Pauline Kael (3 page)

“Chicken ranching? I can’t remember a thing about it. But just ask me about the Mystic Movie Theater in Petaluma.”

In the early 1960s, before New Journalism had really taken hold and it had become acceptable for reporters to impose their own personalities on their work, no one really expected a movie critic to share personal information in a review. So it came as something of a surprise when Pauline did just that in her
Film Quarterly
review of Martin Ritt’s 1963 Western drama
Hud
. She felt that the material had been misinterpreted by both those who made it and the critics who reviewed it. To them, the character of Hud, played by Paul Newman at his most virile and attractive, was meant to symbolize the moral decay that had infected the country. Audiences, meanwhile, seemed to react to him—understandably, given the glamour casting of Newman—as “a celebration and glorification of materialism—of the man who looks out for himself.” Pauline agreed with popular sentiment, adding that she appreciated
Hud
’s accurate depiction of the West—“not the legendary west of myth-making movies like the sluggish
Shane
but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West . . . The incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr Pepper signs, paperback books—all emphasizing the standardization of culture in the loneliness of vast spaces.” In her analysis of the honest, unromantic way Ritt had depicted life on a western ranch, she offered a very personal memory:

And later:

It was an unusual point of view for an educated woman to hold in the 1960s: Rather than resenting her father for his infidelity to her mother, Pauline seemed almost to take pride in it. In her adult years, Pauline would be drawn steadily to similarly unapologetic, confident, and self-reliant males—as friends, sometimes as lovers, and often as objects of professional admiration.

 

By mid-1928 Isaac Kael had reached his peak of prosperity, having built the ranch up to the point where it could accommodate a capacity of twenty-five thousand chickens and having amassed a stock portfolio totaling more than $100,000. But because he had bought the bulk of his securities on margin, they didn’t really belong to him, and he then made a terrible misjudgment in selling short. As the market continued to rise, however, he was forced to lay his hands on more cash in order to maintain control of his stock. “He put up everything he had as security, and still he was short,” remembered Louis Kael. With such a huge amount of stock debt, Isaac was in no way prepared for such turbulence in the marketplace, and eventually he was washed up.

He quickly found that he had become a pariah, as far as the other chicken ranchers were concerned, and the people who had always seemed to look up to him were now plainly uneasy, avoiding him when he ran into them on the street. There was nothing for Isaac to do but pull up stakes and move to San Francisco, where he hoped he might be able to piece together a new life for his family.

I
saac Kael was only forty-five when he lost the Petaluma ranch, and initially, at least, he was confident that he was capable of two more decades of solid work. Taking into account the expertise he had developed during his years as a chicken rancher, he decided it would make sense to go into the retail poultry and produce business. When the Kaels arrived in San Francisco, he immediately sprang into action and, using most of the little money that was left, leased three separate stores. As he had no equipment, no license, and no product, he sent Louis, now in his early twenties, to the Jewish Welfare Foundation to take out a series of modest loans to help launch his new business.

Isaac enjoyed a few reasonably profitable months as a poultry retailer and greengrocer until October of 1929 and the Wall Street crash, after which it became a constant struggle to keep the business going. He tried to put on a brave front by taking the produce salesmen out for nice lunches; in private, however, his confidence began to desert him. He pined for the days when he had been a man of influence in Petaluma, and succumbed to bouts of nerves and melancholy.

Judith was forced to work in the grocery store, and she despised catering to the public even more than she had disdained life on the farm. Her disposition worsened, and with Louis and Philip out on their own, the three daughters still at home all gradually withdrew, in different ways, from her. Pauline’s niece Dana Salisbury believed that “Pauline had no patience or even any kind of feeling for her mother.” Nevertheless, Judith remained a powerful spur to her daughters’ education, constantly putting money aside in the hope that one day they would all be able to attend a four-year college. She was delighted when Annie—who now called herself Anne—was accepted as a freshman at Berkeley. According to Salisbury, Anne felt that “these ideas had saved her life. Reading and listening to music had given her a whole world, and she was thrilled to be able to pursue the life of the mind at Berkeley.”

