Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [131]
Mrs. Casey was silent—by no means hostile but ever so slightly indicating with one elegantly raised eyebrow a certain impatience. When, at last, I paused for breath, she gave a small, ladylike snort of derision. “Nonsense,” she said firmly. “It’s the way the harness fits around the crotch.”
• • •
THE STORY on dangerous sports ran without the parachutists, I’m sorry to say, but it taught me the lesson that the simple, functional answer is usually the correct one, even (and perhaps especially) when it comes to sex. It also taught me that women’s magazine editors, ranging from Helen Gurley Brown to Grace Mirabella, have a toughness of mind all their own. From then on, I avoided the Glamour offices but continued to contribute regularly to the magazine and even started to get fan mail. After a couple of years of writing long feature articles, Amy Greene asked if I would like to be Glamour’s movie reviewer. It was not something I had ever imagined myself doing—since almost everybody in my family was in the movie business, reviewers had always seemed to be the enemy, even (perhaps especially) when they were literate reviewers. My Uncle Alex had begun his career at the age of seventeen as the film critic for a Budapest arts weekly, and when he stepped behind the camera as a director for the first time, at the age of twenty-one, he remarked on how much easier it was to criticize a film than to make one. His attitude toward critics did not change over the years. My father’s comment on movie critics was simply, “Vat the hell do they know about it?” Still, it was too good an offer to refuse—not just a regular monthly income, but getting to see movies before everyone else and for free!
Movie reviewers, I soon discovered, are courted fiercely by the major studios. In those lavish days, every movie company maintained a glamorous, plush screening room in midtown Manhattan, most of them furnished comfortably with big easy chairs or sofas and a staff of people whose only job was to see that reviewers got to see each movie in the most comfortable circumstances possible.
It was apparent to me from the beginning that Glamour’s readers were not looking for reviews of meaningful foreign films that would, in any case, never play in their towns, nor were they anxious to read slashing intellectual attacks against major movies, still less cleverness for its own sake. Basically, they wanted to know which of the current movies was worth seeing—it was a service column, in short. Gradually, over the months, I hit my stride, and my fan mail, most of it positive, increased sharply—an important fact, since Glamour had an elaborate month-by-month system for determining how many readers there were for each feature and column in the magazine, as well as their age, income, and so on. Fan mail played a part in scoring each writer’s work, so the more letters you generated, the better.
It never occurred to me that I would go on reviewing movies for nearly ten years—at three movies a week, about fifteen hundred movies—until, in fact, I could hardly even remember a time when my evenings weren’t taken up by screenings. I began by writing a review of each movie I’d seen, but before long it became like the obligatory essay at Oxford: something that was easy to put off until a day or two before the deadline, at which point there was nothing to do but cancel everything else, make a pot of strong coffee, and sit down with clenched teeth to do it. Doing it this way, the hardest part was trying to remember what movies I had seen, since most of them tended to run into a blur. Penelope Gilliatt, the formidable critic for The New Yorker, actually had a tiny flashlight in her purse so she could make notes during the screenings, but I relied on my memory, only to find, by the time two or three weeks had elapsed, that I couldn’t remember a thing except dim recollections of plots. Time after time, the approach