Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  In the spring of 2001 Pauline received word that she had been chosen for a prestigious fellowship administered by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program. The Distinguished Lectureship in Criticism, which had previously gone to writers such as Patricia Bosworth and Pauline’s friend Arlene Croce, offered an honorarium of $20,000, to be paid that September, and required one visit to Columbia in the fall or spring semesters, during which time she would present a lecture to the elite of Columbia’s community. Given the state of her health, it was arranged that the balance of her participation would take place via teleconferencing and videoconferencing from Great Barrington. Pauline was as happy about the cash prize as she was about the honor, and she looked forward to the presentation of the fellowship, scheduled for October 4 at Columbia’s Kathryn Miller Bache Theater.

  In late August 2001, Polly Frost was sitting with Pauline at her bedside. Frost had never seen Will’s favorite film, Braveheart, and when he began agitating for her to watch it with him, Frost said to Pauline that she thought it was the right thing to do. At one point, the leading lady, Sophie Marceau, lashed out at Mel Gibson. “You tell him, girlie!” whispered Pauline, like the 1930s heroine she had always imagined herself being.

  Her friend Dennis Delrogh had been to see Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Redux, with much original footage restored. Delrogh pointed out that Andrew Sarris still hadn’t liked the movie.

  “Of course,” said Pauline. “He’s smart.”

  Around the same time, Pauline’s old friend Erhard Dortmund telephoned her from Oregon to ask how she was feeling. The nurse brought the telephone to her. After a few whispered exchanges, Pauline asked Dortmund what he was reading. As it happened, he was in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.

  On Monday, September 3, 2001, Michael Sragow telephoned Pauline at home. Her voice was weaker than ever, but she told him that Gina had been taking very good care of her. They spoke a bit about mutual friends, including Lamont Johnson. “Isn’t he amazing?” Pauline whispered. Sragow could tell it was impossible for her to speak for much longer, and told her goodbye.

  A little less than two hours later, Craig Seligman telephoned Sragow to tell him Pauline had died.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  On November 30, 2001, a memorial tribute to Pauline was presented at the Walter Reade Theater by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The New Yorker. George Malko hosted the event. Gina was the first speaker, and her comments were remarkably brave and unsentimental:

  As a mother, Pauline was exactly what you would expect from reading her or knowing her. Taste, judgment, being right were crucial. Her inflexibility pleased her. She was right—and that was it. My mother had tremendous empathy and compassion, though how to comfort, soothe, or console was a mystery that eluded her. Pauline tried to make me aware of people’s needs and she taught me to be considerate of other people’s feelings. But when Pauline spoke to someone about their work as if it had been produced by a third party, it had repercussions. There was fallout. In my youth, I watched what she left, unaware, in her wake: flickering glimpses of crushed illusions, mounting insecurities, desolation. Those she was not dismissive of, those who valued her perception, judgment, integrity, and extreme forthrightness, did feel her sting, but also felt she was totally real and that she affirmed and valued them as human beings. She could see the possibilities. Pauline’s greatest weakness, her failure as a person, became her great strength, her liberation as a writer and critic. She truly believed that what she did was for everyone else’s good, and that because she meant well, she had no negative effects. She refused any consideration of that possibility and she denied any motivations or personal needs.... This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint, or hesitation gave Pauline supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice. She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.

  Gina was followed by Craig Seligman, who spoke of the good fortune he’d had, not only in becoming friends with his literary idol, but in finding her such fun to be around. “She was funny and lethal right up to the end,” said Seligman. “One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ‘It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can’t write.’ And she said, very weakly, ‘Yes—they say things like ‘It never ceases to amaze me.’”

