Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  In June, William Abrahams wrote to Robert Mills that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was “going great guns at the moment,” and that Atlantic was so encouraged that it was expanding the book’s advertising campaign. By late August it had earned back its advance, and Pauline was collecting royalties. Peter Davison was pleased to be able to send Robert Mills a check for $2,684.90 for royalties on both of Pauline’s books. And a substantial paperback sale had been made to Bantam Books, with a release set for the spring of 1969.

  One of the book’s most ardent admirers was Louise Brooks, the silent-era actress who had established new levels of sexual candor with her revealing performances in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl and had in recent years turned out a number of startlingly perceptive articles on film. She had corresponded with Pauline for a number of years, ever since Pauline had tried to get Brooks to fly from her home in Rochester, New York, to speak before a showing of Pandora’s Box at the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Brooks thought her “the best film critic since Agee.” Pauline had sent her a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, to which Brooks responded, “You could have knocked me over with Audrey Hepburn.” She mentioned several parts of the book that she had pored over with fascination: “Going through the index I have sampled some of your views on my loves and hates. And I don’t care what you write about anyone as long as I have found you love Garbo.” She closed with the kind of shrewd observation she was known for: “Your picture on the dust cover made me think of Dorothy Parker when she was young in a moment of happiness.”

  One thing that Pauline most lamented about the movies of the 1960s was the absence of genuine stars. For her this had always been one of the elemental pleasures of going to the movies: being bowled over by an astonishing talent who genuinely belonged on the screen. Realism was always welcome, but Pauline craved the charge of something more. “In life,” she wrote, “fantastically gifted people, people who are driven, can be too much to handle; they can be a pain. In plays, in opera, they’re divine, and on the screen, where they can be seen in their perfection, and where we’re even safer from them, they’re more divine.”

  In the fall of 1968 she found the star she’d been waiting for in Barbra Streisand. When Pauline resumed her duties at The New Yorker that September, her first review was of Streisand’s debut film, Funny Girl. It was titled simply, “Bravo!” and the word was aimed at Streisand alone—certainly not at her costar, the almost preternaturally passive Omar Sharif, and not at the director, William Wyler. Pauline’s review nearly vibrated with the thrill of discovery.

  “It has been commonly said,” Pauline wrote, “that the musical Funny Girl was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. That is nonsense; the ‘message’ of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl is that talent is beauty.” She went on:

  Most Broadway musicals are dead before they reach the movies—the routines are so worked out they’re stiff, and the jokes are embalmed in old applause. But Streisand has the gift of making old written dialogue sound like inspired improvisation; almost every line she says seems to have just sprung to mind and out. Her inflections are witty and surprising, and more surprisingly, delicate; she can probably do more for a line than any screen comedienne since Jean Arthur, in the thirties.

  Streisand posed a formidable challenge to audiences, even those who had rushed out to buy her records but weren’t yet at ease with her as a screen presence. She conveyed the idea that she was exactly what she appeared to be—a kooky, unvarnished, undiluted Jewish girl from Brooklyn. Her looks were perhaps more charismatically mercurial than those of any movie actress since Bette Davis: She could be crude and horsey-looking one minute, ravishingly beautiful and glowingly expressive the next—just as her singing voice could go from powerful to exquisitely tender and vulnerable in a split second. Many of the men in the audience didn’t know quite what to make of her, and neither did some of the male critics. In a stunningly misguided review in The New York Morning Telegraph, Leo Mishkin wrote of Streisand’s spectacular star turn, “She is not quite up to the task as yet of carrying a whole motion picture by herself,” adding, “The one thing you cannot fault her with is that she is unique. But it takes time to get used to her.”

  Pauline found that Streisand was more than just a naturally adept funny girl—she was a beguiling actress as well. In the picture’s second half, when Fanny Brice’s story got bogged down in heartbreak, Streisand showed her deep well of self-respect as an actress: “She simply drips as unself-consciously and impersonally as a true tragic muse.... She doesn’t ‘touch’ us for sympathy in the Chaplinesque way by trying to conceal her hurt. She conceals nothing; she’s fiercely, almost frighteningly direct.”

