down on its luck. History may have haunted the halls, but it didn’t haunt the walls, which were bare of framed magazine covers or awards plaques that might be interpreted as showing off for visitors, institutional boasting. Ostentation was considered poor form and vulgar taste, with noise the rudest intruder of all, the sound of unmoderated laughter a breach of monastic protocol that would have the church mice poking their heads out doors and then retreating to add another link or two to the paper-clip necklace they were assembling. Some of this irritation was directed at Pauline because hers was one of the few writers’ offices that welcomed visitors and hosted conversations conducted at normal human volume instead of the rice-papery whispers that kept everybody’s tongues on tiptoe. Some hall mates resented having their quiet concentration broken, even though it was quiet concentration that had them in a cement headlock. There were offices occupied almost every weekday by staff writers whose typewriter keys almost never clacked. I once asked Pauline about a staff reporter with an elegant byline who always seemed to be posing in profile, even in the elevator, and whose output was pristinely small. She always seemed to be in her office with the scenic view, pensively, decorously not writing—what does she
do
all day? “She thinks beautiful thoughts,” Pauline said.

Pauline didn’t have the luxury of Wordsworthian contemplation, not with her pressure-cooker schedule, a vicious cycle of deadlines that had her meeting herself coming and going. She did her writing on the second floor of her house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bent over at a drawing table facing light-flooding windows looking out on her long, descending lawn to the road below. She wrote in pencil with a rubber thimble on her thumb, her phenomenal concentration pouring from the point of her pencil across the page as she followed the line of argument wherever it led, keeping every circuit open. In his memoir-meditation
Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me
, Craig Seligman recalls sitting on the veranda of Pauline’s house, staring vacantly, when Pauline asked him what he was doing. “Thinking,” he replied. “I only think with a pencil in my hand,” Pauline said, a bit of overstatement, but what it was overstating had a core validity; the pencil point was the drill bit that drove through surface resistance, releasing unconscious energies and correspondences. She scorned reviewers who outlined their pieces in advance, executing a blueprint, saying of one such practitioner, “That’s why his pieces read like term papers.” She wanted the writing to read like one long exhalation that would seize the reader from the opening gunshot and then drop him off at the curb after a dizzy ride. The first draft was given to her daughter, Gina, for typing, and then corrections were made on the typescript. Pauline would then be driven to the city, where by day the piece would go through
The New Yorker
’s fanatically fly-eyed round of copyediting and fact-checking while at night she would catch screenings of the movies she would review for the next column, returning to Great Barrington to write over the weekend and then back again to the city, a rapid turnaround that could have devolved into a repetitive grind for someone simply filing copy. But Pauline was still riding the crest of the crescendo that was
Deeper into Movies
(1973), the collection of reviews that stamped her name as the most important and embattled film critic in America, her championing of
The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Cabaret
, Steven Spielberg’s
Sugarland Express
(when most critics preferred Terrence Malick’s
Badlands
) helping augur the seventies resurgence of American cinema that left us such beautiful scars and drizzly haze. It was the feudal age of film criticism too, when criticism retained the ability to make readers mad in both senses of the word, angry-mad and crazy-mad, with popular opinionists such as Judith Crist and Rex Reed and deep-dish ponderers such as Vernon Young (the
Hudson Review
), William S. Pechter (
Commentary
), and Charles Thomas Samuels (an academic freelancer whose mentor was John Simon, then at the unpopular height of his Dracula impersonation) making every major studio release or prestige European import a debatable proposition, the basic terminology setting a dividing line. “[John] Simon’s brief for insisting on ‘films’ instead of ‘movies’ reminds one of two monks chaffering over the word ‘consubstantiation’—no mean issue in its day,” wrote the novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed from his own shaky vantage point as an unallied observer. “Movies means popcorn, double features, and coming in the middle: democracy. Film means, well, at least chewing quietly, no talking (a rule Mr. Simon has been known to break in person), the seriousness one brings to the other arts: aristocracy.” Pauline, a movies person, found it absurd that “film” should be accorded such fancy airs. Asked for the ten thousandth time why she preferred “movies” to “film,” she said, “Film is what you load a camera with.” Simple as that.