Pauline Kael (35 page)

On her return to
The New Yorker
she continued to chafe under the six-month reviewing schedule. Given the success of her books and her ever-growing popularity on the lecture circuit, she rightly believed that she had eclipsed Penelope Gilliatt in importance,
Sunday Bloody Sunday
notwithstanding. She railed to friends about Gilliatt’s having missed the point of so many of the movies she reviewed in her spring-summer schedule, and she detested the character of the little old lady that Gilliatt invented in her columns—a kind of surrogate through whom she filtered her own view of the movie. Still, William Shawn remained fiercely loyal to Gilliatt and showed no interest in bringing Pauline on year-round.

Pauline, who prided herself on her ability to size people up, continued to be baffled by Shawn. He loved television comedians—George Jessel was a particular favorite—and he was an avid amateur jazz pianist, frequently performing at the parties he and his wife gave at their apartment. He also was fascinated by everything that was going on in the movies. But Pauline found it all but impossible to reconcile this fun-loving side of Shawn with the repressed, schoolmasterish behavior she saw him exhibit around the office. Her battles with Shawn and the other editors over language choices continued on a regular basis—and sometimes her arguments unleashed themselves in streams of profanity. “She thought that the editorial department should be doing more to establish some kind of line of succession for Shawn,” recalled Hoyt Spelman, who worked in the magazine’s editorial and marketing departments for years. “She would pick up the phone and talk to me about it.” But some of Pauline’s friends thought she was churlish to complain about her boss so much. After all, she had the best film-reviewing gig in the world, and a luxury virtually no other critic had: unlimited space.

Pauline generally maintained a cordial presence around
The New Yorker
offices, though she was dismissive of many in the old guard, such as Lillian Ross, whom Joe Morgenstern remembered Pauline characterizing as a “fossil.” But she could be exceptionally kind to those she liked—and, as always, she was never a snob about rank. “Pauline was one of the women at
The New Yorker
who paid attention to the female underlings and was friendly to us,” remembered Karen Durbin. “We were
very
aware of the women who ignored us or were slightly hostile.”

Surprisingly, Pauline took a keen interest in the magazine’s business affairs, despite its policy of complete separation of editorial and advertising matters. (The departments were on separate floors, and fraternization between the two was discouraged.) She was amused by the policy of turning down advertising for things such as ladies’ lingerie and cigarettes. Spelman often made trips to advertisers to try to clarify
The New Yorker
’s editorial stance, and from the early ’70s Pauline was frequently tapped to be the main speaker at advertising and promotion conferences on the West Coast. She was always happy to do it, because she felt the magazine had become far too insular and she wanted to help bring it to a wider audience.

 

For years Pauline had deplored the lack of first-class movies about the black experience. In “Trash, Art and the Movies,” she had claimed that the main distinction of the film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s almost universally admired play
A Raisin in the Sun
was that it taught us “that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family.” So she was thrilled to kick off her
New Yorker
stint in the fall of 1972 with a review of
Sounder
, Martin Ritt’s drama about the near-collapse of a family of black sharecroppers during the Depression after the father is jailed for stealing food. She had expected a wearisome tribute to poor people that wore its good intentions on its sleeve; instead, she wrote, Ritt “never pushes a moment too hard or too far—the movie earns every emotion we feel. And I think it will move audiences—move them truly, that is—as few films ever have.” Pauline thought that Cicely Tyson, as the farm wife and mother, Rebecca, who must struggle along when her husband is sent to prison, had “the singular good fortune to play the first great black heroine on the screen.”

One might have expected many critics to embrace
Sounder
, but Pauline’s was one of the most laudatory reviews the movie received. In
The New York Times
, Roger Greenspun found that Ritt seemed “to strive for classical plainness, but to succeed only in being ordinary.” Lindsay Patterson, also in the
Times
, boasted that he grew up in a small Louisiana town among black and white sharecroppers, and wrote that
Sounder
bore “no resemblance whatsoever to reality as I observed it, and sometimes lived it, among black sharecroppers.” Even Richard Schickel, who admired the film, worried about the reaction of the black audience: “Are they available only for fantasies about machismo-bound private eyes? Can they respond to the story of a black man of another generation for whom rage and militancy were simply not available as responses to injustice?” Despite a soft opening,
Sounder
was a hit, building slowly and steadily and proving especially popular in the new marketing technique of group sales; by January 1973, it would gross $3,251,000 on 115 engagements.

Another smart and important film for the black audience appeared that fall—Sidney J. Furie’s
Lady Sings the Blues
, a biography of the great Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross. Pauline, the inveterate jazz-lover, was riveted, even if she found that the film fell far short of its subject in musical terms: Much as she liked Ross’s acting, she thought her shallow pop singing was a pale echo of Holiday’s emotionally naked performances. Yet
Lady Sings the Blues
pleased her because it wasn’t “heavy and glazed,” as so many other singer biographies in the past had been. “Factually it’s a fraud, but emotionally it delivers. It has what makes movies work for a mass audience: easy pleasure, tawdry electricity, personality—great quantities of personality.” It held her, despite its inability to show what drove Holiday musically—what made singing the most important thing in her life. Pauline felt that the entire project was inflected with a pop sensibility, rather than a jazz one. “Pop music provides immediate emotional gratifications that the subtler and deeper and more lasting pleasures of jazz can’t prevail against,” she wrote. “Pop drives jazz back underground. And that’s what this pop movie does to the career of a great jazz singer.” She admitted that she had loved
Lady Sings the Blues
, yet she stressed that she didn’t “want Billie Holiday’s hard, melancholic sound buried under this avalanche of pop. When you get home, you have to retrieve her at the phonograph; you have to do restoration work on your own past.”

