Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  And there were the movies. The city was full of grand-scale picture palaces, and Pauline went as often as she could to the Fox, the Roxie, the Castro, and to the Paramount over in Oakland. As a young girl discovering the talkies, she found herself especially drawn to the tough gangster movies that Warner Bros. turned out with the beginning of sound. Of all the studios at the time, Warners seemed most committed to portraying the ways that American life had been altered by the Depression in what were, by Hollywood standards, realistic terms. Its stories were built around hardened gangsters, wised-up chorus girls and dance-hall hostesses, ruthless and enterprising crime bootleggers and syndicate bosses. These down-and-dirty archetypes had great appeal for American audiences, who saw something of their predicament in the lives of the characters onscreen, who, after all, were just caught up in the business of trying to get ahead. With their no-frills settings and uncomplicated lighting, these films were easy and inexpensive to produce, and were turned out by the week during the early ’30s. With her own natural tough-mindedness, Pauline responded to them immediately; years later, when she came to write about them, she was amazed by how much they had stayed with her. The crime drama from this period that meant the most to her was I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), which she would eventually dub “one of the best of the social-protest films—naïve, heavy, artless, but a straightforward, unadorned story with moments that haunted a generation.” As a girl, she was shattered by the moment at the end of the movie when the starving hero, James Allen (Paul Muni), is asked, “How do you live?” His face a study in pure anguish, he replies, “I steal.”

  Pauline was most taken with the independent spirit of the smart, fast-talking heroines of screwball comedies and progressive women’s dramas. She later observed that in the 1930s, “The girls we in the audience loved were delivering wisecracks. They were funny and lovely because they were funny. A whole group of them with wonderful frogs in their throats. They could be serious, too. There was a period in the early ’30s when Claudette Colbert, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne and other actresses were running prisons, campaigning for governor or being doctors and lawyers.” Many of these were made prior to the 1934 establishment of the Production Code, devised by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to ensure that the screen presented a safe and sanitized view of American life.

  Pauline’s lifelong love of movie comedy also began in the ’30s. She never liked Chaplin—whom she regarded as a tear-pulling fraud—but soaked up the screwball farces of the first decade of the talkies and fell in love with their quick-witted stars—Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Lee Tracy, and Cary Grant. The change in her own family’s fortunes had helped give her a deep understanding of the ways in which the Depression era had given birth to screwball. She felt that the best comedies of the time “suggested an element of lunacy and confusion in the world; the heroes and heroines rolled with the punches and laughed at disasters. Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized—lovers talked back to each other, and fast. Comedy became the new romance, and trading wisecracks was the new courtship rite. The cheerful, washed-out heroes and heroines had abandoned sanity; they were a little crazy, and that’s what they liked in each other. They were like the wisecracking soldiers in service comedies: if you were swapping quips, you were alive—you hadn’t gone under.” She also developed a great love for the manic, eye-spinning antics of the Ritz Brothers, and she wanted to yelp in pain when her friends failed to perceive their worth. “She was crazy, ga-ga, over my dad,” recalled Harry Ritz’s daughter, Janna Ritz. Pauline loved to ask people she met which performers they liked best, the Ritz Brothers or the Marx Brothers—if the answer was the Ritz Brothers, Pauline thought a person might turn out to be worth her time.

  One of Pauline’s favorite actresses of the ’30s was Barbara Stanwyck. Decades later, she was one of the first critics to grasp fully the power and seamlessness of Stanwyck’s craft, which was simple and spare and true, devoid of the sentimental, laid-on effects in which so many other female stars of the time indulged. Of Stanwyck’s performance in the 1930 drama Ladies of Leisure , directed by Frank Capra, she wrote, “Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually ‘natural’ actress even onstage.” To Pauline, Stanwyck represented a “remarkable modernism” and was “an amazing vernacular actress.” This observation about Stanwyck was crucial to understanding the aesthetic that would later make Pauline famous, controversial, and deeply misunderstood. She loved movies—and literature—that made honest, direct, and imaginative use of plain American speech.

  Pauline was less pleased with many of Hollywood’s more high-minded efforts. The antithesis of Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a kind of celluloid confectionary, turning out big-budget movies marked by exquisite set designs, costumes, and lighting. No one could argue with the high level of the studio’s craftsmanship, but it seldom had more than a passing resemblance to real life. The studio’s head, Louis B. Mayer, was a martinet committed to presenting squeaky-clean, sentimental, wholesome entertainment, with a view of American life that bordered on propaganda; when she eventually wrote about MGM pictures, Pauline delighted in puncturing their grandiosity and high-mindedness. She would come down particularly hard on the studio’s number-one female star, Norma Shearer—in Pauline’s view, a thoroughly phony actress who in MGM’s 1931 Private Lives rose to the level of acting “halfway human,” but who most of the time never made it even that far.

