The New York Press’ Armond White, a calculated contrarian, pulled the bull shit alarm in warning that the “misogynists and elitists” will arm themselves with the negatives in Brian Kellow’s bio of Paulina Regina to rip her to shreds. I’m sure he’ll want to add me to his list of cretins, as I’m not about to waste much time defending her, or waste lengthy time on what she famously wrote with counter opinions of my own, or discuss her positions on theory (she didn’t believe in any), or why she didn’t get orgasmic over Hitchcock, or concoct excuses for her antipathy toward the masochist marathon Shoah. Or did I just do that? And I’ll assume readers are familiar with background. What happens after the lights go down eventually comes to light.
rian Kellow is just about the most happy fella showbiz biographer currently working. He’s that rare gentleman caller who is up front about kissing dead ass. As shrine building, his biography on Ethel Merman was a fun safe read; he wasn’t going for the dirt on the diva with balls, though you wished he had. He doesn’t quite use a shovel for Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, either, chiefly because he doesn’t have nearly enough biographical ground to dig deeper to fully expose hers. He discovered first by a sharp reader’s observation and second by research that his subject lied when suggesting her twelve volumes of movie criticism were the equivalent of memoirs; they were treasure troves of everything but, having managed to artfully extract her personal life to leave a deliberate inscrutability. Displaying his usual dazzling arsenal of tidings, cultural and social history, speculation and juicy inserts, supported by something like 170 interviews, and while still in superfluous genuflection, he unveils his subject’s super-guardedness through a series of offenses that Kael privately and professionally committed. When, for example, he finishes the chapter on her deplorable ruse concerning Citizen Kane, we’re not only ready to convict her of serious ethical breaches—transgressions worthy of being fired for at any major venue except The New Yorker—we’re also floored by what is a quintessential Woody Allen moment.
That comic thunderbolt revealing Kael’s dupery as the screenplay Woody has yet to write comes when it’s most needed. The beginning chapters are as smooth as radiospeak—Brian might have borrowed from Kael’s compulsive need to “hear” what has been written—and are loaded with background on her parents and sisters (not much on her brothers), her friends, education, recreations, dead-end jobs, grievances. And, substantially more telling than book reviewers have assessed, the troubling relationships with men that helped shape the life of the lionized bitch supreme among the nation’s cineasts. However, as soon as Kael gets to the Big Apple to cement her career, and onward for roughly 180 pages, the bio nearly collapses into a cut & paster. There are hordes of quotes from her famous pieces, Brian’s own commentary about her reviews, odds and ends about this and that, all so maddening as filler than those of us who are already overly aware of what Brian has chosen to repeat start skimming—a lot. The reason for what isn’t necessary is that he doesn’t have access to intimate detailing about her most productive writing years; she virtually disappears into the protective dark of screenings of movies and other people’s lives. As everyone knows by now, Kael’s daughter Gina James decided, after considerable thought and without prejudice, not to cooperate with Brian and oh, does that hurt. (It’s what virtually all the book reviewers agree on.) Though Kael’s friends and detractors—a roundup of the usual suspects—wanted to blab, Brian soon ascertained they really didn’t know much about her personally. During the October, 2011 NYFF panel convened to discuss Brian’s book and her career James Toback remarked that she was always asking about his life, wanting all the dish but kept tightly mum about herself. Whether it was a conscious ploy of avoidance to act as inquisitor and/or a fear of having a protected past become inquisition, those around her sensed the taboo of going too far. (The brave ones who did, or who didn’t accept her conditions, were mercilessly banned from court.) Despite her “memoirist” remains, despite Brian’s extensive interviews and travels to birth place, homes, apartments, schools, movie houses, work places and Hollywood, and despite his slogging through every one of the 124 boxes of Kael material over at the Lilly Library of Manuscripts at Indiana University—“for someone who claimed she didn’t want a biography written,” he wrote me while writing the bio, “she certainly did a meticulous job of cataloging her professional life”—he can’t find a way to get into why she committed her various infractions, blunders and malicious slights. Perpetrate the sins she did and then did her best to keep us from knowing about them.
uring the hungry years, Kael was a fag hag who ended up using movies as sexual sublimation because she didn’t get much action in bed. Those early years of rejection are discomforting to read; disparagers might be gleeful about illations she wasn’t GIB, but we still don’t know—and not from a lack of trying on Brian’s part—what possessed her to get involved with gay fatales. Maybe the
challenge of forbidden fruit, a brazen flaunt against convention she despised, a self-recognized lack of physical attractiveness, a hostility nurtured by social outcasting. (Surmises Meryl Streep: “Pauline was a poor Jewish
girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blonde
hair, and the heartlessness of them got her. And then, years later, she sees
me.”) In retrospect, her adventures seem to be true to her loosely-defined libertarian modus vivendi, revealed when writing one of her gay crushes, “Don’t be foolish—you will never love me.” But what is that old adage—fool me once, shame on you, fool me tres? Poetry isn’t the exclusive domain of gay men and women falling in love with them aren’t going to experience much poetry. The bruising consequences have the feel of the origins of her privacy barriers. Even so, all the noisy fuses blown over
her supposedly
anti-gay remarks years later in The Sergeant and Rich and Famous were and still are outages of fairness by the pink shirt commissars. In her review of The Sergeant, she spent roughly 180 words on the gay Don Juan complex that many of our gay friends have spent portions of their adult lives trying to come to grips with; it is precisely because of her experiences with those poets and the men in their lives that she could nail it. (The only observation she missed in Rich
and Famous is about that eighteen-year old hustler Jackie Bisset abandons herself to—he’s Joe Buck whose foreplay moves are out of a sedated romance novel. What the commissars would miss is her pedophilic adjunct about the boy in Paris at the end of The Accidental Tourist—“a scene that has an almost homoerotic idealization.”)
