Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  One day I was puttering around the apartment, trying to unstick one of the drawers in my captain’s bed, washing a fork, who knows, when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard a voice that carried a ripple of laughter even as it said hello.

  “Hi, you’re a hard person to get ahold of. It’s Pauline Kael.”

  PART II:

  Like Civilized People …

  We hadn’t met, though there had been a near encounter.

  In 1974, the Voice winched me into a coveted screening of Lenny, the director Bob Fosse’s fancy switchblade farrago on the life, career, and fury of the comedian Lenny Bruce—an existential X-ray shot in high-contrast black and white where the nightclub spotlight blasted Dustin Hoffman like a prison searchlight as he did his sardonic thing. I had arrived at the screening room early, knowing it would be a packed house, and, having snagged an aisle seat, swung my legs to the side as a couple slid into my row. “Excuse me,” a young woman apologized in a cool-mint voice, her elbow apparently having grazed my arm as she settled, and I nodded no problem before glancing sideways and recognizing her as the actress Cornelia Sharpe, whose piquant nose, high-end-model cheekbones, and creamy surface rendered questions of acting ability incidental, irrelevant, almost rude. No problem indeed. Sharpe had appeared in Serpico, riding on the back of Al Pacino’s motorcycle and wrapping her adorning arms around him as his reward for rejecting police graft and embracing a free-spirited lifestyle that won him entrée into the grooviest loft parties. But since the most recent film I had seen her in was a loutish buddy-cop number called Busting, where she splayed her legs wide in a dentist’s chair as a call girl who made office calls, I decided not to risk saying anything gauche and so said nothing at all, hoping that my courteous follow-up nod conveyed the mark of a young gentleman, despite my cruddy sneakers.

  A few minutes before the lights were due to darken, I heard a minor bustle behind me. The last row, which appeared to have been kept unofficially empty, filled. This arrival seemed to slide a tray of quiet import under the ongoing chatter, and the chatter became self-conscious, inorganic, as if everyone’s awareness had split and doubled and effort was being made not to crane one’s head in reverse. Whoever was in the last row was chatting away merrily, and there was the paper rustle of notebooks being opened. The man escorting Cornelia Sharpe tipped his head her way and whispered, “Pauline,” and it was as if the mention of Pauline’s name were the cue for the lights to dim, the movie to begin.

  It was a loud movie, Lenny was, a real yeller, understandable given its sainted antihero’s propensity to propound harsh truths like a renegade prophet laying down some heavy jazz on the varsity sweaters and nine-to-five squares and all those queasy liberals hung up on newspaper editorials. But between the rants and the verbal shivs could be heard the unmistakable scratch of a pencil scribbling notes, invading our collective head space like graphite graffiti. It wasn’t that the note-taking called attention to itself, it wasn’t loud or continuous; it was the collective awareness that of those of all the movie critics, her notes mattered most, and whatever she was scribbling might be added to the bill of indictment or provide the embroidery of a fantastic rave. Each note could be a nail in Fosse’s gaudy coffin or a diamond stud for his vest. She had loved Cabaret, after all, helped it smash a wall of resistance. But it was coffin nails being driven that night. Melodramatic as that might sound, Kael’s review of Lenny proved to be such a devastator that Fosse, carrying a grudge until he stooped, immortalized its aftershocks in All That Jazz, where his pill-popping stud-choreographer alter ego—Roy Scheider in a Vandyke beard in a portrait of the artist as prodigious genius-phallus, the self-professed bastard that everybody can’t help but love—has a heart attack after his Lenny Bruce opus is coolly panned by a local-news critic. That part was played by Chris Chase, a former actress and then-current New York Times Arts and Leisure contributor who, not incidentally, was a friend of Pauline’s. Casting Chase instead of Pia Lindström or Leonard Harris or some other local New York television reviewer was intended to flip the bird at Pauline, blaming her for blowing a hole in his chest with her blast at Lenny. Little did I sense as I sat there next to Cornelia Sharpe’s shadowed profile the line that was being cast into the future, the ripple effect.

