Lucking Out - James Wolcott [45]
“You may need to give the matter a little more thought,” Pauline says, which doesn’t stop him from further elaboration and clarification of his point of view. We stop at the screening address, and Pauline pays the fare, plus some.
“I didn’t want him to think I was using his racist talk as an excuse to under-tip him,” Pauline says as we make our way to the building lobby.
Upstairs, a young female publicist giving out press kits—back then, it was always a young female publicist, shiny with hope—hands one to Pauline and enjoins us to enjoy the movie, like a flight attendant welcoming us aboard. Perhaps a couple of Pauline’s other invitees are waiting so that we can all go in together, or perhaps they’re already inside, saving seats. It wasn’t that Pauline wouldn’t or didn’t go to movies alone, or with a single partner; it’s that she didn’t see moviegoing as a solitary rite that required silence, devotion, and rapt communion. What she brought from San Francisco was an informal sociability that abjured pigeonholes and caste systems—all the trappings of Manhattan snobbery—in favor of a floating party whose membership was in intimate flux. Because she’d been forced to give up minor vices (allergies would later restrict her meals and activities), conversation was the one buzz left to her, and no wonder she responded with such kin affinity to the multilayered murmur and byplay of Robert Altman’s ensemble films, those cloud maneuvers of subtle relations.
Sometimes we don’t go straight in, instead waiting outside for the previous screening to end and the audience to vacate. Pauline told me once of a film she was seeing that was being shown in back-to-back screenings, she having arrived for the later one. The doors opened and one of her then protégés, now one of the few remaining prominent film critics with a paying job, came out with his usual facial arrangement of academic thoughtfulness. “So how was it?” Pauline asked.
Not much, he said. A few good scenes but mostly a mess. I’m not sure I’d bother with it.
“Well, since I’m already here …,” Pauline said.
The movie was Mean Streets, not Martin Scorsese’s first feature, but the one that missiled his directorial career and that of its stars, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, De Niro’s entrance into the Little Italy bar to the sound of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” one of the great character intros in movie history, the rest living up to its kinetic promise, a film in which Catholic guilt earned its own dressing room.
So after that Pauline stopped trusting immediate eyewitness reports, assuming she ever did.
We take up mortar position in the back row. Pauline nearly always sits in the back, often right beneath the projectionist’s portholes, flanked by fellow critics on her squad, New Yorker fact-checkers and copy editors, a lateral entourage of friends and allies. (The auteurists—those ardent members of Andrew Sarris’s Raccoon Lodge—tended to huddle closer to the screen, as if to meld mind and image into a blissful, shimmering mirage of Kim Novak with her lips parted.)
A few rows ahead, one of Pauline’s protégés stands and adjusts his jeans, which seem to sag in the back no matter how tight his belt is notched.
“R. never did have any ass to him,” Pauline observes almost wistfully.
R. removes the jacket he was using as a seat saver to make room for his date, a co-worker from Newsweek, who’s running a bit late.
“R. will probably be bringing her along afterwards,” Pauline says, “afterwards” referring to wherever we decide to go for the postmortem.
“Oh, goody,” I say, as Pauline gives me a light rap on the arm.
Another of Pauline’s junior G-men arrives, ceremonially helping his date off with her coat with the Southern courtliness of a quality seducer. I can tell from his forlorn gallant wave to Pauline before he sits down that he’s miffed he didn’t arrive early enough to sit in the back row, forced instead to make do with a middle row far from the nerve center of activity.
The rustling in the seats subsides. Here we are, pencils and pens at the ready.
“Let us pray,” Pauline says,