Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  Pauline never spoke to me of her unhappiness at Paramount, not then, not later, not even alludingly. When she phoned from the coast in the summer of 1979, it was to hear what movies I had seen, what I was up to, if there was any talk about some recent story or review in The New Yorker, her amusement over an item in Liz Smith’s syndicated gossip column that she had “gone Hollywood” and was taking driving lessons—“me, at my age,” she scoffed. “As if I’d even be able to see over the steering wheel! Who feeds her this stuff, garden gnomes?” Were there clues in our long-distance conversations to the emotional wringer she was going through that I was too tone-deaf to detect over the phone? I don’t know. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been that obtuse, but subtext wasn’t something Pauline trafficked in. I had a closer view of the buffetings that were to come, the shaky underpinnings in her voice this time unmistakable. The decade was about to dim.

  Coda

  Here’s how I remember it, the moment for me when the doorknob turned and the seventies were truly over.

  It was after an evening showing at the now-gone Loew’s Tower East of The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving as rival concert pianists whose inconvenient romance prickles every passive-aggressive nerve in Dreyfuss’s acting quiver, his character’s male ego in danger of developing a bald spot from too much rubbing. He wants her so bad, but can’t accept that she might out-Rachmaninoff him! For some reason, Pauline Kael hadn’t caught the film when it was screened for critics, and so her review would run late, weeks after its December release. After her sojourn in Hollywood, Pauline had returned to active duty at The New Yorker in June 1980 with a long take on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that seemed to mimic Kubrick’s Steadicam tracking through the remote snow, followed by a state-of-the-art polemic called “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers,” in which she took what she had learned at Paramount, shaped it into a plasticine bomb, and set it off. Colonized by conglomerates that knew and cared nothing about movies themselves, studios were now run by executives who hedged their bets by green-lighting package-deal projects whose premise could be boiled down to a sound bite: “The higher the executive, the more cruelly short his attention span.” Beneath the bureaucratic inertia and servile bowing to the balance sheets, chaos. “Nobody really controls a production now; the director is on his own, even if he’s insecure, careless, or nuts.” If her sabbatical had been a sour education, worse was on the way now that Pauline was back home. In August, Renata Adler, she of the bell-ringer braid, a longtime New Yorker contributor who had been one of the relievers rotated out of the bullpen to review movies in Pauline’s absence (along with Roger Angell, Veronica Geng, and Donald Barthelme), fastidiously shoved a steel safe off the roof of the New York Review of Books, an eight-thousand-word flattener titled “The Perils of Pauline.” Judgment had fallen. It read like an autopsy report filed by the archangel of death whose pen was her scalpel.

  Occasioned by the publication of Kael’s latest collection, When the Lights Go Down, the scale of the vivisection combined with its methodical thoroughness indicated months of preparation intended to deliver a coup de grâce. Once upon a time, when unicorns gamboled, Adler had entertained fancies that Kael might be a critic to marry the distinguished mind of Robert Warshow with the frequency of the political columnist Walter Lippmann (how’d he get in here?). But the cucumber slices had fallen from her eyes. “Now, When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or [John] Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless. It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture.” It was as hyperbolic an exaggeration as Mary McCarthy’s assertion that every word of Lillian Hellman’s was a lie, including “and” and “the,” and Adler was just getting started. The publication of “The Perils of Pauline” hit Pauline hard. Not so much the meat and particulars of the essay, though these damaged and vexed. “She’s trying to take away my language,” Pauline told me, “to make me so self-conscious that every time I ask a rhetorical question or do something jazzy I’ll catch myself and worry, ‘Is this something everyone will jump on?’ ” And she found Adler’s elevation of “the intermittent critic” over those who covered a critical beat absurdly snobbish and patrician, as if anyone who had to meet deadlines for a living were some kind of bum. More unnerving was the gloating jubilation it ignited in the press, including a feature article in New York magazine by Philip Nobile that called it a “crucifixion,” and Andrew Sarris climbing like a rooster atop the henhouse to proclaim that Pauline was now “naked to thine enemies.” Gary Indiana, a former colleague of mine at the Voice, would later muse in Artforum, “I have a fond memory of devouring that essay with Susan Sontag, peering over each other’s shoulder, in the donut shop that used to occupy the corner of Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, both of us nearly gagging with laughter at the sly, inexorable trajectory of every sentence, the devastating conclusion of every paragraph, the utterly damning thoroughness with which Ms. Kael’s grotesquely inflated, even sacrosanct reputation had been laid out like a corpse for burial.” Sontag gagging with laughter is not a picture to linger over. It was more than simple Schadenfreude at work; it was more visceral and hooting, a vulture party, reminding me in its circling glee of the footage of Frenchwomen having their heads shaved in public after the liberation. Which is not to argue that Pauline was an innocent, defenseless victim, or that Adler’s article was unanimously endorsed. I did a jokey riff on the controversy for the Voice and for my jesting found myself vaguely threatened with a lawsuit, a prospect that seemed to excite our resident civil liberties advocate, Nat Hentoff, who always enjoyed having a First Amendment case to warm his hands over.

