interest in reading, and Pauline seemed no more inclined than ever to encourage him. He entered Bard College at Simon’s Rock, an experimental institution in Great Barrington. He dropped out, then went back. Gina worried about her son a great deal, and wondered if he might have some sort of serious medical condition—but Pauline mostly turned a blind eye to Will’s resistance to a traditional path.
In 1999 the National Book Critics Circle awarded Pauline the Ivan San-drof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters. That June, she celebrated her eightieth birthday with an enormous party at the Great Barrington house. It was a beautiful late spring day, and in attendance were her closest friends: Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill, Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek, Steve Vineberg, Michael Sragow, Arlene Croce, David Edelstein, Allen and Jonelle Barra. Wallace Shawn was there, unofficially representing her New Yorker years. Her sister Anne flew out from Berkeley, and the two of them sat together at the party, looking diminutive and birdlike. She invited some people to whom she had not been close for years, such as David Denby—but no invitation was issued to James Wolcott. With Pauline’s ignorance about technology and which appliances were better than others, she had never owned a first-class television set. Several of her critic friends chipped in and bought her a big, state-of-the-art television, which delighted her. (When Gina bought a new computer, however, Pauline didn’t go near it, but only eyed it suspiciously.)
Also present was Roy Blount, Jr., who composed a poem for the occasion:“Presenting Creation, more or less,”
Said Jehovah.
“Oh. What a mess,” Pauline observed.
So he gave it form.
Roundish. Molten cooling to warm.
“Has it occurred to you to let there be light?”
“By golly,” Jehovah said, “you’re right.”
But light revealed a certain void.
“You might try creating celluloid,
And then a projector,” said Pauline,
“For showing images on a screen.”
“Look, it’s one thing you’re not afraid of me,
But don’t get so far ahead of me!
What are those images gonna be of?”
Exclaimed Jehovah—“Vengeance? Love?”
“A couple of characters wouldn’t hurt.”
So Jehovah grabbed two handfuls of dirt.
“Mm,” said Pauline, “you’ve got something there.
You’re casting Cary Grant and Cher?”
“No. For Eve I want someone deep,”
He said, “I’m making Meryl Streep.
And who really cares whom I make first male?
A first-mate type. Think Alan Hale.”
“Oh God,” said Pauline, “a feminist flick,
With the Holy Ghost as the only dick.”
“No,” he huffed, his face getting red,
“A serious film, with a message,” he said.
“Oh why does my sinking heart suspect
You’re letting Stanley Kramer direct?”
“So be it,” Jehovah thundered, and that
Is why “The Fall of Man” fell flat.
And also why, when Edison came
To visit Pauline one day and claim,
“I’ve made a moving picture,” she
Patted his hand and said, “We’ll see.”
And seen we have, with feelings and eyes
Her vision’s done much to aesthetize.
Here’s to Orson and Bogie and Katie,
And towering over them, Pauline at 80.
In telephone conversations with a number of old friends and colleagues, she expressed regret that she might have treated them unfairly when she was in her heyday. In September 2000, Carrie Rickey received a call from a mutual friend, Francis Davis, who told her that Pauline wanted to speak with her. Rickey called the house in Great Barrington, and in the course of a ninety-minute conversation, Pauline at one point said, “I don’t know what you know, but I know I’ve done some things to you that were not okay.” Rickey told her that it was all in the past and not to burden herself with it. After she hung up the phone, she wept uncontrollably—she had had the conciliatory conversation with Pauline that she had never been able to have with her own mother.
An endless stream of writers still sought her out for interviews, demanding to know what she thought of the current stream of films and directors. There was still an army of readers who felt cut adrift without her to lean on as their guide to the world of moviemaking. Two of the more prominent were Francis Davis, who recorded a lengthy conversation with her that he eventually published in book form as Afterglow, and Susie Linfield, a respected New York journalist and professor who requested Pauline’s permission to write a full-scale biography. Linfield conceived of her book as more of an interior look at Pauline’s life than a conventional biography, and sent Pauline a lengthy and well-presented proposal, but Pauline declined to participate.
In the spring of 2001 Pauline received word that she had been chosen for a prestigious fellowship administered by Columbia University’s National