title of Leonard Bernstein’s suburban operetta, Pauline tended to fault the girlfriend/wife as the guilty albatross. “She’s a clog dancer,” Pauline said of one critic’s wife, whose folk dancing she considered culturally stunted, and would refer to another protégé’s wife’s penchant for spangly bracelets and peasant skirts as if she were a refugee from a gypsy caravan who had gotten him under her witchy spell. In her review of West Side Story, she talked about the unendurable vexation of dating someone whose movie tastes you didn’t share. “Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider,” she wrote. “Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness). It’s experiences like these that drive women into the arms of truckdrivers—and, as this is America, the truckdrivers all too often come up with the same kind of status-seeking tastes.” Truck-driving aesthetes being in short supply in New York, it was college-educated women whom Pauline perceived rightly or wrongly to be prisses and conventional-minded cultural pretenders, more inclined to gentility. (Pauline admired the intelligence and stately poise of the film critic Molly Haskell, the wife of Andrew Sarris, but thought Molly was corseted by her fear of anything unruly and new, stuck in a potato sack race with her husband’s fogy tastes.) So when Pauline spotted slippage in one or another of her single protégés, small failures of nerve or lapses of taste that took the edge off his fastball, she would sometimes attribute his wayward slide to his current choice of girlfriend. “H. really seems to have lost his way since he started dating P.,” she would lament, to which I replied, “I know—he could have been the next Dr. Kildare!” Which made no sense but made Pauline laugh, and for me then there was no happier calling than making Pauline laugh. (I ran into another ex-girlfriend of H.’s years later who told me, “I think Pauline cooled on me after I told her I didn’t like Yentl. In retrospect, that was the Beginning of the End.”)
Pauline had female protégées, such as the tall, husky-voiced, meticulously perceptive Lloyd Rose, who wrote for The New Yorker and the Atlantic before becoming theater critic for the Washington Post and then jettisoned criticism to write paperback novelizations of Doctor Who, and the even taller Polly Frost (epic-scaled women amused Pauline—they had a storybook quality), a California export who published humor pieces in The New Yorker of quirky, elliptical, scattery unclassifiability that would find no place later under Tina Brown’s more utilitarian regime. But it was the male rowing team with whom she most identified. She already had a daughter, Gina—film criticism gave her a raft of sons. Male energy and bravado provided a hum that appealed to Pauline’s iconoclasm, with her refusal to make pretty or put up with soppy sentiment; temperamentally, she was very much of the thirties, when wisecracking rough diamonds played by Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, and Jean Harlow sized up a man or a scene with one measuring glance. (She was an immediate fan of Sex and the City, considering Kim Cattrall’s Samantha the trophy heiress to the screwball-comedy legacy of lewd sass.) A fellow writer at the Village Voice, who knew Pauline in San Francisco, said she would walk into a party and size up the weight of a man’s balls in the cup of her hand. I assumed she was speaking metaphorically—I really should have asked—and this was not the Pauline I knew, and my balls never met her scales of justice. But she did derive a vicarious kick from the company of men on the make, renowned studs, seducers, pickup artists, and passive-aggressive victim-magnets such as Beatty, Toback, Towne, and the aforementioned helicopter pilot (who, after moving to L.A., told me of being caught in bed with a friend’s wife and sternly lectured, “D., it’s bad enough, your fucking my wife, but I really resent you thinking that gives you the right to borrow my fucking bathrobe”). Toward the exploits of a number of her tomcatting