Pauline Kael (54 page)

Now that she was back from her aborted Hollywood foray, it seemed more important than ever that she gather a close circle of moviegoing friends around her. Many of them could be described, with some accuracy, as acolytes. However much Pauline loved passing judgment, it is clear that her inner circle craved her approval. It had become the talk of the industry that she preferred to surround herself with younger people—the word was that she loved to play the mentor, the lecturer, and wanted to be surrounded by those who didn’t challenge her views, who dutifully nodded at every word that came out of her mouth. Once, when Warren Beatty saw her at a screening with several of her young critic friends in tow, he remarked, “Here comes Ma Barker and her gang.” These adoring young protégés would come to be known as the Paulettes, a term clearly intended to imply slavish imitation and sycophancy, and its accuracy would be debated by both friends and enemies of Pauline’s for decades to come. No one is absolutely certain who coined the label “Paulettes”—some credit the critic Richard Corliss—but it stuck. (After her death David Denby would even title a
New Yorker
remembrance of her “My Life as a Paulette.”) Whatever the source of the term, it is equally true that it was accurate in the case of some of her followers—and deeply unfair in the case of others.

The Paulettes had been in formation for some time before they found themselves so neatly labeled. In 1976, following a screening of
Carrie
, Joseph Hurley, a mutual friend of Pauline and Joseph Morgenstern, had spent an evening with Pauline and several of her younger followers—among them Carrie Rickey and Al Avant—and was distressed by what he witnessed there. He hadn’t liked
Carrie
at all and felt that the others had ganged up on him for not agreeing with Pauline’s favorable opinion of the movie, trying to make him look like a fool. He found it even more distasteful for people as young and inexperienced as Rickey and Avant to be gleefully mowing down the reputations of many fine film artists. To Hurley, their behavior reeked of the worst kind of New York snobbery. The following morning he dashed off a scorching letter to Pauline, accusing her of encouraging such behavior.

One of Pauline’s favorite young friends was Ray Sawhill. He had written to her about her review of
Nashville
while he was still a student at Princeton, and, as was often the case, it marked the beginning of a friendship. Sawhill had a keen, probing intelligence, a quick wit, and he was friendly and unpretentious—Pauline’s kind of person. Their tastes certainly weren’t completely congruent—Sawhill was far more interested in avant-garde cinema than Pauline was—but once he had moved to New York and she got to know him, he became a steady companion at screenings and dinners. Sawhill eventually became an arts reporter at
Newsweek
, an experience he grew to dislike because he felt that the magazine didn’t care much about how to convey information to its readers, only about how to package it. Pauline took a great interest in his career and was constantly prodding him to be a movie critic. The problem was that Sawhill didn’t particularly
want
to be a movie critic; he was drawn to other kinds of writing, as well, and by his own admission, he was not much of a careerist. As a result he became Pauline’s favorite “bad boy”—the one in her circle who often wouldn’t do what she told him to. Pauline was perpetually exhorting Sawhill to write huge critical pieces on spec and send them to the top magazines, as a way of securing a regular writing post, but he often ignored her advice—to the degree that, once, she shook her fist at him and railed, “You make me so mad!” But clearly, Sawhill’s independence from her was also a quality she respected.

Another of Pauline’s favorites was Michael Sragow, whom she had gotten to know in the 1970s when he was a student at Harvard. When Sragow began writing criticism for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
and then
Rolling Stone
, Pauline would call to tell him what she thought about a particular review. “Most of her criticism was not that hard if you understood the tenor of what she said,” Sragow observed. “One of the joys of coming up in that era was that there was real argument, and it was zesty and not always fighting. I think you had to be in the same sort of ballpark of perceiving what was on the screen to have the kind of friendship where you would discuss movies with her. But I think she was kind of bored if you only thought what she thought, if you didn’t bring your own eyes to it.”

