Pauline Kael (60 page)

In the winter of 1986 Pauline was delighted to celebrate the release of Stephen Frears’s
My Beautiful Launderette
. With the major studios steadily turning out such dross, it was small, independent pictures such as
My Beautiful Launderette
, made for less than $1 million, that were drawing an enthusiastic audience—the viewers who used to be defined as the “art house” crowd. Pauline loved this spiky love story set in punk-infested South London, about two young men, Omar and Johnny (Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day-Lewis), who inject some life into their seedy neighborhood by opening a spiffed-up, trendy laundromat. Pauline wrote, “Frears is responsive to grubby desperation and to the uncouthness and energy in English life—he’s responsive to what went into the punk-music scene and to what goes into teen-age gang life.” She found that “Frears’s editing rhythms that seem so right are actually very odd.
My Beautiful Launderette
doesn’t feel like any other movie; it’s almost as if he’s cutting to the rhythm of Pakistani-accented English—to what you can hear even in the quirky lilt of the title.” She loved Day-Lewis’s performance as the constantly daring Johnny, and she loved the movie’s light, unself-conscious portrayal of two men in love: “This Johnny wants to make something of himself, and he’ll go through more than his share of humiliation to do it,” she wrote. “He also enjoys wooing the cuddly Omar. He can’t resist touching Omar with his tongue when they’re out on the street, right in front of the launderette, with white-racist rowdies all around them. He can’t resist being frisky, because it’s dangerous, and that makes it more erotic.”

The fact that
My Beautiful Launderette
and other “small pictures” (such as James Ivory’s
A Room with a View
) were able to break through and find their audience was heartening to Pauline. The fates of most films now seemed pegged solely on the question of how big a noise could be made about them. This and this alone was seen by the industry—and by a growing part of the audience—as the sole measure of their worth. The strong, cautionary words, the advocacy for smart, risky, creative filmmaking that Pauline had poured forth in her column for years may have been more important than ever, but they seemed increasingly futile. The movie executives who had once read her with great fascination, even when she destroyed their films, now were far less interested in what she had to say. The marketing lords had figured out a way to make certain films—many films—critic-proof. Don Simpson’s power had reached its apex, while Pauline’s was on the decline.

All of this was very much on her mind when she reviewed
Top Gun
, a Tom Cruise action picture about fighter pilots that became one of the top box-office hits of the summer of 1986. It was produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and Pauline wrote, “Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new ‘art’ form: the self-referential commercial.
Top Gun
is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”

Still, she advocated steadfastly for the few signs of life she saw on the movie scene. One came with David Lynch’s latest,
Blue Velvet
. The film belonged to a rather overworked genre: the study of a small town whose calm exterior masks sexual perversities and violent tensions. But this was nothing for the mainstream bestseller mentality, such as
Kings Row
or
Peyton Place
: In exploring the unexpected horrors that lurk in the little town of Lumberton,
Blue Velvet
took many audience members to a place they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to be. As the odd, clean-cut, yet slightly bent Jeffrey, whose coming of age is the final destination point of the bizarre plot, Kyle MacLach-lan gave what Pauline termed “a phenomenal performance.” The film, she thought, was “the work of a genius naïf. If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition. Lynch doesn’t censor his sexual fantasies, and the film’s hypercharged erotic atmosphere makes it something of a trance-out, but his humor keeps breaking through, too.”

She also loved the spirit of twenty-nine-year-old Spike Lee’s
She’s Gotta Have It
, which was shot in black and white in twelve days for around $175,000 and grossed more than $7 million—around the same amount as the studio-backed
Blue Velvet
. Pauline thought Lee had the rarest gift of all—“what for want of a better term is called ‘a film sense.’ It’s an instinct for how to make a movie move—for how much motion there should be in a shot, for how fast to cut the shots, for how to make them flow into each other rhythmically.” And she was delighted by Jonathan Demme’s
Something Wild
, largely because Demme possessed “a true gift for informality . . . I can’t think of any other director who is so instinctively and democratically interested in everybody he shows you. Each time a new face appears, it’s looked at with such absorption and delight that you almost think the movie will flit off and tell this person’s story.”

