her years of struggle, and having on some level adjusted herself to being in a state of perpetual difficulty, the prospect of major success was somewhat daunting, somewhat complicated. Like Benjamin Burl in her long-ago story “The Brash Young Man,” she found that the idea of finally being on the inside, when for so many years she had been pressing her face against the window, took some degree of mental adjustment. “I think there was a moment when she realized that she was going to be really successful,” said David Young Allen. “I remember her lying on the couch with her hand on her head and she said something—she had to go through a whole process. She went through a struggle to make the transition in her mind.” Her friend Dan Talbot, who owned the prestigious art house the New Yorker Cinema on Manhattan’s West Side, telephoned her and said, “I know you love California, but come east—this is where you belong.”
The Atlantic Monthly Press signed an agreement with Bantam Books for the latter to bring out the paperback version, Marcia Nasatir having persisted in her enthusiasm for the book and having made the attractive offer of $15,000 for the rights. By fall the paperback edition was in production, but Pauline was not happy with Bantam’s ideas for the cover. Robert Mills wrote to Nasatir that he shared Pauline’s disappointment, because “the cover seems to illustrate the title rather than the contents, and also looks a little bit like a Grove Press comic book.” She asked some of her artist friends to whip up some rough sketches for a cover, and these were used as the basis for the jacket design in its final form. Pauline was an astute judge of a cover’s commercial possibilities, and for the rest of her career, she would not hesitate to express her opinions on an art department’s efforts on her behalf. Her efforts to make I Lost It at the Movies a commercial prospect paid off: It would sell in the neighborhood of 150,000 copies—astonishing for a book on the movies.
By summer the decision that had been gnawing at her for months was made: She would move to New York. The Oregon Street house was sold, and Pauline and Gina went through the arduous process of packing up their belongings, among which books far outnumbered everything else. She had asked several of her friends in New York to be on the watch for available apartments, and Dan and Toby Talbot helped her locate one on the West Side of Manhattan, at 670 West End Avenue—with enough room for the basenjis.
While they were getting ready to take possession of the apartment, Pauline and Gina stayed with Robert and Tresa Hughes at their West Side flat. Robert had been a protégé of Colin Young at the UCLA film school, and Tresa was a respected stage actress. “In the evenings, especially, Bob and Pauline drank and talked,” said Tresa Hughes. “There were all these F.O.O. F.s around—Friends of Old Film.” Pauline transferred the party atmosphere of the Oregon Street house to her Manhattan dwelling—even the temporary one. Frequently when Tresa came home from the theater, the apartment was still full of Pauline’s movie cronies, talking, drinking, and often violently disagreeing.
These relationships were now the closest thing to an emotional life that Pauline had. Her New York friends all had the impression that she was essentially through with men. Perhaps her feeling on the matter was best observed in Wearing the Quick Away, a one-act monologue she had written in the 1940s. “People shouldn’t marry you if they can’t accept you as you are,” her character says. “These men get to acting as though this change was what they married you for and you cheated them by not turning into something else.”
I Lost It at the Movies turned out to be a potent calling card: Pauline was constantly being asked to make lecture appearances, and Holiday magazine offered her $750 for a 2,000-word piece, “The Incredible Shrinking Hollywood,” which eventually ran in its March 1966 issue. What she craved most, though, was a steady movie-reviewing berth. Over the summer Robert Mills worked hard trying to find one for her, and by summer’s end, it appeared that McCall’s (which called itself the “first magazine for women”) was seriously interested. With its emphasis on features dealing with home and beauty, it was hardly the sort of place Pauline might have imagined would offer her a staff position, but Robert