Lucking Out - James Wolcott [54]
Pauline once related to me the travails of a rakish writer of our acquaintance who had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from a partner in a one-night stand. The problem was that Rakish Writer had a steady girlfriend, and when he told her about the STD, how he had gotten it, and why she needed to get herself tested, “she didn’t react very well,” Pauline reported with a sympathetic sigh. “She was awfully hard on him.” Pauline thought the betrayed girlfriend should have been a little more understanding, at least until the test results came back. Pauline knew RW was in the wrong, but that’s where her sympathies tilted, with the guy who couldn’t resist a scoring opportunity. Pauline could sometimes excuse male appetites with rationales that won points for originality. Although she disapproved of the goings-on at Roman Polanski’s clubhouse, based on firsthand reports from Towne (the screenwriter on Chinatown), she thought too much fuss was being made over the underage-sodomy incident that sent the director into exile. “It’s not as if he could physically hurt those girls,” Pauline said. “Have you ever seen Polanski? He’s quite tiny and slight, about the same size as those girls they’re talking about. They’re on an equal scale.” But he’s still so much older than they are, I said; he’s the adult here. “Oh, I know, I know,” Pauline said. “Gina doesn’t agree with me either.” It was clear she thought Polanski deserved clemency, a view that was shared by critics who otherwise shared few opinions with Pauline, such as Andrew Sarris. A director’s prerogatives got a lot more leeway back then.
When not wishing she could tear certain relationships down the middle along the dotted line, Pauline would play matchmaker, the unlikeliest fairy godmother imaginable. She would drop ten-ton hints to pry a little interest and initiative from my direction. Of Veronica Geng, she remarked in her office one day, “Have you noticed, Veronica’s got the cutest figure.” I had noticed, not being insensible, but never thought of Veronica as girlfriend material because her dance card, to use an antediluvian phrase, seemed filled, and temperamentally, psychologically, aesthetically, Veronica was a quadratic equation way beyond my ability to comprehend. I got a huge charge whenever we ran into each other—Veronica was incapable of conventional responses, the crook of her smile presaging some darted observation or madcap disclosure. (“This guy I like is coming to New York this weekend—I better start doing some leg lifts.”) But I also knew that she could click off on people who had displeased her as if they had never been born. Suddenly they de-existed. But Veronica, sprite with a bee stinger that she was, made more sense than another of Pauline’s date suggestions, a lanky, tomboyish writer-editor whom we’ll call Stacy. “You really should ask her out,” Pauline said. “You’d make quite a pair.”
“I thought she was a lesbian.”
“Oh, that. So what. Aren’t you up for a challenge?”
“No. Are you sure you’re talking to me and not H.?”
(H. was always giving women he scarcely knew neck rubs to “loosen them up.”)
“It’s just that your senses of humor are so much alike,” Pauline said. “Anyway, it’s worth considering.”
And then I found myself up in Pauline’s hotel room with one of Pauline’s friends, whom I’ll call Madison. In the realm of pulp fiction Madison would have been known as a man-eater: slender, dark eyed, her gaze direct and appraising, long, thick brown hair—an urban Jane ready to swing from a vine and carry a man off to her bachelorette tree house, where she would ravish her prey between tidbits about the latest movies or art shows she had attended. Not the worst way to spend an evening, if you could keep up with her quick costume changes of mood. She was unique in Pauline’s circle for her lightning lack of hesitation to sass Pauline or shoot down innocent bystanders until smoke poured from their fuselage and sent them plashing somewhere in the Pacific. She could be breathtakingly rude, like Lauren Bacall in