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through), but more often she wanted to know if she “went too far” this time “going after” a certain movie or actor or director, knowing that by execrating the latest Neil Simon or some meretricious bagatelle from Mike Nichols (“God, the shit he gets away with”), she was blaspheming everything the New York Times Arts and Leisure section held hallow. It wasn’t that she was looking to cotton-pad her opinions; it was that she didn’t relish another round of aggravation from the aggrieved and wanted to settle in her own mind that animosity hadn’t gotten the worst of her. “I want to be fair to the son of a bitch,” she said once, cleaving to the belief that every filmmaker was capable of redemption, even Ken Russell, though that might be pushing it (she once said he deserved having a stake driven through his heart, if they could find it). Sometimes the fear of going “too far” went in the other direction—Pauline would seek confirmation that she hadn’t snapped out of earth’s orbit by hailing Carrie or The Warriors, two pulp smashers considered garish and low-pandering not only by most fellow critics but by many of The New Yorker’s readers, whose nerves couldn’t take all this noisy ruckus. Such movies, they were enough to tip over one’s gondolas.

I once was witness—a student co-pilot—to a master class in Pauline’s instant power-on of articulation, where every phrase quivered like the handle of a knife whose blade had just lodged in the tree bark. It was a pilot for a talk show hosted by David Susskind’s wife, Joyce Davidson, who had already established herself as a TV name in Canada and was looking to expand south. David Susskind, for those who need escorting into the memory vault, was an adventurous, high-strung, phone-juggling, devoutly, almost stereotypically Jewish urban liberal (back when the New York Post was the tabernacle organ of middlebrow, middle-class Jewish liberalism, home to columnists such as Max Lerner and Dr. Rose Franzblau). He was the producer of socially conscious dramas such as the TV adaptations of Raisin in the Sun and Death of a Salesman, and the groundbreaking, gritty-vérité original drama East Side/West Side, starring George C. Scott as a social worker contending with slum conditions, child abuse, drug addiction, racial discrimination, and the bureaucratic coils of the welfare system, and the host of a weekly two-hour Manhattan-based talk show that was part seminar, part encounter group, part freak show, and part celebrity séance, with Susskind rattling his papers and stammering questions as if trying to make sense of the madness pitching the deck of his once stable world. With his white hair and Mr. Magoo eye pouches, Susskind was a monochromatic man made dizzy by the kaleidoscopic swirl of the sixties. Unlike on the Charlie Rose set (Charlie sharing some of Susskind’s befuddlement but exuding a far stronger sense of varnished ease in the international brotherhood of media moguls and the permanent political class), guests weren’t expected to be on their best behavior when they convened in the Susskind studio. Some of his most famous installments were barely contained uproars, such as the reunion of the Andy Warhol superstars that turned into a queeny uprising over the vile influence of Paul Morrissey over Andy; a debate about feminism in which Germaine Greer squashed the book reviewer and culture critic Anatole Broyard like a presumptuous grape; a discussion of “radical chic” in which guests of Leonard Bernstein’s fund-raiser for the Black Panthers vented against an absent Tom Wolfe over his caricature of them in his infamous New York cover story (illustrated with a photograph of supposed uptown socialites making a black power fist salute to the camera); and the classic “How to Be a Jewish Son” support group featuring Dan Greenburg, David Steinberg, and Mel Brooks at his most hilarious-spontaneous.

One visual sip of Davidson’s Chardonnay chill and it was clear her talk show was going to be a classier affair than her husband’s, no rolling around on the floor or raised voices. The guests for the pilot episode