Pauline Kael (57 page)

Since they met in 1980, Gina’s relationship with Warner Friedman had blossomed, and on March 17, 1982, she gave birth to their son, William James. Like Pauline, Gina had a deep desire to have a child, but she was not entirely certain about marriage. Then, on Will’s first birthday, Friedman and Gina invited a group of friends, including Pauline, over to celebrate at Friedman’s house in Sheffield, Massachusetts. He had secretly called a justice of the peace to show up and marry him and Gina before the gathering, and when he announced his plan, Pauline’s voice emerged loud and clear from the group: “Oh, shit.” She was no less skeptical about marriage than she had ever been—and the thought that Friedman would now have an even greater claim on Gina’s attention was jarring to her.

Friedman and Pauline often disagreed. She became very angry one evening when he said that all actors were stupid, and on another occasion when, after several drinks, he pronounced, “Movies are not art.” He characterized Pauline’s relationship with Gina as “a distant closeness” and recognized that, as independent as Pauline was, she needed Gina to be close by. Gina, for her part, clearly harbored certain resentments against Pauline. She was angry with herself that she had not rebelled against her mother and insisted on having a proper education—a point on which many of Pauline’s friends sympathized with her. Mother and daughter had one important trait in common: they were both self-contained about their emotions, very conscious of not allowing tensions between them to be played out before others. Friedman recalled a time when Gina was hospitalized for some minor surgery. “Pauline sort of showed a little affection,” he recalled, “and Gina was annoyed by it. As close as they seemed, they were not demonstrative.”

F
or some years Billy Abrahams had been urging Pauline to publish a collection of her capsule reviews, which by now were an institution in
The New Yorker
’s front-of-book section. She had amassed more than eleven thousand of these pieces, some of them dating back to her days writing program notes for the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Noting the success that Leonard Maltin had had with his own collection of brief reviews, Abrahams urged her to gather her own, and when it became clear that
Lays of Ancient Hollywood
would not materialize, the project became a priority. Videocassettes of movies were soon to hit the market, and Abrahams knew that if movies on tape led to the anticipated revolution in home viewing, Pauline’s book was likely to be very popular indeed. She chose the title herself
—5001 Nights at the Movies
. Assembling and editing the collection was a massive task, but when Holt, Rinehart and Winston brought it out in 1982,
The Boston Globe
’s Mark Sweeney called it “an incomparable dip-in book,” and the
Chicago Tribune
’s Richard Christiansen dubbed it “a browser’s delight.” It sold very well and eventually had even greater success as a paperback—the only thing that baffled readers was the inclusion of movies such as
Car Wash
and
Straight, Place and Show
, with the Ritz Brothers—at the expense of staples such as
Gone With the Wind
and
The Wizard of Oz.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that she altered her view of at least one film, Robert Bresson’s
Diary of a Country Priest
. In
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
she had called it “one of the most profound emotional experiences in the history of film”; now she still found it great, but qualified her opinion, judging that the slow rhythm might make viewers feel that they were “dying with the priest. The film may raise the question in your mind: Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is?”

Whatever her feelings about the quality of the films she was reviewing, Pauline’s enthusiasm for writing was undiminished. William Whitworth once observed that of all the staff writers at
The New Yorker
, no one exhibited the zeal for sitting down to work that she did. By now she was no longer pleased with Daniel Menaker as her direct editor, and requested that he be replaced. William Shawn called Menaker in and said, “I don’t want you to take this personally. You lasted a long time with her. But Miss Kael feels that you may not have the time and attention to give her the sort of editorial help she needs.” Pauline’s idea of the attention she wished for from an editor primarily involved sitting in her office and reading her column aloud to him, with a small electric fan blowing behind her. “Whenever she came across something that she felt didn’t sound like her, she would change it. I had been learning all along from other writers that when you have a genuine voice, you have to listen to it and listen to it carefully. The dark side of that was incredible tedium, after a while. It was more like being a silent witness than it was being an editor. I suppose my impatience showed through.”

