For those of us who lived in New York in the seventies and felt as if this is where our real lives began despite wherever it was we were marking time before, the opening montage of Woody Allen’s Manhattan—the city photographed by Gordon Willis in a black-and-white panorama of enshrining shadows and blinking signs; the elevated subway inching like a Lionel model train past Yankee Stadium, whose lights glow like birthday-cake candles; the mute mosaic of skyscrapers, silhouetted bridges, billowy steam clouds, snow-laden streets, thronged sidewalks, and traffic honks silenced as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue builds to a fireworks climax—is more than a beautiful overture, a midnight valentine. It carries ambiguous undernotes, emotional motes that never quite settle. When the film came out in 1979, the montage appeared to soar with nostalgia for the present, the sense that (to quote the Carly Simon lyric) “these are the good old days.” Even with the surefire laugh line in Allen’s narrative voice-over about the city being “a metaphor for the decay of contemporary society,” the Gershwin-Willis opening was a balm for every bruise that New York had taken in the seventies, a relieved sigh from the trenches signaling that perhaps the worst was over, somehow we had come through. To some, this relief had a tincture of wishful thinking. “In the most wry way, to anyone who knows the Manhattan of potholes and poverty and rudeness, the film is a fable—written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman—about a city of smooth rides and riches and thoughtfulness,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker. To others, it was an ironic fable, the grandeur of the cityscape, the vertical climb of the arrow-topped towers and Gershwin score, being so much grander a stage than its characters with their scratchy dilemmas and violin-tuned neuroses deserved.
Nineteen seventy-nine was also the year of the publication of John Leonard’s Private Lives in the Imperial City, its title the perfect subhead for Allen’s Manhattan. A collection of Leonard’s columns from the New York Times, a weekly report from the bay window of Leonard’s Zeitgeist receptor, Private Lives in the Imperial City was to the needily narcissistic seventies what Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City would be to the stiletto-clicking, dangling-price-tag nineties. It’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent Leonard was as a baroque calligrapher of the bobbing cultural stream in the seventies, broadcasting on so many frequencies as critic and commentator, his sentences rolling across the page like a player piano programmed by the Irish absurdist Flann O’Brien on a liberal arts bender, tight yet loose compositions that yoked together cultural-literary-political-pop references in ragtime syncopation:
Since they stopped paying me to watch television, I don’t do it much any more: M.A.S.H., maybe, and Lou Grant on Monday nights; The Rockford Files on Fridays. (I would like to think James Garner is modern man. I used to like to think Dirk Bogarde was modern man. Modern man is probably Captain Kangaroo. On the other hand, why is everybody always kissing Yasir Arafat? “… and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped,” said James Joyce in Ulysses.) The Pope, of course, got me out of bed. But ordinarily I am upstairs listening to Joni Mitchell and reading Kierkegaard.
Idiosyncratic as Leonard’s allusion-clustered prose was, his Private Lives column exemplified the Times’s thrust into lifestyle, service, and trend-spotting features under the managing editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who gleefully pirated Clay Felker’s carbonated formula for New York magazine and brought out the Weekend Edition, which begat the Sports, Home, Science, and Living sections. Like Allen, Leonard in Private Lives had a specimen-pinning eye and a psychoanalyst’s ear for the overthunk vanities of sophisticated brunchers tangling up their nerves on the soundstages of their overarching self-importance. Meanwhile, the spires of Manhattan stood by like obelisks, unmoved by such dramas, having witnessed millions of cast changes before.
But Woody’s Manhattan was more than just a study of some private lives in the imperial city, a matte exhibition of love and confusion from the vantage point of Table 8 at Elaine’s, his personal table. (It is at Elaine’s where, against the Altmanesque rustle and bustle of egos, we first meet the Amazon nymphet Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway, who, when asked the aboriginal New York question, “And what do you do?” answers with guileless aplomb: “I go to high school.”) Visually, the movie joins the social and the spatial dimensions of the city together in tense embrace. For real estate was about to become everyone’s demanding mistress. Compared with the tiny, rattletrap apartments of Annie Hall, the interiors of Manhattan look like shadow boxes, shipping containers for larger ambitions. By 1979, affluence has found room to stretch its bony arms, freeing more breathing space for the psychological fidgets and romantic quandaries of Woody’s ensemble. The fading hippie-boho spirit poured into the Modigliani string-bean figure of Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall (she was the Rolling Stone baby journalist who found a concert featuring a robed, garlanded guru “transplendent”) is nowhere to be found in Manhattan, everyone being too busy beavering away at their careers. “In Annie Hall, Diane Keaton sings from time to time, at a place like Reno Sweeney’s,” wrote Joan Didion in a disdainful notice of Manhattan in the New York Review of Books. “In Manhattan she is a magazine writer, and we actually see her typing once, on a novelization, and talking on the telephone to ‘Harvey,’ who, given the counterfeit ‘insider’ shine to the dialogue, we are meant to understand is Harvey Shapiro, the editor of The New York Times Book Review.” Actually, it’s so inside it’s pitch-dark, but let it go. The keenest perception Didion has concerns that famous list of things worth living for that Woody confides to his tape recorder, a roll call of redeeming greatness for the mediocre crapitude of existence that includes Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” and Flaubert’s novel A Sentimental Education. “This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report,” Didion writes, “and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.” That subworld was about to surface, conquer, and colonize. Consumerism in sneakers was where the culture was moseying before eventually sprinting in the eighties, our tastes on the lookout for any false step.
I, however, rode the rising surf in the wrong direction, managing somehow to move up professionally while knocking my quality of life down a notch. In the late seventies, my career had started to go slick. Still writing for the Voice, I would be hired as a columnist at Esquire, the Don Draper of sixties magazines, whose columnists at various times had included Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, the English gadfly Malcolm Muggeridge (who, after his religious conversion, would enjoy a third-act career revival as “St. Mugg,” the praise-singer of Mother Teresa), and Kingsley Amis, heroes all. Esquire had changed ownership in 1979, purchased by Chris Whittle and Phillip Moffitt, a team of Tennessee investors who were greeted with the askance condescension New York publishing kept on ice for anyone perceived as provincial and soft-padded, possible banjo-pickers. After the financially ruinous tenure of the previous editor, Clay Felker, who had converted Esquire from a monthly to a fortnightly (“an ingenious scheme to lose money twice as fast,” someone pointed out), the non-nudie men’s title needed a savior, only the Tennessee Two didn’t fit anyone’s fantasy twin bill of the reincarnation of Esquire’s founder Arnold Gingrich and Harold Hayes, the editor who ran the ranch in its New Journalism renaissance. Who could have? Their outside status may have immunized them to the daunting weight of institutional lore that would have crushed those who approached the magazine as a sacred trust. They took proper care of the property. Unlike the entrepreneurs, arbitrageurs, and turnaround kings who would vulture attack vulnerable businesses to strip assets, cut payrolls, and enrich shareholders, leaving behind skeletal remains and a debauched brand, the Tennessee Two weren’t out for a quick kill. Where Felker had salvaged the Village Voice by dragging it into the future with iron claws, Whittle and Moffitt propped Esquire back on its feet with deerskin gloves, dusting it off and making it respect itself again, no matter how much the other kids laughed at it. Moffitt, who would become editor to Whittle’s publisher, conducted business in his office with a bluegrass lilt to his voice that was as far away from Felker’s seal bark as could be imagined. It was like listening to a transcript of James Taylor’s greatest croons, and although Esquire revitalized itself by catering to baby-boomer consumerism (yuppies in their puppy stage, discovering the talismanic powers of the perfect saucepan), it was little surprise decades later to discover that Moffitt had become a yoga guru, preaching the dharma of nonattachment.