  What made this harder for Pauline to weather than the high-powered hits she had taken before (such as Mailer’s bull run at her over Last Tango in Paris) was that Adler’s attack had the acid residue of an inside job, a takedown encouraged with a nod and a wink by those at The New Yorker who thought the Minotaur mama’s vulgarity and bullying had gone too long unchecked. A few claimed they did more than nod and wink, directly assisting in the mechanics of the piece. The high-altitude novelist Harold Brodkey, whom we met earlier, boasted that he had helped Adler with the essay, suggesting solecisms and signature mannerisms to toss in the evidence bag. Of course, Brodkey had an extravagant sense of his own diaphanous influence, placing himself as the lightning rod of every literary creation that had happened since he attained consciousness, claiming that he was the unattributed model for Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, the Devil in Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, and Leander Dworkin in Adler’s novel Pitch Dark. A fun guy, he resented the fact that the New York Mets ace Dwight Gooden made more money on the pitching mound than he did at his desk as a writer, to me a distinct sign of a madman. So his testimony always had to be filed under “Dubious” or “Iffy.” But Brodkey was also a notoriously sly malice-spreader who liked to keep busy, so it’s quite possible he did put his Iago insinuations into play here. In any case, Brodkey wanted partial credit, even if no credit was due, and he made sure Pauline was aware his fingerprints were on it. Other New Yorker colleagues let slide smiles of royal court approval over Adler’s onslaught, and it was conjectured that William Shawn himself tacitly condoned the piece, distressed over the coarse improprieties Pauline kept traipsing across the stage like a burlesque queen’s tatty boa. “Some New Yorker watchers feel that the genteel editor is in secret sympathy with Adler’s analysis and wishes that Kael, whom Brendan Gill characterizes as ‘foul mouthed’ in Here at The New Yorker, would clean up her column,” Nobile wrote in New York, citing those unnamed sources whom no journalist can be without. Granting an interview to Nobile, Shawn denied that this was so, but that the elf wizard himself felt compelled to speak on the record indicated how roiling this was intestinally for the magazine. The last paragraph of Nobile’s piece read, “Adler observed in [her nonfiction
collection] Toward a Radical Middle that ‘no essay form becomes as quickly obsolete as an unfavorable review.’ She is mistaken. ‘The Perils of Pauline’ will most likely haunt Kael for the rest of her career.” It didn’t haunt the rest of her career, but it cast a blight over the rest of the year, which wasn’t done.

  A few months later, Woody Allen’s latest film, Stardust Memories, was screened, an evening high with anticipation. Seated in the row in front of us, Dick Cavett, crickety with excitement, turned to Pauline and said: “Pauline, let me ask you something. Do you think it would be worthwhile learning German to understand a pun John Simon recently told me?”

  Without missing a beat, Pauline shot back, “Why are you talking to John Simon?”

