Pauline Kael (16 page)

The message was clear: With the steady collapse of the once-powerful studio system and the immense publicity machine that operated within it, the public was forming a new, closer connection with movie critics. As personalities they were becoming better known via radio and television; starting in 1964, Crist would become a familiar face via her appearances on NBC’s
Today Show
. Talk show hosts frequently invited Pauline and Andrew Sarris, who were far more in tune with the latest trends in filmmaking, and the new audience it had created, than
The New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther, who increasingly resembled a relic from another era. As the subject matter of movies became more and more provocative, Crowther began to seem more and more out of touch—particularly in his distaste for onscreen violence.

The public’s appetite for writing about film was also growing. Only a few years earlier “film studies” was an all but nonexistent category in book publishing. Now there was a demand for film history, theory, and biography, and for published screenplays. Pauline spent all of her spare time hard at work on her own book project, and although a few friends tried to talk her out of her plan to call it
I Lost It at the Movies
, she held fast. The title precisely conveyed its tone—wicked, funny, provocative—and, in terms of her own development as a moviegoer, was absolutely to the point.

She had acquired a New York agent, the estimable Robert P. Mills, and in the summer of 1963 he phoned her with the news that
I Lost It at the Movies
had been accepted for publication by the Atlantic Monthly Press. She received an advance of $1,500 (a year later, the publisher would increase that sum by an additional $1,000), and that, combined with her Guggenheim money and her genius for managing to survive on very little, permitted her to settle down and finish the book.

Despite her hard work on the manuscript, she was tempted by the occasional plum freelance assignment. One came her way in late August 1963, when Robert B. Silvers, the recently appointed editor of
The New York Review of Books
, asked if she would be willing to write a 1,500-word review of
The Group
, Mary McCarthy’s new novel about eight bright and promising Vassar graduates. The book had caused a sensation with a surprisingly frank sex scene and an equally detailed sequence in which one of the women gets fitted for a diaphragm. Only a few weeks after publication, it was well on its way to becoming one of the year’s most popular and critically praised novels. Pauline, who had liked much of McCarthy’s work in the past, snapped up the assignment, which Silvers asked her to turn around in two weeks.

Pauline’s review offered a fresh point of view about McCarthy’s achievement:

This opening salvo was the strongest part of her assessment; elsewhere, her review did not represent her best work. In dissecting the problems with McCarthy’s overall conception of the book, she seemed to circle without ever quite landing. A few days after she had submitted the review, she received a letter from Elizabeth Hardwick, editorial adviser at
The New York Review of Books
(and a close friend of McCarthy). Hardwick apologized for the magazine’s tight deadline and then politely, if somewhat condescendingly, rejected the piece, without offering Pauline an opportunity to make revisions. Hardwick told Pauline that it was “rather fruitless to care so much about how fairly or unfairly womankind is treated in this or any other book,” that such questions, unless treated in an entirely new way, “seem a bit tired and irrelevant.” She added that the piece Pauline had submitted did not seem up to her best work.

Pauline delivered the manuscript for
I Lost It at the Movies
early in the summer of 1964. The Atlantic Monthly Press’s director, Peter Davison, wrote to her in mid-July that he was returning the manuscript with “the general recommendations which are truly not too radical.” In general Davison was delighted with the condition of the book, but he stressed that “some of the very best pieces were marred by being too long. In fact, I was deterred from full appreciation by boredom!”

By the fall, word had gotten around the publishing industry that
I Lost It at the Movies
was, potentially, at least, a hot project—so much so that Marcia Nasatir, special projects editor at Bantam Books (and future vice president of production at United Artists), wrote to Pauline in October asking to see the manuscript, with an eye toward bringing out a paperback edition.

 

The intense social upheaval of the 1960s had a curious effect on the arts—and, more particularly, on the audiences for the arts, in whom a certain restless spirit was now in evidence. People who read or attended the theater, concerts, and movies were unsure of what they wanted, and even more unsure of exactly how to react once they had gotten settled into their seats. On the music scene, serial composition had won overwhelming favor with the academic community and music critics; the result was that geniuses such as Aaron Copland more or less lost their footing musically, or in the case of Samuel Barber, languished completely.

In her essay “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?” Eudora Welty commented on reader reaction to her famous short story “A Worn Path,” in which an old Mississippi country woman, Phoenix Jackson, makes the trek into Natchez to get medicine for her grandson. Many of Welty’s readers wrote to her, intrigued by the idea that Phoenix’s grandson had already died, that the old woman was making the trip out of habit—the implication being that this somehow improved the story. It was an interpretation that disturbed Welty. “It’s
all right
, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say.” More and more people seemed to be having some sort of breakdown of identity in relation to what they consumed; they were learning not to trust their own reactions to what they experienced in the arts. This might have been regarded as a healthy sign, as a breaking out of complacent patterns and a reaching toward something new and different—but there were many who did not view it that way, and Pauline was one of them. She expressed her concerns on this subject in an essay called “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” which was published in December 1964—her first appearance in a large-circulation periodical,
The Atlantic Monthly.

