Lucking Out (8 page)

My uptown address had the down-market advantage of being within walking distance of two of the major revival houses in the city, the New Yorker and the Thalia. Shopping-mall multiplexes were unknown when I was growing up in Maryland, the only two theaters being on the Edgewood Arsenal military base and in the nearby town of Bel Air. The programming at the army theater never erred on the side of daunting pretension. Each weekend offered a carousel of the latest Elvis Presley musical, Jerry Lewis comedy, or garish war epic (such as
Merrill’s Marauders
or any other World War II film set in the Pacific with malaria and leeches), and to this day I can dazzle myself with piquant, mindless details from
It Happened at the World’s Fair
or
Follow That Dream
or
The Delicate Delinquent
that are stuck like gum to the roof of my mind. I knew nothing about directors but was aware when I saw
Ride the High Country
(Peckinpah) and
Hell Is for Heroes
(Don Siegel) that the guys behind the camera were a different breed of cat from the ones who gave us Elvis making with the hips at a back-lot luau. Though I had taken an introductory film course at Frostburg, where screenings of the classics of German Expressionism (
The Last Laugh, The Street
) failed to fire my classmates’ synapses, judging by their simulated snores, it was at the New Yorker and the Thalia, especially the former, that I was inducted into the Eleusinian mysteries of art cinema. Nesting in the balcony of the New Yorker, I wondered why strangers sat so close to each other, given the availability of vacant seats, and then, as if answering a cue, migrated to the men’s room together, missing much of the movie. I soon divined that these weren’t instances of bladders in harmonic sync. The other patrons seemed to be solitaries, like me, perhaps because I tended to avoid the theaters on weekend date nights, my dating life still in the starting blocks. Many a time I sensed that the men in the audience weren’t going to the movies as much as getting
away
from something, stealing a few hours in the hideaway cove as a temporary reprieve. The prints of classic foreign and Hollywood films in those pre-DVD days were legendarily scuffed like locker room floors, with washed-out colors, bleached black and white, frames missing, vertical lines slicing the frames, strange blotches appearing like fungus, fuzzy sound, the screen going blank as a reel came unsnapped and the audience groaned, what little audience there was in the dead of afternoon. But the imperfections in the prints made the experience more dreamlike, closer to an unfinished rough draft from the unconscious, the subtitles a ghostly reduction of dialogue that sounded so much more expressive and layered than the plain words at the bottom of the screen. Needing no translation, the serious Hollywood heavyweights—
On the Waterfront, High Noon
—carried their own echo of the hereafter, a sense that you were watching glorious figments reenacting a heroic rite that now belonged to immortality, where self-importance savors its just reward.

And so the uptown revival houses combined art and elegy in a delinquent atmosphere that made Susan Sontag’s vaunted cinephilia seem like basic training for cultural sainthood, membership in a monastic order of paleface prunes. It was different downtown at Theatre 80 St. Marks, which specialized in Hollywood musicals and screwball comedies, its seats a chiropractor’s delight; after a double feature you might hobble out like Walter Matthau with back trouble, but that was the price of admission to movie-queen heaven, where the name Norma Shearer could prompt militant debate and Ruby Keeler’s tap-dancing glee was categorized as a genial species of dementia. At the time the double bills at Theatre 80 St. Marks seemed lighter, fluffier, less canonical than the Euro classics at other houses, but those crackling relics of the Hollywood studio system have retained a vigor, rigor, elegance, ivory spine, and starglow that (for me) have proven to be hardier, more sustaining than the signature originalities of Godard, Truffaut, and Bresson or the surly realism of
Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger
, and similar English indictments of the class system’s rotting carcass and the ghastly fucking wallpaper put up to seal in the gloom. Each year the mystery appeal of Eleanor Powell’s horsy clumping deepens, the piquancy of Myrna Loy’s uptipped nose romantically beguiles, while Godard’s
La Chinoise
seems like a set of fancy card tricks and the lyricism of Truffaut’s films looks ever more wispy and attenuated. I went to old movies alone, my occasional dates preferring to see something new in venues that didn’t seem haunted. Apart from Peckinpah films and the occasional high mass such as Jean Eustache’s black-and-white three-and-a-half-hour
The Mother and the Whore
(the first masterpiece of miserabilism whose spellbinding power owes nothing to anything except its own bleak recalcitrance), I was reading reviews of new movies more than I was actually attending them, keeping just pseudo-informed enough to hold up my weak end in any conversation. That was about to change. I was about to receive my draft notice.

