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By Root 2186 0

Linda Allen, who loved Isak Dinesen, which Pauline considered far too head-in-the-clouds; instead, she pressed Allen to read Colette. Anne Kael Wallach was a frequent visitor. She was now a highly respected English teacher at Berkeley’s Lowell High School; she would be fondly remembered by generations of Lowell students as a quietly exacting but kindly Mrs. Chips. Pauline remained extremely fond of her oldest sister, and when Anne’s husband, Max Wallach, had difficulty making a success of his business, Pauline lent him money. She was known for being generous to her young artist friends—even something of a soft touch. She also managed the difficult feat of being brutally honest about their creative work while at the same time showering them with generosity. “She was one of the most ethical people I ever knew,” said David Young Allen, a young Texan whom Pauline met after he had enrolled as a student at Berkeley and come to work as a projectionist at the Cinema Guild. “I would sometimes clean house for her when I was a student. She was always cooking soup, or sometimes doing her hand laundry. Sometimes she was a little insulting. She said to me, ‘You are a kind of a semi-fuck-up, honey.’ I would get pissed at her, but she was so funny—and she wasn’t wrong.”

For Gina, the constant crowd of artist friends created an atmosphere in which she had to compete for her mother’s attention. She craved a more conventional home life, one in which the dinner hour wouldn’t be interrupted by phone calls that had to be answered “Cinema Studio and Guild!” What bothered her most, however, were the stricken reactions that many of Pauline’s friends had to her opinion of their work. Some of them were quite devastated by her pronouncements, and while Pauline seemed oblivious to it all, Gina internalized the friends’ hurt feelings.

Employees of the Cinema Guild and invited members of the audience also regularly gathered for parties at Oregon Street, where Pauline laid out a generous supply of California wine and homemade lasagne and shepherd’s pie and roast chicken. The hostess always had the best time of all, pouring bourbon, mingling with everyone, cigarette in hand, enthusiastically holding forth on the latest developments in the film industry. Sometimes, when she would get particularly excited about a point she was making, she would give a little backward kick with her heel. “Her mind was always moving five times faster than most other people’s minds,” said Donald Gutierrez, who worked at the Cinema Guild for a brief time. “But she had an engaging habit of indicating that she didn’t understand some point of view or poem. She would say, ‘Beats me—what do you think about that?’ Kind of a compliment of sorts.”

She had two beloved basenji dogs, Polly and Bushbaby, who frolicked with the guests, and several of her friends noted the irony that a compulsive talker like Pauline chose to have dogs who couldn’t bark. There was an upright piano in the living room with characters from The Wizard of Oz painted on it, and Pauline loved to sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs, The Mikado’s “The Moon and I” being a particular favorite. She liked to joke that through the doors of 2419 Oregon Street passed the best-educated and worst-looking people in the world. “She had a motherly side,” recalled Ernest Callenbach, “especially to young people who needed help. I think that’s why she was sympathetic to certain directors. She thought she could be their den mother. She could be very bitchy to people, but she had a very soft, sweet side, which many people refused to admit was there.”

Robert Duncan often turned up at Oregon Street. Gregarious and uninhibited, he added a lot to the parties, despite his disconcerting habit of scratching his rear end in front of other people. Perhaps because he had developed an enviable reputation as a poet, she seemed to have mixed feelings about her old friend. For years she had harbored a strong prejudice against almost anyone who came from the world of academia; she professed to believe that most literature professors were second-rate,