If Norman Mailer wittingly called Kael “the first frigid” of movie critics, a thumbnail he’d pay for when she did him in with her piece on his Marilyn, Brian posits that her retreat from personal relationships to “spectator” was out of necessity to survive without the vicissitudes of unseemly strings attached. Her only marriage, one of convenience to Ed Landberg in whose name the now legendary Berkeley Cinema Guild was leased, was likely the catalyst humiliation for her. With Landberg handling the fiances (about which she was a perennial failure), she expanded the theatre’s reputation, spent all her free time writing what became locally very popular but unsigned notes on the movies shown. After an extended trip elsewhere, Landberg came home to find that Kael had literally taken over the run of the theatre as her own and had the temerity to sign her name to the freely distributed notes. Landberg was incensed, arguing—presaging some of her difficulties later—about usurpation and copyright ownership and threw her out. (Neither the first time she got the boot while in a relationship nor the last.) Within the strained messiness of that union, Kael managed if not plotted all along to do something that helped save her daughter Gina’s life—get the money for an operation to correct a heart problem.
rian’s writing is riveting in Chapter 13 covering Citizen Kane and in Chapter 21, dealing with what happened to Kael in Dorothy Parker’s nightmare land euphemistically referred as “out there.” The reason the chapters work is that Brian’s not intruding. He tells the pitiable tales as straight reportage and packs in the particulars. What amazes in the former chapter is how she chose not to see
her intellectual heist for what it was and more flabbergasting than amazing is that in the latter chapter she banked on a Hollywood stud and a slimebag fatass director to help finance her future retirement needs. In reference to Kael’s lifting of UCLA professor Howard Suber’s research material on Citizen Kane there’s a postscript since Brian’s book has been published. Suber has told TheWrap.com about her theft: “It may be excessively dramatic to describe it as rape, but that’s what
it felt like.”
TheWrap continues: Suber never took legal action or went public about the plagiarism. But on the heels of the book’s publication, he finally has broken his silence, telling TheWrap exclusively that after all these years, Kael’s betrayal still stings. “I take no satisfaction in the story coming out,” Suber said. “I was depressed over the weekend, despite getting included in the New York Times and New Yorker reviews, because it did stir up a lot of painful memories.” So raw was the feeling that Suber almost declined to participate in the book when Brian Kellow contacted him on his 74th birthday. “I wrote him back and said, ‘Here I am celebrating my birthday, and I’m feeling good about my life, and I get your letter, which asks me to talk about how I was raped by my parish priest when I was 15,’” Suber recalled. Suber agreed to participate in Kellow’s biography only after he learned that the author had unearthed Kael’s original notes for the piece in her papers at the Indiana University Library. It turned out her reference material consisted almost wholly of Suber’s research. What’s more, Suber now says that Kael promised to split the profits and give him a co-writing credit. Except all he got in the end was a check for $375. Ironically, he later became a copyright expert, testifying frequently over the years in court cases. “If I’d only known what I know about copyright now, I would have sued her ass, but I didn’t.” Even though Kellow’s book has brought attention to the injustice, Suber said he has no plans to take any legal action or try to get credit inserted into any subsequent reprints of “Raising Kane.” Suber says he never saw or interacted with Kael again. Previously, the critic had been tapped to make paid speeches on UCLA’s campus, but after word leaked out in the department of Kael’s betrayal, those offers apparently dried up. “Some years later a mutual friend asked [Pauline] when she was coming back to UCLA, and she said, ‘Not until Howard Suber apologizes,’ which I thought was hilarious,” Suber said.
The drawback about the Hollywood coverage is that there isn’t more, because some alleged incidents are not addressed. Those of us who read Peter Biskind’s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America found that his juiciest parts were the still-unimaginable scenes included about Kael—specifically her supposed breakdown in director Richard Brooks’ office on the Paramount lot, in tears fearing she’ll never live down having bombed because, it turns out, many were waiting for her to bomb. The way in which Biskind uses the Brooks scene is without attribution. No Brooks papers to trowel through? Brian unaccountably avoids the Biskind material, so there’s neither confirmation nor refutation of what may have been her most crushing if not uncharacteristically humanizing moment at Paramount. Critic Richard Schickel, in his “Citizen Kael” piece reviewing A Life in the Dark, spotted the skip and albeit lamely confirmed the anguish: “Brooks had an office (on the lot) and told me later that Kael took to dropping by, sometimes in tears, to discuss her troubles.” Brian’s difficulties in getting deeper into Kael’s personal side have our sympathies; on the other hand, to have allowed this additional Woody Allen bit in her biggest career blunder to go unaddressed is more than polite omission, it’s also wusillanimous.