Judith’s advocacy was not something that Pauline spoke about easily in later years. But she carried a sense of it inside her. In her review of James Toback’s 1978 movie
Fingers
, she observed, “All of us have probably had the feeling of being divided between what we got from our mother and what we got from our father, and no doubt some of us feel that we’ve gone through life trying to please each of them and never fully succeeding, because we have always been torn between them.”

By the time Pauline reached high school, it was clear to her family that she was a girl with an intense intellectual drive and wide-ranging talents. “The youngest in a large family has a lot of advantages,” she once said. “You pick up a fair amount of knowledge from your older siblings, and your parents don’t worry too much about you.” Not only was she unusually well-read for someone her age, she had learned to play the violin, and her teacher was certain that if she kept working at it, she could become a superb musician. Most of the time she played classical music, and she went regularly to hear Alfred Hertz guest-conduct the San Francisco Symphony, but Gershwin and Ellington ultimately proved to be as much her taste as Dvořák and Mozart. At San Francisco’s Girls’ High School, which she attended from age fourteen, Pauline was the only violinist in the school orchestra. She also was a member of the debating club, and with her quick wit and already solid reasoning skills was an expert debater, at one point going up against Lowell High School’s Carol Channing. A photograph taken in June 1933 reveals Pauline to be the smallest girl in the group, with big glasses, a mass of brown hair, and a shrewd-looking expression that suggests a much older and more mature woman.

In her warm and friendly yet strong and commanding voice—her diction was immaculate—she could hold forth on an amazing range of topics for one so young. Already she was seized by the power of reading and acquiring more knowledge; like W. B. Yeats’s Wandering Aengus, she had a fire in her head. She spoke in beautifully complete sentences, but she also loved slang and four-letter words, “shit” being a favorite. She was very funny, and her family delighted in her extroverted side. “I was quick to understand things,” she once told the film historian Sam Staggs. “I can remember members of the family asking me to repeat gags I’d pulled on them when we had company.”

While it was an impressive achievement for her older sisters to have graduated from Berkeley, Pauline was not very enthusiastic about their career choices as teachers. She herself had no interest in teaching, which she considered a very ordinary profession. She recognized that Anne was a talented educator, and was always fond of her, even though they had completely different temperaments. As a child, Anne had exhibited a temper, but as she grew older, she became more even-keeled—although her calm demeanor masked a strong will.

Rose, on the other hand, was Pauline’s bête noire from an early age, as Rose resented what she viewed as her younger sister’s egocentricity. Pauline, for her part, soon grew enormously critical of Rose’s middlebrow taste in reading material. Rose favored
Liberty
and
Collier’s
magazines and Zane Grey Westerns, while Pauline valued the works that Anne passed her way, including Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio
and Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia
.

Recalling the sisters’ relationship as adults, Dana Salisbury said, “Pauline looked down with such contempt on my aunt Rose. Pauline loved to be in charge. She had ideas. She was the intellectual. Pauline considered herself smarter than everyone else, and Rose was more conventional in her behavior and refused to kowtow.” As a result Rose and Pauline often squared off against each other, leaving Anne to play the role of the calming oldest sister.

Life in San Francisco was much to Pauline’s liking. The Kaels were now living in an infinitely more diverse and cosmopolitan place, which was fine with Pauline, who always maintained a neutral, detached attitude toward her own Jewish past. Like Rose and Anne, she in no way identified herself, even humorously, as a “nice Jewish girl,” with all that term’s connotations, and friends from the later part of her life do not remember her ever using Yiddish expressions in conversation, even in the offhand way that many urban gentiles do. Only in her thirst for knowledge and culture did Pauline embrace traditional Jewish values, but throughout her life she refrained from thinking of them as “Jewish.” To her, that sort of self-identification was the essence of straitjacketed thinking, and she would have none of it.