He was not the one who talent-scouted me. Contact was made by Lee Eisenberg, who, knowing my devotion to a certain black feline, had a bag of kitty litter delivered to my door. The editor to whom I was assigned at Esquire was a young woman in her mid-twenties named Dominique Browning, imaginative, scarily proficient, bound for the higher rafters of magazine-dom, with transfixing crystal blue eyes whose glance always seemed to catch you unawares even if you had been looking forward to it the entire elevator ride up to Esquire’s floor. I had a crush on Dominique. Everyone had a crush on Dominique. There was a secret society of Dominique infatuees who stroked her name aloud as if it had dove wings. I probably fantasized that she would be the editorial Suzanne Pleshette to my rippling raw-talent James Franciscus in Youngblood Hawke, only Dominique wasn’t droll and raven-dark like Pleshette posing in doorways and I couldn’t quite get a Jungle Jim ripple going. It was certainly for the best, my opportunities for embarrassment more usefully deployed offstage, enabling me to maintain the facade of cool professionalism that existed whenever I practiced it in the men’s room mirror.
In 1979, I also published my first piece for the New York Review of Books, a roundup of books about television, the subject mattering less than the fact that I was being initiated, if not fully inducted, into the intellectual Sky Club, where Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, V. S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, and I. F. Stone were contributors. In my middling twenties then, I was probably the youngest of the paper’s contributors, whose median age was somewhere around the half-century mark and would only climb to Methuselah heights. My first arrival at its offices on West Fifty-seventh underlined my unripened status. I was sitting in the outer office, waiting to go over my copy, when Barbara Epstein came out with an air of dispatch and handed me a manila envelope as if it contained codes that needed to be delivered to HQ, fast. “It’s a doorman building,” she said, “but make sure the doorman buzzes the apartment while you’re there—” At which point the editor Robert Silvers rode to the rescue by popping out of his office and saying, “No, no, that’s not a messenger—he’s one of our contributors.” That I was mistaken for a messenger might have been mortifying if I had owned much in the way of pride, but I prided myself on my lack of pride. (I was only sorry that I didn’t get a chance to check out the address on the envelope, imagining myself “dropping something off” for Didion or Sontag.) Lack of undue pride, overprizing one’s lack of pretense, has a self-punitive side, a penalty tax, I recognize now. If only such enlightenments arrived when they could do you some good. A healthier dash of self-worth and I might not have finished out the seventies where I did, pacing the ceiling.
Unable to pull enough together for a down payment on my apartment when the building on Horatio went co-op, I was in luck. I was offered an apartment on St. Marks Place that a former girlfriend was vacating, which I could sublet until the lease was up and have renewed in my name. Making the hazardous journey from West Village to East, I saw the apartment as a stopgap, a stepping-stone to the next chapter of my ruthless climb to the top of the middle, but I would stay there for ten years, as if serving out a sentence handed down from an unknown court. True, it was a rent-stabilized apartment, something so coveted in New York real estate that tenants would hold on to one until their toenails had turned yellow, their bodies had gone scarecrow, and they had become shut-in hoarders, until the inevitable day fell when neighbors would notice “a funny smell” wafting from the apartment, and out came the carcass, buried under a rotting pyramid of pet-food cans. I suppose there are worse ways to go. Incarceration wasn’t too bad for, oh, the first six or seven years, but the longer I stayed, the harder it became to leave, despite the lack of amenities that less evolved societies took for granted. It was a studio like the one on Horatio, but smaller, darker, sulkier. Horatio had two windows into which sunsets could wash. St. Marks had one window that snatched a meager slice of morning light. No air-conditioning, no cable hookup, and a bathroom where I could hear every gurgle upstairs. I never had the walls painted, letting them fade to a festive laundry gray. Homeless alcoholics, holed up on the roof for informal meetings, deposited empty bottles in the rain gutters, sending water slopping over the sides during torrential storms and cascading down the back wall, often leaking through the tops of sills and giving the inside walls small-scale topographical maps of severe beach erosion. With my studio located on the floor conveniently above the garbage room, mice didn’t have far to come to visit. I once dispatched a mouse with a broom after it dropped in around three o’clock at night, swinging at it like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs while my cat, Gully, sedately sat by and monitored the situation, interested in seeing how this would turn out. Once the mouse was suitably flattened (not something I enjoyed doing, but glue traps seemed more sadistic and the snap of mousetraps too guillotine), I, sweat drenched on this summer night by the sudden exercise, gave Gully a silent look of reproach for falling down on the job as a mouser. I may have actually voiced something like this aloud, since a person who lives alone with a pet is prone to carrying on one-sided conversations. As I prepared to sweep the dead mouse into a dustpan, Gully trotted over to the radiator, reached behind it with her paw, and scooped out a decomposed mouse body that had been there so long it looked mummified, it too unable to give up a rent-stabilized apartment. Rather than tote the dead mouse in her mouth, she scooted it over with her paw and left it next to the fresh body, as if to say, Since you’re disposing of that one, how ’bout getting rid of this one while you’re at it? Cats really do have their nerve.
