Lucking Out - James Wolcott [132]
by James Toback. It has been argued in at least one stewpot biography of Beatty (Peter Biskind’s Star) that luring Pauline out to the coast was a Machiavellian ploy by the ageless superboy to teach her a humility lesson, let her know what it was truly like in the major leagues, and cut her down to size, render her inoperative. This is motivational conjecture raised to the plane of advanced calculus. A true Machiavellian knows what he wants and plots the angles in advance to achieve his aims, and Beatty was too indecisive to be a true Machiavellian, his ideas and choices subject to constant, worrying revision and his conversation (as interviews reveal) a golden cloud of coy, cagey, hazy, noncommittal indirection. And one would have to assume that Beatty simply enjoyed buying a new toy to break to explain the personal hostility needed to set such a trap into motion. It was Pauline who championed Bonnie and Clyde and was the first critic to treat Beatty seriously as an artist, who hailed the Beverly Hills sex farce Shampoo as a Mozartean bed-hopper (“The central performance that makes it all work is Beatty’s. [The hairdresser], who wears his hair blower like a Colt .45, isn’t an easy role; I don’t know anyone else who could have played it”), and if she thought that the remake of Heaven Can Wait emasculated Beatty’s talents (he “moves through it looking fleecy and dazed”), well, she was hardly alone. And she would be working on Love & Money with friends, not just Beatty and Toback, but Dick Albarino, who pitched in with Pauline on the polishing of Toback’s script. I saw various versions of the script, which became progressively sharper, funnier, and structurally firmer, and what happened to that screenplay I do not know. I do know that at some point Beatty evanesced out of the project and with his withdrawal went the money interest. What was conceived as a big-budget jeweled elephant starring Beatty, Laurence Olivier as his father (or was it grandfather?), Laura Antonelli as the love interest (Isabelle Adjani was also discussed), and a lavish backdrop ended up a much runtier film that looked as if it were shot just off the turnpike with Ray Sharkey pipsqueaking as the hero, the aged director King Vidor in the Olivier role (who died months after the film’s release), and, in the role of the imported white chocolate, the gorgeous Ornella Muti, whom Pauline and I so appreciated in her slinky catsuit as the vixen in Flash Gordon, which we caught in a theater in Times Square where the rodents outnumbered the customers. Love & Money played a brief engagement when it was released after some delay in 1982, already something everybody involved wanted to put behind them. Friendships were severed over this film, certainly Pauline’s and Albarino’s was. She successfully lobbied at Paramount for David Lynch to direct The Elephant Man, but that seems to have been small consolation for what others have since told me were indeed miserable months out there for Pauline, a mortifying letdown. Though I don’t believe the rumor, repeated in Biskind’s book, “that she would go over to director Richard Brooks’s office, complain that she had been put out to pasture, and weep.” The weeping sounds so unlike her, and Brooks was not a director with whom she would have been on confiding terms, and vice versa, not after her panning of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Like so many of the anti-Pauline anecdotes in Star from studs now in their sinking suns, this strikes me as sexist payback.
Pauline never spoke to me of her unhappiness at Paramount, not then, not later, not even alludingly. When she phoned from the coast in the summer of 1979, it was to hear what movies I had seen, what I was up to, if there was any talk about some recent story or review in The New Yorker, her amusement over an item in Liz Smith’s syndicated gossip column that she had “gone Hollywood” and was taking driving lessons—“me, at my age,” she scoffed. “As if I’d even be able to see over the steering wheel! Who feeds her this stuff, garden gnomes?” Were there clues in our long-distance conversations