I felt myself becoming a prim prune when a film critic who aspired to the patriarchal status of Irving Howe or Moses the Lawgiver, apropos of nothing, began regaling me with how M., a former girlfriend whom I had met when they were still an item, had a pussy that was always piping hot—“she’s like an oven down there,” he said, “or an active volcano.” That was rather more vivid than necessity required, and I had nothing to offer in response, not wanting to imagine his frankfurter being grilled and having the uneasy sense that he was nudging me to take a temperature reading myself. Another member of the fraternity, let’s initial him S., was equally expansive about a woman who was one of my editors then, marveling over the milky slopes of her flesh, which was far more firm underneath than you anticipated from seeing her clothed. She had the muscles of a belly dancer, he said, and again I felt as if I were being encouraged to test the slopes myself and report back to my buddies at the lodge. Yet another offered me his girlfriend’s number before he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of being the next Robert Towne, screenwriter-shaman-sage-seducer extraordinaire, saying I should give her a call. “She’s really into helicopter sex,” he said. “That’s when the woman wraps her legs around you while you’re dicking and you swing her around the room.” I had seen a similar scene in Five Easy Pieces, with Jack Nicholson giving Sally Ann Struthers the whirlybird, but I couldn’t see myself calling a stranger based on so specific a recommendation. So I demurred and of course kicked myself about it later, during those 3:00 a.m.’s of the soul when you know there’s a lot going on in the untamed night and you’re not doing any of it.
Some reviewers traded off girlfriends, or the young women in contention themselves decided to switch partners, which in itself was not unusual—similar roster moves went on in the rock-critic world, but rock critics, surprisingly perhaps, seemed less partial to anatomical shoptalk than the film critics I knew, who were more engaged in competitive jousting while showing off for Pauline. Pauline wasn’t a snob about intellect, nor did she crave yea-sayers; the young women she enjoyed were those who were pretty, sparkly, animated, pixieish—H.’s new girl is “darling,” she would say, or R.’s new girl was “such a doll.” But the dolls and darlings didn’t stick around long, replaced by other passing lights until the fella had acquired himself a serious girlfriend, which didn’t preclude bringing other new faces to screenings, a turnover that entertained Pauline because she liked new faces and seemed to get a spectatorish kick out of the rakish complications. Also because the Serious Girlfriend often became a serious drag, excess cargo, especially if matrimony ensued.
It wasn’t as if Pauline disapproved of every girlfriend and spouse. She was keen on Susan Cahill, the wife of Tom Cahill, who would go on to best-selling success with How the Irish Saved Civilization, and championed Susan’s Catholic schoolgirl novel, Earth Angels. She got a kick out of Joan Ackermann-Blount, the then wife of the humorist and Southern prodigy Roy Blount Jr., a neighbor of hers up in the Berkshires. Joan was an athletic spitfire who went on to become a playwright (The Batting Cage) and TV screenwriter (the HBO sports comedy Arli$$), and she and Roy would later divorce. But whenever there was trouble in Tahiti, to borrow the title of Leonard Bernstein’s suburban operetta, Pauline tended to fault the girlfriend/wife as the guilty albatross. “She’s a clog dancer,” Pauline said of one critic’s wife, whose folk dancing she considered culturally stunted, and would refer to another protégé’s wife’s penchant for spangly bracelets and peasant skirts as if she were a refugee from a gypsy caravan who had gotten him under her witchy spell. In her review of West Side Story, she talked about the unendurable vexation of dating someone whose movie tastes you didn’t share. “Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider,” she wrote. “Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness). It’s experiences like these that drive women into the arms of truckdrivers—and, as this is America, the truckdrivers all too often come up with the same kind of status-seeking tastes.” Truck-driving aesthetes being in short supply in New York, it was college-educated women whom Pauline perceived rightly or wrongly to be prisses and conventional-minded cultural pretenders, more inclined to gentility. (Pauline admired the intelligence and stately poise of the film critic Molly Haskell, the wife of Andrew Sarris, but thought Molly was corseted by her fear of anything unruly and new, stuck in a potato sack race with her husband’s fogy tastes.) So when Pauline spotted slippage in one or another of her single protégés, small failures of nerve or lapses of taste that took the edge off his fastball, she would sometimes attribute his wayward slide to his current choice of girlfriend. “H. really seems to have lost his way since he started dating P.,” she would lament, to which I replied, “I know—he could have been the next Dr. Kildare!” Which made no sense but made Pauline laugh, and for me then there was no happier calling than making Pauline laugh. (I ran into another ex-girlfriend of H.’s years later who told me, “I think Pauline cooled on me after I told her I didn’t like Yentl. In retrospect, that was the Beginning of the End.”)