What I inhabited on St. Marks was a primitive, rough-draft “man-cave,” a term that makes me shudder whenever I hear it on a real-estate show such as House Hunters or Property Virgins, a man-cave being something one needs to escape from, not a womb to revert to in middle age to revegetate. It was the only apartment I lived in in that high-crime era that was burglarized. I returned from a screening or some other outing one night and, reaching the top steps of the first-floor stairs, saw that my door was ajar. I heard nothing happening within. Whoever had been there had presumably left, unless they were waiting inside, as happened to someone I knew who had been face-punched as soon as he stepped in. I eased the door open, flipped on the light, and flinched as if expecting everything to leap to life, crying, “Boo!” What I saw was a shambles worse than the one that was the usual ordinary. Drawers open, their contents spilled on the floor, mattress askew, records and books strewn across the floor. But nothing major seemed to be missing. The TV and the VCR must have been too megalithic to lug in a jiffy down the stairs and through the narrow hall, and nothing else would have fetched much on the resale market. It wasn’t as if I had a jewelry box where I stowed all my “nice things.” It wasn’t material things I was worried about, in any case. The fear in my throat was that vicious harm had come to my Gully, that she might be lying kicked-dead on her side, her life broken. Or that in a panic as the place was being tossed she might have darted out the door, and the rest of my night would be dedicated to going from floor to floor looking for her, hoping she hadn’t somehow gotten out into the street. As worst-case scenarios were firing synaptically away in rapid overlapping succession, Gully poked her head out of the closet door, checking to see if the coast was clear, then stepped into the room, her meow sounding only marginally more cranky than usual. I filled her water bowl, which had been kicked aside by the intruder, and mopped up the spill as she sipped and enjoyed a late snack of dry crunchies. While she dined, I tidied up the debris in the living room, which was also the bedroom, which was also the workroom. Less than an hour later my girlfriend came over and we made love on the bed amid the disarray as if it were London after a blitz raid, then made love less romantically a second time, the encore having a lot more James M. Cain boiling on the stove. Next morning I phoned a professional, undergoing one of those meaningful and costly rites of passage for New Yorkers in that period, the Changing of the Locks. My saltine box of an apartment was now fortressed with the bolts and bars of a security cell at Rikers, but that was part of the package deal of living in the East Village, the trade-off for being at the nexus of everything it had to heave at you before it eventually turned into a simulation of itself, a watering hole for hipster doofuses on safari.
My apartment was in the rear (that’s what made it man-cavey), a refuge from the street racket that gave weekend nights the festive melee spirit of Mardi Gras for the Mohawk-haired. St. Marks Place between Second and Third avenues in 1979 was still the Sunset Strip of bohemian striving and slumming, rinse-cycling at all hours with the creative detritus and chosen outcasts without whom any city becomes merely a business address for the embalmed. It was like the set for Rent out there on the block, without the piercing pathos that made Rent such an inspirational pain. On the southwest corner was Gem Spa, where the New York Dolls had been photographed in cocky dishabille for the back cover of their debut album. Farther west was Trash and Vaudeville, whose wares resembled a garage sale of the Dolls aesthetic with a healthy stock of punk fetishistica. Next door was the St. Marks Baths, where men in strategically wrapped towels adopting odalisque poses waited in cubicles for other men to drop by for a meet and greet (or, as one wag put it, “a meat and greet”). Across the street was the venerable St. Mark’s Bookstore, before it migrated to the strip of Ninth Street where I had interviewed Patti Smith in her own saltine box. Nearby, on the same north side, was Manic Panic, the store founded by CBGB’s Tish and Snooky, where fans of Kathy Acker’s serrated fiction could get everything they needed to doll themselves up for the dawn of the dead. Farther east was a café where some of the hip, choppy-haired, beyond-caring waitresses could be as surly as the lesbian strippers in John Waters’s Pecker, the customers too cowed to complain. The café had a courtyard dining area surrounded by apartment buildings on three sides where you could brunch amid potted plants and agnostically pray that an air conditioner wouldn’t make a suicide leap. Farther east down on St. Marks was the apartment where W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman had lived for so many years, the poet punctuating conversations by taking a pee in the kitchen sink. “Everybody I know pees in the sink,” he told a visitor. “It’s a male’s privilege.” It was a male something, anyway. Across from the Auden preserve was Theatre 80 St. Marks, still operating, on June 20, 1979, presenting a Kay Francis double bill, I Found Stella Parish and Confession, which I was sure not to miss, being a Kay Francis fan long after it became unfashionable. Around the block from my studio was McSorley’s Old Ale House on East Seventh, which I didn’t visit the entire time I lived on St. Marks (too college-studenty), but found reassuring to simply know it was there if I wanted to pop in for a pint and a sneeze of sawdust. It’s psychologically bracing having landmarks nearby, even if you avoid them. Most important, my new address positioned me equidistant between CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, within easy walking distance of both, the perfect triangle for bat flight.
Barricaded inside when nothing outside called, I made the most of the sensory deprivation, which did wonders for my productivity. So much work I got done there. It was like a sewing room for words. And though my memory may be mussed, writing didn’t feel like drudgery at the time, a way to earn parole. It was as if I had the whole outfield to myself to run around in. In 1979, I did a review for the Voice of a Pete Hamill paperback thriller that was just too juicy for a joker like me to resist, though maybe I should have. Few remember Pete’s thrillers today. He may only hazily recall them himself; for most prolific authors, books often recede from consciousness once they’re pushed out the parachute door and sent praying. Hamill’s career in fiction, though still riding backup to the pugilistic impact of his justifiably lauded newspaper journalism, is known largely from the late-flowering lyrical nostalgic word-daubing of Snow in August, from 1997, and the novels that followed. But in the late seventies, Pete cracked his knuckles and set out to do a series of smart urban action kiss-kiss-bang-bangs featuring a tough-guy-with-a-soft-cookie-center alter ego hero named Sam Briscoe, “who loves women, fast cars—and solving murders.” Sort of like Spenser: For Hire with his own honorary bar stool at the Lion’s Head (where Jessica Lange had waitressed in the mid-seventies before ending up in King Kong’s paw) and a bust of Brendan Behan to bless the beer foam. The cover illustration of the paperback of Dirty Laundry featured Hamill’s own handsome Hollywood head of hair with some icy dame in the background whose V-plunging cleavage was an open invitation for uptown snob and downtown knob to clash in the satin sack. For all of his ability to nail down a phrase and magnetize a regular-guy rapport with readers, Pete didn’t possess the primitive guile and gusto of the phenomenal Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer and such disreputable brute forcers as I, the Jury and Kiss Me, Deadly, whom I once had the opportunity to interview at a police equipment office, for reasons now forgotten. Mick was a swelluva guy, if I may be idiomatic. Spillane didn’t believe in fancy setup fiction. Go in hard, get them hooked, and leave them happy, that was the literary praxis he lived by. “The first page of a novel sells that novel, the last page sells the next one” was his maxim, and it’s a better one than most of the wrapped morsels of wisdom from those Paris Review “Writers at Work” interviews with various laureates who discuss their craft like medieval wood-carvers. Hamill tried to muster the door-busting pulp energy of a Mike Hammer-head (“I skulled him with the gun butt,” growls his he-man avenger), but he was too much of a self-conscious poet of the common man to pull it off, which made his steamier passages worthy contenders for what would later in London earn their own Bad Sex Awards. Here is how my review of Dirty Laundry for the Voice ended:
When Briscoe is naked and handcuffed, a Mexican whore unzips her jumpsuit and straddles the defenseless hero. As she rapes him, she keeps her boots on, the perfect porno touch. The funniest sentence in the book is when Hamill, after describing her up-and-down motions, writes: “She tossed her head, but the bun stayed in place.” After her muffled orgasm, Briscoe grabs a gun and jams it in her gut. “Stop right there, sweetheart,” he says. “Or you’ll never come again.”
