Lucking Out (12 page)

“This shouldn’t be long,” Pauline says. “Here’s the new issue of the magazine. Lore Segal has a wonderful story in it.”

It’s also a long story, so instead I go puddle jumping from cartoon to cartoon. Pauline returns in record time.

“Turned out he wanted to ask for some other change, and was so relieved when I just gave in without making an issue of it. It feels so good not to fight.”

“That’s what my parents used to say between bouts.”

“We’ll have to hurry now.”

Pauline brushes her thin, neatly kept gray hair (the ripplier hairdo in the jacket photo of
I Lost It at the Movies
a historical curio), knots a scarf around her neck, assuming it’s chilly out, which, let’s stipulate, it is, slips into her brown suede coat, and grabs her carrying case by the handle. If it’s heavy, I’ll do the carrying, but this time it’s not. Out her office door we go, passing the miniature satanic mills of Harold Brodkey’s tireless genius, muscling out countless drafts of his Proustian epic that was provisionally titled
A Party of Animals
, then later retitled
The Runaway Soul
(an alteration that Edmund White called a catastrophic mistake), or perhaps it was a separate novella or story endowing the out-tray. I never met Brodkey in the transcendent flesh during my visits to Pauline’s office. Our run-in would come later, at an Upper West Side book party, like the kind you read about in novels about the fast-fading Literary World, when I genially noted that Brodkey (who prided himself on his height, as he prided himself on everything) wasn’t as tall as James Dickey, whom I had just returned from interviewing down in Columbia, South Carolina. To which Brodkey snapped, in one of the great impromptu non sequiturs ever to fly in my direction: “Dickey doesn’t live in New York and put up with what I have to put up with.” I laughed, assuming Brodkey was kidding about the invisible ceiling restricting the towering climb of his true full height (i.e., that he’d be a few inches taller if New York literary society hadn’t stunted his growth), but a kidder he was not. It was an incident that would oil-spill into print, in the pages of the
New York Observer
to be precise, but Brodkey is gone now, the monumental presence he thought he was permanently casting eaten by sunlight.

Down the hall Pauline and I go, past a long table sparsely piled with miscellaneous reading material and past the lobby desk, where Morticia hands Pauline phone messages she had taken that had somehow slipped her mind earlier, as if they were parking tickets that had collected under the windshield wipers. Pauline waits to read them in the elevator to see which important calls she has missed and which needn’t be answered because now it’s too late. Once an older gentleman entered the elevator with us and replied to Pauline’s greeting with what sounded like a semi-monosyllable, as if he were withdrawing a word in mid-release. When the elevator deposited us in the downstairs lobby and distance was thrown between us, Pauline said, as if indicating a local landmark, “That’s Joe Mitchell.” Joseph Mitchell, whose reputation would be resuscitated and permanently restored with the publication of
Up in the Old Hotel
in 1992, was the legendary “fact” reporter of raffish dives and waterfront lore who had hit the unmerciful wall of writer’s block following the publication of
Joe Gould’s Secret
, where the secret was that Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village bohemian human scarecrow legend who claimed to be working on a diary that would be the masterpiece the century was waiting for, was a fraudster whose magnum opus was all gummy mouth. Mitchell, like so many in the Village, had been taken advantage of and taken in. (The cranky co-dependency of author and subject became the basis for a too-stately film starring Stanley Tucci as Mitchell and Ian Holm as the Greenwich Village John Aubrey.) Although Mitchell maintained an office at the magazine, he had not been published in its pages since 1964, his decades-long journalistic silence a phenomenon as pregnant with absent presence as J. D. Salinger’s permanent sabbatical a’twidst the protective birches of New Hampshire. But while there were those who insisted that Salinger was diligently, monkishly scribbling away, fewer prospects were held that Mitchell was squirreling anything away for posterity. His garbage can was often empty at the end of the day, no bouquet of balled-up discarded pages left behind as evidence of frustrated effort. His muse seemed to have given up the ghost. It was after another round of throat clearing from Mitchell (this time in the lobby) that Pauline said to me, “I keep reading about Joe Mitchell the Southern gentleman. I’ve been saying hello to him for twenty years and all I’ve ever gotten back is a grunt.”

