by Brian Kellow
As she began her first stint of movie reviewing for the magazine, Pauline was shocked when she saw what had been done to her copy. It seemed that there was scarcely a sentence that hadn’t been rearranged and turned upside down, emerging with an entirely different accent and rhythm from what she had initially written. She had worked hard to develop a spontaneous, intimate, conversational tone in her writing, but after it had been through The New Yorker’s cleansing process, it didn’t sound so very different from many other articles. “I think a certain Anglophilia crept into it very early on—when it was founded, really,” Pauline once told an interviewer. “It started out with a sort of English tone and a kind of elite sophisticated Manhattan tone which was fake English.” Each week, when the first galley proof arrived, she went through it and carefully restored her original meaning and rhythm, writing very precisely in the margins in order to minimize editorial confusion in the second stage of galleys. Then she went to Shawn’s office to discuss the matter.
When she was hired, Shawn had given Pauline a handshake agreement that her copy would not be changed without her permission. As a courtesy to his writers, he made clear to them that if they felt that the magazine’s editing had violated their intentions, they were free to withdraw their articles and still receive payment. Shawn didn’t go back on his word with Pauline, but he didn’t give up without a fight, either. While many of his writers gratefully accepted his editorial handiwork, Pauline’s highly theatrical negotiating sessions with Shawn soon became the stuff of New Yorker legend. She often compared him with a pit bull, but she proved to be more than his equal in their arguments. She appreciated his urging her toward greater clarification of her thoughts on the page, but she reminded him over and over that she had to sound the way she sounded—otherwise there was no point.
Certainly, Pauline and Shawn were never likely to be truly compatible. He was an old-style gentleman through and through, who behaved with an imperturbable politeness. No matter how abusively someone might treat him, he seemed almost incapable of responding with anything but patient kindness. Jane Beirn, who served as his secretary for three years in the early 1970s, remembered, “Mr. Shawn was always polite and courteous to everyone he dealt with. Even if he wound up rejecting the work of people who came to see him, he would sit and talk with them, and they would walk out on air. I think he was so lovely and charming and complimentary that some of them may have gotten down to the lobby before they realized that the answer was ‘no.’ ”
Pauline was amused by Shawn’s courtly manners, but it appears that she never believed them to be entirely sincere, either; she felt his behavior had the ring of passive aggression. Nearly all staff writers referred to him as “Mr. Shawn”; Pauline made a point of calling him “Bill” early on in their working relationship and made no attempt to purge the “goddammit”s and “shit”s from her conversations with him.
Shawn’s many quirks and phobias have been well documented by various chroniclers of the magazine’s history. He detested the cold and dressed warmly almost year-round. Even on hot days at the office, when the air-conditioning might be on the blink, he would put on a blazer to receive visitors. At lunches with authors, at the Algonquin Hotel, just a block from the magazine’s offices at 25 West Forty-third Street, Shawn’s guests might gorge themselves on steak and martinis, while he ate a bowl of cereal or a slice of toasted pound cake. He prided himself on being the soul of propriety—yet he maintained his relationship with Ross throughout all the years of his marriage to his wife, Cecille. He abhorred the increasing violence and tension of daily life in New York—yet he had given Pauline the space for her lengthy essay on the shockingly violent Bonnie and Clyde.
A number of New Yorker staff members agreed with Ross’s view that Pauline “seemed to seek combat” with Shawn. Pauline was wise enough to realize that at last she had an editor willing to give her the number of words she needed. Indeed, Shawn was famous for his generosity to writers and often hesitated to suggest a word length, preferring to think that the size and scope of the piece would be dictated by the subject matter. With Pauline, he insisted on one rule only: that her written attacks on other critics come to a halt. Such things, he told her, had no place in The New Yorker.
There was nothing remotely posh about The New Yorker’s working environment. The corridors were dingy and disorderly, and the walls seemed always to be in need of a fresh coat of paint. It was a far cry from the plush image of New York publishing promoted in movies like The Best of Everything. “The New Yorker has a long-standing tradition of squalor with which I am loath to interfere,” Shawn once said. When she first joined the magazine staff, Pauline did most of her writing at home but was given a small, nondescript office that she generally used on the days when her pieces were going through various stages of proofs, to make long-distance telephone calls, and to answer mail—and also as a rest stop before and after her wrangles with Shawn.
