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By Root 885 0

the backseat of a limo, casting aspersions that carried the whap of a slap; yet she could be tremendously tactful and generous, too, returning from her travels with the perfect present, often a rare edition of a book that the recipient had mentioned in passing but Madison had entered into her case file. Her tastes and Pauline’s often clashed because her taste seemed so whim-driven. “She’s a snob who likes everything,” someone said, but the snobbery came across as brattiness, not as the pinched anality of someone awaiting Susan Sontag’s next encyclical. Her sexual forthrightness was the flip side of the pickup-artist swagger Pauline found so amusing, and here she was, seated on the edge of Pauline’s bed in the Royalton, looking up at me with licky eyes, as if I were that night’s barbecue special, or was that my tropical imagination? And was Pauline stage-managing this moment? I pretended innocence just this side of stark insensibility, suspecting that whatever might transpire between Madison and me that night or any other night would be broadcast to Pauline, and I simply didn’t want Pauline knowing my business, not like she seemed to know that of so many others. Much as I adored her, I didn’t want the godmother to have total jurisdiction.

Although the seventies had a lot more going on at groin level than the decade that followed (when whoring for fame earned its racing stripes), it would be an error of my own emphasis to leave the impression that Pauline’s loyal band was primarily libido-driven, a nest of Les Liaisons Dangereuses swingers trading “biting repartee” without benefit of painted fans and snuffboxes, as Pauline occupied the center of the silken web, eating the flies we brought her. The erotics at play were less those of the flesh than those of yearning, striving egos—an erotics directed toward recognition. The motoring force at work as we sat there in the glorified drawing room of the Algonquin was the drive for approval and attention, Pauline’s approval and attention most of all (the larger world’s acceptance an amplification and ratification of hers), which was won and held not by being smarty or fawning or doctrinaire but by being receptive to whatever might be coming around the corner, willing to play the tricky carom. She couldn’t stand “stiffs,” whose tastes were fully formed, rigidified, and stuck in the petrified forest of the past, and those of us sitting in the Algonquin were on the upswing of our careers, just starting our scouting missions. These were the years of encouragement. Some would stray off target, disappear into the reeds, defect from criticism under the pressure of unfulfilled expectations and career frustrations, or simply find something more frolicking to do, Pauline being more ambitious for them than they were for themselves. In a sense we all would fail Pauline because none of us would surpass her defiant nerve, her resounding impact. But tonight, we’re modestly in character, the future only extends so far, and Pauline is sipping tea from a cup, having brought her own tea bag. H. is there, looking Southern courtly as his words seem to roll down his tapered wrists, like beaded droplets. R. is there, leaning forward, avid, his date poised on her chair as if it were a lily pad, choosing each peanut from the peanut bowl with premeditated care. Madison presides from her corner of the sofa, giving a Tallulah Bankhead performance. As for me, there I am, just a few years after leaving college, sitting at the Algonquin with the greatest film critic then or now, part of the gang, wearing jeans that probably need washing and nursing a Coke, the only thing I ever ordered. And Pauline—she listens, she laughs, she passes along nuggets (“I asked Peckinpah why he made —— look like such a dumb cow in ——, and he said, ‘Because that’s what she is’ ”), but she doesn’t hold forth, she doesn’t make pronouncements, she doesn’t pontificate, and she doesn’t traffic in absolutes, like Ayn Rand holding an indoctrination séance. “Let’s order a last round, like civilized people,” she says, and rings the bell.

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