Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  One visual sip of Davidson’s Chardonnay chill and it was clear her talk show was going to be a classier affair than her husband’s, no rolling around on the floor or raised voices. The guests for the pilot episode were the actor Ed Asner, Gore Vidal (a frequent guest on the Susskind show, whose entire two hours were devoted once a year to Vidal’s “state of the union” reflections), Pauline, and myself. It was an impressive lot, apart from me, a relative nobody. I was there because Pauline suggested me to the producer in my role as a TV reviewer for the Voice and because, I think, she wanted company in the rental car that ferried us to and from the studio, which I remember as being outside of Manhattan. Connecticut? Long Island? I don’t remember, only that we passed a lot of trees.

  What I do remember was my first meeting with Gore Vidal, who was then, as now, quintessentially Gore Vidalish—“in character,” as it were. We chatted beforehand while Pauline was elsewhere, perhaps in makeup, about the literary feud ablaze between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, which one wag compared to the gunfight between Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar, only less butch. It was one of those spats that escalated into a rift that divided cocktail parties into two opposing camps glowering at each other with frosty eyebrows. The fracas uninnocently began when McCarthy, a guest on The Dick Cavett Show (during its PBS iteration), rendered a verdict regarding Hellman’s veracity as a memoirist, declaring with a leopardess smile that had claimed many a victim before: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” That Hellman’s relationship with the truth was a rather smoky romance with a lot of room for mythmaking and revision was not a controversial notion. Pauline, for example, had pegged the heroic saga of Julia as a phony from the get-go, a suspicion vindicated when the real Julia—Muriel Gardiner, who shared a lawyer with Hellman—surfaced to reveal that Hellman’s memoir was a self-glorifying fiction, a form of identity theft. And those in the liberal anti-Communist camp were almost admirably agog at how Hellman had managed to misty-watercolorize her Stalinist past, repackaging herself as a doughty heroine—a thorny survivor—for a new generation of feminist readers for whom the iridescence of Anaïs Nin had lost its lozenge effect. But the forest-clearing sweep of McCarthy’s dismissal—executed with such blithe condescension (“tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past”)—was like flaunting a red flag in Hellman’s face, if I may mix metaphors with mad abandon, and Hellman retaliated not with a poison-dipped dart of her own but with a lawsuit upside McCarthy’s head. She sued not only McCarthy for defamation but Cavett and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation too, asking $2.25 million in damages. The cost of defending the suit threatened to impoverish McCarthy (Hellman was far wealthier, in part due to the royalties of the Hammett estate), and the spectacle of two writers dragging their war of words to court was abhorrent even to many of those who felt Hellman had been wronged.

  Vidal was dispassionate, viewing this folly, like so many others, through a long lens. He understood what motivated Hellman to persevere, and it wasn’t a sense of injustice. “When you reach a certain age,” he philosophized, “sometimes there’s nothing that gets you out of bed in the morning with more zest than a nice juicy lawsuit.” (It only occurred to me later that Vidal must have had more than his share of zippedy-do-dah days, given his headline-making lawsuits with William F. Buckley Jr. and Truman Capote.) I mentioned that Norman Mailer was playing the unlikely role of truce maker, referring to an article Mailer had done for the New York Times appealing to Hellman and McCarthy to drop their gloves and call off the legal hostilities. “Ah, yes, Norman,” Vidal said, “he always has such a vital role to play, being our Greatest Living Writer, as you so often remind us in the pages of the Village Voice.”

  Boy, did I feel swatted! And yet thrilled too. Here I was, low person on the totem pole, being put in my place as a Mailer fanboy by Gore Vidal in his inimitable epigrammatic manner, his irony at my expense proof that he had been reading me at the Voice and was aware of my existence as a writer, however irksome. Vidal knew who I was! That he found me egregious was secondary. I had, in some small, meaningless, minuscule way, arrived.