San Francisco also placed her in much closer proximity to the arts. Like all other cities, it had been hard hit by the effects of the Depression, yet its performing arts thrived. While audience numbers may have declined during the peak Depression years, touring companies continued to view San Francisco as the most important stop on their West Coast schedule. Martha Graham and Trudi Schoop gave dance recitals; Charlotte Greenwood, Leo Carillo, Ethel Waters, and many other great stars of the New York stage appeared at the President, Tivoli, Curran, and Orpheum theaters. Top-balcony seats at the Curran were only fifty cents, and as they were growing up, Pauline and her sisters attended concerts and plays as often as they could. One of the plays that thrilled Pauline most was a 1932 touring production of
Cyrano de Bergerac
, starring Richard Bennett.

And there were the movies. The city was full of grand-scale picture palaces, and Pauline went as often as she could to the Fox, the Roxie, the Castro, and to the Paramount over in Oakland. As a young girl discovering the talkies, she found herself especially drawn to the tough gangster movies that Warner Bros. turned out with the beginning of sound. Of all the studios at the time, Warners seemed most committed to portraying the ways that American life had been altered by the Depression in what were, by Hollywood standards, realistic terms. Its stories were built around hardened gangsters, wised-up chorus girls and dance-hall hostesses, ruthless and enterprising crime bootleggers and syndicate bosses. These down-and-dirty archetypes had great appeal for American audiences, who saw something of their predicament in the lives of the characters onscreen, who, after all, were just caught up in the business of trying to get ahead. With their no-frills settings and uncomplicated lighting, these films were easy and inexpensive to produce, and were turned out by the week during the early ’30s. With her own natural tough-mindedness, Pauline responded to them immediately; years later, when she came to write about them, she was amazed by how much they had stayed with her. The crime drama from this period that meant the most to her was
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(1932), which she would eventually dub “one of the best of the social-protest films—naïve, heavy, artless, but a straightforward, unadorned story with moments that haunted a generation.” As a girl, she was shattered by the moment at the end of the movie when the starving hero, James Allen (Paul Muni), is asked, “How do you live?” His face a study in pure anguish, he replies, “I steal.”

Pauline was most taken with the independent spirit of the smart, fast-talking heroines of screwball comedies and progressive women’s dramas. She later observed that in the 1930s, “The girls we in the audience loved were delivering wisecracks. They were funny and lovely because they were funny. A whole group of them with wonderful frogs in their throats. They could be serious, too. There was a period in the early ’30s when Claudette Colbert, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne and other actresses were running prisons, campaigning for governor or being doctors and lawyers.” Many of these were made prior to the 1934 establishment of the Production Code, devised by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to ensure that the screen presented a safe and sanitized view of American life.

Pauline’s lifelong love of movie comedy also began in the ’30s. She never liked Chaplin—whom she regarded as a tear-pulling fraud—but soaked up the screwball farces of the first decade of the talkies and fell in love with their quick-witted stars—Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Lee Tracy, and Cary Grant. The change in her own family’s fortunes had helped give her a deep understanding of the ways in which the Depression era had given birth to screwball. She felt that the best comedies of the time “suggested an element of lunacy and confusion in the world; the heroes and heroines rolled with the punches and laughed at disasters. Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized—lovers talked back to each other, and fast. Comedy became the new romance, and trading wisecracks was the new courtship rite. The cheerful, washed-out heroes and heroines had abandoned sanity; they were a little crazy, and that’s what they liked in each other. They were like the wisecracking soldiers in service comedies: if you were swapping quips, you were alive—you hadn’t gone under.” She also developed a great love for the manic, eye-spinning antics of the Ritz Brothers, and she wanted to yelp in pain when her friends failed to perceive their worth. “She was crazy, ga-ga, over my dad,” recalled Harry Ritz’s daughter, Janna Ritz. Pauline loved to ask people she met which performers they liked best, the Ritz Brothers or the Marx Brothers—if the answer was the Ritz Brothers, Pauline thought a person might turn out to be worth her time.