Lucking Out - James Wolcott [40]
Months went by, the pilot wasn’t picked up, and, most irksome, we were never paid the fee we had been promised. “I figured they’d find a way to forget us,” Pauline said. “Well, I blame Ed Asner,” I said. “He ruined it for everybody with his stomach growls. I wonder how Vidal’s segment went, though.” We had left after our segment.
“Don’t worry,” Pauline said. “Whatever he said, he’ll be sure to repeat it on some other show.”
After a messenger picks up the latest set of galleys Pauline has notated, she slides the pile of correspondence to the action part of her desk: a paper-clipped stack of fan letters, film scripts, forwarded news clips, nitpicky corrections, three-page dissertations explaining the throbbing urgencies of the latest Fassbinder she hadn’t reviewed, anti-Semitic diatribes (although it’s hard to imagine anyone who made less of her Jewish background in print than Pauline, she somehow attracted the wrath of Jew haters who seemed to subscribe to The New Yorker for the sole purpose of sending her periodic harangues—with every phrase you could practically hear hot cinders heaving through their nostrils as they blamed her for making Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould possible), and insistent pleas for Pauline to stop squandering valuable space in the magazine on movies that appealed only to the most violent, primitive tastes—why dignify and encourage such cultural Visigoths? (It was a question floated by Pauline’s colleagues at The New Yorker as well, some of whom trooped off to a movie she personally recommended only to emerge with a cultural crisis of faith that cinema had come to this.) Occasionally, Pauline would slide over a letter from a reader that was so flecked with rage and personal invective that I would ask, “Why don’t you just toss it in the trash? It’s got to be bad voodoo having all this hostility hanging around.” “No,” she said, “it’s just to respond and acknowledge their existence, otherwise they’ll just keep writing.” So to the correspondent who expressed his detestation as if he had scorpions dictating his sentences, she would dash off a courteous “Let’s just agree to disagree” response on New Yorker note cards that were designed for elegant brevity and to discourage further elaborations. It was with a deeper sigh that she moved on to the weightier correspondence that (unlike the scattershot nut mail) descended from some loftier altitude of intellectual pretense, printed on fine stationery (who knew there were so many subtle shades of cream?) and bearing the professional letterhead of a professor or, worse, psychotherapist or, worse still, heaven spare us, a married pair of Ph.D.’s who had drafted a joint communiqué intended, after doling out a few olives of praise, to set Pauline straight. Like Norman Mailer, Pauline was more exasperated by leechy, well-intentioned liberals trying to set everything in proper order than by outright antagonists. She trailed a finger along the italicized title of the film about which Pauline had so fallen short.
“Oh, God, not that one,” I said. Pauline read:
“As long-time readers and devotees of your New Yorker columns …”
“—who are about to viciously turn on you,” I interjected.
“… we looked forward, as we always do