“Here was a perfect opportunity for Will to learn about art. And Pauline could have given so much to him, and she didn’t.”
Pauline kept abreast of the changes that continued to sweep through The New Yorker offices. After five years Si Newhouse had judged Robert Gottlieb’s editorial tenure unsatisfactory—advertising had declined sharply, and the magazine was losing $5 million a year—and replaced him with Tina Brown, the thirty-eight-year-old British editor who had successfully relaunched Vanity Fair and transformed it into a top celebrity magazine. Many of the old-guard writers and reporters suddenly found themselves bounced from their long-standing (and frequently unproductive) jobs. The content changed considerably, with much greater emphasis on current events and far less focus on the magazine’s literary and cultural subjects. Carefully crafted features on cultural figures such as the Irish author Molly Keane, the producer Irene Mayer Selznick, and the famously dyspeptic novelist Marcia Davenport appeared far less frequently; topicality was now critical.
A number of insiders, as well as many longtime readers, resented the new direction, feeling that Brown had subverted the unique mission and tone of the magazine, but Pauline believed that Brown’s arrival made for a welcome and exciting change. (She often asked friends if they really thought anyone would miss Ved Mehta’s interminable, old-fashioned articles.) Pauline was also pleased when Brown, at long last, engaged James Wolcott as a staff writer—a sign that the magazine was cultivating some livelier voices. She was unhappy, however, when Brown terminated Michael Sragow as movie critic.
By the mid-1990s Pauline’s Parkinson’s symptoms had grown debilitating. While in the house, she relied on her four-pronged cane—she joked that it wasn’t very dashing, but it did the job. Outside, however, she was constantly fearful of falling, and felt quite uneasy if she didn’t have someone’s arm to support her. Visits to New York were impossible—she made her last trip there in 1992. Public appearances were also no longer feasible, and she hated to go to plays or concerts or movies: When her shaking was at its worst, she noticed that she made the seats around her vibrate, and she didn’t want to distract her fellow audience members.
Twice a week she took massage therapy from a doctor in Otis, Massachusetts—Pauline thought he was a little like a hippie version of Jeff Bridges. She looked forward to her sessions for two reasons: Her doctor was unimpressed with her celebrity and frequently told her why he thought she’d been wrong about certain movies; most important, the therapy brought forth good results, making her muscles much more supple.
Although she tried not to lose her sense of humor, she wasn’t very good at witnessing her own diminuendo. Her fading memory was a particular source of irritation: She told Ray Sawhill that during the day, she would often wonder if the words she couldn’t come up with would ever come back to her. They did—at night, when she was in bed. She also experienced in a highly personal way the cold and condescending way in which people discriminate against the elderly: In stores in Great Barrington, she was frequently ignored by clerks who didn’t want to contend with an elderly woman with a cane and the shakes. For someone who had always possessed a strong sense of pride and independence, such episodes were humiliating.
She continued to take pride in the developing careers of the Paulettes. Hal Hinson had secured a reviewing spot at The Washington Post, David Edelstein was doing fine work at Slate, Michael Sragow was the lead film critic at the San Francisco Examiner. More than ever, she was a devoted champion of James Wolcott—who in 1997 left The New Yorker and returned to Vanity Fair, where he had once been a contributing editor. He was hired to write columns on media and pop culture, which he would presumably be able to do in more of a no-holds-barred way than The New Yorker had permitted. Pauline wasn’t mad about Vanity Fair, which she found too brassy and insubstantial and celebrity-driven, but she looked forward to seeing what Wolcott came up with.
In the magazine’s April 1997 issue, she found out. In a column titled “Waiting for Godard,” Wolcott wrote a devastating piece about the Paulettes, branding them as a band of hopeless imitators who had squandered their own talents by falling under Pauline’s spell. “They write as advocates, both feet on the accelerator,” he wrote. “They still write as if‘trash’ (the good kind—blatant, vital, sexy) were in danger of being euthanized by the team of