Lucking Out - James Wolcott [29]
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