Lucking Out (11 page)

Pauline and I hadn’t rehearsed or vamped anything ahead of time, not wanting our comments to sound canned. So when the first question came about
United States
, directed at Pauline, I was interested in what particular points she would make, the tack she would take. Then, you know, we’d chat, compare notes. Instead, it was as if everything fell away as Pauline’s voice, almost independent of her person, began to screwdrive into the show’s aspirations and pretensions, articulating everything that was wrong with its format and execution with a lucid, methodical, almost
lilting
precision that was like a mini-tutorial in criticism. So rapt was I by Pauline’s analysis that I forgot I was supposed to chip in too as I sat there fascinated at this fencing display of
formal rigor
, not wanting to break the flow. It wasn’t just the brilliance with which she took the series apart cubistically; it was this palpable sense of criticism as a higher power, something that made you lean into the pitch, not just a series of opinions beading a target board, but a liberating force that lit up the top floor of your brain and cast out fear. After leaving nothing standing except a few support beams, Pauline was asked by the host what the show revealed about its creator, and she said, as if slamming shut the car door, “It’s the work of a man with a lousy marriage.” Rather more candor than Davidson anticipated, judging from her frozen-parfait expression. Not for nothing was Pauline a fan of Thelma Ritter, whose classic line from
All About Eve
about Eve Harrington’s contrived tale of woe—“Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end”—was one of Pauline’s favorites. (Her favorite line reading may have been Jean Hagen’s nasal sublime “Ah cain’t
stan’
it” from
Singin’ in the Rain
, which I once heard her emulate when asked her opinion of William Styron—“Ah cain’t
stan’
’im.”)

Months went by, the pilot wasn’t picked up, and, most irksome, we were never paid the fee we had been promised. “I figured they’d find a way to forget us,” Pauline said. “Well, I blame Ed Asner,” I said. “He ruined it for everybody with his stomach growls. I wonder how Vidal’s segment went, though.” We had left after our segment.

“Don’t worry,” Pauline said. “Whatever he said, he’ll be sure to repeat it on some other show.”

After a messenger picks up the latest set of galleys Pauline has notated, she slides the pile of correspondence to the action part of her desk: a paper-clipped stack of fan letters, film scripts, forwarded news clips, nitpicky corrections, three-page dissertations explaining the throbbing urgencies of the latest Fassbinder she hadn’t reviewed, anti-Semitic diatribes (although it’s hard to imagine anyone who made less of her Jewish background in print than Pauline, she somehow attracted the wrath of Jew haters who seemed to subscribe to
The New Yorker
for the sole purpose of sending her periodic harangues—with every phrase you could practically hear hot cinders heaving through their nostrils as they blamed her for making Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould possible), and insistent pleas for Pauline to stop squandering valuable space in the magazine on movies that appealed only to the most violent, primitive tastes—why dignify and encourage such cultural Visigoths? (It was a question floated by Pauline’s colleagues at
The New Yorker
as well, some of whom trooped off to a movie she personally recommended only to emerge with a cultural crisis of faith that cinema had come to this.) Occasionally, Pauline would slide over a letter from a reader that was so flecked with rage and personal invective that I would ask, “Why don’t you just toss it in the trash? It’s got to be bad voodoo having all this hostility hanging around.” “No,” she said, “it’s just to respond and acknowledge their existence, otherwise they’ll just keep writing.” So to the correspondent who expressed his detestation as if he had scorpions dictating his sentences, she would dash off a courteous “Let’s just agree to disagree” response on
New Yorker
note cards that were designed for elegant brevity and to discourage further elaborations. It was with a deeper sigh that she moved on to the weightier correspondence that (unlike the scattershot nut mail) descended from some loftier altitude of intellectual pretense, printed on fine stationery (who knew there were so many subtle shades of cream?) and bearing the professional letterhead of a professor or, worse, psychotherapist or, worse still, heaven spare us, a
married
pair of Ph.D.’s who had drafted a joint communiqué intended, after doling out a few olives of praise, to set Pauline straight. Like Norman Mailer, Pauline was more exasperated by leechy, well-intentioned liberals trying to set everything in proper order than by outright antagonists. She trailed a finger along the italicized title of the film about which Pauline had so fallen short.

“Oh, God, not that one,” I said. Pauline read:

“As long-time readers and devotees of your
New Yorker
columns …”

“—who are about to viciously turn on you,”
I interjected.