After 200-plus pages of pistol-whipping and kiss-my-boots kink, it’s a bit disconcerting to flip to the front of the book and read the dedication:
This book is for my Daughter
DEIRDRE.
Daddy, you shouldn’t have!
Oh, I was such a scamp. Shortly after the review appeared, Pete did a column in the Daily News in which a buddy commiserated with him over my slam. Was it a real buddy or a ventriloquist’s dummy? Newspaper columnists had a much freer hand with colorful dialogue back then, in the heyday of Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, and similar heirs to Hemingway, John O’Hara, and salted peanuts. He banged you up pretty good, Pete’s buddy said. Yeah, Pete conceded, like a weary sailor home from the sea, but he’s young, and someday he’ll be on the receiving end, then he’ll know what it’s like. Laugh while you can, buddy boy, but someday I’d be the one hurting, that was the word from the ring corner of the reigning champion. And of course Pete was right! Curse his perspicacity! I brought out a novel of my own years later, a novel Pauline Kael had tried to mother out of existence, and I got mine. Not universally, but the naysayers had a pecking party while I made like Tweety Bird with my little wing in a sling. (Showing his resilience, Pete revived Sam Briscoe in a 2011 crime solver called Tabloid City, and bully for him.) But, looking forward, looking back, what was the alternative? Not writing criticism, not trying fiction? The filthy secret about writing fiction is in the early ski runs, when no one’s watching, it’s fun. A reviewer’s praise only means something to readers if it has a force of personality and conviction behind it that hasn’t been compromised by too much cream filling in everything else you’ve written. Free-swinging writing was more expected in the seventies, and there was more room for it in print, but even in a rude decade it wasn’t going to win you any popularity contests. One of the minor revelations I got after clocking a few years in journalism was how many writers wanted to be in the popularity pool, wanted to be invited for weekends at the Vineyard. Although I should have known better, being aware that one of the bedsores of Norman Mailer’s resentment toward Norman Podhoretz was Podhoretz’s inviting of Mailer’s then-archrival William Styron to a party for Jacqueline Kennedy and not him, I couldn’t understand how not being asked to certain parties or panel discussions or petition drives could plunge a can opener into a writer’s pride and morale. I was naive enough to believe that such pouting ended once you graduated from high school, when it was replaced by a jolly new set of pouting opportunities and grudge breeders. It took me a while to learn that warm grievances fresh from the bakery do come along in life but they’re simply piled atop the old, cold ones, a sedimentation akin to Philip Larkin’s accounting of how Mum and Dad muck you up in “This Be the Verse” (“They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you”).
Going into writing for the social-climbing glory was never the goal, and not just because I didn’t have any long-range goals, never picturing myself in the white mink palace of penthouse nooky and celebrities with all-cap names that gave the critic Seymour Krim such gnashed teeth. I was making my name almost solely as a critic, where restrictions apply. Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod. It’s impossible to imagine George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt from All About Eve as anything other than a fully formed adult, issued from a printing press. To those literary cubs who fancied having a cigarette dangling from their mouths like Albert Camus or Jack Kerouac, or sharing a club table with Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz to anteater a line of coke from here to the Vegas strip, or getting a Chinatown tattoo alongside Mary Gaitskill, or watching Jonathan Franzen adjust his eyewear (and who today would be happy just to get through breakfast without feeling as if everything’s turned to gravel), to them, critics are the snipers in the trees that the director Sam Peckinpah heard whenever the palm leaves rustled. To creatives, the Critic is the undermining inner voice maliciously put on the intercom to tell the whole world (or at least the tiny portion of it that still cares), You’re no good, you were never any good; your mother and I tried to warn you this novel was a mistake, but, no, you wouldn’t listen, Mister-Insists-He-Has-Something-to-Say. Failed artists consider critics failed artists like themselves, but worse, because unlike them they took the easy way out by not even trying to succeed, critics not having the guts to climb into that Teddy Roosevelt arena that everyone likes to invoke as the crucible of character, or risk the snows of Kilimanjaro. Even prestige authors who flex their fingers at performing criticism as if filling in at the piano on Monday nights feign disdain of it as a secondary activity, siphoning off the creative juices necessary to keep genius fertile and gurgling. For some reason, the elegant retort “If doing criticism didn’t cost Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and John Updike any candlepower, what makes you think you’re too good for it, buster?” never seems to stick.
Journalistic critics such as myself were, are, and forever will be routinely disparaged as parasites, sore losers, serial slashers, Texas tower snipers, and eunuchs at the orgy (what orgy? where is this orgy we seem to have missed?), which would hurt our feelings, if we brutes had any. The journeyman critics who are both perceptive and funny—genuinely funny, not jokey, their wit flipping off their wrists like a sneaky curveball—can escape the accusations of jealousy hurled across the notions counter and earn the affection accorded durable entertainers. But there’s a catch—there’s always a catch, for everything. Like Woody Allen’s comedians, such elegant wiseacres can often feel as if they’ve been denied a seat at the adults’ table, unless it’s the Algonquin Round Table that’s their ideal, where they would have been right at home, passing the soup to Dorothy Parker. They can even start to talk about their reviewing as if it were a minor knack at which they got nimbly adept, like card tricks or shooting pool. But it was these Parcheesi champions with whom I felt the most kinship in the seventies and beyond, the ones unafraid to crack jokes that had a hickory snap to them, such as, yes, John Leonard. Though I didn’t share his enthusiasm for that bevy of neurasthenic seismographs—among them, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion, and Renata Adler—he escorted round the cotillion whenever one of them had a new book out. He and I had a vaudeville moment in the seventies when I was entering the auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards just as he was exiting and he halted, did a classic double take, and asked, “What are you doing here?” as if the purpose of the organization were to keep people like me out. Then he clapped a friendly hand on my shoulder as if to say, It’s okay, you can go in.
Other serious comedians: the marauding balletomane and literary critic Marvin Mudrick (who, told by a young woman at the Hudson Review, where he was a regular contributor, “You’re the funniest writer I have ever read,” beamed and said, “I could live the rest of my life on that compliment. I don’t care whether it’s true; I love it. That’s what I want to be”); Alfred Chester, whose review of John Rechy’s City of Night provided the template for every hatchet job Dale Peck would undertake decades later; and Wilfrid Sheed, a novelist of asperity (his Max Jamison of 1970 is the definitive poison-pen etching of a critic and the vale of vanities he inhabits—“He was in love with the way his mind worked, and he was sick of the way his mind worked. The first thing that struck you about it, wasn’t it, was the blinding clarity, like a Spanish town at high noon. No shade anywhere. Yet not altogether lacking in subtlety”), primarily known as a critic who could spin dimes with every sentence. His defoliation of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It was something to cherish, something I would sometimes lift from the milk-crate shelf and read in rainy moods like selections from Robert Browning:
This is the first impression of Making It: that of a burlesque queen solemnly striding up and down to the strains of “Temptation,” and nothing coming off. Hour after pitiless hour …
… Ambiguity is totally alien to Podhoretz’s book, which has but one gear and one track and rolls down it like a Daily News van …
… The names come tumbling out like clowns from a circus car. Mary and Dwight and Philip—but then he gets stuck. A gentleman doesn’t rat on his friends. He simply uses them to pad his index …
… An anatomy of Making It should not bog down on the first navel it comes to. Why have we been brought here, anyway? Anyone who has paddled about in these literary wading pools knows at the very least that George Plimpton looks over your head and Podhoretz looks under your armpit and that Macdonald looks you periodically right in the eye. (Our bad luck that the armpit man wrote the book.)
