Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  During Christmas week, a film opened that exploded box-office records around the country: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist—a thriller based on William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel about the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl. Pauline was offended by the movie’s grotesqueries, but she was even more outraged by its attempts at an overlay of seriousness on a basic horror story. Pauline, whose distrust of organized religion had only intensified with the years, thought Blatty’s musings about the afterlife and the other side to be a lot of medieval nonsense, and she opened her review with a full-barrel attack: “When you see him on TV talking about communicating with his dead mother, your heart doesn’t bleed for him, your stomach turns for him.” She chose to interpret The Exorcist as a public relations effort on behalf of the Catholic Church, and she wanted desperately to see it exposed as such. (Friedkin, for his part, was a non-Catholic who recalled “learning about the Catholic Church while I was doing that film.”) To her The Exorcist was the grossest sort of study in manipulation; she saw “no indication that Blatty or Friedkin has any feeling for the little girl’s helplessness and suffering, or her mother’s, any feeling for God or terror of Satan.”

  The Exorcist had been a difficult film to get off the ground, despite the book’s success. According to Friedkin, three top directors—Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Mike Nichols—turned it down, largely because they didn’t think it would be possible to cast as the possessed Regan a young girl who could do everything that the script demanded of her. “The whole movie was balanced on that,” Friedkin remembered. “There was an open call for a thousand girls. Linda Blair never came to the open call. Her mother brought her in. [Until then] I thought I was going to have to do it with a sixteen-year-old. No one else came close.” The Warners publicity stated that Friedkin had actually looked at some five hundred girls, and Pauline seized on this fact for one of the most lacerating observations she ever put down on paper. “I wonder about those four-hundred and ninety-nine mothers of the rejected little girls.... They must have read the novel; they must have known what they were having their beautiful little daughters tested for. When they see The Exorcist and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with the crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, ‘That might have been my little Susie—famous forever’?”

  Blatty was incensed by her review and lit into her on television and in print interviews, though he apologized by letter a few months later. Friedkin was also upset about her attack, though he admitted that she had perhaps scored a point when she called The Exorcist “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s.” “I found it wrong-headed,” said Friedkin. “On the other hand, I know many people who went into the priesthood because of that. I remember meeting James Cagney toward the end of his life, and he had seen it, and he said, ‘Young man, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I had a barber for twenty years, and he saw the movie and he left being the barber to enter the priesthood.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Kael was probably right—but it wasn’t intended that way.”

  The Exorcist would eventually gross in the neighborhood of $165 million. Its success was also an early harbinger of sweeping change in the industry that not even Pauline could have predicted.

  Fortunately, there was Robert Altman, who was proving to be not only in artistic command but highly prolific. Thieves Like Us, his newest picture, was released in February 1974. Filmed in and around Jackson, Mississippi, on a budget of $1.25 million, Thieves Like Us was an unusual film for Altman in that it followed its source material, a novel by Edward Anderson about a trio of bank robbers during the Depression, rather closely.

  By now Pauline anticipated Altman’s new films with such fervor that she decided to make a visit to the set of Thieves Like Us. She knew that the material was very close to that of Bonnie and Clyde, but she read Anderson’s novel and liked it, and she was curious to see how Altman would transform it. Pauline’s presence was a major event for the cast and crew, who felt her support for their work as keenly as Altman did. “I remember her walking in and seeing her for the first time,” the screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury said, “and you just wanted to rush up and say, ‘My God, I think you’re wonderful—and thank you!’ And she just went straight for Bob, and we thought . . . okay. She walked around and looked and they talked.” Tewkesbury recalled that it was obvious that Pauline preferred the company of big men in the movie industry to hanging out with other women. To her, Pauline resembled a major cultural figure such as the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. “What you got was this sense of women who really had to come through the journalistic ranks, which meant they were competing with the boys and not with each other,” said Tewkesbury. “So you got very short shrift from these girls.”

  Thieves Like Us was a beautifully sustained piece of work, and because it was more plot-driven than Altman’s earlier films, it had the potential to capture a wider audience. For Pauline, it was yet another Altman triumph; it had “the pensive, delicate romanticism of McCabe, but it isn’t hesitant or precarious . . . It’s the closest to flawless of Altman’s films—a masterpiece.” She had long loved to describe the dry, cautious writing of some of her fellow critics as “saphead objectivity”; there was none of that in her review of Thieves Like Us:

  Robert Altman spoils other directors’ films for me; Hollywood’s paste-up, slammed-together jobs come off a faulty conveyor belt and are half chewed up in the process. I think I know where just about all the elements come from in most American movies (and in most foreign movies, too) and how the mechanisms work, but I don’t understand how Robert Altman gets his effects, any more than I understand how Renoir did (or, for that matter, how Godard did from Breathless through Weekend , or how Bertolucci does). When an artist works right on the edge of his unconscious, like Altman, not asking himself why he’s doing what he’s doing but trusting to instinct (which in Altman’s case is the same as taste), a movie is a special kind of gamble.

