by Brian Kellow
The new breed of stars—Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Esther Williams—likewise disheartened her, because they were not “protagonists in any meaningful sense; they represent the voice of adjustment, the caution against individuality, independence, emotionality, art, ambition, personal vision. They represent the antidrama of American life.” And with this assembly line of movies designed not to threaten anyone, to please as wide an audience as possible, she could see that newspaper critics were bound to praise the popular and pan the problematic until they lost their way entirely.
This was Pauline in one of her most accomplished roles: the Cassandra of film criticism, predicting nothing less than a cultural holocaust if the movies continued to go down the same, self-defeating path. And the blight, she warned, had already infected critics everywhere, who had “been quick to object to a film with a difficult theme, a small camera range, or a markedly verbal content (they object even when the words are worth listening to). Because action can be extended over a wide area on the screen, they think it must be—or what they’re seeing isn’t really a movie at all.”
Overall, the essay was a thrilling demonstration of Pauline’s credo that a critic’s voice should never be objective. It was only through subjective means that a critic could convey what was in her heart and mind to the reader. “Movies, the Desperate Art” was a milestone in Pauline’s early career. Only three years after she had published her first review, she had found her voice and what would become her greatest subject and the continuing passion of her life: the confluence of what happened onscreen and what happened in life.
With the house on Oregon Street, Pauline at last had a real workspace where she could spread out and be genuinely productive. Where the two front rooms divided, she set up a movie screen and constantly ran 16 mm films on a giant projector. She wrote at a drafting table, often standing up, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Wild Turkey in the other, with her favorite Bessie Smith records playing. She stayed up late at night, reading obsessively and scribbling articles to submit to The Partisan Review.
The house became a gathering place for local movie-lovers, writers, poets, musicians. She fussed over what they were reading. She became upset with her friend Linda Allen, who loved Isak Dinesen, which Pauline considered far too head-in-the-clouds; instead, she pressed Allen to read Colette. Anne Kael Wallach was a frequent visitor. She was now a highly respected English teacher at Berkeley’s Lowell High School; she would be fondly remembered by generations of Lowell students as a quietly exacting but kindly Mrs. Chips. Pauline remained extremely fond of her oldest sister, and when Anne’s husband, Max Wallach, had difficulty making a success of his business, Pauline lent him money. She was known for being generous to her young artist friends—even something of a soft touch. She also managed the difficult feat of being brutally honest about their creative work while at the same time showering them with generosity. “She was one of the most ethical people I ever knew,” said David Young Allen, a young Texan whom Pauline met after he had enrolled as a student at Berkeley and come to work as a projectionist at the Cinema Guild. “I would sometimes clean house for her when I was a student. She was always cooking soup, or sometimes doing her hand laundry. Sometimes she was a little insulting. She said to me, ‘You are a kind of a semi-fuck-up, honey.’ I would get pissed at her, but she was so funny—and she wasn’t wrong.”
For Gina, the constant crowd of artist friends created an atmosphere in which she had to compete for her mother’s attention. She craved a more conventional home life, one in which the dinner hour wouldn’t be interrupted by phone calls that had to be answered “Cinema Studio and Guild!” What bothered her most, however, were the stricken reactions that many of Pauline’s friends had to her opinion of their work. Some of them were quite devastated by her pronouncements, and while Pauline seemed oblivious to it all, Gina internalized the friends’ hurt feelings.
Employees of the Cinema Guild and invited members of the audience also regularly gathered for parties at Oregon Street, where Pauline laid out a generous supply of California wine and homemade lasagne and shepherd’s pie and roast chicken. The hostess always had the best time of all, pouring bourbon, mingling with everyone, cigarette in hand, enthusiastically holding forth on the latest developments in the film industry. Sometimes, when she would get particularly excited about a point she was making, she would give a little backward kick with her heel. “Her mind was always moving five times faster than most other people’s minds,” said Donald Gutierrez, who worked at the Cinema Guild for a brief time. “But she had an engaging habit of indicating that she didn’t understand some point of view or poem. She would say, ‘Beats me—what do you think about that?’ Kind of a compliment of sorts.”
She had two beloved basenji dogs, Polly and Bushbaby, who frolicked with the guests, and several of her friends noted the irony that a compulsive talker like Pauline chose to have dogs who couldn’t bark. There was an upright piano in the living room with characters from The Wizard of Oz painted on it, and Pauline loved to sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs, The Mikado’s “The Moon and I” being a particular favorite. She liked to joke that through the doors of 2419 Oregon Street passed the best-educated and worst-looking people in the world. “She had a motherly side,” recalled Ernest Callenbach, “especially to young people who needed help. I think that’s why she was sympathetic to certain directors. She thought she could be their den mother. She could be very bitchy to people, but she had a very soft, sweet side, which many people refused to admit was there.”
