Pauline Kael (64 page)

Many of the Paulettes were hesitant about introducing their wives and girlfriends to their mentor. When James Wolcott became seriously involved with the talented writer and editor Laura Jacobs, who eventually became his wife, he told her that he wasn’t going to introduce her to Pauline because Pauline wouldn’t like her. Besides Polly Frost, however, she was fond of Stephanie Zacharek, another critic for
The Boston Phoenix
, who eventually married the film critic and essayist Charles Taylor, whose career Pauline had followed with interest for some time. Zacharek had idolized Pauline when she was growing up, and the day that Taylor took her to meet Pauline in Great Barrington, Zacharek was extremely nervous. She was an attractive redhead, and Pauline put her at ease immediately by opening the door and saying, “Oh—you have Annette O’Toole’s hair!”

Oddly enough, she had rather kind feelings toward Molly Haskell, who was married to her chief agitator, Andrew Sarris. Pauline was quick to point out that she thought Sarris had a lively intelligence, and that she had refrained from commenting on his work after “Circles and Squares”—the so-called feud between them was mostly maintained by Sarris over the years. “Pauline felt that Molly, once she married Sarris, really hampered herself,” observed Wolcott, “because there was no way that she was not going to bow to his greater authority. She felt that Molly never became the critic she might have been, because she took up so many of Andy’s tastes and sensibilities. Even when she differed, she had to explain
why
she differed.”

Similarly, Pauline often regretted that the wives of important artists took such a backseat to their husbands. When she had dinner with Satyajit Ray, a director whose work she had admired for decades, she found his wife, Bijoya, to be extremely bright and poised. But she noticed that when Ray began to speak, Bijoya became silently adoring. At one point in their conversation, Pauline mildly challenged one of Ray’s opinions about a movie. The director froze, and his wife gave Pauline a look to indicate that she had deeply offended the great man.

Her younger friends admired her for hanging on to her democratic spirit; spending time with Pauline was a teaching experience that went beyond the bounds of talking about writing. Charles Taylor remembered, “I once said, in a fit of frustration, ‘Stupid people drive me crazy.’ And she said, ‘You know, some people just aren’t bright. They can’t help that.’” Another time, Polly Frost was with Pauline at a party where one of the other guests was complaining about her recent experience on jury duty. “These people were all housewives, and what do they know?” she snapped. Pauline turned to her and said, “And what did
your
mother do?”

In late 1994, with several of Pauline’s earlier volumes having gone out of print, Dutton published
For Keeps
, a huge compendium of her reviews, spanning her entire career. By February 1995 it appeared in the number-six position on
The Village Voice Literary Supplement
’s list of hardcover bestsellers. (By January 1996, it had sold more than 18,000 copies in hardcover—an excellent run.) Pauline had gone carefully through all of her published reviews and essays, in conjunction with Billy Abrahams, and carefully excerpted the pieces of writing she considered her best. (Perhaps because she had battle fatigue, she omitted several of her more controversial reviews, including the ones of
The Children’s Hour
,
The Sergeant
,
Rich and Famous
, and
Shoah
.) In her author’s note she discussed the pleasures of a lifetime of reviewing films. “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs,” she wrote. “I think I have.” Many friends and colleagues continued to prod her to do a memoir, however, including Peggy Brooks, who spent a weekend with Pauline and Charles Simmons in Great Barrington in September of 1994. “I kept bringing up the idea of her work on an autobiography,” Brooks wrote to Abrahams. “She was resistant at first, but it seemed both to Charles and me, that towards the end, she was starting to think about it seriously. I know it’s difficult for her physically to write now, but her head is in such sharp shape, I think she could do a fascinating book, different from any other of hers.” The memoir never came to pass.

One of her greatest pleasures continued to be her grandson. Will, now ten, was an energetic, quixotic boy who didn’t seem particularly interested in either his studies or athletics—several friends observed that he seemed to live almost in a world of his own. His interests were few but intense. He loved action figures and action movies—Bruce Lee was a favorite. He was fascinated by space—any television documentary on black holes was certain to capture his attention—and he loved his enormous collection of big, unbreakable Carnegie animals. Pauline indulged him in all of these, never attempting to steer him toward a more “serious” path. She thought that children should be left alone, allowed to find their own way, and she happily joined him in watching Bruce Lee movies. She seemed intent on giving her seal of approval to Will’s uncomplicated pursuit of pop culture in the same sense that she had once tried to tell her readers that there was no need to feel guilty about enjoying kitsch and trash.

