in a complete career change but was careful in her comments to the press, saying that if the job didn’t pan out, she would return to criticism. Ziffren recalled, “She was keen to break loose from what she had been doing all her professional life and to try to do it from another chair, or another typewriter, so to speak.”
Pauline’s work on Love and Money began in Great Barrington, before she moved west. To Albarino, James Toback was someone who viewed himself as a kind of laboratory for his own fantasies. “He never wrote or made anything that he hadn’t experienced first,” observed Albarino. “He can’t write fiction; he can only write diaries, and dramatize them.” The immediate problem was that Pauline thought the script for Love and Money was a mess. She and Albarino would have late-night meetings at her room at the Royalton to discuss the script’s problems. Eventually the deadline for submitting the script loomed, and Pauline panicked. Horrified by the thought that the first picture her name would be linked with might be a dud, she telephoned Albarino and told him that she needed him to rewrite the script in ten days. Over a meeting at the Harvard Club, Toback agreed to let them rework it, despite the fact that it was likely to change dramatically once casting was completed and filming began. Albarino quit his job, drove up to Great Barrington, and went to work. At that time of year it was bitterly cold in Massachusetts, and he and Pauline stayed up for several nights, fortifying themselves with brandy as they worked away. She seemed oddly protective of Toback at times: When Albarino devised a lengthy, Bertolucci-like tracking sequence around a bungalow, of which he was rather proud, Pauline rejected it, protesting that Toback would never know how to direct it.
As the week wore on Albarino realized that the current ending didn’t work. At around ten o’clock one night, he drove to a local supermarket, where he suddenly came up with a way to fix it. He rushed back to Pauline’s and told her his idea. She approved of it, and he sat down to write. “I typed about four words,” said Albarino, “and she burst in and said, ‘Is it done?’ I broke down crying. That’s how fraught this circumstance was.”
With the script completed, Pauline and Albarino flew out to Hollywood together. A few evenings later she reported to him that the script had met with general enthusiasm. Behind the scenes, however, all was not well. For one thing, both Beatty and Toback were growing weary of Albarino’s lengthy digressions during meetings. They weren’t sure he was the right person for the project, but Pauline appeared to be quite dependent on him.
Pauline found a second-floor apartment in Beverly Hills. It was a lovely old-style L.A. setting, and she quickly made herself at home there. She took taxis to and from her office at Paramount, where Beatty was headquartered, and enjoyed getting caught up with old friends such as Joe Morgenstern and Piper Laurie, Marcia Nasatir, Paul Mazursky, and Irvin Kershner.
In a short time, Pauline demonstrated her lack of finesse at the game of studio politics. It led her to deliver a number of blunt judgments to various executives, who weren’t used to being spoken to quite so sharply. She and Toback also had major disagreements about various aspects of Love and Money. Disagreements, of course, are a standard part of the production process in Hollywood, but Pauline had had no experience in this atmosphere. Her battles with William Shawn over copy may have been ongoing, but the process of putting together a movie involved far more people and ideas, and she was not accustomed to such a complex mix of opinions and points of view from creative, marketing, and merchandising personnel.
One principal conflict between Pauline and Toback involved the sanctity of the script. Toback looked at it in much the same way that Altman did—as a constantly evolving work in progress. He knew that on the set any number of changes would be made, because he regarded a script as nothing more than “a blueprint which may or may not work.” Pauline, however, thought that her greatest asset as a producer was attentiveness to the screenplay; she believed that many potentially good films of recent years had gone off the rails because the producers hadn’t cared enough to weigh in on the writing. “I found it impossible to work with her,” Toback remembered, “because