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:
Before I came here, when I used to read the papers and magazines and Partisan Review and the film journals, I used to think that there was all this intellectual corruption in publishing that explained why so many mediocrities were given the big push and so many gifted, trickier talents treated like bums. I thought people in publishing and so on were smarter than what they were praising and promoting, that there was a hidden adoption scheme that explained how we got custody of Arthur Miller. But once I started talking to writers and editors and publishers, I realized there was no cultural conspiracy at work, apart from conformity. They weren’t Machiavellian or evil, they were just so cut off from their responses that their brains rolled downhill. And they were more provincial than you thought possible from how they pretended to such sophistication in print. I’d mention Satyajit Ray and you would have thought a flying saucer had landed on the roof. Intellectuals were the worst, some of them stupider than you thought possible.)
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 themselves. 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.
As I enter Pauline’s office, she clears a place for me on the couch if there’s no spot to perch, moving aside scripts she’s been sent, stacks of newly delivered books and galleys, unsolicited manuscripts, manila folders with news clippings, and whatever else has come through the pipeline. On her desk lay the latest set of New Yorker galleys, undergoing extensive surgery. Although Pauline wrote fast and was accused of being more impressionistic and free-associative than rational-analytical (an accusation laced with a sexism with which she was wearily familiar, the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that a woman critic was more at the mercy of her hormones, mood fluctuations, and monthly cycles than a marble bust of judicious decorum such as the New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann or a sprightly carnation such as Vincent Canby of the New York Times), she was meticulous with her copy, as fanatical a tinkerer as any fussbudget from the E. B. White elf academy. It was the aim and direction of her perfectionism that were different. She didn’t pursue evenly smoothed embalmed non-reflective-surface perfection. She sanded down the jagged edges of her reviews to piercing effect. She was slangy the way New Yorker writers were slangy in the thirties, before excess propriety and hallowed obeisance to the fine-toned points of craft outfitted writers with clerical collars. Rather than camp behind the fine-mesh scrim of mandarin prose or adopt the chummy manner of New Yorker critics past (such as Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, and her predecessors on the film beat, among them John McCarten, John Mosher, and Brendan Gill), she filed battlefield reports from the front line of the back row, writing for the ear as much as the eye, one of the few critics (to borrow a locution from Seymour Krim) whose words were capable of matching the speed of our minds. In his book, Seligman quotes one of Pauline’s editors at The New Yorker, John Bennet, describing the complexity of her creative-destructive grid work. “Balzac, madly revising at his most caffeinated, Proust at his most hypodermically caffeinated, had nothing on Pauline when it came to crossing out, writing all over the margins, taping extra sheets of paper to the margins to make even more revisions—revisions of revisions, inserts inside inserts.” Entire paragraphs were x-ed out and new ones inserted, sentences were transposed within paragraphs that themselves were moved around like modular furniture, commas delicately planted by The New Yorker’s notoriously comma-promiscuous copy department (resulting in sentences that resembled a higher plane of constipation, bogged down in late-period Henry James particularization) were plucked out and em dashes liberally thrown like left jabs. Even without the benefit of literacy, strictly as an eye exam, her pieces looked more alive on the page than those of anyone else (save for Donald Barthelme and his typographical Monty Python circus). Nearly every cut and addition she made was to foster idiomatic verve, direct contact, and acceleration, the hum of a live broadcast.
Having made her name as a film reviewer for a Berkeley radio station, Pauline was an advocate of reading work aloud to make sure that it “played.” She would sometimes read me reviews or partial reviews over the phone, not to toot her own horn (though she loved it whenever a line got a laugh), but to have a sounding board, a preview audience. It was a way of pinpointing false notes and dead spots, lopping the branches off of sentences that went on so long that her voice ran out of wind before the finish line. On rare occasions she’d call because she was “stuck” (she would read up to the point the piece hit a blank wall, trying to figure out how to push through), but more often she wanted to know if she “went too far” this time “going after” a certain movie or actor or director, knowing that by execrating the latest Neil Simon or some meretricious bagatelle from Mike Nichols (“God, the shit he gets away with”), she was blaspheming everything the New York Times Arts and Leisure section held hallow. It wasn’t that she was looking to cotton-pad her opinions; it was that she didn’t relish another round of aggravation from the aggrieved and wanted to settle in her own mind that animosity hadn’t gotten the worst of her. “I want to be fair to the son of a bitch,” she said once, cleaving to the belief that every filmmaker was capable of redemption, even Ken Russell, though that might be pushing it (she once said he deserved having a stake driven through his heart, if they could find it). Sometimes the fear of going “too far” went in the other direction—Pauline would seek confirmation that she hadn’t snapped out of earth’s orbit by hailing Carrie or The Warriors, two pulp smashers considered garish and low-pandering not only by most fellow critics but by many of The New Yorker’s readers, whose nerves couldn’t take all this noisy ruckus. Such movies, they were enough to tip over one’s gondolas.
I once was witness—a student co-pilot—to a master class in Pauline’s instant power-on of articulation, where every phrase quivered like the handle of a knife whose blade had just lodged in the tree bark. It was a pilot for a talk show hosted by David Susskind’s wife, Joyce Davidson, who had already established herself as a TV name in Canada and was looking to expand south. David Susskind, for those who need escorting into the memory vault, was an adventurous, high-strung, phone-juggling, devoutly, almost stereotypically Jewish urban liberal (back when the New York Post was the tabernacle organ of middlebrow, middle-class Jewish liberalism, home to columnists such as Max Lerner and Dr. Rose Franzblau). He was the producer of socially conscious dramas such as the TV adaptations of Raisin in the Sun and Death of a Salesman, and the groundbreaking, gritty-vérité original drama East Side/West Side, starring George C. Scott as a social worker contending with slum conditions, child abuse, drug addiction, racial discrimination, and the bureaucratic coils of the welfare system, and the host of a weekly two-hour Manhattan-based talk show that was part seminar, part encounter group, part freak show, and part celebrity séance, with Susskind rattling his papers and stammering questions as if trying to make sense of the madness pitching the deck of his once stable world. With his white hair and Mr. Magoo eye pouches, Susskind was a monochromatic man made dizzy by the kaleidoscopic swirl of the sixties. Unlike on the Charlie Rose set (Charlie sharing some of Susskind’s befuddlement but exuding a far stronger sense of varnished ease in the international brotherhood of media moguls and the permanent political class), guests weren’t expected to be on their best behavior when they convened in the Susskind studio. Some of his most famous installments were barely contained uproars, such as the reunion of the Andy Warhol superstars that turned into a queeny uprising over the vile influence of Paul Morrissey over Andy; a debate about feminism in which Germaine Greer squashed the book reviewer and culture critic Anatole Broyard like a presumptuous gra
pe; a discussion of “radical chic” in which guests of Leonard Bernstein’s fund-raiser for the Black Panthers vented against an absent Tom Wolfe over his caricature of them in his infamous New York cover story (illustrated with a photograph of supposed uptown socialites making a black power fist salute to the camera); and the classic “How to Be a Jewish Son” support group featuring Dan Greenburg, David Steinberg, and Mel Brooks at his most hilarious-spontaneous.
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