  Pauline did not yet know Streisand personally, but she must have seen in Streisand a great deal of herself. Like Streisand, Pauline was a smart Jewish girl who had refused to alter, even modify her singular talent and her independent approach to life. Each was uncompromising about how she wanted her talent to be presented to the public, and in the years ahead, Pauline would follow Streisand’s career with a close fascination she reserved for very few actors.

  It was when writing about performers that Pauline’s gift for imaginative analysis was expressed at its finest. She could not only give an acute assessment of a performance but could offer fascinating insights about what it revealed about the actor’s relationship with his public, or why a particular piece of casting had turned out to be wrongheaded, and even damaging to a career. Shortly after Funny Girl opened, Julie Andrews’s latest vehicle, Star!, a biography of the stage actress Gertrude Lawrence, was released by Twentieth Century–Fox. A musical about Gertrude Lawrence, an actress whose fame was by that time quite remote, was an odd, risky choice for a big-budget film, but it had its intriguing side: The director, Robert Wise, and the screenwriter, William Fairchild, didn’t want to do a standard rags-to-riches show-business biopic; instead they wanted to explore Lawrence’s selfish, manipulative side, and in the process, reveal an untapped side of Andrews’s talents.

  Pauline, however, found the results misguided: “Glamour is what Julie Andrews doesn’t have,” she wrote. “She does her duties efficiently but mechanically, like an airline stewardess; she’s pert and cheerful in some professional way that is finally cheerless.” There was a certain tough determination underneath Andrews’s dependable smile that Pauline found the most interesting thing about her, but in the end the actress “merely coarsen[ed] her shining nice-girl image, becoming a nasty Girl Guide.” Star! opened in classy roadshow engagements, but it was pulled from circulation by July 1969, and reedited and rereleased a few months later as Those Were the Happy Times. It flopped all over again, and Pauline was delighted when Streisand unseated Andrews as the movies’ number-one female musical star.

  October 1968 also saw the release of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, an uneasy blend of bitchy high comedy and historical drama, starring Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine. Hepburn had recently moved to the front of the herd of the movie industry’s sacred cows: Her longtime companion Spencer Tracy had died the year before, and she subsequently won the Academy Award for their last film together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? It was considered a form of cinematic sacrilege not to respond to her gracefully aging beauty and no-nonsense Yankee spirit. If Streisand had become Pauline’s new movie love, Hepburn plummeted from her pantheon at almost precisely the same moment. Hepburn had always struck Pauline as the toughest and least maudlin of golden-age movie stars—even Bette Davis had done her share of lugubrious soapers, but Hepburn had, for the most part, retained a crisp dignity in the roles she played. But now, Pauline complained, her idol had let her down by succumbing to the public’s affection for her, and by playing up to them and begging them for that affection:

  When an actress has been a star for a long time, we know too much about her; for years we have been hearing about her romances or heartbreaks, or whatever the case may be,
and all this carries over into her presence on the screen. And if she uses this in a role, she’s sunk. When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be—when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves—they may get praise and awards (and they generally do), but it’s not really for their acting, it’s for capitulating, and giving the public what it wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen.... When Hepburn, the most regal of them all, contemplates her blotches and wrinkles with tears in her anxious eyes, it’s self-exploitation, and it’s horrible.

  Pauline was all too accurate about the rewards for this kind of performance: The following year, Hepburn won her third Oscar and, for the first time in her career, found herself on an exhibitors’ list of the top ten box-office stars.