Pauline had female protégées, such as the tall, husky-voiced, meticulously perceptive Lloyd Rose, who wrote for The New Yorker and the Atlantic before becoming theater critic for the Washington Post and then jettisoned criticism to write paperback novelizations of Doctor Who, and the even taller Polly Frost (epic-scaled women amused Pauline—they had a storybook quality), a California export who published humor pieces in The New Yorker of quirky, elliptical, scattery unclassifiability that would find no place later under Tina Brown’s more utilitarian regime. But it was the male rowing team with whom she most identified. She already had a daughter, Gina—film criticism gave her a raft of sons. Male energy and bravado provided a hum that appealed to Pauline’s iconoclasm, with her refusal to make pretty or put up with soppy sentiment; temperamentally, she was very much of the thirties, when wisecracking rough diamonds played by Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, and Jean Harlow sized up a man or a scene with one measuring glance. (She was an immediate fan of Sex and the City, considering Kim Cattrall’s Samantha the trophy heiress to the screwball-comedy legacy of lewd sass.) A fellow writer at the Village Voice, who knew Pauline in San Francisco, said she would walk into a party and size up the weight of a man’s balls in the cup of her hand. I assumed she was speaking metaphorically—I really should have asked—and this was not the Pauline I knew, and my balls never met her scales of justice. But she did derive a vicarious kick from the company of men on the make, renowned studs, seducers, pickup artists, and passive-aggressive victim-magnets such as Beatty, Toback, Towne, and the aforementioned helicopter pilot (who, after moving to L.A., told me of being caught in bed with a friend’s wife and sternly lectured, “D., it’s bad enough, your fucking my wife, but I really resent you thinking that gives you the right to borrow my fucking bathrobe”). Toward the exploits of a number of her tomcatting protégés, she also adopted a lenient policy.
Pauline once related to me the travails of a rakish writer of our acquaintance who had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from a partner in a one-night stand. The problem was that Rakish Writer had a steady girlfriend, and when he told her about the STD, how he had gotten it, and why she needed to get herself tested, “she didn’t react very well,” Pauline reported with a sympathetic sigh. “She was awfully hard on him.” Pauline thought the betrayed girlfriend should have been a little more understanding, at least until the test results came back. Pauline knew RW was in the wrong, but that’s where her sympathies tilted, with the guy who couldn’t resist a scoring opportunity. Pauline could sometimes excuse male appetites with rationales that won points for originality. Although she disapproved of the goings-on at Roman Polanski’s clubhouse, based on firsthand reports from Towne (the screenwriter on Chinatown), she thought too much fuss was being made over the underage-sodomy incident that sent the director into exile. “It’s not as if he could physically hurt those girls,” Pauline said. “Have you ever see
n Polanski? He’s quite tiny and slight, about the same size as those girls they’re talking about. They’re on an equal scale.” But he’s still so much older than they are, I said; he’s the adult here. “Oh, I know, I know,” Pauline said. “Gina doesn’t agree with me either.” It was clear she thought Polanski deserved clemency, a view that was shared by critics who otherwise shared few opinions with Pauline, such as Andrew Sarris. A director’s prerogatives got a lot more leeway back then.
