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By Root 800 0

an act as Kenneth Tynan’s theater reviews had been in the sixties for the same paper. I stole from James as if copping his dance moves, mimicking his mimicry of anchormen and bogus dialogue, and later flew with him up to meet Pauline at her house in the Berkshires, an airsick excursion he described in “Postcard from New York” for the Observer: “We flew through a storm all the way. Lighting his cigarette one-handed, the pilot did a no-sweat Buzz Sawyer routine while his co-pilot made a great show of understanding the map. The aircraft behaved like a pair of underpants in a washing machine.” As the plane came in for a landing, we looked out the window and saw the hills adjacent the strip full of summer-dressed people gawking upward. “What are they doing out there on the grass?” I asked, to which Clive replied, “Waiting to see us crash.” Once we arrived at Pauline’s, we chased away the jitters and relaxed before going out to dinner, Pauline and Clive standing and sipping wine while I sat on the couch, drinking cola. Somewhere between sips, Clive reflectively remarked, “I feel old enough to be his father.” “I’m old enough to be his grandmother,” answered Pauline. “Pa! Grandma!” I cried, throwing open my arms as if discovering my long-lost kin.

If it was the funnier columns that readers enjoyed and remembered, it may have been because, with identity politics coming more to the fore, many of my fellow Voicers considered a light touch suspect, and some of the paper’s political correctos—whose numbers would increase in the decade to come as the Voice in its new digs on lower Broadway would become an ideological honeycomb of minority caucuses competing for staff representation and column space—were grunting out copy as if handcuffed to a rowing machine.

Then again, as the irritable tone of the theater critic implies, maybe I was just getting on everybody’s nerves. I can see now why others might have found me abrasive, overfull of myself, acting as if expecting a star on my dressing room door any day soon. The TV column was increasingly popular at the Voice, and popularity translated into higher visibility, and higher visibility translated into the Esquire column, the call from the New York Review, feature assignments from The New Yorker that were never published or completed (including one where I spent a sunstroke week in New Mexico on the set of Sam Peckinpah’s delay-plagued Convoy, where he called me a pussy in front of the crew, which I was told not to take personally, I was but the latest in an infinite line), and similar offers that no one at the paper was being treated to, with the exception of Ellen Willis, who by the late seventies had phased out of The New Yorker and New York Review, and the Press Clips columnist, Alexander Cockburn. The Voice’s brightest journalistic star, Cockburn could get away with it better in the office because along with his stylistic brilliance he was English and sexy, whooshing in and out of the building on a jet stream of daredevilish charisma. I didn’t have that going for me then, and it isn’t something you pick up later along the highway of life. I probably came across as bumptious, though I didn’t conduct a survey. If I no longer hunched my shoulders like Norman Mailer ready to plow through the defensive line to tackle the bitch goddess of success, I was dropping Pauline Kael’s name and her latest asides with mad abandon, and not just to annoy the Andrew Sarris faction in the office whose bat ears picked up everything and transmitted it uptown to His Tetchiness himself. That’s how things were done in the days before tweeting and texting sped up the hamster wheels of competitive tattle.

The irony was that I was seeing less of Pauline for most of that particular year. Nineteen seventy-nine was when she took an unprecedented leave of absence from The New Yorker to make the trans-coastal hop from film critic to film producer at the behest of Warren Beatty, seducer of all he surveyed. She would be given an office at Paramount as a producer on Beatty’s next project, Love & Money, based on a script