Lucking Out - James Wolcott [42]
“I see that they urge you to see the movie again and reconsider,” I said, hopping to the last paragraph, its decrescendo. “See it again through their eyes.”
“My eyes are the only ones I have,” she said. “And they’re allowed to get tired.”
Reconsiderations could wait until a lazier, more contemplative day, of which there were few on the horizon. It was Pauline’s practice and principle to beam a movie into her brain once and move forward, believing that the first responses were the true responses and that repeated viewings gave rise to rationalizations, a fussy curatorship—a consensus-building exercise in your own mind full of minor adjustments that took you further and further away from the original altercation (although she did go see Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller a second time, anxious to confirm her original feeling that it was a great shaggy melancholy beauty of a movie worth going to the wall for). She wanted the nerve endings of her reactions exposed, not neatly tapered and trimmed. She was amused by a New Yorker colleague who only watched old movies, “as if she can’t bear to part with her black-and-white TV.” Nearly the first question Pauline asked a friend in conversation was, “Have you seen anything?” Meaning: anything new, anything she should know about, anything exciting. So much was happening in the ragged advance of movies in the seventies that she craved reports from the front lines, confirmations that she wasn’t crazily alone in her likings.
As Pauline edited her copy and winnowed the mail, a thin traffic stream appeared and disappeared at the door, not all of them New Yorker cast members.
“Hi, do you know Jim Wolcott?”
Whom did I meet in Pauline’s office in those years? Piper Laurie, famously speared by the flurry of telekinetically delivered kitchen knives in Carrie. I interviewed Sissy Spacek, the star of Carrie, for the Voice, illustrated by a portrait of Spacek by the photographer James Hamilton that made every freckle look fetchingly spooky, not that I recall that actually coming up in our conversation with Laurie, since I don’t recall our conversation, only the moment of hello. The screenwriter Ron Shelton, who would later direct Bull Durham, whose famous “I believe” monologue (“… that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”), delivered by Kevin Costner, seemed to chime with Pauline’s tastes. Did I meet the writer-director-reprobate hyphenate James Toback there? It doesn’t matter, because Toback is a universal application, his friendship with Pauline and her praise of his directorial debut, Fingers, one of the whacking sticks used against her. It wasn’t enough that Pauline’s opening sentence shot like a squirt of lighter fluid—“James Toback is trying to be Orson Welles and Carol Reed, Dostoyevski, Conrad and Kafka” (though Pauline said to me it wasn’t as hyperbolic as it sounded: “I said he was trying to be them, not that he had achieved it”)—but she also compared his flair for self-dramatization to that of the “young Tennessee Williams,” though one imagines Toback’s Glass Menagerie would be shattered by roughly obtained orgasms. Reviewing Fingers for National Review, John Simon claimed that Pauline’s championing of Toback represented personal logrolling and “rather shoddy journalism,” given their prominent chumming around, and the ugliness evolved from there. (Years later, following a screening of Fingers at the Museum of the Moving Image, Toback set the record straight in his rogue fashion: “John Simon actually wrote and implied that I was fucking Pauline Kael—that’s why she wrote what she did about the movie—and then said it at UCLA at a big gathering they had. And they asked me about it on a TV interview after that and I said, ‘I have fucked Pauline Kael the same number of times I’ve fucked John Simon.’ ”) If it wasn’t in her office that I met Toback, it may have been at a screening, it may have been anywhere, because he was everywhere then, just as he’s everywhere now, and