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Greene himself, who stated that after he counted fifty errors and misquotations in Gilliatt’s published profile, he gave up reading it. It was a shocking embarrassment for The New Yorker, which, under Shawn’s guidance, had successfully maintained a reputation for irreproachable professional standards. A key part of that reputation had been the magazine’s fact-checking department, which still kept up a watch so fastidious that it drove some authors to distraction. But it was not the first time Gilliatt had come under fire for “borrowing” from other writers. In 1974 Sandra Berwind, a professor of English at Bryn Mawr, had written to Shawn complaining that Gilliatt, in her review of Paul Mazursky’s Harry and Tonto, had borrowed heavily from W. B. Yeats’s Essays and Introductions.

Berwind’s complaints prompted a telephone call from Shawn, who obsequiously thanked her for her letter, then said, “I suppose, Professor Berwind, that in your line of work you come upon students who plagiarize. And I suppose you are understanding at times and forgive them?” Shawn vacillated throughout his conversation with Berwind, who remembered him as being “kind of patronizing. No indication of doing one thing or the other.”

In 1978 Andy Holtzman, film program coordinator for the New York Shakespeare Festival, accused Gilliatt of showing up twenty-five minutes late for a screening of the documentary film Deal, ignoring the festival’s attempts to schedule another screening, and then publishing a negative review in The New Yorker. Holtzman suggested reassigning the film to Pauline, but again, the complaint about Gilliatt fell on deaf ears.

For years Gilliatt’s drinking had been a well-known problem among film producers, publicists, critics, and The New Yorker staff. Howard Kissel recalled a screening that he attended in the late 1970s. Gilliatt had failed to show up for it, and after delaying the start time as long as possible, a nervous team of publicists had screened the film without her. After the movie was finished, Kissel and his fellow critics attempted to exit the screening, but they couldn’t leave the room: Gilliatt, blind drunk, had arrived late and passed out against the door.

Not even Shawn, however, could completely ignore the Michael Mewshaw matter, and The New Yorker agreed to the writer’s demands for a $1,000 payment. But Shawn, in enabler mode, told Mewshaw that Gilliatt had been plagued by personal problems, and persuaded him to drop his request for a printed acknowledgment of her plagiarism. Instead, he placed her on a leave of absence from the magazine.

Pauline was able to keep a close eye on these events, thanks to many members of The New Yorker’s editorial staff who were loyal to her and were reliable sources on the Gilliatt affair. One of them, Patti Hagan, wrote to her in Los Angeles that the fact-checking department had uncovered all of the similarities in the Gilliatt and Mewshaw articles and reported them to Shawn. According to Hagan, Gilliatt had gone to Shawn’s office and talked her way out of it, and Shawn had ordered all of her copy restored; now that the matter had become a public embarrassment, he was putting the blame on the fact-checkers.

By the end of 1979 Pauline had not renewed her five-month contract with Paramount, and her Hollywood episode came to an end (though she always claimed that she had received other offers that would have enabled her to remain in Hollywood). To the press she remarked that she hadn’t had enough energy to accomplish her goals at Paramount. “Frankly, many producers aren’t doing the job that they should; the director is asked to carry too large a burden,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. She put the blame for the high quotient of misguided movies on the producers: Often, actors were miscast, rewrites were abandoned, the thread of the movie was lost, simply because the producer had failed to do his job.

She contacted Shawn and told him that she would like to return to her old post—a proposition that was much more attractive to her now that Penelope Gilliatt’s future with the magazine