Pauline Kael (26 page)

Like a great opera singer, she saved the best she had to give for the aria’s climax:

The movie that “escaped” wound up becoming one of the year’s biggest successes, and Altman would always claim that
M*A*S*H
saved Fox (whose executives finally perceived that movies for the new audiences, rather than overdressed musicals, were the way to go). What was most interesting about Pauline’s reaction to
M*A*S*H
, given that Altman would soon become the director most closely associated with her tastes and sensibility, is that her review is remarkably succinct and in scale. She didn’t overreact to anything, didn’t proclaim the arrival of a new moviemaking messiah—as she well might have done had
M*A*S*H
appeared later in her career. But clearly she had perceived Altman’s greatest talent. In Elliott Gould’s words, “His pictures showed life taking its course.”

M*A*S*H
became one of the most potent symbols of the New Holly wood; contrary to expectations, it buried Mike Nichols’s highly anticipated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, which would have a disappointing release in June 1970.

 

Pauline’s attitudes toward pomposity and self-righteousness versus authenticity in screen drama were briskly consistent without being stiffly predictable. In February of 1970 Irvin Kershner’s
Loving
took her by surprise. It gave the talented George Segal, an actor Pauline had admired for years, a great role as a failed artist, plodding along while trying to provide for his wife and family, but never losing sight of the fact that he wasn’t what he once dreamed of becoming. “After so many movies that come on strong with big, flamboyant truths,” Pauline observed, “a movie that doesn’t pretend to know more than it does but comes up with some small truths about the way the middle class sweats gives us something we can respond to; it gives us something we desperately need from the movies now—an extension of understanding.” Like Altman, Kershner earned her praise by shunning the easily theatrical and manipulative and simply showing life as it was lived.

 

Late in February Pauline’s third book of criticism was published by Little, Brown. Again, her book had a sexy title, and also one that reflected her secure status at
The New Yorker
—
Going Steady
. It included all of her
New Yorker
reviews, plus “Trash, Art and the Movies.” By now a new book by Pauline was treated as something of a publishing event. “Pauline Kael is my favorite movie critic,” John Leonard stated in the opening of his
New York Times
review. It was a rave, with suggestions throughout that she had moved beyond the position of a mere film critic and into the pantheon of significant writers. Leonard admitted, “While I miss the polemics and the reviews of other reviewers that made her first two collections such evil fun”—the very thing that William Shawn had insisted on purging from her work—“I care about Miss Kael’s criticism as literature. Her reviews can be read before, immediately after, and long after we have seen the movie that inspires or exasperates her.”

Appearing before that positive notice, however, was a more probing one in the Sunday
New York Times Book Review
, written by Charles T. Samuels, a member of the English faculty at Williams College and already a prominent film commentator. Seizing on some of Pauline’s comments in “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Samuels suggested that Pauline might be more of a reviewer than a genuine critic, less an aesthetician than a social historian. In “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Pauline had written, “One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done.” To Samuels, this was a warning sign. “By neglecting to analyze technique,” he wrote, “Miss Kael can do no more than assert that a given film is new, or beautiful, hoping that her language will provide the reader with something parallel to the qualities implicit in the work of art.” And underneath her consistent refusal to delve into formal analysis, Samuels went on—in the pointed yet cautious tone so often adopted by academics—was the implication that she ultimately came down on the side of trash rather than the side of art:

If it had been fair for her to rail unrelentingly against academia so many years, it was fair for academia to strike back, and that, clearly, was part of Samuels’s agenda. He revealed as much when he wrote with self-contained derision, “In her youth, as the author avows, she was a farm girl harried by schoolmarms spoon feeding her classics. The movies were her escape from ‘respectable,’ therefore emasculated, culture and she assumes that they function as a similar antidote for us all.” With these words Samuels laid the foundation of an argument against Pauline’s work that would grow louder and more insistent in the years ahead.

 

Unlike many critics who insisted on maintaining a stance of complete neutrality and distance toward their subjects, Pauline enjoyed making a blatant show of her support. When she was in the company of artists of whose work she approved, she could be enormously warm and encouraging. Many of her colleagues, among them Joseph Morgenstern, were uncomfortable with this aspect of her personality, but Pauline saw no reason to remain aloof in such circumstances.

She was also quite willing to confront the artists she considered failures and could be dismissive and fault-finding with them. Because she believed she was simply expressing her honest opinion rather than seeking to do harm, she was often naïvely baffled when the objects of her scorn reacted negatively to her criticism. A mutual friend had put her together with Mart Crowley, whose
The Boys in the Band
—the story of a group of gay men who play out their longings and regrets in high, bitchy style during a birthday celebration—had been a tremendous hit Off-Broadway and then had transferred to Broadway for another highly successful run. Pauline attended a performance of the piece in the company of the playwright and afterward, at the home of the mutual friend, she excoriated Crowley, telling him she found the play empty, cheaply theatrical, and superficial. As they talked and drank, Pauline became ever more abusive, until Crowley, stunned and wounded, got up and retired to another room. After a couple of hours, during which she got increasingly drunk, Pauline sought out Crowley to tell him that the next time she saw him he would no doubt be very rich and famous. (William Friedkin’s screen version of
The Boys in the Band
was even more offensive to her; she thought Friedkin had compounded the play’s problems with too many lingering close-ups aimed at currying sympathy for his poor, suffering-through-their-wisecracks characters.)

