Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  The Marcuses invited her to dinner, and when she arrived at their house, she looked around and asked where the other guests were. “She just sort of expected that there would be a big party for her,” Marcus said. “Which it had never occurred to us to do. We had a marvelous time, and she lived up to all our fantasies, which is to say, she was extreme in her opinions—extreme in her likes and dislikes, whether it had to do with movies or books or food or anything.”

  The spring of 1976 was occupied with a heavy promotional tour for Reeling , which started with lectures at the College of Marin, Berkeley, the Los Angeles Film Festivals (Filmex), Immaculate Heart College, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. There were numerous radio and television interviews, including an hour-long appearance on Los Angeles’s KNBC-TV. She also was eager to appear on several of the national talk shows whose invitations she had previously declined, including those of Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, and Phil Donahue. She wrote to her editor Billy Abrahams that she would be “happy to do any radio or TV that comes up, but wish to avoid newspaper and magazine interviews, as I am too tempting a target for bitchy reporters.”

  By the summer of 1976 Pauline had a new agent, Perry Knowlton of Curtis, Brown Ltd. Peter Davison of the Atlantic Monthly Press was delighted and wrote Knowlton a congratulatory note, advising him, “She is not lacking in exigence as an author, nor, I’m sure you will find, as a client.” But the publisher was relieved that at last she was handling her business affairs over to a proper agent, having been without one since dispensing with Robert Mills’s services several years earlier.

  She had a number of new projects in the offing, one of which was a collection of her capsule reviews. Knowlton offered it to Billy Abrahams for an advance of $75,000. Abrahams balked at the asking price and offered $25,000, which Pauline turned down out of hand. There was also Lays of Ancient Hollywood, a collection of essays on actors, with “Cary Grant—The Man from Dream City” as its centerpiece. But Abrahams again found Knowlton’s request for $75,000 “too high by far,” and passed; the long-planned book never materialized.

  In the fall of 1976 Pauline saw a movie at the New York Film Festival that she admired very much—the Swiss director Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, the story of a group of left-leaning men and women who are attempting to adjust to the fact that the social revolution they anticipated in the ’60s has not come to pass. It was a witty and quietly provocative talkfest, austerely but beautifully photographed, and while some critics objected to its odd structure—John Simon found the people in it “as uncomfortable to watch as a backless chair is to sit in”—Pauline thought it “a marvelous toy, weightless, yet precise and controlled.” She was indulgent of what would become the year’s smash hit, Rocky, saying that the picture was “shameless, and that’s why—on a certain level—it works. What holds it together is innocence.” She was won over by Sylvester Stallone’s performance in the title role, as a down-and-out debt collector who gets a chance at the world heavyweight boxing title. “Stallone has the gift of direct communication with the audience,” Pauline wrote. “Rocky’s naïve observations come from so deep inside him that they have Lewis Carroll enchantment.”

  The young writer Carrie Rickey, a former student of Pauline’s old friend Manny Farber, accompanied Pauline the night she saw Rocky (which happened to be Election Night, 1976) and would remember the evening for reasons apart from the movie. After the screening, Pauline and Rickey went to her room at the Royalton and watched the election returns. Pauline, who supported Jimmy Carter, was incensed when Rickey admitted that she had cast an absentee ballot in her native California for Eugene McCarthy. “She screamed at me for doing that,” recalled Rickey. “She lectured me on why I needed to be for Carter. We also had a very interesting conversation about whether Nashville predicted Carter—this weird populist governor from a Southern state augured for a Carter win.”

  Rickey also remembered Pauline’s lack of interest in the feminist movement. Rickey was quite intrigued by the contrast between the female and male aesthetics in film. “I had proposed back then that the women who directed movies—and there weren’t a lot of them—used longer takes and not a lot of cuts. I thought their rhythm was inimical to mainstream cinema, which was more quick cuts and actions. Pauline said, ‘Stay away from that feministic stuff’—her word—‘it’s going to kill your career.’”

  The picture that excited Pauline most in late 1976 was an unexpected one: Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Based on a novel by Stephen King, Carrie was a horror tale about the drab, unpopular high school girl (Sissy Spacek) dominated by her crazed, fundamentalist mother but gifted with powers of telekinesis. The film climaxed at the senior prom, where, after her sadistic high school classmates humiliate her by rigging the election so that she is voted prom queen and then dumping a bucket of pig’s blood on her, she exacts a horrifying revenge on all of them. In Carrie, De Palma went far beyond the parameters of the typical horror film, infusing it with a great deal of warmth and humor, and a rather astute point of view about growing up in 1970s America. It had a nasty, funny, subversive feel, and was perhaps the ideal horror film for the post-Watergate era. Pauline had admired aspects of De Palma’s low-budget efforts in the 1960s, but with Carrie, she felt he had arrived onscreen as a major talent. And the acclaim she heaped on him caused a great deal of eye-rolling among her colleagues, who felt that the director had turned out nothing more than a well-crafted commercial product.

  Pauline thought Carrie had “a beautiful plot,” and she laid another of her superlatives on De Palma, who, in her judgment, had “the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies.” She loved the teasing sense of humor and pulp sensibility that he brought to the horror movie. To Pauline, Carrie seemed to be taking off from a number of other movies, including Psycho, The Way We Were, and one of her favorite classic bad films, 1935’s She, with Helen Gahagan. In his 1960s films, she pointed out, De Palma had used mostly stationary camera setups, but here his camera swirled dizzingly in scene after scene, particularly the romantic moment with Carrie and her dream date (William Katt) at the senior prom, in which the audience has the sensation of dancing along with the couple and getting completely drawn into the most gloriously romantic night of poor Carrie’s wretched life. She celebrated De Palma’s emergence as a stylish, tongue-in-cheek director. “He’s uncommitted to anything except successful manipulation,” she wrote, “when his camera conveys the motion of dreams, it’s a lovely trick. He can’t treat a subject straight, but that’s all right; neither could Hitchcock. . . . Everything in his films is distanced by his persistent adolescent kinkiness; he’s gleefully impersonal.”

  If her elevation of De Palma’s “persistent adolescent kinkiness” into some kind of major achievement baffled many of Pauline’s friends as well as her enemies, it was her review, in the end, that carried the day for De Palma and his cast. Nancy Allen, who played the movie’s chief villainess, remembered vividly the day that Pauline’s review appeared. “I think that Brian was just thrilled,” she said. “And disgusted at the same time, because the studio wasn’t treating it like it was anything better than a slasher picture.” De Palma quickly became one of the directors Pauline felt compelled to promote. Allen remembered that she had the reputation for being a bit chilly toward her pet directors’ wives and girlfriends, but she found Pauline warm and friendly. “She liked Brian a lot and there I was, the girlfriend. I didn’t know if I would be accepted or not. She was very pleasant and said hello and smiled sweetly. I remember thinking, Okay, that was all right. She was possessive. They were her guys.”

  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 sati
rist 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 earl
ier, 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.”