There’s more male wussiness: Warren Beatty wouldn’t be interviewed for his take on what transpired but he’s ostensibly given an acquittal on the charges (and continuing speculation) that he set Kael up to fail. According to Brian, Beatty recused himself from blame in the script disputes that Kael and Toback were engaged in over Love and Money (an eventual turkey) that led to her dismissal, which he insisted more times than necessary was never his idea, and handed her situation over to Barry Diller who then turned to braggart Don Simpson, senior vice president of worldwide production at Paramount, to deal with her remaining time in Hollywood. Although the following confession is not reported in the book, Toback on the NYFF panel, with Brian present, took the blame for what happened to her, saying that he was “the primary culprit.” His admission comes thirty years after the career-damaging fiasco, twenty years after she retired, ten years after she died. How gallant of him. (Included in the book is a pic of Kael’s 80th birthday party and he’s spotted in the back rows; couldn’t Kael have slipped him a little something—like a piece of poisoned cake?) Then, in a disgraceful moment, he blurted out that not only was Kael’s assistant Richard Albarino partially to blame—Toback calls him “a factotum”—but so was Simpson, who died (from overeating? did Kael crack a smile?) in 1996. Leave it to a sleazy bastard to blame the dead who can’t answer back. Though Brian cites Toback as saying that Simpson thought himself fortunate to be able to be the one to give Ms. Know-It-All a little payback—despite his nasty memos, his animus toward her is opaque of derivation—it’s unsettling that Beatty, Toback and Barry Diller are passing the buck by failing to intervene to keep her from becoming a laughingstock. And while Brian seems to lay most of the blame on Simpson and pronounce Kael as suffering from a “naïveté” about the studio machinations of Hollywood movie making, she has to take her own harsh hits: with the realization that not only did she put herself into a situation about which she was temperamentally unsuited—she was neither a collaborator nor a group player throughout her career—she would duplicate unfathomably poor judgment by remaining in an environment in which she was the perceived target. (As was her wont but this time to an unappreciated audience, she exercised a few too many lapsus linguae.) As for Albarino, who quit his job to go to Hollywood with Kael, he wrote somewhere on the Internet that he had a split with her over the whole sordid muddle—he was given the shaft, an echo of how she treated Suber?—but they eventually made up and it’s to Brian’s discredit that we don’t get more of his side. What becomes manifest through Brian’s determination to keep the fiasco in perspective is that the original principals wanted to save themselves separately, not conjointly.
Whether breaking down in Brooks’ office or hitting the Wild Turkey in her Hollywood apartment, Kael’s fear of public reaction was real. The press was in full knock down mode, running blaring headlines like “Kael Loses It in Hollywood” and articles about her supposed feuds with Beatty and Toback and, in the flash fire that is gossip, she became the object of ridicule from coast to coast. She didn’t help her situation: she told Arthur Bell of the Village Voice on the eve of her return to The New Yorker, “I didn’t realize how long it takes to make movies.” All that exalted knowledge about the movies in seven books (up to that time) went down the drain in ten irretrievable words. What was carefully quieted fact was that when Kael’s second Paramount contract expired—zero chance it would've been renewed, and the offers she claimed to have received to work elsewhere in Hollywood have never been disclosed—she wanted to return to her post at the magazine because she missed the love of writing (real translation: having been kicked out of Hollywood she had nowhere else to go) and she discovered to her horror that William Shawn didn’t want her back. “Like a teacher or a theologian,” he used his inimitable soft-spokenness to label her “corrupted.” The bearded editor William Whitworth intervened on her behalf more than once. You can envision a shorthand but cleaner version of Whitworth’s argument: “You want a cunt or a drunk?” And indeed it was the providential timing of co-critic Penelope Gilliatt’s alcoholic decline that changed Shawn’s mind. Some of Kael’s whopper lies of omission are her oft-repeated claims that she didn’t “have an appetite for gossip” or knew what was going on behind the scenes at The New Yorker, when in fact she had in-office pipe lines feeding her the latest, in fact for years she pushed writers (like dance critic Arlene Croce) for positions at the magazine and schemed to become the full time movie critic, not only because she needed the money but also because she knew all about the tales of Gilliatt’s boozing and how her reviews were increasingly abstruse and, in Kael’s view, wrongheaded and out of touch with what was happening on screen. In spite of her repeated entreaties to get rid of Gilliatt, Shawn wouldn’t budge; he had the old fashion belief of allegiance. Though Kael’s disaster in Hollywood and Gilliatt’s plagiarism in her profile of Graham Greene were embarrassments for Shawn, Kael’s sins weren’t as problematic as Gilliatt’s potential legal issues and the “corrupted” was allowed to return. Showing an insistently ugly trait of instant judgment and disguised backstabbing of others during her life and career, Kael seldom understood nor had much tolerance for Shawn’s sense of loyalty; she long condemned such sentimentality and, as Brian shows, her concept of loyalty was a perilous one way street. Some years later when Advance Publication’s Samuel Newhouse, Jr. bought The New Yorker and Shawn was about to be dumped, Kael refused to sign the pro forma letter of protest from longtime New Yorker staff. The following irony should not be missed: to advertisers in Beverly Hills she said, “He was a great editor, but he was eighty.” Indicative of Brian’s irritating omissions, we learn Kael consented to write a letter of recommendation to the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation to grant a fellowship Shawn had applied for but never find out if he got it, nor if she attended his funeral or memorial service in 1992.