  Robert Altman gave a rambling speech about Pauline’s championing of his work—it was easy to imagine her mentally editing his remarks—while Arlene Croce shared affectionate reminiscences of being with Pauline and Gina the day that they found the Great Barrington house, and of crossing Fifth Avenue with Pauline to avoid running into Otto Preminger. John Bennet, one of her later editors at The New Yorker, recalled her constant fussing over revisions. (“It’s a piece of crap, but maybe I can do something with it.”) Jonathan Demme, Marcia Nasatir, and an obviously shaken David Edelstein all took their turns at the podium. Malko read a brief note from Anne Wallach, who was unable to attend the service. And Roy Blount, Jr., read the poem he’d composed for Pauline’s birthday, concocting different voices for Pauline and the Almighty.

  It had been decided that the last voice should be Pauline’s. The lights went down. A series of recordings with Pauline reading from her reviews and talking about the movies were played. The audience sat transfixed, listening to that soft, sensual voice with its rising and falling cadences, its easy western rhythm and accent.

  Malko took the stage again. “Pauline really believed all her life that she was lucky to be able to do what she wanted to do,” he said. “But we were the lucky ones. Thank you, Pauline.”

  Then the audience quietly filed out of the theater, as quiet as if they were critics leaving a screening, accompanied by the Baroque music that Pauline loved.

  It is always tempting—too tempting—to try to draw great lessons from the lives of those writers whom we have spent a lifetime admiring. As Polly Frost observed, their pull is too powerful: We insist on trying to determine what kind of legacy the person has left, now that she is no longer there to explain the world to us. “Upon sober reflection,” said Arlene Croce at Pauline’s memorial tribute, “I have to say that I haven’t understood anything in this country since—well, since Pauline stopped writing about the movies.”

  One of the most powerful truths to be gleaned from examining Pauline’s life is that it was, throughout its span, a triumph of instinct over an astonishing intellect. Her highly emotional responses to art were what enabled her to make so indelible a mark as a critic. On the surface, it might seem that any critic does the same thing, but it’s doubtful that any critic ever had so little barrier between herself and her subject. She connected with film the way a great actor is supposed to connect with his text, and she took her readers to places they never could have imagined a mere movie review could transport them.

  To call what she did reviewing, of course, is to trivialize it. She was not writing snappy, easily quoted opinions that would fit neatly into twelve column inches. She brought us into the experience of sitting next to her in a darkened movie theater. She generously shared her passion and knowledge and insights, made us feel that we were a part of the magic and chaos and wreckage unfolding up there on the screen. She made us feel the way we feel during a great performance in the theater—that we’re part of what’s happening onstage.

  Pauline’s biggest professional disappointment was that she lived to see the infantilization of the great moviegoing audience she had always dreamed of and believed in. “Now people watch movies so they can stay kids,” said her friend Armond White in a 2009 interview. Pauline would have agreed with him. She also would have been shattered to witness the way in which the role of the film critic has been eclipsed—not only by studio marketing practices but even more by the Internet, with its system of validating the critical opinion of anyone who owns a computer.

  But Pauline’s great victory was that, like a visionary novelist, she wid
ened the scope of her art—she redefined the possibilities of how a critic could think, and how a critic’s work might benefit the art form itself. At a certain point she abandoned the idea of writing about anything but the movies. She may have been able to bring her critical gifts to bear on other subjects, and affected us similarly. What mattered most was that she gave completely and exhaustively of herself, until the day came when physically she had nothing left to give. To Ray Sawhill, her reviews weren’t pieces of criticism so much as exhilarating pieces of performance art, played out in the pages of The New Yorker.

  We should be grateful that once she found her subject, she never deserted it, never grew bored with it—the trap that awaits nearly every critic. Her almost childlike optimism about the screen’s possibilities, even her unsuccessful time in Hollywood, was an attempt to draw herself closer to her subject. She lived her entire life the way so many of us do only for a brief time as college students, staying up all night in coffee shops with our ragged copies of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and Flannery O’Connor, reading and debating, unable, yet, to imagine that we could ever grow weary of the world of books and music and movies and ideas.

  Perhaps Pauline’s life’s work, and the unflagging, joyful energy she brought to it, are best illuminated by a story that Marcia Nasatir loved to tell. It was September 1971, and the past week had seen the death of Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon’s being named Time’s Man of the Year; Nasatir’s son Seth had just been sent over to Vietnam. Nasatir called Pauline to tell her how overwhelmed she felt by it all.