Another young writer whose career Pauline took great interest in was David Edelstein. Unlike some of the acolytes who felt that the way to get along with Pauline was to agree with her, Edelstein did not find that she dictated opinions to him. Rather, he found her extremely sensitive about letting him find his own way in his thinking about movies, as if she understood that he was still a work in progress and she didn’t want to influence him unduly. He felt that her interest in being surrounded by a group had less to do with wanting to be Ma Barker, or the Queen Bee, than with her love of being the member of an audience. “Pauline had enormous insight into people,” said Edelstein. “For someone who was a critic, she was extraordinarily other-directed. She would get people spouting their opinions and sometimes she would use them. She would use it in a way that was orchestrated in a way that was beyond anything anybody could have done. But she loved to be surprised.”

For Pauline, being a spectator continued to be the best thing life could offer. Carrie Rickey remembered an Italian restaurant in Times Square of which Pauline was particularly fond. For dessert she always ordered zabaglione, the custard dessert that was made at the table—something Rickey suspected she relished because she was both attending a performance and granting an audience. Her old friend Linda Allen recalled a visit that Pauline made to Berkeley when she attended a family reunion. Pauline asked Allen to come over for a visit, and when Allen arrived, she found Pauline’s grandnieces and grand-nephews playing rambunctiously in the backyard. “She was watching them, like a movie,” Allen said. “She said at one point, ‘I want to see how this comes out.’”

If Pauline thought, however, that her protégés were going in the wrong direction, or if she suddenly felt that she had misjudged their potential, she could drop them with amazing swiftness. This was the fate of Carrie Rickey. Around the time Pauline left for Hollywood, Rickey was given a job as an art critic for
The Village Voice
. Pauline seemed delighted; she frequently called Rickey to ask her questions about various painters or exhibits. In the midsummer of 1980 the
Voice
gave Rickey the job she had had her eye on all along—film critic, as an alternate to Andrew Sarris. The Renata Adler piece had come out by then, as well as Sarris’s piece in the
Voice
in which he backed up Adler’s point of view. When Rickey called Pauline to commiserate, she noticed immediately that Pauline seemed uninterested in discussing the Adler essay. She talked briefly about the Sarris article, denouncing him to Rickey as sexless and telling her that his marriage to Molly Haskell was a sham. Then Rickey told her that she had just gotten the film critic’s post. There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“Well,” Pauline finally said. “They didn’t ask me. If they had, I would have told them to hire Jim Wolcott.”

“The conversation was over,” said Rickey years later, “and so was our friendship.”

In 1982 Rickey interviewed for a job at
Rolling Stone
. She had been led to believe that it was as good as hers, when she was suddenly informed that she was out of the running: One of the editors had called Pauline, who pronounced against Rickey. Although Rickey went on to work successfully at
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, at the time she felt professionally blackballed. “I thought,” she remembered, “I was fine when I was an acolyte. But she didn’t want me as a peer.”

 

At the end of 1980,
Heaven’s Gate
, Michael Cimino’s epic Western about the conflict between settlers and cattlemen in Johnson County, Wyoming, was released by United Artists—to disastrous reviews. Pauline didn’t find it quite the abomination that many other critics did, but she believed Cimino had gotten so wrapped up in creating a certain atmosphere that he had completely lost sight of his story, which rambled along incoherently. “It’s a movie you want to deface; you want to draw mustaches on it, because there’s no observation in it, no hint of anything resembling direct knowledge—or even intuition—of what people are about,” Pauline wrote. Running nearly three hours and forty minutes,
Heaven’s Gate
had cost in excess of $36 million—possibly up to $50 million—and the press was quick to paint it as a symbol of the worst excesses of directorial freedom in Hollywood. United Artists withdrew it quickly and cut it by more than an hour, but it flopped again on rerelease. In time,
Heaven’s Gate
was seen as the final, cataclysmic gasp of the great auteurist period of the past decade, but the process of getting a movie made in Hollywood had been getting more and more complicated for some time.
Heaven’s Gate
, if anything, became a convenient excuse for the studio heads, who would increasingly refuse to green-light a project unless an entire publicity campaign could be built around one good line—the Don Simpson legacy. The marketing executives were steadily taking over, and now that her bruises were beginning to heal, Pauline was relieved not to have remained in Hollywood.