  The taping began. The first guest was Ed Asner. It took him only a few minutes to sink the pilot and send Davidson’s hopes of an American career nosing to the ocean bottom. I thought—assumed—that Asner the talk-show guest would be like his Mary Tyler Moore Show alter ego, Lou Grant, a gruff ball of ornery no-nonsense. If only. He began by asking if the microphone attached to his shirt (or was it a sweater?) was picking up his stomach gurgles. No, he was assured, first by our host, then by the stage director. But Asner was not assured, returning to the issue of his growling stomach and the distraction it might cause. “Maybe they can edit this out of the tape later,” I whispered to Pauline, who said, “We may want to edit ourselves out of the tape later.” “Why don’t they just start the taping over? It’s not like this is going on the air tonight.” I was hushed by a sidelong look from someone connected with the production. Giving his stomach a rest as a topic, Asner then began talking honestly and sincerely, earnestly and devoutly, about how therapy had helped him as an actor, gotten him over some hurdles. The last of our curmudgeonly hopes were dashed. It was like listening to a testimonial at a 12-step meeting, euthanizing the show before it had had a chance to perk up its ears. “Actors …,” Pauline quietly groaned, as if despairing of their entire race. The interview finally tapered to an end, and Pauline and I were ushered onto the set for our segment, the bright studio lights beating down and blocking out everything beyond the island rim of the stage, our butts making those crucial last-minute adjustments to achieve comfort as we were wired with mikes.

  The subject of our segment, the reason we were there, was a new sitcom called United States, an unpeeling portrait of a marriage in close captivity starring Beau Bridges and Helen Shaver. Influenced by the unsparing domestic glumness and eruptive psychodrama of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, whose original five-hour version for Swedish television had been compressed into a powerful depressant that was released into U.S. art-houses in 1974 and hailed as a landmark study of intimate warfare, United States was the first series created and written by Larry Gelbart after the success of M*A*S*H. It was greeted as an artistic growth spurt, solemnized by many reviewers much as Woody Allen’s forays into mirthless seriousness were lauded for their “growth” and “maturity.” In those days before the arrival of the prestige cable series (no Sopranos, no Wire, no Mad Men), United States was one of the rare shows that smart people felt a semi-obligation to have an opinion about, to adopt as their own. Also, male critics by the carload had major crushes on Helen Shaver, whose gravelly voice was a seductive warm-up act for Demi Moore’s.

  Pauline and I hadn’t rehearsed or vamped anything ahead of time, not wanting our comments to sound canned. So when the first question came about United States, directed at Pauline, I was interested in what particular points she would make, the tack she would take. Then, you know, we’d chat, compare notes. Instead, it was as if everything fell away as Pauline’s voice, almost independent of her person, began to screwdrive into the show’s aspirations and pretensions, articulating everything that was wrong with its format and execution with a lucid, methodical, almost lilting precision that was like a mini-tutorial in criticism. So rapt was I by Pauline’s analysis that I forgot I was supposed to chip in too as I sat there fascinated at this fencing display of formal rigor, not wanting to break the flow. It wasn’t just the brilliance with which she took the series apart cubistically; it was this palpable sense of criticism as a higher power, something that made you lean into the pitch, not just a series of opinions beading a target board, but a liberating force that lit up the top floor of your brain and cast out fear. After leaving nothing standing except a few support beams, Pauline was asked by the host what the show revealed about its creator, and she said, as if slamming shut the car door, “It’s the work of a man with a lousy marri
age.” Rather more candor than Davidson anticipated, judging from her frozen-parfait expression. Not for nothing was Pauline a fan of Thelma Ritter, whose classic line from All About Eve about Eve Harrington’s contrived tale of woe—“Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end”—was one of Pauline’s favorites. (Her favorite line reading may have been Jean Hagen’s nasal sublime “Ah cain’t stan’ it” from Singin’ in the Rain, which I once heard her emulate when asked her opinion of William Styron—“Ah cain’t stan’ ’im.”)

  Months went by, the pilot wasn’t picked up, and, most irksome, we were never paid the fee we had been promised. “I figured they’d find a way to forget us,” Pauline said. “Well, I blame Ed Asner,” I said. “He ruined it for everybody with his stomach growls. I wonder how Vidal’s segment went, though.” We had left after our segment.

  “Don’t worry,” Pauline said. “Whatever he said, he’ll be sure to repeat it on some other show.”

