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By Root 2272 0

and unpretentious—Pauline’s kind of person. Their tastes certainly weren’t completely congruent—Sawhill was far more interested in avant-garde cinema than Pauline was—but once he had moved to New York and she got to know him, he became a steady companion at screenings and dinners. Sawhill eventually became an arts reporter at Newsweek, an experience he grew to dislike because he felt that the magazine didn’t care much about how to convey information to its readers, only about how to package it. Pauline took a great interest in his career and was constantly prodding him to be a movie critic. The problem was that Sawhill didn’t particularly want to be a movie critic; he was drawn to other kinds of writing, as well, and by his own admission, he was not much of a careerist. As a result he became Pauline’s favorite “bad boy”—the one in her circle who often wouldn’t do what she told him to. Pauline was perpetually exhorting Sawhill to write huge critical pieces on spec and send them to the top magazines, as a way of securing a regular writing post, but he often ignored her advice—to the degree that, once, she shook her fist at him and railed, “You make me so mad!” But clearly, Sawhill’s independence from her was also a quality she respected.

Another of Pauline’s favorites was Michael Sragow, whom she had gotten to know in the 1970s when he was a student at Harvard. When Sragow began writing criticism for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and then Rolling Stone, Pauline would call to tell him what she thought about a particular review. “Most of her criticism was not that hard if you understood the tenor of what she said,” Sragow observed. “One of the joys of coming up in that era was that there was real argument, and it was zesty and not always fighting. I think you had to be in the same sort of ballpark of perceiving what was on the screen to have the kind of friendship where you would discuss movies with her. But I think she was kind of bored if you only thought what she thought, if you didn’t bring your own eyes to it.”

Another young writer whose career Pauline took great interest in was David Edelstein. Unlike some of the acolytes who felt that the way to get along with Pauline was to agree with her, Edelstein did not find that she dictated opinions to him. Rather, he found her extremely sensitive about letting him find his own way in his thinking about movies, as if she understood that he was still a work in progress and she didn’t want to influence him unduly. He felt that her interest in being surrounded by a group had less to do with wanting to be Ma Barker, or the Queen Bee, than with her love of being the member of an audience. “Pauline had enormous insight into people,” said Edelstein. “For someone who was a critic, she was extraordinarily other-directed. She would get people spouting their opinions and sometimes she would use them. She would use it in a way that was orchestrated in a way that was beyond anything anybody could have done. But she loved to be surprised.”

For Pauline, being a spectator continued to be the best thing life could offer. Carrie Rickey remembered an Italian restaurant in Times Square of which Pauline was particularly fond. For dessert she always ordered zabaglione, the custard dessert that was made at the table—something Rickey suspected she relished because she was both attending a performance and granting an audience. Her old friend Linda Allen recalled a visit that Pauline made to Berkeley when she attended a family reunion. Pauline asked Allen to come over for a visit, and when Allen arrived, she found Pauline’s grandnieces and grand-nephews playing rambunctiously in the backyard. “She was watching them, like a movie,” Allen said. “She said at one point, ‘I want to see how this comes out.’”

If Pauline thought, however, that her protégés were going in the wrong direction, or if she suddenly felt that she had misjudged their potential, she could drop them with amazing swiftness. This was the fate of Carrie Rickey. Around the time Pauline left for Hollywood, Rickey was given a job as an art