Pauline Kael (20 page)

Pauline’s review did not, as was often claimed, turn around
Bonnie and Clyde
’s fortunes single-handedly. The movie had been doing well in its single-theater bookings in a number of major U.S. cities, but Warner Bros. had never put much promotional muscle behind it, and by mid-October, it was being yanked from theaters to make way for the studio’s new release,
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.

But the fascination with
Bonnie and Clyde
continued, and in December
Time
ran a lengthy cover story about the movie’s impact on the culture. Early in 1968 Warren Beatty strong-armed Warners into giving the picture a well-orchestrated rerelease, and this time, there were long lines at the box office everywhere. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in competition with another of the year’s trendsetting films, Mike Nichols’s
The Graduate
. (Both lost to the much tamer
In the Heat of the Night
—but even that, via its exploration of racial tensions in a Mississippi murder case, was indicative of a changing Hollywood.)

The management of
The New York Times
, meanwhile, had taken note of the movie’s resonance and decided that the time had come for their chief film critic to step down, and December of 1967 marked the end of Bosley Crowther’s twenty-two-year reign. He continued on staff for a time as a special reporter, but he was devastated that the success of
Bonnie and Clyde
had unseated him from the powerful position he had held for so long.

In an act of counterpoint so perfect it might have come out of an old movie, Pauline’s fortunes rose at the precise moment that those of her old nemesis collapsed. She had been out of work since
The New Yorker
’s piece on
Bonnie and Clyde
had run, and with the holidays approaching, she was in bed with the flu. Uncharacteristically for her, she had sunk into a state of dejection and self-pity. The irony of her situation seemed particularly nasty: Just as the movies were showing signs of having the dust blown out of them, she seemed further than ever from her dream of making a living as a film critic.

For weeks William Shawn had been pondering some of the points Pauline had raised in her essay on
Bonnie and Clyde
.
The New Yorker
had a long history of movie critics who traded in light, above-it-all dismissals of the pictures they reviewed, a school of criticism that owed much more to the brittle wit of a Dorothy Parker than to the searching curiosity of a James Agee; John McCarten, particularly, had represented this school of criticism, peering at the movies he covered as imperiously as Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s icon, peered through his monocle. Shawn decided that a different approach was needed. He wanted someone in tune with the way movies were now, who could speak to the rabid movie-loving audience that had come along in the last decade. Pauline’s piece on
Bonnie and Clyde
had been a test, and she had passed. Shawn phoned her and told her that he wanted her to succeed Brendan Gill as movie critic for six months a year, alternating with Penelope Gilliatt. She was to begin in January.

It is tempting—however wrongly—for those of us examining the lives of writers, actors, and other artists of the mid–twentieth century to see those lives unfold with the rhythm and pace of an old-fashioned three-act Broadway play. Act I entails the long, slow study and preparation for a brilliant career, Act II the vintage years of that career, Act III the inevitable decline to the end.

Pauline’s Act I had lasted an unusually long time. At age forty-eight, her prolonged apprenticeship was finally completed. What she felt now was the opposite of stage fright: it was an inability to remain standing in the wings any longer, a driving urgency to make her entrance and get on with the best part of the play.

B
y the mid-1960s
The New Yorker
had long since attained iconic status among its readers. The longtime subscribers who stacked copies of the magazine on their coffee tables felt that it brought something into their homes that no other magazine could come close to offering. In those days the magazine focused principally on cultural and literary matters; while it did frequently run profiles of political figures, it was not primarily concerned with up-to-the-minute journalism that probed troubling social issues and the machinations of contemporary politics. The image of New York that the magazine presented to its readers everywhere was that of a sophisticated, unconventional city where it was possible to seek out the very best in culture twenty-four hours a day, a place where the traditional values and habits of thought that might hamstring the rest of the country did not come into play. A reader in the Midwest or on the Pacific Coast might never come close to touching down at LaGuardia Airport—yet he could feel, through the pages of
The New Yorker
, that he possessed an intimate knowledge of the city and of the city’s sensibility. In 1940 a piece of promotional literature outlined the magazine’s ethic succinctly: “You cannot keep
The New Yorker
out of the hands of New York–minded people, wherever they are. For, unlike the myriad points in which New York–minded people live, New York is not a tack on a map, not a city, not an island nor an evening at ‘21.’
The New Yorker
is a mood, a point of view. It is found wherever people are electrically sensitive to new ideas, eager for new things to do, new things to buy, new urbanities for living.”

Many longtime readers of the magazine, however, had begun to feel that the image of sophistication it peddled was as outmoded as the old black-and-white movies featuring chic café singers on nightclub sets the size of the roof of the Empire State Building. These critics believed that
The New Yorker
had fallen out of touch with the world to the point of ossification. And their target for blame was William Shawn.

The New Yorker
was perhaps the supreme illustration of the principle that any good magazine is a reflection of its presiding editor’s tastes and ideas. Shawn had started his career at the magazine as a reporter for the front-of-book section “Talk of the Town” in 1933. In only a few years he had become managing editor for fact, and in 1952, he was promoted to the top job, succeeding the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross.
The New Yorker
was Shawn’s passion; he devoted himself to it, with an attention to minutiae that might have astounded even the most workaholic editors in chief of the day. Shawn followed many of the precepts established by Ross: He did not believe that a magazine succeeded by sending out reader surveys and frantically chasing what it believed its readers’ strongest interests to be. He believed that a good editor compelled readers to become interested in what
he
was interested in by presenting the material in the clearest, best balanced, and most lucid way.

But as the 1960s became the most chaotic decade in American memory, Shawn’s chorus of critics grew steadily louder. They complained that the pulse of modern life simply was not present in the magazine; they believed there was a way for
The New Yorker
to retain its impeccable journalistic standards and still come closer to depicting life as it was really being lived.