  Even as a girl, Pauline was flat-out bored by the figure of the ladylike, long-suffering heroine—a staple of the movies, in various incarnations, for decades to come. (She was stubbornly resistant to the charm of Irene Dunne, despite Dunne’s talent and versatility.) She was instinctively drawn to actresses who could unapologetically portray toughness and sexuality and independence, actresses who went against the grain, such as Miriam Hopkins in The Story of Temple Drake (1932). While she never made any outrageous claims for Greta Garbo’s acting ability, she was, like so many others, spellbound by the actress’s “extraordinary sensual presence.” She did consider Garbo capable of great artistry, but in her adolescence was already beginning to form the notion that it was not necessary for movie stars to be brilliant actors, so long as the audience was somehow seduced by their presence. Garbo was the most seductive of all 1930s stars, and Pauline understood early on that she had the power to make the audience surrender to her. She didn’t apologize for responding to performers’ physical beauty, whether they were women or men. She could enjoy a second-rate actress such as Paulette Goddard because she was “shiny and attractive.”

  There were two female stars of the time who Pauline placed above all the rest—Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis. It isn’t surprising that a high-spirited, rebellious, and fiercely intellectual girl like Pauline would make such an instant connection with both actresses: Each was a blazingly original talent who fought hard to make sure that her own view of herself came through on the screen. Hepburn, with her casual superiority and tough-mindedness where men were concerned, and Davis, with her sizzling, neurotic intensity, refused to be shoved into the glamorous, conventional leading-lady mold; on film, they radiated independence, and their impact was overwhelming, in ways that their audiences weren’t always quite able to figure out. Both were also well known for refusing to melt into the Hollywood system, for defying the studio bosses—a fact that was not lost on Pauline, for whom the Hepburn of the ’30s was a kind of beacon for all the strong-minded American women who were under the ever-present pressure to compromise their standards. Writing of Hepburn’s drama Christopher Strong (1932), Pauline recalled a scene that had haunted her as a young woman. In the film Hepburn played a daring aviatrix who falls in love with a distinguished married man. After their first night together, the man asks that she withdraw from flying in the match she has entered. Pauline observed:

  I don’t know of any other
scene that was so immediately recognizable to women as a certain kind of their truth. It was clear that the man wasn’t a bastard, and that he was doing this out of anxiety and tenderness—out of love, in his terms. Nevertheless, the heroine’s acquiescence destroyed her. There are probably few women who have ever accomplished anything beyond the care of a family who haven’t in one way or another played that scene. Even those who were young girls at the time recognized it, I think, if only in a premonitory sense. It is the intelligent woman’s primal post-coital scene.

  Bette Davis’s explosive energy, Pauline felt, made the actress “the embodiment of the sensational side of ’30s movies . . . vibrantly, coarsely there.” In the ’30s Davis’s material didn’t resonate with Pauline the way Hepburn’s did, but she relished Davis’s ability to transcend it with her own audacious style. A ramshackle movie such as Dangerous (1935) was still worthwhile because of the way Davis “hypes it with an intensity that makes you sit up and stare.” A weeper like Dark Victory (1939) might have struck Pauline as “a gooey collection of clichés,” but Davis made it worthwhile by the way she “slams her way through them in her nerviest style.” She felt that Davis, more than any other screen actress, was able to reflect the neuroses that gnawed at Depression-era American women.

  There was one movie genre whose appeal eluded Pauline from the beginning. Although she admired John Ford’s influential Stagecoach (1939)—she later wrote that it presented a view of the American past “that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe in it even if we didn’t”—most Westerns left her cold. She didn’t buy the male fantasy of the mythical past that the Western sold to the public, and she hated the treatment of the Indians as monsters more appropriate to a horror movie. Isaac was a great lover of movie Westerns, and Pauline later recalled that he always said it didn’t matter if it was any good or not, or if he’d already seen it. “I think I understand what my father meant,” Pauline observed in the mid-1960s. “If you’re going for a Western (the same way you’d sit down to watch a television show), it doesn’t much matter which one you see.”

  It might have been expected that Pauline would become an English literature major once she reached college, but she avoided that route, possibly because she worried that she might be pigeonholed into a teaching career. Instead, after graduating from Girls’ High School in the spring of 1936, she enrolled that fall at the University of California at Berkeley as a philosophy major. In view of her excellent high school record, Berkeley awarded her an alumni-sponsored scholarship for her first year.

  Founded in 1868, Berkeley had come to be regarded by many as the apotheosis of modern academic freedom. Unlike the Ivy League colleges in the east, Berkeley at the time was anything but exclusive: Proof of a legitimate high school diploma, along with proof of a solid background in the arts, sciences, and humanities and a solid B average, was usually a guarantee of admission. The emphasis was on electives, with a minimal number of required courses.

  Along with the relatively enlightened academic atmosphere came the beautiful campus setting. The Greek Theater, the Sather Gate, the Doe Library were all impressive works of architecture free of institutional chill. There were eucalyptus groves, bountiful gardens and creeks, and plenty of open spaces. There was a lively off-campus scene, too. The Sather Gate Bookstore was widely known as one of the finest retail book outlets in the state. There were good restaurants, such as the Varsity, that fell within student budgets. The Campus Theater, on Bancroft, was a haven for those who loved foreign-language films. And at the Berkeley Music House, classical music lovers could go into a soundproof booth and get to know the latest recordings without ever having to plunk down cash for them.