  When the lights came up again, I didn’t have the assurance to intrude upon the loose scrum of people around Pauline to introduce myself, unable to think of anything to venture that wouldn’t sound inane. It wasn’t just who she was that was intimidating. Saying anything at all seemed poor form, a violation of church doctrine. It was somehow communicated to me without being articulated that the shuffle from screening room to elevator or stairwell was an interval that called for politesse and murmur, like the orderly procession to sign the guest book in a funeral service, comments being kept to the neutral minimum since it was rude and imprudent to broadcast your opinions, not knowing who might be within earshot. Save the evil cackle of delight for when there’s no danger of the director’s mother overhearing or the film’s editor, who’s been in a bat cave for the last three months trying to string this spaghetti together. No such strictures applied to a movie that had “hit” stickered all over it. Nobody cared if you uncorked your carbonation then, I would learn. It wasn’t happiness that needed to be reined in, but disdain and disapproval, at least until you got outside. From the almost cowed way the elevator passengers kept their eyes lifted and fixed on the floor numbers as they ticked down to the lobby, it was evident that everyone had formed a temporary collective of silent collusion. My reading was: everyone respected the effort Fosse had put into Lenny, but respecting effort is what you do when something hasn’t succeeded. So into the night the audience dispersed, as if jury duty had been adjourned. Pauline’s group must have taken a later elevator, because when I reached the sidewalk they were nowhere to be seen, and they didn’t strike me as a fast-moving amoeba. I didn’t hang around to wait for them to show, not wanting to seem like a stage-door Johnny. I didn’t want to be a nuisance until absolutely necessary, but now, to bring us back into my apartment, where I’m holding a phone to my ear, I didn’t need to contrive a proper moment to introduce myself—she was the one who threw out the first ball.

  What had prompted Pauline’s call? She had read and enjoyed a piece I had published in the Voice about stand-up comics, a reported essay that had me posting myself night after night to the Improv, a comedy showcase located on a stretch of Forty-fourth Street in Times Square where one tended to pick up the pace just in case it became necessary to race for survival. The hostess at the Improv was Elayne Boosler, who also performed and would make a high mid-level name for herself later, a bright presence with a non-demeaning approach to self-deprecation (as opposed to Joan Rivers’s militant ugly-duckling persona that converts Jewish masochism into an assault weapon). If anything, she tended to err on the side of “vivacious,” more Cosmo Girl than cutting edge. The regular comics—nearly all of them men—were a mixed bag of promising minor leaguers trying to nail together a tight set that might win them a spot on Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin, or (the heavenly blue light at the top of the ladder) Johnny Carson, along with more experienced pros who had been around long enough to pick up a fine bouquet of rancor. It was the lull before the waterfall roar of Saturday Night Live’s arrival on NBC, a paradigm shifter that would upend the dues-paying pecking order of stand-up comedy, launching a new battery of clowns—Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, later Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray—whose success bypassed the club circuit and the Vegas strip and didn’t require even the cool nod of Carson’s papal blessing for induction into the golden ring.

  (Not long after SNL had altered the gravitational field, I interviewed a veteran comic named Milt Kamen, well-known at the time for doing absurdly detailed plot summaries of the latest movies on Merv and The Mike Douglas Show. After a few cordialities, he spat fire through the phone at how fucking unfair it was that these fucking sketch artists who simply read off of fucking cue cards and never
knew what it was to play shitholes and learn their fucking craft got treated like rock stars while older comics got the bum’s rush, a rant that went on so long that he seemed to forget there was somebody listening on the other end of the line, finally braking to say, “But what the hell, to each his own,” which made us both laugh. A few weeks later, Kamen died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills.)

  For this same Voice piece I also interviewed Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, then co-starring on Broadway in Good Evening (the show where Moore hopped out as a one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan). We met in Tuesday Weld’s apartment in the Astoria, an interview that I dragged out so long through nerves and inexperience that when I said, “Well, that’s all I got,” Cook snorted, “That’s all you’ve got?” indicating how tapped dry they were after having so much of their time taken hostage. I left the Astoria mortified, vowing to be less of a yammerer in the future, one of those quick-dissolving vows forgotten as soon as the next round of journalistic stage fright hit.

  “And I see that you’re also not a big fan of Marcel Marceau,” Pauline said, his Everyman school of mime being something I had made fun of, like watching Mickey Mouse put on an existential show. She invited me to a screening of a movie whose name has been erased from memory, but I wasn’t invited afterward to join her and the others for whatever they were doing, and I returned to the apartment feeling that we hadn’t quite clicked and it was my unspecified fault. Perhaps I was dressed poorly, a potato to be thrown back into the pile. (Though Pauline was no snob about clothes or social class—one profile of her from the seventies quoted an unnamed publicist who said that Pauline had once shown up at a New York event wearing a dress with a hole under the arm, “and it was really The Scandal.”) But I was invited to another screening and another. I made an unnamed appearance in Pauline’s review of The Goodbye Girl, as the friend who shared her “stony silence”—yes, that was me, I told people, Mr. Stony—as the paying audience roared at Neil Simon’s mixture of gum-snapping dialogue and therapeutic hugging that would come to be known, horribly, as “dramedy.”

