by Brian Kellow
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Acknowledgements
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ALSO BY BRIAN KELLOW:
ALSO BY BRIAN KELLOW:
Ethel Merman: A Life
The Bennetts: An Acting Family
Can’t Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell
VIKING
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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Brian Kellow, 2011
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kellow, Brian.
Pauline Kael : a life in the dark/ Brian Kellow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54532-4
1. Kael, Pauline. 2. Film critics—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1998.3.K34K46 2011
791.43092—dc23
[B] 2011021798
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To my father, Jack Kellow, who loves shoot-’em-ups
To my mother, Marjorie Kellow, who loved The Godfather and Prizzi’s Honor, and thought ’40s women’s pictures were “crap”
And most of all to my brother, Barry Kellow, whose movie love turned out to be contagious
INTRODUCTION
In the beginning, even the French had their doubts about Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. The director’s 1972 film was a memory piece that drew on elements of his own childhood. In it, a timid fifteen-year-old boy grows increasingly distant from his bourgeois French father and increasingly attached to his freewheeling Italian mother. After a bout with scarlet fever reveals that the boy has a heart murmur, his mother takes him to a health spa, where, free from the constraints of their ordinary lives, mother and son are drawn closer than ever—so close, in fact, that one night, on the heels of a boozy Bastille Day celebration, they wind up in bed together, quite gently and quite naturally making love to each other.
When Malle turned in his script for Murmur of the Heart, the Centre National du Cinéma refused to come across with any support at all. The script, they complained, depicted “too many erotic sequences . . . in which all manner of perversions are evoked with a disturbing complacency.” Malle was stunned by the reaction. “I certainly did not set out to do a film about incest,” he later recalled. “But I began exploring a very intense relationship between a mother and her son, and I ended up pushing it all the way.”
Murmur of the Heart went on to enjoy an immense worldwide critical and financial success, and one of its most celebrated admirers was Pauline Kael, who for years had been upending conventional, academically correct notions of film criticism, first as a freelance contributor to a string of film journals and, since 1968, from a truly enviable and distinguished platform as one of two regular authors of the column “The Current Cinema” in The New Yorker magazine. To Kael Murmur of the Heart was one of the most refreshingly complex and honest views of family life she had ever experienced. Malle was to be commended for seeing “not only the prudent, punctilious surface” of the bourgeois experience “but the volatile and slovenly life underneath.” She noted that advance word on the picture centered on its shock value, because of the element of incest. But for Kael, “the only shock is the joke that, for all the repressions the bourgeois practice and the conventions they pretend to believe in, they are such amoral, instinct-satisfying creatures that incest doesn’t mean any more to them than to healthy animals. The shock is that in this context incest isn’t serious—and that, I guess, may really upset some people, so they won’t be able to laugh.”
In 1976 she found herself addressing an overflow audience at Mitchell Playhouse in Corvallis, Oregon, home of Oregon State University. For years Kael had been keeping up a hectic schedule of appearances around the country, drawing huge crowds as her fame grew and more and more readers were hanging on her opinions of the latest movies. Although she had little patience for many of the questions that she was asked at these lecture tours, she relished the opportunity to come together with movie-lovers—young ones, especially—during this fertile period of filmmaking that had sprung up in the late 1960s and was still flourishing.
At Mitchell Playhouse she was introduced by Jim Lynch, an associate professor of English at Oregon State, who delighted her by introducing her as “the Muhammad Ali of film critics.” She proceeded to give a stimulating talk on the current state of movies, then took questions from the audience.
“How many times do you see a movie before you write about it?”
“Only once,” replied Kael.
“What about Persona?” asked one senior member of Oregon State University’s English faculty. “I had to see it three times before I felt I had any real grasp of it at all.”
“Well,” said Kael, “that’s the difference between us, isn’t it?” The line played less insultingly
than it might read, and she laughed as she said it. Then she went on to explain that she felt the need to write in the flush of her initial, immediate response to a movie. If she waited too long, and pondered the film over repeated viewings, she felt that she might be in danger of coming up with something that wouldn’t be her truest response.
Someone else in the audience persisted with a question along similar lines: “But if you were going to see one movie again, which one would it be?”
“I’d always rather see something new.”
