I remember getting a letter from an eminent New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung and that I should move out with my cowboy boots.
Shawn stuck by her, although he would sometimes call in the night about comma placement. Kael was finally secure, and she continued to publish books that collected her reviews. Her second, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, did almost as well as I Lost It at the Movies. It contained the piece she’d written about The Group for Life. But by then, having become a regular reviewer of movies, she had developed a reputation not just for exuberance but for cutting remarks. From her niche at the New Yorker she was busting up consensus right and left, and she tended to do so with a flair for drama. From the beginning of that gig it was clear she would be a force to be reckoned with.
Some people had more flattering ways of describing her approach than others. Kael sent a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, for example, to the silent film star Louise Brooks, with whom she’d long corresponded. Brooks replied, “Your picture on the dust cover made me think of Dorothy Parker when she was young in a moment of happiness.” Waspish but happy seemed something like what Kael was going for with her persona in print. But Kael’s enemies, a growing list, pegged her as too brash for the entire business. A headline in the December 13, 1967, issue of Variety read:
Pauline Kael: Zest but No Manners; She Tramples Down Polite Males
This was perhaps overstating it. William Shawn was definitely a “polite male.” But he had a will of steel, and he didn’t really want general essays on the state of the movie art or movie criticism and ran enough interference with Kael to prevent them from appearing in his genteel magazine. Kael, too, felt early on that she needed to settle into being a more ordinary sort of reviewer. In the 1960s she published just one more long essay, which ended up in the February 1969 issue of Harper’s, titled “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”
Just as Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” has sometimes been mischaracterized as a wholesale defense of camp, “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is sometimes wrongly described as a defense of trash as art. But Kael spends most of her time explaining that there are key differences between the two. She wanted to explain why, on a certain level, questions of technique are irrelevant:
The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made.
This argument is not very far from some of the claims Sontag persistently made about the interaction of form and content. In fact, one way to quickly summarize “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is in terms borrowed from Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Kael argues at length for erotics in the place of hermeneutics. As ever, she is interested in reaction, not aesthetics. Audiences respond most to the movies that please them, she says, even when they are trash and not art. But she also argues that art, in the movies:
is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.
The problem with the interplay of trash and art, Kael worried, is that increasingly it meant that people were willing to call trash art when there was no need. Probably few disagreed with her that this sort of sophomoric pretentiousness was damaging. Where Kael again began to run afoul of quite a few critics, most of them male, was when she classified the work of Hitchcock as trash, but then got angry with those who insisted that trash needed some kind of justification. “But why should pleasure need justification?” she asked. It was not that Kael couldn’t see trash corrupting, on some level, the entire tone of the culture: “It certainly cramps and limits opportunities for artists.” But she thought of it as a kind of gateway drug, in the famous formulation of her final line: “Trash has given us an appetite for art.”
The analogy with Sontag’s ideas about camp and interpretation is not one-to-one. Sontag had written that there was a kind of pleasure in analysis, in the taking apart and putting back together of things, something that Kael could never abide. Sontag believed in a less popularized version of pleasure and could not have cared less about how the average moviegoer encountered the higher values; an admission of pure enjoyment of trash—unmediated by the ironies of camp—would have been totally beyond her. But strangely, despite their shared interest in the question of what made art, well, art, Sontag and Kael never crossed swords again. Neither wrote a word about the other except that one brief exchange in 1964. Kael seemed to lose interest in these grand pronouncements. Her reviews, while still sterling and brilliant, settled into relatively conventional review form. In fact, for the rest of her life she never again wrote anything like “Trash, Art and the Movies,” eschewing these kinds of broader essays for the most part.
There was a reason for that. The one major project Kael was able to persuade William Shawn to publish at the New Yorker was a long essay about Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Originally, Kael had meant to write an introduction to an edition of the screenplay, but it ballooned, in her hands, to a fifty-thousand-word treatise on the relationship of a writer to the whole process of making movies. The New Yorker published it in two parts in October 1971, no doubt thinking it would showcase the crown jewel Kael had become as one of the most famous film reviewers in the country, a figure of cultish popularity. Instead, it was a career disaster.
Kane is set aside almost immediately. Kael declares it valuable as a “shallow masterpiece,” which according to her personal scale of value did not make the film a bad one. She had her sights set on a different question: she wanted to know who, exactly, was responsible for what brilliance could be found in Kane. She attributes much of the film’s genius not to the much-laureled Welles, but rather to the relatively forgotten screenplay writer, Herman Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz had been a hanger-on around the Round Table, and like Dorothy Parker he had been offered Hollywood work and taken it for the money. In explaining his career, Kael rapidly turned up the dial to rhapsodize about the achievements of 1920s and 1930s screenwriters:
And though, apparently, they one and all experienced it as prostitution of their talents—joyous prostitution in some cases—and though more than one fell in love with movies and thus suffered not only from personal frustration but from the corruption of the great, still new art, they nonetheless as a group were responsible for that sustained feat of careless magic we call “thirties comedy.” Citizen Kane was, I think, its culmination.