eturning to The New Yorker as the full timer, Kael wasted little time in getting back at those in Hollywood she believed had ruined her working vacation. In the piece entitled “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers,” she unloaded on what people like nameless Don Simpson were doing to American movie production, what with all the mania about money, the pie-in-the-sky advance
sales of movies not yet made, all the drugs and broads, all the disrespect of writers. Especially the writers. It’s a boohoo on how she couldn’t get this unnamed project going, or get the coke heads to listen to her about that exceptional script. (She didn’t mention that she managed to get good buddie Roy Blount Jr. about $50,000 for two of his “screenplay gigs” that never came to fruition.) It’s also a taxing update on everything, in one way or another, she’s been bitching about since “Movies, the Desperate
Art.” It is, I think, legit to claim that in her piece she convinced herself into believing that, once more, she knew everything there was to know and, in an closeted academic way she would have seen through in any other critic, escaped being attacked for her concocted teacher-is-telling-you-she’s-learned-some-new-things method because she worked hard to disguise the fact that she turned into the kind of pedagogue she hated. Her slant wasn’t the only bad smell: if the lengthy bout of diarrhea managed to keep us running
out of Charmin, it’s the last bit of dung at the end that there was a “backlash” against Ridley Scott’s Alien that plugged the toilet. She claimed “many people were angry at how mechanically they’d been worked over.” Does anyone remember being angry when screaming in frightened delight while watching the cat’s eyes as creepy Harry Dean Stanton gets it? Can viewers recall a single backlash episode anywhere, except for the one she was inexplicably attempting to create? Had Kael been ensconced in Great
Barrington and not in Hollywood enduring all that foreseeable rejection, there’s every possibility she’d have given the picture its due as a trend-setting refurbishment of the shit-in-you-pants genre that gave audiences what they wanted—a scary good time. She lost it on her own argument: movies are nothing if not manipulation. She no doubt congratulated herself for “Why Movies Are So Bad?” and she certainly accepted the “Pauline, you really put it to those mother fuckers!” accolades from the acolytes. Here’s
what happened in GaGa Land as a result of her envenomed pen: absolutamente nada. So much for influence. For many of the rest of us, this piece, and not Renata Adler’s Madame Defarge at the Guillotine, was the beginning of the end of her rule over us.
The Adler piece from The New York Review of Books is available online, and it’s now an Amazon Digital Service Kindle e-book entitled Movie Criticism: The Case of Pauline Kael. From the e-book’s preface is the following rebuttal: There were rumors: a committee had collaborated to write it; Mr. Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, had secretly commissioned it; Adler was pursuing a vendetta generated by some incident or series of incidents years before. None of this, as it happened, was true. Kellow, in his biography, writes that Adler, at a meeting of the New York Film Critics, “stormed out,” saying she “had to see her analyst immediately.” Adler had no analyst; she had not “stormed out.” When she did, in fact, quietly walk out, several other critics, including Stefan Kanfer of Time, walked out with her. As they left, Kael said, “Do you realize how offensive you’re being?” That tone and that question were provoked by the departing critics’ (including Vincent Canby’s) courteous disagreement with a consensus which Kael was trying to create and enforce. Adler had no reason to be hostile to Kael, and was not. In fact, until she was asked to review Kael’s collection, Adler had thought fairly highly of Kael’s work.
To Francis Davis in Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, she confessed this: “I was stunned when that piece by Adler came out...in which she rejected everything I had ever written. I was told by Harold Brodkey that it was a group effort—that a dozen or so people helped out on it, in a group movement to denounce me. I knew nothing about it. I had no idea that it was coming, that anything was building.” Either she couldn’t remember details or was avoiding them, but, as Brian confirms, NYRB editor Robert Silvers sent her an advanced copy of the piece to both prepare her and allow a response if she wished. Other than the gossip of Brodkey, a New Yorker short-story writer who died four years before Davis’s interview, and the suspicions of Kael’s still-remaining male champions, there is no evidence Adler conspired with anti-Kael forces. What does exist as circumstantial evidence is a change of attitude toward Kael. With the Hollywood botch, the putsch against Gilliatt, Adler’s takedown, she discovered the atmosphere at the magazine could turn suddenly incendiary. One day New Yorker editor-critic-story writer Veronica Geng unleashed her infamous vitriol on Kael, who would later comment sans conscience, “She cut me dead so conspicuously I couldn’t believe it. We were friends the day before. It was out of the blue. It was . . . personal.”
