Pauline Kael (61 page)

F
or years one of the chief topics of conversation among staff members at
The New Yorker
had been the eventual retirement of William Shawn. There was much concern about the magazine’s lack of a succession plan. Given
The New Yorker
’s love of promoting from within, various staff members had been put forth as possible heirs to Shawn’s mantle, and all were deemed unsuitable for one reason or another. By the mid-1980s the magazine industry had changed as dramatically as the movie industry had: Few if any other publications now had the same degree of sensitivity about the separation of editorial and advertising departments. Making money and capturing the endlessly sought-after young demographic were more important than ever, and at many publications, the state of advertising was the overwhelming consideration when the owners were considering which grade to put on the editor’s report card.

Shawn had weathered a number of tense situations in the past several years; one had come in 1976, when several staff members brought the threat of unionization to a head.
The New Yorker
had never been a union house, and in a memo written to the staff in the fall of 1976, Shawn articulated his opposition:

Shawn won the battle over unionization, but as time went on, it was increasingly clear that he could not really face the idea of a succession plan. Even many of those who loved and respected him had long recognized his enormous capacity for manipulation; by now, it seemed that he was unwilling to entertain the notion of a
New Yorker
without himself at the helm. Even the old-time company man Brendan Gill had written in his memoir, published on the occasion of the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary in 1975, “If Shawn were to give up some of his duties as editor, it might have the welcome effect of freeing him to write more. For it is as a writer that he could still achieve, if he so wishes, a second and equally distinguished career.”

Those who kept a close eye on such matters were aware that
The New Yorker
was not keeping pace in the competitive 1980s marketplace. Circulation and advertising were on the decline, and the magazine’s longtime owner, Peter Fleischmann, was in failing health and wearying of the responsibility of presiding over the publication; eventually, as the majority stockholder, he sold all of his shares to Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., head of the immense publishing and media corporation Advance Publications. In May 1985, for a final payment in the neighborhood of $170 million, Newhouse became
The New Yorker
’s new owner. For a time it seemed that Newhouse might honor the magazine’s family-oriented process of advancement by naming the veteran editor Chip McGrath to succeed Shawn. That plan fell through, however, and in January 1987, Newhouse sent a memo to staff members informing them that a new editor would be brought in from the book industry: Robert A. Gottlieb, the highly regarded editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf—a firm that happened to be owned by Newhouse.

Many longtime members of the magazine staff were devastated that Shawn would be dismissed in such a manner. A letter was composed to Gottlieb, informing him of the staff’s “powerful and apparently unanimous expression of sadness and outrage over the manner in which a new editor has been imposed upon us.” It went on to explain to Gottlieb that “
The New Yorker
has not achieved its preeminence by following orthodox paths of magazine publishing and editing, and it is our strange and powerfully held conviction that only an editor who has been a long-standing member of the staff will have a reasonable chance of assuring our continuity, cohesion, and independence.” The document was signed by all but a handful of staff members—and Pauline was one of the latter. Although Pauline had remained offended by what she considered his casual treatment of her since her return from Hollywood, her refusal to sign the letter was not a personal matter: She simply felt that the time had come. On Friday, February 13, 1987, William Shawn exited the publication where he had begun work in 1933.

“He was a great editor, but he
was
eighty,” Pauline said to a crowd of advertisers at one of
The New Yorker
’s promotional luncheons at the Beverly Hills Hotel in May 1987. She went on to assure them that “with Bob Gottlieb replacing Bill Shawn at
The New Yorker
, the magazine still will hold on to the values you like, and, if anything, it’ll be more readable.” Late in 1987, however, she was happy to write a letter of support for Shawn, who was eager to take on some challenging retirement projects and had applied to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a fellowship. Pauline’s letter hailed him as “an amazing man—dedicated to what he believes to be the best writing,” and urged the MacArthur Foundation to give him the fellowship because it would “constitute a vote of confidence in an eighty-year-old man of letters. It would be a beautiful gesture.”

Readers who were anticipating a difficult adjustment to a new editor were surprised by how little the scope of the magazine changed once Gottlieb assumed control. Like Shawn, he was very much a hands-on editor, and there was still frequent coverage of subjects that might not be done in depth elsewhere. Pauline was scarcely affected; she was still allowed a generous amount of space, although she wasn’t always writing as long as she had in the past—partly because of a certain diminishing of her energy, but also because it was getting harder for her to justify spending so much time on inferior films.

At year’s end she was once again able to praise John Huston, who, at eighty and struggling with emphysema, had directed a screen version of James Joyce’s “The Dead”—a detailed account of an annual party and supper given by a pair of spinster music teachers on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1904 Dublin, thought by many to be the finest short story in the English language. Huston had, in Pauline’s words, “never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically,” as he had in these “funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range.” (Huston had actually spent twenty years living in Galway.) He had done what Pauline thought every great artist needed to do: He had enlarged his vision as he aged. Huston died shortly after completing the filming in the summer of 1987.

