I’ve been lucky: I wrote about movies during a great period, and I wrote about them for a great readership, at The New Yorker. It was the best job in the world. But it didn’t come about quickly. I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way. Writing from the San Francisco area, publishing in a batch of mostly obscure “little” magazines, reviewing on KPFA in Berkeley, and then, in 1965, bringing out “I Lost it at the Movies,” I razzed the East Coast critics and their cultural domination of the country. (We in the West received the movies encumbered with stern punditry.) I was in my mid-thirties when my first review was published, in the San Francisco quarterly City Lights, in 1953; by the time I wrote about “Bonnie and Clyde” in The New Yorker, in 1967, I was close to fifty. But after I moved to New York and became a professional (i.e., salaried) reviewer, I had to fight to keep my hard-won voice.
It took a long time for that direct, spoken tone to catch on with New Yorker readers. Some of them were real stiffs. If I said I’d walked out on a Fellini extravaganza or a movie of a Pinter play, they informed me that it was my duty to go back and see it all the way through. The hate mail piled up. Then, curiously, some of the readers seemed to begin to enjoy hating me. Maybe my conversational American tone brought them into a closer relationship than they’d been accustomed to; maybe what they had first experienced as a crude invasion from the pop world began to be something they looked forward to. Whatever it was, I can’t believe that any other movie critic has had such thoughtful, picky, exuberant readers. They saw aspects of a movie that I had been blind to or hadn’t fully perceived. Hyperintelligent, they were maddeningly eager to catch me out. They said I added to their experience of a movie, and I know they often added to mine.
It was true conviviality—a variation of the intense discussions about the arts that I’d had with friends in high school and college—except that there was never really time to answer the readers’ letters properly. By the late sixties, movies had become so political that just about every comment on a movie sparked wider discussion. And readers were arguing with me over last week’s movie when I was trying to check this week’s galleys and clear my head to get into next week’s subjects.
My life was especially hectic during my first years at The New Yorker, because I (literally) spent more time and effort restoring what I’d written than writing it. The editors tried to turn me into just what I’d been struggling not to be: a genteel, fuddy-duddy stylist who says “One assumes that . . .” Sometimes almost every sentence was rearranged. The result was tame and correct; it lost the sound of spoken language. I would scramble for nine or ten hours putting back what I had written, marking the galleys carefully, so they couldn’t be misread, and then I would rush to see William Shawn to get the galleys approved. Since he was the person who had instigated the finicky changes, the couple of hours I spent with him were an exhausting series of pleas and negotiations. He had given me a handshake agreement when he hired me that no word would be changed without consultation, and he stuck by his word, but I had to fight for every other contraction, every bit of slang, every description of a scene in a movie that he thought morally offensive—not my description but the scene itself. He didn’t see why those things had to be mentioned, he said.
Our sessions were complicated by the fact that he was a loving, dedicated editor and sometimes he was right. But I had to fight him anyway—how else could I keep from turning into one of his pets? He was the most squeamish man I’d ever met. He could hardly ever see all of a film—a hint of blood would send him packing—and so I wrote “Fear of Movies” to spook him. He hero-worshipped Gandhi, and so I made a dumb joke comparing the Gandhi of the 1982 film to the guilt-inducing Jewish mothers that TV comics complained about, and, despite his humble entreaties, refused to remove it. I hardened myself against his disappointed-in-you expression; I had to. Once when I compared the sets of a movie to a banana split, his suggested alternative was a pousse-café. When I quoted Herman J. Mankiewicz’s famous line “Imagine—the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass,” he insisted that it be “Harry Cohn’s derrière.” (I won out.) For more than twenty years, William Shawn and I squared off like two little pit bulls. I was far from being the only writer who fought him, but it took years for me to learn about the others. He told each of us that we were the only ingrates. He brought up the names of all the famous writers who, according to him, had been appreciative of the editing; it was a nightmare listening to that litany. Yet he could also be more responsive to what a writer was trying to do than anyone else I’ve ever encountered. The man was an enigma. On the day after my review of Mailer’s “Marilyn” appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review, we ran into each other in a hallway. “Why didn’t you give that to us?” he asked. “What for?” I answered. “You wouldn’t have printed it.” “That’s right,” he said mournfully.