“… we looked forward, as we always do …”

“—the two of them, waiting by the mailbox …”

“… to your review of
Seven Beauties
by the Italian director Lina Wertmüller, which in its broad, intemperate disregard for the dark comedy that infuses Wertmüller’s vision …”

Not a movie whose mention today lights the black-mass candles of Nazi-kink nostalgia (displaced by Liliana Cavani’s
Night Porter
, where sadomasochistic decadence was represented by the ravishing desolation of Charlotte Rampling’s Euro-goddess bone structure), Wertmüller’s
Seven Beauties
was a major honking controversy when it was released in 1975, a black comedy set mostly in a concentration camp where Giancarlo Giannini, to save his cowardly hide, submitted to sex with the obese commandant, played by Shirley Stoler, their coupling filmed as if he were mating with a hippopotamus or elephant, an obdurate, bestial, Diane Arbus bulk. Long before the word “transgressive” became a journalistic crutch and Quentin Tarantino a jacked-up marionette,
Seven Beauties
put viewers’ heads in a thunder-thigh vise. It might have remained a film festival/art-house transient had it not received the grand push by the
New York Times
(“
Seven Beauties
is Miss Wertmüller’s
King Kong
, her
Nashville
, her
8½
, her
Navigator
, her
City Lights
”), which awarded special dispensation to any Holocaust-related work, its lead reviewer, Vincent Canby, christening it as “a handbook for survival, a farce, a drama of almost shattering impact.” And the film brandished a feminist sash because it was directed by a woman who, by pulling out this hand grenade and juggling it with such bravura, was making a bid for major-league status in foreign film as a female Fellini. (Fellini himself having gotten a bit run-down and recyclish.) Pauline found
Seven Beauties
a porky, pretentious wallow, as reflected in the title of her review, “Seven Fatties,” a head that nowadays would have the beleaguered remnants of the copy department fretting that such phrasing might be construed as insensitive, weight-ist. I can almost hear Pauline’s pithy, characteristic response:
“Tough.”
(Which sometimes, depending on the situation, had a
“shit”
attached.) It was often what she said when someone expressed queasy apprehension on some point of possible offense, a retort that was made not with anger or defiance but with a snorty impatience for euphemism, false modesty, and weak-kneed equivocation as secondhand mode of shirking the truth, or, worse, killing a joke. Tender feelings were a fraudulent cover for larger failures of nerve. (Pauline agreed with Nabokov’s contention that sentimentality and brutality were the flip sides of a subservient mind.) But with a film such as
Seven Beauties
, the background shadows of barbed wire and camp barracks made critics pro and con feel compelled to dress their prose in its Sunday best, which Pauline only did when true reverence was due (as, say, whenever the majestic prow of Vanessa Redgrave hove into view), and her pan of
Seven Beauties
was considered a slap in the face of the more sober-minded symposiasts. It was only after the psychologist and critic Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of Auschwitz whose authority on the subject of the camps was unassailable, published a devastating critique of
Seven Beauties
in
The New Yorker
in August of that year that its high-minded defenders lightened up on Pauline, but letters still trickled in, furrowed with disappointment. The backlash over
Seven Beauties
proved to be light flak compared with the furor over Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah
, when Pauline was more cautious in her tone and respectful in dissent and fat load of good it did her, what she got in return was the plague, accusations of being a self-hating Jew.

After reading a passage from the duo’s letter citing Günter Grass’s
Tin Drum
and Jerzy Kosinski’s
Painted Bird
(“to further my education, I suppose,” Pauline said), she handed me the letter so that I could see for myself the closely packed paragraphs of reasoned dissent demonstrating that Pauline had missed not only the boat on
Seven Beauties
but the ocean, and the larger lesson of the Holocaust, not to mention the farcical dimensions of moral choice in a universe gone madly awry.

“I see that they urge you to see the movie again and reconsider,” I said, hopping to the last paragraph, its decrescendo. “See it again through their eyes.”

“My eyes are the only ones I have,” she said. “And they’re allowed to get tired.”

