Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Soon enough she realized that it was not possible for her to survive in this environment. She was appalled by the coarse behavior of some of the executives, particularly at one casting session, in which she witnessed a selection of actresses’ eight-by-ten head shots divided into two piles: “Would fuck her” and “Wouldn’t fuck her.” She had assumed that people would want to listen to what she had to say, and she quickly understood that while they might be polite on the surface, they regarded her as completely disposable. She was hurt, angry, and humiliated, and in the end, only one project she was keen on—The Elephant Man, the story of Joseph Merrick, a deformed man who lived in London during the Victorian era—managed to find its way into production, under the brilliant direction of David Lynch.

  Many people who knew her well speculated that her hiring by Paramount had all been part of an elaborate plan by Beatty after her damning review of Heaven Can Wait. “Warren’s power to charm cannot be overestimated,” observed the actor-writer Buck Henry. “Everyone he has ever worked with has had knock-down drag-out fights with him, and yet they—or at least many of them—come back for more. And the fact is that he is great fun to spend time with when there isn’t some horrible problem.” Pauline, however, seems never to have accused Beatty of tricking her. In interviews after leaving Hollywood, she always stressed how fairly and decently she had been treated by Beatty. She gently dismissed the whole matter by saying that she had underestimated the demands of movie producing—that she had realized, early on, that she was not the kind of person to corral a group of creative people and ride herd on them until they did what she wanted. “An awful lot of the time in Hollywood was spent mulling over the same things,” she said, “because you talk to people and two days later they come back and talk over the same problems, and I got very impatient. It’s hard not to show it.”

  There was truth in all of this—but the biggest truth of all was that she simply missed writing, and the power base that had gone with it. Now that she gotten a close view of what went on in Hollywood, she felt that she had gained an advantage that no other film critic really had. Now she really knew something about how movies were—or weren’t—made, and she could impart that knowledge to her readers. She did discuss other career possibilities—Kenneth Ziffren recalled that there was some talk about how she might use her talents effectively in the theater—but in the end, she decided that what she wanted most was to return to The New Yorker.

  While she was still in Hollywood, she had lunch with Paul Schrader at Nickodell’s, an old-time Melrose Place restaurant that was the unofficial commissary of Paramount Pictures. Once they had gotten settled in, Schrader explained his reason for wanting to see her. Pauline had commented to someone at an industry party that he was a good writer who would never make a good director. From Schrader’s viewpoint, this was extremely damaging: She was, after all, speaking not to her readers in the pages of The New Yorker but to people in the movie business who would make decisions about whether or not to hire him. “You are trying to destroy my career from the inside,” Schrader told her, “and I’ve got to call you on it.” Schrader recalls that Pauline gave him a “typical kind of mealy-mouthed response—‘I didn’t really mean it that way’—like any politician.”

  In the meantime, The New Yorker was having some rather public problems of its own. In March, shortly after Pauline had written her farewell review of The Warriors, the magazine had published a profile of the celebrated British author Graham Greene, written by Penelope Gilliatt. In April, William Shawn received a letter from the writer Michael Mewshaw, who offered compelling evidence that Gilliatt was guilty of plagiarism: Entire sentences and phrases, as well as a number of paraphrased ideas and sentences, had been lifted directly from an article Mewshaw had written for The Nation in mid-1977, one that was later reprinted in both The London Magazine and the Italian publication Grazia. Gilliatt’s final paragraph had consisted of fourteen sentences, eight of which were stolen from Mewshaw. Mewshaw’s attorney had urged him to pursue high-cost damages, but because the magazine had a high reputation, and because it had run positive reviews of two of his novels, Mewshaw asked Shawn for only $1,000, in addition to a printed acknowledgment that Gilliatt had plagiarized his piece.

