Pauline Kael (31 page)

In fact, the part about
Mad Love
was basically the same sort of movie detective work she had accused the auteurists of peddling. Interestingly, she did not draw a connecting line to a more recent film that may possibly have influenced Welles—Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rebecca
. It was released the year before
Kane
, and the opening—the passing through the front gates of the stately Manderley, the scenes with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine standing in enormous rooms with great fireplaces, and the fiery finale, in which the camera slowly moves in to reveal a pillow with the monogram “R” being consumed in flames, just as “Rosebud” is, may well have influenced the look of
Kane
.

At the end of “Raising Kane,” Pauline suddenly shifted to a slightly milder, almost apologetic tone. Welles, she wrote, “had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be ‘Orson Welles,’ though ‘Orson Welles’ had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly.” She closed by lamenting that Welles “has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him.” This was one point on which Welles could not contradict her: Interviewed in the early 1970s, he characterized his career as “98% hustling and 2% moviemaking—that’s no way to spend a life.”

 

The New Yorker
launched “Raising Kane” in a celebratory manner, with a full-page advertisement in
The New York Times,
and letters poured in to
The New Yorker
from enthusiastic readers. The acclaimed screenwriter Nunnally Johnson had had an epistolary acquaintance with Pauline for some time, and Pauline had spoken with him while preparing “Raising Kane.” Now Johnson wrote to her that the essay was “a first-rate account and I am a better man for having read it.” He added that Sara Mankiewicz wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not; she appreciated Pauline’s advocacy for Herman but “the references to Mank’s drinking must bring up many painful memories.” Mostly, though, members of Mankiewicz’s family were grateful to Pauline for illuminating the man they believed to be Kane’s auteur. “There have always been the Welles idolators,” said Tom Mankiewicz. “We just said, ‘Herman did everything, and thank you so much, Pauline Kael.’ ”

With all the acclaim greeting “Raising Kane,” Bantam decided the essay was now too important to publish as a paperback original. A deal was made with Little, Brown to bring out a hardcover edition, which would include the shooting script, and in October 1971
The Citizen Kane Book
appeared. Pauline’s essay opened the book, followed by the complete shooting script, illustrated by eighty-one frames from the film, and the cutting continuity of the finished picture.

In
The New York Times
, Mordecai Richler called it “a highly intelligent and entertaining study of a bona fide film classic” and praised Pauline for her “wonderfully sensible reconstruction of the making of
Kane
.” But no matter how persuasively she made the case for Herman Mankiewicz, Richler felt her argument was undercut by the publication of the script, which, despite its merits, he found “superficial and without one quotable line. To Welles, then, however vain and objectionable his manner, rococo his style, must go the ultimate credit for the miracle of
Citizen Kane
,” since in Richler’s view “he was the one who did in fact put it all together.”

It appears that Welles never contacted Pauline about the article, but Peter Bogdanovich and others claimed he was deeply wounded by Pauline’s reduction of his role in
Kane
, feeling that his work on the picture had been undercut once again. The opposition, however, had readied itself on the director’s behalf. When the book appeared,
The Village Voice
’s Andrew Sarris angrily rejected Pauline’s thesis, but the toughest response came from Bogdanovich in
Esquire
. “The Kane Mutiny” was a lengthy article that was both a levelheaded refutation of Pauline’s ideas and an expression of righteous anger, and the single worst piece of press she had received to date. Bogdanovich condemned “Raising Kane” as being “loaded with error and faulty supposition presented as fact.” Because he had heard Howard Suber’s story through his UCLA connections, he explained that Suber and Pauline “were to collaborate in writing the prefatory material to the published screenplay,” adding that Pauline took “full credit for whatever use she made of it, and gives none at all to Dr. Suber.”