In the foreword to the expanded edition of The Morning After, where the Making It review was collected, Sheed recounts a party hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. where he was “accosted by a man I didn’t recognize anymore who said, or rather sneered, ‘I guess there’s a statute of limitations, you son-of-a-bitch,’ and turned on his heel.” It was, of course, Armpit Man making the heel turn. Sheed: “Welcome to the world of Norman Podhoretz, where there obviously is no statute of limitations, even after thirty years, and where enemies are forever. In fact, Podhoretz had written a book around then called Ex-Friends in which ancient feuds still sound as fresh as this morning’s razor cuts.” Reviewing Ex-Friends for the Nation, John Leonard turned Podhoretz’s travail into an unhappily ever after fairy tale: “It’s an old story, and even my own, so let’s be brief. Once upon a time you were a Wunderkind, and now, oh so suddenly, you’re an old fart.” A hard fact of life, which is why it’s best not to linger on what awaits at the last depot and relish the memory of when we were young farts, and free.
I made enemies with my reviews but seldom ran into their gun-slit stares because my invitations to book parties were equally seldom, my one near altercation occurring when an innocent at a magazine fete asked someone whose book I had reviewed months earlier, “Do you know Jim Wolcott?” to which he snapped, “Yeah, I know the son of a bitch,” and revved off, which in the brusque seventies barely even registered as bad manners. In his shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted to say hi either, and if we ran into each other today, I’m sure we would amiably ignore each other, having amassed so many better enemies in the interim. I developed a reputation for being “a smart-ass” in print, but a smart-ass at least has some bounce to it, and my interest in literature was never liturgical. It was enthusiasm or forget it. Literature with a capital L, like a marble foot planted atop the reader’s head, didn’t interest me. I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe. As Kael wrote in “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best; it’s an inhuman position, and I don’t believe them.” I did believe them, having seen how high they could raise the Communion wafer. Especially in lit-crit, there were those who could be believed when they professed undying fidelity to only the highest and the best, not only Sontag (for whom “seriousness” was the purring word she most liked to pet, telling an interviewer, “Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness”), but The New Yorker’s supreme polymath and European curator George Steiner, and William H. Gass, who wrote in his essay “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World,” “It is the principal function of popular culture—though hardly its avowed purpose—to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men’s minds full, small, and careful.” Which is one weird slant on the slaughterhouse of history (those small, careful minds that waged the Crusades, set Montezuma in motion, and so forth), as if literature has its own pacifying lies to tell, a finer class of platitudes.
I was once sitting with Pauline in the last row of a literary panel discussion downtown starring Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates, who were trading honeydew compliments back and forth as if they expected Eudora Welty to show up with a wide-brimmed hat and a watering can. Ozick would compliment Oates on the dynamic fecundity of her bullet-train imagination and how it cowed her, confessing that she could only proceed to the next sentence in her own fiction after she had chipped and beveled the previous sentence to perfection, to which Oates would deftly respond, And that’s what I so admire and envy about your writing, Cynthia, the exquisite crystalline luminosity of each beautifully chosen, carefully arranged phrase and metaphor … Back and forth it fluttered, Ozick in her girlish voice (so incongruous with her tank-turret head) and Oates doing her shrinking-violet act, until Pauline side-whispered, “Can you believe this shit?” We had a movie later to go to uptown, and as Ozick and Oates appeared on the verge of singing a duet, I asked what time our screening started. Pauline said, “It can’t start soon enough,” and out we hastened, into the welcoming arms of liberty. (Though when Ozick’s “Shawl” appeared in The New Yorker, Pauline was on the phone like a literary town crier to everyone she knew, urging it on them, alerting them to its greatness.)
It was on such occasions that you felt literary fiction didn’t need any additional enemies, its own advocates and exemplars were doing such a swell job draining its blood banks. Nevertheless, literary quarterlies and critics with the long chins of undertakers found no dearth of suspects responsible for the slow, desert-crawling Death of the Novel, done in like an Agatha Christie victim by multiple assailants, each taking a stab at the distinguished old crone, a mixture of the usual suspects and new culprits: rock music with its invasive rush of pure pop for now people; the summer movie blockbuster, beginning with Jaws in 1975, its shark fin converting the American imagination into a drive-in screen; the academicization of literature by professors full of French cheese (a favorite theme of Gore Vidal’s, whose essay “American Plastic” joined Roland Barthes and John Barth in unholy wedlock); the aversion of fiction writers to risk bunions and discourtesy at their tender expense to do Dickensian-Balzacian reporting of institutions, status-spheres, and the hidden gear-works of class (an argument strung like Christmas tree lights by Tom Wolfe in his introduction to the anthology The New Journalism); the inadequacy of fiction to keep up with the acceleration and jump-cut transitions of our minds, the Godzilla rampages of breakout of America’s once-repressed derangements, something Seymour Krim pegged back in 1967: “If living itself often seems more and more like a nonstop LSD trip … what fertile new truths can most fiction writers tell us about a reality that has far outraced them at their own game? How can they compete with the absurd and startling authorship of each new hour?” This was the clamorous challenge that the narrator of Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things was mockingly determined to confront with a meat-hook in each hand: “My next book will be a novel, for you, tracing the fortunes of a typical American family, from the years of Depression up through the Swinging Sixties. It will be written in Abracadabra, have a number of brutally candid sex scenes, and the hero will be an alienated Jew who likes to Suck Off Christian movie stars and Fuck black girls in the Ass. Confronting Contemporary America in a Big Way. There will be no plot and I will exhaust everybody in sight by listing, at every opportunity, the contents of anyone’s pockets and wallets and handbags.”