What is most striking about her reviews in her first years at The New Yorker is their relative brevity; she would sometimes cover two or three films in a single column of “The Current Cinema,” and if the movie didn’t warrant extensive comment, she typically kept her review fairly succinct. She didn’t belabor the plots of bad movies; she often used her reviews of them to make a particular point about a trend she saw in films in general, or about an actor she felt might be seriously going off the track. She often raised her continued concern about the corrupting influences of television. The fast-paced economics of television production had been turning up for years on the big screen. In early 1968 Pauline observed:
The emotional shorthand of television—climaxes with a minimum of preparation—has been developed so that the audience won’t get away. Like the flip-page sex that authors of pulps now put in, so that the man in the drugstore can open the book anywhere and reach within a few pages a passage that makes him want to buy, the television director learns to keep socking the viewers so they won’t get bored, so he won’t lose them. They may have just tuned in, and he’s got to hold them for the commercial.... The men who have learned these lessons graduate to movies, where they try to keep up the same mechanical pace irrespective of subject or meaning, and where, increasingly, they’re working with the flip-page sex authors, who have mastered the knack of turning out a book in ten days and can produce a TV script or a movie script with the practiced indifference to quality of a short-order cook. And as this kind of material floods the market and gives audiences immediate sensations (audiences that may very possibly be interested only in excitation and be indifferent to theme anyway), the very notion of movie art, or even craftsmanship, begins to seem old-fashioned, “classical”—too slow in development perhaps, or too painstaking, or too “personal.”
In Hollywood, the old studio heads such as Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack L. Warner—men who, whatever their shortcomings, had cared and known a great deal about the craft of moviemaking—were now retired, and they had been replaced by bright young business-school graduates with a lust for making money, some crude understanding of basic marketing techniques, and no real interest in film at all. At the same time, however, there were signs of progress in terms of taking on adult subject matter. Several films released in 1968 took on the still-controversial subject of homosexuality, but Pauline wasn’t at all sure how much it mattered if the results were mostly negative; the films were a spotty bunch, ranging from the serious (The Fox) to the sensationalistic (The Detective). During her first year at The New Yorker Pauline reviewed several of them, and Rod Steiger starred in two. This was safety-net casting at its best: Few actors were less likely to be suspected of actually being gay than Steiger, particularly since his Academy Award–winning turn in 1967 as the bigoted small-town Mississippi sheriff in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. The first of his 1968 films, No Way to Treat a Lady, was released in March and directed by one of Pauline’s least favorite directors, Jack Smight (who came from television). It was a black comedy, with Steiger as a cross-dressing, mo
ther-dominated psychopath who spends his spare time strangling women. Pauline wrote that Steiger’s “presence is so strong that he often seems to take over a picture even when he isn’t the lead. This is true of George C. Scott, too, and actors this powerful just don’t fit into ordinary roles. The answer, of course, is that they need extraordinary ones—great roles.” But in Steiger’s case, the best that Hollywood could come up with was “this fag phantom of the opera.” It was a line that would haunt her years later, when a faction of gay readers accused her of having used her pages in The New Yorker to indulge in bald-faced homophobia. Certainly her choice of the word “fag” was questionable, yet she was using it for a specific purpose—to convey the crude, low-grade quality of both Rod Steiger’s role and the film’s coarse, low-comedy attitude toward gay men. In this particular context, “homosexual” would have lacked the zing she was after.
A more complicated matter was The Sergeant, released, strangely enough, during the Christmas season of 1968. In it Steiger played a career military man who develops an obsessive passion for a young private in his outfit. The movie was clearly an attempt to make a serious statement about the damage wrought by repression, but it also showed that the price paid for throwing off repression was often tragic. (The sergeant finally kisses the private, then, out of disgust, kills himself.) The outcome was a dreary film that was really all about the “daring” casting of Steiger, an excuse to let him exercise his acting skills; the audience could practically feel the actor asking for their approval, but Pauline wasn’t sure that he’d gotten it. “Does playing a homosexual paralyze him as an actor?” she wondered. “He gives such a tense, constricted performance it’s almost as if he didn’t want to convince anybody.” But the nerviest part of her review, again, would come back to plague her years later:
There is something ludicrous and at the same time poignant about many stories involving homosexuals. Inside the leather trappings and chains and emblems and Fascist insignia of homosexual “toughs” there is so often hidden our old acquaintance the high-school sissy, searching the streets for the man he doesn’t believe he is. The incessant, compulsive cruising is the true, mad romantic’s endless quest for love. Crazier than Don Juan, homosexuals pursue an ideal man, but once they have made a sexual conquest the partner is a homosexual like them, and they go on their self-defeating way, endlessly walking and looking, dreaming the impossible dream.
Since her writing about the films of Jean-Luc Godard had propelled William Shawn’s interest in having her at The New Yorker, it seemed fitting that two Godard pictures opened during her first year on the magazine’s staff. There were few major directors of the time with whom Pauline felt more inwardly connected; Godard’s jangly, modern tempo was her tempo. She had not liked Vivre sa vie, his 1962 drama with Anna Karina, because she suspected there was nothing much happening behind the heroine’s opaque presence. But his more recent efforts, including Band of Outsiders and Masculin féminin, had pleased her; she considered them “a volatile mixture of fictional narrative, reporting, essay, and absurdist interludes” whose frenzied, pop-art spirit was an ideal reflection of the chaotic times.
