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By Root 806 0

he was doing.” She was also an early flag-waver for the playwright John Guare, whose lyrically bent Lydie Breeze and House of Blue Leaves she urged on listeners (his big breakthrough was Six Degrees of Separation, which also appears to have been his cresting peak), and she was a regular patron of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where we saw Christopher Reeve in The Cherry Orchard together. Pauline didn’t posit the theater and movies as irreconcilable, evolutionary rivals, rejecting the notion that movies were the supersonic present and future, theater the dowdy, upholstered past. She thought her former disciple David Denby had loaded the dice when he did a theater dispatch for the Atlantic that disposed of Broadway as slow, stodgy, dust-bunnied, and mausoleum-ish compared with the sexy, magnified immediacy of movies; she found Denby’s piece a fact-finding mission by a mind already made up. (In the fullness of time, Pauline would decide that music criticism would be Denby’s proper sphere, if only he would awaken to the idea and embrace his true calling and stop mucking about. “All that boring intelligence,” she would say of his movie reviews, as if they were overdone meat loaf.)

Pauline thought the theater invaluable and exciting because it was where you saw actors at their most uninhibited and unhindered, unchopped into edited bits. I once went with her to see Blythe Danner in The New York Idea, Danner being one of those actresses Pauline adored. (Especially her husky, inimitable voice—“That voice has levels in it; it’s a French 75—you get the champagne through the chipped ice and cognac,” she wrote of her plucky performance in Hearts of the West.) She never quite got the breaks and vehicles that vaulted her into major stardom, unlike her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, who enjoyed the sunburst of Shakespeare in Love. Meryl Streep was a proficient technician, but Danner had the lyrical splendor of a Margaret Sullavan, a delicacy of touch and inflection that didn’t seem mentally penciled in beforehand. She was radiant in the uneven Lovin’ Molly, an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel that took a poison dart to the neck when McMurtry published an article in New York magazine just before the opening railing against the film for coarsening and low-browing his original work. Pauline resented how all the effort by the cast and crew got mud-spattered by a disgruntled author, giving audiences an excuse to stay away. Onstage, Danner had poise and projection, unlike a Madonna (in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow) or even a Julianne Moore (in David Hare’s Vertical Hour), both of whom stood glued as if they had lost the use of their arms, which hung dead. After the play we ran into a top editor at Newsweek and his wife, who invited us back to their Manhattan town house for drinks. Dominating the living room was a huge rectangular glass coffee table with sharp edges, ideal for splitting your head open to bleed to death after a fall. The long couches on which we reclined had such a steep slant that Pauline and I had to dig in our heels so as not to slide under the glass table and become specimens, like characters in The Glass Bottom Boat. The only item, or rather the only prominent item, placed on the glass plate was a copy of Joan Didion’s then-latest novel, A Book of Common Prayer.

“So what do you think of it?” asked Pauline during a conversational lull, conversational lulls being rare when Pauline was around. The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: “It’s full of resonance.” Thinking he was kidding, I almost snickered, having been an expert snickerer since high school, biting the inside of my mouth when I realized he was in earnest. I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance.

“I didn’t realize editors actually talked that way,” I said once we were outside.

“The ones in nice offices do,” Pauline said.

“Maybe he was trying to provoke you, given what you think of Didion.”

Reviewing Frank Perry’s screen adaptation