  In both New York and Los Angeles, her colleagues began to grumble: Pauline was not keeping a healthy distance from her pet director. At the San Francisco Film Festival in the fall of 1973, Altman spoke at a retrospective of his own work, telling audiences that “Pauline Kael saved McCabe & Mrs. Miller when the studio and the distributors were going to junk it, and she did the same for The Long Goodbye. Naturally I agree with everything she said.” Pauline’s detractors predicted that, sooner or later, it all had to end badly. One thing that delighted them: Her rapturous support failed to keep Thieves Like Us from being a box-office disappointment.

  Pauline’s 1973–74 season at The New Yorker ended with a pair of “road” pictures about criminals on the lam: Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express and Terrence Malick’s Badlands. In The Sugarland Express a daffy blonde named Lou Jean goads her husband to escape from a Texas prerelease prison so they can kidnap their child, whom the welfare department has taken from them and placed in foster care. Pauline rightly thought that she sensed the influence of Robert Altman in the film’s clear-eyed and perceptive, but never condescending, view of America. She recognized immediately Spielberg’s gift for camera technique and jazzy visual storytelling: “In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.” She loved that Spielberg had managed to get a naturalistic performance out of Goldie Hawn as the blissfully oblivious Lou Jean, who revels in her newfound celebrity and never stops believing that everything is going to work out just fine. Most important, Spielberg loved the art form and knew how to use it: “If there is such a thing as a movie sense—and I think there is (I know fruit vendors and cabdrivers who have it and some movie critics who don’t)—Spielberg really has it.”

  She was bored, however, by Badlands, which she judged to be yet another oppressively sour film about the dead end of American life, with no ray of light and not much humor
. She found this study of two killers named Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) in flight through the Plains states “an intellectualized movie—shrewd and artful, carefully styled to sustain its low-key view of dissociation. Kit and Holly are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose; it’s as if the director had taped gauze over their characters, so that we wouldn’t be able to take a reading on them.” Badlands wasn’t playful enough for Pauline; the violence had no comic edge to it, and she was bound to tire of Holly’s “poetic” voice-over narration.

  Her review, however, caused her unexpected difficulties with William Shawn. When he read her March 8, 1974, column while it was in production, he cornered her in The New Yorker offices. Terrence Malick was a Harvard friend of Shawn’s son, Wallace. Shawn said, “I guess you didn’t know that Terry is like a son to me.”

  “Tough shit, Bill,” Pauline answered, as she prepared for her six-month layoff.

  In June 1974 Pauline delivered the address at the 142nd commencement exercises of Wesleyan University. Over the past few years she had begun to amass a string of honorary doctoral degrees from various universities around the country. On June 18, 1972, Columbia College awarded her a Doctor of Arts and Letters, and on May 27, 1973, she gave the commencement address at Smith College, which also conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Letters upon her. On June 19, 1973, she gave a speech, “The Effects of Movies,” at the commencement exercises at Kalamazoo College, where she received a Doctorate of Humane Letters. While her opinions on the general state of academia hadn’t changed, she enjoyed speaking before graduating classes and getting a chance to mingle with the students.

  A few months earlier, on April 18, 1974, Pauline received her most distinctive honor to date when Deeper into Movies received the National Book Award in the category of Arts and Letters. In addition to the citation, the award carried a cash prize of $1,000. Janet Flanner presented her with the award, praising her not only as a writer but as a New Yorker colleague, causing Pauline to hang her head humbly. In her acceptance speech, she said, “Movie criticism is a happy, frustrating, slightly mad job. You can’t help knowing how ridiculous you appear when you interpose your words between the public and the vast machinery of advertising and publicity. Often you know you’re going to be made to look a fool. And so I’m particularly grateful for this award, as a recognition for those of us who try to sort out what’s going on in the mass media, without getting swept up in the circus. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Pauline’s life had never been as exhilarating as it was now. Her existence revolved around going to movies, talking about movies, lecturing on movies, being interviewed about movies. Not only had the National Book Award put an official seal on her status, but that year she also received the Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, for the Best Magazine Column of 1974. Once she had been described as one of America’s most important and influential film critics, but now, there were few other qualifiers. She had achieved what she had always craved—major stardom—and with stardom came power.

  The National Society of Film Critics was her pet group, far more than the New York Film Critics Circle. While the NYFCC was populated with critics who had been established long before Pauline’s arrival in New York, the NSFC boasted a number of new members whose careers she had nurtured. “With her review of Last Tango, I think,” observed Howard Kissel, then the film reviewer for Women’s Wear Daily, “she began to sense that she did have a power. And I think she had this notion that if the critics had a cabal, they could be more powerful.” Several of her colleagues felt she was overestimating the force that a group such as the NSFC could wield. “I would say film critics have power when it comes to some little movie that could be overlooked otherwise,” said Kissel. “But in terms of what Hollywood wants to sell—no.”

