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By Root 2311 0

invited Allen Barra and his wife, Jonelle, to attend a screening, but the film was so poor that she decided against reviewing it. She invited the Barras out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Eighth Avenue, and as they were sitting at a window table, Pauline looked up to see a man knifed in the middle of the street. The man fell to the ground, and Barra went out to stay with him until the police and ambulance arrived. Barra remembered that Pauline “was cool the entire time. Didn’t say a word. Gina told me afterward that it shook her so badly that she couldn’t function for a couple of days. That cemented her loathing of New York. I don’t know how many times she said, ‘Oh, dearie, it would be so nice to see you later on in the day, because I just can’t stand it in this awful city.’ ”

By now there was another new actress to add to her pantheon. She thought that Diane Keaton, forgiven at last for Reds, had hit her stride in movies ranging from Crimes of the Heart to Baby Boom. Debra Winger’s career already seemed to be fading, something that disappointed Pauline terribly. She liked Christine Lahti, Rae Dawn Chong, Ellen Barkin, Lesley Anne Warren, Pamela Reed, and the beautiful and gifted Michelle Pfeiffer, whose talent had first impressed Pauline in Natica Jackson on PBS-TV. When Stephen Frears was preparing to film Dangerous Liaisons, he had settled on Kelly McGillis for the pivotal role of the cruelly manipulated Mme. de Tourvel. Pauline was already displeased with him for having cast Glenn Close as the scheming Marquise de Merteuil (an opinion she would change when the film was released), and when she went out to dinner with him suggested several other actresses for the part of Mme. de Tourvel—among them, Pfeiffer. She sent him a VHS tape of Natica Jackson, and Frears, won over, gave the actress the role. She gave a beautiful performance, as she did in her new film, Steve Kloves’s The Fabulous Baker Boys. Pauline hailed Pfeiffer’s arrival with her usual flair: “With Pfeiffer in deep-red velvet crawling on the piano like a long-legged Kitty-cat and sliding down to be closer to the pianist, something new has been achieved in torrid comedy.”

In December a film opened that would usher in one of the most profitable and influential movie trends of the 1990s: Disney’s animated feature version of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid. Pauline, who had little patience for most of the enormously popular Disney features of the 1930s,’40s, and ’50s, was delighted that her grandson, Will, was more drawn to exotic, exciting adventure stories. She made short work of The Little Mermaid, which she found no less treacly than vintage Disney had been:

Are we trying to put kids into some sort of moral-aesthetic safe house? Parents seem desperate for harmless family entertainment. Probably they don’t mind this movie’s being vapid, because the whole family can share it, and no one is offended. We’re caught in a culture warp. Our children are flushed with pleasure when we read them Where the Wild Things Are or Roald Dahl’s sinister stories. Kids are ecstatic watching videos of The Secret of NIMH and The Dark Crystal. Yet here comes the press telling us that The Little Mermaid is “due for immortality.” People are made to feel that this stale pastry is what they should be taking their kids to, that it’s art for children. And when they see the movie they may believe it, because this Mermaid is just a slightly updated version of what their parents took them to. They’ve been imprinted with Disney-style kitsch.

The Little Mermaid took in more than $100 million at the box office and achieved a merchandising success that Walt Disney himself might only have dreamed of, opening the door for the studio’s astonishing resurgence in the 1990s.

The following year brought many pictures she liked very much, including two released at the end of 1989, Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story and Bruce Beresford ’s Driving Miss Daisy, the latter inadvertently causing her yet more trouble in the by-now advanced era of political correctness. Driving