Pauline Kael (11 page)

It was becoming well known around the Bay Area that Pauline was the prime mover responsible for putting the Cinema Guild on the map. Friendly, gregarious, and bawdy, she was becoming something of a local character. She dressed down—with her finances in the shape they were in, it was impossible to do anything else—and locals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop. Landberg, on the other hand, struck people as cold and diffident. “Landberg was very remote,” recalled Ariel Parkinson, widow of the poet and Berkeley English professor Thomas Parkinson. “He almost
cultivated
the image of the faceless man. The theater was a fully cooperative enterprise, or at least it seemed to me. I think it’s a shame that people don’t remember Ed Landberg, but then he was very self-effacing. Pauline was the one.”

Pauline’s relationship with Landberg was more in the nature of a meeting of minds, and even that was a bit shaky, as Landberg was a peculiar, somewhat morose man who seemed unable to express joy and enthusiasm in the same way Pauline did. She tried her best to see him as a man of quality and refinement and was encouraged by certain gestures on his part; he had given her a gift of a recording of Gluck’s opera
Orphée et Eurydice
, and she clung to this as evidence that he would make a good match for her. Landberg also provided a degree of financial security, and she thought that at last she might be able to establish a bit of stability for herself and for Gina. If she was searching for a father figure for her daughter, however, she was doomed to be disappointed: Landberg made no secret of his dislike for children in general and showed no interest in Gina whatsoever.

Despite all the reasons she shouldn’t have, Pauline married Edward Landberg. She later told friends that she had cried all through the ceremony, knowing that the marriage was a mistake. She also liked to tell the story that on their wedding night, Landberg fell asleep.

Gina’s observation that her mother never told the same story twice is borne out in Pauline’s puzzling and perverse account of her marriages. Although she delighted in confusing reporters by suggesting to them that she had married two or three times, she was married only once, to Landberg. “We were married for something like a year,” Landberg said decades later. “It was very brief. I didn’t find her sexually attractive, among other things. She was also very bossy, and it wasn’t a happy marriage. It was out of mutual interest.” (Attempts to track down a marriage certificate yielded nothing; Landberg claims not to remember where the marriage took place.) Friends and colleagues agreed that they were a bizarre match. “Pauline and Ed Landberg came for dinner one night,” remembered Ariel Parkinson. “They struck me as having a very tenuous relationship to one another. They weren’t on the same set of vibrations, really.”

Pauline did gain one important thing in her brief union with Landberg—a big step up in living quarters: a handsome, redwood-shingled two-story Craftsman home at 2419 Oregon Street in Berkeley. In the small front yard was a magnificent deodar cedar tree, and in the back was a small garden. The house had a decent-sized front room, a spacious living room with a separate dining area, a kitchen with redwood cabinets, and three upstairs bedrooms. Pauline loved it, and when she and Landberg purchased it, she lost no time in putting her own personal stamp on it, beginning with her vast assortment of books. The downstairs of the house was quite dark, but she had a remedy for that. Pauline was drawn to color, and for years she had been collecting a number of brilliant Tiffany lamps. At the time, they were regarded by many as gaudy junk, but Pauline made a point of picking them up for very little at garage sales and antique shops. She loved the bright, warm pools of light that they cast around the room. The kitchen floor was done in a pattern of bright, Harlequin-colored square tiles by Harry Jacobus: sea green, black, salmon, yellow, mauve. It became her house, not Landberg’s—and soon that was true in the literal sense. Out the back door, on the other side of the small garden, the newlyweds had a little couple’s house built. In a matter of months the marriage had become so rocky that it became Landberg’s new home; he came into the big house mostly for meals and to discuss Cinema Guild business with Pauline, but it was clear that their marriage was doomed. As Landberg bluntly put it, “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman.”

At the Cinema Guild, Pauline supervised all the details of presentation, taking great care to choose the music that was piped in before and in between screenings. Always she selected pieces that connected in some way to what was being shown. One thing she didn’t involve herself in were the theater’s financial affairs. That was Landberg’s territory, and he watched over it obsessively. At each showing of a movie he would stand in the back counting the heads in the audience. Then he would check the ticket count, and if the two numbers didn’t match, the theater staff was expected to make up the difference.

In 1956 Pauline turned out her finest essay to date. Originally published in
The Berkeley Book of Modern Writing, No. 3
by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Movies, the Desperate Art” was a critical view of what Pauline felt was the deplorable level of expensive, wide-screen filmmaking in the mid-1950s. It was a chaotic period in Hollywood: The postwar demand for greater realism, and the rise of the Actors Studio in New York, with its emphasis on sense-memory as a way of creating an authentic, emotional moment pulled out of the actor’s personal past, had paved the way for more adult performers and subject matter. This was all good news to Pauline, who was pleased to see the emergence of pictures such as Elia Kazan’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951), Fred Zinnemann’s
From Here to Eternity
(1953), Richard Brooks’s
The Blackboard Jungle
(1955), and Charles Laughton’s
Night of the Hunter
(1955, scripted by James Agee). However, there was a danger, Pauline felt, in the new quest for more serious and complicated emotional subject matter, which was exemplified by George Stevens’s
A Place in the Sun
(1951) and
Shane (
1953). Stevens, who had delighted her with warm, human dramas such as
Alice Adams
(1935) and thrilling, tongue-in-cheek adventures like
Gunga Din
(1939), had become a self-appointed Minister of Relevance; his movies now wore their serious intentions on their sleeve.

