Lucking Out - James Wolcott [31]
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