One day I was puttering around the apartment, trying to unstick one of the drawers in my captain’s bed, washing a fork, who knows, when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard a voice that carried a ripple of laughter even as it said hello.

“Hi, you’re a hard person to get ahold of. It’s Pauline Kael.”

We hadn’t met, though there had been a near encounter.

In 1974, the
Voice
winched me into a coveted screening of
Lenny
, the director Bob Fosse’s fancy switchblade farrago on the life, career, and fury of the comedian Lenny Bruce—an existential X-ray shot in high-contrast black and white where the nightclub spotlight blasted Dustin Hoffman like a prison searchlight as he did his sardonic thing. I had arrived at the screening room early, knowing it would be a packed house, and, having snagged an aisle seat, swung my legs to the side as a couple slid into my row. “Excuse me,” a young woman apologized in a cool-mint voice, her elbow apparently having grazed my arm as she settled, and I nodded no problem before glancing sideways and recognizing her as the actress Cornelia Sharpe, whose piquant nose, high-end-model cheekbones, and creamy surface rendered questions of acting ability incidental, irrelevant, almost rude. No problem indeed. Sharpe had appeared in
Serpico
, riding on the back of Al Pacino’s motorcycle and wrapping her adorning arms around him as his reward for rejecting police graft and embracing a free-spirited lifestyle that won him entrée into the grooviest loft parties. But since the most recent film I had seen her in was a loutish buddy-cop number called
Busting
, where she splayed her legs wide in a dentist’s chair as a call girl who made office calls, I decided not to risk saying anything gauche and so said nothing at all, hoping that my courteous follow-up nod conveyed the mark of a young gentleman, despite my cruddy sneakers.

A few minutes before the lights were due to darken, I heard a minor bustle behind me. The last row, which appeared to have been kept unofficially empty, filled. This arrival seemed to slide a tray of quiet import under the ongoing chatter, and the chatter became self-conscious, inorganic, as if everyone’s awareness had split and doubled and effort was being made not to crane one’s head in reverse. Whoever was in the last row was chatting away merrily, and there was the paper rustle of notebooks being opened. The man escorting Cornelia Sharpe tipped his head her way and whispered, “Pauline,” and it was as if the mention of Pauline’s name were the cue for the lights to dim, the movie to begin.

It was a loud movie,
Lenny
was, a real yeller, understandable given its sainted antihero’s propensity to propound harsh truths like a renegade prophet laying down some heavy jazz on the varsity sweaters and nine-to-five squares and all those queasy liberals hung up on newspaper editorials. But between the rants and the verbal shivs could be heard the unmistakable scratch of a pencil scribbling notes, invading our collective head space like graphite graffiti. It wasn’t that the note-taking called attention to itself, it wasn’t loud or continuous; it was the collective awareness that of those of all the movie critics, her notes mattered most, and whatever she was scribbling might be added to the bill of indictment or provide the embroidery of a fantastic rave. Each note could be a nail in Fosse’s gaudy coffin or a diamond stud for his vest. She had loved
Cabaret
, after all, helped it smash a wall of resistance. But it was coffin nails being driven that night. Melodramatic as that might sound, Kael’s review of
Lenny
proved to be such a devastator that Fosse, carrying a grudge until he stooped, immortalized its aftershocks in
All That Jazz
, where his pill-popping stud-choreographer alter ego—Roy Scheider in a Vandyke beard in a portrait of the artist as prodigious genius-phallus, the self-professed bastard that everybody can’t help but love—has a heart attack after
his
Lenny Bruce opus is coolly panned by a local-news critic. That part was played by Chris Chase, a former actress and then-current
New York Times
Arts and Leisure contributor who, not incidentally, was a friend of Pauline’s. Casting Chase instead of Pia Lindström or Leonard Harris or some other local New York television reviewer was intended to flip the bird at Pauline, blaming her for blowing a hole in his chest with her blast at
Lenny.
Little did I sense as I sat there next to Cornelia Sharpe’s shadowed profile the line that was being cast into the future, the ripple effect.

