her back, he felt compelled to convey his disapproval in other ways. Once it seemed that he might have gotten some degree of perverse enjoyment out of their wrangles over copy—he was well known for being susceptible to the emotional demands of many of the women on the staff. Now he seemed much of the time to avoid her. “She loved to provoke Shawn,” remembered Menaker. “Pauline would put stuff in to madden him—I think she’d even say, ‘This will get his goat.’ ” But Shawn’s attitude toward Pauline was also complex: As much as he respected her and was grateful for the attention she had brought to “The Current Cinema,” he also seemed resentful of her. She had grown beyond his power to control. Shawn’s genial, paternal attitude had never worked particularly well with Pauline, yet they seemed strangely fond of each other on some level—like Beatrice and Benedict. “I think they really got off on this partnership of mutual dislike,” said Menaker. “He was weary and resigned, but I just can’t believe that he didn’t enjoy the game a little bit.”
In 1980 Pauline had asked a casual acquaintance of hers, a painter named Warner Friedman, to come by the house in Great Barrington. Gina, who was living in her own house near Pauline’s, had become immersed in her painting—she would choose volcanoes as one of her chief subjects—and Pauline asked Warner to give her daughter some advice on how to frame some of her pictures. Before long Warner and Gina were dating. Warner was not intimidated by Pauline but he remembered that she maintained something of a coolness toward him once he and Gina began seeing each other. He and Gina developed a large circle of painter friends, and whenever Pauline was around them, she would mutter, “Painting, painting, painting!” Warner felt that she was somewhat bothered by the fact that so many of their circle were struggling and showed no sign of being close to any kind of commercial success. More to the point, he recalled, she was dying for someone to ask her about the movies.
Now that she was back from her aborted Hollywood foray, it seemed more important than ever that she gather a close circle of moviegoing friends around her. Many of them could be described, with some accuracy, as acolytes. However much Pauline loved passing judgment, it is clear that her inner circle craved her approval. It had become the talk of the industry that she preferred to surround herself with younger people—the word was that she loved to play the mentor, the lecturer, and wanted to be surrounded by those who didn’t challenge her views, who dutifully nodded at every word that came out of her mouth. Once, when Warren Beatty saw her at a screening with several of her young critic friends in tow, he remarked, “Here comes Ma Barker and her gang.” These adoring young protégés would come to be known as the Paulettes, a term clearly intended to imply slavish imitation and sycophancy, and its accuracy would be debated by both friends and enemies of Pauline’s for decades to come. No one is absolutely certain who coined the label “Paulettes”—some credit the critic Richard Corliss—but it stuck. (After her death David Denby would even title a New Yorker remembrance of her “My Life as a Paulette.”) Whatever the source of the term, it is equally true that it was accurate in the case of some of her followers—and deeply unfair in the case of others.
The Paulettes had been in formation for some time before they found themselves so neatly labeled. In 1976, following a screening of Carrie, Joseph Hurley, a mutual friend of Pauline and Joseph Morgenstern, had spent an evening with Pauline and several of her younger followers—among them Carrie Rickey and Al Avant—and was distressed by what he witnessed there. He hadn’t liked Carrie at all and felt that the others had ganged up on him for not agreeing with Pauline’s favorable opinion of the movie, trying to make him look like a fool. He found it even more distasteful for people as young and inexperienced as Rickey and Avant to be gleefully mowing down the reputations of many fine film artists. To Hurley, their behavior reeked of the worst kind of New York snobbery. The following morning he dashed off a scorching letter to Pauline, accusing her of encouraging such behavior.
One of Pauline’s favorite young friends was Ray Sawhill. He had written to her about her