Lucking Out (10 page)

As I enter Pauline’s office, she clears a place for me on the couch if there’s no spot to perch, moving aside scripts she’s been sent, stacks of newly delivered books and galleys, unsolicited manuscripts, manila folders with news clippings, and whatever else has come through the pipeline. On her desk lay the latest set of
New Yorker
galleys, undergoing extensive surgery. Although Pauline wrote fast and was accused of being more impressionistic and free-associative than rational-analytical (an accusation laced with a sexism with which she was wearily familiar, the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that a woman critic was more at the mercy of her hormones, mood fluctuations, and monthly cycles than a marble bust of judicious decorum such as the
New Republic
’s Stanley Kauffmann or a sprightly carnation such as Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
), she was meticulous with her copy, as fanatical a tinkerer as any fussbudget from the E. B. White elf academy. It was the aim and direction of her perfectionism that were different. She didn’t pursue evenly smoothed embalmed non-reflective-surface perfection. She sanded down the jagged edges of her reviews to piercing effect. She was slangy the way
New Yorker
writers were slangy in the thirties, before excess propriety and hallowed obeisance to the fine-toned points of craft outfitted writers with clerical collars. Rather than camp behind the fine-mesh scrim of mandarin prose or adopt the chummy manner of
New Yorker
critics past (such as Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, and her predecessors on the film beat, among them John McCarten, John Mosher, and Brendan Gill), she filed battlefield reports from the front line of the back row, writing for the ear as much as the eye, one of the few critics (to borrow a locution from Seymour Krim) whose words were capable of matching the speed of our minds. In his book, Seligman quotes one of Pauline’s editors at
The New Yorker
, John Bennet, describing the complexity of her creative-destructive grid work. “Balzac, madly revising at his most caffeinated, Proust at his most hypodermically caffeinated, had nothing on Pauline when it came to crossing out, writing all over the margins, taping extra sheets of paper to the margins to make even more revisions—revisions of revisions, inserts inside inserts.” Entire paragraphs were x-ed out and new ones inserted, sentences were transposed within paragraphs that themselves were moved around like modular furniture, commas delicately planted by
The New Yorker
’s notoriously comma-promiscuous copy department (resulting in sentences that resembled a higher plane of constipation, bogged down in late-period Henry James particularization) were plucked out and em dashes liberally thrown like left jabs. Even without the benefit of literacy, strictly as an eye exam, her pieces looked more
alive
on the page than those of anyone else (save for Donald Barthelme and his typographical Monty Python circus). Nearly every cut and addition she made was to foster idiomatic verve, direct contact, and acceleration, the hum of a live broadcast.

Having made her name as a film reviewer for a Berkeley radio station, Pauline was an advocate of reading work aloud to make sure that it “played.” She would sometimes read me reviews or partial reviews over the phone, not to toot her own horn (though she loved it whenever a line got a laugh), but to have a sounding board, a preview audience. It was a way of pinpointing false notes and dead spots, lopping the branches off of sentences that went on so long that her voice ran out of wind before the finish line. On rare occasions she’d call because she was “stuck” (she would read up to the point the piece hit a blank wall, trying to figure out how to push through), but more often she wanted to know if she “went too far” this time “going after” a certain movie or actor or director, knowing that by execrating the latest Neil Simon or some meretricious bagatelle from Mike Nichols (“God, the shit he gets away with”), she was blaspheming everything the
New York Times
Arts and Leisure section held hallow. It wasn’t that she was looking to cotton-pad her opinions; it was that she didn’t relish another round of aggravation from the aggrieved and wanted to settle in her own mind that animosity hadn’t gotten the worst of her. “I want to be fair to the son of a bitch,” she said once, cleaving to the belief that every filmmaker was capable of redemption, even Ken Russell, though that might be pushing it (she once said he deserved having a stake driven through his heart, if they could find it). Sometimes the fear of going “too far” went in the other direction—Pauline would seek confirmation that she hadn’t snapped out of earth’s orbit by hailing
Carrie
or
The Warriors
, two pulp smashers considered garish and low-pandering not only by most fellow critics but by many of
The New Yorker
’s readers, whose nerves couldn’t take all this noisy ruckus. Such movies, they were enough to tip over one’s gondolas.

I once was witness—a student co-pilot—to a master class in Pauline’s instant power-on of articulation, where every phrase quivered like the handle of a knife whose blade had just lodged in the tree bark. It was a pilot for a talk show hosted by David Susskind’s wife, Joyce Davidson, who had already established herself as a TV name in Canada and was looking to expand south. David Susskind, for those who need escorting into the memory vault, was an adventurous, high-strung, phone-juggling, devoutly, almost stereotypically Jewish urban liberal (back when the
New York Post
was the tabernacle organ of middlebrow, middle-class Jewish liberalism, home to columnists such as Max Lerner and Dr. Rose Franzblau). He was the producer of socially conscious dramas such as the TV adaptations of
Raisin in the Sun
and
Death of a Salesman
, and the groundbreaking, gritty-vérité original drama
East Side/West Side
, starring George C. Scott as a social worker contending with slum conditions, child abuse, drug addiction, racial discrimination, and the bureaucratic coils of the welfare system, and the host of a weekly two-hour Manhattan-based talk show that was part seminar, part encounter group, part freak show, and part celebrity séance, with Susskind rattling his papers and stammering questions as if trying to make sense of the madness pitching the deck of his once stable world. With his white hair and Mr. Magoo eye pouches, Susskind was a monochromatic man made dizzy by the kaleidoscopic swirl of the sixties. Unlike on the
Charlie Rose
set (Charlie sharing some of Susskind’s befuddlement but exuding a far stronger sense of varnished ease in the international brotherhood of media moguls and the permanent political class), guests weren’t expected to be on their best behavior when they convened in the Susskind studio. Some of his most famous installments were barely contained uproars, such as the reunion of the Andy Warhol superstars that turned into a queeny uprising over the vile influence of Paul Morrissey over Andy; a debate about feminism in which Germaine Greer squashed the book reviewer and culture critic Anatole Broyard like a presumptuous grape; a discussion of “radical chic” in which guests of Leonard Bernstein’s fund-raiser for the Black Panthers vented against an absent Tom Wolfe over his caricature of them in his infamous
New York
cover story (illustrated with a photograph of supposed uptown socialites making a black power fist salute to the camera); and the classic “How to Be a Jewish Son” support group featuring Dan Greenburg, David Steinberg, and Mel Brooks at his most hilarious-spontaneous.

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.