We head to Sixth Avenue, along Forty-fourth Street. Picture blue-gray garbage-y streets, multilayered traffic tiered all the way up to Fifty-ninth, where Central Park begins. Most of the screening rooms are on the West Side, if not in the Times Square area, then higher up, approaching Carnegie Hall. If the screening room lies within reasonable walking distance, we’ll hoof it; if not, we’ll try to snag a taxi, always an adventure in midtown, especially in the seventies, when the most frequently spoken language from the driver’s seat in the cab was surly, especially at rush hour. We catch one at Sixth, the driver grumbling after hearing we’re only going a few blocks up and over. At night, when the traffic had thinned, the mood coming from the front of the cab might be more philosophical, more inclined to a
comme ci, comme ça
approach to the human endeavor, but now, the minutes ticking down to reach a 6:00 p.m. screening, f-words and car honks alternate as if
The French Connection
’s Popeye Doyle were bent over every steering wheel, boiling from the eyebrows up. Anticipating the light going green, the cab hops forward, then brakes to avoid fendering a pedestrian of nonwhite denomination.

“Nigger got lucky that time,” the driver says.

“Now, now,” Pauline says.

The driver’s elbow juts out his rolled-down window as the light turns green and he eases ahead. Detecting the note of reprimand in Pauline’s words, he explains that he doesn’t have a beef with all blacks, just the ones who make it shitty for everybody else.

“You may need to give the matter a little more thought,” Pauline says, which doesn’t stop him from further elaboration and clarification of his point of view. We stop at the screening address, and Pauline pays the fare, plus some.

“I didn’t want him to think I was using his racist talk as an excuse to under-tip him,” Pauline says as we make our way to the building lobby.

Upstairs, a young female publicist giving out press kits—back then, it was always a young female publicist, shiny with hope—hands one to Pauline and enjoins us to enjoy the movie, like a flight attendant welcoming us aboard. Perhaps a couple of Pauline’s other invitees are waiting so that we can all go in together, or perhaps they’re already inside, saving seats. It wasn’t that Pauline wouldn’t or didn’t go to movies alone, or with a single partner; it’s that she didn’t see moviegoing as a solitary rite that required silence, devotion, and rapt communion. What she brought from San Francisco was an informal sociability that abjured pigeonholes and caste systems—all the trappings of Manhattan snobbery—in favor of a floating party whose membership was in intimate flux. Because she’d been forced to give up minor vices (allergies would later restrict her meals and activities), conversation was the one buzz left to her, and no wonder she responded with such kin affinity to the multilayered murmur and byplay of Robert Altman’s ensemble films, those cloud maneuvers of subtle relations.

Sometimes we don’t go straight in, instead waiting outside for the previous screening to end and the audience to vacate. Pauline told me once of a film she was seeing that was being shown in back-to-back screenings, she having arrived for the later one. The doors opened and one of her then protégés, now one of the few remaining prominent film critics with a paying job, came out with his usual facial arrangement of academic thoughtfulness. “So how was it?” Pauline asked.

Not much, he said. A few good scenes but mostly a mess. I’m not sure I’d bother with it.

“Well, since I’m already here …,” Pauline said.

The movie was
Mean Streets
, not Martin Scorsese’s first feature, but the one that missiled his directorial career and that of its stars, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, De Niro’s entrance into the Little Italy bar to the sound of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” one of the great character intros in movie history, the rest living up to its kinetic promise, a film in which Catholic guilt earned its own dressing room.

So after that Pauline stopped trusting immediate eyewitness reports, assuming she ever did.

We take up mortar position in the back row. Pauline nearly always sits in the back, often right beneath the projectionist’s portholes, flanked by fellow critics on her squad,
New Yorker
fact-checkers and copy editors, a lateral entourage of friends and allies. (The auteurists—those ardent members of Andrew Sarris’s Raccoon Lodge—tended to huddle closer to the screen, as if to meld mind and image into a blissful, shimmering mirage of Kim Novak with her lips parted.)

A few rows ahead, one of Pauline’s protégés stands and adjusts his jeans, which seem to sag in the back no matter how tight his belt is notched.

“R. never did have any ass to him,” Pauline observes almost wistfully.

R. removes the jacket he was using as a seat saver to make room for his date, a co-worker from
Newsweek
, who’s running a bit late.

“R. will probably be bringing her along afterwards,” Pauline says, “afterwards” referring to wherever we decide to go for the postmortem.

“Oh, goody,” I say, as Pauline gives me a light rap on the arm.

Another of Pauline’s junior G-men arrives, ceremonially helping his date off with her coat with the Southern courtliness of a quality seducer. I can tell from his forlorn gallant wave to Pauline before he sits down that he’s miffed he didn’t arrive early enough to sit in the back row, forced instead to make do with a middle row far from the nerve center of activity.

The rustling in the seats subsides. Here we are, pencils and pens at the ready.

“Let us pray,” Pauline says, as the lights dim in the screening room, hoping for the best that this movie might deliver. And as those lights dim, a silhouetted figure dips into a seat nearby, an apparent latecomer.

Without moving her head, Pauline registers the peripheral blur and whispers, “Spy.”