Clint Eastwood, speaking generally, if not smarting about Kael’s reviews of his movies, comes close to summing up the debris she left behind: “She really suckered them into thinking she knows something. That’s what’s so funny. It becomes a kind of a joke. Just making a lot of outrageous statements not having any bearing on anything, but you’re doing them because you’ve found that that’s the avenue to get attention. That’s exactly what the secret to Kael is: she’s found a way to get attention.”
That attention-getting stratagem would show up again in Kael’s review of Reds, Beatty’s epic about American journalist John Reed. It’s fact (as opposed to gossip) that before going to Hollywood she had been haranguing him not to make a movie about commies that she claimed nobody wanted to see. Peter Biskind’s book even has another Woody moment in which she’s on the blower telling Diane Keaton to convince Beatty not to do it. Brian writes that both Kael and Toback were “increasingly anxious” that Beatty was far more interested in the making of Reds than he was over their little nifty and that Kael was “dead set against the Reed film...accusing him of trying to reinvent himself as the new David Lean.” Biskind believes Beatty decided to chance a business relationship with Kael to keep her from reviewing Reds because she had already pre-formulated an opinion (about two years before the movie was actually released) and, lo and behold, she managed to twist the Lean knife in her eventual review. Let’s grant that Beatty wasn’t setting her up to fail or prevent her from reviewing, and let’s grant that Beatty and Kael “remained friends” in spite of what transpired at Paramount. The ethical issue remains: could she write fairly on a movie she was “dead set against”? Kael had inserted in her piece the taboo “pussywhipped” about Beatty’s characterization of Reed, which was a clever ploy to let Shawn feel he could once more edit her work to his moral standards and she wouldn’t have to once more put on the boxing gloves to fight him so long as the piece itself was left basically intact. Brian went into The New Yorker archives to find any possible ethics issue Shawn might have had but found none. Readers did: a critic with a sense of fairness would have recused herself over any possible conflicts of interest, particularly in view of the fact the principals knew her advanced opinions and that the review was being published during awards season and not delayed so as not to be accused of attempting to alter award votes. She was going to defy in the maverick tradition to which she had always molded herself. The review wasn’t altogether a slam. Between poisoned darts she gave him a hand job, stroking him in that falsely solicitous manner elder women often employed in his equally fawnish company. According to Biskind, Beatty thought her review was yet another example of her patronizing him, insulting him with faint praise and lack of due credit for what were his accomplishments and not those of the tattling writers. (She would do it to him with Shampoo too, soaking those panties for Towne, who Brian only mentions once, and would in her last collection For Keeps slap Warren down again by admitting the obvious that she wrote gratuitously about the movie and cut huge portions of her original piece.) No one in Hollywood or N.Y. or even in the sticks who heard anything about the Kael-Warren débâcle missed a single nuance of her review; the comeuppance read like a sad resignation that not only were Warren’s dreams of making his magnum opus over but so were her dreams for riches and higher esteem. One price according to Biskind: Beatty refused to speak to the “vituperative bitch” for at least ten years.
Kael’s assertion no one wanted to see a movie about communists proved to be unfounded. Though Brian lists the box office receipts of Reds to be “around $32 million” against its reported cost that was roughly the same, the movie made slightly more than $40 million by the end of its full theatrical run. By any estimation, that’s a lot of people who didn’t want to see Warren as a commie.
nother price: longtime readers started to become suspicious enough to wonder the following: if Kael didn’t have the stuff to make it in Hollywood, perhaps other stuff she claimed during her reign as America’s bitch supreme wasn’t the whole truth. Brian has called her prevarications, like her bogus three marriages, good story telling, but let’s call them what they are—lies
for saps.
She was a liar by perpetuating the myth she didn’t see a movie more than once. She told interviewer Marc Smirnoff in Conversations with Pauline Kael about seeing twice Nashville, The Godfather II and Casualties of War and in the last two examples why. In the same book she tells George Malko she had to see McCabe and Mrs. Miller a second time to confirm her sensibilities hadn’t failed her; and we all know damned well she didn’t “trust her memory”
when writing the Chatty Cathy “Raising Kane,” although in her zeal to strip Welles of his due she made numerous errors as if she had. Those are repeats we know about. The acid test: Would you believe her if she said she need listen only once to the recordings of Mozart or Stravinsky or Beethoven to retain their mastery? That she need read James only once to grasp his complexity? Not even Shawn trusted his writers, sending copy editors and fact-checkers to see what the magazine’s critics were
writing about.