  Pauline listened. There was a momentary silence.

  “And to think,” Pauline finally said, “there’s not even a decent movie to see.”

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began for me many years ago in Oregon, when I was a seventh-grade student and first came across Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang at the Tillamook County Library. Much of what she said about Blow-Up and Morgan! and other films of the sixties was lost on me—this kind of movie never made it to the Tillamook Coliseum—but I devoured “Notes on 280 Movies” at the back of the book. Movie criticism to me meant the reviews in The Oregonian, written by the local critic, who, I could tell even at that early age, couldn’t write. But here was a woman who could—her sentences had such drive and pulse and snap that they took complete hold of me. I found I committed great chunks of them to memory, the way, as a good little schoolboy, you’re supposed to memorize “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. I knew, of course, that at Beaver Elementary School, you couldn’t really stand up in the classroom and recite, “Author-director Joseph Mankiewicz’s bad taste, exhibited with verve, is more fun than careful, mousy, dehydrated good taste,” and not expect your classmates to wonder if you’d lost it. So I kept reading Pauline Kael quietly. This wasn’t diligent reading, like my progression through the novels of John Steinbeck. This was impassioned reading.

  When I was eighteen, my parents gave me a subscription to The New Yorker, and all through college—the late 1970s and early 1980s, I went to the movies with a kind of breathless excitement; there were very few films that opened in my little college town that I didn’t see. And Pauline Kael was my guide. She explained things to me, introduced me to things I hadn’t seen, angered me when I thought she’d been unfair or prejudiced. Best of all, by her example, she toughened me up intellectually. I don’t know at which point it occurred to me that I really didn’t know much about her life, beyond the bare externals that she revealed in interviews—her pride in her West Coast roots, her preference for country living over New York City—but I wondered why, with the unceasing flow of biographies, no one had attempted to write the story of Kael’s life. Partly, I found out, it was because she had consistently discouraged any such attempts. She had memorably stated her position in the introduction to her final published collection, For Keeps, in 1994: “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” I took her point. Pauline’s life was not a highly dramatic or even a particularly eventful one in terms of marriages and love affairs. I discovered to my surprise that she had not traveled widely, and that her curiosity had been unflagging but in some ways oddly limited. Her life had been consumed by reading and going to the movies and writing about them. Still, she had known many important and gifted people in both the moviemaking and literary worlds, and she had lived through, responded to, and influenced some very exciting times. Maybe her life wouldn’t make a book that was chock-full of thrilling events. But I was sure there was a way to show how her life was really a spectacular playing out of her own artistic enthusiasms, to show how she interacted with the changing world of movies.

  There were a few disappointments along the way. I sought the cooperation of Pauline’s daughter, Gina James. She promised she would give the matter serious thought, but eventually decided against participating in any way. She was a kind and friendly presence on the other end of the phone, however, and to my knowledge she has not done anything to stand in the way of the book. For that I am grateful to her.

  The majority of Pauline’s friends wanted to talk about her, wanted to talk about what she had brought into their lives, and what they missed about her now that she was gone.

  Much of my central research was conducted at Pauline’s archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. This is a wonderful institution I have made use of while working on earlier books, and I am grateful to the Lilly’s courteous, efficient, supportive staff. For someone who claimed she didn’t want a biography written, Pauline preserved much of her past meticulously. My thanks to Indiana University for giving it such a good home, and for maintaining it so well.

  As I delved into the film history of the 1960s and ’70s, I spent countless hours at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Once again, I am grateful to the library’s helpful staff.