Broadcast News
, another year-end release in 1987, was a much more penetrating look at the world of television news than the grandiose and pretentious
Network
, and it became a big hit with audiences, grossing more than $50 million on its release. Directed, produced, and scripted by James L. Brooks,
Broadcast News
was the story of a changing TV news industry. The traditional, hard-research-and-reporting route is represented by the driven, brainy producer Jane (Holly Hunter) and solid, reliable newsman Aaron (Albert Brooks), who dreams of having a shot at anchoring the news. The increasingly popular news-as-entertainment route is represented by the vapid, poorly informed, but charismatic and audience-savvy reporter Tom (William Hurt). The following exchange typified the movie’s essential conflict:

As a news junkie, Pauline had watched the content of network news being debased for years, and her years of watching brilliantly informed her review of the picture:

While
Broadcast News
was an intelligent, tartly observed look at a major shift in America’s culture, Pauline found it ultimately too neat and facile. “There’s not even a try for any style or tension in
Broadcast News
,” she wrote. “It’s all episodic, like a TV series.... Jim Brooks has made a movie about three people who lose themselves in their profession, and it’s all cozy and clean and clever. He plays everything right down the middle. He can’t seem to imagine having a conflicted, despairing relationship with your profession.”

Still, she felt essential goodwill toward the picture, and she admired the performances of all three stars. But she didn’t feel that
Broadcast News
was good enough to sweep the New York Film Critics Circle’s 1987 awards—which it did.

As always, Pauline could be counted on not to fall in line with her fellow critics, many of whom found Louis Malle’s latest effort,
Au revoir les enfants,
among the year’s finest pictures. It was an embroidered account of an episode from Malle’s childhood, when the Catholic boarding school he attended hid a number of Jewish boys among the students—boys who were later uncovered by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. It was a dignified, stately, nobly restrained piece of moviemaking, and the critics, while admiring Malle’s craftsmanship, were also quite moved by the subject matter itself. Malle made no bones about saying to the press that he considered it his finest achievement.

As always, this sort of serious self-awareness was a red flag to Pauline, who thought that
Au revoir les enfants
suffered from an overdose of subdued good taste that kept the audience at a steady remove from the story. “The camera is so discreet it always seems about ten feet too far away,” she wrote. She found that Gaspard Manesse, as Julien Quentin, the character Malle based on himself, was a bit of a blank, “directed so that he never engages us; we can’t look into him, or into anyone else.” The end of her review was vintage Pauline, exhorting her readers not to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by Malle’s story:

The old guard at
The New Yorker
mostly gave a cold shoulder to the film version of Jay McInerney’s bestselling 1984 paperback original,
Bright Lights, Big City
, which became a kind of
Catcher in the Rye
for the coked-up club crowd of 1980s Manhattan. The main character, Jamie, was based on McInerney himself, in the days when he briefly served as a fact-checker at
The New Yorker
while submerging himself in the downtown disco scene. There were a number of characters lifted directly from the offices of
The New Yorker
, among them Jamie’s fellow fact-checker Yasu Wade, a character that was a direct hit at Pauline’s good friend Craig Seligman, who had long since left the magazine and was pursing a writing career on the West Coast. (McInerney described Wade/Seligman as “too fastidious to do anything dangerous or dirty. You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical. He’d take a hot piece of gossip over a warm piece of ass any day of the week.”) Pauline thought the movie was flat and rather humorless, but she couldn’t resist singling out what for her was its high point: John Houseman’s performance as the magazine’s weary editor in chief, based all too clearly on William Shawn. She told friends that Houseman’s pained look was the very essence of William Shawn’s soul.

Perhaps none of the gifted directors of the 1970s displayed the degree of stagnation, a decade-plus later, that Woody Allen did. With
Another Woman
, released in the fall of 1988, he demonstrated that his fascination with the remoteness and emotional aridity of Manhattan intellectuals and artists hadn’t receded—or developed. Gena Rowlands played a cold philosophy professor who rents an apartment for the purpose of writing a book; she is distracted by the next-door conversations, through the vent, of a therapist and her patients—one patient in particular, a coming-unglued pregnant woman (Mia Farrow). The professor becomes obsessed with the woman, who gradually leads her to confront the things in life she has missed. The professor was a distant cousin to Geraldine Page’s perfection-obsessed mother in
Interiors
. But by now, Allen had worn down his concern for these characters to the point where the grooves were off them; his insights now seemed the kind that ’70s college students would come up with after a few hits on the bong. Pauline put it succinctly: “Woody Allen’s picture is meant to be about emotion, but it has no emotion. It’s smooth and high-toned; it’s polished in its nothingness.”