  By the late summer of 1968, Pauline had decided to give up the flat at 670 West End Avenue. She and Gina found a large, high-ceilinged apartment at the Turin, at 333 Central Park West. The apartment was on the twelfth floor, and it had a spacious living room with a commanding view of Central Park. The Turin, which had been completed in 1910, was designed by Albert Joseph Bodker in the New Renaissance style. It was a famous building on the West Side because of the intensity of its social life, and many leftist writers and academic types lived there. The doyenne of the building’s left-leaning thinkers was a West Side socialite named Roz Roose, who threw regular parties and weekend brunches that became famous gatherings. Roose worked assiduously in trying to get Pauline to attend, but she succeeded only once, and then Pauline remained for only a few minutes, as she was bored by the other guests. “She hated that kind of thing,” said Jane Kramer, the distinguished writer who penned many of The New Yorker’s “Letter from Europe” columns. “Pauline was the least pretentious person.”

  As she always had, Pauline turned the living room into the place where she wrote. She still worked at the drafting table she had brought with her from California. On the table was an inkstand filled with paper clips, ajar of pencils, an electric pencil sharpener, and, inevitably, the many little scraps of memo pads on which she took notes during movie screenings. She sat in a straight-backed chair with a pillow folded over on the seat. During her six months at The New Yorker, it was from this spot that she maintained a fiercely demanding schedule. Her rough copy was due each week on Tuesday, but she saw several films for each one she wrote about, and she might not see until Monday night the main movie she would choose to cover. Often she would hand-write several drafts, and that meant staying up all night on Monday, fortified with bourbon and cigarettes, to get her copy to The New Yorker on time. Jane Beirn recalled that “there was always a fair amount of drama in getting the copy out of Penelope Gilliatt,” but that Pauline was extremely strict and disciplined about observing her deadlines. One of the advantages to working all night, she said, was that she got to see some spectacular Tuesday morning sunrises over Central Park.

  But Pauline’s routine was also punishing for Gina, whose job was to type her mother’s drafts before they were submitted to The New Yorker. As she went to bed, Pauline would leave her final handwritten copy in the living room, and by the time she arose, Gina would have neatly typed it. Sometimes Gina had to type more than one version and have it ready, usually with Pauline’s penciled-in last-minute emendations, by the time The New Yorker’s messenger arrived to pick it up. Gina turned twenty in 1968 and was still very much functioning as her mother’s right hand. Gina complained about her situation to a number of people, but she usually did it in a quasi-humorous way, so it was easy enough to dismiss. “Gina was a lovely girl,” remembered Tresa Hughes. “I always felt she was a slave—or rather, on a leash.”

  Certainly those close to the family felt that Pauline made little attempt to encourage Gina to widen her horizons. It was obvious to everyone that Pauline loved her, but she had also grown accustomed to the steady, dependable role that Gina played—as secretary, driver, reader, sounding board—and she was loath to give her up. Gina was a constant in her life, and now that Pauline lived in New York, where she was not nearly as much at ease as she had been in Berkeley, having her daughter close by was more important than ever. “I think she had more of a sense of fellowship and community on the West Coast,” observed Hughes. “Here, it was sort of dispersed. She didn’t really have her coterie.”

  Although Pauline definitely had her favorites among directors, her New Yorker reviews were, from the beginning, full of surprising reactions. She went out of her way to praise a movie that few saw, Greetings, directed by a twenty-eight-year-old filmmaker named Brian De Palma. Greetings wasn’t in the macabre vein of the later films that made De Palma famous but was an off-kilter comedy about three young New Yorkers trying to keep from being drafted, and it had been shot in two weeks for very little money. Rutanya Alda, who played a supporting role in the film, recalled how the tiny budget made it essential to work fast and accurately: “Brian would say, ‘I’ve got only three minutes of film—we’ve got to get the scene in three minutes.’” Locations were snapped up wherever they could arrange them cheaply: one sequence in a bookstore was shot at three in the morning without the owner knowing about it. Pauline acknowledged that some of Greetings was a mess, but she also recognized a vibrant, original talent; Greetings went on to win the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Pauline noted De Palma as a talent to watch.