This would not be an issue had she not forever claimed that she hadn’t seen a movie more than once, and it’s lazy for Roger Ebert to declaratively state that she never did simply because she said it or for The Washington Post’s Louis Bayard to write “we knew she refused to see any movie more than once” when fact checking can be done right from their computers. Or open the books they received as reviewer copies. Brian’s not exempt from coddling the “story teller,” either: He opens
the
bio with a scene in 1976 during which she once again repeats the myth and you expect him somewhere to correct the falsity. After Carrie Rickey—an undeserved victim of Kael’s vicious backstabbing—informed him what she knew as fact, and James Wolcott would confirm in Lucking Out, he smilingly tried to concede the point in a pleasant interview with Jeff Glor over at cbsnews.com’s Author Talk. No wonder Kael often held her head in her hands for pictures in that Dorothy Parker way—she was propping up
contempt. (Parker, however, was never fooled by Katharine Hepburn. When Kael blasted her idol for “self-exploitation” in The Lion in Winter, she omitted the far more egregious solicitations in Summertime and The Rainmaker.)
The lies by omission in not reporting to her readers that she was involved in script and editing room consultations with movie makers whose movies she’s eventually praise are true corruption. Of course, we know why she didn’t tell. Schmoozing with all those movie makers and writers who sit at your feet is just too irresistible, especially when they want The Godmother’s advice and get a review as good head they can’t refuse. It’s too incestuous and there’s no way to re-slurp those blow jobs on Nashville, Taxi Driver or Shampoo or Personal Best or Tequila Sunrise (the last three from My Own Private Gossip Robert Towne, who reportedly stopped talking to her after she was no longer useful to him in her retirement) and how many more without gagging. Remember in 1977 tripping through Close Encounters on some great grass—the whole audience was probably blitzed—but re-viewing it years later, sober, I was appalled. Richard Dreyfuss’s cocaine-bloated face should have alerted us that we’re in for some bad acting and even before half-time the movie was so labored with frenzied juvenility that Julia Phillips was right that location shooting was equal to a drug den. Ebert and definitely Kael had the most explaining to do—their reviews were illustrations of enabling. Readers might have forgotten but she would relapse later with a second binge on Spielberg’s fruit looper. If most of us back then were suckered into believing that she was honestly opining, we’re a lot less convinced now that she wasn’t functioning as a prestige publicity machine. Long overdue that we admit to the sick joke that she thought she was above la règle du jeu.
rain doesn’t hide his affection for Kael or her influence on him since grade school and the injection of his movie commentary is his own William Shawn test for a go at The Current Cinema and if he’s never less than highly readable, little of it belongs in this bio. It’s dangerous to allow yourself to be compared to your celebrated subject. He has a tiresome penchant for the word “brilliant”
(where was his editor?), and the same word shows up to a fault in his other writings, especially the thoroughly entertaining columns over at Opera News. (Is he amazed at how much “brilliance” there is in the same way Rex believes he sees several “masterpieces” each week?) In his research at Indiana U, he would come upon letters from admirers, detractors and the famous she received, and one of the latter is Bill Clinton for whom she provided a separate folder. But Brian’s too busy with
the trivia of New York Film Critics Circle voting to tell us what Bill wrote her. Observing there are roughly 11,000 of her notes on movies, most of which have never been published, he doesn’t tease with a glimpse of the list. (Now that Brian’s book is into a second printing, readers won’t be surprised if those unpublished notes show up in a future collection.) Kael’s long-term boozing and smoking are perfunctorily covered, as is her writing process, which gets a more vivid view in Wolcott’s
Lucking Out. (She liked her writing environment neat but her proofs were often mazes of corrections and/or additions as typesetter nightmares.) Brian told The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy in an interview that he exceeded his contractual obligation by delivering a much longer book and, remaining longer than specified, there still had to be cuts. For instance, he regretted slicing the stuff about Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, and though he didn’t say why, it’s likely this: Gilliatt was in her six month turn at the critic’s chair when the movie was released and she had to recuse herself
because she had an affair with Nichols. Kael was called to fill in but not without some resistance from the studio who tried to keep her from an advance screening. (If you haven’t read her review, you needn’t guess her reaction.) Not missing are Gilliatt’s blotto embarrassments but absent are Gilliatt’s connections to Nichols and Vincent Canby, with whom she also had an affair. And he might have included that Gilliatt had a masochistic bent, having married playwright/misogynist John Osborne after
he wrote her this proposal: “Will you marry me? It’s risky, but you’ll get fucked regularly.” A drinker who’d eventually die of alcoholism, she had a much more active sex life than the bitch who connived surreptitiously to get rid of her. Brian catches Kael’s subterfuge in reference to Gilliatt’s award-winning movie: “Seeing Sunday, Bloody Sunday was for me like reading a novel that was very far from my life and temperament.” He points out that the “central situation—the sharing of a man
with another man—was reminiscent of her own past, with Robert Horan and James Broughton.” It’s deeper than that: in Kael’s review she wonders what Glenda Jackson’s Alex sees in Murray Head’s “innocuously blank boy” when in all likelihood she did know what Alex was settling for. While Gilliatt’s published screenplay describes the female Alex as a fantasy version of herself, Jackson plays her, unknowingly, temperamentally closer to Kael. In one of his rare gems of insight, and likewise not knowing
how bloody close he was getting to Brian’s subject, Roger Ebert writes that S,BS is not “a movie about the loss of love, but about its absence.”
