Pauline Kael (53 page)

One person who didn’t rise to her defense was William Shawn, who characteristically tried to calm the waters. “That’s just how Renata reacts to Pauline,” he told a reporter. “One has to permit all writers a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.” Many at the magazine speculated that Shawn agreed with Adler’s assessment of Pauline’s work, but in interviews, the editor worked hard to maintain a neutral stance, saying, “There are boundaries beyond which the magazine can’t go. But you have to give Pauline the benefit of the doubt as to her intentions and needs. If at times she finds it necessary to use unconventional language, that has to be allowed.”

Many of Pauline’s friends, James Wolcott among them, felt that the Adler piece was something of an inside job, given the close relationship of both Adler and Penelope Gilliatt to one of Pauline’s chief antagonists, Vincent Canby. (Gilliatt did send Pauline a sympathetic note when Adler’s essay was published. Gilliatt wrote that such an outrage “shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone to anyone who writes.” She added, “And you certainly know how much I have
always
admired your humanity and zeal.”)

Pauline attempted to stay above the fray, telling
Time
’s reporter simply, “I’m sorry that Ms. Adler doesn’t respond to my writing. What else can I say?” Privately, however, she was deeply wounded by Adler’s harsh words. Despite her sharpness with others in print, she had always maintained a conscience about what she wrote, and she often told friends that she would have had to have been a complete boor not to feel a twinge of sadness and discomfort when she ran into someone whose films she had savaged. She had always known how painful it was for an artist to be the object of a full-scale critical attack: Now she had experienced it personally.

 

She went back to work, and it is impossible to know exactly what effect, if any, on her day-to-day writing Adler’s criticism had had. Certainly there seemed to be no difference in tone or substance or style, at least not immediately. The run of movies that fall wasn’t bad: She loved
The Stunt Man
, starring Peter O’Toole, and considered its director, Richard Rush, “a kinetic-action director to the bone; visually, he has the boldness of a comic-strip artist”; she found “a furious aliveness in this picture.” And she was completely won over by Jonathan Demme’s
Melvin and Howard
, which opened the 1980 New York Film Festival. Pauline compared Demme’s intuitive gifts at creating characters onscreen with Jean Renoir’s; she thought
Melvin and Howard
“a comedy without a speck of sitcom aggression: the characters are slightly loony the way we all are sometimes (and it seldom involves coming up with cappers or with straight lines that somebody else can cap). When the people on the screen do unexpected things, they’re not weirdos; their eccentricity is just an offshoot of the normal, and Demme suggests that maybe these people who grew up in motor homes and trailers in Nevada and California and Utah seem eccentric because they didn’t learn the ‘normal,’ accepted ways of doing things.”

The fall of 1980 saw the release of the one movie she had managed to help get onto the assembly line in Hollywood—
The Elephant Man
. (Some critics would have recused themselves, but Pauline saw no conflict of interest.) Pauline had liked David Lynch’s
Eraserhead
, and she thought that he had brought his powerful imagination to full flower in his new picture. The story of the unfortunate, deformed Englishman John Merrick was handled with remarkable grace, and without hysteria or sentiment. “
The Elephant Man
has the power and some of the dream logic of a silent film,” Pauline wrote, “yet there are also wrenching, pulsating sounds—the hissing steam and the pounding of the start of the industrial age.”

In late October she published a long review of Woody Allen’s latest,
Stardust Memories
, the most annihilating piece of criticism she had done for some time. Pauline thought the director had been in decline for a while. She had admired the sweetness of feeling that came through in his 1977 hit
Annie Hall
, but she was bothered by the picture’s New York chauvinism and sneering attitude toward Los Angeles, and Allen’s self-deprecating treatment of his Jewishness worked on her nerves. In her notes for the movie (she didn’t review it), she wrote of Allen’s character, the uptight Jewish comedian Alvy Singer, “He only shows you what you see anyway.” She thought
Annie Hall
was a promising idea that wasn’t delved into deeply enough and never quite found its real subject because it veered off into a tale of two cities—New York versus L.A. She had also had major reservations about Allen’s 1979 picture
Manhattan
, which Andrew Sarris hailed as the first great film of the seventies; Pauline was disturbed that Allen chose to focus on the narcissism and career issues of three mixed-up people as being representative of what was wrong with all of New York, and she hooted at the idea that all of this neurosis was shown in contrast to the purity of the teenage girl played by Mariel Hemingway. “What man in his forties,” she wrote, with chilling prescience, “could pass off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values?”

In
Stardust Memories
, Allen played Sandy Bates, a famous comedy director who wants to be taken seriously and find himself as an artist, but no one will let him. Pauline was annoyed by the movie’s sour narcissism; she thought that Allen was trying to become the Jewish Fellini. “Throughout
Stardust Memories
,” she wrote, “Sandy is superior to all those who talk about his work; if they like his comedies, it’s for freakish reasons, and he shows them up as poseurs and phonies, and if they don’t like his serious work, it’s because they’re too stupid to understand it. He anticipates almost anything that you might say about
Stardust Memories
and ridicules you for it.” There was no question in Pauline’s mind that Sandy was a mouthpiece for Allen’s true feelings about himself; she cited a comment he had made to
Newsweek
: “When you do comedy, you’re not sitting at the grown-ups’ table, you’re sitting at the children’s table.” In her reviews of
Stardust Memories
, she painted him as another kind of traitor, too: For years Allen’s unmade-bed looks and wired, smart Jewish humor had made him “a new national hero.” Now he seemed to be rejecting all that as well. Pauline considered it “a horrible betrayal when he demonstrates that despite his fame he still hates the way he looks and that he wanted to be one of
them
—the stuffy macho Wasps—all along.” She closed with a stinging slap: “If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying.”