At the 1986 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, she supported
Blue Velvet
, although she would have been happy to see
Something Wild
win. Unfortunately, she was thwarted across the board:
Hannah and Her Sisters
swept the prizes, winning Best Picture, Best Director for Woody Allen, and Best Supporting Actress for Dianne Wiest. The NYFCC, however, ignored the film that won that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, Oliver Stone’s
Platoon
. Pauline spent the first paragraph of her review laying out Stone’s (to her) suspect background: Yale dropout, failed, nomadic writer, decorated soldier in Vietnam, postwar druggie, then NYU film student under Martin Scorsese. “We can surmise,” Pauline wrote (perhaps somewhat unfairly), “that Stone became a grunt in Vietnam to ‘become a man’ and to become a writer. As
Platoon
, a coming-of-age film, demonstrates, he went through his rite of passage, but, as
Platoon
also demonstrates, he became a very bad writer—a hype artist.” She recognized that Stone was trying to show the madness brought on by Vietnam in a more visceral way than it had ever been shown before, but, despite such touches as the use of her old sparring partner Samuel Barber’s
Adagio for Strings
as counterpoint for the bloody battle scenes,
Platoon
lacked the poetry, however misshapen, of
The Deer Hunter
. “The results are overwrought,” Pauline wrote, “with too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity.”

 

By this time Gina and Warner Friedman had separated. Pauline had feared that marriage would destroy their relationship, and she had wanted to save them both the heartbreak. Gina and Will moved in with Pauline briefly before finding another house nearby. Warner continued to visit Pauline after he and Gina were divorced. One thing they had in common was a love of watching boxing matches on television, and they were often joined by Allen Barra.

One person for whom Pauline showed unconditional affection was Will. Her friends were amazed by how completely she doted on him—and he in turn adored her. Will always called her “Pauline”—never “Grandma.” Once, when Will was a small child, Warner and Gina had gone away for an overnight trip and left Will in Pauline’s care. Gina asked her mother to be sure to keep a close eye on him, and Pauline replied, ‘I’ll watch him with my own life.”

She continued to love life in Great Barrington and the big house with its spacious rooms and overflowing bookshelves. She enjoyed going to several of the local restaurants, including the Inn on the Green and the Castle Street Grill. But if she dined at a place that was under par, she would sigh, “I can do better than this myself.” She did enjoy cooking at home and typically preferred simple meals with fresh ingredients—lots of vegetables and pasta. By now she had stopped drinking as a general health precaution. She missed her strong shots of Myers’s Rum and Wild Turkey, but learned to get the utmost out of endless pots of tea and bottles of water.

Her relations with most of the local business owners were fairly harmonious, with the occasional ripple. Once, Warner had taken her to a hardware store to buy some supplies. It happened to be Mother’s Day, and the proprietor gave her a gift, adding in a condescending tone, “Because you look like you’re a mother or a grandmother.” “Fuck you, Charlie,” Pauline replied. “Do you know I’ve written ten books?”

Pauline continued to work hard to promote younger writer friends that she considered had something exceptional to offer. Ray Sawhill by now had a serious girlfriend, a bright and attractive young writer named Polly Frost. Many of the male Paulettes felt that Pauline was unduly harsh on their wives and girlfriends, but in this case, Pauline had introduced the couple. She had immediately taken to Frost, who had studied the harpsichord but now had a serious interest in being a writer. Pauline sensed in Frost what she had sensed in Sawhill: Neither of them was interested in her as a cult leader or career champion, but as an entertaining, warm, lively person who was fun to talk with over a meal. Her conversations with Frost revolved around clothes, food, and animals more than it did movies. Frost’s gift was for humor, and Pauline helped her get several pieces published in
The New Yorker
and
The Atlantic Monthly
. But she almost always believed that criticism was the path her protégés should take, and she began prodding Frost to write movie reviews.

