by Brian Kellow
By this time Gina and Warner Friedman had separated. Pauline had feared that marriage would destroy their relationship, and she had wanted to save them both the heartbreak. Gina and Will moved in with Pauline briefly before finding another house nearby. Warner continued to visit Pauline after he and Gina were divorced. One thing they had in common was a love of watching boxing matches on television, and they were often joined by Allen Barra.
One person for whom Pauline showed unconditional affection was Will. Her friends were amazed by how completely she doted on him—and he in turn adored her. Will always called her “Pauline”—never “Grandma.” Once, when Will was a small child, Warner and Gina had gone away for an overnight trip and left Will in Pauline’s care. Gina asked her mother to be sure to keep a close eye on him, and Pauline replied, ‘I’ll watch him with my own life.”
She continued to love life in Great Barrington and the big house with its spacious rooms and overflowing bookshelves. She enjoyed going to several of the local restaurants, including the Inn on the Green and the Castle Street Grill. But if she dined at a place that was under par, she would sigh, “I can do better than this myself.” She did enjoy cooking at home and typically preferred simple meals with fresh ingredients—lots of vegetables and pasta. By now she had stopped drinking as a general health precaution. She missed her strong shots of Myers’s Rum and Wild Turkey, but learned to get the utmost out of endless pots of tea and bottles of water.
Her relations with most of the local business owners were fairly harmonious, with the occasional ripple. Once, Warner had taken her to a hardware store to buy some supplies. It happened to be Mother’s Day, and the proprietor gave her a gift, adding in a condescending tone, “Because you look like you’re a mother or a grandmother.” “Fuck you, Charlie,” Pauline replied. “Do you know I’ve written ten books?”
Pauline continued to work hard to promote younger writer friends that she considered had something exceptional to offer. Ray Sawhill by now had a serious girlfriend, a bright and attractive young writer named Polly Frost. Many of the male Paulettes felt that Pauline was unduly harsh on their wives and girlfriends, but in this case, Pauline had introduced the couple. She had immediately taken to Frost, who had studied the harpsichord but now had a serious interest in being a writer. Pauline sensed in Frost what she had sensed in Sawhill: Neither of them was interested in her as a cult leader or career champion, but as an entertaining, warm, lively person who was fun to talk with over a meal. Her conversations with Frost revolved around clothes, food, and animals more than it did movies. Frost’s gift was for humor, and Pauline helped her get several pieces published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. But she almost always believed that criticism was the path her protégés should take, and she began prodding Frost to write movie reviews.
One of the flaws in her mentoring style was that her pride in her own past often led her to give bad career advice to young writer friends. “She was about to go back to San Francisco when Shawn gave her a buzz and hired her at The New Yorker,” said Sawhill. “But somehow, in her mind, this turned into: She got what she worked for—it wasn’t just a great stroke of luck that turned her life around. It was—finally, the universe has been proven a just one.” And Pauline was certain that if the writers she was encouraging would only sit down and write a big piece on spec, magazine editors would see how brilliant they were and have to hire them. “She would be let down if I would say, ‘I’m killing myself writing these pieces and nobody’s publishing them,’” said Sawhill. “Somehow, she really thought it would work, and in many cases, it didn’t.”
Pauline also continued to advocate strongly for both David Edelstein and James Wolcott. She had been trying for some time to interest Shawn in Wolcott, but the editor always demurred, saying that he didn’t think Wolcott was quite right for The New Yorker. She also tried to persuade Billy Abrahams to bring out a book of Wolcott’s collected pieces. As early as 1982, she had written to Abrahams that Wolcott’s movie columns for Texas Monthly were “absolutely first rate. The amazing thing about his writing—whether it’s the freelance pieces in The New Republic or in The New York Review of Books or one of his regular columns—is that it overlaps and forms a body of witty criticism. There hasn’t been anything like him since the young Tynan. . . . Why don’t you nab him?”
One person who resisted being drawn into Pauline’s circle was the gifted young critic Owen Gleiberman. Like many others, Gleiberman’s friendship with her began when he wrote her a fan letter while still a college student. He was writing reviews for the University of Michigan’s student newspaper, and Pauline encouraged him to send her some samples, writing back and offering praise and constructive criticism in some detail. They eventually met in 1980 in New York, shortly after her return from Hollywood, and at first Gleiberman seemed poised to become a Paulette.
Although Gleiberman was as flattered by Pauline’s attention as most of her protégés were, he also was very aware of the complexities involved in her mentorship. He believed that she was most comfortable when her younger “discoveries” did work she could respect and honestly praise, work that showed originality and spark, yet she was also quite conscious of keeping them in the position of being an acolyte. It was the same complex that David Denby had observed years earlier, and in many cases the fate of the Paulettes seemed to rest on the question of their individual temperament: How willing were they were to remain in Pauline’s shadow?