Two years later, in 1973, a novel following Sorrentino’s recipe for bathtub gin was published that truly confronted America in a big way, poking it in the face with a stubby penis, its very title a high-stakes provocation: American Mischief. Written by Alan Lelchuk, American Mischief was a campus novel turned reeducation camp whose inmates were well-known New York intellectuals: “ ‘A.’ has a ‘boyish’ unruly forelock and a propensity for going down on nubile seamen; ‘E.’ is a professor at Columbia, an Arnold and Forster specialist, who as a phase of his re-education is forced to watch fellatio being performed on Lelchuk’s narrator (by a girl, thank God!),” Marvin Mudrick recapped in his review. A. was clearly meant to flag the multidisciplinary social thinker Paul Goodman, and E. could be none other than the patron saint of moral seriousness and T. S. Eliot tea-cozy decorum, Lionel Trilling, the author of full-length studies of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster. Norman Mailer appeared in American Mischief under his real name, assassinated with a bullet up his ass, perhaps intended as a bit of literary back atcha for the transgressive buggery of the German maid in Mailer’s American Dream. But the real-life Mailer wasn’t amused or appreciative of such a one-gun salute, vowing, “By the time this is over, Lelchuk, you ain’t going to be nothin’ but a hank of hair and some fillings.” (It was always a treat when Mailer talked Southern sheriff, as if he had been taking Broderick Crawford lessons on the sly.) This sideshow stoked anticipation for the novel, like a scuffle at the prefight weigh-in before a major rumble. Excerpted in Theodore Solotaroff’s New American Review, the most exciting literary publication of the late sixties and the seventies, its back issues as indispensable to comprehending the political and cultural storm systems of the time as any retrospective overview, American Mischief had the makings of a Big Mac of a succès de scandale, its picaresque effrontery something that the literary establishment was keen to embrace now that Roth’s Portnoy had snapped the paper chains of propriety and everyone wanted to be with-it. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and indeed was a succès de scandale. I glanced at American Mischief years later, and it already seemed an overwrought period piece, overfueled by the same urgency that juiced even our most eagle-eyebrowed confabulators (Philip Roth in Our Gang and The Great American Novel, Robert Coover with The Public Burning) to overswing wildly for the fences and twist themselves into Twizzler sticks in their efforts to do vigilante justice to the grotesque, hyperthyroid surrealism of the news in the age of Nixon.
I wasn’t a size queen when it came to fiction, either as reader or as reviewer, though I wasn’t as averse to heavy lifting as the devilishly suave Anatole Broyard, one of the Times’s daily reviewers, comically notorious among his critical brethren for his penchant for choosing the slimmest volume from the galley pile for his accomplished caresses and tango moves. Aroused by Books his 1974 collection was called, and as review collections go, it holds up much better than most precisely because its author doesn’t apologize for prizing the pleasure principle over moral instruction, spiritual enlightenment, and intellectual muscle-building. Reviewing Alfred Kazin’s Bright Book of Life, that cavalcade of American literature’s Easter Island heads from Faulkner to Bellow and beyond, Broyard writes, “Mr. Kazin is what I would call an ideophile. He’s in love with ideas, but though he generously shares that love with us, I know that I feel a certain lack … [I]t’s all just a bit too platonic. Mr. Kazin seems to think about fiction more than he feels it.” And Broyard was definitely more of a fingers-flexing feeler (which is to take nothing away from how keen, elegant, and mobile his spidery mind was), as was Alfred Chester, who wrote in a review of John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, “Despite the currency of the phrase, we really don’t want writers to say anything because, as soon as they do, we get bored. What we do want is for them to feel something, and to make us feel something.” Then Chester broke into peroration: “Teach us, O Artists, not to settle for guilts and anxieties, for twitches and embarrassments! Teach us, O Artists, to feel again! Because emotions are the only thing that artists have to say—and emotion can make us gigantic and tragic. (Ideas never can; they can only follow, like dogs. Ideas, however pertinent, however great, tend to remove us from reality; feelings always bring us back again. Ideas never explain experience; feelings are experience.)”
Whether or not a novel “holds up” over time means less to me than whether or not it holds on—if you can open any page and hear a voice coming through like a hypnosis countdown, initiating a one-on-one spell. When I think about the novels from the seventies, it isn’t the big kahunas that project staying power in my crabby affections, bashing best sellers such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose prodigious set pieces were like the gargantuan meals in La Grande Bouffe, a grandiose glut with scatty arias of word-spew and a sprawling cast of characters with wacky, Dr. Strangelovian names (Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe, Lucifer Amp, Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz); Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which constructs a too-unwieldy, top-heavy, and monument-minded edifice for the tragic unraveling of the poet of so much/too much promise undone by insanity, Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (who would become the subject of James Atlas’s moving biography); E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a brilliant nickelodeon of a coup at the time, historical personages and fictional characters painted a bright enamel and set in pageant motion, but now something of a novelty item; William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, a pretentiously sham Arthur Miller soap-opera exercise in moral breast-beating set in the Holocaust for maximum high-minded, grandstanding sensationalism; John Irving’s World According to Garp, that Rube Goldberg Grand Guignol contraption of castration, self-mutilation, brain damage, and radical gender reassignment that the literary establishment found life-ratifyingly uproarious (“We not only laugh at the world according to Garp, but we also accept it and love it,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times); even Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, a half-great book that has the pared purity of a Japanese prose master such as Kawabata or Tanizaki in its mosaic account of the life of Gary Gilmore, but flabs up in the second half when it shifts to the media circus erected around Gilmore’s execution and includes a heap of special pleading for Mailer’s collaborator on the project, Lawrence Schiller.
No, the seventies novels that mean the most to me are the ones that expressed, distilled, and bottled a mood, mood being the most mysterious element in art, something beyond design and technique, the dark matter that permeates the grainy tilt of Robert Frank photographs, where roadside America seems viewed through skull sockets; the bleak winter of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the rancid sunlight of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; the sonic dislocation and embracing estrangement of David Bowie’s Low; the God-abandoned destitution of some of the best Twilight Zone episodes.
James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime has that for me, an erotic novel unsurpassed at recapturing that godly, awakening sense of two young bodies in bed being a new world unto itself, sealed behind shuttered windows that silence and hide the long white afternoons. “Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.” Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, quoted above, crackles with caustic comedy steeped in a witches’ brew of coffee grounds, shed hair on the sofa, and grease spots of mediocrity, with a fine selection of impotence on tap (sexual, literary, you name it) and at least one wisecrack on every other page that will unstitch your scalp and brighten your doomy day, bitter apostrophes about the life of a poet in all its avenues to disappointment: “The real poet was obsessed with his poems, his life, an egoist, selfish, boorish, rude, crazy. A great, romantic thing, into the breach, kill me tomorrow let me live tonight! and so on. Long hair and flowing lips, falling on the thorns of life, tortured to death in stifling university jobs, the Great Soul Writhing Underneath. Swift, intense, and destructive affairs with female undergraduates, too many vodka martinis, Fuck the Dean! Fuck the Chairman! … Anything. Everything.” A frustration-driven novel, always glancing over its shoulder at the next nuisance to darken the doorway, with a mock lyricism that becomes the real impassioned thing by the end, as if it can’t help itself. Imaginative Qualities is the only metafictional novel I can read without feeling as if I’m moving furniture up flights of stairs, the only one most animated by animal human vitality instead of marching through a cerebral encyclopedia. Why Sorrentino orphaned this snaggled line of attack in so many of his later naturalistic-mode novels (which dug their naturalistic knuckles into the brow until the reader cried, “Uncle”) is one of those questions that, had it been posed to him, would have probably been met with a “gruff retort,” like provoking Nabokov by asking about all the damned doppelgängers in his emerald fiction. Be grateful for what we’re given, and don’t muddle criticism with backseat driving.