In March of 1981 she saw Louis Malle’s
Atlantic City
, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon. Her chief pleasure was in seeing the screen work of the brilliant playwright John Guare. Like Pauline, Guare had an aversion to the carefully orchestrated “problem” dramas of playwrights such as William Inge, which told the audience, “Little Sheba might not Come Back but don’t worry, we’ll learn from this experience and everything will be all right. I was beginning to see that Great White Way naturalism is to reality what sentimentality is to feeling.”

Pauline loved the ecstatic flow of Guare’s work, and the way in which great ideas, genre spoofs, and free-floating, imagistic dialogue all bumped into one another. “You’re not struck with the usual dramatic apparatus—the expository dialogue and the wire-pulling to get the characters into the planned situations. Instead, you get gags, which prove to be the explanation.” She admitted, “Though I have a better time in the theater at John Guare’s plays than I do at the plays of any other contemporary American, I would not have guessed that his charmed, warped world and his dialogue, which is full of imagery, could be so successfully brought to the screen.”

On May 7, 1981, Pauline appeared in a public debate with a onetime idol, Jean-Luc Godard, held at the Marin Civic Center in Mill Valley, California. The event had attracted a crowd of some two thousand people, and on the way there, Godard was quite charming to Pauline. Once they got onstage, however, his tone changed. Their debate turned out to be a long, rambling conversation in which Godard seemed perennially on the offensive against Pauline, who had taken a dim view of some of his more recent pictures. She persistently attempted to keep the conversation on a fairly linear track, while Godard just as persistently attempted to venture off on other paths. He launched the session by criticizing her for “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers.” He didn’t accept the degree of blame she placed on the conglomerates behind the studios, and felt that critics, Pauline included, needed to take more responsibility for the level of movies being released. Critics, he said, were “using their power in the same direction that the businessmen of the movies are”—meaning that advertising influenced how reviews were written. Pauline tried to defend
The New Yorker
’s strict separation of advertising and editorial matters, but Godard dismissed the argument.

Using Michael Cimino as an example, he attacked the press for overpraising
The Deer Hunter
while blatantly condemning
Heaven’s Gate
, a picture which, to his eye, had a number of admirable elements. “It has a lot of magnificent things that the director cannot follow through on—for very obvious reasons which we can analyze,” he protested. “But the reviewers never say that, and never try to help someone who is very arrogant, as Cimino is, to make a better picture next time.” He attacked one of Pauline’s favorites, Brian De Palma, for not adequately preparing his scripts, and compared him unfavorably with Hitchcock. He also stated that he felt criticism should be a kind of science, a comment that Pauline told him was downright perverse. The conversation ambled on, and as the evening’s presenter, Sydney Goldstein of City Arts and Lectures, recalled, “It was a chilling ride back to the city.”

The summer of 1981 saw the release of the year’s greatest commercial success,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, the George Lucas–Steven Spielberg tribute to old movie serials, starring Harrison Ford. The picture had a tongue-in-cheek tone that appealed to the snobs in the audience who wanted to feel they weren’t “just” looking at an adventure movie. It appealed to an incredibly wide base, but Pauline regarded it as a perfect symbol of the rise of the marketing executives; in her review of the picture, she pointed out that marketing budgets often surpassed total production budgets, a practice that “could become commonplace.” She found
Raiders
didn’t allow you “time to breathe—or to enjoy yourself much, either. It’s an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer—for flash.” At last, she could see the direction in which
Jaws
had led. Its excesses were especially a pity, she thought, because both Lucas and Spielberg were loaded with movie-making talent. She observed that if Lucas “weren’t hooked on the crap of his childhood—if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them—there’s no imagining the result.” But it’s doubtful that Lucas paid attention to her admonishment—not in the face of the $230 million gross racked up by
Raiders.