But a parallel universe was rising in 1950s Hollywood, and it was a place where none of the new dramatic content had much currency. The wide-screen spectacle had grown out of the movie studios’ desperation to compete with the onslaught of television. To Pauline, big-screen romances such as
Three Coins in the Fountain
(1954) and biblical spectacles like
The Robe
(1953) and
The Egyptian
(1954) had set moviemaking back decades. “Like a public building designed to satisfy the widest public’s concept of grandeur,” Pauline wrote in “Movies, the Desperate Art,” “the big production loses the flair, the spontaneity, the rhythm of an artist working to satisfy his own conception. The more expensive the picture, the bigger the audience it must draw, and the fewer risks it can take.” She was not impressed with the so-called visual splendor made possible by the wide-screen process; she deemed it “about as magical as a Fitzpatrick travelogue.”

The new breed of stars—Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Esther Williams—likewise disheartened her, because they were not “protagonists in any meaningful sense; they represent the voice of adjustment, the caution against individuality, independence, emotionality, art, ambition, personal vision. They represent the antidrama of American life.” And with this assembly line of movies designed not to threaten anyone, to please as wide an audience as possible, she could see that newspaper critics were bound to praise the popular and pan the problematic until they lost their way entirely.

This was Pauline in one of her most accomplished roles: the Cassandra of film criticism, predicting nothing less than a cultural holocaust if the movies continued to go down the same, self-defeating path. And the blight, she warned, had already infected critics everywhere, who had “been quick to object to a film with a difficult theme, a small camera range, or a markedly verbal content (they object even when the words are worth listening to). Because action can be extended over a wide area on the screen, they think it must be—or what they’re seeing isn’t really a movie at all.”

Overall, the essay was a thrilling demonstration of Pauline’s credo that a critic’s voice should never be objective. It was only through subjective means that a critic could convey what was in her heart and mind to the reader. “Movies, the Desperate Art” was a milestone in Pauline’s early career. Only three years after she had published her first review, she had found her voice and what would become her greatest subject and the continuing passion of her life: the confluence of what happened onscreen and what happened in life.

 

With the house on Oregon Street, Pauline at last had a real workspace where she could spread out and be genuinely productive. Where the two front rooms divided, she set up a movie screen and constantly ran 16 mm films on a giant projector. She wrote at a drafting table, often standing up, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Wild Turkey in the other, with her favorite Bessie Smith records playing. She stayed up late at night, reading obsessively and scribbling articles to submit to
The Partisan Review
.

The house became a gathering place for local movie-lovers, writers, poets, musicians. She fussed over what they were reading. She became upset with her friend Linda Allen, who loved Isak Dinesen, which Pauline considered far too head-in-the-clouds; instead, she pressed Allen to read Colette. Anne Kael Wallach was a frequent visitor. She was now a highly respected English teacher at Berkeley’s Lowell High School; she would be fondly remembered by generations of Lowell students as a quietly exacting but kindly Mrs. Chips. Pauline remained extremely fond of her oldest sister, and when Anne’s husband, Max Wallach, had difficulty making a success of his business, Pauline lent him money. She was known for being generous to her young artist friends—even something of a soft touch. She also managed the difficult feat of being brutally honest about their creative work while at the same time showering them with generosity. “She was one of the most ethical people I ever knew,” said David Young Allen, a young Texan whom Pauline met after he had enrolled as a student at Berkeley and come to work as a projectionist at the Cinema Guild. “I would sometimes clean house for her when I was a student. She was always cooking soup, or sometimes doing her hand laundry. Sometimes she was a little insulting. She said to me, ‘You are a kind of a semi-fuck-up, honey.’ I would get pissed at her, but she was so funny—and she wasn’t wrong.”

For Gina, the constant crowd of artist friends created an atmosphere in which she had to compete for her mother’s attention. She craved a more conventional home life, one in which the dinner hour wouldn’t be interrupted by phone calls that had to be answered “Cinema Studio and Guild!” What bothered her most, however, were the stricken reactions that many of Pauline’s friends had to her opinion of their work. Some of them were quite devastated by her pronouncements, and while Pauline seemed oblivious to it all, Gina internalized the friends’ hurt feelings.

Employees of the Cinema Guild and invited members of the audience also regularly gathered for parties at Oregon Street, where Pauline laid out a generous supply of California wine and homemade lasagne and shepherd’s pie and roast chicken. The hostess always had the best time of all, pouring bourbon, mingling with everyone, cigarette in hand, enthusiastically holding forth on the latest developments in the film industry. Sometimes, when she would get particularly excited about a point she was making, she would give a little backward kick with her heel. “Her mind was always moving five times faster than most other people’s minds,” said Donald Gutierrez, who worked at the Cinema Guild for a brief time. “But she had an engaging habit of indicating that she didn’t understand some point of view or poem. She would say, ‘Beats me—what do you think about that?’ Kind of a compliment of sorts.”

She had two beloved basenji dogs, Polly and Bushbaby, who frolicked with the guests, and several of her friends noted the irony that a compulsive talker like Pauline chose to have dogs who couldn’t bark. There was an upright piano in the living room with characters from
The Wizard of Oz
painted on it, and Pauline loved to sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs,
The Mikado
’s “The Moon and I” being a particular favorite. She liked to joke that through the doors of 2419 Oregon Street passed the best-educated and worst-looking people in the world. “She had a motherly side,” recalled Ernest Callenbach, “especially to young people who needed help. I think that’s why she was sympathetic to certain directors. She thought she could be their den mother. She could be very bitchy to people, but she had a very soft, sweet side, which many people refused to admit was there.”