Same with Don DeLillo. In recent years DeLillo must ask himself the cosmic question, “Why go on?,” his later novels greeted with a fish-face without a trace of affection for everything he’s done before, beating him up with his own achievements (Libra, Underworld) instead. His Great Jones Street of 1973 doesn’t have the cybernetic density and conspiratorial mesh of his corporate-gnostic-algorithmic probes into power, chance, and paranoia, but its hungover mood evokes the exhaustion and pissed-away promises of the post-sixties, a psychological dehydration requiring a sequestering with none of the skin tingle of A Sport and a Pastime’s incognito air. I know, sounds like fun, and the novel’s charcoal prose can read like a coroner’s report: “I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” And yet its sense of time and place (I love that the novel is named for and set in an actual street with no mythic overtones until DeLillo endowed them) hooks me each time out: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge.” How such passages recall rooms and views from my own past, as if my Horatio Street and St. Marks apartments had merged into one. I sometimes wonder if Great Jones Street might not be more highly esteemed if DeLillo hadn’t dubbed his rock-star narrator Bucky Wunderlick, a Pynchonesque moniker that’s hard to take seriously for a mystique-ridden Jim Morrison–like lizard king in self-exile. I can’t see the name Bucky without thinking of Captain America’s kid sidekick, one of the residua of having grown up religiously consuming Marvel Comics.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I found true fruition in book reviewing and taken up literary criticism as my sole vocation, setting aside childish things. I bet I’d be real bitter now. Staring out the screen door like Tommy Lee Jones in a bad mood, having long been farmed out by whatever magazine employed me and wishing I had drunk more so that I could write a sobriety memoir. Writing as deskbound craft, profession, and calling already comes pre-outfitted with so many diaphanous veils of solitariness that word-delight alone—the pleasure of all the billiard balls clicking and emptying into the pockets—doesn’t compensate for an audience that doesn’t answer no matter how nicely you call. I never felt this way writing about television for the Voice, even though television watching was considered then (less so now) a sedentary, light-bleached act of inanition that The New Yorker’s former TV critic Michael Arlen once compared to masturbation, which would presumably make writing about television like masturbating with both hands, no one’s idea of heroism. There was always a sense of a larger audience out there, a fandom of fellow anchorites who watched The Rockford Files (James Garner as the perfect low-overhead, corner-cutting L.A. investigator for a recessionary time—a Lew Archer who can’t step out of his trailer home without some cheap hood harassing his sideburns); Kojak (with the lollipop-sucking baldie detective who looked like a Ban Roll-on deodorant whose show even Lionel Trilling confessed to watching); Tom Snyder’s late-night Tomorrow show, where the host’s cigarette smoke ribboned the moody tension on the set, so different from the decompression chambers of studios today; the local Stanley Siegel talk show on WABC, where the Me Decade host bared his neuroses and had a regular segment on Friday mornings when he discussed the week in review with his actual psychotherapist (Siegel’s national moment landing when a discombobulated Truman Capote appeared as guest and slurred, “We all know a fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” and a “Southern fag” is “meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met,” as a prelude to venomizing Princess Lee Radziwill, with whom he had had a planet-fissuring falling-out); SCTV, the comedy ensemble whose satirical genius flickers intermittently today in the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, absent the sketch revue; and Uncle Floyd, the New Jersey kiddie-show host with a puppet sidekick whose magicianship with minimalist stagecraft made him the Ernie Kovacs of the punk-decade mutant brigade (when the Ramones were guests on the program, they felt right at decrepit home). Writing about certain shows week after week (to the point where a few Voice editors got fed up with my recurring favorites) was like writing about your friends, the latest chapter of what they were up to. When I flick back at the book reviews I did in the seventies, I sometimes wince at the nasty incisions I inflicted on writers when I crossed the line between cutup and cutthroat (I won’t quote examples—no need to re-inflict wounds). But what really retrospectively bugs me was when I got prescriptive, telling writers what they should have done, where their true gifts lie, the road they should take to get onto I-95 to reach Delaware by dawn. I recoil when I see reviewers doing it today, acting like talent management agents for some literary Almighty.
TV defied such dispensing morning-after pills to those involved. It was a collaborative push following its own set of tracks, and nothing a critic said was likely to lodge and peck inside its creators’ brains for years after, building a nest. Even the sharpest dig didn’t have the palpable impact of being spat at by a stranger in the street, to use one of Sheed’s analogies for how a novelist feels having his latest work speared in print. In the seventies, before HBO, Showtime, AMC, and the networks built supertanker series with multichambered Godfather novelistic character bibles (The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, The Wire, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), television was more antihierarchical, prestige-resistant, and alien to putzy pretension. It didn’t have any of the auteurist mystique and pantheon aura of film criticism, and to this day no collection of TV criticism swings the clout of Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies and Deeper into Movies, James Agee’s Agee on Film, Andrew Sarris’s American Cinema, Manny Farber’s Negative Space, or the roundups of Otis Ferguson’s reviews for the New Republic. This was freeing for me, this acceptance of transience. It kept me balanced and responsive, not having a canon to lean on. I remember getting a report from a friend about a conversation he had with one of the Voice’s top theater critics who nosed up at the sound of my name as if it might trigger his hay fever. “Wolcott can be funny,” he conceded, “but it’s easy being funny about television. It’s not a medium that makes many demands.” “How dare he call me facile!” I fumed with the pretend ire I so enjoyed in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels when this was related to me. I would have gotten more upset if it weren’t for the fact that he had a point about TV requiring less deep-sea drilling and rock quarrying than theater-opera-dance reviewing. I couldn’t pretend I was propping up any of the pillars of Western Civ when I descanted on The Ropers, the spin-off series from Three’s Company that co-starred Audra Lindley in a succession of misguided muumuus and Norman Fell, whose lips were caulked with a chalky white substance, no one quite knew why: a sitcom that I always mention when I feel my friend Elvis Mitchell could use a laugh. But being facile is harder than it looks, no one survives long as a chuckle bunny in print, and it wasn’t all party tricks. I had to ladder up to a higher diving board to do justice to Paul Winfield’s magnificent Martin Luther King in King, Dennis Potter’s breakthrough lip-sync musical Pennies from Heaven, and the epochal miniseries Holocaust, because that was part of the job, being able to work at different altitudes.
