Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Judith’s unhappiness made a sharp contrast with Isaac Kael’s own good-natured gregariousness. He was a man who naturally expected good things to unfold before him and made no attempt to hide his delight when they did. He had great drive and energy and confidence, and his children adored him.

  The Jews who settled in Petaluma generally fell into one of two groups—those who allied themselves with the Labor Zionist movement in Israel, and those who sought to improve social conditions for American Jews; outsiders were quick to tag the latter group as “radical,” even “Red.” To Kenneth Kann, author of Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, an oral history of farm life in Petaluma, the town was “a community of idealists, people who were not so concerned with making a lot of money, people who preferred the agricultural life over the sweatshops and the pushcarts of the city.” The so-called radicals were, in Kann’s view, individuals who “retained a Jewish identity, but they were people with a national and a world perspective.”

  To Isaac and Judith Kael, it was plain that such an intellectually inquisitive community needed a proper social gathering place, and Isaac became one of the founders of the Jewish Community Center of Petaluma. Plans for the center got under way in 1924, but when it became apparent that the community hadn’t raised enough money to pay for its construction, Isaac traveled to San Francisco and appealed to the wealthy Haas family of the Levi Strauss Company, well known for their support of Jewish cultural enterprises. The Haases came up with a sizable gift, and with Judith serving tirelessly on the building committee, the Jewish Community Center of Petaluma opened on August 2, 1925. Its activities were focused on Jewish cultural and religious issues; the individual organizations that made the center their home included both the men and women’s branches of B’nai Brith, Hadassah, and Poale Zion. Jewish performers and lecturers on Jewish topics visited the center, spurring the locals to engage in colorful and often heated debates on topics of international significance. Sometimes the locals themselves banded together to perform readings from Yiddish literary classics.

  To Kenneth Kann, the community of Petaluma Jews “bore an unmistakable resemblance to the shtetl, the Jewish village of Tsarist Russia.” Certainly the Jewish farmers’ customs seemed quite alien to many of their gentile neighbors, and their relations were not always harmonious. In school the Jewish children were frequently subjected to racist slurs by their gentile classmates. Annie Kael, for instance, was a good student and generally well accepted, but even though her gentile friends were allowed to come to the Kael house to visit, the reverse did not hold true. The success of the Jewish Community Center, however, made Isaac something of a local golden boy, and many of the prominent gentiles in Petaluma held him in high esteem. Still, the esteem was qualified. One local dignitary referred to him as “the one white Jew in Petaluma.” Many local Jews were given bank loans on the condition that Isaac cosign for them, which he was more than happy to do.

  This early part of Pauline’s childhood unfolded in an ambience of comfort and security. She enjoyed life on the farm and, though she was too young to have much to do with the egg business, she liked spending time outdoors in the temperate climate. At many of the meals, nearly everything on the table came from the land—chicken, eggs, and vegetables and fruits directly from the garden. The film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who met Pauline in the early 1990s, observed that “she loved to eat and cook, and she was very conscious of what she ate and the quality of the food. She said, ‘It’s because I grew up in the country, and we always had fresh vegetables and eggs. That was part of where I came from.’”

  Despite being an agricultural community, Petaluma was fertile ground for any child interested in reading and writing and ideas. The community overflowed with the traditional Jewish love of culture and learning. Many of its ranchers subscribed to the Yiddish-language newspapers from New York and engaged in spirited debate about world issues. “Such wonderful evenings we had talking about books in Petaluma,” recalled Basha Singerman, a Russian immigrant whose family moved to the area early in the twentieth century. “Yiddish books—the classical writers, history, politics. Books were our life in Petaluma.” And there were silent movies in town, which the entire family attended. Pauline remembered sitting on her father’s lap and being enthralled by the “flickers” if impatient with their intertitles: “We were so eager for the movie to go on that we gulped the words down and then were always left with them for what, to our impatience, seemed an eternity, and the better the movie, the more quickly we tried to absorb and leap at the printed words, and the more frustrating the delays became.”

  From the beginning it was clear to the family that Pauline was exceptionally clever. She learned to read at an early age, and both Isaac and Judith encouraged her interest in books. As a small child, she devoured L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, collections of fairy tales, and Edith Maude Hull’s torrid The Sheik, filched from her older brothers. She was extremely precocious, and her older siblings delighted in the astonishing observations that routinely popped out of her mouth. Like her sisters, Pauline was diminutive. (Family members jokingly referred to them as the “Three Amazons.”) Rose was industrious and earnest, eager to fit in with her peers; Anne was a quiet, disciplined, and bright student; and Pauline was the talkative one who couldn’t help but call attention to herself, the one whose intellect was the most obvious and least conformist.

  Isaac’s success and popularity in Petaluma no doubt encouraged him to indulge in his principal vice: pursuing other women. By the mid-1920s he had developed a reputation as one of Petaluma’s smoothest ladies’ men. There was one particular widow whom he joined for frequent dalliances. As a way of covering up his motives, he often brought along Pauline, who would play outside while her father paid court.

