Pauline Kael (52 page)

Six days later she was a guest on the late-night talk show hit
Tomorrow
, with Tom Snyder. One day later, she did interviews for
Women’s Wear Daily
and National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered
. On April 9, she had interviews with the
New York Post
and with Arlene Francis on New York’s WOR radio. Then she was off to Boston for interviews with
The Boston Globe
,
The Christian Science Monitor
,
The Real Paper
, WGBH-TV, and WB2 Radio, plus a lecture at the Rabb Lecture Hall. After that, she was off on a grueling lecture tour, including appearances in Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto.

During one of her L.A. appearances, she was startled during the question-and-answer session when a man raised his hand and asked, “Why are you shaking?” Recently she had noticed a very slight tremor in her hands, but she had put it down to nerves, and she was astonished that it would be visible to someone sitting halfway across a large auditorium.

 

At
The New Yorker
Pauline at last had what she had always wanted—the entire reviewing post, with a commensurate raise in salary. Her schedule was adjusted slightly: Now she came down to New York every other week, checked into the Royalton for four days, and saw two movies each night, returning to Great Barrington to write her column. Often Gina or one of Pauline’s friends in the Berkshires drove her both ways.

After a pleasant trip to Colombia with Gina and their friend the author Jaime Manrique, she returned in the magazine’s June 9, 1980, issue, with a negative review of Stanley Kubrick’s latest,
The Shining
, a supernatural tale that boasted great technological advances but fell flat as a thriller. While Pauline enjoyed Jack Nicholson’s performance early in the film—“He has a way of making us feel that we’re in on a joke—that we’re reading the dirty, resentful thoughts behind his affable shark grins”—more of him was less as the movie went on. She thought that he was too ideally cast: “His performance begins to seem cramped, slightly robotized. There’s no surprise in anything he does, no feeling of invention.”

Her big “comeback” piece, however, came in the June 23, 1980, issue, with a lengthy essay titled “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers.” Some have viewed it as her revenge on Hollywood for her mistreatment there; in fact, she offered no explanation about her time in Hollywood, assuming that informed readers would understand her position. What she was really doing was giving her readers a glimpse of what she had learned “out there,” and the essay was Pauline at her stinging best. Taking precise (if unspoken) aim at Don Simpson, she opened fire on the new breed of studio executives—ignorant, uneducated, and unfeeling where movies were concerned, who thought only about box-office grosses, and never about giving an audience something that might prove deeply satisfying. The conglomerates in charge of the studios were painted with the blackest part of her brush: She described them as filled with men who were attracted to the film world because it gave them the opportunity to elevate their status by rubbing shoulders with famous stars and directors. Part of the trouble was that they began to see themselves as genuinely creative people:

She believed the central problem was that the studio heads had “discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking . . . If an executive finances what looks like a perfectly safe, stale piece of material and packs it with stars, and the production costs skyrocket way beyond the guarantees and the picture loses many millions,
he
won’t be blamed for it—he was playing the game by the same rules as everybody else. If, however, he takes a gamble on a small project that can’t be sold in advance—something that a gifted director really wants to do, with a subtle, not easily summarized theme and no big names in the cast—and it loses just a little money, his neck is on the block.”

It was a loss to American letters that Pauline, away in Hollywood, missed the opportunity to review the most ambitious undertaking of the decade—the movie that was, whether it was intended to be or not, the cumulative event of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic
Apocalypse Now
. Despite the movie’s horrendous production problems—shooting in the Philippines was shut down for some months—Pauline correctly perceived that the film signified the audience’s “readiness for a visionary, climactic, summing-up movie. We felt that the terrible rehash of pop culture couldn’t go on, mustn’t go on—that something new was needed. Coppola must have felt that, too, but he couldn’t supply it.” She was distressed, however, to see that a film with such brilliant isolated sequences was, in her words, “an incoherent mess”; she felt that the director had simply gotten lost. (Robert Getchell recalled that when he and Pauline went to see the movie in Westwood, she held her nose as they walked out of the theater.)

Pauline didn’t get behind James Bridges’s evocative
Urban Cowboy
, about aimless Texas oil-rig workers who compete to ride a mechanical bull, but she was entranced by Debra Winger, whom she described as having “a quality of flushed transparency. When she necks on the dance floor—and she’s a great smoocher, with puffy lips like a fever blister—her clothes seem to be under her damp skin. (She’s naked all through the movie, though she never takes her clothes off.)” Winger had the kind of sensual, electric presence that Pauline had once loved in the young Jane Fonda.

She again came out powerfully on behalf of Brian De Palma for his latest,
Dressed to Kill
, a compendium of Hitchcockian themes and takeoffs. There were a few genuinely frightening scenes in
Dressed to Kill
, but her response to the movie seemed excessive: She found it De Palma’s most sustained piece of work, in which he had “perfected a near-surreal poetic voyeurism—the stylized expression of a blissfully dirty mind.” But despite her exuberant description of some of the movie’s lengthier set pieces, many readers found her review unpersuasive if not simply wrong-headed.

Why did Pauline prefer De Palma’s work to Hitchcock’s, when the younger director was essentially reworking over many themes developed by the master? Perhaps it was the understanding of female psychology that De Palma showed. (Hitchcock’s movies are full of scenes with women that make one’s skin crawl—a prime example being the sequence in his 1955 version of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, in which James Stewart sedates Doris Day before telling her that their son has been kidnapped.) Her friend David Edelstein thought that she also favored the lushness of DePalma’s visual palette—his emphasis on pure sensuality.