 

In March 1970 Pauline—more unwillingly than ever—again made way for Penelope Gilliatt to take over “The Current Cinema.” She continued to complain to her friends that, while
The New Yorker
might offer a lively, informed readership—she delighted in the letters she constantly received from her readers—it did not, on a six-month schedule, pay enough to allow her to live comfortably in New York.

The city itself continued to challenge her. After five years she still hadn’t grown accustomed to its noise and chaos and aggression; she once told a reporter that while her tone on the printed page might be quite assertive, she was not, in life, a particularly assertive person. (This was only partly true; in an argument, she could be quite formidable.) She despised the greased machinations of the city’s social network, the way so many gifted and deserving individuals were looked down upon because they didn’t have money or an Ivy League education—while socially connected people of lesser talent generally had an easier time of it.

She was often most comfortable in the company of people like herself, who came from the West Coast or the Midwest—anywhere but the carved-in-marble runway to success that New York represented. She answered as much of her fan mail as she could, often in great detail. If a young film fan approached her, either at a screening or by mail, telling her that he wanted to be a critic, she was usually happy to provide good counsel. Several close friends attributed this to her egalitarian, West Coast roots, the simple background that she might not care to discuss in any depth, but that clearly she had not forgotten.

In time she found an escape—a spacious, turreted Victorian house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small, attractive town right on Route 7, in the heart of the Berkshires. It was a lovely, graceful, unspoiled area, near the Housatonic and Green rivers. Two Berkshire Heights Road stood on a four-and-a-half-acre lot and was in a state of decay, but the asking price—$37,000—was attractive, and she and Gina decided to go to work on it. The down payment and costly repairs virtually depleted Pauline’s savings, but she considered it a sound investment. She looked forward to the day when she and Gina would be able to move there full-time. As she told a reporter years later, “I never adapted to New York. I feel better in the country.”

On May 26, 1970, Pauline received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It was presented to her “for her film criticism, written fast, out of a desire to respond to new movies before they have settled into history. Her exacting standards and her enthusiastic recognitions of excellence have been a stimulus to the quality of film-making and film-viewing.” The $3,000 she was given was as welcome as the honor itself.

She occupied herself in the summer of 1970 with reading, and clipping articles from
The New York Times
,
The Atlantic Monthly,
and other publications that might be useful reference points when she resumed her
New Yorker
duties in September. She also paid close attention to Penelope Gilliatt’s columns in “The Current Cinema,” and remained frequently baffled by Gilliatt’s cloudy style. A brilliant, well-read woman, Gilliatt possessed a formidable intellect that Pauline respected. Her reviews were much shorter than Pauline’s, but they were often vaporous, their central points difficult to identify. It is possible that Shawn prized this very quality in Gilliatt’s writing, simply because it provided such a startling contrast with Pauline’s own style, but for those who loved the latter, the six months that Gilliatt was on reviewing duty were an opportunity to pass over the pages of “The Current Cinema” as quickly as possible. In the spring of 1971, one disgruntled reader vented his frustration to Shawn in the form of a poem:

Gilliatt was a sweet-natured woman who was generally well liked by her colleagues at
The New Yorker
. She did, however, have a serious drinking problem. Patrick Crow, an editor at the magazine, remembered sitting in O’Lunney’s Bar near
The New Yorker
offices and seeing Gilliatt saunter in in mid-afternoon and toss down four Scotch and sodas. When the bartender asked her if she wanted a fifth, she replied that she had to go to the office and read proof. She was constantly plagued by money worries, and while she needed her post at
The New Yorker
to maintain any reasonable kind of lifestyle, she seemed unable to perform her critic’s duties without the aid of a drink. Her friend Jane Kramer recalled that Gilliatt “could focus under the most intense sedation—alcohol, God knows what pills she was taking. Most people would be conked out. But with Penelope . . . it focused her mind. She wrote some of her best fiction that way.”

Pauline was convinced that Shawn was effectively holding her back by not giving her the chance to write “The Current Cinema” year-round. She had clearly demonstrated her connection to the younger readers that the magazine’s advertising department coveted, and while Gilliatt may have possessed a keener sensitivity to certain European films, she was not tuned in to the tenor of the times in the way that Pauline was. Pauline’s resentment of Gilliatt’s presence at the magazine grew by the day. She was not uncivil to her, but she spent plenty of time complaining about Gilliatt to friends and colleagues. “My sense was that they stayed out of each other’s way almost intentionally,” said Jane Kramer. “Penelope, during a lot of that time, would have been happy to see Pauline. I’m not sure Pauline would have been happy to see Penelope. She talked to me about it in these terms: ‘I can’t believe that I am not in every week—this other mind has nothing to do with what I can say.’ I know that there’s something to be said for having comparative critical voices, but I’m not sure that when you’ve got something like Pauline, you don’t stick to it as the one critical voice, because it creates a vocabulary that people attach themselves to.”

For years Gilliatt had written striking pieces of fiction, and recently, she also had her eye on a screenwriting career. The instinctively competitive Pauline, who believed that she had put any ambition to do creative writing strictly behind her, could not help but feel that Gilliatt was in danger of outdistancing her by pursuing areas of writing apart from reviewing films.