In 1983 Pauline received the Award for Distinguished Journalism from the Newswomen’s Club of New York. She was pleased by the honor, but she had continued to resist any feminist interpretation of her career. She was not comfortable with the increasing labeling of “male” and “female” art and culture and was also ill at ease with the streak of militant anger present in the thinking of so many hard-core feminists. She thought, to paraphrase the writer Suzanne Gordon, that there was a great difference between male objectification and male appreciation, and she did not see that much good could come from the sexes being increasingly isolated from each other.

In June 1983 she turned sixty-four, and was conscious of a certain physical decline. That summer she suffered a long period of back pain that made it difficult for her to sit in screenings for long periods of time. More worrisome was the frequent tightness in her chest, which struck her when she picked up the mail each day in Great Barrington and began walking back up the hill to her house. She had developed hypertension and tried treating it with the beta blocker Diltiazem, which only made her depressed; her doctors put her on Dyazide, which proved a more effective way of treating her blood pressure. She suffered several more bouts of severe flu, and still had a slight tremor in her hands, which she attributed to the advancing years.

The summer of 1983 was an unrewarding time to be writing movie criticism. Her review of
Flashdance
could easily have been interpreted by some Hollywood insiders as an open attack on the man who produced it, Don Simpson—but it is doubtful that Pauline would have liked the film no matter who happened to be at the helm. She trounced it as a “lulling, narcotizing musical; the whole damn thing throbs. It’s a motorized anatomy lesson, designed to turn the kids on and drive older men crazy. It’s soft-core porn with an inspirational message, and it’s maybe the most calculating, platinum-hearted movie I’ve ever seen.” She welcomed Woody Allen back, guardedly, with her review of
Zelig
, his documentary satire about a chameleon-like personality who inserts himself into the lives of many of the great figures of the century. She felt it was a small success that had been wildly overrated: “The film has a real shine, but it’s like a teeny carnival that you may have missed—it was in the yard behind the Methodist Church last week.”

That fall, she enjoyed herself tremendously at Philip Kaufman’s
The Right Stuff
, based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the marketing of Project Mercury’s groundbreaking team of astronauts. She wrote that the entire film gave off “a pleasurable hum” and that “like Tom Wolfe, Phil Kaufman wants you to find everything he puts in beguilingly wonderful and ironic. That’s the Tom Wolfe tone, and to a surprising degree Kaufman catches it and blends it with his own.” What intrigued her most was the way in which Kaufman, “far more of an anti-establishmentarian than Tom Wolfe,” had taken the book’s “reactionary cornerstone: the notion that a man’s value is determined by his physical courage . . . Yet the film’s comedy scenes are conceived in counterculture terms.”

Years later, Kaufman still wasn’t certain about Pauline’s term “reactionary cornerstone.” “Someone told me she saw it with a group of her followers,” he said, “and I don’t know if that was a Pauline reaction, purely. The movie was all about the wives and female courage, and all of these things—women holding up. Every scene in the movie was an aspect of the right stuff. It wasn’t all about macho stuff. In fact, a lot of it was downplaying that. Pauline saw a movie once and sometimes she might see it in a mood or with certain people and the mood of the room—and you just have to live with that. I would never think of calling Pauline to try to explain my work to her.”

She was delighted by Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut with
Yentl,
released in November. She thought the movie “rhapsodic,” and a welcome musical return to the screen for the star. “Her singing voice takes you farther into the character; the songs express Yentl’s feelings—what she wants to say but has to hold back,” Pauline wrote. “Her singing is more than an interior monologue. When she starts a song, her hushed intensity makes you want to hear her every breath, and there’s high drama in her transitions from verse to chorus.” Pauline had always resented that Streisand had in the past come under fire for her perfectionism, and toward the end of the review, her partisanship came glaring through: “And now that she has made her formal debut as a director, her work explains why she, notoriously, asks so many questions of writers and directors and everyone else—that’s her method of learning. And it also explains why she has sometimes been unhappy with her directors: she really did know better.”