In the 1980s The Boston Phoenix served as a kind of farm team for the Paulettes who had their eye on success in bigger, New York jobs: Janet Maslin, Steven Schiff, and David Edelstein had all put in their time at the Phoenix before moving on to higher-profile reviewing posts. Gleiberman took this route as well, and had spent two and a half years on the newspaper, happily working as a second-string movie critic, when he received a call from Clay Felker. The genius behind New York was now in decline, and was trying to revive some of his lost glory by starting a small newspaper, a sort of precursor to the successful Seven Days, known as The East Side Express. He had read some of Gleiberman’s reviews in the Phoenix and asked him to be his first-string movie critic. Gleiberman agreed, staying on at the Phoenix while freelancing for Felker’s publication.
Once Gleiberman began working for the short-lived East Side Express, he found himself reviewing many of the same films Pauline wrote about for The New Yorker. Often he disagreed with her—Bob Fosse’s Star 80, which he liked and Pauline detested, being a case in point. His career advanced to the point that he was put up for membership in the National Society of Film Critics, which initially he was denied. When discussing his disappointment about that decision with Pauline one day, she told him that she felt that a number of the members had not believed his work for The East Side Express to be at the same level of what he was doing for the Phoenix.
“Nobody was reading my reviews in The East Side Express,” Gleiberman recalled. “They read what you sent in. I knew she was lying to me. And what I said to myself was, I cannot trust what she’s saying. And I decided right there to end my friendship with Pauline, because I realized that she would lie to her critic acolytes in order to keep them in line. She was a great, fascinating woman who had her dark side.” There was no dramatic falling-out between Pauline and Gleiberman; they remained on cordial but relatively distant terms for the rest of her life. But Gleiberman’s experience with her was as shocking, perhaps even traumatic, as, in a different way, Denby’s had been. Gleiberman always considered himself the truest of all the Paulettes because he had realized that he had to be himself. “To be true to what Pauline taught us,” he said, “you had to break with her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
For years one of the chief topics of conversation among staff members at The New Yorker had been the eventual retirement of William Shawn. There was much concern about the magazine’s lack of a succession plan. Given The New Yorker’s love of promoting from within, various staff members had been put forth as possible heirs to Shaw
n’s mantle, and all were deemed unsuitable for one reason or another. By the mid-1980s the magazine industry had changed as dramatically as the movie industry had: Few if any other publications now had the same degree of sensitivity about the separation of editorial and advertising departments. Making money and capturing the endlessly sought-after young demographic were more important than ever, and at many publications, the state of advertising was the overwhelming consideration when the owners were considering which grade to put on the editor’s report card.
Shawn had weathered a number of tense situations in the past several years; one had come in 1976, when several staff members brought the threat of unionization to a head. The New Yorker had never been a union house, and in a memo written to the staff in the fall of 1976, Shawn articulated his opposition:
Dozens of people had advanced . . . from typist or secretarial jobs into jobs as checkers or proofreaders; or gone from jobs as checkers or proofreaders to Talk reporters or messengers into jobs as editors or into writing for the magazine. Everything has been open to everybody. The organization has not been stratified or rigid. This openness and this freedom of movement have been basic for the way The New Yorker works. This is a place in which scores of people, over the years, have learned and have found themselves. We have not thought in job “categories.” People here have been thought of as individuals and treated as individuals, with a good deal of latitude for individual temperaments and work habits, and even idiosyncrasy. This is, in fact, a magazine of individualists. I think that a union might introduce a rigidity in the way the office functions, hinder the free flow of people from one kind of work to another, reduce the opportunity for experiment, and reduce the emphasis on the individual. I also think that it would tend to polarize the office.
Shawn won the battle over unionization, but as time went on, it was increasingly clear that he could not really face the idea of a succession plan. Even many of those who loved and respected him had long recognized his enormous capacity for manipulation; by now, it seemed that he was unwilling to entertain the notion of a New Yorker without himself at the helm. Even the old-time company man Brendan Gill had written in his memoir, published on the occasion of the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary in 1975, “If Shawn were to give up some of his duties as editor, it might have the welcome effect of freeing him to write more. For it is as a writer that he could still achieve, if he so wishes, a second and equally distinguished career.”
Those who kept a close eye on such matters were aware that The New Yorker was not keeping pace in the competitive 1980s marketplace. Circulation and advertising were on the decline, and the magazine’s longtime owner, Peter Fleischmann, was in failing health and wearying of the responsibility of presiding over the publication; eventually, as the majority stockholder, he sold all of his shares to Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., head of the immense publishing and media corporation Advance Publications. In May 1985, for a final payment in the neighborhood of $170 million, Newhouse became The New Yorker’s new owner. For a time it seemed that Newhouse might honor the magazine’s family-oriented process of advancement by naming the veteran editor Chip McGrath to succeed Shawn. That plan fell through, however, and in January 1987, Newhouse sent a memo to staff members informing them that a new editor would be brought in from the book industry: Robert A. Gottlieb, the highly regarded editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf—a firm that happened to be owned by Newhouse.
