Pauline Kael (8 page)

The critic who most consistently irritated Pauline was the country’s most powerful one:
The New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther. He had come to the
Times
in 1940, taking over as screen editor and chief movie critic from Frank Nugent, who had gone to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Crowther’s writing style was ponderous and schoolmasterish, lacking in any real wit. He was constantly on the march against vulgarity and sensationalism, two qualities that Pauline believed could make for hugely entertaining movies. Crowther sought to maintain a certain numbingly correct objectivity. “Any critic writing for a large publication cannot be extremely personalized,” he once stated. “He must realize that other persons have their own opinions.” Pauline dismissed this as “saphead objectivity” and found some of Crowther’s opinions—such as his belief that the best actors are the ones who maintain the most consistent popularity—downright loopy. In his high-minded insistence that “pictures are a great intellectual exercise and have great power to influence people in their thinking,” Pauline felt that Crowther completely missed the fun and vitality that movies were capable of bringing to audiences. She also resented his power and influence; because he was generally hailed as America’s most powerful critic, his
Times
reviews could affect whether people elsewhere in the country saw a film. In her denunciation of Crowther, she was once again squaring off against the East Coast establishment.

 

Pauline found her situation in New York increasingly untenable: She couldn’t live on her unemployment insurance, and she found herself waiting until a check—from Vi or Bob Horan or Robert Duncan, or from one of her odd freelance jobs—came through so that she could pickup her clothes at the dry cleaners, or purchase some new stockings. She was filled with invective for the “eastern college people” who swoop down on the best publishing jobs, because “they’ll work for almost anything (since they don’t need the money).... I’ve seen so many really incompetent people get jobs in preference to good people.” On a visit to Capricorn, she and Barber got into a violent argument about some artistic point, and Barber, who by now perceived her as a threatening influence on Horan, lit into her without mercy. No invitation for a weekend at Capricorn had been issued since, and if Horan had traveled into the city, he hadn’t bothered to contact her.

By the fall Pauline had to acknowledge that New York was not working out for her. Deeply disappointed, she packed her things and moved back to San Francisco. Her years in New York seemed to her to represent one stinging defeat after another, and she felt no closer to success than she had been when she left Berkeley.

O
n her return to the West Coast Pauline moved in temporarily with her mother, who was living on her own and in declining health. Their time together was apparently pleasant, for when Pauline found an apartment of her own at 355 Fulton Street, she felt guilty about leaving Judith. She cast around for a newspaper job, trying (unsuccessfully) to master typing. She worked for a time as a clerk at Brentano’s, where her total income for 1946 was $156.65, and then found a position at Houghton Mifflin. She was grateful for the money, but she complained to Vi, “I don’t think properly on the typewriter and I have been composing hundreds of business letters so that my poor mind is a cesspool of business English.”

Her timing in coming back to San Francisco, however, was excellent, as she was about to witness one of the most explosive flowerings of the arts in the city’s history. One of the crucial figures of the period—in many ways, the woman who triggered the beginning of it—was the poet and translator Madeline Gleason, who launched the first Festival of Modern Poetry at San Francisco’s Lucien Labaudt Gallery in April of 1947. This landmark event unfolded over the course of two evenings. Among the poets featured were the activist Muriel Rukeyser; the anarchist Kenneth Rexroth, who had for some years been cultivating a growing presence in San Francisco; and Robert Duncan, who had returned to the Bay Area following the collapse of his marriage to Marjorie McKee and had enrolled at Berkeley as a student in medieval and Renaissance literature. The event was the catalyst for what came to be known as the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s, which in turn would feed into the later San Francisco Renaissance. The local audience for poetry readings began to grow. Both Duncan and Jack Spicer had a following from their classes at Berkeley; they began to have discussion groups in their homes in which young poets would read from their works, and soon more and more people were crowding into their salon evenings. While the city had long been home to major individual writers such as Frank Norris, Bret Harte, and Jack London, the poetic activity of the 1940s and ’50s would make it a genuine bohemian literary center.