When not wishing she could tear certain relationships down the middle along the dotted line, Pauline would play matchmaker, the unlikeliest fairy godmother imaginable. She would drop ten-ton hints to pry a little interest and initiative from my direction. Of Veronica Geng, she remarked in her office one day, “Have you noticed, Veronica’s got the cutest figure.” I had noticed, not being insensible, but never thought of Veronica as girlfriend material because her dance card, to use an antediluvian phrase, seemed filled, and temperamentally, psychologically, aesthetically, Veronica was a quadratic equation way beyond my ability to comprehend. I got a huge charge whenever we ran into each other—Veronica was incapable of conventional responses, the crook of her smile presaging some darted observation or madcap disclosure. (“This guy I like is coming to New York this weekend—I better start doing some leg lifts.”) But I also knew that she could click off on people who had displeased her as if they had never been born. Suddenly they de-existed. But Veronica, sprite with a bee stinger that she was, made more sense than another of Pauline’s date suggestions, a lanky, tomboyish writer-editor whom we’ll call Stacy. “You really should ask her out,” Pauline said. “You’d make quite a pair.”
“I thought she was a lesbian.”
“Oh, that. So what. Aren’t you up for a challenge?”
“No. Are you sure you’re talking to me and not H.?”
(H. was always giving women he scarcely knew neck rubs to “loosen them up.”)
“It’s just that your senses of humor are so much alike,” Pauline said. “Anyway, it’s worth considering.”
And then I found myself up in Pauline’s hotel room with one of Pauline’s friends, whom I’ll call Madison. In the realm of pulp fiction Madison would have been known as a man-eater: slender, dark eyed, her gaze direct and appraising, long, thick brown hair—an urban Jane ready to swing from a vine and carry a man off to her bachelorette tree house, where she would ravish her prey between tidbits about the latest movies or art shows she had attended. Not the worst way to spend an evening, if you could keep up with her quick costume changes of mood. She was unique in Pauline’s circle for her lightning lack of hesitation to sass Pauline or shoot down innocent bystanders until smoke poured from their fuselage and sent them plashing somewhere in the Pacific. She could be breathtakingly rude, like Lauren Bacall in the backseat of a limo, casting aspersions that carried the whap of a slap; yet she could be tremendously tactful and generous, too, returning from her travels with the perfect present, often a rare edition of a book that the recipient had mentioned in passing but Madison had entered into her case file. Her tastes and Pauline’s often clashed because her taste seemed so whim-driven. “She’s a snob who likes everything,” someone said, but the snobbery came across as brattiness, not as the pinched anality of someone awaiting Susan Sontag’s next encyclical. Her sexual forthrightness was the flip side of the pickup-artist swagger Pauline found so amusing, and here she was, seated on the edge of Pauline’s bed in the Royalton, looking up at me with licky eyes, as if I were that night’s barbecue special, or was that my tropical imagination? And was Pauline stage-managing this moment? I pretended innocence just this side of stark insensibility, suspecting that whatever might transpire between Madison and me that night or any other night would be broadcast to Pauline, and I simply didn’t want Pauline knowing my business, not like she seemed to know that of so many others. Much as I adored her, I didn’t want the godmother to have total jurisdiction.