Robert Duncan often turned up at Oregon Street. Gregarious and uninhibited, he added a lot to the parties, despite his disconcerting habit of scratching his rear end in front of other people. Perhaps because he had developed an enviable reputation as a poet, she seemed to have mixed feelings about her old friend. For years she had harbored a strong prejudice against almost anyone who came from the world of academia; she professed to believe that most literature professors were second-rate, affected hacks who made their living off the work of real writers. One night Duncan arrived at Oregon Street, having just come from the home of Thomas Parkinson, the noted Berkeley English professor with a keen interest in the avant-garde. When Duncan announced where he had been earlier in the evening, Pauline lit into him with a vengeance, asking him how he could possibly associate with people like Parkinson, whom she considered a mediocre academic. And many other times, she would snipe about Duncan as soon as he wasn’t around. “She started damning his poems,” said Gutierrez. “Here’s someone she seemed to approve of, and then as soon as he was out the door, she was slamming him. I thought, Well, if she said that about him, what would she do to me? It developed a distrust on my part.” It seemed much easier for her to extend generosity to her younger friends, the ones who were struggling to find their way.
Around this time, Pauline enjoyed some of the benefits of a widening reputation. In 1958 Ernest Callenbach was approached to become editor of a new, California-based magazine, Film Quarterly. He declined and suggested Pauline to the magazine’s founder, August Fruge. But when Pauline and Fruge spoke, it was clear that they didn’t agree on matters of editorial content. Pauline told Fruge that she would accept the post only if she could be guaranteed no editorial interference of any kind, an assurance Fruge refused to give. In the end, Callenbach did accept the job, which he held from 1958 to 1991.
Gina benefited from Pauline’s marriage to Edward Landberg in that there were now funds available for the heart surgery that had been put off for so many years. (Pauline’s niece Dana Salisbury, believed that getting the money for the operation was Pauline’s principal motive in marrying Landberg.) It was delicate surgery, but it was successful, and Gina proceeded through a long and difficult recovery period with Pauline looking after her every minute.
Even though she was still a young girl, Gina was usually not excluded from the parties. She was bright and precocious, although still remarkably small for her age. Guests got used to her coming downstairs in her
pink bathrobe, watching the movies that Pauline was screening and taking in the heady conversation that was swirling around her. Gina was a student at Bentley, a reputable private school in Oakland. Pauline monitored her education carefully and, critical of teachers as always, decided that her daughter wasn’t being taught properly. After a tremendous row with one of Gina’s instructors, Pauline removed her from Bentley and home-schooled her until she was eighteen. She claimed that it was designed to give Gina a more substantial education, but Anne Wallach always believed that the break had come because Pauline loved to stay up late and didn’t want to be bothered getting Gina off to classes.
It was a dramatic move that shocked many of Pauline’s friends and relatives, and they worried that Gina was being deprived of a normal childhood. Gina herself had extremely conflicted feelings about being removed from school. While she was accustomed to having a close relationship with her mother, she missed the camaraderie of her classmates. Pauline’s involvement with her daughter could also be unpredictable. “Her attention to Gina would go on and off like a searchlight,” said Stephen Kresge. “There would be a boom, giving Gina an overwhelming amount of attention, and the next minute, Pauline was off on the next thing. This happened not just with Gina but with others, and they weren’t too thrilled. They loved it when the spotlight was on them and were miffed when it wasn’t. But that was Pauline. Whatever she was doing, she was doing with all of herself, and she wasn’t about to waste time.”
Landberg and Pauline had become increasingly incompatible, and neither one had much difficulty reaching the decision to separate. Since their working relationship had been mutually beneficial, they saw no reason not to continue it, and Pauline assumed management of the theater while Landberg, though still nominally in charge, went to Los Angeles to take filmmaking courses at UCLA.
One evening in the spring of 1961, the Cinema Guild had the most celebrated visitor in its history. Jean Renoir had been invited by Berkeley’s Council of Regents to occupy a chair, an appointment that had turned out to be a mostly pleasant experience for the veteran director. Renoir was cheerful and outgoing; he had a good rapport with the Berkeley students and was heartened by their enthusiasm for film. Almost immediately it was clear to him that the Cinema Guild was part of the reason for the high level of expertise among the young local movie buffs, and when Pauline programmed his 1951 film The River, he attended the screening and the after-party at Oregon Street. The evening had its bumpy moments: Renoir nearly became apoplectic when one of the guests asked him if he edited his own films; he angrily responded, “Does a poet edit his own poetry?”
Throughout the night, however, Pauline was in a state of bliss. “She was overwhelmed in his presence,” remembered Donald Gutierrez, “so that she didn’t bother to introduce me.” David Young Allen recalled that Pauline was in a state of high anxiety preparing for Renoir’s visit. “She got Gina and me out of the house,” Allen said. “She didn’t want interference. She came down with lipstick on and sort of a nice chartreuse sweater. She took the trouble to look nice.” Renoir was quite heavy at the time, and when he sat down on one of the good-quality chairs that Pauline had picked up in an antiques shop, he went right through it. But she was too ecstatic in the great man’s presence to care in the least.