  We continued to talk on the phone at an increasing tempo until I began to know it was her when the phone rang, even amid a volley of other calls, to the point where even close bystanders could identify the party at the other end before I picked up. Once I got into trouble with my then girlfriend when she spotted another young woman, a friend of hers, leaving my apartment as she arrived for our date. It was an innocent crossing of paths—it was Halloween and T. had dropped over on her way to a party to show off her costume, a skintight Peter Pan number complete with feathered cap and plastic dagger—but my girlfriend was in none too trick or treat a mood, and no sooner had she taken off her coat than the phone rang. As my hand reached the receiver, she said, “That better be Pauline.”

  It was.

  “Hi, have I gotten you at a bad time?” Pauline asked.

  “Oh, no, not at all,” I said with an extra dash of debonair.

  My girlfriend lowered herself into the one comfortable chair in my apartment and picked up a magazine to browse, as if she were in a waiting room. She knew the next fifteen or twenty minutes were Pauline time.

  It wasn’t only movies we went to. One thing that distinguished Pauline from the critics who have come after, even those she had encouraged and promoted, was that she had an interest in the arts that didn’t begin and end at the popcorn stand. (Most of the post-Pauline reviewers, by comparison, were so enthralled by the burning roads that she and Sarris and others cut that they couldn’t imagine being anything other than movie magistrates. One of Pauline’s most doted-upon protégés turned down a book-review request by sputtering, “But, but—that would be writing about writing!” Yes, the editor explained over the phone, that’s what book reviewing is, writing about writing, been going on for centuries.) The liberal arts were what she liberally pursued. She was an opera fan, a jazz enthusiast, and a pop music appreciator (she grasped immediately what made the Talking Heads compelling, whereas John Simon walked out fifteen minutes into the screening of Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s concert film of the Heads). And although she didn’t attend dance performances when I knew her, she was up on everything going on and thought it was a howling oversight for The New Yorker to be ignoring dance in the seventies while devoting so much acreage to classical music concerts. It was her lobbying for dance coverage that paved the archangel arrival of Arlene Croce—she pressed clips of Croce’s essays from Ballet Review (of which Croce was the founding editor) on William Shawn until the brilliance and necessity of Croce’s critical voice became crowningly self-evident and she was hired. Her arrival gave the magazine the strongest and widest contingent of women contributors ever, not only Kael and Croce but Penelope Gilliatt, the theater critic Edith Oliver, the book critic Naomi Bliven, the city hall correspondent Andy Logan, and the Washington political reporter Elizabeth Drew. On any roster of male feminist heroes, William Shawn earns high salutation, even if Drew’s longueurs drove many readers, including Pauline, mad.

  Pauline, unlike movie critics today, was a theater lover. “I loved Charles Ludlam,” she told the interviewer Ray Sawhill, a fellow member of Pauline’s fraternity, who worked at Newsweek magazine. “I once took Claude Jutra, the French Canadian director, down to the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. And Claude said, ‘This is theater.’ And he had tears streaming out of his eyes, he laughed so hard. I loved Charles Ludlam’s shows, and I thought there was a real craft and polish and crazy elegance in what he was doing.” She was also an early flag-waver for the playwright John Guare, whose lyrically bent Lydie Breeze and House of Blue Leaves she urged on listeners (his big breakthrough was Six Degrees of Separation, which also appears to have been his cresting peak), and she was a regular patron of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where we saw Christopher Reeve in The Cherry Orchard together. Pauline didn’t posit the theater and movies as irreconcilable, evolutionary rivals, rejecting the notion that movies were the supersonic present and future, theater the dowdy, upholstered past. She thought her former disciple David Denby had loaded the dice when he did a theater dispatch for the Atlantic that disposed of Broadway as slow, stodgy, dust-bunnied, and mausoleum-ish compared with the sexy, magnified immediacy of movies; she found Denby’s piece a fact-finding mission by a mind already made up. (In the fullness of time, Pauline would decide that music criticism would be Denby’s proper sphere, if only he would awaken to the idea and embrace his true calling and stop mucking about. “All that boring intelligence,” she would say of his movie reviews, as if they were overdone meat loaf.)

  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.