Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  It was not a decision she entered into lightly. Many critics dreamed of going to Hollywood, and most of them, it seemed, had a script tucked away in a drawer, ready to show at the right moment to the stars and directors with whom they came in contact. Some had actually developed serious screenwriting careers, such as Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times movie critic from 1936 to 1940, who had gone west and written John Wayne pictures such as Fort Apache and The Quiet Man. James Agee had worked on an even higher level with the scripts for The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.

  With Penelope Gilliatt still occupying her post for half the year, Pauline did not feel that she owed unwavering loyalty to The New Yorker. She had been explicit about her feelings on the matter, and William Shawn had refused to listen—getting rid of Gilliatt seemed something he simply could not and did not want to do. She met with Shawn and told him of her decision. After offering some basic words of caution about the dangers of venturing into the viper’s nest of Hollywood production, he agreed to a leave of absence.

  It is surprising that, knowing as much as she did about Hollywood politics, Pauline felt confident in her choice. But she was nearly sixty, aching for a change of pace, and she felt it was then or never. Many of her friends at The New Yorker were saddened by her decision—it felt as if an era was ending, and indeed it was, in more ways than one. Around the time she filed her last column, Nora Ephron wrote to tell her how much she would miss reading her. Her old nemesis Ray Stark also contacted her: “Now we can be friends again—I hope.”

  A number of people close to her attempted to talk her out of her plan. Whatever problems she had encountered at The New Yorker, after all, she had essentially been in the company of gentlemen and gentlewomen—too much so, at times, for her taste and temperament. She believed she had been too tough for The New Yorker, and she believed that she was tough enough to withstand anything that Hollywood could hand her. Warren Beatty was famous for being a master manipulator, and several friends warned her that he probably wanted to bring her out to Hollywood to neutralize her. “He wanted to hunt her down, and get her,” observed Paul Schrader. “If she was a twenty-two-year-old starlet, he would get her in one way. If she was a sixty-year-old film critic, he would get her another way.” But Pauline was an enthusiast, and with enthusiasm went a certain naïveté that does not exist in the heart of a true cynic.

  On the occasion of her departure, the fact-checking department composed an extended limerick, with numerous jabs at Penelope Gilliatt:

  There was a fine writer named Pauline

  Who chose judging films as a calling

  But she shared half her chores

  With the Empress of Bores

  A limey whose work was appalling

  So Pauline became a producer

  A calling where deadlines are looser

  And if she ever needs

  Some new stars to play leads

  We hope our debuts won’t traduce her.

  From now on those of us who CK

  Current Cin will be seen much more than TK

  With Penelope here

  Fucking up her career

  Oy vey, will we miss La PK!

  Her X-rated prose was too jarrin’

  To the boss of the mag she was star in

  Though the alternative critic

  Leaves us near paralytic

  Still we wish her the best with old Warren!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There is a famous story about Fred Zinnemann, the veteran director of From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons, and The Nun’s Story, being interviewed in the 1980s by a young, arrogant studio executive with no knowledge of movie history, for a job directing a major new studio film.

  “So,” said the executive, having done no homework whatsoever on the director’s distinguished career. “Tell me—what have you done?”

  “You first,” said Zinnemann.

  While Pauline’s desire to go to work in Hollywood was unquestionably driven by her desire to have an effect on how movies got made, she had a much simpler motivation as well—money. Her half-year’s salary at The New Yorker was still insufficient for her and Gina to live at any consistent level of comfort, and as she approached sixty, she became increasingly concerned about building up a nest egg. She worried that her meager earnings at the magazine would never be enough to provide Gina with any kind of decent inheritance. And now she faced the prospect of more money than she had ever seen in her life.

  Kenneth Ziffren’s negotiations with Warren Beatty’s lawyer, David Saunders of Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, were complicated and protracted. “Now I know what Warren meant when he said that his attorneys must get paid by the word,” Ziffren wrote to Pauline, adding that it would “probably take the whole weekend” to examine the contract that Saunders had sent over. In the end Ziffren worked out a very attractive deal for her: She would receive a salary of $150,000 a year, payable in monthly installments. The agreement stipulated that if one of the films she worked on wound up being produced, her annual salary would rise to $175,000 for the second picture and to $200,000 for the third and any succeeding ones. Ziffren also secured a payment of $750 weekly for Richard Albarino to act as Pauline’s associate producer on Love and Money. She was granted the right to remove her credit on any picture, provided that Beatty decided to remove his. And there were various other perks thrown in, including reimbursement for transportation, since she still didn’t drive.

  One thing was clear to everyone close to her: Despite the fact that she had left the door open by only requesting a leave of absence from The New Yorker, she was not at all sure she would ever return. Pauline viewed her job with Beatty as the first step in a complete career change but was careful in her comments to the press, saying that if the job didn’t pan out, she would return to criticism. Ziffren recalled, “She was keen to break loose from what she had been doing all her professional life and to try to do it from another chair, or another typewriter, so to speak.”