There was a time when Pauline had been invited to Allen’s New Year’s Eve parties, events filled with many bright lights among New York’s intelligentsia. On one invitation, Allen wrote that even if she didn’t like most of the people there, she’d have him to talk to for laughs. He was apologizing in advance for the guests at his party. Pauline had seen right through him, and she used it in her review of
Stardust Memories
. After that, her friendship with Allen froze solid.

She was also disappointed in Martin Scorsese’s new picture,
Raging Bull
, in which Robert De Niro played the middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta. Like Allen, Scorsese seemed to have gotten carried away with his own seriousness. She thought
Raging Bull
wasn’t content to be a human drama about the glory days and inevitable decline of a famous prizefighter; it aimed to be “a biography of the genre of prizefight films.” And it wasn’t even content to be that: “It’s also about movies and about violence, it’s about gritty visual rhythm, it’s about Brando, it’s about the two
Godfather
pictures—it’s about Scorsese and De Niro’s trying to top what they’ve done and what everybody else has done.” It was meant to be the apotheosis of all the great, tough pictures of the seventies about Italian-American urban life, but it had a muffled impact, in Pauline’s view, because “You can feel the director sweating for greatness, but there’s nothing
under
the scenes.” She also found De Niro’s much-acclaimed performance didn’t have the impact that was intended. “What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly,” she wrote. “Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable. De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with.”

Pauline was annoyed the following year when the eight Academy Award nominations for
The Elephant Man
did not include one for Freddie Francis’s cinematography. She was also upset that the Academy ignored her new favorite, Debra Winger, for
Urban Cowboy
. At the New York Film Critics Circle voting that year, she had gotten behind
Melvin and Howard
, her friend Irvin Kershner’s sequel to
Star Wars
,
The Empire Strikes Back
, and—inexplicably—
Dressed to Kill
for Best Picture; O’Toole, Alan King (for Sidney Lumet’s comedy
Just Tell Me What You Want
), and Kurt Russell (for
Used Cars
) for Best Actor; Debra Winger, Mary Steenburgen, Dyan Cannon (for
Honeysuckle Rose
), and Shelley Duvall (as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s film of the famous comic strip
Popeye
), for Best Actress. She was chagrined when
Ordinary People
took the prize for Best Picture, but happy that
Melvin and Howard
earned citations for Best Director (Jonathan Demme) and Best Screenplay (Bo Goldman).

At
The New Yorker
Pauline had been edited for some time by Gardner Botsford, someone she was fond of, but eventually there was a reshuffling, and Daniel Menaker was assigned to her. It seemed a good fit: Menaker, who had started at the magazine in 1969 as a fact-checker, was a longtime movie fan, and he was bright and eager to succeed. “I would say that of all of the nonfiction writers I worked with, there certainly was no one else with whom I did less,” recalled Menaker. He noticed early on that she wasn’t seeking from her editor a response to the content of what she wrote. “She wanted someone to help make sure her inflections and feelings were what she meant them to be,” Menaker recalled. “She would be more likely to say, rather than ‘Do you think a comma should go there?,’ ‘Do you think people will get the fact that I sort of admired, but also had real questions about, this particular actor?’ It was more like tonalities. It wasn’t like editing. Well, I guess it was, in a way—she knew what I meant. I was more like a reader or a sounding board or an audience.”

Pauline was well liked by the magazine’s support staff—the copy editors, fact-checkers, and messengers who were more or less at her service. Her rapport with them was not unlike Joan Crawford’s camaraderie with the crew members on her movies. “I don’t think she had a snobby bone in her body toward such people,” said Menaker. “But these people were no threat to her. She had a good common touch, a good, decent comportment with them. There were occasions when I saw her get kind of cross in one way or another, but she very seldom got angry. What she would do is look or act sort of bewildered or flummoxed, and that was a sign of her displeasure.” Most often, Pauline would become aggravated when a fact-checker had unintentionally given away something in a review to a source, but she seldom made an issue out of it.

To close friends Pauline complained that Shawn had, in a subtle way, been treating her differently since her return from Hollywood. Perhaps, having been persuaded despite his original instincts to take her back, he felt compelled to convey his disapproval in other ways. Once it seemed that he might have gotten some degree of perverse enjoyment out of their wrangles over copy—he was well known for being susceptible to the emotional demands of many of the women on the staff. Now he seemed much of the time to avoid her. “She loved to provoke Shawn,” remembered Menaker. “Pauline would put stuff in to madden him—I think she’d even say, ‘This will get his goat.’ ” But Shawn’s attitude toward Pauline was also complex: As much as he respected her and was grateful for the attention she had brought to “The Current Cinema,” he also seemed resentful of her. She had grown beyond his power to control. Shawn’s genial, paternal attitude had never worked particularly well with Pauline, yet they seemed strangely fond of each other on some level—like Beatrice and Benedict. “I think they really got off on this partnership of mutual dislike,” said Menaker. “He was weary and resigned, but I just can’t believe that he didn’t enjoy the game a little bit.”

In 1980 Pauline had asked a casual acquaintance of hers, a painter named Warner Friedman, to come by the house in Great Barrington. Gina, who was living in her own house near Pauline’s, had become immersed in her painting—she would choose volcanoes as one of her chief subjects—and Pauline asked Warner to give her daughter some advice on how to frame some of her pictures. Before long Warner and Gina were dating. Warner was not intimidated by Pauline but he remembered that she maintained something of a coolness toward him once he and Gina began seeing each other. He and Gina developed a large circle of painter friends, and whenever Pauline was around them, she would mutter, “Painting, painting,
painting
!” Warner felt that she was somewhat bothered by the fact that so many of their circle were struggling and showed no sign of being close to any kind of commercial success. More to the point, he recalled, she was dying for someone to ask her about the movies.