Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Warner Friedman often worried that his son’s interests weren’t broad enough and would try to encourage him to paint and to attend museums with him. He also asked Allen Barra to try to get Will interested in sports. Barra spent a fair amount of time practicing baseball with him; while Will was a very good batter, he lacked the patience to master fielding. When Barra came for visits, he often brought his young daughter, Maggie, to play with Will. Barra had taken an active role in helping to shape Maggie’s reading tastes and had instructed her to read both Tom Sawyer and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Pauline’s reaction bordered on hostility. “Oh, just let her grow up,” she would say. “I never understood her attitude on things like that,” Barra recalled. “Here was a perfect opportunity for Will to learn about art. And Pauline could have given so much to him, and she didn’t.”

  Pauline kept abreast of the changes that continued to sweep through The New Yorker offices. After five years Si Newhouse had judged Robert Gottlieb’s editorial tenure unsatisfactory—advertising had declined sharply, and the magazine was losing $5 million a year—and replaced him with Tina Brown, the thirty-eight-year-old British editor who had successfully relaunched Vanity Fair and transformed it into a top celebrity magazine. Many of the old-guard writers and reporters suddenly found themselves bounced from their long-standing (and frequently unproductive) jobs. The content changed considerably, with much greater emphasis on current events and far less focus on the magazine’s literary and cultural subjects. Carefully crafted features on cultural figures such as the Irish author Molly Keane, the producer Irene Mayer Selznick, and the famously dyspeptic novelist Marcia Davenport appeared far less frequently; topicality was now critical.

  A number of insiders, as well as many longtime readers, resented the new direction, feeling that Brown had subverted the unique mission and tone of the magazine, but Pauline believed that Brown’s arrival made for a welcome and exciting change. (She often asked friends if they really thought anyone would miss Ved Mehta’s interminable, old-fashioned articles.) Pauline was also pleased when Brown, at long last, engaged James Wolcott as a staff writer—a sign that the magazine was cultivating some livelier voices. She was unhappy, however, when Brown terminated Michael Sragow as movie critic.

  By the mid-1990s Pauline’s Parkinson’s symptoms had grown debilitating. While in the house, she relied on her four-pronged cane—she joked that it wasn’t very dashing, but it did the job. Outside, however, she was constantly fearful of falling, and felt quite uneasy if she didn’t have someone’s arm to support her. Visits to New York were impossible—she made her last trip there in 1992. Public appearances were also no longer feasible, and she hated to go to plays or concerts or movies: When her shaking was at its worst, she noticed that she made the seats around her vibrate, and she didn’t want to distract her fellow audience members.

  Twice a week she took massage therapy from a doctor in Otis, Massachusetts—Pauline thought he was a little like a hippie version of Jeff Bridges. She looked forward to her sessions for two reasons: Her doctor was unimpressed with her celebrity and frequently told her why he thought she’d been wrong about certain movies; most important, the therapy brought forth good results, making her muscles much more supple.

  Although she tried not to lose her sense of humor, she wasn’t very good at witnessing her own diminuendo. Her fading memory was a particular source of irritation: She told Ray Sawhill that during the day, she would often wonder if the words she couldn’t come up with would ever come back to her. They did—at night, when she was in bed. She also experienced in a highly personal way the cold and condescending way in which people discriminate against the elderly: In stores in Great Barrington, she was frequently ignored by clerks who didn’t want to contend with an elderly woman with a cane and the shakes. For someone who had always possessed a strong sense of pride and independence, such episodes were humiliating.

  She continued to take pride in the developing careers of the Paulettes. Hal Hinson had secured a reviewing spot at The Washington Post, David Edelstein was doing fine work at Slate, Michael Sragow was the lead film critic at the San Francisco Examiner. More than ever, she was a devoted champion of James Wolcott—who in 1997 left The New Yorker and returned to Vanity Fair, where he had once been a contributing editor. He was hired to write columns on media and pop culture, which he would presumably be able to do in more of a no-holds-barred way than The New Yorker had permitted. Pauline wasn’t mad about Vanity Fair, which she found too brassy and insubstantial and celebrity-driven, but she looked forward to seeing what Wolcott came up with.