  During her first year at The New Yorker she also experienced some unexpected reversals of opinion. Her longtime readers were particularly caught off guard by her review of Ingmar Bergman’s Shame. For years she had struggled with Bergman’s body of work and had come to the conclusion that she had no temperamental affinity for much of it. She loved the humanity the director showed toward the foolish lovers of Smiles of a Summer Night, and the contemporary wit and sensibility he brought to his medieval allegory The Seventh Seal. But Wild Strawberries, a major breakthrough for Bergman on the international art-house circuit, had left her both dissatisfied and unconvinced, and once he had gone into his long series of films that probed man’s attempt to unravel the mystery of God’s silence, Pauline had gradually lost interest. It was not simply, as some have suggested, that Bergman’s tempo was too slow for her, or that she disliked contemplative films; it was that she questioned the profundity of the dilemmas he was setting forth on the screen. She was deeply suspicious of the way Bergman had been turned into a cultural hero by college students who, she felt, didn’t grasp how simpleminded many of his ideas were. (“I did my own share of soul-wrestling,” she once said, referring to her youth, “and it’s not too tough to do.”) She was uncomfortable with the sort of unwritten contract Bergman had with his audience, in effect asking to take them by the hand and explore the spiritual crises that were plaguing his own life, over and over, in film after film.

  Pauline believed Shame, however—a study of the ravaging effects of war on a married couple (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) living on an island—to be a significant artistic step forward for Bergman. Shame succeeded, in her view, because he had reversed direction and made “a direct and lucid movie . . . Bergman has pulled himself together and objectified his material. There are no demons, no delusions. Everybody is exactly who he appears to be, so we can observe the depth and complexity of what he is. There is no character who may or may not represent Bergman; he is not lost in the work but is in control of it, and is thus more fully present than before.” She thought that Shame had an “almost magical lack of surprise; it has the inevitability of a common dream.” There is a strong indication that she was comparing Bergman with Godard when she offered this observation:

  In film, concentrating on a few elements gives those elements such importance that the material can easily become inflated, and the method is generally attempted by people who overvalue their few ideas and have little sense of the abundance of ideas that must go into a good movie. Bergman was not in such straitened intellectual circumstances, but he was given to inflation of “dark” and messy id
eas. The order he imposed on his chamber dramas was a false order. The films looked formal and disciplined, but (as often happens in movies) that “abstract” look concealed conceptual chaos. If a movie director cannot control both his thematic material and the flux of visual material, it is far better to have inner order and outer chaos, because then there is at least a lot to look at—different people and things and places to distract one—even if it is disorganized, while if the movie looks formally strict but the ideas and emotions are disturbed, the viewer may feel that the fault is in himself for not understanding the work, or, worse, feel that this kind of artistic-looking, disturbing ambiguity is what art is.

  Inner order and outer chaos: it was a theme she would return to again and again in future reviews, and one that her critics, many of them guilty of misreading her, would take up as ammunition against her.

  At The New Yorker, Pauline had many of the luxuries that most writers can only dream of—a generous-minded editor who, despite his attempts at interference, permitted her to write in her own true voice; no crippling space restrictions; an enthusiastic and informed readership.

  Her main problem was money. Initially the magazine paid her $600 per column. Over a six-month period that meant an annual income in the neighborhood of $14,000—which, after taxes and set off against New York’s high cost of living, she found very difficult to live on. She told friends that she wanted Shawn to fire Penelope Gilliatt and give her the reviewing job year-round, so at least she could make a more respectable living. “She was sore because she was only paid half a salary, and salaries in those days were so awful,” recalled Jane Kramer. “But it was a very benevolent place, on the other hand. A paternalistic benevolence.” Pauline had a limited appetite for paternalism: It galled her that she was rushing to meet weekly deadlines when many of the magazine’s old-guard writers, cronies of Shawn’s from the war years and after, were getting money on their monthly “drawing accounts” when they hadn’t turned in a word of copy for years.