Reconsiderations could wait until a lazier, more contemplative day, of which there were few on the horizon. It was Pauline’s practice and principle to beam a movie into her brain once and move forward, believing that the first responses were the true responses and that repeated viewings gave rise to rationalizations, a fussy curatorship—a consensus-building exercise in your own mind full of minor adjustments that took you further and further away from the original altercation (although she did go see Robert Altman’s
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
a second time, anxious to confirm her original feeling that it was a great shaggy melancholy beauty of a movie worth going to the wall for). She wanted the nerve endings of her reactions exposed, not neatly tapered and trimmed. She was amused by a
New Yorker
colleague who only watched old movies, “as if she can’t bear to part with her black-and-white TV.” Nearly the first question Pauline asked a friend in conversation was, “Have you seen anything?” Meaning: anything new, anything she should know about, anything exciting. So much was happening in the ragged advance of movies in the seventies that she craved reports from the front lines, confirmations that she wasn’t crazily alone in her likings.

As Pauline edited her copy and winnowed the mail, a thin traffic stream appeared and disappeared at the door, not all of them
New Yorker
cast members.

“Hi, do you know Jim Wolcott?”

Whom did I meet in Pauline’s office in those years? Piper Laurie, famously speared by the flurry of telekinetically delivered kitchen knives in
Carrie.
I interviewed Sissy Spacek, the star of
Carrie
, for the
Voice
, illustrated by a portrait of Spacek by the photographer James Hamilton that made every freckle look fetchingly spooky, not that I recall that actually coming up in our conversation with Laurie, since I don’t recall our conversation, only the moment of hello. The screenwriter Ron Shelton, who would later direct
Bull Durham
, whose famous “I believe” monologue (“… that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”), delivered by Kevin Costner, seemed to chime with Pauline’s tastes. Did I meet the writer-director-reprobate hyphenate James Toback there? It doesn’t matter, because Toback is a universal application, his friendship with Pauline and her praise of his directorial debut,
Fingers
, one of the whacking sticks used against her. It wasn’t enough that Pauline’s opening sentence shot like a squirt of lighter fluid—“James Toback is trying to be Orson Welles and Carol Reed, Dostoyevski, Conrad and Kafka” (though Pauline said to me it wasn’t as hyperbolic as it sounded: “I said he was
trying
to be them, not that he had achieved it”)—but she also compared his flair for self-dramatization to that of the “young Tennessee Williams,” though one imagines Toback’s
Glass Menagerie
would be shattered by roughly obtained orgasms. Reviewing
Fingers
for
National Review
, John Simon claimed that Pauline’s championing of Toback represented personal logrolling and “rather shoddy journalism,” given their prominent chumming around, and the ugliness evolved from there. (Years later, following a screening of
Fingers
at the Museum of the Moving Image, Toback set the record straight in his rogue fashion: “John Simon actually wrote and implied that I was fucking Pauline Kael—that’s why she wrote what she did about the movie—and then said it at UCLA at a big gathering they had. And they asked me about it on a TV interview after that and I said, ‘I have fucked Pauline Kael the same number of times I’ve fucked John Simon.’ ”) If it wasn’t in her office that I met Toback, it may have been at a screening, it may have been anywhere, because he was everywhere then, just as he’s everywhere now, and we’ll be leaving for the screening soon, just as soon as Pauline polishes off a final query or two from the fact-checker, removes the rubber thimble from her thumb, dips a pair of fresh pencils one after another into an electric sharpener, and collects her things.

The phone rings. Mr. Shawn would like to speak to her now, if she’s available.

“I’ll be right there.” Sigh. To me: “He’s probably going to implore me to substitute ‘posterior’ for ‘rump.’ As if anyone has ever said, ‘He gave her a smack on the posterior.’ ”

Pauline had regular tussles with Shawn over the years over the fine points of acceptable slang and vulgarity, generating a defensiveness within Shawn and a resentment on the part of the staff that Pauline was pursuing liberties that others had the good grace not to drag out of the locker room. They seem almost antique today, these battles over words for body parts and suitable euphemisms, when
The New Yorker
of the Tina Brown–David Remnick era publishes the humorist Ian Frazier’s irregular series of Cursing Mommy routines (“Fuuuuuuuck! Ow! Jesus Christ! Fucking shit! I stubbed my fucking toe!”) and its dance critic can casually refer to a plié as “the cunt-dip,” but they were quite stressful for both parties at the time, a small-scale war of attrition that was a big wear-down. When it became too animated, Pauline was advised (by whom, she didn’t say) that Shawn had been having heart problems and pressing him just might push him over the top. Pauline had been advised this so many times that she suspected it was a form of emotional blackmail, intended to make her ease up, and so whenever the issue of Shawn’s fragile ticker came into editorial play, I would grab my chest and wave my arm in the air like Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford staggering backward, feeling the “big one” coming on. I was careful not to do this when anyone else was around.