After a few minutes of back and forth, a man in the audience raised his hand and asked about Murmur of the Heart, which Kael had reviewed for the October 23, 1971, The New Yorker. He told her that, having seen the film again recently, he had found it sentimental and unconvincing, and wondered if she still recalled it with enthusiasm.
“Yes,” said Kael, “I do.”
“Really?” pressed the questioner.
After a stiff silence punctuated only by the clearing of throats and the rustling of programs, Kael fixed her gaze on the man for a moment and gave him a catnip smile.
“Listen,” she finally asked. “Do you remember your first fuck?”
“Sure,” he answered, flushing, struggling to hang on to his composure. “Of course I do.”
“Well, honey,” said Kael, after another perfectly weighed silence, “just wait thirty years.”
This was the Kael that her army of readers at The New Yorker had come to worship—bold, clear-eyed, pithy, a brilliant critical thinker unafraid of a flash of showmanship. Do you remember your first fuck? was, as well as a laugh line, a perfect description of the effect that Pauline always wanted the movies to have on her. She had made similar pronouncements on many occasions. She had discovered her passion for the screen early on, as a child growing up in the farming community of Petaluma, California. It was a passion that grew during her adolescence; through her time as a student at Berkeley; her hardscrabble years when she struggled at a demoralizing series of dead-end jobs to support herself and her only child, Gina; her protracted apprenticeship as a critic for obscure film magazines; up to her emergence, when she was nearing fifty, as the most famous, distinctive, and influential movie critic The New Yorker ever had. And her love of the movies reached its apex from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, a period she regarded as equivalent to some of the great literary epochs in history. Her involvement with her subject matter was anything but casual; it was as tumultuous and irrational and possessive as the most volatile love affair. “Definitely her engagement was libidinal,” observed her friend the film critic Hal Hinson. “She took notes constantly at screenings, that nubby little pencil going constantly throughout the movie. That engagement was as erotic as any erotic engagement could be.... Pauline’s presence was essential, and you felt what she felt: that she was at the center of the culture, and that movies were at the center of the culture.”
“I am the most grateful human being in the whole world for what Hollywood has given me,” Joan Crawford once said with straight-faced sincerity, in a late-career interview. “It’s given me my education—it’s given me everything that I’ve ever earned.” Pauline Kael, who dismissed Crawford as an actress, might easily have said something along those lines. Her love of the movies was nothing short of life-giving: It sustained her in ways that nothing and no one else in her life ever could, or ever did.
CHAPTER ONE
From the beginning of her career Pauline Kael seemed intensely proud of the fact that she came from the American west. There were elements of both careerism and reverse snobbery in this: She took great pains to paint herself as a western rebel, an independent, plain-speaking thinker who owed nothing to what she considered to be the hidebound thinking of the East Coast literary and critical establishment. While she often gave the impression of being a second- or third-generation Californian, her parents were actually only in the process of settling into their life on the West Coast at the time she was born.
For most of her life, Kael’s mother, Judith Yetta Friedman, projected the identity of the classic displaced person. She was born on December 21, 1884, in Pruszków, Poland, a town whose population hovered around 16,000 in the early years of the twentieth century. Kael later claimed that her mother’s father was a tax collector for Tsar Alexander II.
Judith prized a solid, first-rate education above most other things in life, but during her formative years, such a thing was mostly out of reach for even the brightest of young women. A proper education was a privilege reserved for men, and Judith never stopped resenting the way women were denied opportunities in the Old World. “Judith Kael resented her lot in life, which was to be a breeder,” said her grandson, Bret Wallach. Pauline Kael may well have had her mother in mind when she reviewed the 1983 film Yentl, directed by and starring one of her favorite performers, Barbra Streisand. Based on a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yentl tells the story of a young woman who, yearning to become a religious scholar, disguises herself as a boy and enrolls in a yeshiva. Though never an ardent feminist in the traditional sense, Kael, more than most critics at the time, liked Yentl and particularly responded to Streisand’s portrayal of the title character, “who runs her fingers over books as if they were magic objects.”