he lack of cooperation by Kael’s daughter Gina James is unfortunate because Brian badly needed the first hand accounting, but it’s also understandable: an only child who becomes companion, friend, confidante, typist, driver, care-taker to a Mommie Dearest at the expense of her own life is wrapped in conflicting emotions and exhaustion. My own mother was thrown out of her sister’s home in another state
and had to move into a motel until her credit card denied further charges. At that time she called me, broke and unemployed, asking me to send cash and if she could stay at my place until she recovered. Said yes but misgivings abounded, and after she arrived all the old familial baggage would periodically pop open until we came to an arrangement that satisfied us. During the last years of her life, we became very close free-speaking friends and accepted the realities of her growing health problems
but because she died suddenly after suffering a stroke in her doctor’s office (two months after Kael’s passing), I hadn’t much exhaustion in providing long term care. In looking back, she gave me the gift of relief, until my best friend also suffered a stroke a short time later and his family decided that they were too busy to provide the required care. That’s too many years ago and counting. I now know that 24/7 exhaustion, those deep conflicting feelings, the dread as well as the good. You hear it countless
times from the experts: home care providers are often in worse shape than the people they care for. At some point, after all the emergencies, the doctors, the recurring hospitalizations, the unending tests and refills of ever-longer list of meds, the constant worries about falls and declining mobility, the cleaning of butts and bedding after accidents, the calls of your name in the middle of the night that were sometimes real but often part of unsettling dreams, the sudden flares of tempers, you really do need
to escape and don’t want
to look back. And in Miss James’ case, it isn’t beyond pure reason that she’s just not interested in talking about her mother having hooked up with faggots as lovers, her father’s abandonment, or the death of her son William who was the object of his grandmother’s affections. Miss James is also aware that if there’s huge interest generated by one bio of her mother, it will possibly beget another, and in time she’ll likely open up. One day Meryl Streep may call to tell Miss James that she’s filming Brian’s
book.
About the deaths of Kael and her grandson, Brian is short on the basics. He doesn’t inform the reader if Kael’s remains were cremated or buried and where. Having mentioned William sufficiently to warrant this troubling line—“Gina worried about her son a great deal, and wondered if he might have some sort of serious medical condition” (the view of him behind his grandmother at her birthday party suggests Tim Curry out of Rocky Horror Picture Show)—Brian not only fails to tell us what that condition might have been but, worse, he doesn’t tell us in an after word about William’s sudden unexplained demise at 25 at the East Mountain Forest in Massachusetts six years after his grandmother passed.
ael’s first major essay “Movies, the Desperate Art,” written in 1955, has reappeared in the Library of America’s The Age of Movies: Selected Writings by P.K. Wouldn’t be happy about the resurrection since she suppressed the piece for about 45 years. There are obvious reasons why she didn’t include it in her first collection I Lost It At the Movies or her
last For Keeps: the
repetition of words and phrasing; the excessive parentheticals; the rants on the mob’s movie tastes, on movie technology, on artists’ responsibilities; the sticky commentary about race; the grossly embarrassing generalizations and faulty predictions about Christianity and movie spectacles. All of this undoubtedly made her cringe. Buried to avoid an accounting, of course, but those pesty little omissions from the past keep popping up: in Afterglow, interviewer
Davis asked her about the popular usage of the word “filmic” and she responded, “I see no reason for that word. What the devil does it mean?” That didn't stop her from using it fives times in the essay. (It also shows up in I Lost It At the Movies.) Yet a limited treasure the piece remains: we’re given what are considered the printed origins of her “elusive aesthetics.”
