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By Root 852 0

for him to bring off this symphonic opus and trying to extend every benefit of the doubt while I, feeling queasier with each cruelty served on a platter, slumped so deep into myself that I felt like a ball of wax with walnut eyes. And this was only the first half of the five-hour uncut version! There was going to be a break in the afternoon, followed by Part Two. As Part One neared its climactic end, one of the inbred decadents in the film—played by Donald Sutherland with all the dementia at his disposal, which was a lot—tied a wriggling kitten to the wall, and I said to Pauline, “If anything happens to that cat, I’m outta here.” After a beat to build up a sense of apprehension, Sutherland bashed the kitten with his head, killing it. I’m sure the killing was faked, but that was enough for me, I’d had it, and I didn’t return for Part Two. Pauline understood my squeamishness (she too let out a yip when the kitten was brow-hammered), but I also think she thought I was being silly, letting it get to me that much. She prided herself on being able to sit through something as brutally protracted and fecal as Pasolini’s Salò with nary a qualm. Her review of 1900 would be an unwieldy teeter-totter straddle—acknowledging its grotesqueries while praising its titanic scope (“It makes everything look like something held at the end of a toothpick”)—but once Bertolucci unburdened himself of the ludicrous Luna, starring Jill Clayburgh in a near-career-killer role as an incestuous mom, she was unable to argue herself out of her disenchantment with Bertolucci.

Apart from 1900, the screenings held especially for Pauline were the most enjoyable because we could chat among ourselves without heads snapping and shushes coming from scholars trying to concentrate. Even then there could be repercussions once the studio spies reported back to the brass. I recall a screening of Bobby Deerfield at which Toback was one of the invitees. Toback, not just a writer, director, and actor, but a gambler, storyteller, and heat-seeking sausage of hit-and-run legend whose pickup tactics would make him a familiar Spy target in the eighties, was the most conspicuous fireball in Pauline’s orbit. (Not that he didn’t have a lot of other orbits in which he moved, as a friend and collaborator of Warren Beatty’s—Toback did the screenplay for Bugsy—and a disciple of Norman Mailer, whose improvisational bad-vibe weekend-party pseudo-documentary Maidstone he had covered for Esquire. Toback went even more white Negro than Mailer dared, playing Jewish-intellectual sidekick to the football great Jim Brown, his personal guide into the vectors of soul power and black studhood. In Jim, Toback’s “self-centered memoir” of his friendship with Brown, they end up in a big bed with a couple of hot chicks, balling in bonding syncopation.) It was easy to see what Pauline saw in Toback as a person, what all of us did: his glistening presence, radio hum of energy, self-deprecating humor, constantly refilling trove of jaw-dropping anecdotes about Hollywood trespasses, and ebullient outgoingness—a high-voltage extroversion that made those of us who stuck to the word trade feel like fabric samples. He was out there banging while the rest of us played spectator, or so it seemed. As the opening credits of Bobby Deerfield began to roll, Toback supplied a running commentary on the names presented on-screen, supplying capsule descriptions such as “useless,” “totally useless,” “completely pathetic,” “former Teamster,” “drug addict,” “Warren slept with her once,” “I thought he had retired,” “completely unacceptable,” “met her by the pool once,” “what’s he doing here?” and, as Al Pacino’s Bobby Deerfield emerged, an immaculate placard of focus and integrity in a motorized circus of competitive uproar, the greeting “Nice jacket, Al.” The churchly, hunting-dog nobility of Bobby Deerfield only liberated Toback even more, his sit-down stand-up routine more entertaining than anything on-screen, until eventually he too became subdued by the leaden import of the tedious plight of a race driver’s conscience