In the end Pauline’s success with the Cinema Guild turned out to be too much for Landberg. After his sojourn in Los Angeles, which he followed up with a trip to Mexico, he returned to Berkeley in late 1961. When he discovered how Pauline had essentially taken over the Cinema Guild by signing the program notes, he was furious, accusing her of stealing all of the theater’s publicity. The two of them quarreled bitterly over the issue of the copyright on the notes, and Landberg announced that she was to cease and desist in all matters of programming; he was going to regain control of his own theater. He accused several of the Guild staff members of treason, causing them to resign on the spot. In 1962 Pauline ended her association with the Cinema Guild. Eventually Landberg had a dispute with the landlord, who now wanted him to pay rent plus a percentage. He refused and wound up letting the Cinema Guild fold. He had acquired another theater, the Cinema, on Shattuck Avenue, and eventually he astounded local audiences by playing the Japanese epic Chushingura there for forty-three consecutive weeks. But his Cinema Guild audiences felt abandoned: A great institution had come to an end.
CHAPTER SIX
Once again Pauline was left without a steady source of income. As her fame had grown locally, she had appeared more and more frequently on KPFA. She continued to lobby hard for payment—cofounder Lewis Hill and the station manager, Trevor Thomas, calmly listened to her demands and refused. She was writing critical pieces for The Partisan Review and Film Quarterly, but her work yielded minimal income. She petitioned The San Francisco Chronicle for a reviewing job, but nothing came of it. She fretted over money, wondering how she was going to provide for Gina and if she would ever be able to build a proper, functioning life for herself.
It wasn’t only KPFA’s refusal to put her on salary that made Pauline feel antagonistic toward its management. It was what she considered their middle-of-the-road editorial voice. She felt that the station had something in common with Sight and Sound and other film journals: While they prided themselves on their liberal point of view, and their editorial content, which was superior to the commercial norm, they were in fact stodgy, predictable, and drearily well-intentioned. She constantly criticized the station—sometimes on the air—for its self-congratulatory attitude and lack of programming flair. (KPFA, trying to maintain a proper atmosphere of free speech on the airwaves, did little to protest.) Pauline found the station’s lack of response to suggestions and any criticism of their programming policies an adequate explanation of the fact that after thirteen years, it had a total of only eight thousand subscribers.
She also encouraged her colleagues to rebel whenever possible. “She was kind of a champion of mine in times when I was in a little bit of trouble at KPFA,” remembered the station’s music director, Alan Rich. On his weekly music review program, Rich’s critical arrows were often aimed at the San Francisco Symphony. Unfortunately, several of the Symphony’s major donors were also viewed by KPFA’s management as potential patrons of the station, and from time to time, Lewis Hill made his objections known to Rich. “I remember running into Pauline on Telegraph Avenue,” said Rich, “and she, at the top of her lungs, started yelling about how good I was, and how dare they give me a hard time.”
Pauline’s weekly broadcasts, meanwhile, were covering many of the new European movies that were catching on with American art-house audiences. One of the most exhilarating movements in world cinema then was the Nou-velle Vague (New Wave). The many champions of the New Wave during the late 1950s and early ’60s prized its style of looking at movie storytelling—a more complex, relaxed, intuitive means of portraying characters and situations onscreen. Those at the forefront of the New Wave carried on loudly about the stagnation and lack of imagination that had blighted French cinema since the end of the war, arguing that it had never moved ahead in any innovative way, having been crippled by the hard financial times that cast a pall over the postwar years.
New Wave filmmakers were not too concerned with plot symmetry and conventional narrative technique; they wanted to get at the absolute truth of a situation, often in jagged and allusive ways. If the final result challenged or even puzzled the audience, so much the better. Among the notable characteristics of the New Wave was a preference for location shooting over studio-made sets, a sense of the absurd, an overall feeling of cinema verité—an attempt to portray life as it really was, not as moviegoers had grown accustomed to seeing it manipulated. There was some irony in this, since many of the New Wave directors—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, among others—had begun their careers by writing for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, a scholarly journal that consistently paid homage not only to the Italian neorealist movement, but to commercial Hollywood s
tudio product. The Cahiers critics were at the forefront of the new movement of auteurists, intent on reevaluating the achievements of many screen directors they considered underrated, and linking their films to one another in terms of style and theme. They elevated the works of studio directors such as Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk to a level of appreciation that Americans had not shown them. The Cahiers du Cinéma group revered directors who left a conspicuous visual “signature” on their movies, and, like police detectives trying to connect a disparate set of clues, they loved searching for visual links among the directors’ films. John Ford, with his painterly instinct in depicting the Old West, and Alfred Hitchcock, the most unapologetically commercial director of all, were held up by the New Wavers as cinema geniuses par excellence.
In 1959, the crucial year for the New Wave, three films premiered at the Cannes Festival and went on to tremendous international success. The first, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, with its relentless impressionistic score by Luiz Bonfa, was by no means a characteristic New Wave effort, but the other two, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, were landmark events in world cinema. These films had unexpected rhythms, perversities of editing, scenes of great complexity, ambiguity, and beauty. The 400 Blows, in particular, was full of unforgettable sequences, with Henri Decae’s camera impassively observing the characters in long, fluid takes. The lack of a conspicuously controlled and controlling directorial tone struck audiences as wildly exciting—even liberating.