  A few days later Shawn received a letter from Graham Greene himself, who stated that after he counted fifty errors and misquotations in Gilliatt’s published profile, he gave up reading it. It was a shocking embarrassment for The New Yorker, which, under Shawn’s guidance, had successfully maintained a reputation for irreproachable professional standards. A key part of that reputation had been the magazine’s fact-checking department, which still kept up a watch so fastidious that it drove some authors to distraction. But it was not the first time Gilliatt had come under fire for “borrowing” from other writers. In 1974 Sandra Berwind, a professor of English at Bryn Mawr, had written to Shawn complaining that Gilliatt, in her review of Paul Mazursky’s Harry and Tonto, had borrowed heavily from W. B. Yeats’s Essays and Introductions.

  Berwind’s complaints prompted a telephone call from Shawn, who obsequiously thanked her for her letter, then said, “I suppose, Professor Berwind, that in your line of work you come upon students who plagiarize. And I suppose you are understanding at times and forgive them?” Shawn vacillated throughout his conversation with Berwind, who remembered him as being “kind of patronizing. No indication of doing one thing or the other.”

  In 1978 Andy Holtzman, film program coordinator for the New York Shakespeare Festival, accused Gilliatt of showing up twenty-five minutes late for a screening of the documentary film Deal, ignoring the festival’s attempts to schedule another screening, and then publishing a negative review in The New Yorker. Holtzman suggested reassigning the film to Pauline, but again, the complaint about Gilliatt fell on deaf ears.

  For years Gilliatt’s drinking had been a well-known problem among film producers, publicists, critics, and The New Yorker staff. Howard Kissel recalled a screening that he attended in the late 1970s. Gilliatt had failed to show up for it, and after delaying the start time as long as possible, a nervous team of publicists had screened the film without her. After the movie was finished, Kissel and his fellow critics attempted to exit the screening, but they couldn’t leave the room: Gilliatt, blind drunk, had arrived late and passed out against the door.

  Not even Shawn, however, could completely ignore the Michael Mewshaw matter, and The New Yorker agreed to the writer’s demands for a $1,000 payment. But Shawn, in enabler mode, told Mewshaw that Gilliatt had been plagued by personal problems, and persuaded him to drop his request for a printed acknowledgment of her plagiarism. Instead, he placed her on a leave of absence from the magazine.

  Pauline was able to keep a close eye on these events, thanks to many members of The New Yorker’s editorial staff who were loyal to her and were reliable sources on the Gilliatt affair. One of them, Patti Hagan, wrote to her in Los Angeles that the fact-checking department had uncovered all of the similarities in the Gilliatt and Mewshaw articles and reported them to Shawn. According to Hagan, Gilliatt had gone to Shawn’s office and talked her way out of it, and Shawn had ordered all of her copy restored; now that the matter had become a public embarrassment, he was putting the blame on the fact-checkers.

  By the end of 1979 Pauline had not renewed her five-month contract with Paramount, and her Hollywood episode came to an end (though she always claimed that she had received other offers that would have enabled her to remain in Hollywood). To the press she remarked that she hadn’t had enough energy to accomplish her goals at Paramount. “Frankly, many producers aren’t doing the job that they should; the director is asked to carry too large a burden,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. She put the blame for the high quotient of misguided movies on the producers: Often, actors were miscast, rewrites were abandoned, the thread of the movie was lost, simply because the producer had failed to do his job.

  She contacted Shawn and told him that she would like to return to her old post—a
proposition that was much more attractive to her now that Penelope Gilliatt’s future with the magazine was in question. It wasn’t a matter, however, of simply saying she wanted to come back. Shawn had to decide what to do about Roger Angell, Susan Lardner, and Renata Adler, all of whom had taken a turn writing “The Current Cinema.” Pauline headed back to New York and waited to hear how Shawn would prepare for her reentry. She busied herself with lecture appearances, including a visiting writers’ symposium at Vanderbilt University on March 26, at which she spoke of the decline in quality movies. “You work for a long time to become a writer,” she complained to the audience, “and then your subject is cut out from under you.”

  She was stunned when she discovered that Shawn did not want her to rejoin the staff. She had assumed that, given her reputation, it would be relatively easy to work out the details. Her fame was at its height. Her new publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, where Billy Abrahams had recently moved, was preparing to bring out her new collection. And now, after all she had done to raise the magazine’s visibility and attract younger readers, Shawn was saying he didn’t want her.

