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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I became a follower of the New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael, or a "Paulette," as her acolytes were later derisively known, in the spring of 1969, when I answered a summons and showed up at her apartment, at Ninety-third Street and Central Park West. I knew her only slightly. I had been introduced to her two years earlier by Paul Warshow, the son of the critic Robert Warshow, and we had met a few times since and had laughed a lot--in person, she was always funny. I was a graduate student then, hiding on a shadowless California campus and putting off my life as much as I could. I guess I was trying to find a way to ease myself into writing. I had sent Pauline some short movie reviews, and she knew that I had written a letter to The New York Review of Books teasing the hostile shenanigans of the avant-garde troupe the Living Theatre. The letter wasn't much, and it was never printed, but Pauline demanded to see it.
"Give!" she said when I entered her apartment. She snatched the pages from my hands, and, without looking them over, began to read to her guests, a documentary filmmaker and a publishing executive. Pauline read the letter the way that she read her own work on the radio--slowly, with a schoolteacher's weighted emphasis that brought out the structure of the sentences. My heart pounded violently, and my ears must have turned red. I knew that hiding was no longer possible--the public reading was some kind of laying on of hands.
Not a singular honor, of course. Pauline had taken up many young people before me, and took up many more later on. Young readers who dropped her a combative note about something she had written, or who sent her pieces they had written themselves, even in a small-town newspaper, might get called up and asked over. Pauline, who lived with her twenty-year-old daughter, Gina James, liked having company at night when she wasn't working. The Central Park West apartment, an odd, inviting place, had become a kind of minimalist writing-and-talking theatre. A previous tenant had knocked down a couple of walls, leaving an irregular open area facing the Park. Pauline worked on a slanted architect's table, which dominated one side of the room; her narrow bed was behind it, only a few feet away. In the center of the room there was a round oak table illuminated by a hanging Art Nouveau lamp. At night, the lamp created a pool of light, and Pauline, facing the windows and the Park, would sit at the table and sip a glass of watered white wine, often with her legs folded under her. Laughing steadily (her laugh was itself a vibrant commentary), she argued with the guests, leaping up now and then to provide food or drink or to kiss one of the barkless, shorthaired dogs--basenjis--that lived with her and Gina. She praised, ardently and in detail, and she blamed. Mainly she blamed, scalding the reputation of virtually every writer in town.
She had recently completed her second year at The New Yorker (she and Penelope Gilliatt alternated in six-month periods), writing sentences with a brazen force unknown among the magazine's critics at the time. The sainted Ingmar Bergman, she wrote, had become "a tiresome deep thinker of second-rate thoughts . . . the Billy Graham of the post-analytic set." About "Charly," the Cliff Robertson-Claire Bloom weeper, she wrote, "And now there's 'Charly,' with that primitive, garbagey appeal that seems to reach through sophistication and education right to the primordial jerk. College students study Ionesco and Beckett and Artaud and then respond to--'Charly.' A surprising number of people seem to be educated beyond their own tastes." She wanted to pep up the readers' notions of what art could be, and, quickly, in the first two years, she set out her belief in the hybrid nature of the movie medium, celebrated D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance" and the career of Luis Bunuel, dismissed English directors as inept, and made a case for "Planet of the Apes." Her column was the most exciting regular writing about movies to have appeared in English since James Agee gave up his job at The Nation, in 1948. Two years before Pauline arrived at the magazine, the paperback version of her first collection of pieces, "I Lost It at the Movies," had been published, and sold more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies, an almost unimaginable number for a book of criticism. At forty-nine, she had suddenly become successful and famous, and she was at once, in rather bewildering combinations, cocky, overbearing, and friendly.
Pauline Kael was short (five feet), and she usually wore a flowered print shirt, slacks, and sneakers. Except for her eyes, which were a beautiful blue and darted this way and that, she was an ordinary-looking woman who spoke in a breathy, liltingly feminine voice (it was teacherly only when she read aloud). In that soft voice, however, she tore through conversations like a projectile. The first time I met her, she couldn't believe that Paul Warshow and I had enjoyed "The Graduate" or that we had identified with Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin, a silent naif adrift in a world of rancid adults. She sighed, giggled, and then said, "Do you think that grownups are predatory and corrupt?" Her voice reached into upper registers, suggesting that all of rationality lay on her side, none on ours. Well, no, we didn't think that. More sighs and musically insinuating questions: "How could you identify with someone who doesn't have an idea in his head?" Well, we shared some of his feelings. "But he's a blank. Aren't you projecting your own feelings onto him?" She asked questions, she poked you to see what you were made of, and then she knew: some people had it, and some didn't. There were taxi-drivers who knew what a good movie was, and there were famous intellectuals, including more than a few movie critics, who did not.
Still, I must have said something that impressed her as sensible or I wouldn't have been invited back. In all the years since then, I have never...
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