The first of his 1968 films, released in March, was La Chinoise, a biting satire of a bunch of young revolutionaries who attempt to use terrorist techniques to pull off a Maoist takeover. La Chinoise was aptly described by the Godard scholar Richard Brody as “less a document of Maoist thought, action, or organization than a collage of Maoist graffiti and paraphernalia.” The movie had been loosely organized, to say the least; Godard admitted to his close associates that he had given little thought to a cohesive story line, instead peppering the film with fast and furious references to figures such as Sartre and Malraux and Rosa Luxemburg, which vexed many members of the art-house audience. But Pauline respected Godard for not making the effort to explain the allusions that flew by so quickly:
We all know that an artist can’t discover anything for himself—can’t function as an artist—if he must make everything explicit in terms accessible to the widest possible audience. This is one of the big hurdles that defeat artists in Hollywood; they aren’t allowed to assume that anybody knows anything, and they become discouraged and corrupt when they discover that studio thinking is not necessarily wrong in its estimate of the mass audience. Godard, like many American novelists, works in terms of an audience that is assumed to have the same background he has.
Unlike so many American filmmakers, who repackaged old genres to make them palatable for a late-’60s audience, Godard was a fresh, original thinker; Pauline found his films “funny, and they’re funny in a new way.”
But it was Godard’s Weekend, released in October, that excited her more than any European film had in years. Pauline believed that by this time, Godard’s craft was so brilliantly confident that he had become the equal of James Joyce among filmmakers. She predicted that Godard would “probably never have a popular, international success; he packs film-festival halls, but there is hardly enough audience left over to fill small theaters for a few weeks.”
Weekend is a study of a greedy, bourgeois French couple (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) who leave on a trip to make sure the wife’s dying mother has provided for them in her will. Along the way they are plunged into a nightmarish traffic jam that leads to complete chaos—including the rape of the wife, portrayed in a disturbing, seriocomic tone. Pauline considered the director’s vision of the true hell of the modern materialistic world to be “a great original work.” There were sequences that excited her so much she could hardly wait to get her reactions down on the page—particularly the wife’s confession to her husband of a heated erotic episode with her lover, and the virtuoso filming of the traffic jam, in which the camera tracks its way through the cars that have come to a standstill, until it comes to the reason for the delay: a horrific, bloody accident that has attracted a crowd of gawkers. The movie’s ending stunned audiences: The couple become prey to a gang of cannibalistic hippies who slaughter and cook the husband; the wife winds up feasting on his flesh.
It was the most potent comment on the decay of modern French society that any filmmaker had dared to make, and Godard’s touch throughout was sure, brazen, and perpetually unexpected. Pauline felt that he had become one of the few directors who had really done what a great artist was supposed to do: He had enlarged the way in which his public saw the world around it.
In the spring of 1968 Penelope Gilliatt took over for Pauline, as planned. Pauline took advantage of her first layoff to get ready for the big event of the year—the publication of her second book by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Its working title had initially been Movie Watching, then All About Movies, both of which Pauline had rejected as being too tame. She finally settled on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, words she had once seen on an Italian movie poster. She considered the phrase “perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of the movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”
Robert Mills had sold Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to the Atlantic Monthly Press for an advance against royalties of $8,500. In the end it included reviews from The New Republic and McCall’s, as well as “The Making of The Group,” which at last would appear in its entirety. The most attention-getting feature of the book was “Notes on 280 Movies: From Adam’s Rib to Zazie.” Taking up the book’s final 143 pages, “Notes” was quite a surprising feature in those days before such general movie guides as Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Hound; several of the pieces were slightly reworked versions of the notes she had written for the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Despite the occasional peculiar observation (“Katharine Hepburn is probably the greatest actress of the sound era”), the “Notes” were pithy and highly original. There was also a last-minute inclusion, Pauline’s New Yorker essay on Bonnie and Clyde, and because the book was already in page proofs, she was charged $306 for inserting the piece in the late stage of production. Pauline also did her own
index, compiling some two thousand index cards.
The Atlantic Monthly Press brought out Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as one of its big releases in the spring of 1968, and again the reviews were excellent. In Newsweek her friend Joseph Morgenstern proclaimed her a “she-Shaw of the movies” and pronounced Kiss Kiss Bang Bang “blessedly brilliant.” Walter Kerr, the esteemed drama critic of The New York Times, reviewed the book for his newspaper’s Sunday Book Review:
If Miss Kael has a particular bent as a film critic, it is in the direction of social psychology. Almost always she wants to know what a film means to the people who make and see it, how it squares with—or falsifies—their lives, how it functions as truth or untruth in the immediate environment....
When you disagree with Miss Kael, you do not become irritable or want to tell her to shut up. You see—in the candor with which she records her own case history, in the intense curiosity she brings to the implications of what she is seeing and responding to—that she has earned her right to her hardheadedness, her decisiveness. She went to the movie with us, and as we walk home gesticulating, she can say anything she pleases. That’s why we’re walking home—to discuss the damn thing.