 

As much as Pauline had praised several films of the past two years, as much as she obviously felt they were pointing in a new and intoxicating direction for the cinema, close readers of her column may well have had the sense that these pictures were simply preparation for some ultimate, as yet unknown event in her moviegoing life. Her reviews had began to pulsate with an almost palpable sense of anticipation and vulnerability, as if she were preparing herself for an experience so overpowering that she had never fully been able to imagine it. Having proclaimed that the last year had represented a legendary time for the movies, she now seemed poised for the supreme seduction. And it took place on October 14, 1972, the closing night of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, when she experienced Bernardo Bertolucci’s
Last Tango in Paris
.

Bertolucci’s film had arrived at the festival accompanied by tremendous word-of-mouth excitement. There had not been the usual special screening for the critics, and the top reviewers in New York were vying for a seat at the final night of the festival. They already knew that
Last Tango in Paris
took on extremely adult and difficult subject matter—the MPAA had given it an X rating—and there was considerable talk that the movie was bound to run into difficulty with the notoriously difficult Italian censors. There was a chance that it might be banned altogether. In
The New Leader
, John Simon stated that the film’s distributor, United Artists, had had representatives present at the Lincoln Center showing, driving home the point that if the New York reviews weren’t strong enough, the censors might succeed in burying the picture.

With a script by Bertolucci and Franco Arcali,
Last Tango in Paris
told the story of Paul (Marlon Brando), a forty-five-year-old American living in Paris who has reached a critical juncture in his life. He and his wife have run a flea-trap hotel, where the wife often conducted affairs right under Paul’s nose, including one with a long-term resident of the hotel. As the film opens, Paul’s wife has died—a suicide, though the details are intentionally murky. While perusing a vacant apartment he is thinking of renting, he encounters Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a twenty-year-old Parisian girl who is also looking at the apartment. Their attraction to each other is instantaneous, and they surrender to it with total abandon, having sex in the empty apartment. Paul persuades her that they must not know anything about each other—they must not even reveal their names. Paul rents the place, and for several days they meet to have sex. But it wasn’t like the sex that had ever been portrayed on the screen before: Because of the emotional intensity behind it, nothing like it had been seen even in a hardcore porn film.
Last Tango
’s most famous moment—when Paul uses a stick of butter to lubricate his sodomy of Jeanne—was hardly the most shocking thing in the film. “Everything outside this place is bullshit,” says Paul, as he presses Jeanne to confront her inner core for the first time. He induces her to stick two fingers up his ass. He tells her that he’s going to get a pig to fuck her; that he’ll vomit in her face and make her swallow the vomit. “Are you going to do all that for me?” she asks. This dialogue stunned the audience, unaccustomed to seeing and hearing real intimacy between a man and a woman on the screen. (It’s possible that the most intimate scenes prior to the ones between Paul and Jeanne had been those featuring Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret in the decidedly G-rated
Ship of Fools
.)

Midway through the picture there is a shattering scene in which Paul rails at the corpse of his wife, laid out in the funeral parlor. He tells her that he could never, ever have discovered the truth about her. She was dishonest with him from the beginning—dirtier than the dirtiest street pig, he tells her. He hopes she rots in hell, because “our marriage was nothing more than a foxhole for you, and all it took for you to get out was a thirty-five-cent razor and a tub full of water.” Paul is losing himself in Jeanne, attempting to find the truth through erotic means. “Listen, you dumb dodo,” he tells her, when she keeps protesting that she’s really in love with her young television filmmaker boyfriend (Jean-Pierre Léaud), “all the mysteries that you’re ever going to get to know in life are right here.”

The scene at the casket was a history-making moment in world cinema. It was doubtful that any screen actor had ever exposed himself so completely and pitilessly as Brando did in that scene; it made his very fine work in
The Godfather
look like child’s play—a harmless exercise.

When the lights came on after
Last Tango in Paris
at the New York Film Festival screening, Pauline was almost speechless. Her friend George Malko, who accompanied her to it, recalled her as being “drenched”—unable even to go out for a drink with him to discuss it afterward. Pauline recalled that there was very little chatter among the critics at the party following the screening; most people seemed to be in a state of shock.

Most of the critics planned to wait to review
Last Tango
until it had opened in Italy and then officially in New York in January. But Pauline could not wait; she retired to her desk at the Turin and wrote her lengthy review as if in one great gasp. Her review
had
to be a masterpiece—it was, as far as she was concerned, the most important review she had ever written. Such a risky piece of filmmaking demanded the riskiest piece of criticism she could muster.

The intensity of her response worked both for and against her, winning her a deeper level of loyalty from her
New Yorker
readers who were swept along by her passion for the film, yet ultimately alienating those who felt she had simply overpraised it. Perhaps not even William Shawn was prepared for her opening:

The strange, mysterious relationship of sex to intimacy—and the ways in which the two simultaneously feed and contradict each other—was one of the most powerful themes in
Last Tango
, and it was one that Pauline responded to with her whole being. She had a deep respect for the nature of genuine sexual bliss, the eagerness to engage, however fleetingly, in complete surrender to another. As she sat in the darkness at Lincoln Center, dazzled by what was unfolding on the screen, she knew she was witnessing a revolutionary step in the portrayal of human emotions, and that it would be pointless to write about the film with anything less than total abandon.

Brando’s performance stunned her. In her review she called up her memory of seeing him on Broadway in
Truckline Café
back in 1946—a performance so visceral that she had thought he was “having a seizure onstage.” His work in
Last Tango
was the most revealing work she had ever seen an actor do onscreen. His performance as Paul was “a study of the aggression in masculine sexuality, and how the physical strength of men lends credence to the insanity that grows out of it gives the film a larger, tragic dignity. If Brando knows this hell, why should we pretend we don’t?”