Pauline Kael (34 page)

It was a stunning assertion, and it certainly stunned Peckinpah that Pauline had taken the film’s portrayal of Amy to be a kind of statement about the nature of women, as he assumed such regimented thinking to be beneath her. “Fascist, God how I hate that word,” he wrote to Pauline a year after her review appeared, “but I suppose every director in his way is a fascist.
Straw Dogs
was about a bad marriage and the subtle incitement of violence by [the protagonist]. It’s a funny thing, but I know that couple, which means knowledge has nothing to do with art. As I evidently failed. In a way I made it for you . . . with all the integrity I could, and missed the boat.” In his
Playboy
interview, he used stronger words. “Doesn’t Kael know
anything
about sex? Dominating and being dominated: the fantasy, too, of being taken by force is certainly one way people make love.... I like Kael; she’s a feisty little gal and I enjoy drinking with her—which I’ve done on occasion—but here she’s cracking walnuts with her ass.”

 

The movie season, already the most stimulating she had experienced since coming to
The New Yorker
, was about to come to a triumphant close. Despite her scorn for elephantine productions such as
Camelot
and
Paint Your Wagon
, Pauline hoped the screen musical could be revived in some new and invigorating way. Keeping true to the general tenor of her tastes, she believed the musical to be at its greatest when it was tough and sassy, not when it drowned in sentiment. She could barely contain her excitement once she had seen
Cabaret
, Bob Fosse’s tough, fearless screen version of the John Kander–Fred Ebb stage hit. Given its source material—Christopher Isherwood’s
Goodbye to Berlin
stories, which traced the fate of a disparate group of characters during the rise of Nazism—
Cabaret
was a welcome departure from the world of singing nuns and dancing street gangs that Pauline had come to loathe:

Pauline loved the score, with its “distinctive, acrid flavor—a taste of death on the tongue.” And she loved the fact that the songs didn’t spring “organically” from the story: Nearly all of the musical numbers in
Cabaret
took place where they made most sense to take place—on the stage of the cabaret itself. Fosse had given the audience a bracing view of a society desperately trying to maintain a party atmosphere while ignoring what was happening around them. Not only did he never relax his vision; more surprisingly, he never let it get away from him—never allowed it to become labored and heavy-handed or moralistic. “The grotesque amorality in
Cabaret
is frightening,” Pauline wrote, “not because it’s weak but because it’s intensely, obscenely alive.” Most of all, she saw
Cabaret
as glorious evidence of the courage of its filmmaker’s convictions, proving that “you can create a new organic whole by style and imagination—if you have enough faith in the audience to do it right.”

Only a few weeks after
Cabaret’
s release,
The Godfather
opened and overshadowed all of the year’s other outstanding films. It changed the fortunes of everyone connected with it: most of all, those of its director and co-screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola; its star, Marlon Brando; and its dynamic young cast members James Caan, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall. Based on the bestselling novel by Mario Puzo, its depiction of the dark side of New York Italian–American life took the world by storm. More important, as far as Hollywood was concerned, it launched the careers of a prodigiously gifted group of Italian–American directors and actors.

In recent years most of the pictures that had taken on organized crime as a subject hadn’t done well, and
The Godfather’s
producer, Robert Evans, felt it was because too many of the characters had come off as walking Italian movie clichés: The audience simply couldn’t believe in them. He wanted the brand of realism that he felt only an Italian American could bring to the project, and he engaged Francis Ford Coppola, a gifted young filmmaker who had yet to come up with a hit, to direct. It was Coppola who believed that
The Godfather
should be less of a standard organized crime thriller than an incisive look at the inner workings and dynamics of the Corleone family.

No critic delighted more in its success than Pauline. The list of all-time box-office grosses had never been a badge of honor where she was concerned, but in her review, she celebrated her theory that “the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art.” She admired the fact that Coppola had “stayed very close to the book’s greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’s used to have.” Pauline found Coppola’s work “tenaciously intelligent . . . It’s amazing how encompassing the view seems to be—what a sense you get of a broad historical perspective, considering that the span is only from 1945 to the mid-fifties.” As for Brando, she considered that his acting had “mellowed in recent years; it is less immediately exciting than it used to be, because there’s not the sudden, violent discharge of emotion.” To convey fully the impact of his performance, she displayed her own imaginative powers, writing like a fiction writer: Brando reminded her of one of “those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside a frail frame, those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces.”

Best of all, Coppola had been true to his fictional story while adeptly catching the current mood of the country: He had done what so many other heavy-handed directors had been attempting to do and failing. “Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism,” Pauline wrote, “it’s what we fear Americanism to be. It’s our nightmare of the American system. When ‘Americanism’ was a form of cheerful, bland official optimism, the gangster used to be destroyed at the end of the movie and our feelings resolved. Now the mood of the whole country has darkened, guilty; nothing is resolved at the end of
The Godfather
, because the family business goes on....
The Godfather
is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism.”

Pauline’s mid-March review of Marcel Ophuls’s
The Sorrow and the Pity
, a documentary about the collaboration of France’s Vichy government with the Nazis—
“
one of the most intricately balanced moral dilemmas imaginable”—was her final review of the season, and never before had she found it so difficult to step away from her job for six months. Films had become so amazingly present and alive with the work of so many superb craftsmen (Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sam Peckinpah) and so many artists capable of revitalizing genres that had long ossified (Robert Altman, Bob Fosse). The confluence of talent and activity exhilarated her so much that she couldn’t stop talking about it; often, she told people that she had the best job she could possibly have found.