  That was not the response he expected, and, innocently unaware that fraternization with John Simon carried the risk of Senate censure, Cavett expressed his fondness for puns by way of explanation, then turned around and faced front as the lights dimmed. How well I recall the film that followed. The abrasive whining about fame and the parasites it attracted. The Felliniesque scattered remains of a carnival that’s left town. The conflation of private angst and historical atrocity. The Grosz-like close-ups of the Jewish characters as they swooped into frame, exhibited like gargoyles. (“Here comes another nose,” Pauline muttered unhappily at one point during the screening.) If Pauline was dubious about much of Manhattan and Interiors, now Stardust Memories had bared Woody’s sour desire to blend into the tasteful WASP wallpaper (or sink between a pair of shiksa thighs) and be free from clawing Jewish cling. “The Jewish self-hatred that spills out in this movie could be a great subject, but all it does is spill out,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “He may be ready to become a Catholic convert.” The review was so blistering—“Stardust Memories doesn’t seem like a movie, or even like a filmed essay; it’s nothing”—that it drove a stake into her and Woody’s friendship for good. How close that friendship was, I didn’t know, but it had been at one of Woody’s New Year’s parties that Norman Mailer, still stung over Pauline’s slam of his Marilyn Monroe biographical photo album, gun-slingered up to her with his elbows extended and proposed that they butt heads to square things. She declined the invitation, like a sane person. In a portrait of Pauline published years later in the Atlantic, her friend and Massachusetts neighbor Roy Blount Jr. recounted how during a car drive a fellow passenger expressed what a shame it was that Woody had taken the review so personally, and Pauline replied, “Oh, no. It was vicious.” She accepted that casualties were part of the price of practicing criticism, one of its lousier sacrifices, which didn’t make it less painful. Walking into rooms to meet waves of resentment loses its novelty appeal after a while, and losing friends only makes each entrance more exposed.

  We got through The Competition, Pauline murmurously pleased whenever Sam Wanamaker appeared as the snowcapped Leonard Bernstein maestro who wore his sweater tied around his neck like a cape, and scoffing at Lee Remick’s stiff-postured projectile launch of such unsayable lines as “It will turn your tits a lovely shade of puce.” We gathered ourselves together and ventured out into the December night to signal a taxi to take us downtown. The mood in the taxi was strange, wrong somehow, a bubble of trapped air of heavier density than that outside. The sound from the car radio was turned down low, but not for long. Pauline gave the driver the destination, and he said, as the taxi found the lane it wanted, “Guess you haven’t heard the news—John Lennon got shot tonight. Outside the Dakota. They’re saying it was carried out like an assassination.” The driver turned the radio up to one of the all-news channels that had reporters on the scene relaying the latest bulletins. “God,” Pauline said, “anyone with a gun can have his day.” The faces on the street through the passenger windows looked stunned, everyone moving at three-quarters speed, or maybe that’s memory slowing down the videotape. We said the usual hopeless things one said about the sadness and awful senselessness of it all as the soft machinery of shock and mourning took shape elsewhere in the city, the candlelight vigils to come, the chorusing of “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance.”

  The Christmas lights in midtown looked incongruous, an irony we could have done without. The driver had lowered the radio volume again, as if respecting our quiet, or sensing we had heard enough, and beside me Pauline said, “I wish the movie had been better. It had so much going for it.” “I guess this just wasn’t our night,” I said. “It wasn’t anyone’s night,” Pauline said, and it got quiet again as the Christmas lights continued to go by.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost to my editor, Gerald Howard, the sort of editor everybody insists doesn’t exist anymore, but how wrong they are, as I and this book can attest. He initiated the idea for Lucking Out and kept the project alive with encouragement and enthusiasm during its choppy passages at sea after I had swallowed the compass. Thanks too to editorial assistant Hannah Wood at Doubleday and to copy editor Ingrid Sterner, who tweezed the text with nimble precision. My agent, Elyse Cheney, is the dynamo every writer dreams of having in his corner. And the last two decades of my life as a writer would be unimaginable if it weren’t for the creative support and spirited generosity of Aimee Bell, my editor at Vanity Fair, and of the magazine’s editor, the phenomenal Graydon Carter.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material:

  Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc., and Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “Loudmouth” words and music by Johnny Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone, Tommy Ramone, and Joey Ramone, copyright © 1977 by Mutated Music (ASCAP), Bleu Disque Music (ASCAP), and Taco Tunes (ASCAP), copyright renewed. All rights for Bleu Disque Music and Taco Tunes administered by WB Music Corp. All rights for Mutated Music administered by BMG Chrysalis. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc., and Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Rhoda Wolf: Excerpt from letter from Dan Wolf to James Wolcott. Reprinted by permission of Rhoda Wolf.

  The Wylie Agency LLC: January 1972 letter from Norman Mailer to Dan Wolf, copyright © 2011 by the Norman Mailer Estate. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

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