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a healthy distance from it. The bold choices she had made in her personal life—having Gina out of wedlock, doggedly pursuing her chosen profession even in the years when it brought her little income, refusing to stand in Edward Landberg’s shadow or to bend to William Shawn—suggested that she had been living her own version of a feminist ideal. She, of course, would never have characterized it that way: feminism reeked too much of dogma for her to be able to take it seriously and join the movement in any specific, organized way. The feminist sensibility, she feared, was a trap that shackled thinking and rendered one unable to come up with fresh and invigorating opinions. Also, she found many of the feminists she knew to have a certain humorlessness—always a cardinal sin. Pauline’s idea of being a feminist was to live her life rather like a Jean Arthur career woman: proving herself by doing her work better than any man, but always maintaining a sense of humor about herself.

“I thought Pauline was deaf to feminism,” observed Karen Durbin, who worked with her at The New Yorker in the early ’70s before becoming a film critic. “Not hostile. It just wasn’t something she could hear. If she had been younger, my generation, I’m convinced she would have been a feminist firebrand. But as it was, she fought the fight by herself. It seemed to me one of the key insights of women’s liberation was the moment when I thought, ‘We don’t have permission.’ That’s what we’re fighting for. The pure nerve of the way Pauline would say what she thought and not mince anything—it must have been God’s own battle for her to create that permission for herself. And she lived by it. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t underneath that permission a tremulous place—‘Am I getting away with this?’”

Pauline’s review of one of the year’s great critical and commercial successes, The French Connection, gave clear indications about how she felt living in New York City at the time. More and more films were being shot there, a development that had been actively sought by Mayor John V. Lindsay. But particularly since the success of Midnight Cowboy, filmmakers delighted in presenting the starkest, seamiest views of the city ever to wind up on film. The isolation of Tina Balser (Carrie Snodgress) in Diary of a Mad Housewife, lost in a maze of her husband’s ambition; Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels, the high-priced call girl in Klute, racing to get into her apartment because she knows someone is watching her; the junkie (Al Pacino) who says that death is “the best high of all” in The Panic in Needle Park; the squalid apartments of Barbra Streisand and George Segal in The Owl and the Pussycat—all of it showed New York as a place of bare trees and gray winter skies, where the inhabitants were simply caught up in the frenzy of trying to survive. Pauline continued to struggle with her own feelings of hostility toward the city, where she thought “everyone seems to be dressed for a mad ball.” She volunteered to her readers, “It is literally true that when you live in New York, you no longer believe that the garbage will ever be gone from the streets or that life will ever be sane and orderly.”

The New York audience fascinated her, because she felt that a large sector of it was so attuned to the explosive rhythm of the city that they demanded to see it reflected on the screen. The French Connection was a fact-based account of one of the great narcotics busts in the history of the New York Police Department. The movies were now giving this audience what it wanted: violent, high-tension thrillers and action films geared to this crazed element in the audience, movies that were “often irrational and horrifying brutal.”

While other critics reviewed The French Connection simply as a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, the embodiment of what would soon become the cliché “high-octane thriller,” Pauline insisted on examining it in the context of the realities of contemporary New York, and of the audience that the city’s seemingly endless decline had helped to create. She acknowledged that