Bogdanovich then proceeded to expose, point by point, the weaknesses in Pauline’s research. Not only had she chosen not to consult Welles but she had failed to contact several of the other key players in her story. One was Marion Davies’s nephew Charles Lederer, who claimed that he had never—as Pauline had stated—shown the script to Davies. “That is 100 percent, whole-cloth lying,” Lederer told Bogdanovich, adding that he had returned the script to Mankiewicz, telling him that he didn’t think that Davies would be bothered by the characterization of Susan Alexander. He also told Bogdanovich that the early draft, called
American
, was lugubrious, and that Welles had “vivified the material, changed it a lot, and I believe transcended it with his direction. There were things in it that were based on Hearst and Marion—the jigsaw puzzles, Marion’s drinking—though this was played up more in the movie than in the script I read, probably because it was a convenient peg for the girl’s characterization.” (Lederer’s version of this episode is regarded by the Mankiewicz family as highly suspect, since the script reportedly was returned with annotations by the Hearst legal team.)

Bogdanovich quoted George Coulouris, who portrayed Thatcher, the man who becomes young Charles Kane’s guardian, dismissing Pauline’s essay as “twaddle.” The testimony of an actor in thrall to Welles might be questionable. But Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the film’s musical score, and famously not a man to play politics in any way, denounced Pauline’s research of the film’s classic opera sequences, in which Susan Alexander miserably fails her New York debut. Pauline claimed that Welles had pressed Herrmann to create the film’s fictional French opera-within-the-film,
Salammbô
, because the first choice,
Thaïs
, involved the expensive proposition of obtaining musical rights. Here she jumped to a conclusion, pointing out that Hearst had once been engaged briefly to Sibyl Sanderson, the American soprano for whom Jules Massenet had written
Thaïs
. Also she reported that Samuel Insull, one of the models for Kane, had built the Chicago Opera House in 1922, and that it had been managed for one disastrous season by the retired diva Mary Garden, in her day a famous Thaïs. But according to Welles, he had simply needed an opera that opened with a big dramatic aria for Susan Alexander, to drive home the point that her career is all but finished the minute the curtain rises. There were no operas in the standard repertory that fulfilled this requirement, since they all had lengthy introductory passages, mostly involving the chorus—so Herrmann simply had to write one.

Bogdanovich suspected that for all of Pauline’s knowledge of film history, she did not know much technically about how movies were really made. She had taken Sara Mankiewicz’s word for it that the script of
Kane
had changed very little from the first draft, but she had failed to grasp the degree to which scripts change in their long, tortuous evolution.
Kane
’s associate producer, Richard Barr, claimed that “The revisions made by Welles were not limited to mere general suggestions, but included the actual rewriting of words, dialogue, changing of sequences, ideas, and characterizations, and also the elimination and addition of certain scenes.”

Bogdanovich’s essay for
Esquire
was extremely courageous: For a rising young director, so dependent on popular and critical support, to take on the most celebrated movie critic in the United States showed great conviction and a brave lack of concern about the possible consequences of writing such an article. “The Kane Mutiny,” however, did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation. It did, however, represent a serious breakdown of
The New Yorker
’s fact-checking process. Significantly, no transcripts of Pauline’s purported conversations with John Houseman, George Schaefer, or Rita Alexander have survived—perhaps because she took no notes. The only research materials in her personal archive, housed at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, are copies of Howard Suber’s interviews. And Bogdanovich’s revelation of her inadequate research efforts did nothing to dissuade her from continuing to chip away at Welles’s achievements: In the future she would tell numerous colleagues that she did not believe that the missing reels of
The Magnificent Ambersons
had ever existed—that she felt Welles had simply abandoned the picture.

Decades after the publication of “The Kane Mutiny,” Bogdanovich happened to be having dinner with Woody Allen in New York. Allen, who was once quite friendly with Pauline, recalled that he had been with her when she had finished reading “The Kane Mutiny.” She was shocked by the evidence that Bogdanovich had stacked up against her.

“How am I going to answer this?” she asked Allen.

“Don’t answer,” Allen told her.

And she never did.