  Pauline delivered the shocking news to the staff editor William Whitworth, who immediately went to Shawn’s office to discuss the matter. It was an unwritten rule that one was not supposed to question Shawn’s staff decisions, but Whitworth managed to bring up the matter of Pauline tactfully. “He went into a long explanation that she had corrupted herself by adopting the ways and standards of Hollywood,” Whitworth remembered. “He talked for some time. When something was immoral, that was one of the magic words for him—‘corrupted.’ He would explain it to you like a teacher or a theologian—at length. I went away just stunned. It was so unexpected and impractical. This was when movies were really something in the culture. I just thought she was tremendously important to us.”

  Whitworth appealed to Shawn a few days later, pointing out that the leave of absence that Pauline had taken implied that she would be able to return when her Hollywood period was finished. It was the kind of point of honor on which Shawn was always quite vulnerable, and after listening to Whitworth’s entreaties, he reluctantly agreed that Pauline could resume her position. Eventually it was worked out that she would begin writing full-time for the magazine in the fall of 1980.

  In the years to come Pauline would always be extremely reticent about the details of her time in Hollywood. If pressed by an interviewer, she would give her own carefully orchestrated version of what had transpired, but the experience had clearly left its mark on her. As Jeanine Basinger said, “I had the feeling that what had happened to her there shocked her. She was not a woman who failed at things. She had a sense of shame and failure, and I think she buried it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In April 1980 Holt, Rinehart and Winston brought out Pauline’s new collection of reviews, titled When the Lights Go Down (a title suggested by a stranger she met a dinner party in Los Angeles). The new volume covered her reviews and essays from July 1975 to March 1979. Now that her reputation as America’s foremost movie critic seemed all but unassailable, it was ironic that she could no longer expect unqualified raves when she published a new book. Her impact and influence had to be examined closely for subtext and possible negative influences.

  Taking note of her increasing tendency to rhapsodize on the page, Michael Wood in The New York Times Book Review wrote, “What has happened, I think, is not that she has lost her touch or her taste, but that she has tried to ride her enthusiasms too hard and her astringent language won’t take it. I can’t think of a single bad film she’s praised, but her recent work is littered with extravagant claims for merely amiable or seriously skewed movies.” Wood pointed out, in his largely favorable review, that she was extremely persuasive about audiences’ potentially damaging leeriness about violence in “Fear of Movies,” and he stressed, “Whatever mellowness has crept into her writing, there are no signs at all of fatigue.”

  Andrew Sarris gave her a good lashing in an odd, risky review published in The Village Voice. “When Pauline scolds the industry,” Sarris wrote, “she seems to be flailing at phantoms from the past. She has no more control over the raging unconscious of today’s unbridled movies than anyone else, but she never gives up trying to shape the future.” Much more damning was his strong suggestion that she was deeply corrupt. Citing her positive review of Fingers, a movie he disliked, he wrote, “a more candid critic than Pauline might have felt impelled to inform her New Yorker readers that this alleged denizen of Dostoevskian depths was her constant escort at screenings. It is not that I care whether Pauline chooses to be seen in public with James Toback. It is simply that her politique often seems to consist of setting one standard for people she knows and another for people she doesn’t. She thus acts as an unflagging apologist for Sam Peckinpah and Irvin Kershner, whatever their failings, while heaping a steady torrent of abuse on Don Siegel and Alan Pakula, whatever their virtues.”

  The promotional tour that had been arranged for When the Lights Go Down was daunting—and a clear indication that public interest in Pauline was high. On April 1 she appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, joking about the avalanche of hate mail she had received for her positive reviews of Mean Streets and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, contrasted with only two letters for her favorable review of Last Tango in Paris. She expressed her regret that Robert Altman’s latest films didn’t display the same affection for their characters that his earlier ones had, and she skillfully downplayed her Hollywood episode by claiming that her six-month leave from The New Yorker had been coming up anyway—that she had simply prolonged it slightly.

