Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [105]
When Dorothy Comingore read the article, she was livid. She telephoned Suber, demanding to know how her quotes had ended up in Pauline’s piece. Comingore stressed that she had given those recollections to Suber for his use only and threatened to sue Kael. Suber was devastated but also ashamed, feeling that he had somehow been responsible for what had happened. To raise the issue with his department head, Colin Young, would have been to walk into a political quagmire: Not only was he Pauline’s close friend, but he could be quite acerbic to the younger members of the faculty. Suber told a few close friends—then tried to put the matter behind him.
“Raising Kane” dominated the pages of the February 20 and 27, 1971, issues of The New Yorker and quickly became one of the magazine’s publishing events of the year. From its strong opening sentence, “Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened”—the essay was a thrilling, audacious piece of writing—if one that indulged in frequent flights of sheer speculation. Early on Pauline launched into an observation sure to rankle many of those who had planted Kane at the top of their all-time-best lists. “Citizen Kane,” she asserted, “isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece.” It was “conceived and acted as entertainment in a popular style (unlike, say, Rules of the Game or Rashomon or Man of Aran, which one does not think of in crowd-pleasing terms.)” To use the “conventional schoolbook explanations for greatness,” she explained, was “to miss what makes it such an American triumph—that it manages to create something aesthetically exciting and durable out of the playfulness of American muckraking satire. Kane is closer to comedy than to tragedy, though so overwrought in style as to be almost a Gothic comedy.”
She linked this idea to what she believed to be Kane’s real onscreen antecedents—the fast-talking screwball comedies of the 1930s, an era that had “never been rivaled in wit and exuberance.... The ’30s were the hardest-headed period of American movies, and their plainness of style, with its absence of false ‘cultural’ overtones, has never got its due aesthetically.” Many of the comedies she cited were set in the newspaper world, depicting tough, aggressive reporters and their hard-driving, duplicitous editors; many of these were written by a small group of smart writers, in exile from the New York newspaper and magazine world, such as Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur—and Herman Mankiewicz. Pauline felt that it was these writers, rather than the directors whom the auteurists loved to credit, who “may for a brief period, a little more than a decade, have given American talkies their character.” She thought it was Mankiewicz’s background in this sort of unsentimental comedy that gave Kane much of its flavor. Shortly after “Raising Kane” was published, she explained in an interview, “When I got into it and started to research it, it opened up so many interesting areas—particularly when I discovered something about Herman Mankiewicz—his background and what his connections were with Hecht and MacArthur and the whole literary tradition the scripts came out of.”
In “Raising Kane,” Pauline traced Welles’s triumphant arrival in Hollywood, taking care to capture the movie colony’s suspicious attitude toward a self-promoting “boy genius” who had managed to be awarded an RKO contract that gave him unprecedented authority. Her description of the industry’s discovery that the picture was modeled on Hearst and Davies was vivid and suspenseful: According to her, Mankiewicz had foolishly shown the script to his friend the screenwriter Charles Lederer, who happened to be Marion Davies’s devoted nephew—and Lederer had in turn shown it to the Hearsts. She did not hesitate to blame Mankiewicz for his “idiotic indiscretion,” which she believed “resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall,