Pauline Kael (45 page)

But if Pauline led the critical chorus in praise of
Carrie
, she was in the front row of the booing section for one of the most extravagantly praised and talked-about movies of the year, Sidney Lumet’s satire on the television industry,
Network
. Lumet was not the real creative force behind the picture—that distinction belonged to the screenwriter, Paddy Chayevsky, who had long since established himself as the satirist for the masses.
Network
appealed to a wide audience, partly because everyone could grasp its shrill, loud message, and also because it presented itself as a movie that was really about something
important
. Perhaps it was the film’s combination of intellectual posturing and outrageous satire that seduced the critics, many of whom gave it excellent reviews. The television newsmen themselves took a much dimmer view of the picture. CBS’s Walter Cronkite called it “a fantasy burlesque that might be considered an interesting, amusing divertissement, but nothing more,” and NBC’s Edwin Newman denounced it as “incompetent.”

Pauline loathed the movie, observing that Chayefsky had become “like a Village crazy, bellowing at you: blacks are taking over, revolutionaries are taking over, women are taking over. He’s got the New York City hatreds, and ranting makes him feel alive.” She felt that Chayefsky’s thesis that television “is turning us into morons and humanoids” was insupportable. “TV may have altered family life and social intercourse; it may have turned children at school into entertainment seekers. But it hasn’t taken our souls, any more than movies did, or the theatre and novels before them.” The movie was unremitting in its assault on the audience. She complained that Chayefsky had failed to provide audiences with a good, satiric farce because he wrote “directly to the audience—he soapboxes. He hardly bothers with the characters; the movie is a ventriloquial harangue,” aided by Lumet, who kept “the soliloquies going at a machine-gun pace.” But while an enthusiastic review from Pauline could often help a film’s box-office fortunes, a damning review from her had little impact if a movie was destined to connect with the public consciousness—which
Network
certainly did:
Network
’s
“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
became more widely quoted than any movie line since “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

 

In her spare time Pauline continued to be a TV news junkie, and nothing that transpired on the American political and cultural scenes seemed to escape her notice. She was an avid TV watcher in other ways, too, some of her favorites being
The Carol Burnett Show
,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, and the comedy phenomenon that had premiered on NBC in the fall of 1975,
Saturday Night Live
. She was less enthusiastic about many of the well-intentioned made-for-television films of the time, though she did like her friend Lamont Johnson’s
The Execution of Private Slovik
, starring Martin Sheen. (It made up for her distaste for Johnson’s
Lipstick
, a graphic rape drama starring Margaux and Mariel Hemingway that had been hampered by studio interference. When Johnson ran into Pauline at a screening of the film in New York, she got up from her seat as the final credits were rolling and whispered, “I’m not going to write about this one, darling.”)

As 1976 drew to a close, Pauline expressed her growing disappointment in Barbra Streisand, whose latest film,
A Star Is Born
, represented what she felt was another step in the wrong direction. Most stars, at some point, become obsessed with delivering the image that they want their public to believe in—and often, the one that the public itself wants to believe. For Pauline, Streisand had now reached this juncture in her career. Her portrayal of Esther Hoffman in
A Star Is Born
was in effect a rejection of her earlier brash New York Jewish girl persona. The bigger the star she was becoming, the more she seemed to want to be loved. Pauline found “she acts a virtuous person by not using much energy. She seems at half-mast, out of it, and you don’t get engrossed in reading her face, because she’s reading it for you. She wants to make sure we get what’s going on all the time. That kills any illusion—that and the camera, which is always on her a second too soon, and seconds too long, emphasizing how admirable she is, how strong yet loving. How gracious, too.”
A Star Is Born
was done in because all the sting was taken out of the plot—now it was “a drippy love story about two people who love each other selflessly.” She felt that Streisand had taken a one-dimensional, colorless role, with no indication in the script that Esther might have a hint of ruthless ambition that would make her rise to stardom more interesting.

The musical orchestrations, which Pauline characterized as “fake gospel, fake soul, fake disco, or fake something else” didn’t help, either. But the saddest waste, as far as she was concerned, was of her beloved star. “Streisand has more talent than she knows what to do with, and the heart of a lion,” she wrote. “But she’s made a movie about the unassuming, unaffected person she wants us to think she is, and the image is so truthless she can’t play it.”

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion had written the script, but later they all but disowned the picture after it was turned over to Streisand and her coproducer husband, Jon Peters. After Pauline’s damning review appeared, Dunne wrote to her, “Yours was the only notice I saw that proceeded from the proper assumptions about the story and the kind of star it attracted.... To give Barbra her due, she always knew that, given the nature of the material, the man had to have the better part. She asked us to switch the parts around, but we said the man would come out like Chance Wayne [the gigolo in Tennessee Williams’s
Sweet Bird of Youth
].... We are now quite amused . . . by the movie, in large part because of the amount of money it is making.” Dunne concluded by saying he hoped to see Pauline when she was in L.A. that spring: “Perhaps we can get together. I’m only a parttime shit.”

 

Considering her fame, and the stable if not completely secure financial position she was in, it was odd that Pauline traveled to Europe so infrequently. That May, however, she did agree to serve on the jury at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. It was welcome recognition of her stature from the international film community, but the experience itself was not a positive one. The jury included the chair, Roberto Rossellini, plus Jacques Demy, Carlos Fuentes, Benoîte Groult, and Marthe Keller. Shortly after her arrival Keller was pulled aside by Robert Favre Le Bret, the festival’s president, who informed her that a solid commercial choice was needed for the top prize, the coveted Palme d’Or, and that he was instructing her to vote for Ettore Scola’s
A Special Day
, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren—a film with the potential to be a great commercial success. Keller, incensed, went to the jury members the next day and told them what had transpired. Over the next few days the jurors were approached one by one—with Pauline, the one that Le Bret had reason to fear the most—being the last. The end result was they all tacitly agreed not to vote for
A Special Day
—a film most of them admired—on principle. Instead the Palme d’Or went to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s
Padre Padrone
. “I will remember all my life,” Keller said, “the morning the Palme d’Or was announced—Le Bret said on the radio that the women who wanted to make some salade niçoise, they would not find any tomatoes, because people were throwing them at the jury today. Pauline got completely wild.”

Keller spent a great deal of time with Pauline at Cannes. “We had, in private, a great relationship. We went all the time to see the movies together. She had very good manners—but not in the theater when she saw the movie.” At a screening of Marguerite Duras’s
Le Camion,
with Gérard Depardieu, Pauline started to scream when she saw the actor’s name in the credits. “Before it started, she was saying very bad things about him,” Keller recalled.

James Toback remembered that she viewed her summer at Cannes as “a horrible experience.” He felt that Pauline had, despite her elevated position, retained a heavy streak of provincialism that was rooted in her defensiveness about her upbringing. To yield to the intoxication of a major European cultural event such as Cannes simply would be a betrayal of her entire background. “She was not comfortable in Europe because she was not the pope,” Marthe Keller observed. “There are highly intelligent people, lots of them, in our business in Europe. In America, some of them were a little bit more superficial. I think she was too smart to be only a critic. I think there was somewhere a frustration in her. I thought she was so smart, but there was something mean killing her smartness.”

The summer at Cannes also brought about a small eruption in her harmonious relationship with Robert Altman. There had been trouble earlier, when Pauline had seen his first picture since
Nashville
,
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
. After the screening, which was attended by many in Altman’s inner circle, Pauline sat in silence. It was the first Altman picture since
Brewster McCloud
that she thought was a fizzle, and she was wondering how to let the director know. Finally, she leaned over to him at dinner and whispered that she thought the editing should be speeded up a bit to give the picture more momentum. Altman was drunk, and he exploded at her, telling her to be a big girl and get up and share her opinion with everyone else in the room.

It was a tense moment, followed by another at Cannes, where Altman’s new film,
Three Women
, starring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, was being shown. “I was at Cannes, because Shelley won a prize there for it,” recalled Altman. “And I remember seeing Pauline at the airport, and she said, ‘I loved the first part of the movie, Bob, but I hated the second part.’ I said, ‘That’s like I’m showing you my new kid, and you say, ‘I love his head but I can’t stand his body.’ So you didn’t like it. Forget it.”

But the director didn’t forget that Pauline had failed to advocate for
Three Women
when she was in a powerful position on the Cannes jury. Marthe Keller bumped into him at Elaine’s restaurant in Manhattan not long after, and he refused to speak to her. For Keller, that was the price paid for being a juror: “You have one person who loves you forever, and you have twenty-five people who hate you.”

U
nlike many of her colleagues, who thought it was appropriate to be entertained by press agents and publicists, Pauline maintained a strict code when it came to accepting gifts or even meals out. If she liked and respected the people, she treated them fairly—if not, she could be withering. Marion Billings, who worked on many of Martin Scorsese’s best pictures, was a publicist Pauline particularly admired. They met at a screening for
Mean Streets
, became friends, and for years had a regular lunch date at Armando’s, an Italian restaurant on West Seventy-sixth Street. Billings would make it clear that she was on an expense account, but Pauline never permitted her to pick up the check. “She respected me because I didn’t lie,” Billings recalled. At one point early in their friendship, Pauline gave her a copy of
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
, inscribed “For Marion—and there are all those others that out of charity I haven’t mentioned, but which are engraved on our behinds instead of our hearts. Love, Pauline.” Some of the others could try their best to ingratiate themselves with her, but it didn’t work. Sally Ann Mock of
The New Yorker
remembered one Christmas in the mid-’70s when a steady stream of bottles of liquor and boxes of chocolates was sent to Pauline from various publicists. Mock’s job that holiday season was to pack them all up and send them back.

Michael Sragow, film critic for
The Baltimore Sun
, among other publications, once observed that 1977 was a pivotal year in the American movie industry—the year when film artistry quite suddenly reached a plateau as a number of changes began to make themselves felt throughout Hollywood. Pauline had guessed wrong about the long-term impact of a couple of the young-lion directors who had burst forth early in the decade, namely Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin. After three spectacular box-office successes in a row—
The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?,
and
Paper Moon
—Bogdanovich suffered three consecutive flops:
Daisy Miller
,
At Long Last Love
, and
Nickelodeon
. Friedkin, after the enormous success of both
The French Connection
and
The Exorcist
, came up with the disappointing
Sorcerer
.

Another factor whose influence Pauline didn’t quite fully appreciate was the enormous box-office (and critical) success of
Jaws.
The danger it presented was that the blockbuster was now becoming the backbone of the industry—something upon which every studio was beginning to depend. The studios increasingly wanted the safe guarantees of audience polls, demographic studies, and bank-approved stars. Low-budget films that were deemed lacking in mass appeal were routinely denied a big marketing and publicity push and might return only a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office. The studio executives were losing confidence in their ability to build a hit on good, basic story material, making it unlikely that a
M*A*S*H
or
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
could get financing. One sign that the producers didn’t really know which direction to go in was the decline of the sort of serious contemporary subjects that had flourished only a few years ago. The great dialogue between screen and audience that Pauline had dreamed of now showed every sign of being in jeopardy. The more she talked to her friends about the corrupt, moneygrubbing ways of Hollywood, the more she felt compelled to do something about the situation.

She addressed this state of affairs in an essay she wrote before her six-month layoff in March 1977. In “Where We Are Now” she cited the rise of high-quality television films such as
Roots
and
Sibyl
, and that she had come to feel she was missing nothing in the cinema by staying home to watch them. “The movie studios aren’t putting up a fight,” she wrote. “The lassitude of the studio heads—in for a year or two, or just a half year, and then moving around in the conglomerate chess game—is a sign of their powerlessness. Suddenly, there are no strong men at the top. Heads of production come and go without having had a chance to build a reputation.”