Many longtime members of the magazine staff were devastated that Shawn would be dismissed in such a manner. A letter was composed to Gottlieb, informing him of the staff’s “powerful and apparently unanimous expression of sadness and outrage over the manner in which a new editor has been imposed upon us.” It went on to explain to Gottlieb that “The New Yorker has not achieved its preeminence by following orthodox paths of magazine publishing and editing, and it is our strange and powerfully held conviction that only an editor who has been a long-standing member of the staff will have a reasonable chance of assuring our continuity, cohesion, and independence.” The document was signed by all but a handful of staff members—and Pauline was one of the latter. Although Pauline had remained offended by what she considered his casual treatment of her since her return from Hollywood, her refusal to sign the letter was not a personal matter: She simply felt that the time had come. On Friday, February 13, 1987, William Shawn exited the publication where he had begun work in 1933.
“He was a great editor, but he was eighty,” Pauline said to a crowd of advertisers at one of The New Yorker’s promotional luncheons at the Beverly Hills Hotel in May 1987. She went on to assure them that “with Bob Gottlieb replacing Bill Shawn at The New Yorker, the magazine still will hold on to the values you like, and, if anything, it’ll be more readable.” Late in 1987, however, she was happy to write a letter of support for Shawn, who was eager to take on some challenging retirement projects and had applied to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a fellowship. Pauline’s letter hailed him as “an amazing man—dedicated to what he believes to be the best writing,” and urged the MacArthur Foundation to give him the fellowship because it would “constitute a vote of confidence in an eighty-year-old man of letters. It would be a beautiful gesture.”
Readers who were anticipating a difficult adjustment to a new editor were surprised by how little the scope of the magazine changed once Gottlieb assumed control. Like Shawn, he was very much a hands-on editor, and there was still frequent coverage of subjects that might not be done in depth elsewhere. Pauline was scarcely affected; she was still allowed a generous amount of space, although she wasn’t always writing as long as she had in the past—partly because of a certain diminishing of her energy, but also because it was getting harder for her to justify spending so much time on inferior films.
At year’s end she was once again able to praise John Huston, who, at eighty and struggling with emphysema, had directed a screen version of James Joyce’s “The Dead”—a detailed account of an annual party and supper given by a pair of spinster music teachers on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1904 Dublin, thought by many to be the finest short story in the English language. Huston had, in Pauline’s words, “never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically,” as he had in these “funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range.” (Huston had actually spent twenty years living in Galway.) He had done what Pauline thought every great artist needed to do: He had enlarged his vision as he aged. Huston died shortly after completing the filming in the summer of 1987.
Broadcast News, another year-end release in 1987, was a much more penetrating look at the world of television news than the grandiose and pretentious Network, and it became a big hit with audiences, grossing more than $50 million on its release. Directed, produced, and scripted by James L. Brooks, Broadcast News was the story of a changing TV news industry. The traditional, hard-research-and-reporting route is represented by the driven, brainy producer Jane (Holly Hunter) and solid, reliable newsman Aaron (Albert Brooks), who dreams of having a shot at anchoring the news. The increasingly popular news-as-entertainment route is represented by the vapid, poorly informed, but charismatic and audience-savvy reporter Tom (William Hurt). The following exchange typified the movie’s essential conflict:
TOM: I don’t write. But that didn’t stop me from sending my audition tapes to the bigger stations and the networks.
JANE: It’s hard for me to advise you, since you personify something that I truly think is dangerous.
As a news junkie, Pauline had watched the content of network news being debased for years, and her years of watching brilliantly informed her review of the picture:
Basically, what the movie is saying is that beautiful, assured people have an edge over the rest of us, no matter how high our I.Q.s are. But, by applying this specifically to the age of television, Jim Brooks used it as the basis for a satirical critique of what TV is doing to us. On the surface, at least, he’s saying that Aaron represents substance and integrit
y, while handsome, slick Tom—a faker who’s essentially an actor-salesman—represents TV’s corruption of the news into entertainment. The picture suggests that this view is the lowdown on TV: it satirizes anchorman punditry by showing the rising star as a boob with a smooth, practiced manner. And its thesis may give moviegoers a tingle, because it connects with some of what we see anchormen doing: reading sentences so rhythmically that the meaning is lost, asking questions of the reporters and then not following through even when their answers raise much bigger questions, smiling so falsely that it seems to rot their facial muscles.
While Broadcast News was an intelligent, tartly observed look at a major shift in America’s culture, Pauline found it ultimately too neat and facile. “There’s not even a try for any style or tension in Broadcast News,” she wrote. “It’s all episodic, like a TV series.... Jim Brooks has made a movie about three people who lose themselves in their profession, and it’s all cozy and clean and clever. He plays everything right down the middle. He can’t seem to imagine having a conflicted, despairing relationship with your profession.”
Still, she felt essential goodwill toward the picture, and she admired the performances of all three stars. But she didn’t feel that Broadcast News was good enough to sweep the New York Film Critics Circle’s 1987 awards—which it did.