  Pauline’s work on Love and Money began in Great Barrington, before she moved west. To Albarino, James Toback was someone who viewed himself as a kind of laboratory for his own fantasies. “He never wrote or made anything that he hadn’t experienced first,” observed Albarino. “He can’t write fiction; he can only write diaries, and dramatize them.” The immediate problem was that Pauline thought the script for Love and Money was a mess. She and Albarino would have late-night meetings at her room at the Royalton to discuss the script’s problems. Eventually the deadline for submitting the script loomed, and Pauline panicked. Horrified by the thought that the first picture her name would be linked with might be a dud, she telephoned Albarino and told him that she needed him to rewrite the script in ten days. Over a meeting at the Harvard Club, Toback agreed to let them rework it, despite the fact that it was likely to change dramatically once casting was completed and filming began. Albarino quit his job, drove up to Great Barrington, and went to work. At that time of year it was bitterly cold in Massachusetts, and he and Pauline stayed up for several nights, fortifying themselves with brandy as they worked away. She seemed oddly protective of Toback at times: When Albarino devised a lengthy, Bertolucci-like tracking sequence around a bungalow, of which he was rather proud, Pauline rejected it, protesting that Toback would never know how to direct it.

  As the week wore on Albarino realized that the current ending didn’t work. At around ten o’clock one night, he drove to a local supermarket, where he suddenly came up with a way to fix it. He rushed back to Pauline’s and told her his idea. She approved of it, and he sat down to write. “I typed about four words,” said Albarino, “and she burst in and said, ‘Is it done?’ I broke down crying. That’s how fraught this circumstance was.”

  With the script completed, Pauline and Albarino flew out to Hollywood together. A few evenings later she reported to him that the script had met with general enthusiasm. Behind the scenes, however, all was not well. For one thing, both Beatty and Toback were growing weary
of Albarino’s lengthy digressions during meetings. They weren’t sure he was the right person for the project, but Pauline appeared to be quite dependent on him.

  Pauline found a second-floor apartment in Beverly Hills. It was a lovely old-style L.A. setting, and she quickly made herself at home there. She took taxis to and from her office at Paramount, where Beatty was headquartered, and enjoyed getting caught up with old friends such as Joe Morgenstern and Piper Laurie, Marcia Nasatir, Paul Mazursky, and Irvin Kershner.

  In a short time, Pauline demonstrated her lack of finesse at the game of studio politics. It led her to deliver a number of blunt judgments to various executives, who weren’t used to being spoken to quite so sharply. She and Toback also had major disagreements about various aspects of Love and Money. Disagreements, of course, are a standard part of the production process in Hollywood, but Pauline had had no experience in this atmosphere. Her battles with William Shawn over copy may have been ongoing, but the process of putting together a movie involved far more people and ideas, and she was not accustomed to such a complex mix of opinions and points of view from creative, marketing, and merchandising personnel.

  One principal conflict between Pauline and Toback involved the sanctity of the script. Toback looked at it in much the same way that Altman did—as a constantly evolving work in progress. He knew that on the set any number of changes would be made, because he regarded a script as nothing more than “a blueprint which may or may not work.” Pauline, however, thought that her greatest asset as a producer was attentiveness to the screenplay; she believed that many potentially good films of recent years had gone off the rails because the producers hadn’t cared enough to weigh in on the writing. “I found it impossible to work with her,” Toback remembered, “because she was fetishistic about the script. There are certain things that work theoretically that don’t work practically. She was insistent on mapping things out, with the most precise and neat sense of certainty, in a way that made me feel she had never actually been on a set.”

  Both Pauline and Toback were also becoming increasingly anxious about another project that was occupying more and more of Beatty’s attention: a large-scale drama based on the lives of the socialist revolutionary John Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant. It had became clear, once Pauline arrived in Hollywood, that Beatty was far more interested in making that film than he was Love and Money. She was dead set against the Reed film and repeatedly tried to talk Beatty out of doing it, warning him that it was a pompous, grandiose idea, and accusing him of trying to reinvent himself as the new David Lean.

  After several weeks of arguing with Pauline over the script of Love and Money, Toback went to Beatty and told him that he was not going to be able to function with her as the film’s producer. Beatty assured him that it would be foolish, if not suicidal, of him to drop the most powerful movie critic in America from his movie, but Toback was adamant. Beatty finally agreed to accede to his demand, on the condition that he be allowed to tell Pauline that the whole idea of dropping her was Toback’s and that he, Beatty, did not support it.

  A meeting was called at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, with Beatty, Toback, Pauline, and Albarino. “I feel very badly,” she said when informed of the decision. “This is not the way I wanted it to work out. I don’t feel it’s necessary to stop working, but if Jim does, I guess I have to accept it.” Beatty was true to his word, telling her repeatedly that her dismissal was not his idea and that he thought it was a mistake.

  The firing of Pauline from Love and Money also presented Beatty with a very real practical problem: He had sold Paramount’s CEO, Barry Diller, on the idea of Toback and Pauline as a team. By 1980, Diller, in his late thirties, was riding high. As CEO and chairman of Paramount Pictures, he was a wizard at promotion, and he saw to it that Paramount’s marketing budgets were beefed up to unheard-of levels. He also rejected the notion of opening big movies slowly and gradually, allowing word of mouth to build. Diller felt this process backfired more often than it succeeded, and drove home the new method of mass release, getting audiences into theaters before a wide received opinion had been formed.