  In the magazine’s April 1997 issue, she found out. In a column titled “Waiting for Godard,” Wolcott wrote a devastating piece about the Paulettes, branding them as a band of hopeless imitators who had squandered their own talents by falling under Pauline’s spell. “They write as advocates, both feet on the accelerator,” he wrote. “They still write as if‘trash’ (the good kind—blatant, vital, sexy) were in danger of being euthanized by the team of Merchant Ivory. Gentility is the enemy—we’re drowning in crinoline! they cry. Bring back hot rods and cheap lipstick.” Wolcott was reasonably careful not to place Pauline herself in his crosshairs, but he didn’t really need to: Without saying so directly, his article heavily implied that she had encouraged sycophancy and slavish devotion. Pauline was stunned that someone whose career she had worked so assiduously to advance could have written such a piece. Of course, Wolcott had learned a great deal from her: “Waiting for Godard” was, in its own way, as much of an attention-getter for him as “Circles and Squares” had once been for her. Articles were written about it, radio broadcasts were devoted to it, and the term “Paulette” became familiar to a wide reading public. Pauline refrained from commenting on “Waiting for Godard” publicly, but, unsurprisingly, Wolcott instantly became persona non grata among his fellow Paulettes. “He’s a careerist creep,” observed Charles Taylor. “I think that Wolcott simply decides what is going to advance him and takes the pose. I read that piece, and that piece hurt Pauline. That piece really hurt her. The loss of him as a friend hurt her.”

  Wolcott acknowledged that “Waiting for Godard” severed their friendship, although it is difficult to tell if he considered that a strong possibility at the time he was writing the piece. “I knew she wasn’t happy about it,” he said. “James Toback told me later on that she was really pissed. I think that piece was overkill. I feel bad about it. I had just re-upped with Vanity Fair, so I was trying to build up a head of steam—not so much about Pauline but about the other people.... I didn’t think people would carry on the grudges for fifteen years.”

  Despite the fact that “Waiting for Godard” created a permanent split between Wolcott and Pauline, she continued to read his work with interest. During one of her treatments at Massachusetts General Hospital in the late 1990s, she asked Steve Vineberg to bring her a copy of Vanity Fair so she could read Wolcott’s latest column.

  As the 1990s wore on, Gina had to deal with her own health problems in addition to caring for her mother. She suffered a bout with cancer, which was treated successfully, in addition to a prolonged and draining case of Lyme disease that left a few lingering effects in its wake. Pauline’s Parkinson’s had by now made it impossible for her to manage a knife and fork properly, which meant that she stopped going to restaurants for a time. Eventually she was put on a more intensive round of medication that stabilized her shaking condition and enabled her to lead a much more normal life. The problem was, the stronger medicine gave her hallucinations. She saw live bears—“no cartoons, no lyricism—just realism,” she told Ray Sawhill—at the edge of her vision. Once she watched as a third arm came out of her chest to grapple with her other two arms. When she reached out to crush the third arm, she watched in terror and amazement as it shattered into bits; she told friends it reminded her of the end of Zabriskie Point. Eventually, the hallucinations receded, and she joked that she had occasionally reached out to pat the animals that
appeared before her.

  When she didn’t feel up to climbing the stairs to her second-floor bedroom, she would stay downstairs in the living room, reading and keeping up with the news. She had an exercise bicycle installed there, which she was supposed to use to keep herself as limber as possible. She slept deeply, but not for long periods of time—often, five hours was the limit. She told Ray Sawhill that her declining health made her all the more “desperate to read and to take in everything . . . I think I’ve never been so eager to learn and to do things as I am now.” She loved keeping up with television news and watching The Sopranos , Saturday Night Live, and Sex and the City. She also made her way through the steady stream of cassettes of new movies that producers and directors were constantly sending her. Sometimes a screening of a new picture was arranged for her at a local movie theater.

