Lucking Out (14 page)

But the Blue Bar was most suitable for only two or three conspirators at best. So let us imagine that the main room of the Algonquin has couches to spare, enough to accommodate a squad of us assembling to talk about the movie or, if the movie was hopelessly humdrum, to chat about everything else, or nearly everything. In my memory, one topic that never came up was money. The seventies were the last decade in which money with a capital
M
wasn’t party to every conversation, ready to prey. Everyone apart from Pauline was renting, so real-estate prices were also a non-preoccupation. This freed up so much head space to devote to the things that mattered. In her recent memoir,
The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies
, Toby Talbot presents a vivid home movie in words of what Pauline was like in the early sixties, having arrived east with Gina, a collection of Tiffany lamps, and a dog named Corgy, holding forth in the living room of the Talbot household: “Pauline, at five feet, was larger than my Naugahyde sofa.
Gutsy, gusto, gumption
are words that come to mind—along with salty, unsentimental, bawdy, brash, jazzy, feisty, passionate, ecstatic, scornful.” Affixed to the sofa, Pauline held forth like a bohemian intellectual trying to make herself heard over the din of Dwight Macdonald: “Pauline, with her usual bourbon in one hand, cigarette dangling in the other, took alternate sips of bourbon and puffs on her cigarette. Her arms flailed in excitement as we heatedly discussed—was it
Hiroshima Mon Amour
? As the bourbon decreased, the ash on the cigarette slowly mounted until, with one grand sweep of her arm, it
fell
on our Naugahyde sofa. Its pristine surface got marked with a
hole for life
!”

This rootin’ tootin’ double-shootin’ Pauline, alternating from cig to sip in a torrential outpour of words, was not the Pauline alighting at the Algonquin. She had given up both cigarettes and alcohol for health reasons by the time I knew her, and conversation was now her chief outlet for release and decompression.
We
were her way of unwinding, the bull session between the leaning-back intensity of viewing a movie and the leaning-forward intensity of reviewing it.

Who makes up the revolving cast? Other reviewers, protégés of Pauline’s; non-reviewers, who were friends of Pauline’s. Let’s say it’s a winter evening, since Pauline’s six-month alteration with Penelope Gilliatt annually began in autumn and ended in spring, and so we are all unbundling ourselves as we make ourselves comfortable. Although the Algonquin had a dress code, requiring jackets for gentlemen, it was laxly enforced, although there was one evening when a waiter, perhaps under heat from management, informed us—me, mostly—that our attire wouldn’t do. The hotel kept jackets handy for just such embarrassing occasions, and the waiter brought out a pair of blue jackets that appeared roomy enough to fit anyone short of a sumo wrestler, the long sleeves hanging down to my knuckles.

“It’s like a Jerry Lewis routine,” Pauline said.

“What did you think of
The Nutty Professor
?” someone says.

Pauline: “Stella Stevens was so scrumptious in that film, you think she’d have had more of a career.”

“She wasn’t bad in
Cable Hogue
,” someone else says.

“No, she was quite touching. But her character was oversentimentalized, which wasn’t her fault.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much lint there is in these pockets,” I said, fishing around.

“We’ll take your word for it,” Pauline said.

Others brought dates to the after-screenings. Me, never. Partly because I’ve always operated on a “need to know” basis, preferring my personal life to be a phantom subplot rather than an open secret—a bit of a mystery, even if nothing much was going on, which was, in the early seventies, often. (Though I did tell Pauline once about a date I took to see Alfred Hitchcock’s
Family Plot
who, sitting back in her seat like Gidget or Patty Duke, hissed at the movie to express her feminist displeasure. “Well, it was a truly terrible movie,” Pauline said.) When something
was
going on, I wasn’t interested in entering my girlfriends into competition, submitting them for inspection. Not that there were that many girlfriends to shield with my Zorro cape—I was a serial monogamist, not a compulsive pollinator. But I felt, rightly or wrongly, that introducing a serious girlfriend into Pauline’s court risked a spillover that could spoil everything. It wasn’t that Pauline was a scary matriarch, putting young women in their place with an ice dagger of disdain, or that the other male critics would start verbally pawing some unsuspecting cutie as if she were the bride in Peckinpah’s
Ride the High Country
, in danger of being passed around to the groom’s mangy brothers. But there was an air of audition whenever a new ingenue was introduced to Pauline, some of Pauline’s guys seeking her approval and hoping to impress the other studs. I didn’t go in for sexual shoptalk, swapping tales being a one-sided trade since I didn’t divulge any particulars about anyone I was dating.

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 seen 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.”