My model was the Australian multi-talent Clive James (poet, novelist, literary critic, celebrity profiler, TV host), whose television column for the London Observer was as hilarious and high-wire an act as Kenneth Tynan’s theater reviews had been in the sixties for the same paper. I stole from James as if copping his dance moves, mimicking his mimicry of anchormen and bogus dialogue, and later flew with him up to meet Pauline at her house in the Berkshires, an airsick excursion he described in “Postcard from New York” for the Observer: “We flew through a storm all the way. Lighting his cigarette one-handed, the pilot did a no-sweat Buzz Sawyer routine while his co-pilot made a great show of understanding the map. The aircraft behaved like a pair of underpants in a washing machine.” As the plane came in for a landing, we looked out the window and saw the hills adjacent the strip full of summer-dressed people gawking upward. “What are they doing out there on the grass?” I asked, to which Clive replied, “Waiting to see us crash.” Once we arrived at Pauline’s, we chased away the jitters and relaxed before going out to dinner, Pauline and Clive standing and sipping wine while I sat on the couch, drinking cola. Somewhere between sips, Clive reflectively remarked, “I feel old enough to be his father.” “I’m old enough to be his grandmother,” answered Pauline. “Pa! Grandma!” I cried, throwing open my arms as if discovering my long-lost kin.
If it was the funnier columns that readers enjoyed and remembered, it may have been because, with identity politics coming more to the fore, many of my fellow Voicers considered a light touch suspect, and some of the paper’s political correctos—whose numbers would increase in the decade to come as the Voice in its new digs on lower Broadway would become an ideological honeycomb of minority caucuses competing for staff representation and column space—were grunting out copy as if handcuffed to a rowing machine.
Then again, as the irritable tone of the theater critic implies, maybe I was just getting on everybody’s nerves. I can see now why others might have found me abrasive, overfull of myself, acting as if expecting a star on my dressing room door any day soon. The TV column was increasingly popular at the Voice, and popularity translated into higher visibility, and higher visibility translated into the Esquire column, the call from the New York Review, feature assignments from The New Yorker that were never published or completed (including one where I spent a sunstroke week in New Mexico on the set of Sam Peckinpah’s delay-plagued Convoy, where he called me a pussy in front of the crew, which I was told not to take personally, I was but the latest in an infinite line), and similar offers that no one at the paper was being treated to, with the exception of Ellen Willis, who by the late seventies had phased out of The New Yorker and New York Review, and the Press Clips columnist, Alexander Cockburn. The Voice’s brightest journalistic star, Cockburn could get away with it better in the office because along with his stylistic brilliance he was English and sexy, whooshing in and out of the building on a jet stream of daredevilish charisma. I didn’t have that going for me then, and it isn’t something you pick up later along the highway of life. I probably came across as bumptious, though I didn’t conduct a survey. If I no longer hunched my shoulders like Norman Mailer ready to plow through the defensive line to tackle the bitch goddess of success, I was dropping Pauline Kael’s name and her latest asides with mad abandon, and not just to annoy the Andrew Sarris faction in the office whose bat ears picked up everything and transmitted it uptown to His Tetchiness himself. That’s how things were done in the days before tweeting and texting sped up the hamster wheels of competitive tattle.
The irony was that I was seeing less of Pauline for most of that particular year. Nineteen seventy-nine was when she took an unprecedented leave of absence from The New Yorker to make the trans-coastal hop from film critic to film producer at the behest of Warren Beatty, seducer of all he surveyed. She would be given an office at Paramount as a producer on Beatty’s next project, Love & Money, based on a script by James Toback. It has been argued in at least one stewpot biography of Beatty (Peter Biskind’s Star) that luring Pauline out to the coast was a Machiavellian ploy by the ageless superboy to teach her a humility lesson, let her know what it was truly like in the major leagues, and cut her down to size, render her inoperative. This is motivational conjecture raised to the plane of advanced calculus. A true Machiavellian knows what he wants and plots the angles in advance to achieve his aims, and Beatty was too indecisive to be a true Machiavellian, his ideas and choices subject to constant, worrying revision and his conversation (as interviews reveal) a golden cloud of coy, cagey, hazy, noncommittal indirection. And one would have to assume that Beatty simply enjoyed buying a new toy to break to explain the personal hostility needed to set such a trap into motion. It was Pauline who championed Bonnie and Clyde and was the first critic to treat Beatty seriously as an artist, who hailed the Beverly Hills sex farce Shampoo as a Mozartean bed-hopper (“The central performance that makes it all work is Beatty’s. [The hairdresser], who wears his hair blower like a Colt .45, isn’t an easy role; I don’t know anyone else who could have played it”), and if she thought that the remake of Heaven Can Wait emasculated Beatty’s talents (he “moves through it looking fleecy and dazed”), well, she was hardly alone. And she would be working on Love & Money with friends, not just Beatty and Toback, but Dick Albarino, who pitched in with Pauline on the polishing of Toback’s script. I saw various versions of the script, which became progressively sharper, funnier, and structurally firmer, and what happened to that screenplay I do not know. I do know that at some point Beatty evanesced out of the project and with his withdrawal went the money interest. What was conceived as a big-budget jeweled elephant starring Beatty, Laurence Olivier as his father (or was it grandfather?), Laura Antonelli as the love interest (Isabelle Adjani was also discussed), and a lavish backdrop ended up a much runtier film that looked as if it were shot just off the turnpike with Ray Sharkey pipsqueaking as the hero, the aged director King Vidor in the Olivier role (who died months after the film’s release), and, in the role of the imported white chocolate, the gorgeous Ornella Muti, whom Pauline and I so appreciated in her slinky catsuit as the vixen in Flash Gordon, which we caught in a theater in Times Square where the rodents outnumbered the customers. Love & Money played a brief engagement when it was released after some delay in 1982, already something everybody involved wanted to put behind them. Friendships were severed over this film, certainly Pauline’s and Albarino’s was. She successfully lobbied at Paramount for David Lynch to direct The Elephant Man, but that seems to have been small consolation for what others have since told me were indeed miserable months out there for Pauline, a mortifying letdown. Though I don’t believe the rumor, repeated in Biskind’s book, “that she would go over to director Richard Brooks’s office, complain that she had been put out to pasture, and weep.” The weeping sounds so unlike her, and Brooks was not a director with whom she would have been on confiding terms, and vice versa, not after her panning of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Like so many of the anti-Pauline anecdotes in Star from studs now in their sinking suns, this strikes me as sexist payback.
Pauline never spoke to me of her unhappiness at Paramount, not then, not later, not even alludingly. When she phoned from the coast in the summer of 1979, it was to hear what movies I had seen, what I was up to, if there was any talk about some recent story or review in The New Yorker, her amusement over an item in Liz Smith’s syndicated gossip column that she had “gone Hollywood” and was taking driving lessons—“me, at my age,” she scoffed. “As if I’d even be able to see over the steering wheel! Who feeds her this stuff, garden gnomes?” Were there clues in our long-distance conversations to the emotional wringer she was going through that I was too tone-deaf to detect over the phone? I don’t know. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been that obtuse, but subtext wasn’t something Pauline trafficked in. I had a closer view of the buffetings that were to come, the shaky underpinnings in her voice this time unmistakable. The decade was about to dim.