Pauline Kael (17 page)

The Atlantic Monthly Press signed an agreement with Bantam Books for the latter to bring out the paperback version, Marcia Nasatir having persisted in her enthusiasm for the book and having made the attractive offer of $15,000 for the rights. By fall the paperback edition was in production, but Pauline was not happy with Bantam’s ideas for the cover. Robert Mills wrote to Nasatir that he shared Pauline’s disappointment, because “the cover seems to illustrate the title rather than the contents, and also looks a little bit like a Grove Press comic book.” She asked some of her artist friends to whip up some rough sketches for a cover, and these were used as the basis for the jacket design in its final form. Pauline was an astute judge of a cover’s commercial possibilities, and for the rest of her career, she would not hesitate to express her opinions on an art department’s efforts on her behalf. Her efforts to make
I Lost It at the Movies
a commercial prospect paid off: It would sell in the neighborhood of 150,000 copies—astonishing for a book on the movies.

By summer the decision that had been gnawing at her for months was made: She would move to New York. The Oregon Street house was sold, and Pauline and Gina went through the arduous process of packing up their belongings, among which books far outnumbered everything else. She had asked several of her friends in New York to be on the watch for available apartments, and Dan and Toby Talbot helped her locate one on the West Side of Manhattan, at 670 West End Avenue—with enough room for the basenjis.

While they were getting ready to take possession of the apartment, Pauline and Gina stayed with Robert and Tresa Hughes at their West Side flat. Robert had been a protégé of Colin Young at the UCLA film school, and Tresa was a respected stage actress. “In the evenings, especially, Bob and Pauline drank and talked,” said Tresa Hughes. “There were all these F.O.O. F.s around—Friends of Old Film.” Pauline transferred the party atmosphere of the Oregon Street house to her Manhattan dwelling—even the temporary one. Frequently when Tresa came home from the theater, the apartment was still full of Pauline’s movie cronies, talking, drinking, and often violently disagreeing.

These relationships were now the closest thing to an emotional life that Pauline had. Her New York friends all had the impression that she was essentially through with men. Perhaps her feeling on the matter was best observed in
Wearing the Quick Away
, a one-act monologue she had written in the 1940s. “People shouldn’t marry you if they can’t accept you as you are,” her character says. “These men get to acting as though this
change
was what they married you for and you cheated them by not turning into something else.”

 

I Lost It at the Movies
turned out to be a potent calling card: Pauline was constantly being asked to make lecture appearances, and
Holiday
magazine offered her $750 for a 2,000-word piece, “The Incredible Shrinking Hollywood,” which eventually ran in its March 1966 issue. What she craved most, though, was a steady movie-reviewing berth. Over the summer Robert Mills worked hard trying to find one for her, and by summer’s end, it appeared that
McCall’s
(which called itself the “first magazine for women”) was seriously interested. With its emphasis on features dealing with home and beauty, it was hardly the sort of place Pauline might have imagined would offer her a staff position, but Robert Stein, the magazine’s editor, was trying to reshape the readership by seeking out cultural coverage with a bit more gravitas. By the mid-1960s Stein recognized that there was a wide, new audience of young women with college degrees who might be looking for something a little more serious in tone in a standard-issue women’s magazine. By early October Mills had concluded negotiations with Stein:
McCall’s
would sign Pauline for a six-month trial period, to commence in February 1966. During that time she would turn in one monthly column of no more than 2,500 words, for which she would be paid $1,500—a good salary for the time. At last she would be able to make a real living solely as a film critic.

While she was waiting for the
McCall’s
assignments to begin, she accepted a number of lecture engagements. One of them was an invitation to speak at a conference of educators held at Dartmouth College in October 1965. The speech that resulted may not have been what the conference’s officials had in mind, but it was a perfect distillation of Pauline’s feelings about the worst traps of academia. “It’s Only a Movie” was a persuasive argument against film studies courses in American universities. In it, Pauline referred to her early, rebellious student attitudes. Sitting down to try to prepare a film course, she said, served only to remind her “how my thumbnails got worn down from scraping the paint off my pencils as the teacher droned on about great literature. I remembered music appreciation with the record being played over and over, the needle arm going back and forth, and I remembered the slide machine in art history and the deadly rhythm of the instructor’s paper. Teaching a course in film studies,” she said, “goes against the grain of everything I feel about movies, and against the grain of just about everything I believe about how we learn in the arts.”

What academic instructors seemed incapable of recognizing about genuine movie-lovers, she argued, was that film represented “a world more exciting than the deadening world of trying-to-be-helpful teachers and chewed-over texts.” Film, like jazz and popular music, had an advantage over other traditional art forms because it had not received a cultural stamp of approval in advance; it was “something we wanted, not something fed to us.” She went on:

She also penned an intriguing essay for
The Atlantic Monthly
: “Marlon Brando: An American Hero.” The title may have suggested a straightforward, starry-eyed appreciation, but what evolved was something rather different: an attempt to explain why Brando, only sixteen years after the beginning of his screen career, seemed to be parodying himself. Pauline placed the blame on the unspoken conspiracy of both journalists and the movie industry to ridicule him. She also lit into the corrupt studios, which, in her view, usually reacted to a star’s rising power and fame by launching “large-scale campaigns designed to cut him down to an easier-to-deal-with size or to supplant him with younger, cheaper talent.” Still, Brando’s talent could not be disguised. “His greatness is in a range that is too disturbing to be encompassed by regular movies,” she wrote. She found him “still the most exciting American actor on the screen. The roles may not be classic, but the actor’s dilemma is.”

