Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [121]
Pauline, who prided herself on her ability to size people up, continued to be baffled by Shawn. He loved television comedians—George Jessel was a particular favorite—and he was an avid amateur jazz pianist, frequently performing at the parties he and his wife gave at their apartment. He also was fascinated by everything that was going on in the movies. But Pauline found it all but impossible to reconcile this fun-loving side of Shawn with the repressed, schoolmasterish behavior she saw him exhibit around the office. Her battles with Shawn and the other editors over language choices continued on a regular basis—and sometimes her arguments unleashed themselves in streams of profanity. “She thought that the editorial department should be doing more to establish some kind of line of succession for Shawn,” recalled Hoyt Spelman, who worked in the magazine’s editorial and marketing departments for years. “She would pick up the phone and talk to me about it.” But some of Pauline’s friends thought she was churlish to complain about her boss so much. After all, she had the best film-reviewing gig in the world, and a luxury virtually no other critic had: unlimited space.
Pauline generally maintained a cordial presence around The New Yorker offices, though she was dismissive of many in the old guard, such as Lillian Ross, whom Joe Morgenstern remembered Pauline characterizing as a “fossil.” But she could be exceptionally kind to those she liked—and, as always, she was never a snob about rank. “Pauline was one of the women at The New Yorker who paid attention to the female underlings and was friendly to us,” remembered Karen Durbin. “We were very aware of the women who ignored us or were slightly hostile.”
Surprisingly, Pauline took a keen interest in the magazine’s business affairs, despite its policy of complete separation of editorial and advertising matters. (The departments were on separate floors, and fraternization between the two was discouraged.) She was amused by the policy of turning down advertising for things such as ladies’ lingerie and cigarettes. Spelman often made trips to advertisers to try to clarify The New Yorker’s editorial stance, and from the early ’70s Pauline was frequently tapped to be the main speaker at advertising and promotion conferences on the West Coast. She was always happy to do it, because she felt the magazine had become far too insular and she wanted to help bring it to a wider audience.
For years Pauline had deplored the lack of first-class movies about the black experience. In “Trash, Art and the Movies,” she had claimed that the main distinction of the film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s almost universally admired play A Raisin in the Sun was that it taught us “that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family.” So she was thrilled to kick off her New Yorker stint in the fall of 1972 with a review of Sounder, Martin Ritt’s drama about the near-collapse of a family of black sharecroppers during the Depression after the father is jailed for stealing food. She had expected a wearisome tribute to poor people that wore its good intentions on its sleeve; instead, she wrote, Ritt “never pushes a moment too hard or too far—the movie earns every emotion we feel. And I think it will move audiences—move them truly, that is—as few films ever have.” Pauline thought that Cicely Tyson, as the farm wife and mother, Rebecca, who must