 

When the Lights Go Down
was still selling nicely by midsummer. One prominent publication, however—
The New York Review of Books—
had not weighed in on the book until mid-August, when it ran a lengthy review by Renata Adler. The sniping notices that Pauline had received over the years—particularly for
Reeling
—were of a type that nearly every writer had to deal with in the course of a career. But the piece in
The New York Review of Books
was another matter altogether: It was the most devastating critical attack on Pauline’s career ever published. The cover line, “The Sad Tale of Pauline Kael,” was an indication of what was to come; the review itself was titled “The Perils of Pauline,” a formula that had already been exhausted in any number of newspaper and magazine pieces about her. More than just a review of
When the Lights Go Down
, Adler’s essay was a broadside against Pauline’s lofty reputation, an aggressive attempt to discredit her—with the nation’s literary community occupying a ringside seat.

Certainly an attack on America’s most celebrated movie critic was a “box-office” concept, and Renata Adler was an inspired choice to write it. She was a well-known contributor to the publication, a sometime film critic with impressive credentials (
The New York Times
and, most recently,
The New Yorker
). and an acclaimed fiction writer. The passionate, emotional, argumentative Pauline confronted with the dispassionate, chiseled-prose Adler—two more temperamentally opposed writers would have been difficult to imagine.

Pauline had been annoyed by many of Adler’s recent reviews for
The New Yorker
; in particular, she was incensed by Adler’s dismissal of Carroll Ballard’s
The Black Stallion
, which Pauline considered one of the best films of a bad year. And with her tony educational background (Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, a law degree from Yale) and frequently reported-on social connections, Adler was the sort of darling of the East Coast intellectual establishment that Pauline had for so long viewed with contempt.

An advance copy of
The New York Review of Books
issue that featured “The Perils of Pauline” was sent to Pauline with a note from the publication’s editor, Robert Silvers, in the event that Pauline wanted to reply.

Adler’s essay began with a lengthy two columns in which she outlined her thoughts on what made a good critic in the arts, and why the best ones inevitably found themselves played out after a certain period and moved on to write about other topics. For another two and a half columns she expressed her qualified admiration for Pauline’s work from the 1950s up through her first few years at
The New Yorker
, stating that she had “continued to believe that movie criticism was probably in quite good hands with Pauline Kael.”

The bomb was dropped midway through the fifth column, when Adler stated that
When the Lights Go Down
was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” She went on to detail her complaints—that Pauline’s work had taken on “an entirely new style of
ad hominem
brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.”

In 1976, when
Reeling
was published, John Simon had, while expressing his admiration for Pauline as a stylist, objected to her coarseness of spirit and taste, in terms of both language and her championing of certain movies he considered lowbrow: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler echoed this theme in her review, complaining that Pauline had “lost any notion of the legitimate borders of polemic. Mistaking lack of civility for vitality, she now substitutes for argument a protracted, obsessional invective—what amounts to a staff cinema critics’ branch of
est.
” Adler—not coincidentally, perhaps, an ardent admirer of William Shawn’s editing style—lamented Pauline’s use of images of “sexual conduct, deviance, impotence, masturbation; also of indigestion, elimination, excrement. I do not mean to imply that these images are frequent, or that one has to look for them. They are relentless, inexorable.” Among the words and phrases that bothered her: “just a belch from the Nixon era”; “you can’t cut through the crap in her”; “plastic turds”; and “tumescent filmmaking.”

Adler also attacked Pauline for her repeated use of “the mock rhetorical question,” such as “Were these 435 prints processed in a sewer?” “Where was the director?” and “How can you have any feelings for a man who doesn’t enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?” These questions, she felt, were “rarely saying anything; they are simply doing something. Bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning, rallying.”

There was more: Adler took issue with Pauline’s use of “you” to indicate what the audience was feeling, when she would have more civilly, in Adler’s view, said “I.” Like Robert Brustein, Andrew Sarris, and even Pauline’s friend Greil Marcus, she found fault with the surfeit of hyperbole, and she objected, seemingly on moral grounds, to comments such as the one Pauline wrote about Paul Schrader, in
Hardcore
—not knowing how to turn a trick—which Adler felt represented “a new breakthrough in vulgarity and unfairness.” She also theorized that Pauline had taken advantage of
The New Yorker
’s famously genteel editing process, in which writers are “free to write what, and at what length, they choose.” While disagreements with writers of feature articles could be dealt with simply by postponing the running of the piece, movie reviews demanded constant currency; Pauline’s work had to be run, week in and week out, essentially forcing
The New Yorker
either to fire her or “to accommodate her work. The conditions of unique courtesy, literacy, and civility, of course, were what Ms. Kael was most inclined by temperament to test. Her excesses got worse.” Reading Pauline in book form was a very different experience from reading her from week to week, Adler wrote, because “It is difficult, with these reviews, to account for, or even look at, what is right there on the page.”

“The Perils of Pauline” quickly became an incendiary topic of conversation in New York literary circles. It was hard to remember when any established writer had launched such a damning dismissal of one of her own kind.
Time
and
New York
ran full-scale feature articles on the scandal. In
The Village Voice,
Andrew Sarris gave his seal of approval to Adler’s broadside, but the publication also ran a scathing article by Pauline’s friend James Wolcott, who mercilessly limned Adler as “Princess Renata,” a writer who “when not dusting off her diplomas . . . writes about journalistic chores—book reviewing, movie reviewing, investigative reporting—with the pained, annoyed tone of a royal bride stranded in one of the empire’s scruffier provinces.” Letters to the editor poured into
The New York Review of Books
. “Renata Adler should see a psychiatrist,” her young critic friend at the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
, Michael Sragow, wrote to Pauline. “Hope you’re bearing this latest injustice with your usual fortitude and good humor, which is what you’ve been displaying in your reviews.” Several other friends came to Pauline’s rescue in print, including Gary Arnold, who denounced Adler to
New York
as “one of the dunces of the profession.”