  Throughout her writing career, and even to an overwhelming degree throughout her personal life, Pauline was extraordinarily reluctant to discuss her childhood and adolescence. Stephanie Zacharek remembered that she would talk about her past “only in a vague sort of way.” Even people who felt that they knew her quite well realized at some point or other that she had revealed next to nothing about the dynamics of her family life, especially her relationship with her mother. When Kenneth Kann called Pauline to interview her for Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, she provided him with a one-sentence reply:

  “Chicken ranching? I can’t remember a thing about it. But just ask me about the Mystic Movie Theater in Petaluma.”

  In the early 1960s, before New Journalism had really taken hold and it had become acceptable for reporters to impose their own personalities on their work, no one really expected a movie critic to share personal information in a review. So it came as something of a surprise when Pauline did just that in her Film Quarterly review of Martin Ritt’s 1963 Western drama Hud. She felt that the material had been misinterpreted by both those who made it and the critics who reviewed it. To them, the character of Hud, played by Paul Newman at his most virile and attractive, was meant to symbolize the moral decay that had infected the country. Audiences, meanwhile, seemed to react to him—understandably, given the glamour casting of Newman—as “a celebration and glorification of materialism—of the man who looks out for himself.” Pauline agreed with popular sentiment, adding that she appreciated Hud’s accurate depiction of the West—“not the legendary west of myth-making movies like the sluggish Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West . . . The incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr Pepper signs, paperback books—all emphasizing the standardization of culture in the loneliness of vast spaces.” In her analysis of the honest, unromantic way Ritt had depicted life on a western ranch, she offered a very personal memory:

  The summer nights are very long on a western ranch. As a child, I could stretch out on a hammock on the porch and read an Oz book from cover to cover while my grandparents and uncles and aunts and parents didn’t stir from their card game. The young men get tired of playing cards. They either think about sex
or try to do something about it. There isn’t much else to do—the life doesn’t exactly stimulate the imagination, though it does stimulate the senses.... I remember my father taking me along when he visited our local widow: I played in the new barn which was being constructed by workmen who seemed to take their orders from my father. At six or seven, I was very proud of my father for being the protector of widows.

  And later:

  My father, who was adulterous, and a Republican who, like Hud, was opposed to any government interference, was in no sense and in no one’s eyes a social predator. He was generous and kind, and democratic in the western way that Easterners still don’t understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranchhands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived.

  It was an unusual point of view for an educated woman to hold in the 1960s: Rather than resenting her father for his infidelity to her mother, Pauline seemed almost to take pride in it. In her adult years, Pauline would be drawn steadily to similarly unapologetic, confident, and self-reliant males—as friends, sometimes as lovers, and often as objects of professional admiration.

  By mid-1928 Isaac Kael had reached his peak of prosperity, having built the ranch up to the point where it could accommodate a capacity of twenty-five thousand chickens and having amassed a stock portfolio totaling more than $100,000. But because he had bought the bulk of his securities on margin, they didn’t really belong to him, and he then made a terrible misjudgment in selling short. As the market continued to rise, however, he was forced to lay his hands on more cash in order to maintain control of his stock. “He put up everything he had as security, and still he was short,” remembered Louis Kael. With such a huge amount of stock debt, Isaac was in no way prepared for such turbulence in the marketplace, and eventually he was washed up.

  He quickly found that he had become a pariah, as far as the other chicken ranchers were concerned, and the people who had always seemed to look up to him were now plainly uneasy, avoiding him when he ran into them on the street. There was nothing for Isaac to do but pull up stakes and move to San Francisco, where he hoped he might be able to piece together a new life for his family.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Isaac Kael was only forty-five when he lost the Petaluma ranch, and initially, at least, he was confident that he was capable of two more decades of solid work. Taking into account the expertise he had developed during his years as a chicken rancher, he decided it would make sense to go into the retail poultry and produce business. When the Kaels arrived in San Francisco, he immediately sprang into action and, using most of the little money that was left, leased three separate stores. As he had no equipment, no license, and no product, he sent Louis, now in his early twenties, to the Jewish Welfare Foundation to take out a series of modest loans to help launch his new business.

  Isaac enjoyed a few reasonably profitable months as a poultry retailer and greengrocer until October of 1929 and the Wall Street crash, after which it became a constant struggle to keep the business going. He tried to put on a brave front by taking the produce salesmen out for nice lunches; in private, however, his confidence began to desert him. He pined for the days when he had been a man of influence in Petaluma, and succumbed to bouts of nerves and melancholy.