Although the seventies had a lot more going on at groin level than the decade that followed (when whoring for fame earned its racing stripes), it would be an error of my own emphasis to leave the impression that Pauline’s loyal band was primarily libido-driven, a nest of Les Liaisons Dangereuses swingers trading “biting repartee” without benefit of painted fans and snuffboxes, as Pauline occupied the center of the silken web, eating the flies we brought her. The erotics at play were less those of the flesh than those of yearning, striving egos—an erotics directed toward recognition. The motoring force at work as we sat there in the glorified drawing room of the Algonquin was the drive for approval and attention, Pauline’s approval and attention most of all (the larger world’s acceptance an amplification and ratification of hers), which was won and held not by being smarty or fawning or doctrinaire but by being receptive to whatever might be coming around the corner, willing to play the tricky carom. She couldn’t stand “stiffs,” whose tastes were fully formed, rigidified, and stuck in the petrified forest of the past, and those of us sitting in the Algonquin were on the upswing of our careers, just starting our scouting missions. These were the years of encouragement. Some would stray off target, disappear into the reeds, defect from criticism under the pressure of unfulfilled expectations and career frustrations, or simply find something more frolicking to do, Pauline being more ambitious for them than they were for themselves. In a sense we all would fail Pauline because none of us would surpass her defiant nerve, her resounding impact. But tonight, we’re modestly in character, the future only extends so far, and Pauline is sipping tea from a cup, having brought her own tea bag. H. is there, looking Southern courtly as his words seem to roll down his tapered wrists, like beaded droplets. R. is there, leaning forward, avid, his date poised on her chair as if it were a lily pad, choosing each peanut from the peanut bowl with premeditated care. Madison presides from her corner of the sofa, giving a Tallulah Bankhead performance. As for me, there I am, just a few years after leaving college, sitting at the Algonquin with the greatest film critic then or now, part of the gang, wearing jeans that probably need washing and nursing a Coke, the only thing I ever ordered. And Pauline—she listens, she laughs, she passes along nuggets (“I asked Peckinpah why he made —— look like such a dumb cow in ——, and he said, ‘Because that’s what she is’ ”), but she doesn’t hold forth, she doesn’t make pronouncements, she doesn’t pontificate, and she doesn’t traffic in absolutes, like Ayn Rand holding an indoctrination séance. “Let’s order a last round, like civilized people,” she says, and rings the bell.
A waiter miraculously materializes, as if emerging from the carpet.
It gets late, eleven thirtyish, the hotel guests have levitated to their rooms, only a few rendezvousing couples occupy the corner tables, and Pauline has galleys to tackle the next day. She rings for a waiter, the bill is brought, and Pauline pays the tab. Pauline always paid the tab, though some chipped in. A couple of us accompany her across the street to the steps of the Royalton, where we say our good-byes. The air rings with cold. “I have a screening tomorrow night for The Last Tycoon, so let me know if you’re up for it. It’s hard to imagine Elia Kazan and Fitzgerald being a good match, but you never know.”
And with that, a wave as if given to a departing train, and up into the marble lobby of the Royalton she goes.
PART III:
Punk
It was like seeing my own ghost, the Spirit of Punk Past.
I was home, dawdling across the cable-TV dial, when I was arrested by the sight of a host of once-familiar faces, a few of them sporting incongruous New Year’s Eve hats and leis. Incongruous, not because it wasn’t New Year’s Eve, but because of the lean, lunar faces jutting under the hats. These were not faces normally associated with holiday mirth. Fervent intent was usually more like it, furry heads and furrowed brows. I identified the bleached-out footage as being shot along the bar at CBGB’s, some of the faces belonging to Tom Verlaine (sitting on an actual bar stool, like a normal person), Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca, J
ohn Cale, Deborah Harry, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, the journalist Lisa Robinson, and Lenny Kaye. And then, a flash of light and gone, there I was: me—the me I once was, one of the milling crowd, part of the scene. Chatting with someone at the only place where my memories are three-dimensional, a hologram in my head that still feels like a crummy home movie. The film—run on the Independent Film Channel—was Amos Poe and Ivan Kral’s Blank Generation, a music documentary shot mostly in the loose bowels of the Bowery, its title taken from a song by the sun-glassed poet, mouth-grimacing virtuoso, and inadvertent style setter Richard Hell, whose torn T-shirt bearing the inviting plea “Please Kill Me” proved to be one of the period’s most enduring fashion statements, along with laced-tight bondage gear tricked out as smart evening wear. Filmed in black and white with no live-synced sound (the songs draped over the images like a scratchy, patchy carpet), Blank Generation jerked along like a home movie even back then and today looks like an archaeological find, a kinescope discovered in a salvage yard recording the last known sightings from that prelapsarian age when un-trust-funded artists still coyoted the streets and, be it ever so humble, every hovel felt like home. I had forgotten I was in Blank Generation, however fleetingly, and seeing myself again as if for the first time didn’t make me mourn Lost Youth, that not being my preferred form of masochism; it made me smile. It was like a college yearbook come alive. Here were my fellow classmates, the old alma mater in its midnight glory.
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