There was no real indication that Shawn was displeased with the job that his writers had been doing with “The Current Cinema” over the years. “William Shawn respected, admired, and enjoyed the movie reviews of John McCarten and Brendan Gill, both of whom he regarded as talented writers who were funny, witty, sharp, and independent,” observed Lillian Ross, a
New Yorker
staff writer since the 1940s, and Shawn’s longtime companion. “He liked the way both writers took a light-hearted view of much Hollywood product, while—never grim or cranky—they prized the movies of unique artists like Bergman, Renoir, Kurosawa, Fellini, et cetera. Above all else, Shawn loved writers’ humor in their pieces.”

Shawn brought a number of new critical voices to the magazine during the mid-1960s. In 1966 he hired Michael Arlen to write “The Air,” a regular column on television. George Steiner began contributing his erudite, deeply informed book reviews. Harold Rosenberg, the esteemed proponent of modern American art, joined the staff as art critic. Shawn was an avid moviegoer who sensed that something new and exciting was happening in the world of film and decided that Pauline would be an excellent choice to cover it. Brendan Gill, whom Pauline regarded as something of a dinosaur, had desired a change of pace and was reassigned to review theater; it was decided that Pauline would cover film reviewing for the months of September through March. Penelope Gilliatt, a former critic for the London
Observer
who had successfully completed a kind of test run at the magazine during the summer of 1968, would take over from April to August.

In a business in which the relationship between writer and editor is often a prickly, contentious one, Shawn had the loyalty of the great majority of those who contributed to
The New Yorker
. It was unusual for any editor in chief to be as closely involved in line editing as Shawn was; every major article that appeared in the magazine bore his stamp. Shawn was, along with many of his subeditors, dedicated to the highly manicured style for which the magazine had long been famous. Those lapidary sentences and smoothly flowing paragraphs that appeared in the magazine each week had been worked over by many people before they made it into print, which led to criticism that there was a kind of sausage-grinder mentality at work in
The New Yorker
’s editorial process. Pauline, for one, thought that all the obsessively careful editing sometimes yielded a rather uniform, almost generic
New Yorker
tone.

There were certain oddities about the daily workings at
The New Yorker
. The magazine’s fact-checking department was considered the finest in the industry. Accuracy had been a priority since 1927, when the magazine had published a profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay so filled with inaccuracies that a lawsuit had been threatened. Sometimes, however, the clinging to factual accuracy crossed over from obsessive to irrational. John Simon recalled that he once submitted a piece of light verse to
The New Yorker
called “A Short Social History of the Condor.” “It was totally fictitious,” he remembered, “a fantasy about the history of the condor through the ages, including Europe, where there never
was
any condor.” He sent it in to the magazine and soon received an enthusiastic letter from Katharine White, the poetry editor, praising it and telling him how wonderful it was to discover a new light-verse writer, something the magazine had been searching for for some time. “The only thing she wanted me to do,” remembered Simon, “was to give her the factual basis for the poem. I said, ‘That’s like asking the Brothers Grimm to give the factual basis for fairy tales.’ I was told by one of the editors that there was a big editorial meeting at which they took up this matter. And the decision finally was that they couldn’t do it.”

As she began her first stint of movie reviewing for the magazine, Pauline was shocked when she saw what had been done to her copy. It seemed that there was scarcely a sentence that hadn’t been rearranged and turned upside down, emerging with an entirely different accent and rhythm from what she had initially written. She had worked hard to develop a spontaneous, intimate, conversational tone in her writing, but after it had been through
The New Yorker
’s cleansing process, it didn’t sound so very different from many other articles. “I think a certain Anglophilia crept into it very early on—when it was founded, really,” Pauline once told an interviewer. “It started out with a sort of English tone and a kind of elite sophisticated Manhattan tone which was fake English.” Each week, when the first galley proof arrived, she went through it and carefully restored her original meaning and rhythm, writing very precisely in the margins in order to minimize editorial confusion in the second stage of galleys. Then she went to Shawn’s office to discuss the matter.

When she was hired, Shawn had given Pauline a handshake agreement that her copy would not be changed without her permission. As a courtesy to his writers, he made clear to them that if they felt that the magazine’s editing had violated their intentions, they were free to withdraw their articles and still receive payment. Shawn didn’t go back on his word with Pauline, but he didn’t give up without a fight, either. While many of his writers gratefully accepted his editorial handiwork, Pauline’s highly theatrical negotiating sessions with Shawn soon became the stuff of
New Yorker
legend. She often compared him with a pit bull, but she proved to be more than his equal in their arguments. She appreciated his urging her toward greater clarification of her thoughts on the page, but she reminded him over and over that she had to sound the way she sounded—otherwise there was no point.

Certainly, Pauline and Shawn were never likely to be truly compatible. He was an old-style gentleman through and through, who behaved with an imperturbable politeness. No matter how abusively someone might treat him, he seemed almost incapable of responding with anything but patient kindness. Jane Beirn, who served as his secretary for three years in the early 1970s, remembered, “Mr. Shawn was always polite and courteous to
everyone
he dealt with. Even if he wound up rejecting the work of people who came to see him, he would sit and talk with them, and they would walk out on air. I think he was so lovely and charming and complimentary that some of them may have gotten down to the lobby before they realized that the answer was ‘no.’ ”

Pauline was amused by Shawn’s courtly manners, but it appears that she never believed them to be entirely sincere, either; she felt his behavior had the ring of passive aggression. Nearly all staff writers referred to him as “Mr. Shawn”; Pauline made a point of calling him “Bill” early on in their working relationship and made no attempt to purge the “goddammit”s and “shit”s from her conversations with him.