  During her freshman year Pauline immersed herself in English and philosophy courses. For both semesters she scored a solid B in philosophy, earning an A in English. She also excelled in public speaking, but did less well in French, earning a B during the first semester and a C in the second. She took no further language courses for the rest of her time at Berkeley, and the pattern of her freshman year was to be repeated over her sophomore and junior years: excellent grades in her philosophy and literature courses, lower ones in the classes she took simply to fill a requirement, such as economics.

  In high school Pauline had been frustrated by her teachers’ persistent attempts to force-feed their students material that was good for them: history that reeked of academic correctness, literature with carefully worked out, socially and morally responsible themes. It was learning deemed socially constructive rather than learning that opened up the mind, training it to think in daring, critical ways. At Berkeley she encountered a whole new set of frustrations. For one thing, she wasn’t allowed to write her papers in colloquial English. Pauline responded to literature, music, and art with a kind of no-holds-barred intensity, but she found that her professors criticized her for injecting her personal voice into her essays. Humor was seldom welcome at all. The conversational style that she naturally favored was frowned upon; she was asked to remove “I” from her essays and use “one” instead. It was a kind of chilly formality, “term-paper pomposity,” as she would come to label it, that went against her natural writing instincts.

  But she was a serious student, with a fierce competitive streak, and mindful of the importance of succeeding at Berkeley. So she set to work, trying her best to turn out essays in her own individual voice, in ways that wouldn’t alienate the professor and result in a poor grade. She was a great lover of the works of contemporary English novelists such as Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Rosamond Lehmann, and in one essay, written midway through her time at Berkeley, she compared the leading British authors with their American counterparts:

  The English are the inheritors of civilization and style, and the current writers know how to use them. They write with grace and assurance; the words mean what they intend them to mean; the rhythms fall where they should. They use the English language with authority. The American writer, caught in his clumsy despair, can scarcely withstand envy and resentment.

  But the English, for their part, have more to resent in us than our dollars! The freshness . . . of American writing, the qualities that have made American novels an influence abroad, are as little accessible to them as their authority is to us.

  This argument took hold of her early on, and once she became a film critic, it would figure very strongly into the way she wrote about American and European movies.

  Pauline’s years at Berkeley were a time of great discovery, as she lost herself in the novels of Dostoyevsky, Melville, Hawthorne, James, and Woolf. She loved to make her way through an author’s entire oeuvre, becoming, as she put it, “immersed in a sensibility.” Henry James’s novels would prove an exception to Pauline’s habit of binge reading, as it took ten years for her to familiarize herself with the author’s work, with breaks in between. Early on she was most deeply drawn to The Bostonians, James’s 1886 account of the conflict between the hard-bitten suffragette Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom, a staunch conservative from the old South, as they both fight to control the future of Verena Tarrant, a charismatic rising star on the public lecture circuit. James hints strongly that Olive is a repressed lesbian whose designs on Verena are motivated by sex, as well as by her commitment to the movement, but Pauline was less intrigued by this than she was by Olive’s audacious, monomaniacal character—by her pure determination to get what she wants. Already, Pauline was getting a sense of how hard most women had to fight to hold on to their ambitions and ideals, to hold fast against the threat of compromise.

  To Pauline, The Bostonians made a fascinating contrast with the immaculately wrought, complex subtleties of James’s later works, such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors. She regarded it as “the liveliest of his novels, maybe because it has sex right there at the center, and so it’s crazier—riskier, less controlled, less gentlemanly—than his other books.” The Bostonians possessed “a more earthly kind of greatness.” It became
one of the seminal books of her early life, and her reaction to it provides a key to her developing literary sensibilities. Years later, reviewing the 1984 James Ivory film of The Bostonians, she would put forth the theory that James’s original was “the best novel in English about what at that time was called ‘the woman question,’ and it must certainly be the best novel in the language about the cold anger that the issue of equal rights for women can stir in a man.”

  For extra money Pauline worked as a teaching assistant, reading papers for a number of courses. Later she had a job as assistant to a chemist who created makeup for performers. One of his clients was the skating star Sonja Henie, then at the height of her movie fame. Taking note of Pauline’s fair complexion, the chemist asked her to be the “test girl” for Henie’s makeup. “She would come in and inspect the cream on my arms,” Pauline later told Sam Staggs. “I don’t believe she ever spoke a word to me; she would talk to the chemist while fingering the patches on my arms.”

  Pauline managed to keep up her generally good grades while pursuing an intense social life. The Bay Area in the 1930s was a good place to be for anyone who loved jazz as much as she did, and she later claimed that she went out dancing every single night in the many top jazz clubs that had sprung up around the city. One of her favorite performers was Turk Murphy, a trombonist who earned a big Bay Area following playing in the dance bands of Will Osborne and Mal Hallet. She delighted in Murphy’s Dixieland jazz; she also loved dancing to the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, and others who frequently played at San Francisco’s best hotels. For Pauline, music, like movies, didn’t have to be immaculately polished to give intense pleasure. Sometimes it was much better if it wasn’t polished at all. She developed a passion for the singing of the trombonist Jack Teagarden; she recalled thinking, Oh, that’s how to do it. You don’t need a voice; you just sing.