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small town whose calm exterior masks sexual perversities and violent tensions. But this was nothing for the mainstream bestseller mentality, such as Kings Row or Peyton Place: In exploring the unexpected horrors that lurk in the little town of Lumberton, Blue Velvet took many audience members to a place they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to be. As the odd, clean-cut, yet slightly bent Jeffrey, whose coming of age is the final destination point of the bizarre plot, Kyle MacLach-lan gave what Pauline termed “a phenomenal performance.” The film, she thought, was “the work of a genius naïf. If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition. Lynch doesn’t censor his sexual fantasies, and the film’s hypercharged erotic atmosphere makes it something of a trance-out, but his humor keeps breaking through, too.”

She also loved the spirit of twenty-nine-year-old Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, which was shot in black and white in twelve days for around $175,000 and grossed more than $7 million—around the same amount as the studio-backed Blue Velvet. Pauline thought Lee had the rarest gift of all—“what for want of a better term is called ‘a film sense.’ It’s an instinct for how to make a movie move—for how much motion there should be in a shot, for how fast to cut the shots, for how to make them flow into each other rhythmically.” And she was delighted by Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, largely because Demme possessed “a true gift for informality . . . I can’t think of any other director who is so instinctively and democratically interested in everybody he shows you. Each time a new face appears, it’s looked at with such absorption and delight that you almost think the movie will flit off and tell this person’s story.”

At the 1986 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, she supported Blue Velvet, although she would have been happy to see Something Wild win. Unfortunately, she was thwarted across the board: Hannah and Her Sisters swept the prizes, winning Best Picture, Best Director for Woody Allen, and Best Supporting Actress for Dianne Wiest. The NYFCC, however, ignored the film that won that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Pauline spent the first paragraph of her review laying out Stone’s (to her) suspect background: Yale dropout, failed, nomadic writer, decorated soldier in Vietnam, postwar druggie, then NYU film student under Martin Scorsese. “We can surmise,” Pauline wrote (perhaps somewhat unfairly), “that Stone became a grunt in Vietnam to ‘become a man’ and to become a writer. As Platoon, a coming-of-age film, demonstrates, he went through his rite of passage, but, as Platoon also demonstrates, he became a very bad writer—a hype artist.” She recognized that Stone was trying to show the madness brought on by Vietnam in a more visceral way than it had ever been shown before, but, despite such touches as the use of her old sparring partner Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as counterpoint for the bloody battle scenes, Platoon lacked the poetry, however misshapen, of The Deer Hunter. “The results are overwrought,” Pauline wrote, “with too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity.”

By this time Gina and Warner Friedman had separated. Pauline had feared that marriage would destroy their relationship, and she had wanted to save them both the heartbreak. Gina and Will moved in with Pauline briefly before finding another house nearby. Warner continued to visit Pauline after he and Gina were divorced. One thing they had in common was a love of watching boxing matches on television, and they were often joined by Allen Barra.

One person for whom Pauline showed unconditional affection was Will. Her friends were amazed by how completely she doted on him—and he in turn adored her. Will always called her “Pauline”—never “Grandma.” Once, when Will was a small child, Warner and Gina had gone away for an overnight trip and left Will in Pauline’s care. Gina asked