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universally acclaimed big studio picture was James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment. It had a good premise: the uneasy relationship between an unusual, strong-minded, exceptional-in-some-ways mother (Shirley MacLaine) and her much less exceptional daughter (Debra Winger), whose life swings out of control when she enters into a bad marriage and later develops terminal cancer. Pauline loathed it, feeling that Brooks had directed “the actors with both eyes on the audience.” Winger confirmed Pauline’s faith in her; she found her performance “incredibly vivid,” but in the end, the film’s manipulative style irritated her: “If Terms had stayed a comedy,” she wrote, “it might have been innocuous, but it had to be ratified by importance, and it uses cancer like a seal of approval. Cancer gives the movie its message: ‘Don’t take people for granted; you never know when you’re going to lose them.’ At the end, the picture says, ‘You can go home now—you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.’ What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.” Terms of Endearment was about as close as the major Hollywood studios seemed to be willing to get to complex, problematic subject matter, and the savvy moviegoer was beginning to perceive the decision-by-committee mentality that had gone into such movies.

Music continued to play an enormous role in Pauline’s life at home. She listened to a wide range of recordings—everything from opera to Aretha Franklin. She considered opera a great, all-consuming art form, like movies, and she could be thrilled by it without possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of it. (She once telephoned opera aficionado John Simon because she didn’t recognize Verdi excerpts being played in Bertolucci’s 1900.) Her musical tastes made for a fascinating parallel with her taste in movies. In general, she preferred the subtlety of jazz to the all-out, hearty razzmatazz of Broadway show tunes; one of her favorite recordings was Billie Holiday’s “Getting Some Fun out of Life.” In the realm of classical music, she was extremely resistant to the composers who wore their profundity on their sleeve. For this reason she never fully warmed to Mahler and Bruckner (“There wasn’t a lot of room for bombast,” observed David Edelstein) while she had a deep love for the music of Handel and Gluck and other early-music composers, because she admired their economical structure—they created exciting, passionate music that was also formally disciplined. One of the singers whose records she played most often was the great American countertenor Russell Oberlin—an unusual preference, since at the time countertenors had nothing like the wider acceptance they later achieved.

Reviewing Amadeus, Milos Forman’s screen version of Peter Shaffer’s long-running play, Pauline was amused by the playwright’s vision of the relationship between the respected middlebrow court composer Antonio Salieri and the wildly gifted young Mozart: “Shaffer has Salieri declaring war on Heaven for gypping him, and determined to ruin Mozart because God’s voice is speaking through him. . . . He’s the least humble of Christians—he seems to expect God to give him exact value for every prayer he has ever delivered.” Where she took issue with the movie, however, was in its suggestion that Salieri was right: She thought that Shaffer erred “by showing you Mozart as a rubber-faced grinning buffoon with a randy turn of mind, as if that were all there was to him, [and it] begins to lend credence to Salieri’s mad notion that Mozart doesn’t have to do a thing—that his music is a no-strings-attached, pure gift from God.” Still, she was surprised how much she liked the film, in large part because of F. Murray Abraham’s performance—she considered him “a wizard at eager, manic, full-of-life roles, and he gives Salieri a cartoon animal’s obsession with Mozart—he’s Wile E. Coyote.”

The year 1984 was significant in several ways. In April, Pauline’s seventh collection of reviews, Taking It All In, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, covering her New Yorker pieces from June 1980 to June 1983. She