  After a messenger picks up the latest set of galleys Pauline has notated, she slides the pile of correspondence to the action part of her desk: a paper-clipped stack of fan letters, film scripts, forwarded news clips, nitpicky corrections, three-page dissertations explaining the throbbing urgencies of the latest Fassbinder she hadn’t reviewed, anti-Semitic diatribes (although it’s hard to imagine anyone who made less of her Jewish background in print than Pauline, she somehow attracted the wrath of Jew haters who seemed to subscribe to The New Yorker for the sole purpose of sending her periodic harangues—with every phrase you could practically hear hot cinders heaving through their nostrils as they blamed her for making Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould possible), and insistent pleas for Pauline to stop squandering valuable space in the magazine on movies that appealed only to the most violent, primitive tastes—why dignify and encourage such cultural Visigoths? (It was a question floated by Pauline’s colleagues at The New Yorker as well, some of whom trooped off to a movie she personally recommended only to emerge with a cultural crisis of faith that cinema had come to this.) Occasionally, Pauline would slide over a letter from a reader that was so flecked with rage and personal invective that I would ask, “Why don’t you just toss it in the trash? It’s got to be bad voodoo having all this hostility hanging around.” “No,” she said, “it’s just to respond and acknowledge their existence, otherwise they’ll just keep writing.” So to the correspondent who expressed his detestation as if he had scorpions dictating his sentences, she would dash off a courteous “Let’s just agree to disagree” response on New Yorker note cards that were designed for elegant brevity and to discourage further elaborations. It was with a deeper sigh that she moved on to the weightier correspondence that (unlike the scattershot nut mail) descended from some loftier altitude of intellectual pretense, printed on fine stationery (who knew there were so many subtle shades of cream?) and bearing the professional letterhead of a professor or, worse, psychotherapist or, worse still, heaven spare us, a married pair of Ph.D.’s who had drafted a joint communiqué intended, after doling out a few olives of praise, to set Pauline straight. Like Norman Mailer, Pauline was more exasperated by leechy, well-intentioned liberals trying to set everything in proper order than by outright antagonists. She trailed a finger along the italicized title of the film about which Pauline had so fallen short.

  “Oh, God, not that one,” I said. Pauline read:

  “As long-time readers and devotees of your New Yorker columns …”

  “—who are about to viciously turn on you,” I interjected.

  “… we looked forward, as we always do …”

  “—the two of them, waiting by the mailbox …”

  “… to your review of Seven Beauties by the Italian director Lina Wertmüller, which in its broad, intemperate disregard for the dark comedy that infuses Wertmüller’s vision …”

  Not a movie whose mention today lights the black-mass candles of Nazi-kink nostalgia (displaced by Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter, where sadomasochistic decadence was represented by the ravishing desolation of Charlotte Rampling’s Euro-goddess bone structure), Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties was a major honking controversy when it was released in 1975, a black comedy set mostly in a concentration camp where Giancarlo Giannini, to save his cowardly hide, submitted to sex with the obese commandant, played by Shirley Stoler, their coupling filmed as if he were mating with a hippopotamus or elephant, an obdurate, bestial, Diane Arbus bulk. Long before the word “transgressive” became a journalistic crutch and Quentin Tarantino a jacked-up marionette, Seven Beauties put viewers’ heads in a thunder-thigh vise. It might have remained a film festival/art-house transient had it not received the grand push by the New York Times (“Seven Beauties is Miss Wertmüller’s King Kong, her Nashville, her 8½, her Navigator, her City Lights”), which awarded special dispensation to any Holocaust-related work, its lead reviewer, Vincent Canby, christening it as “a handbook for survival, a farce, a drama of almost shattering impact.” And the film brandished a feminist sash because it was directed by a woman who, by pulling out this hand grenade and juggling it with such bravura, was making a bid for major-league status in foreign film as a female Fellini. (Fellini himself having gotten a bit run-down and recyclish.) Pauline found Seven Beauties a porky, pretentious wallow, as reflected in the title of her review, “Seven Fatties,” a head that nowadays would have the beleaguered remnants of the copy department fretting that such phrasing might be construed as insensitive, weight-ist. I can almost hear Pauline’s pithy, characteristic response: “Tough.” (Which sometimes, depending on the situation, had a “shit” attached.) It was often what she said when someone expressed queasy apprehension on some point of possible offense, a retort that was made not with anger or defiance but with a snorty impatience for euphemism, false modesty, and weak-kneed equivocation as secondhand mode of shirking the truth, or, worse, killing a joke. Tender feelings were a fraudulent cover for larger failures of nerve. (Pauline agreed with Nabokov’s contention that sentimentality and brutality were the flip sides of a subservient mind.) But with a film such as Seven Beauties, the background shadows of barbed wire and camp barracks made critics pro and con feel compelled to dress their prose in its Sunday best, which Pauline only did when true reverence was due (as, say, whenever the majestic prow of Vanessa Redgrave hove into view), and her pan of Seven Beauties was considered a slap in the face of the more sober-minded symposiasts. It was only after the psychologist and critic Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of Auschwitz whose authority on the subject of the camps was unassailable, published a devastating critique of Seven Beauties in The New Yorker in August of that year that its high-minded defenders lightened up on Pauline, but letters still trickled in, furrowed with disappointment. The backlash over Seven Beauties proved to be light flak compared with the furor over Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, when Pauline was more cautious in her tone and respectful in dissent and fat load of good it did her, what she got in return was the plague, accusations of being a self-hating Jew.