  Judith was forced to work in the grocery store, and she despised catering to the public even more than she had disdained life on the farm. Her disposition worsened, and with Louis and Philip out on their own, the three daughters still at home all gradually withdrew, in different ways, from her. Pauline’s niece Dana Salisbury believed that “Pauline had no patience or even any kind of feeling for her mother.” Nevertheless, Judith remained a powerful spur to her daughters’ education, constantly putting money aside in the hope that one day they would all be able to attend a four-year college. She was delighted when Annie—who now called herself Anne—was accepted as a freshman at Berkeley. According to Salisbury, Anne felt that “these ideas had saved her life. Reading and listening to music had given her a whole world, and she was thrilled to be able to pursue the life of the mind at Berkeley.”

  Judith’s advocacy was not something that Pauline spoke about easily in later years. But she carried a sense of it inside her. In her review of James Toback’s 1978 movie Fingers, she observed, “All of us have probably had the feeling of being divided between what we got from our mother and what we got from our father, and no doubt some of us feel that we’ve gone through life trying to please each of them and never fully succeeding, because we have always been torn between them.”

  By the time Pauline reached high school, it was clear to her family that she was a girl with an intense intellectual drive and wide-ranging talents. “The youngest in a large family has a lot of advantages,” she once said. “You pick up a fair amount of knowledge from your older siblings, and your parents don’t worry too much about you.” Not only was she unusually well-read for someone her age, she had learned to play the violin, and her teacher was certain that if she kept working at it, she could become a superb musician. Most of the time she played classical music, and she went regularly to hear Alfred Hertz guest-conduct the San Francisco Symphony, but Gershwin and Ellington ultimately proved to be as much her taste as Dvořák and Mozart. At San Francisco’s Girls’ High School, which she attended from age fourteen, Pauline was the only violinist in the school orchestra. She also was a member of the debating club, and with her quick wit and already solid reasoning skills was an expert debater, at one point going up against Lowell High School’s Carol Channing. A photograph taken in June 1933 reveals Pauline to be the smallest girl in the group, with big glasses, a mass of brown hair, and a shrewd-looking expression that suggests a much older and more mature woman.

  In her warm and friendly yet strong and commanding voice—her diction was immaculate—she could hold forth on an amazing range of topics for one so young. Already she was seized by the power of reading and acquiring more knowledge; like W. B. Yeats’s Wandering Aengus, she had a fire in her head. She spoke in beautifully complete sentences, but she also loved slang and four-letter words, “shit” being a favorite. She was very funny, and her family delighted in her extroverted side. “I was quick to understand things,” she once told the film historian Sam Staggs. “I can remember members of the family asking me to repeat gags I’d pulled on them when we had company.”

  While it was an impressive achievement for her older sisters to have graduated from Berkeley, Pauline was not very enthusiastic about their career choices as teachers. She herself had no interest in teaching, which she considered a very ordinary profession. She recognized that Anne was a talented educator, and was always fond of her, even though they had completely different temperaments. As a child, Anne had exhibited a temper, but as she grew older, she became more even-keeled—although her calm demeanor masked a strong will.

  Rose, on the other hand, was Pauline’s bête noire from an early age, as Rose resented what she viewed as her younger sister’s egocentricity. Pauline, for her part, soon grew enormously critical of Rose’s middlebrow taste in reading material. Rose favored Liberty and Collier’s magazines and Zane Grey Westerns, while Pauline valued the works that Anne passed her way, including Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.

  Recalling the sisters’ relationship as adults, Dana Salisbury said, “Pauline looked down with such contempt on my aunt Rose. Pauline loved to be in charge. She had ideas. She was the intellectual. Pauline considered herself smarter than everyone else, and Rose was more conventional in her behavior and refused to kowtow.” As a result Rose and Pauline often squared off against each other, leaving Anne to play the role of the calming oldest sister.

  Life in San Francisco was much to Pauline’s liking. The Kaels were now living in an infinitely more diverse and cosmopolitan place, which was fine with Pauline, who always maintained a neutral, detached attitude toward her own Jewish past. Like Rose and Anne, she in no way identif
ied herself, even humorously, as a “nice Jewish girl,” with all that term’s connotations, and friends from the later part of her life do not remember her ever using Yiddish expressions in conversation, even in the offhand way that many urban gentiles do. Only in her thirst for knowledge and culture did Pauline embrace traditional Jewish values, but throughout her life she refrained from thinking of them as “Jewish.” To her, that sort of self-identification was the essence of straitjacketed thinking, and she would have none of it.

  San Francisco also placed her in much closer proximity to the arts. Like all other cities, it had been hard hit by the effects of the Depression, yet its performing arts thrived. While audience numbers may have declined during the peak Depression years, touring companies continued to view San Francisco as the most important stop on their West Coast schedule. Martha Graham and Trudi Schoop gave dance recitals; Charlotte Greenwood, Leo Carillo, Ethel Waters, and many other great stars of the New York stage appeared at the President, Tivoli, Curran, and Orpheum theaters. Top-balcony seats at the Curran were only fifty cents, and as they were growing up, Pauline and her sisters attended concerts and plays as often as they could. One of the plays that thrilled Pauline most was a 1932 touring production of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Richard Bennett.