  At Paramount, Diller had scored enormous successes with Saturday Night Fever and Grease. He was a great admirer of Pauline’s, and both his and Beatty’s reputations had risen even higher when word got out that they had managed to sign up the country’s most important critic. It was seen as a joke on the New York establishment: Hollywood money was still all-powerful—even Pauline Kael could be bought. Now, however, Beatty would have to inform Diller that he was delivering only half of the package, and predicted that Diller would withdraw financing for Love and Money, which is ultimately what came to pass. The project bounced over to Lorimar, where it eventually got made. But Pauline’s name—along with Albarino’s—was removed from it.

  Only one trace of her influence on the movie remained: She had insisted that Toback cast her old comedy idol Harry Ritz in a key role. Even that fizzled, however: Toback went to Las Vegas, interviewed Ritz, and agreed that he would be fine in the part. Once filming began at Lorimar, though, Ritz lasted only a single day. “He was confused,” recalled Toback. “He had a lot of trouble with his lines. He didn’t know whether he was any good.” At the end of the day’s shooting, Ritz called Toback into his trailer and begged to be released from the film. “You have to let me go back to Las Vegas,” he said. “I can’t do this. I’m going to embarrass you. I’m going to embarrass the movie. I’m not up to it.” He was replaced by the director King Vidor.

  In order to allow them all—Diller included—to save face, Beatty arranged a new deal for Pauline with Paramount. She was to stay on as a “creative production executive,” helping to develop a number of potential screen projects. The new contract stipulated that she would suggest ideas for films, read novels and scripts, comment on works in progress, and suggest directors, actors, producers, and other talent for specific projects. She started the new post on May 1, 1979. Her contract ran for five months, at a salary of $50,000—a considerable drop from her producer’s salary, but still far more than The New Yorker had paid her. Pauline later recalled that this position consisted of sitting in an office and talking to various producers who happened to drop by, offering her opinions on a wide range of story ideas. She remembered that most people were extremely courteous—partly, she thought, because they respected her, but also because they feared her and the possibility that she might write poisonous things about her experience in Hollywood.

  News of Pauline’s difficulties was inevitably leaked to the press, and Newsweek quoted one studio insider as saying that she “did a masterful job of alienating everybody within six weeks.” Pauline claimed that she was pleased to be relieved of her producing duties because “producers just stand around and wring their hands,” and asserted that her new post was much more to her liking. But her new job soon became even more problematic than the old one had been. There was a distinct hierarchy at Paramount: Diller was the studio chief; Michael Eisner, an old ABC-TV colleague who had helped launch the monster hits Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and whom Diller had induced to join Paramount, was CEO; and Donald Simpson was senior vice president of worldwide production. Unfortunately for Pauline, Simpson was the one who effectively ran studio operations—and the executive to whom she was directly answerable. Simpson would soon become a Hollywood legend, one of the individuals who changed the industry permanently with his “marketing first, production second” paradigm. He helped refine the idea that a movie blockbuster did not require careful planning before being presented to the studios; a mammoth hit could spring from a pitch that lasted no more than thirty seconds. Sometimes it could even spring from a single line, a single idea—as long as it was something the marketing executives could sell. This became known as “high concept,” memorably described by Simpson’s biographer, Charles Fleming, as “a supercharged, simpleminded creature, an Aesop’s fable on crystal meth.” Pauline’s own notions about developing properties ran completely opposite t
o Simpson’s, and she soon found herself caught in the crossfire of studio politics.

  One of the difficulties was that Simpson had not been involved in the hiring of Pauline; Beatty had cut the deal directly with Diller, who ultimately handed her over to Simpson. According to Toback, Simpson had been enraged, feeling that he had been treated like a studio errand boy. It was he who made the decision to kill Love and Money, and he decided, on principle, to block whatever Pauline proposed. Years later he told Toback that when Pauline was put under his supervision, “It was a cake put in my lap, and all I had to do was take out my knife. Rarely in life can you pay back an insult so easily and so quickly.”

  Surviving studio correspondence bears out that this was the state of affairs in which Pauline found herself mired. She attempted to launch a number of projects after being taken off Love and Money. One was Quinces, an original script by her good friend and Great Barrington neighbor, the humorist Roy Blount, Jr. It went nowhere, and everything for which she subsequently expressed enthusiasm was routinely shot down by Simpson. “Dear Pauline,” he wrote to her in late July, “as we discussed last Friday night at the Brian De Palma movie, this is a piece of material that we are not interested in. We just don’t believe in it as a movie.” On another occasion, referring to a script called Dixianne, Simpson wrote, “Eisner and I have reviewed one more time and, unfortunately, it is still pass. Clearly this is a case of oversight versus foresight. At least, as Roy Blount Jr. would say, ‘You’re batting 500.’ Warmest regards, Don Simpson.”