By the seventies, I’d won some freedom; there were still beefs, but there was no more of that sentence-by-sentence quibbling that can turn your brains to jelly. Maybe partly because of my slangy freedom, reactions to my reviews were startlingly physical. When I was introduced to Tennessee Williams at a New York Film Festival party at Lincoln Center, he crowed my name, scooped me up high above his head, and spun about, twirling me in the air. He was short but muscular; I had a flash of news stories I’d read about the strength of the mad. But he was a grinning, happy madman—he was euphoric—and I knew that we were friends. (I also knew that part of his glee was the discovery of how small I was.) I had written enthusiastically of the underground star Holly Woodlawn, the female impersonator who played the wife in “Trash”; when we met, at a New York Film Critics’ Awards party in Sardi’s, Holly, who was usually referred to as “she,” was wearing spike heels, a satin gown, and a monkey-fur jacket. He seemed to forget all that as he swung me up to his height to hug me and deliver a big smooch. John Cassavetes, on the opening day of one of his psychodramas, grabbed me as I came out of the theatre and hoisted me, and as I hung there helpless in his grip, my tootsies dangling at least three feet from the sidewalk, his companions, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk, were chuckling. Cassavetes was saying “Love ya, Pauline, just love ya,” and I felt that he wanted to crush every bone in my body.
The most unlikely men—and women, too—suddenly turned macho around me; they didn’t all offer to butt heads, as Norman Mailer did, but many confronted me angrily, and my escorts often had to calm them down. Years ago, I went to Elaine’s twice, and fights erupted at my table both times. I think that the disjunction between my strong voice as a writer and my five-foot frame somehow got to people: they wanted to take me on—it made them feel big and courageous. I know that I wasn’t exactly the innocent party: people who don’t like my writing find it both Olympian and smart-alecky. I guess at some level it is. But it was hellish to have actors with hurt feelings come gunning for me, demanding to know what right I had not to like a performance of theirs or of a friend of theirs. Gradually, I stopped going to social gatherings in New York.
What began for me as a gregarious activity—talking about movies—became, at last, almost a monastic pursuit. I lived in a small town in Massachusetts, came into New York City a few days a week to see the new movies, and returned home to write. And as the seventies gave way to the eighties the excitement I had earlier found in the movies gave way to the pleasure I found in writing.
My pieces belong to the breakneck era before people could rent videos of old movies and before distributors began to supply reviewers with videos of new movies. (Reviewers can use the video as a text.) I wrote at first sight and, when referring to earlier work, from memory. This had an advantage: urgency, excitement. But it also led to my worst flaw as a writer: reckless excess, in both praise and damnation. Writing very fast and trying to distill my experience of a movie, I often got carried away by words. I’d run on, and I’d hit too many high notes. And I’d repeat myself or say things that were only slightly different from what I’d said before. When I look at what I wrote, the adjectives seem fermented, and I long to strike out a word here, a phrase there. I have resisted, because tidying up the reviews would make them false to what I felt then, and false to the period itself. (Did I, as I have read, exaggerate how “Last Tango in Paris” affected me in order to help the film? No. I haven’t seen it since its festival showing, yet I retain a clear memory of its emotional nakedness.)
A friend of mine says that he learned from reading me that “content grows from language, not the other way around.” That’s a generous way of saying that I let it rip, that I don’t fully know what I think until I’ve said it. The reader is in on my thought processes.
It always seemed miraculous to be paid for what I loved doing. I’d still be doing it if age and illness hadn’t laid me low. I’d be doing it despite the staleness of American movies. I’ve heard bright, jaded remarks, such as “I wouldn’t mind missing the good movies if I could miss the bad ones” and “The only reason for going to movies now is to see why you’re not going to movies.” If I could go on, I’d be writing about why people feel that way.
The writing I did over three decades may give readers the sense of how movies interacted with public life, and give them, too, the critic’s first flushes of discovery. I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have. ♦
