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girl who was also in the car, and soon the two of them find themselves embroiled in a case of high-level conspiracy. It was, as Pauline noted, a movie that had overtones of political events of recent years—ranging from Chappaquiddick to Watergate. Several critics dismissed it as a routine takeoff on Blow-Up, but Pauline found it to be “the first movie in which De Palma has stripped away the cackle and the glee.” It was “hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you’ll never make the mistake of thinking that it’s only a dream. Compared with Blow Out, even the good pictures that have opened this year look dowdy.” And then she took one of her giant steps, as if defying the critics who attacked her for being hyperbolic: “I think De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision.” Despite its virtues, Blow Out didn’t receive particularly strong reviews, and it muddled along at the box office.

The most heralded actress’s performance of the summer left her cold—Meryl Streep in Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. She had admired Streep on the New York stage, particularly as a comedienne, and written warmly of her performance as Linda in The Deer Hunter. But Pauline generally preferred actors who conveyed some kind of ripe sensuality, inflected with a certain craziness or messiness. This was particularly true of her favorite female stars, from Bette Davis to Debra Winger. She had already pegged Streep as a highly cerebral actress, and wrote: “We never really get into the movie because, as Sarah, Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance, but she isn’t mysterious. She’s pallid and rather glacial. . . . Meryl Streep’s technique doesn’t add up to anything. We’re not fascinated by Sarah; she’s so distanced from us that all we can do is observe how meticulous Streep—and everything else about the movie—is.”

Pauline was just beginning to feel that she had recovered from the wounds inflicted by Renata Adler’s essay when she was hit by another attack—one that was, in its way, even more unsettling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was the unlikeliest of films that caused Pauline so much difficulty in late 1981. George Cukor’s Rich and Famous was an anachronism for the early ’80s—a new version of John Van Druten’s musty Broadway comedy Old Acquaintance, about the tumultuous friendship of two women writers, one with a serious literary reputation, the other the author of trashy bestsellers. The play had been previously filmed in 1943, with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins as the battling friends. Now it had been updated, spanning the period from 1959 to 1981, with Jacqueline Bisset as the serious one and Candice Bergen, fresh from her surprising comedic success in Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over, as the trashmonger. Rich and Famous earned a certain niche in film history because, at eighty-one, George Cukor was the oldest director on record to have helmed a major studio picture.

What perplexed Pauline most about the film was her strong feeling that the entire movie was suffused with a gay sensibility. This was fine in the campier scenes, in which an outrageously over-the-top Bergen was used “almost as if she were a big, goosey female impersonator,” in Pauline’s words. The problem came in the scenes in which the picture strained to take a serious look at why Bisset’s character was so bottled up creatively and emotionally. One sequence in particular bothered Pauline. In it, Bisset is picked up by a hot young boy, takes him back to her room at the Algonquin, and watches with anxious lust as he slowly removes his clothes. “She begins to kiss his abdomen passionately, gratefully,” wrote Pauline. “It’s gruesomely silly.... This picture might have been made by young hustlers.” At the end of her review, she offered, “Rich and Famous isn’t camp, exactly; it’s more like a homosexual fantasy.