Pauline was, by nature, distrustful of such movements. She admired the highly personal tone that many of the Berkeley poets employed, but she was not one who easily succumbed to the romance of underground causes; she suspected that those involved in them were guilty of self-consciousness at best, self-promotion at worst. Much as she revered artistic achievement, she also had a pragmatist’s love of mainstream success and failed to see why a group of obscure poets should congratulate themselves for being known only to a tiny sector of the reading public. Her own connection to the postwar flowering of avant-garde activity was a more personal one: She had become a friend and lover of the poet James Broughton.

Born in Modesto, California, in 1913, Broughton claimed that the defining experience of his life had taken place at age three, when he received a visitation from an angel named Hermy, who proclaimed that, however he might resist the calling, he would one day be a poet. “He offered me three gifts that he said would come in handy: intuition, articulation, and merriment,” recalled Broughton. “Poets, he explained, believe in the unbelievable, worship wonder, celebrate life. Despite what I might hear to the contrary the world was not a miserable prison, it was a playground for a nonstop tournament between stupidity and imagination. If I followed the game sharply enough I could be a useful spokesman for Big Joy.” At this point, Broughton recalled, Hermy pulled a sparkler from between his legs and showered him with stars, disappearing into the night, just as Broughton’s mother entered the room to check on him.

A visionary like Broughton might have seemed an unlikely match for a wisecracking, skeptical, resolutely earthbound woman like Pauline, but they had a number of things in common: a California upbringing, a deep feeling for the natural beauty of the west, a difficult mother (like Judith, Broughton’s mother, Olga, was born into comfortable circumstances and was disappointed by the life her husband had carved out for them), and a great love of the arts. Broughton was an immensely likable man—attractive, dynamic, witty, openhearted, and bisexual. Again, Pauline was making a mistake that heterosexual women in the arts often made: They were surrounded by attractive, bright men unafraid to engage in emotional discourse, and they mistakenly thought that a passionate friendship could turn into an enduring romance. And the men, lacking strong gay role models, did their best to conform to what the women wanted them to be.

“He looked like he was the concept that Marlowe was working on in
Doctor Faustus
,” Broughton’s friend Ariel Parkinson said of him. “He was the concept of Mephistopheles!” He also had a remarkably strong sense of self that had made it possible for him to withstand years of adversity that might have sunk a lesser man. James Broughton was the child of a socially ambitious mother who, in her son’s words, “adored babies but disliked children.” The daughter of the president of the San Francisco Bank, she married a man she held in contempt for not being a more aggressive wage-earner. Broughton’s father had died in his mid-thirties, and his mother set about finding herself a new husband; her principal requirement was that he had to be financially secure. But many of her suitors recoiled in the presence of her effeminate son. After Olga came home one night to discover her son decked out in her beaded chiffon evening gown and lamé cloche, she decided that he needed to be taken in hand and given a crash course in masculinity. She passed the responsibility for this on to her current beau, who saw to it that young James wound up in a military academy in San Rafael.

Educated at Stanford (where his lovers included the future writer and gay activist Harry Hay), Broughton had enjoyed a limited success with his play
Summer Fury
and was buoyed up by the enthusiastic climate for avant-garde work in San Francisco, venturing into experimental filmmaking. The Bay Area was home to a number of nonnarrative filmmakers who would receive considerable acclaim, including Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. Pauline circulated among them, and once she and Broughton met, she helped sew costumes and do miscellaneous production work on his dreamlike early film
Mother’s Day
(1948), which Broughton intended as a comment on the tyranny of motherhood, and how it affects children. But Pauline’s involvement in the California underground cinema movement remained limited. “She deplored little magazines, little theater, little films,” Broughton wrote. “She valued the big time, the big number, the big screen.”