  In January 1999 an article by the film director Wes Anderson appeared in The New York Times that many of her friends and followers found deeply insulting. “My Private Screening with Pauline Kael” described Anderson’s efforts to arrange a screening of his new film, Rushmore, for her at the Triplex in Great Barrington. Anderson seemed to have intended the piece to be wry, but it came across as mean-spirited and condescending, portraying Pauline as a frail, out-of-touch woman operating in a state of confusion. Anderson wrote a letter to the Times saying that he hadn’t intended to mock her. “I thought, when I read that, this is what’s wrong with Wes Anderson’s movies,” said Steve Vineberg. “The guy is tone deaf.”

  As she grew older Pauline became increasingly hunched and began to shrink dramatically: By 2000 she had lost a total of four inches in height. She depended on friends to take her out to dinner and movies and support her to keep her from falling. The worst part about this, she said, laughing, was that she had to make deals to see movies she would otherwise have no interest in viewing: When she persuaded a friend to accompany her to American Psycho, she had to promise to go with that friend to see Keeping the Faith, starring Ben Stiller.

  Stephanie Zacharek remembered that even as Pauline’s condition worsened, she seemed amazingly responsive to the world around her; her powers of observation had scarcely dimmed at all. “Sometimes, Charlie and I would go to little shops on the way out to visit her, and I would show her what I had bought—a scarf or something—and I would say, ‘Oh, my God, I shouldn’t be spending money right now.’ And she would say, ‘You have to buy these things when you’re young when you have the figure to wear them, because when you’re older, and you have the money, your figure will be gone.’” Even when she was feeling her worst, there were certain pleasurable constants in her life. Fresh flowers were always welcome—“They’re more delicious than food now,” she once told George and Elizabeth Malko.

  As Pauline grew more fragile, her views softened: Pauline in the stormy weather of bad health was far more conciliatory than the Pauline of her younger, feistier days. Ray Sawhill and Polly Frost, David Edelstein, Silvana Nova, and Craig Seligman were on hand as much as possible to help out. Roy Blount, Jr., who lived nearby, was a loyal neighbor, always checking in to see if she needed anything done around the house. Steve Vineberg frequently drove her to doctor’s appointments at Massachusetts General. Once, Vineberg took his visiting mother and Pauline out to lunch at a restaurant in Great Barrington. As he drove along, his mother in the front seat and Pauline in the back, Pauline commented, “You look so restive sitting up there next to your mother. I wish I could sit with my mother.” It was the first time Vineberg could ever recall her mentioning Judith.

  Several of Pauline’s other friends, however, noticeably dropped out. “A number of people around any diva start to think that that person’s like them, and start to project,” remarked Polly Frost. “And a good diva, like Pauline, allows people to project. It’s power. But Pauline couldn’t play Pauline anymore, and a lot of people disappeared.” They had seen the power player they desperately wanted her to be, but they hadn’t seen past the persona.

  One night in Great Barrington, sometime in the late 1990s, she was having dinner with Taylor and Zacharek. Also dining in the restaurant was George Roy Hill, who also had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Their previous battles—even the letter that opened with “Listen, you miserable bitch”—were immediately forgotten. Pauline clutched his hand warmly and gave him the name of her massage therapist, promising him that the therapy would do him a world of good.

  Despite the general softening of her temperament, she could still snap. After surgery for a congested carotid artery, Pauline came out of the anesthesia to hear the surgeons and nurses talking about the actor Matthew Modine. “He’s never any good,” Pauline whispered. Another time, she was sharing a hospital room with a gregarious woman who kept telling Pauline about her love for Jesus. Finally an exasperated Pauline said, “Well, honey, from the look of things, he hasn’t done much for you lately!”

  As Will grew older, he retained his sweet, friendly nature. Some friends noticed, however, that his interests didn’t seem to be broadening and deepening in the way that might have been expected. He would become quite obsessive about certain movies—such as Braveheart and Last of the Mohicans—films with action and heroism. He loved the outdoors—particularly hiking in the Berkshires—but he still showed little interest in reading, and Pauline seemed no more inclined than ever to encourage him. He entered Bard College at Simon’s Rock, an experimental institution in Great Barrington. He dropped out, then went back. Gina worried about her son a great deal, and wondered if he might have some sort of serious medical condition—but Pauline mostly turned a blind eye to Will’s resistance to a traditional path.