When the lights came up again, I didn’t have the assurance to intrude upon the loose scrum of people around Pauline to introduce myself, unable to think of anything to venture that wouldn’t sound inane. It wasn’t just who she was that was intimidating. Saying anything at all seemed poor form, a violation of church doctrine. It was somehow communicated to me without being articulated that the shuffle from screening room to elevator or stairwell was an interval that called for politesse and murmur, like the orderly procession to sign the guest book in a funeral service, comments being kept to the neutral minimum since it was rude and imprudent to broadcast your opinions, not knowing who might be within earshot. Save the evil cackle of delight for when there’s no danger of the director’s mother overhearing or the film’s editor, who’s been in a bat cave for the last three months trying to string this spaghetti together. No such strictures applied to a movie that had “hit” stickered all over it. Nobody cared if you uncorked your carbonation then, I would learn. It wasn’t happiness that needed to be reined in, but disdain and disapproval, at least until you got outside. From the almost cowed way the elevator passengers kept their eyes lifted and fixed on the floor numbers as they ticked down to the lobby, it was evident that everyone had formed a temporary collective of silent collusion. My reading was: everyone respected the effort Fosse had put into
Lenny
, but respecting effort is what you do when something hasn’t succeeded. So into the night the audience dispersed, as if jury duty had been adjourned. Pauline’s group must have taken a later elevator, because when I reached the sidewalk they were nowhere to be seen, and they didn’t strike me as a fast-moving amoeba. I didn’t hang around to wait for them to show, not wanting to seem like a stage-door Johnny. I didn’t want to be a nuisance until absolutely necessary, but now, to bring us back into my apartment, where I’m holding a phone to my ear, I didn’t need to contrive a proper moment to introduce myself—she was the one who threw out the first ball.

What had prompted Pauline’s call? She had read and enjoyed a piece I had published in the
Voice
about stand-up comics, a reported essay that had me posting myself night after night to the Improv, a comedy showcase located on a stretch of Forty-fourth Street in Times Square where one tended to pick up the pace just in case it became necessary to race for survival. The hostess at the Improv was Elayne Boosler, who also performed and would make a high mid-level name for herself later, a bright presence with a non-demeaning approach to self-deprecation (as opposed to Joan Rivers’s militant ugly-duckling persona that converts Jewish masochism into an assault weapon). If anything, she tended to err on the side of “vivacious,” more
Cosmo
Girl than cutting edge. The regular comics—nearly all of them men—were a mixed bag of promising minor leaguers trying to nail together a tight set that might win them a spot on
Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin
, or (the heavenly blue light at the top of the ladder)
Johnny Carson
, along with more experienced pros who had been around long enough to pick up a fine bouquet of rancor. It was the lull before the waterfall roar of
Saturday Night Live
’s arrival on NBC, a paradigm shifter that would upend the dues-paying pecking order of stand-up comedy, launching a new battery of clowns—Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, later Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray—whose success bypassed the club circuit and the Vegas strip and didn’t require even the cool nod of Carson’s papal blessing for induction into the golden ring.

(Not long after
SNL
had altered the gravitational field, I interviewed a veteran comic named Milt Kamen, well-known at the time for doing absurdly detailed plot summaries of the latest movies on
Merv
and
The Mike Douglas Show.
After a few cordialities, he spat fire through the phone at how fucking unfair it was that these fucking sketch artists who simply read off of fucking cue cards and never knew what it was to play shitholes and learn their fucking
craft
got treated like rock stars while older comics got the bum’s rush, a rant that went on so long that he seemed to forget there was somebody listening on the other end of the line, finally braking to say, “But what the hell, to each his own,” which made us both laugh. A few weeks later, Kamen died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills.)

For this same
Voice
piece I also interviewed Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, then co-starring on Broadway in
Good Evening
(the show where Moore hopped out as a one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan). We met in Tuesday Weld’s apartment in the Astoria, an interview that I dragged out so long through nerves and inexperience that when I said, “Well, that’s all I got,” Cook snorted, “That’s all
you’ve
got?” indicating how tapped dry they were after having so much of their time taken hostage. I left the Astoria mortified, vowing to be less of a yammerer in the future, one of those quick-dissolving vows forgotten as soon as the next round of journalistic stage fright hit.

“And I see that you’re also not a big fan of Marcel Marceau,” Pauline said, his Everyman school of mime being something I had made fun of, like watching Mickey Mouse put on an existential show. She invited me to a screening of a movie whose name has been erased from memory, but I wasn’t invited afterward to join her and the others for whatever they were doing, and I returned to the apartment feeling that we hadn’t quite clicked and it was my unspecified fault. Perhaps I was dressed poorly, a potato to be thrown back into the pile. (Though Pauline was no snob about clothes or social class—one profile of her from the seventies quoted an unnamed publicist who said that Pauline had once shown up at a New York event wearing a dress with a hole under the arm, “and it was really The Scandal.”) But I was invited to another screening and another. I made an unnamed appearance in Pauline’s review of
The Goodbye Girl
, as the friend who shared her “stony silence”—yes, that was me, I told people, Mr. Stony—as the paying audience roared at Neil Simon’s mixture of gum-snapping dialogue and therapeutic hugging that would come to be known, horribly, as “dramedy.”