“She was not sympathetic to avant-garde enterprise and did not make any particular attempt to deal with it in her writing,” observed Ernest Callenbach, longtime editor of
Film Quarterly
. “Documentary was also something that bored her. Broughton said to me once, ‘You have to remember that Pauline is an Ibsenist.’ It’s perfectly true! What she was interested in was plot and character. The visual side of film, although she had an immense visual memory and could remember things well, didn’t interest her as critical material. She was so focused on people and the way the story was told as a drama that she would neglect the things that would make movies interesting.” The filmmaker Bruce Baillie agreed that Pauline could be waspish about avant-garde movies. “She liked the word ‘precious,’” Baillie recalled. “She liked to say, behind the scenes, ‘Those precious filmmakers hold on to every single bit of film and have no discretion’—that kind of thing. But between these tirades, she was also very loving and encouraging to us.” Pauline did attempt to persuade Broughton to head for Hollywood and gain a foothold there, arguing that he would never truly be able to test his own talents unless he tried to make it in Los Angeles.

Broughton had been staying in a small house at 60 Lower Crescent Avenue in Sausalito, and soon Pauline talked her way into moving in with him. His sister, Marjorie Broughton, recalled that Pauline lived by her own rules and sometimes shook up the neighbors: She had a habit of parading in front of the living room windows in her bra, and on one occasion, she removed her bra and waved it out the window at passersby. Still, her presence was a boon in many ways. She flew into a frenzy of cleaning and cooking and interior decorating, leaving Broughton somewhat puzzled by this burst of domestic attentiveness, but she was such vibrant company that it was easy enough to go along with her.

Then, in early 1948, she informed Broughton that she was pregnant. He was stunned, then angry: He believed that she had for some time wanted to have a child and had blatantly manipulated him into being the father. Pauline assured him that she would make no demands on him, of a financial or any other kind. But Broughton wanted nothing to do with the child. Although he claims in his memoir that he was not aware of its existence until many years later, he told a different story to Joel Singer, who remembered, “He ‘threw her out.’ I heard that phrase countless times over the years, and it was certainly related to her being pregnant. He felt deceived. He had no intention of being a father at that time.”

She broke the news of her pregnancy to her mother and to her siblings. Rose was shocked and disappointed, feeling that her sister was making a grave mistake, and several of Pauline’s friends felt that she never fully forgave Rose for not supporting her in a time of stress. Not surprisingly, it was Anne who responded with the greatest equanimity; “Pauline is Pauline” had long been her summing-up of the tumultuous events in her youngest sister’s life. She also had the support of many close friends. In the spring of 1948, she received a letter from Robert Horan, still residing at Capricorn, who expressed regret that “what sounded like such a solid thing for a while” with Broughton “had to explode into these fragments.” He also said that “excepting the fact that for a few infantile hours I even pretended the child was mine!, I couldn’t be happier about it.”

Pauline was happy, too. Decades later, while she was having dinner with the food critic Meredith Brody, the subject of abortion arose. Pauline was in favor of reproductive rights for women, but when Brody praised a mutual friend for her work on pro-choice issues, Pauline stiffened. “When it happens to you,” she said, “you will think of the child growing inside of you and the person that you were making love to—and I guarantee you, you won’t be able to do it.”

It was decided that Pauline would leave town to have her baby. She moved down to Santa Barbara, renting a place at 1108 Bath Street. At Santa Barbara’s Cottage Hospital on September 21, 1948, she gave birth to a five-pound, fifteen-ounce daughter whom she named Gina James. The birth certificate stated that the mother’s name was “Mrs. Pauline James” and the father’s, “Lionel James,” a writer. She adored having a child and received help both from friends and her sister Anne. “The pictures of Gina are a delight,” Robert Horan wrote to her in the summer of 1949. “I have one set up on my desk, and it stares at me with those deep and curious eyes, as if to say ‘What in heaven are
you
doing?’” By June 1950, Gina had begun her toilet training. She was also quite talkative, and she often spoke in the first person: “I’m Gina!” “I’m a baby!”

The first year of Gina’s life was difficult for Pauline. While some writers have strained to portray her as an early feminist, nothing could be further from the truth. To Pauline, leading a life on her own was not really a virtuous act. While she was sorry that Broughton had exited her life, she regretted not having a husband only in the sense that having one would have made it easier to get along financially.