  Six days later she was a guest on the late-night talk show hit Tomorrow, with Tom Snyder. One day later, she did interviews for Women’s Wear Daily and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. On April 9, she had interviews with the New York Post and with Arlene Francis on New York’s WOR radio. Then she was off to Boston for interviews with The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Real Paper, WGBH-TV, and WB2 Radio, plus a lecture at the Rabb Lecture Hall. After that, she was off on a grueling lecture tour, including appearances in Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto.

  During one of her L.A. appearances, she was startled during the question-and-answer session when a man raised his hand and asked, “Why are you shaking?” Recently she had noticed a very slight tremor in her hands, but she had put it down to nerves, and she was astonished that it would be visible to someone sitting halfway across a large auditorium.

  At The New Yorker Pauline at last had what she had always wanted—the entire reviewing post, with a commensurate raise in salary. Her schedule was adjusted slightly: Now she came down to New York every other week, checked into the Royalton for four days, and saw two movies each night, returning to Great Barrington to write her column. Often Gina or one of Pauline’s friends in the Berkshires drove her both ways.

  After a pleasant trip to Colombia with Gina and their friend the author Jaime Manrique, she returned in the magazine’s June 9, 1980, issue, with a negative review of Stanley Kubrick’s latest, The Shining, a supernatural tale that boasted great technological advances but fell flat as a thriller. While Pauline enjoyed Jack Nicholson’s performance early in the film—“He has a way of making us feel that we’re in on a joke—that we’re reading the dirty, resentful thoughts behind his affable shark grins”—more of him was less as the movie went on. She thought that he was too ideally cast: “His performance begins to seem cramped, slightly robotized. There’s no surprise in anything he does, no feeling of invention.”

  Her big “comeback” piece, however, came in the June 23, 1980, issue, with a lengthy essay titled “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers.” Some have viewed it as her revenge on Hollywood for her mistreatment there; in fact, she offered no explanation about her time in Hollywood, assuming that informed readers would understand her position. What she was really doing was giving her readers a glimpse of what she h
ad learned “out there,” and the essay was Pauline at her stinging best. Taking precise (if unspoken) aim at Don Simpson, she opened fire on the new breed of studio executives—ignorant, uneducated, and unfeeling where movies were concerned, who thought only about box-office grosses, and never about giving an audience something that might prove deeply satisfying. The conglomerates in charge of the studios were painted with the blackest part of her brush: She described them as filled with men who were attracted to the film world because it gave them the opportunity to elevate their status by rubbing shoulders with famous stars and directors. Part of the trouble was that they began to see themselves as genuinely creative people:

  Very soon they’re likely to be summoning directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and telling the company executives what projects should be developed. How bad are the taste and judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven’t grown up in a show-business milieu—they don’t have the background, the instincts, the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years.

  She believed the central problem was that the studio heads had “discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking . . . If an executive finances what looks like a perfectly safe, stale piece of material and packs it with stars, and the production costs skyrocket way beyond the guarantees and the picture loses many millions, he won’t be blamed for it—he was playing the game by the same rules as everybody else. If, however, he takes a gamble on a small project that can’t be sold in advance—something that a gifted director really wants to do, with a subtle, not easily summarized theme and no big names in the cast—and it loses just a little money, his neck is on the block.”

  It was a loss to American letters that Pauline, away in Hollywood, missed the opportunity to review the most ambitious undertaking of the decade—the movie that was, whether it was intended to be or not, the cumulative event of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Despite the movie’s horrendous production problems—shooting in the Philippines was shut down for some months—Pauline correctly perceived that the film signified the audience’s “readiness for a visionary, climactic, summing-up movie. We felt that the terrible rehash of pop culture couldn’t go on, mustn’t go on—that something new was needed. Coppola must have felt that, too, but he couldn’t supply it.” She was distressed, however, to see that a film with such brilliant isolated sequences was, in her words, “an incoherent mess”; she felt that the director had simply gotten lost. (Robert Getchell recalled that when he and Pauline went to see the movie in Westwood, she held her nose as they walked out of the theater.)