“Are Movies Going to Pieces?” was a lively examination of what she believed to be the increasing incomprehensibility of many of the new pictures being produced. The New Wave classics might have been free-form, but they had a strong, unified vision behind the experimental style; some of the more recent movies seemed to throw logic and cohesion and structure out the window in search of something more sensational or self-consciously “artistic,” and it disturbed her that viewers didn’t seem to be wise to the trend. Television, with its constant interruptions, might be partly responsible for audiences’ acceptance of gaping lapses of logic in movies, of the breakdown of a reliable storytelling method. But she sensed that there was much more to it than that, and she felt that the true cause was to be found in the chaotic pace of modern life: Audiences were so revved up emotionally that they had lost the ability to discern when a movie’s form and structure had let them down.

It was a film that not many saw which crystallized Pauline’s concerns: Robert Wise’s
The Haunting
(1963), a haunted-house thriller in which the horror is unseen. In her essay she reported what had become one of her favorite reviewing habits: scrutinizing the audience as a way of sorting out what was happening to the movie industry. She reported that at the showing of
The Haunting
that she had seen, the few people in attendance “were restless and talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing—the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along.” From this point, she drew a connecting line to another of her favorite targets, the art-house audience, which she felt “accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style.”

She was careful to warn her readers that, while she didn’t want to be branded as a “boob who attacks ambiguity and complexity,” she did believe that even complex subject matter should be expressed as lucidly as possible. The fracturing of narrative, the habit of taking simple ideas and stories and rendering them “complex” through superficially tricky and dazzling technical means, meant that “more and more people come out of a movie and can’t tell you what they’ve seen, or even whether they liked it.”

Having placed “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” with the widely read
Atlantic Monthly
, Mills was now able to sell Pauline’s essay “Old Movies Never Die” to
Mademoiselle
, which, despite being a women’s fashion magazine, had for years published a good deal of quality nonfiction and fiction. “Old Movies Never Die” was a fairly routine roundup of ’30s movies, and she herself thought little of it when it was eventually published in the July 1965 issue. But she was delighted with the money and exposure that publication in another wide-circulation magazine brought her.

On March 11, 1965,
I Lost It at the Movies
was published. It had an advance sale of 5,227 copies—an excellent showing for a book about film by an author whose name was still relatively unknown to the general reading public. The Atlantic Monthly Press gave it a significant push with full-page ads in trade publications such as
Library Journal
and the American Library Association’s
Booklist
, and smaller ads in such prestigious venues such as
The New York Review of Books
,
The New Republic
,
The Kenyon Review
, and
The New York Times Book Review
. The prepublication reviews from the trade press were encouraging.
Library Journal
stated, “There are very few American film critics whose collected writings would maintain the high level of this book,” while
Publishers Weekly
found “the artistry, literacy, fine style and clearheaded reasoning of this criticism is outstanding” and predicted that it should be an “explosively controversial book.” The exacting
Kirkus Reviews
wrote, “Never dull, blazingly personal, provokingly penetrating . . . Miss Kael is a ‘find.’”

But one review counted the most—that of
The New York Times Book Review
, which appeared on March 14, 1965. The reviewer was Richard Schickel, a former editor at
Look
magazine and the author of the acclaimed study
The Movies.
His review began:

After calling Pauline’s “the surest instinct for movies and movie-making since James Agee,” Schickel concluded:

Among the congratulatory letters she received was one from James Broughton, who wrote that it was “always gratifying when a friend who has worked hard for a long time finally makes a substantial breakthrough.” He signed it, “My good wishes to you and Gina.”

Pauline was pleased by the attention she received from the personnel at the Atlantic Monthly Press, particularly the senior editor William Abrahams, who would work closely with her for years to come. (She would always address him as “Billy dear” in her letters.) Although she was quick to point out when something was not to her liking, the publisher’s staff generally found her to be a very cooperative author, eager to comply with most of the interviews that she was asked to do.

In late March she spent the better part of a month in New York, doing publicity for the book. During that trip, she began giving more serious thought to an idea she had recently been tossing around—returning to New York full-time. Maintaining payments on the Oregon Street house had become a burden, and while she had an attractive offer of $10,300 from UCLA to lecture during the 1965–66 academic year, she admitted to Bob Mills, “I don’t really want to do it—I’d rather be in the east for awhile. So I’m stalling on acceptance.”

Although the thought of paying Manhattan rents was unappealing, she could no longer come up with any excuses for not living in the nation’s publishing capital. Besides, now that she had a solid success under her belt with
I Lost It at the Movies
, she would in a sense be going back a star. Still, after all her years of struggle, and having on some level adjusted herself to being in a state of perpetual difficulty, the prospect of major success was somewhat daunting, somewhat complicated. Like Benjamin Burl in her long-ago story “The Brash Young Man,” she found that the idea of finally being on the inside, when for so many years she had been pressing her face against the window, took some degree of mental adjustment. “I think there was a moment when she realized that she was going to be really successful,” said David Young Allen. “I remember her lying on the couch with her hand on her head and she said something—she had to go through a whole process. She went through a struggle to make the transition in her mind.” Her friend Dan Talbot, who owned the prestigious art house the New Yorker Cinema on Manhattan’s West Side, telephoned her and said, “I know you love California, but come east—this is where you belong.”