a good example: a Western about a Mysterious Stranger who appears to help a scraggly band of gold miners stand up to an evil land baron. Eastwood played this ethereal avenger role with a straight face, and Pauline hooted at the pretensions of the high-toned Western: “This tall, gaunt-faced Stranger sometimes wears clerical garb and is addressed as Preacher,” she wrote. “When he takes off his shirt, his back has shapely bullet holes, like stigmata, and when he opens his mouth sententious words of wisdom fall out of it—gems like ‘There’s plain few problems can’t be solved with a little sweat and some hard work.’ If this is how people beyond the grave talk, I’d just as soon they didn’t come back to visit.” The movie, however, was a hit, and Eastwood continued to maintain, in Pauline’s words, “a career out of his terror of expressiveness.” Several of Pauline’s friends thought her vilification of Eastwood revealed a certain attraction to him. “A lot of people thought she was really turned on by Clint Eastwood,” said Ray Sawhill. “He was the big, macho, alpha male, and Pauline just loved beating up on him. And I think there were reasons why she loved beating up on him.”
Her disappointment in the path taken by Scorsese surfaced once more in her review of After Hours, the director’s comic nightmare about a man who loses his money and spends an insane night stumbling through flakiest SoHo. After Hours had the chaotic, nothing-can-go-right structure of a bad dream, and it had amusing performances and bits of business, but Pauline thought Scorsese’s tone couldn’t sustain itself. “His work here is livelier and more companionable than it has been in recent years; the camera scoots around, making jokes—or, at least, near-jokes,” she wrote. “But the movie keeps telling you to laugh, even though these near-jokes are about all you get. Soon it becomes clear that the episodes aren’t going anywhere—that what you’re seeing is a random series of events in a picture that just aspires to be an entertaining trifle and doesn’t make it.” It disturbed her that Scorsese seemed to be “using his skills . . . like a hired hand, making a vacuous, polished piece of consumer goods—all surface.”
In some ways, the essential Pauline hadn’t changed over the years: In the mid-’80s she was still much more inclined to embrace an oddball trifle such as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (“I liked the movie’s unimportance. It isn’t saying anything”) than she was a big-budget, prestige picture like Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (“Meryl Streep has used too many foreign accents on us, and this new one gives her utterances an archness, a formality—it puts quotation marks around everything she says”) or Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. The film, based on the enormously popular novel by Alice Walker about the lifetime of indignities suffered by Celie, a poor, battered, sexually abused Georgia black woman, before she eventually finds her own path to self-respect, marked Spielberg’s first venture into human drama, and Pauline didn’t think he showed much talent for it. “Spielberg’s The Color Purple is probably the least authentic in feeling of any of his full-length films,” she wrote; “the people on the screen are like characters operated by Frank Oz. . . . The movie is amorphous; it’s a pastoral about the triumph of the human spirit, and it blurs on you.”
For Pauline it was never enough to take on starkly dramatic subject matter—one had to do something with it. On this particular point, she got into further trouble with another picture she covered at the same time, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus documentary on the Nazi death factories, Shoah, which was released to an almost universally rapturous critical reception at the end of 1985.
Pauline’s unsentimental attitude toward her Jewish background hadn’t changed over the years. The idea that she might be one of the “chosen” struck her as absurd, and she resented the sense of entitlement she perceived in many members of the New York Jewish literary community. She had no more tolerance for the religious feelings of Jews than she had for those of Christians. Charles Simmons remembered a night when he invited Jack Greenberg, an attorney and later dean of Columbia College, Greenberg’s wife, and Pauline all to dinner at his apartment. Simmons made a baked ham, and when they all sat down to dinner, Mrs. Greenberg exclaimed, “I can’t eat that!” “Oh, for Chrissake, are you kidding?” snapped Pauline. “That medieval bullshit?” Simmons quickly prepared Mrs.