  Already the legend of Pauline’s inner circle of critic protégés was building. Inclusion in the group was pursued, often desperately, by outsiders. But there were no guarantees of safety at any point. David Denby was a writer in his late twenties who had a burning ambition to become a critic. Pauline met him in 1967, while he was a student at the Columbia University School of Journalism. She got along well with Denby, who assumed an enviable position in the Kael circle, spending many late nights into morning at the Turin, listening in rapt fascination as she debated with her other guests and, as Denby recalled, mowed down “the reputations of virtually every writer in town.”

  At this point Denby felt that he had been inducted into the literary boot camp of his dreams. Pauline might endlessly hector him and her other protégés about their thoughts and opinions, constantly pressing them to go further and deeper in their writing, to sort out and sharpen their ideas on the page. She could openly badger them about what she considered their middlebrow taste, but she was so witty and engaging that “those who didn’t turn away in anger were convinced that she was rough on them for their own good. At least, that was the promise.” She enjoyed playing the role of the tough fourth-grade teacher that so many writers crave: She held the young critics she took up to a dizzyingly high standard, going over their articles line by line—endlessly devoted, it seemed, to showing them how to improve their work. About one article of Denby’s that was in progress, Pauline said, “It’s shit, honey . . . and if you don’t make it better I’ll stick pins in you.” Toward the end of Denby’s time at Columbia, she suggested him for a film critic’s post at The Atlantic Monthly, and he got the job.

  The problem was that, by Denby’s own admission, he was so drawn to, so dominated by, Pauline’s voice on the printed page that it crept into his own writing. She recognized her influence, too, and few things rankled her more than the awareness that her acolytes were blindly devoted to her. She loved being surrounded by like-minded people, but slavish imitators eventually invited her contempt. As far as Denby was concerned, Pauline’s followers had to go along with the general outline of her thinking, but they couldn’t be too obeisant; they had to demonstrate that they could think for themselves. When Pauline noticed the imitative streak in Denby’s writing, she wasn’t pleased. At some point during her New Yorker stint in 1972–73, Denby recalled, she telephoned him to tell him that she didn’t think he had the right stuff. “You’re too restless to be a writer,” she proclaimed. A few hours later, knowing that she had wounded him, she phoned again, telling him, “I’ve thought about this seriously, honey. You should do something else with your energy.”

  In Denby’s case the student had for some time begun to be suspicious of the teacher and revolt against the rules of Pauline’s private academy. He had come to doubt some of her opinions (her rave for Fiddler on the Roof particularly baffled him) and claimed to have been present at a lunch at a Chinese restaurant in New York at which she had laid the director Nicholas Ray out flat, pitilessly analyzing his films one by one and altogether dismissing a good many of them, to the point that “Ray, his face cast down into his shrimp and rice, said hardly a word.”

  So, when greeted with Pauline’s announcement that he was not fit for a career as a writer, Denby nervously disagreed with her and did the only thing he felt he could do: He withdrew from her life. They continued to see each other at professional gatherings in the years that followed—Denby would be film critic for New York and later The New Yorker—but Pauline never recanted her opinion. Denby would later recall the acute discomfort of being cast out not only by Pauline but by many of her acolytes, whom he had mistakenly considered friends. He would go on to an enviable career as a critic and commentator, but the hurt and humiliation that Pauline’s rejection brought remained with him for years.

  She had a similarly conflicted relationship with another of her rebels, Paul Schrader. Since turning down the movie-reviewing post in Seattle that she had urged him to take, Schrader had been living in Los Angeles, trying to be a screenwriter. By 1973 he had finished a number of original scripts and, swallowing his pride, sent Pauline four of them—Taxi Driver, The Yakuza, Déjà
Vu, and Rolling Thunder. Schrader wrote to her about them in May of that year, clearly wanting her to approve of the path he had taken. He told her that he considered Taxi Driver the best of the lot.

  Pauline took the screenplay of Taxi Driver to bed with her late one night, expecting to leaf through only a few pages before dropping off to sleep. She was so riveted by it, however, that she read the entire script before dawn broke. She was unnerved by the characterization of Travis Bickle, the dissociative cabdriver so obsessed with purging the scum of New York, that she was unable to sleep with the script in the bedroom. Eventually she took it into another room, stacked a pile of other things on top of it, and went back to bed.

  In mid-1974 Taxi Driver was green-lighted by Columbia Pictures. Schrader was in New York and had dinner with Pauline and the Chicago film reviewer Roger Ebert at the Algonquin. Perhaps because she didn’t want to admit she had been wrong about which vocation he should choose, she never said much to Schrader about his script. All she offered about Taxi Driver that night was that she felt Robert De Niro would never be able to do justice to the part of Travis Bickle.