  In 1999 the National Book Critics Circle awarded Pauline the Ivan San-drof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters. That June, she celebrated her eightieth birthday with an enormous party at the Great Barrington house. It was a beautiful late spring day, and in attendance were her closest friends: Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill, Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek, Steve Vineberg, Michael Sragow, Arlene Croce, David Edelstein, Allen and Jonelle Barra. Wallace Shawn was there, unofficially representing her New Yorker years. Her sister Anne flew out from Berkeley, and the two of them sat together at the party, looking diminutive and birdlike. She invited some people to whom she had not been close for years, such as David Denby—but no invitation was issued to James Wolcott. With Pauline’s ignorance about technology and which appliances were better than others, she had never owned a first-class television set. Several of her critic friends chipped in and bought her a big, state-of-the-art television, which delighted her. (When Gina bought a new computer, however, Pauline didn’t go near it, but only eyed it suspiciously.)

  Also present was Roy Blount, Jr., who composed a poem for the occasion:

  “Presenting Creation, more or less,”

  Said Jehovah.

  “Oh. What a mess,” Pauline observed.

  So he gave it form.

  Roundish. Molten cooling to warm.

  “Has it occurred to you to let there be light?”

  “By golly,” Jehovah said, “you’re right.”

  But light revealed a certain void.

  “You might try creating celluloid,

  And then a projector,” said Pauline,

  “For showing images on a screen.”

  “Look, it’s one thing you’re not afraid of me,

  But don’t get so far ahead of me!

  What are those images gonna be of?”

  Exclaimed Jehovah—“Vengeance? Love?”

  “A couple of characters wouldn’t hurt.”

  So Jehovah grabbed two handfuls of dirt.

  “Mm,” said Pauline, “you’ve got something there.

  You’re casting Cary Grant and Cher?”

  “No. For Eve I want someone deep,”

  He said, “I’m making Meryl Streep.

  And who really cares whom I make first male?

  A first-mate type. Think Alan Hale.”

  “Oh God,” said Pauline
, “a feminist flick,

  With the Holy Ghost as the only dick.”

  “No,” he huffed, his face getting red,

  “A serious film, with a message,” he said.

  “Oh why does my sinking heart suspect

  You’re letting Stanley Kramer direct?”

  “So be it,” Jehovah thundered, and that

  Is why “The Fall of Man” fell flat.

  And also why, when Edison came

  To visit Pauline one day and claim,

  “I’ve made a moving picture,” she

  Patted his hand and said, “We’ll see.”

  And seen we have, with feelings and eyes

  Her vision’s done much to aesthetize.

  Here’s to Orson and Bogie and Katie,

  And towering over them, Pauline at 80.

  In telephone conversations with a number of old friends and colleagues, she expressed regret that she might have treated them unfairly when she was in her heyday. In September 2000, Carrie Rickey received a call from a mutual friend, Francis Davis, who told her that Pauline wanted to speak with her. Rickey called the house in Great Barrington, and in the course of a ninety-minute conversation, Pauline at one point said, “I don’t know what you know, but I know I’ve done some things to you that were not okay.” Rickey told her that it was all in the past and not to burden herself with it. After she hung up the phone, she wept uncontrollably—she had had the conciliatory conversation with Pauline that she had never been able to have with her own mother.

  An endless stream of writers still sought her out for interviews, demanding to know what she thought of the current stream of films and directors. There was still an army of readers who felt cut adrift without her to lean on as their guide to the world of moviemaking. Two of the more prominent were Francis Davis, who recorded a lengthy conversation with her that he eventually published in book form as Afterglow, and Susie Linfield, a respected New York journalist and professor who requested Pauline’s permission to write a full-scale biography. Linfield conceived of her book as more of an interior look at Pauline’s life than a conventional biography, and sent Pauline a lengthy and well-presented proposal, but Pauline declined to participate.