The year’s most universally acclaimed big studio picture was James L. Brooks’s
Terms of Endearment
. It had a good premise: the uneasy relationship between an unusual, strong-minded, exceptional-in-some-ways mother (Shirley MacLaine) and her much less exceptional daughter (Debra Winger), whose life swings out of control when she enters into a bad marriage and later develops terminal cancer. Pauline loathed it, feeling that Brooks had directed “the actors with both eyes on the audience.” Winger confirmed Pauline’s faith in her; she found her performance “incredibly vivid,” but in the end, the film’s manipulative style irritated her: “If
Terms
had stayed a comedy,” she wrote, “it might have been innocuous, but it had to be ratified by importance, and it uses cancer like a seal of approval. Cancer gives the movie its message: ‘Don’t take people for granted; you never know when you’re going to lose them.’ At the end, the picture says, ‘You can go home now—you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.’ What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.”
Terms of Endearment
was about as close as the major Hollywood studios seemed to be willing to get to complex, problematic subject matter, and the savvy moviegoer was beginning to perceive the decision-by-committee mentality that had gone into such movies.

 

Music continued to play an enormous role in Pauline’s life at home. She listened to a wide range of recordings—everything from opera to Aretha Franklin. She considered opera a great, all-consuming art form, like movies, and she could be thrilled by it without possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of it. (She once telephoned opera aficionado John Simon because she didn’t recognize Verdi excerpts being played in Bertolucci’s
1900
.) Her musical tastes made for a fascinating parallel with her taste in movies. In general, she preferred the subtlety of jazz to the all-out, hearty razzmatazz of Broadway show tunes; one of her favorite recordings was Billie Holiday’s “Getting Some Fun out of Life.” In the realm of classical music, she was extremely resistant to the composers who wore their profundity on their sleeve. For this reason she never fully warmed to Mahler and Bruckner (“There wasn’t a lot of room for bombast,” observed David Edelstein) while she had a deep love for the music of Handel and Gluck and other early-music composers, because she admired their economical structure—they created exciting, passionate music that was also formally disciplined. One of the singers whose records she played most often was the great American countertenor Russell Oberlin—an unusual preference, since at the time countertenors had nothing like the wider acceptance they later achieved.

Reviewing
Amadeus
, Milos Forman’s screen version of Peter Shaffer’s long-running play, Pauline was amused by the playwright’s vision of the relationship between the respected middlebrow court composer Antonio Salieri and the wildly gifted young Mozart: “Shaffer has Salieri declaring war on Heaven for gypping him, and determined to ruin Mozart because God’s voice is speaking through him. . . . He’s the least humble of Christians—he seems to expect God to give him exact value for every prayer he has ever delivered.” Where she took issue with the movie, however, was in its suggestion that Salieri was right: She thought that Shaffer erred “by showing you Mozart as a rubber-faced grinning buffoon with a randy turn of mind, as if that were all there was to him, [and it] begins to lend credence to Salieri’s mad notion that Mozart doesn’t have to do a thing—that his music is a no-strings-attached, pure gift from God.” Still, she was surprised how much she liked the film, in large part because of F. Murray Abraham’s performance—she considered him “a wizard at eager, manic, full-of-life roles, and he gives Salieri a cartoon animal’s obsession with Mozart—he’s Wile E. Coyote.”

The year 1984 was significant in several ways. In April, Pauline’s seventh collection of reviews,
Taking It All In
, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, covering her
New Yorker
pieces from June 1980 to June 1983. She presented it at a sales conference in Washington, D.C. Judy Karasik, an employee at Holt at the time, remembered the excitement that surrounded Pauline’s appearances. “I was sitting next to her,” remembered Karasik, “and I’d never seen anyone so nervous before speaking in my life. Her hands were sweating so profusely that I believed that drops were pouring off of them. She sort of held them at her side and sort of shook them. She was trembling, and breathing oddly. Then she got up there and was so brilliant.”