Lucking Out - James Wolcott [135]
A few months later, Woody Allen’s latest film, Stardust Memories, was screened, an evening high with anticipation. Seated in the row in front of us, Dick Cavett, crickety with excitement, turned to Pauline and said: “Pauline, let me ask you something. Do you think it would be worthwhile learning German to understand a pun John Simon recently told me?”
Without missing a beat, Pauline shot back, “Why are you talking to John Simon?”
That was not the response he expected, and, innocently unaware that fraternization with John Simon carried the risk of Senate censure, Cavett expressed his fondness for puns by way of explanation, then turned around and faced front as the lights dimmed. How well I recall the film that followed. The abrasive whining about fame and the parasites it attracted. The Felliniesque scattered remains of a carnival that’s left town. The conflation of private angst and historical atrocity. The Grosz-like close-ups of the Jewish characters as they swooped into frame, exhibited like gargoyles. (“Here comes another nose,” Pauline muttered unhappily at one point during the screening.) If Pauline was dubious about much of Manhattan and Interiors, now Stardust Memories had bared Woody’s sour desire to blend into the tasteful WASP wallpaper (or sink between a pair of shiksa thighs) and be free from clawing Jewish cling. “The Jewish self-hatred that spills out in this movie could be a great subject, but all it does is spill out,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “He may be ready to become a Catholic convert.” The review was so blistering—“Stardust Memories doesn’t seem like a movie, or even like a filmed essay; it’s nothing”—that it drove a stake into her and Woody’s friendship for good. How close that friendship was, I didn’t know, but it had been at one of Woody’s New Year’s parties that Norman Mailer, still stung over Pauline’s slam of his Marilyn Monroe biographical photo album, gun-slingered up to her with his elbows extended and proposed that they butt heads to square things. She declined the invitation, like a sane person. In a portrait of Pauline published years later in the Atlantic, her friend and Massachusetts neighbor Roy Blount Jr. recounted how during a car drive a fellow passenger expressed what a shame it was that Woody had taken the review so personally, and Pauline replied, “Oh, no. It was vicious.” She accepted that casualties were part of the price of practicing criticism, one of its lousier sacrifices, which didn’t make it less painful. Walking into rooms to meet waves of resentment loses its novelty appeal after a while, and losing friends only makes each entrance more exposed.
We got through The Competition, Pauline murmurously pleased whenever Sam Wanamaker appeared as the snowcapped Leonard Bernstein maestro who wore his sweater tied around his neck like a cape, and scoffing at Lee Remick’s stiff-postured projectile launch of such unsayable lines as “It will turn your tits a lovely shade of puce.” We gathered ourselves together and ventured out into the December night to signal a taxi to take us downtown. The mood in the taxi was strange, wrong somehow, a bubble of trapped air of heavier density than that outside. The sound from the car radio was turned down low, but not for long. Pauline gave the driver the destination, and he said, as the taxi found the lane it wanted, “Guess you haven’t heard the news—John Lennon got shot tonight. Outside the Dakota. They’re saying it was carried out like an assassination.” The driver turned the radio up to one of the all-news channels that had reporters on the scene relaying the latest bulletins. “God,” Pauline said, “anyone with a gun can have his day.” The faces on the street through the passenger windows looked stunned, everyone moving at three-quarters speed, or maybe that’s memory slowing down the videotape.