We continued to talk on the phone at an increasing tempo until I began to know it was her when the phone rang, even amid a volley of other calls, to the point where even close bystanders could identify the party at the other end before I picked up. Once I got into trouble with my then girlfriend when she spotted another young woman, a friend of hers, leaving my apartment as she arrived for our date. It was an innocent crossing of paths—it was Halloween and T. had dropped over on her way to a party to show off her costume, a skintight Peter Pan number complete with feathered cap and plastic dagger—but my girlfriend was in none too trick or treat a mood, and no sooner had she taken off her coat than the phone rang. As my hand reached the receiver, she said, “That better be Pauline.”

It was.

“Hi, have I gotten you at a bad time?” Pauline asked.

“Oh, no, not at all,” I said with an extra dash of debonair.

My girlfriend lowered herself into the one comfortable chair in my apartment and picked up a magazine to browse, as if she were in a waiting room. She knew the next fifteen or twenty minutes were Pauline time.

It wasn’t only movies we went to. One thing that distinguished Pauline from the critics who have come after, even those she had encouraged and promoted, was that she had an interest in the arts that didn’t begin and end at the popcorn stand. (Most of the post-Pauline reviewers, by comparison, were so enthralled by the burning roads that she and Sarris and others cut that they couldn’t imagine being anything
other
than movie magistrates. One of Pauline’s most doted-upon protégés turned down a book-review request by sputtering, “But, but—that would be writing about writing!” Yes, the editor explained over the phone, that’s what book reviewing is, writing about writing, been going on for centuries.) The liberal arts were what she liberally pursued. She was an opera fan, a jazz enthusiast, and a pop music appreciator (she grasped immediately what made the Talking Heads compelling, whereas John Simon walked out fifteen minutes into the screening of
Stop Making Sense
, Jonathan Demme’s concert film of the Heads). And although she didn’t attend dance performances when I knew her, she was up on everything going on and thought it was a howling oversight for
The New Yorker
to be ignoring dance in the seventies while devoting so much acreage to classical music concerts. It was her lobbying for dance coverage that paved the archangel arrival of Arlene Croce—she pressed clips of Croce’s essays from
Ballet Review
(of which Croce was the founding editor) on William Shawn until the brilliance and necessity of Croce’s critical voice became crowningly self-evident and she was hired. Her arrival gave the magazine the strongest and widest contingent of women contributors ever, not only Kael and Croce but Penelope Gilliatt, the theater critic Edith Oliver, the book critic Naomi Bliven, the city hall correspondent Andy Logan, and the Washington political reporter Elizabeth Drew. On any roster of male feminist heroes, William Shawn earns high salutation, even if Drew’s longueurs drove many readers, including Pauline, mad.

Pauline, unlike movie critics today, was a theater lover. “I loved Charles Ludlam,” she told the interviewer Ray Sawhill, a fellow member of Pauline’s fraternity, who worked at
Newsweek
magazine. “I once took Claude Jutra, the French Canadian director, down to the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. And Claude said, ‘This is theater.’ And he had tears streaming out of his eyes, he laughed so hard. I loved Charles Ludlam’s shows, and I thought there was a real craft and polish and crazy elegance in what he was doing.” She was also an early flag-waver for the playwright John Guare, whose lyrically bent
Lydie Breeze
and
House of Blue Leaves
she urged on listeners (his big breakthrough was
Six Degrees of Separation
, which also appears to have been his cresting peak), and she was a regular patron of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where we saw Christopher Reeve in
The Cherry Orchard
together. Pauline didn’t posit the theater and movies as irreconcilable, evolutionary rivals, rejecting the notion that movies were the supersonic present and future, theater the dowdy, upholstered past. She thought her former disciple David Denby had loaded the dice when he did a theater dispatch for the
Atlantic
that disposed of Broadway as slow, stodgy, dust-bunnied, and mausoleum-ish compared with the sexy, magnified immediacy of movies; she found Denby’s piece a fact-finding mission by a mind already made up. (In the fullness of time, Pauline would decide that music criticism would be Denby’s proper sphere, if only he would awaken to the idea and embrace his true calling and stop mucking about. “All that
boring
intelligence,” she would say of his movie reviews, as if they were overdone meat loaf.)