B
y the time Robert Altman’s
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
opened in June 1971, regular readers of “The Current Cinema” were well accustomed to Pauline’s antipathy for the movie Western. In her capsule reviews in the front of
The New Yorker
, she dismissed one revered Western classic after another—
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
,
The Gunfighter
,
The Searchers
,
Two Rode Together
,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
. (
Stagecoach
was an exception.) Given her distaste for the genre’s conventions and sentiments, perhaps it was inevitable that Pauline would fall as hard as she did for
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
. In
M*A*S*H,
Robert Altman had subjected the military comedy to a kind of deconstruction; with
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
, he did the same thing for the Western.

The basic story, based on a novel by Edmund Naughton, didn’t hold a lot of attraction for Altman; it was the atmosphere of a particular time and place that he was after. Set in the rain-soaked and snow-blanketed Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century,
McCabe
was about a small-time hustler who sets out to make his fortune by opening a whorehouse in a remote zinc-mining town. Altman later said that he took great comfort in the story’s familiar types—the drifter/loser hero and the good-hearted whore and the mercenary villains—believing they would give the audience an “anchor,” so he could concentrate on getting the feeling he wanted into the film.

Altman wanted the film to look like the old daguerreotypes of the turn of the century, and he and the production designer, Leon Ericksen, had worked out a muted color scheme in order to achieve it. Altman and the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, also hit on the idea of flashing the film (briefly exposing it to light during processing) in order to capture the desired washed-out effect. And in order to achieve a greater sense of realism, Altman encouraged his actors to overlap their dialogue, much of it once again improvised. Any other director might have turned the story into a conventional romance, but Altman later stated, “I don’t really care much about the story in a film.... I think more about the painting.”
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
was shaping up to be the most elliptical Western ever made—it was nearly an impressionistic study of a Western. Yet there was nothing fey or pretentious about it; for all its visual poetry, it also had tremendous bite and grit.

McCabe
opened in June, and a number of the television critics, who commanded the widest audience, were hostile to it. Rona Barrett said in a broadcast that
McCabe
“saddened and disgusted” her, and that it was “rated R, presumably for rotten.” She also noted that at the screening at the Motion Picture Academy, some forty people “got up and walked out, unable to understand the onscreen mumbling.”

Under normal circumstances Penelope Gilliatt would have reviewed
McCabe
as part of her regular schedule, but Pauline persuaded both Shawn and Gilliatt to let her step in and write the review in the middle of her layoff. It was the most rapturous notice she had written to date—the first of the “bliss-out” reviews for which she would soon become famous. She opened with this sentence: “
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been.” She found the film “so indirect in method that it throws one off base. It’s not much like other Westerns; it’s not really much like other movies.” She loved the picture’s beguiling, allusive style, its almost dreamlike view of another time, and she praised Altman for having given up “the theatrical convention that movies have generally clung to of introducing the characters and putting tags on them. Though Altman’s method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom—as if he simply didn’t want to be straightforward about his storytelling.” Curiously, she mentioned neither Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography, with its innovative use of filters, or the inferior quality of the sound mixing.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
seduced Pauline so completely that she became its cheerleader. In the closing paragraph of her review, she confessed her fear that the movie might not find the audience it deserved. “Will a large enough American public accept American movies that are delicate and understated and searching—movies that don’t resolve all the feelings they touch, that don’t aim at leaving us
satisfied
, the way a three-ring circus satisfies?” Clearly, she was afraid the answer was no. The week that the review was published, she made an appearance on
The Dick Cavett Show
, exhorting moviegoers to get out and support this major work by a brilliant American artist.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
had had a soft opening, but suddenly, after Pauline’s drum-beating on television, box office returns picked up. There is no way of knowing how much Pauline’s advocacy had to do with the increase in
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
’s attendance, but Altman swore that it had been a key factor. In the end, although the film never achieved hit status, Pauline helped to make it one of the year’s most talked-about movies.