By far Pauline’s biggest undertaking in the fall of 1965 was an assignment from
Life
: a report on the filming of Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
. The producer, Charles K. Feldman, had bought the movie rights, and now United Artists, the studio making the picture, had assigned it to the quickly rising director Sidney Lumet. Although he had turned out several pictures that had met with great critical praise, including
Twelve Angry Men
,
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, and
The Pawnbroker
, none had been a commercial success. Given the book’s popularity, it was expected that
The Group
would be one of the big screen events of the year, and
Life
felt it warranted major coverage in the magazine. The success of
I Lost It at the Movies
led
Life
to Pauline, even though she had never done a piece of straight reportage. (It is doubtful that anyone at the magazine knew or cared about her history with McCarthy’s novel and
The New York Review of Books
.)

Initially Sidney Lumet was delighted to have Pauline covering the picture, as he had been following her work for some time and found her one of the most perceptive and articulate critics to come along in years. “The only thing she was really lacking,” said Lumet, “which I feel is true of many critics, is any
technical
knowledge of how a movie is made.” He gave her complete access to the filming, which was being done entirely in New York. On the set Pauline kept herself in the background, never interrupted a shot, never asked questions at tense or inappropriate times. To the actresses she was rather intimidating, despite her low profile—“rather brusque and strict” was how Shirley Knight, playing Polly, the group member who wants only a simple and fruitful marriage, remembered her.

It was a challenging shoot. There were many locations, and often, a key scene would involve as many as eight people—a daunting task from the cameraman’s point of view. Pauline watched as Lumet worked with great speed and authority, a highly professional director who was cordial to most of the cast and crew. Still, she couldn’t help but feel that he was applying too many of the abrupt, unsubtle, time-saving techniques he had picked up during his years directing for television. He was extremely generous with actors, but Pauline wasn’t sure that he always sensed the most imaginative way of pulling a performance out of them; she believed that he had a tendency to settle for a take that was only passable. (Jessica Walter, who played Libby, the bookish girl with ambitions to succeed in the publishing industry, disagreed: “I remember doing so many takes. Sidney always wants it to be a hundred and fifty percent plus. Never did I see him accept the passable.” Shirley Knight concurred that Lumet insisted on many takes, but she questioned the outcome. “He’ll do a bunch of takes, and there’ll be a take that is really
the
one, and everything goes together,” observed Knight. “And he wants you to duplicate it.”)

Lumet and Pauline had a very friendly relationship during the weeks that she observed on the set. Not long after
The Group
had wrapped, Lumet invited her to his apartment for dinner. Also present was Lumet’s close friend the show-business caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, with his wife, Dolly. “We had a good dinner and a lot to drink,” recalled Lumet. “Oh, boy—did Pauline like to drink. Al had the greatest equanimity of any person I’ve ever seen. But I could see he was rankled by Pauline, and they got into an idiotic discussion about the function of a critic.” The argument went back and forth, until Hirschfeld finally raised his voice slightly and demanded of Pauline, “What do
you
think the function of a critic should be?”

“My job,” snapped Pauline, “is to show
him
”—pointing at Lumet—“which way to go.”

Lumet never saw her again. “I thought, this is a very dangerous person. When she had arrived in New York, she had just come from San Francisco, and I thought, poor kid—she’s probably lonely as hell. Little did I know what I was dealing with.”

“The Making of
The Group
” was the most ambitious project Pauline had undertaken, and the result was anything but a piece of conventional reportage. But by 1965 the movement that would come to be known as the “New Journalism” was under way with a new breed of journalists—Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Michael Herr—employing some of the storytelling techniques of fiction, turning reporting from something dutifully responsible into a highly personal and creative art, which, as the historian Marc Weingarten observed, “changed the way their readers viewed the world.”

The New Journalism movement had been evolving for years, but one article that put it center stage appeared in
New York
, the Sunday supplement of
The New York Herald-Tribune
, in April 1965. It was written by the young Tom Wolfe, and the name of it was “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”—an attack on the famously polished and discreet editorial practices of
The New Yorker
’s editor in chief, William Shawn. To a young renegade such as Wolfe, Shawn’s prudish tastes and obsessively controlled line editing had rendered a once-vital magazine rather dull. As journalism, “Tiny Mummies!” was pure provocation.

Pauline, who had always abhorred the idea of an objective tone in her critical writing, was intrigued by the New Journalists, and “The Making of
The Group
” was very much in step with their methods. In
Picture
, her celebrated 1951 account of the filming of MGM’s
The Red Badge of Courage
, Lillian Ross was meticulously detached, never intruding on the story she was telling. By contrast, Pauline was quick to register shock, dismay, amusement, embarrassment.

When “The Making of
The Group
” was completed, it had grown to about 25,000 words—far too long for
Life
to consider publishing. Pauline was enraged that the magazine would turn down an effort on which she had worked so hard in good faith, and she complained loudly to Robert Mills about it, but there was nothing her agent could do: The piece was about ten times longer than anything that
Life
normally published. What the magazine did put into print were Pauline’s observations of the eight lead actresses, in an article titled “A Goddess Upstages the Girls.” Pauline was particularly tough on Candice Bergen, whom she portrayed as a vapid dilettante with no interest whatsoever in the craft of acting. “What really offended me was the way she wrote about Candy Bergen,” Sidney Lumet recalled. “One of the things Pauline attacked her for was sleeping during rehearsals, for daring not to listen to my brilliant, forty-minute speeches. I adored Candy for just that. For anyone at eighteen—that beautiful, that intelligent, with so much of life ahead, to be a devoted actress by that point, would have struck me as a hopeless neurotic—someone who I could find anywhere between Forty-second and Fifty-second Street. Pauline was asking for someone to be as obsessive as she was.”