  After reading a passage from the duo’s letter citing Günter Grass’s Tin Drum and Jerzy Kosinski’s Painted Bird (“to further my education, I suppose,” Pauline said), she handed me the letter so that I could see for myself the closely packed paragraphs of reasoned dissent demonstrating that Pauline had missed not only the boat on Seven Beauties but the ocean, and the larger lesson of the Holocaust, not to mention the farcical dimensions of moral choice in a universe gone madly awry.

  “I see that they urge you to see the movie again and reconsider,” I said, hopping to the last paragraph, its decrescendo. “See it again through their eyes.”

  “My eyes are the only ones I have,” she said. “And they’re allowed to get tired.”

  Reconsiderations could wait until a lazier, more contemplative day, of which there were few on the horizon. It was Pauline’s practice and principle to beam a movie into her brain once and move forward, believing that the first responses were the true responses and that repeated viewings gave rise to rationalizations,
a fussy curatorship—a consensus-building exercise in your own mind full of minor adjustments that took you further and further away from the original altercation (although she did go see Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller a second time, anxious to confirm her original feeling that it was a great shaggy melancholy beauty of a movie worth going to the wall for). She wanted the nerve endings of her reactions exposed, not neatly tapered and trimmed. She was amused by a New Yorker colleague who only watched old movies, “as if she can’t bear to part with her black-and-white TV.” Nearly the first question Pauline asked a friend in conversation was, “Have you seen anything?” Meaning: anything new, anything she should know about, anything exciting. So much was happening in the ragged advance of movies in the seventies that she craved reports from the front lines, confirmations that she wasn’t crazily alone in her likings.

  As Pauline edited her copy and winnowed the mail, a thin traffic stream appeared and disappeared at the door, not all of them New Yorker cast members.

  “Hi, do you know Jim Wolcott?”

  Whom did I meet in Pauline’s office in those years? Piper Laurie, famously speared by the flurry of telekinetically delivered kitchen knives in Carrie. I interviewed Sissy Spacek, the star of Carrie, for the Voice, illustrated by a portrait of Spacek by the photographer James Hamilton that made every freckle look fetchingly spooky, not that I recall that actually coming up in our conversation with Laurie, since I don’t recall our conversation, only the moment of hello. The screenwriter Ron Shelton, who would later direct Bull Durham, whose famous “I believe” monologue (“… that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”), delivered by Kevin Costner, seemed to chime with Pauline’s tastes. Did I meet the writer-director-reprobate hyphenate James Toback there? It doesn’t matter, because Toback is a universal application, his friendship with Pauline and her praise of his directorial debut, Fingers, one of the whacking sticks used against her. It wasn’t enough that Pauline’s opening sentence shot like a squirt of lighter fluid—“James Toback is trying to be Orson Welles and Carol Reed, Dostoyevski, Conrad and Kafka” (though Pauline said to me it wasn’t as hyperbolic as it sounded: “I said he was trying to be them, not that he had achieved it”)—but she also compared his flair for self-dramatization to that of the “young Tennessee Williams,” though one imagines Toback’s Glass Menagerie would be shattered by roughly obtained orgasms. Reviewing Fingers for National Review, John Simon claimed that Pauline’s championing of Toback represented personal logrolling and “rather shoddy journalism,” given their prominent chumming around, and the ugliness evolved from there. (Years later, following a screening of Fingers at the Museum of the Moving Image, Toback set the record straight in his rogue fashion: “John Simon actually wrote and implied that I was fucking Pauline Kael—that’s why she wrote what she did about the movie—and then said it at UCLA at a big gathering they had. And they asked me about it on a TV interview after that and I said, ‘I have fucked Pauline Kael the same number of times I’ve fucked John Simon.’ ”) If it wasn’t in her office that I met Toback, it may have been at a screening, it may have been anywhere, because he was everywhere then, just as he’s everywhere now, and we’ll be leaving for the screening soon, just as soon as Pauline polishes off a final query or two from the fact-checker, removes the rubber thimble from her thumb, dips a pair of fresh pencils one after another into an electric sharpener, and collects her things.