In those days before blog reviewers who tweet insta-responses in mid-screening, the studios would have little birdies pop into the screening room to report back to headquarters on the critical reactions, as much as could be roughly measured in groans, laughter, irritable fidgeting, and silent pockets of bored indifference. (Sometimes the spy was simply a publicist doing double duty.) Given how much money had been invested in a production, it was understandable that the studio and the distributor didn’t want to fly blind into a wall of hostile reviews. Even unequipped with a special swivel head and night goggles, almost any screening-room informant would have found Pauline an easy “read.” When she was held by a film, her head was raptor-rapt, and the notes she took were few, her hand moving almost independently as if not to break the transmission chain. Laughter would lightly bubble up at the appearance of one of her favorite actors, anticipating that his presence meant we were in for a treat (her grin and George Segal’s grin would almost meet in midair), and the laughter would be sharper, caught off guard by delight, when somebody new shot up the energy, whether it was Jeff Goldblum in
Next Stop, Greenwich Village
or Shelley Duvall in
Nashville.
When Pauline fell out of sorts with the film, she would rest her face in her palm and sometimes make a vague gesture at the screen, as if to say, It’s a lost cause, or, They’ve lost their senses. Sometimes, she would give voice to exasperation, as during the screening of
Welcome to L.A.
, when Keith Carradine wrapped a blanket around a naked Geraldine Chaplin and Pauline said, quite distinctly, “That’s the first decent act that’s been performed in this movie.” No matter how dire the movie was, professional obligation semi-dictated that Pauline stick it out for the duration, and of all the screenings I attended with her, the only time we walked out in the middle was during the eighties, the movie in question being Hal Ashby’s inexplicable, unendurable piece of slop
Lookin’ to Get Out
, remembered today only because it offered the first screen appearance of a little bundle named Angelina Jolie. I’m not quite certain why we bailed on that one, having stuck to the finish of films far worse, but I believe it was because, along with further evidence of Ashby’s decay, Pauline found the artistic deterioration of the film’s star (and Angelina’s father), Jon Voight, so dismaying. She had heralded him for being so sunnily alive and vigorous as the rural teacher in
Conrack
, and here he was starting to show the self-conscious decay of a Michael Moriarty, whose film career she pretty much destroyed with her scathing mockery of his existential clamminess in
Report to the Commissioner.

There was an occasion when I solo ejected from a movie, under what I thought was justifiable provocation, though at that point I might have seized upon any opportunity to devour daylight. The occasion was a special early screening set up for Pauline and her crew of Bernardo Bertolucci’s
1900
, a pseudo-Marxist epic of oppression, decadence, and revolt that also revealed to the world Robert De Niro’s penis in its raw, shy state of nature. Gérard Depardieu’s too, though that may have been previously exposed. Given Pauline’s streaking-comet exaltation of
Last Tango in Paris, 1900
arrived atop a moving pyramid of lofty expectations, its huge cast and historical canvas suggesting an unholy trinity of Sergei Eisenstein, David Lean, and Luchino Visconti, a lush panorama bursting with cherry reds of downtrodden peasants who seemed to have sprung out of the soil and debauched aristocrats trained at the de Sade Academy of the Performing Arts. Having so publicly and passionately committed to Bertolucci’s carnal vision with her
Last Tango
rave, Pauline was pulling for him to bring off this symphonic opus and trying to extend every benefit of the doubt while I, feeling queasier with each cruelty served on a platter, slumped so deep into myself that I felt like a ball of wax with walnut eyes. And this was only the first half of the five-hour uncut version! There was going to be a break in the afternoon, followed by Part Two. As Part One neared its climactic end, one of the inbred decadents in the film—played by Donald Sutherland with all the dementia at his disposal, which was
a lot
—tied a wriggling kitten to the wall, and I said to Pauline, “If anything happens to that cat, I’m outta here.” After a beat to build up a sense of apprehension, Sutherland bashed the kitten with his head, killing it. I’m sure the killing was faked, but that was enough for me, I’d had it, and I didn’t return for Part Two. Pauline understood my squeamishness (she too let out a yip when the kitten was brow-hammered), but I also think she thought I was being silly, letting it get to me that much. She prided herself on being able to sit through something as brutally protracted and fecal as Pasolini’s
Salò
with nary a qualm. Her review of
1900
would be an unwieldy teeter-totter straddle—acknowledging its grotesqueries while praising its titanic scope (“It makes everything look like something held at the end of a toothpick”)—but once Bertolucci unburdened himself of the ludicrous
Luna
, starring Jill Clayburgh in a near-career-killer role as an incestuous mom, she was unable to argue herself out of her disenchantment with Bertolucci.