At Kael’s memorial service Arlene Croce encapsulated in twenty one words what many of us felt when reading Kael’s sociological perceptions: “I have to say that I haven’t understood anything in this country since—well, since Pauline stopped writing about the movies.” Indubitability one of her better virtues, but there two movies among many in which her observations are unfinished and flat out wrong that don’t get sufficient attention. In Network, as Brian repeats, she writes that screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky has “the New York City hatreds” (which he always denied) but she doesn’t explain—Brian does, later—that it was she who really had a bad case against the city, wanting to and finally getting out when she moved to Great Barrington. The unfinished part of her slam against Paddy is this: “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.” What’s sorely missing is that if the pervasive box isn’t the black hole snatching our souls, what is? Abundantly clear then as it is now that Kael’s disdain for the impact and evolution of television blinded her insights. She burned with jealousy too: Paddy saw the future long before she did. Regarding Julia, Brian informs that Kael was suspicious of Lillian Hellman’s fond memories of her childhood friend long gone at the hands of the Nazis. The review is about as cautious as any she had ever written; she doesn’t call Lillian an outright liar—Shawn wouldn’t permit it; and if stealing another’s research isn’t the same as stealing a stranger’s life, it’s still stealing—but the code words are carefully planted. Kael then performs a remarkable summersault when she writes: “The friendship between Julia and Lillian is obviously the emotional basis—the original material—for The Children’s Hour.” Not only does this sentence belie Kael’s own doubts, the “emotional basis” itself is factually fraudulent. Kael might not have known at the time she wrote the review that Hellman didn’t hear about who is the real Julia until years after writing the play—Lillian never meet the woman on whom she based Julia on—but there had been long established references that she based The Children’s Hour on an incident that occurred in Edinborough, Scotland in 1810. (Those school teachers won in court their case against the lying pupil.)
Aggregating the reviews of her career, there are all these wet panty responses as lust in the dark. Huge number of her pieces have the undeniable thrusts of sex; her climaxing is the result of being lubed for and by movies (though not exclusively movies) because she was responding openly to the stimuli in the ways we all do without telling. That’s why we love Kael—she gives us the freedom to realize that if we can’t respond erotically and emotionally to all the sex(es) for fear of being labeled one slur or another, then we’re cheating ourselves. She wanted to write about Deep Throat because she rightly believed many of us got a good deal of our hots over sex through the movies. She wanted to make that connection in a stronger (we can assume less censored) way and it’s a loss on her part that she didn’t take Shawn’s emphatic “no” to another venue which would have been delighted to say yes. Pricking Shawn as she loved to do, she doubtlessly didn’t want to talk clinically about deep throating but the power of the erotic senses inherent in the act and how it relates to our movie responses. If she hadn’t been such an insufferable technophobe—never mastered typing, couldn’t drive, feared computers—she’d have discovered early in her retirement how to reconcile her dread to speak the piece to a computer. Imagine the hoopla over what might have been but is now the abandoned ultimate kiss from the movie’s ultimate fellatrix. (In 2008, Linda Williams would write Screening Sex, probably close to what Kael had in mind.) The conundrum remains: how could a woman who apparently didn’t have much of a sex life write so libidinously? Can’t fully explain this, but throughout the biography I kept hoping a seedy lover like Ben Gazzara out of Tales of Ordinary Madness would pop up to plug her and save us from having to use “masturbatory” to explain it.
fter finishing Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, my first impression was that it’s a half successful bio, aware that if Brian wouldn’t get the right familial cooperation he’d have a difficult time. And he did. On further thought, the bio’s only about a quarter successful; he supplies tantalizing
teases on his subject and major supporting acts and then retreats. There’s a cloudy reticence hanging over the bio, as if Brian made tacit arrangements with his available sources on what not to cover—it was not a good omen to read Ray Sawhill’s advance comment that the bio is “superb”—and he can’t seem to accept that it all changed for Kael when she went Hollywood, that she couldn’t talk honestly about what happened because the cost to her reputation was too painful—what
happened “out there” had changed everything—and that her last decade at The New Yorker was a long distance from full recovery.
Brian’s correct that she remained the practitioner of choice for movie reviewing but her sweep of influence, outside those writers wanting to emulate her and receive her blessings and those creep movie makers who used her, and advertisers who breathlessly used her blurbs or entire reviews, never existed much beyond the deserved curiosity of readers wanting to know what she had to say because no one said it better. But even the loyalty of her readership waned, as the magazine’s subscriptions slipped
and Kael’s book sales fell significantly. There’s a palpable fatigue closing in on the finish: He’s been bucking for approval from the dead and a clique of necrophilic geriatrics that for all his respect and civility he becomes his own dead end about a snobby nostalgia for the late sixties and seventies when movie criticism supposedly mattered because it was in the hands of the choice few. That is, in the hands of Kael, who indulged late in her life (ineffably in Afterglow)
an extended moaning that when the celebrated era ended movie reviewing wasn’t fun anymore and that her cherished favs like Spielberg, Scorsese and all the other hangers-on had dared to move beyond what she helped make them famous for. Most of the reviews of the book have been salutatory, though they end up being regurgitated encomiums and then weepy regrets that without Kael—and because of the Internet’s democracy—the art of movie criticism seems at best in a torpid stage.
Take a look at Kael’s progenies and then try to recall a single memorable quote from any of them. You now know why criticism is in danger; those still maintaining a job are deadly bores clinging to yesteryear and counterfeit apologists for their Queen’s sins. Would Kael, the spectacular opinionator-entertainer providing superstar excitement in the joy of reading that remains unparalleled in the art of criticism, like Brian’s biography? The first crack
she’d likely utter is “Saphead objectivity!”
After a few rounds of Wild Turkey, she’d wink at him, “Grow a pair. What do you have to lose?”
— Ralph Benner
Text COPYRIGHT ©2012 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.