One of the things that thrilled her most was that this explosion of creativity was being born out of a specific, unique time in history. The subjects and attitudes of current films were providing a kind of living journal of the times; a legitimate movement was afoot, with filmmakers responding to the world around them and putting their visions up there on the screen in new and exciting ways. Best of all, the audiences were with them. The dialogue between screen and audience that Pauline had always envisioned was rising to glorious heights. Later she would compare this period of filmmaking with the great flowering of American writing in the nineteenth century, with the best of the current crop of directors and screenwriters reinvigorating their art form just as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman had theirs.

“Inexplicably,” she wrote in that season-ending column in March 1972, “despite everything—the suicidal practices of the film industry, the defeat of many people of talent, the financial squeeze here and abroad—this has been a legendary period in movies.... A reviewer could hardly ask for more from any art, high or popular.”

The luckiest people who work in the arts are those who find themselves in just the right place during the perfect confluence of creative activity and an eager, inquisitive public. Pauline was in the vortex. She had reached the apex of her moviegoing life, and she wanted it to go on forever.

A
fter winding up her reviewing at
The New Yorker
in March 1972, Pauline once again plunged into a hectic schedule on the lecture circuit. She always had mixed feelings about this part of the year. Lecture appearances provided her with much-needed income, and she relished the chance to speak with young people about what they responded to in the movies; many of the conversations she had with college students on the road provided her with important material for her
New Yorker
pieces. But she disliked having to associate with faculty members and attending the English Department party that inevitably followed her lecture appearances. She considered most of the English and film studies professors she encountered to be dull, pompous, jealous of her position in the world, or all three. Still, if academia remained generally unattractive to her, she was quite attractive to academia and regularly received offers to become a visiting or regents professor—one example of many being the unsuccessful attempts of the Berkeley professor David Littlejohn to persuade her to join the School of Journalism faculty. She did, however, agree to serve as a member of the Educational Advisory Board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a post that allowed her to use her influence to help artists she considered deserving and underfunded.

When she wasn’t on the road, she was occupied with the ongoing process of fixing up the house in Great Barrington. She told friends that she dreamed of one day living there full-time, though she could not yet see how such a thing would be feasible in practical terms, given the intensity of her schedule at
The New Yorker
and the necessity of spending so much time in Manhattan. She delighted in telling people what a wonderful job Gina was doing in getting the house into shape—from overseeing repair work to choosing a beautiful selection of soft colors for the walls. One of the things Pauline loved most about the house was its spacious kitchen—a luxury after the cramped quarters in New York. It was a classic country kitchen, with old 1950s appliances and a big, generous sink, and Pauline loved spending time in it, cooking for her friends.

There was an unceasing flow of fan mail, which she was diligent about answering. A brief, casual note of appreciation about something she had written in
The New Yorker
usually got a polite reply written on a postcard, but the more in-depth and thoughtful letters she took more time with; sometimes she even surprised her devoted readers by telephoning to thank them for their words, even if they were uncomplimentary. Sometimes lasting friendships were born out of her correspondence with readers.

One person who wrote to her in the early 1970s was a professor of English literature at the Oregon College of Education, Erhard Dortmund, with whom Pauline would maintain a steady and lively correspondence for thirty years. As with many who came into her orbit, she took an interest in Dortmund’s career and encouraged him to submit articles to
The Atlantic Monthly
. Dortmund recalled their friendship as an “improbable one. She was so smart and intuitive and loved all of life’s juices . . . she worshipped people with vitality and people with guts and zaniness. She loved zany things. I’m just the opposite. I’m inhibited and not bold, but luckily full of curiosity. At some level, we found common ground. We had similar vibes about many things.”

As Gina often pointed out, Pauline liked to be surrounded by people whose feelings about the arts and politics were close to her own. She often told friends that she found it difficult to form a close bond with someone who disagreed with her about more than three movies. More to the point, she relished the company of people who had zest and intensity and appetite for movies, art, music, literature, current events. She had no need to dominate the conversation in a group of people—she found such behavior boorish. Her social self was very much like her moviegoing self: She loved being a spectator. The writer James Wolcott, who became friends with her in the mid-1970s, observed, “She would throw a little dart in, but it was only when someone was going way overboard about something. She never dressed anybody down. She liked being around people who were entertaining.”

Pauline was already developing a circle of movie-loving friends, many of them younger critics in whose careers she took an interest. They would meet at screenings and then go out for drinks or dinner afterward, constituting their own floating version of the Algonquin Round Table. But there was a crucial difference: The Algonquin Round Table had been made up of a group of peers; Pauline’s group resembled a Renaissance court, where people tended to seek her approval by agreeing with her about the film they’d just seen, or trying to move to the head-of-class position by outdoing each other with sharp, barbed comments.

It was not strictly true that the way to Pauline’s heart was through slavish agreement. She could be patient with her acolytes’ worship of her, but if it crossed the line into sycophancy, she could distance herself very quickly. Sometimes those who had considered themselves to be rising through the ranks of her inner circle were stunned to find themselves suddenly frozen out. Joe Morgenstern, for one, found the competitiveness and backbiting of Pauline’s acolytes repellent: “Sometimes I would just sit there silent as a stone, listening to everybody dish everybody. It was not part of my knowledge, my world, or my inclination. And I thought it was really unseemly. I had a sense that she needed the idolatry, and that kind of nastiness on the part of the courtiers was just an inevitable part of it.”