Warner Friedman often worried that his son’s interests weren’t broad enough and would try to encourage him to paint and to attend museums with him. He also asked Allen Barra to try to get Will interested in sports. Barra spent a fair amount of time practicing baseball with him; while Will was a very good batter, he lacked the patience to master fielding. When Barra came for visits, he often brought his young daughter, Maggie, to play with Will. Barra had taken an active role in helping to shape Maggie’s reading tastes and had instructed her to read both
Tom Sawyer
and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Pauline’s reaction bordered on hostility. “Oh, just let her grow up,” she would say. “I never understood her attitude on things like that,” Barra recalled. “Here was a perfect opportunity for Will to learn about art. And Pauline could have given so much to him, and she didn’t.”

Pauline kept abreast of the changes that continued to sweep through
The New Yorker
offices. After five years Si Newhouse had judged Robert Gottlieb’s editorial tenure unsatisfactory—advertising had declined sharply, and the magazine was losing $5 million a year—and replaced him with Tina Brown, the thirty-eight-year-old British editor who had successfully relaunched
Vanity Fair
and transformed it into a top celebrity magazine. Many of the old-guard writers and reporters suddenly found themselves bounced from their long-standing (and frequently unproductive) jobs. The content changed considerably, with much greater emphasis on current events and far less focus on the magazine’s literary and cultural subjects. Carefully crafted features on cultural figures such as the Irish author Molly Keane, the producer Irene Mayer Selznick, and the famously dyspeptic novelist Marcia Davenport appeared far less frequently; topicality was now critical.

A number of insiders, as well as many longtime readers, resented the new direction, feeling that Brown had subverted the unique mission and tone of the magazine, but Pauline believed that Brown’s arrival made for a welcome and exciting change. (She often asked friends if they really thought anyone would miss Ved Mehta’s interminable, old-fashioned articles.) Pauline was also pleased when Brown, at long last, engaged James Wolcott as a staff writer—a sign that the magazine was cultivating some livelier voices. She was unhappy, however, when Brown terminated Michael Sragow as movie critic.

 

By the mid-1990s Pauline’s Parkinson’s symptoms had grown debilitating. While in the house, she relied on her four-pronged cane—she joked that it wasn’t very dashing, but it did the job. Outside, however, she was constantly fearful of falling, and felt quite uneasy if she didn’t have someone’s arm to support her. Visits to New York were impossible—she made her last trip there in 1992. Public appearances were also no longer feasible, and she hated to go to plays or concerts or movies: When her shaking was at its worst, she noticed that she made the seats around her vibrate, and she didn’t want to distract her fellow audience members.

Twice a week she took massage therapy from a doctor in Otis, Massachusetts—Pauline thought he was a little like a hippie version of Jeff Bridges. She looked forward to her sessions for two reasons: Her doctor was unimpressed with her celebrity and frequently told her why he thought she’d been wrong about certain movies; most important, the therapy brought forth good results, making her muscles much more supple.

Although she tried not to lose her sense of humor, she wasn’t very good at witnessing her own diminuendo. Her fading memory was a particular source of irritation: She told Ray Sawhill that during the day, she would often wonder if the words she couldn’t come up with would ever come back to her. They did—at night, when she was in bed. She also experienced in a highly personal way the cold and condescending way in which people discriminate against the elderly: In stores in Great Barrington, she was frequently ignored by clerks who didn’t want to contend with an elderly woman with a cane and the shakes. For someone who had always possessed a strong sense of pride and independence, such episodes were humiliating.

She continued to take pride in the developing careers of the Paulettes. Hal Hinson had secured a reviewing spot at
The Washington Post
, David Edelstein was doing fine work at
Slate
, Michael Sragow was the lead film critic at the
San Francisco Examiner
. More than ever, she was a devoted champion of James Wolcott—who in 1997 left
The New Yorker
and returned to
Vanity Fair
, where he had once been a contributing editor. He was hired to write columns on media and pop culture, which he would presumably be able to do in more of a no-holds-barred way than
The New Yorker
had permitted. Pauline wasn’t mad about
Vanity Fair
, which she found too brassy and insubstantial and celebrity-driven, but she looked forward to seeing what Wolcott came up with.