Judith eventually married Isaac Kael, born in Pruszków on August 18, 1883. Isaac’s family background was not nearly as elevated as Judith’s, which appears to have been a source of conflict between them for much of their married life, as Judith grew increasingly resentful of being consigned to the role of housewife and mother.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than two million Jews, a great number of them from Russia and Poland, arrived on American shores. Isaac emigrated to the United States in 1903, with Judith following two years later; Isaac’s younger brother Philip (who married one of Judith’s sisters) would join them in 1907. They settled into the epicenter of New York’s Jewish ghetto—the grim, poverty- and disease-ridden slums of Hester Street, where Jewish peddlers shoved their pushcarts up and down the dirty streets, hawking fish, meat, household items, novelties. Isaac made a living by selling caps. Within a short time the couple started a family: Louis, born February 27, 1906, and Philip, born May 12, 1909. The chilly disposition that Judith showed later in life may have had its roots in the miserable experience of these difficult early years in New York. Soon the family sought out a healthier place to live, with greater opportunities. The Kaels did eventually manage to live for a brief time in the Catskills town of Mountain Dale, New York, where their third child, Annie, was born on September 23, 1912.
For some time Isaac and Judith had been aware of a thriving community of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, a picturesque town in Sonoma County, California. In 1904 a Lithuanian named Sam Melnick had settled there and gained a foothold as its first Jewish poultry farmer. Once word of Melnick’s success got around—thanks in large part to articles and advertisements in The Jewish Daily Forward, the most widely read Yiddish daily newspaper in America—many Jewish immigrants made the trek westward.
The decision of the Kaels to become part of this Jewish community had no particular religious motivation; both Isaac and Judith had been and would remain highly secular Jews. But in Petaluma they would have the chance to live among their own people in what sounded like a beautiful setting, with plenty of fresh air and room for the children to play. They also knew that in a farming community, poor people almost always have an easier time coming by food than they do in the city. So in 1912, along with Judith’s parents and Isaac’s brother Philip, the Kaels packed up their belongings and headed to California.
In 1912 Petaluma, which lies thirty-five miles north of San Francisco, was a tiny town—its population was around 7,500—surrounded by rolling hills and sprawling dairy farms with signs hawking farm-fresh eggs and milkshakes. With its dirt roads and hitching posts and frame houses, it seemed to belong to the Old West more than to the twentieth century.
In 1878, a Canadian
named Lyman C. Byce had arrived in Petaluma, and soon began raising poultry there. In 1879, he and Isaac Dias invented the first egg incubator, which revolutionized the poultry industry. Farmers could produce a far greater number of chicks, and business began to boom. Ranches sprang up that eventually developed the capacity to produce anywhere from 100,000 to 1.8 million eggs annually. The Petaluma Valley became dotted with stock and poultry feed mills, egg-packing plants, and box factories. At the railroad station was a sign depicting an enormous hen sitting on a stack of eggs that trumpeted Petaluma’s sobriquet “The Egg Basket of the World.”
On their arrival the Kaels moved into a two-story house at 219 Fifth Street, until Isaac found a nine-acre farm five miles west of town, near Middle Two Rock Road. On the property was a large frame house, with a couple’s house and bunkhouse out back. The Kaels got their poultry business off the ground with a flock of white Leghorns. As was the case with most Jewish immigrants in the area, their lack of experience wasn’t much of an obstacle. Maintaining a chicken ranch wasn’t overly complicated and didn’t require a huge initial outlay of cash, but it was hard work; the eggs had to be gathered and sorted and cleaned by hand, then packed up to go to market. Year by year their business grew, and Isaac ultimately built up the ranch to the point where it could accommodate five thousand chickens. He and Judith also added to their family. On November 30, 1913, another daughter, Rose, arrived. And on June 19, 1919, their fifth and last child, Pauline, was born at Petaluma General Hospital. In a few short years the family’s life had improved to an almost unimaginable degree, and the future seemed to hold great promise.
At home, however, the atmosphere was far from harmonious. From the beginning, Judith—or Yetta, as she was often called—loathed life on the farm. A woman who, during her privileged youth in Poland, had scarcely had reason even to boil an egg was now harvesting and cleaning them for long hours each day. Then there was the kale that had to be grown, picked, and mixed into the chicken feed, on top of cooking for the ranch hands. Judith was angry and frustrated much of the time, and the harder she worked, the more distant she grew toward her children. Anne Kael Wallach’s son, Bret Wallach, who remembered visiting Judith in the late 1940s, described her as someone whose “affection radiated at about two degrees above absolute zero.” However frustrated she may have been, Judith did show a certain motherly concern for her three daughters, and as time went on, she grew determined that Anne, Rose, and Pauline would have the educational opportunities that had eluded her.