Kael explicitly included Dorothy Parker in that crowd. And while she acknowledged that in Hollywood these writers had mostly become drunks, she also concedes that they managed to pound out a few good films, forcing their writing to become “cruder and tougher, less tidy, less stylistically elegant, and more iconoclastic.” This was her basis, it seemed, for having so much faith in Mankiewicz, in making him into a kind of tragic figure eclipsed by the giant ego of the star Orson Welles. Though Kael didn’t overstate Welles’s role as a villain, he nevertheless came off as one, using his big profile to deliberately throw the screenwriter into the shadows of the project.
At first, people loved Kael’s novel approach to Kane. In the New York Times, the Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler praised her account of the making of the film, especially loving Kael’s claim that Citizen Kane was a “shallow work, a shallow masterpiece.” But he thought she’d overstated the talents of the Algonquin Round Table, quoting back at Kael Parker’s sour assessment that they had been “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.”
But then, disgruntled critics—many of whom loved Kane and idolized Welles as an unquestionable auteur—started checking facts. Kael was not a reporter or researcher by trade. She didn’t have the kind of systematic mind it required. So there were holes. Orson Welles was still alive, but Kael had not interviewed him. She later explained that she thought she already knew what he’d say
about who had written the script, that obviously he would vigorously defend himself. Instead, she had gotten much of her sense of Mankiewicz’s involvement from talking to John Houseman, a producer who’d worked with Welles; and from a UCLA academic named Howard Suber, whom she paid for his research. These two were both convinced that Welles had not had any hand in the script; Pauline repeated their take without testing it against claims from the other side.
This inflamed her enemies. Once again, she was accused of careerism. Opponents claimed that the true goal of her essay was to cut Welles down to size, and as Welles was widely agreed to be a great man, critics rushed into the breach to protect him. Andrew Sarris, for his part, thought this was a concealed broadside on him and his auteurist ideas once again. He sniffed back, now at the Village Voice:
Orson Welles is not significantly diminished as the auteur of Citizen Kane by Miss Kael’s breathless revelations about Herman J. Mankiewicz any more than he is diminished as the auteur of The Magnificent Ambersons by the fact that all the best lines and scenes were written by Booth Tarkington.
Sarris was not the only person to see Kael as mounting a proxy attack on the very notion of an “auteur,” doubling down on what she’d already said in “Circles and Squares.” Bellicose metaphors abounded even in the higher-minded reviews. The sympathetic Kenneth Tynan, in the Observer in London, saw Kael as conducting a crusade: “I support her war, but on occasion feel she has picked the wrong battlefield.”
Orson Welles, after reportedly crying in his lawyers’ office about it and considering a lawsuit against Kael (he ultimately demurred), wrote to the Times of London insisting that the screenplay had been a collaborative effort. Then, it is widely believed, he enlisted a proxy to defend him in Esquire—the then magazine writer, now film director Peter Bogdanovich. Titled “The Kane Mutiny,” Bogdanovich’s article is barely about Citizen Kane at all: it is about dismantling Kael’s essay piece by piece, apparently with a great deal of help from Welles. Bogdanovich landed the attack that truly stuck it to Kael: he excoriated her for not crediting the work of the UCLA academic Suber, whose research she paid for. To make matters worse, Suber was evidently angry with Kael. He told Bogdanovich he wasn’t even sure he agreed with Kael that Mankiewicz had written the script alone.
Bogdanovich’s article had a second purpose: it was also advance marketing for a book he was writing on Welles. He quoted from interviews he’d been conducting with the director since 1969, in which Welles was relatively generous about acknowledging Mankiewicz’s contributions to the script. (Bogdanovich would not publish the book until 1992.) Bogdanovich quotes Welles as saying, “Mankiewicz’s contribution … was enormous … I loved him. People did. He was much admired you know.” From there, Bogdanovich proceeds to dismantle nearly every other sentence of Kael’s essay with refutation from Welles—though he quotes few other sources himself. Bogdanovich also ended on a note that emphasized how hurt Welles was by this speculation, quoting from the man himself:
I hate to think what my grandchildren, if I ever get any, and if they should ever bother to look into either of those books, are going to think of their ancestor: something rather special in the line of megalomaniac lice … Cleaning up after Miss Kael is going to take a lot of scrubbing.
It didn’t matter that, in her reviews of his work, Kael had hailed Welles as a visionary who had done marvelous things. In fact, nearly everything she’d ever written that touched on his work had been superlatively praiseworthy. These were all swept aside, no longer relevant because of the Kane essay. There was, certainly, some fault to be laid at Kael’s doorstep. She’d posed an almost impossible task of firmly determining the authorship of a collaborative work. She wavered. Even before Sarris and Bogdanovich went on the hunt, she was already telling an interviewer at the Saturday Review that she did not mean to diminish his role; Welles had been the key figure in the film, she admitted.