In the magazine’s April 1997 issue, she found out. In a column titled “Waiting for Godard,” Wolcott wrote a devastating piece about the Paulettes, branding them as a band of hopeless imitators who had squandered their own talents by falling under Pauline’s spell. “They write as advocates, both feet on the accelerator,” he wrote. “They still write as if‘trash’ (the good kind—blatant, vital, sexy) were in danger of being euthanized by the team of Merchant Ivory. Gentility is the enemy—we’re drowning in crinoline! they cry. Bring back hot rods and cheap lipstick.” Wolcott was reasonably careful not to place Pauline herself in his crosshairs, but he didn’t really need to: Without saying so directly, his article heavily implied that she had encouraged sycophancy and slavish devotion. Pauline was stunned that someone whose career she had worked so assiduously to advance could have written such a piece. Of course, Wolcott had learned a great deal from her: “Waiting for Godard” was, in its own way, as much of an attention-getter for him as “Circles and Squares” had once been for her. Articles were written about it, radio broadcasts were devoted to it, and the term “Paulette” became familiar to a wide reading public. Pauline refrained from commenting on “Waiting for Godard” publicly, but, unsurprisingly, Wolcott instantly became persona non grata among his fellow Paulettes. “He’s a careerist creep,” observed Charles Taylor. “I think that Wolcott simply decides what is going to advance him and takes the pose. I read that piece, and that piece hurt Pauline. That piece
really
hurt her. The loss of him as a friend hurt her.”

Wolcott acknowledged that “Waiting for Godard” severed their friendship, although it is difficult to tell if he considered that a strong possibility at the time he was writing the piece. “I knew she wasn’t happy about it,” he said. “James Toback told me later on that she was really pissed. I think that piece was overkill. I feel bad about it. I had just re-upped with
Vanity Fair
, so I was trying to build up a head of steam—not so much about Pauline but about the other people.... I didn’t think people would carry on the grudges for fifteen years.”

Despite the fact that “Waiting for Godard” created a permanent split between Wolcott and Pauline, she continued to read his work with interest. During one of her treatments at Massachusetts General Hospital in the late 1990s, she asked Steve Vineberg to bring her a copy of
Vanity Fair
so she could read Wolcott’s latest column.

As the 1990s wore on, Gina had to deal with her own health problems in addition to caring for her mother. She suffered a bout with cancer, which was treated successfully, in addition to a prolonged and draining case of Lyme disease that left a few lingering effects in its wake. Pauline’s Parkinson’s had by now made it impossible for her to manage a knife and fork properly, which meant that she stopped going to restaurants for a time. Eventually she was put on a more intensive round of medication that stabilized her shaking condition and enabled her to lead a much more normal life. The problem was, the stronger medicine gave her hallucinations. She saw live bears—“no cartoons, no lyricism—just realism,” she told Ray Sawhill—at the edge of her vision. Once she watched as a third arm came out of her chest to grapple with her other two arms. When she reached out to crush the third arm, she watched in terror and amazement as it shattered into bits; she told friends it reminded her of the end of
Zabriskie Point
. Eventually, the hallucinations receded, and she joked that she had occasionally reached out to pat the animals that appeared before her.

When she didn’t feel up to climbing the stairs to her second-floor bedroom, she would stay downstairs in the living room, reading and keeping up with the news. She had an exercise bicycle installed there, which she was supposed to use to keep herself as limber as possible. She slept deeply, but not for long periods of time—often, five hours was the limit. She told Ray Sawhill that her declining health made her all the more “desperate to read and to take in everything . . . I think I’ve never been so eager to learn and to do things as I am now.” She loved keeping up with television news and watching
The Sopranos
,
Saturday Night Live
, and
Sex and the City
. She also made her way through the steady stream of cassettes of new movies that producers and directors were constantly sending her. Sometimes a screening of a new picture was arranged for her at a local movie theater.