  I also undertook crucial research at Berkeley University; the California State Historical Society; the Film and Television Archives of the University of California at Los Angeles; Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (special thanks to Vita Paladino and Sean Noel); the Jewish Museum of New York City; Hampshire College; Kent State University (which houses the James Broughton collection); the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Pacifica Radio Archive; the New York Public Library (which houses the archives of The New Yorker); the Paley Center for Media; the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum; Petaluma Regional Library; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Collection at the University of Texas, Austin (particularly for use of the Robert Mills Collection); the San Francisco Public Library; the Sonoma County Library; Special Collections at Stanford University (the William Abrahams papers); the University of Oregon Libraries; Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library (the Dwight Macdonald collection) and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library.

  For assistance with my research, I am grateful to Mara Caden, Jean M. Cannon, Rebecca Feldhaus, Sonia Finley, Tristan Kraft, Beth Higgins, Craig Simpson, Shannon Sullivan, and Tracy Turner.

  For me, the best part of preparing to write a biography is the chance to interview the people who knew the subject. Deepest gratitude to those who took the time to speak with me: Richard Albarino, Rutanya Alda, David Young Allen, Linda Allen, Nancy Allen, Kathryn Altman, Robert Altman, David Ansen, Rene Auberjonois, Bruce Baillie, Bob Balaban, Carroll Ballard, Allen Barra, Sue Barton, Jeanine Basinger, Thomas Baum, Jane Beirn, Sandra Berwind, Marion Billings, Alan Blackman, Roy Blount, Jr., Peter Bogdanovich, Patricia Bosworth, Chris Bram, Harry Breitrose, Meredith Brody, Albert Brooks, Marjorie Broughton, Hilda Burton, Ernest Callenbach, Dyan Cannon, Joel Canarroe, Carol Carey, Kathleen Carroll, Veronica Cartwright, Charles Champlin, Carol Channing, Daryl Chin, Richard Christiansen, George Christy, Paul Coates, Judith Crist, Patrick Crow, Richard Daniels, Francis Davis, David Del Tredici, Dennis Delrogh, Erhard Dortmund, Tre
nt Duffy, Karen Durbin, David Edelstein, Barbara Feldon, Suzanne Finstad, Jack Foley, William Friedkin, Warner Friedman, Polly Frost, Robert Getchell, Owen Gleiberman, Bruce Goldstein, Sydney Goldstein, Ricky Ian Gordon, Elliott Gould, Bob Greensfelder, John Guare, Donald Gutierrez, James Harvey, Buck Henry, Hal Hinson, Rebecca Hughes, Tresa Hughes, Joseph Hurley, James Ivory, Lamont Johnson, Simon Johnson, Howard Kaminsky, Kenneth Kann, Judy Karasik, Philip Kaufman, Marthe Keller, Howard Kissel, Shirley Knight, Jane Kramer, Richard Kramer, Stephen Kresge, Edward Landberg, David Littlejohn, George Litto, Becket Logan, Phillip Lopate, Tom Luddy, Sidney Lumet, Nick Macdonald, Elizabeth Macklin, George and Elizabeth Malko, Tom Mankiewicz, Jaime Manrique, Greil Marcus, Paul Mazursky, Patrick McGilligan, Sheila McGrath, Daniel Menaker, Sally Ann Mock, Joseph Morgenstern, Michael Murphy, Linda Olle, Ariel Parkinson, Pat Patterson, James Pegolotti, James Pritchard, Joe Regan, Alan Rich, Carrie Rickey, Janna Ritz, Dan Rosenblatt, Lillian Ross, Dana Salisbury, Alvin Sargent, Andrew Sarris, Ray Sawhill, Paul Schrader, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., Charles Simmons, John Simon, Joel Singer, Hoyt Spelman, Michael Sragow, Sam Staggs, Nancy Steinbeck, Howard Suber, Dan Talbot, James Tamulis, Charles Taylor, Joan Tewkesbury, David Thomson, James Toback, Lee Tsiantis, Carol Van Strum, Steve Van Strum, Steve Vineberg, Bret Wallach, Jessica Walter, Armond White, William Whitworth, Frederick Wiseman, James Wolcott, Colin Young, Stephanie Zacharek, and Kenneth Ziffren.