of Play It as It Lays, Didion’s austere autopsy of sun-whitened anomie and depraved indifference along the intestinal freeways of Los Angeles, Pauline had not only panned the movie but had the audacity to make fun of Didion’s epigrammatic, ivory-mask prose, which she called “ridiculously swank,” the writerly equivalent to designer chic, “the sparse words placed in the spiritual emptiness of the white pages.” Lines so many book reviewers had caressed as talismanic for our times—such as the opening chord, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask”—gave Pauline a hoot, and she got a bigger hoot out of a pull quote from an interview with Didion where she laid bare, “I am haunted by the cannibalism of the Donner Party.” Every day for Didion was the dawn of the dead. By pinning the bony tail of Didion’s pretensions, Pauline’s mockery shook the foundations of Didion’s literary pedestal—like those of Sontag and Joyce Carol Oates, Didion’s mystery cult was so without humor that it didn’t know what to do when humor came knocking. A lifelong antipathy was the product of that review, with Pauline deprecated by Didion and her husband, the novelist, screenwriter, and journalist John Gregory Dunne, as a hopeless outsider peddling inside dope. Dunne, who did the dirty work in the marriage in the scores-settling department, launched a counteroffensive against Pauline with a piece in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (“That may have been the review,” Pauline told me, “where they used a drawing of me that looked like something out of Der Stürmer”) that opened with her holding court in front of the TV at an Oscar night party, “in a Pucci knockdown and orthopedic shoes,” bad-mouthing winners and losers alike. Dunne also disclosed that he had it on good authority that Pauline didn’t content herself with heckling Play It as It Lays in private, she also gave free concerts for the public: “Wilfrid Sheed had reported her reading it aloud derisively on the beaches of Long Island.” Despite that, Dunne professed personal fondness for Pauline in the untidy flesh, to borrow a phrase of Gore Vidal’s, but lamented that she embarrassed herself sexually by rhapsodizing over “entertaining rubbish” such as The Godfather. Oh, that entertaining rubbish.
So, I hypothesized, by holding up A Book of Common Prayer as if it could ward off evil, the editor with the glass table was razzing Pauline—giving her the business, as they used to say on Leave It to Beaver.
“No, he’s not that Machiavellian,” Pauline said, “Machiavellian” being a dirty word in her vocabulary, the paw mark of mendacity. “There was nothing ulterior going on. He was quite sincere.”
(An episode that reminded me of something Pauline later said about the revelation she had after moving to New York from San Francisco:
Before I came here, when I used to read the papers and magazines and Partisan Review and the film journals, I used to think that there was all this intellectual corruption in publishing that explained why so many mediocrities were given the big push and so many gifted, trickier talents treated like bums. I thought people in publishing and so on were smarter than what they were praising and promoting, that there was a hidden adoption scheme that explained how we got custody of Arthur Miller. But once I started talking to writers and editors and publishers, I realized there was no cultural conspiracy at work, apart from conformity. They weren’t Machiavellian or evil, they were just so cut off from their responses that their brains rolled downhill. And they were more provincial than you thought possible from how they pretended to such sophistication in print. I’d mention Satyajit Ray and you would have thought a flying saucer had landed on the roof. Intellectuals were the worst, some of them stupider than you thought possible.)
On another occasion Pauline invited me to an evening of one-acts written by Wallace Shawn, one of William Shawn’s sons, whom I imagined having grown up inside a grandfather clock, thick carpets muffling every other sound. (The other son, Allen, is