Marvelous as Mankiewicz’s script was, the picture might have been an ordinary picture with some other director … and certainly, with some other actor as Kane.
This qualification achieved little, in part because early in the controversy it no longer mattered what Kael had actually thought about the matter. Her mistakes had exposed a vulnerability in her good reputation, and the people who disliked everything she stood for would not pass on the opportunity to take her down. She liked to fight in print and hardly seemed to fault others for doing the same. As a rule, Kael advanced her arguments like forward companies in an army, marching without pause. Throughout her professional life, she knew that to write with authority entailed projecting extreme, even superhuman confidence.
This was, however, still only a projection. Kael was brash, but she was also precise. Her capacity for self-editing was legendary. As her friend and sometime protégé James Wolcott put it, she was “as fanatical a tinkerer as any fussbudget from the E. B. White elf academy.” Could she have been sloppy with the facts, even given that insane attention to detail? Undoubtedly the answer is yes. Curiously enough, in a career filled with ripostes and ongoing arguments in letters pages, this proved one instance in which Kael chose not to press her argument further. According to Kellow, she had dinner with Woody Allen shortly after reading Bogdanovich’s essay and asked him if she should answer. “Don’t answer,” Allen apparently said. Kael was evidently wounded, but she seemed to learn a lesson from this, that she ought not anymore engage in reporting. She also stopped engaging people who didn’t like her work in print.
But it stuck to her. A few years after the whole debacle, Kael found herself at an Oscars party with a screenwriter named John Gregory Dunne. When he wrote about it he immediately placed the renowned film critic in the context of what he clearly thought her great disgrace. When Raising Kane eventually came out in book form, he said, he’d declined the opportunity to review it. It was, in his view, “an arrogantly silly book that made me giggle and hoot as much as any I had ever read about Hollywood.” But he’d been afraid of falling afoul of someone who could pan the movies he worked on. So he kept his own counsel and allowed it to color his view of the book’s writer. At the party where they met, he wrote, Kael had arrived wearing a “Pucci knockdown and orthopedic shoes.” When he introduced himself, she knew his name. And she promptly asked to meet his wife, Joan Didion.
10
Didion
Didion and Kael would often find themselves lumped with Sontag, because they all came from California, and in New York intellectual circles that was considered a remarkable coincidence. Often they didn’t like the way their names were linked. Certainly, Didion and Kael never felt they were kindred spirits. John Gregory Dunne wrote that when Kael asked to meet Didion, all he could think about was the way she hated one of Didion’s novels, and the film based on that novel too, “a princess fantasy” in Kael’s view. “I know I have a lower tolerance for this sort of thing than many people; but should it be tolerated? I found the Joan Didion novel ridiculously swank, and I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles.” He introduced them anyway, seeing commonality in them, even if they couldn’t find it themselves: “Two tough little numbers, each with the instincts of a mongoose and an amiable contempt for the other’s work, putting on a good old girl number.”
“Tough” is not always a word associated with Didion. “Elegant” and “glamorous” are more common descriptors, and those words aren’t always used as compliments—she has been subject to recurrent complaints of the kind Kael made about her “ridiculously swank” style. But, as Didion well knew, surfaces could be deceiving. Although her style was neither as colloquial nor as directly combative as Kael’s, Didion was just as much a master of shattering others’ self-illusions. She prefers an elegant attack to blunt combat.
Didion was born to a middle-class Sacramento family in 1931. Her father, Frank, was no idealistic poultry farmer like Kael’s, nor a dreamer like McCarthy’s or West’s or Sontag’s. He was a practical, steady man who, until World War II, sold insurance. He then joined the N
ational Guard in 1939. The family moved around with him to bases in Durham, North Carolina; and Colorado Springs. It was, from most perspectives, a very normal and placid sort of American childhood. But later, Didion would say it was the constant moving that first induced her sense of herself as an outsider. She was a naturally shy child, too, which didn’t help. Even in her shyness, though, she dreamed of a life lived in public. Her first dream was to become an actress, not a writer. (This she shared with McCarthy.) She told Hilton Als: “I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.”
But there were certain things about Frank Didion she never wrote about. Didion made her name as a personal essayist, so many concluded she was relentlessly self-exposing. Yet until she was nearly seventy, she did not publish a single word on the other disconcerting event of her early life: in her first year at Berkeley as an English student, her father was committed to a mental hospital in San Francisco.
Her mother was a less melancholy soul, more aligned with the kind of tough California pioneer spirit Didion has spent much of her life articulating and defending. But Eduene Didion was not without an inner life or dream, either. Didion says it was she who had pointed out the item in Vogue that advertised a prize for the best essay: a trip to Paris. She told her daughter she thought she could win it. When her daughter did win, in 1956, she drove home from Berkeley to show her parents and her mother said, “Really?”
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