One of the flaws in her mentoring style was that her pride in her own past often led her to give bad career advice to young writer friends. “She was about to go back to San Francisco when Shawn gave her a buzz and hired her at
The New Yorker
,” said Sawhill. “But somehow, in her mind, this turned into: She got what she worked for—it wasn’t just a great stroke of luck that turned her life around. It was—finally, the universe has been proven a just one.” And Pauline was certain that if the writers she was encouraging would only sit down and write a big piece on spec, magazine editors would see how brilliant they were and have to hire them. “She would be let down if I would say, ‘I’m killing myself writing these pieces and nobody’s publishing them,’” said Sawhill. “Somehow, she really thought it would work, and in many cases, it didn’t.”

Pauline also continued to advocate strongly for both David Edelstein and James Wolcott. She had been trying for some time to interest Shawn in Wolcott, but the editor always demurred, saying that he didn’t think Wolcott was quite right for
The New Yorker
. She also tried to persuade Billy Abrahams to bring out a book of Wolcott’s collected pieces. As early as 1982, she had written to Abrahams that Wolcott’s movie columns for
Texas Monthly
were “absolutely first rate. The amazing thing about his writing—whether it’s the freelance pieces in
The New Republic
or in
The New York Review of Books
or one of his regular columns—is that it overlaps and forms a body of witty criticism. There hasn’t been anything like him since the young Tynan. . . . Why don’t you nab him?”

One person who resisted being drawn into Pauline’s circle was the gifted young critic Owen Gleiberman. Like many others, Gleiberman’s friendship with her began when he wrote her a fan letter while still a college student. He was writing reviews for the University of Michigan’s student newspaper, and Pauline encouraged him to send her some samples, writing back and offering praise and constructive criticism in some detail. They eventually met in 1980 in New York, shortly after her return from Hollywood, and at first Gleiberman seemed poised to become a Paulette.

Although Gleiberman was as flattered by Pauline’s attention as most of her protégés were, he also was very aware of the complexities involved in her mentorship. He believed that she was most comfortable when her younger “discoveries” did work she could respect and honestly praise, work that showed originality and spark, yet she was also quite conscious of keeping them in the position of being an acolyte. It was the same complex that David Denby had observed years earlier, and in many cases the fate of the Paulettes seemed to rest on the question of their individual temperament: How willing were they were to remain in Pauline’s shadow?

In the 1980s
The Boston Phoenix
served as a kind of farm team for the Paulettes who had their eye on success in bigger, New York jobs: Janet Maslin, Steven Schiff, and David Edelstein had all put in their time at the
Phoenix
before moving on to higher-profile reviewing posts. Gleiberman took this route as well, and had spent two and a half years on the newspaper, happily working as a second-string movie critic, when he received a call from Clay Felker. The genius behind
New York
was now in decline, and was trying to revive some of his lost glory by starting a small newspaper, a sort of precursor to the successful
Seven Days
, known as
The East Side Express
. He had read some of Gleiberman’s reviews in the
Phoenix
and asked him to be his first-string movie critic. Gleiberman agreed, staying on at the
Phoenix
while freelancing for Felker’s publication.

Once Gleiberman began working for the short-lived
East Side Express
, he found himself reviewing many of the same films Pauline wrote about for
The New Yorker.
Often he disagreed with her—Bob Fosse’s
Star 80
, which he liked and Pauline detested, being a case in point. His career advanced to the point that he was put up for membership in the National Society of Film Critics, which initially he was denied. When discussing his disappointment about that decision with Pauline one day, she told him that she felt that a number of the members had not believed his work for
The East Side Express
to be at the same level of what he was doing for the
Phoenix
.

“Nobody was reading my reviews in
The East Side Express
,” Gleiberman recalled. “They read what you sent in. I knew she was lying to me. And what I said to myself was,
I cannot trust what she’s saying
. And I decided right there to end my friendship with Pauline, because I realized that she would lie to her critic acolytes in order to keep them in line. She was a great, fascinating woman who had her dark side.” There was no dramatic falling-out between Pauline and Gleiberman; they remained on cordial but relatively distant terms for the rest of her life. But Gleiberman’s experience with her was as shocking, perhaps even traumatic, as, in a different way, Denby’s had been. Gleiberman always considered himself the truest of all the Paulettes because he had realized that he had to be himself. “To be true to what Pauline taught us,” he said, “you had to break with her.”