• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 922 0

that never came up was money. The seventies were the last decade in which money with a capital M wasn’t party to every conversation, ready to prey. Everyone apart from Pauline was renting, so real-estate prices were also a non-preoccupation. This freed up so much head space to devote to the things that mattered. In her recent memoir, The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies, Toby Talbot presents a vivid home movie in words of what Pauline was like in the early sixties, having arrived east with Gina, a collection of Tiffany lamps, and a dog named Corgy, holding forth in the living room of the Talbot household: “Pauline, at five feet, was larger than my Naugahyde sofa. Gutsy, gusto, gumption are words that come to mind—along with salty, unsentimental, bawdy, brash, jazzy, feisty, passionate, ecstatic, scornful.” Affixed to the sofa, Pauline held forth like a bohemian intellectual trying to make herself heard over the din of Dwight Macdonald: “Pauline, with her usual bourbon in one hand, cigarette dangling in the other, took alternate sips of bourbon and puffs on her cigarette. Her arms flailed in excitement as we heatedly discussed—was it Hiroshima Mon Amour? As the bourbon decreased, the ash on the cigarette slowly mounted until, with one grand sweep of her arm, it fell on our Naugahyde sofa. Its pristine surface got marked with a hole for life!”

This rootin’ tootin’ double-shootin’ Pauline, alternating from cig to sip in a torrential outpour of words, was not the Pauline alighting at the Algonquin. She had given up both cigarettes and alcohol for health reasons by the time I knew her, and conversation was now her chief outlet for release and decompression. We were her way of unwinding, the bull session between the leaning-back intensity of viewing a movie and the leaning-forward intensity of reviewing it.

Who makes up the revolving cast? Other reviewers, protégés of Pauline’s; non-reviewers, who were friends of Pauline’s. Let’s say it’s a winter evening, since Pauline’s six-month alteration with Penelope Gilliatt annually began in autumn and ended in spring, and so we are all unbundling ourselves as we make ourselves comfortable. Although the Algonquin had a dress code, requiring jackets for gentlemen, it was laxly enforced, although there was one evening when a waiter, perhaps under heat from management, informed us—me, mostly—that our attire wouldn’t do. The hotel kept jackets handy for just such embarrassing occasions, and the waiter brought out a pair of blue jackets that appeared roomy enough to fit anyone short of a sumo wrestler, the long sleeves hanging down to my knuckles.

“It’s like a Jerry Lewis routine,” Pauline said.

“What did you think of The Nutty Professor?” someone says.

Pauline: “Stella Stevens was so scrumptious in that film, you think she’d have had more of a career.”

“She wasn’t bad in Cable Hogue,” someone else says.

“No, she was quite touching. But her character was oversentimentalized, which wasn’t her fault.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much lint there is in these pockets,” I said, fishing around.

“We’ll take your word for it,” Pauline said.

Others brought dates to the after-screenings. Me, never. Partly because I’ve always operated on a “need to know” basis, preferring my personal life to be a phantom subplot rather than an open secret—a bit of a mystery, even if nothing much was going on, which was, in the early seventies, often. (Though I did tell Pauline once about a date I took to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot who, sitting back in her seat like Gidget or Patty Duke, hissed at the movie to express her feminist displeasure. “Well, it was a truly terrible movie,” Pauline said.) When something was going on, I wasn’t interested in entering my girlfriends into competition, submitting them for inspection. Not that there were that many girlfriends to shield with my Zorro cape—I was a serial monogamist, not a compulsive pollinator. But I felt, rightly or wrongly, that introducing a serious girlfriend into Pauline’s court risked a spillover that could spoil everything.