Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [125]
One person unnerved by Pauline’s passion for Last Tango was William Shawn. While he generously allowed her ample space for her review and did not try to moderate her position, he did not understand her fascination with the sexual behavior that the picture portrayed. He had barely recovered from an incident earlier in 1972, when Pauline and her good friend the writer and New York Times Book Review editor Charles Simmons had gone together to see Deep Throat, the era’s most talked-about and financially successful porn film. Pauline was intrigued by the movie’s publicity and the fact that it made its star, Linda Lovelace, a household name. “I remember we came out of the movie,” recalled Simmons, “and I said, ‘You know, I never saw a pornographic movie before—that was pretty good.’ Pauline said, ‘You lost your cherry on a good one.’” She attempted to bully Shawn into letting her review Deep Throat, but he drew the line at writing about pornography in The New Yorker: His answer was a heated, unequivocal no.
Pauline felt so strongly about the impact of Last Tango that she had difficulty discussing it, even with close friends. “I saw Last Tango, not with her, but I saw it,” recalled Simmons. “I said, ‘That was just a dirty movie.’ If you did that kind of thing, she would absorb it and not defend it at all.” But the failure of so many of her colleagues to share her opinion of the film’s value upset her. Her nemesis Andrew Sarris had not been won over by the movie, which he called “stylistically wasteful and excessive.” He felt that “its best scenes are isolated from each other, and the dull moments in between stretch into dull minutes.” But he saved his sharpest words for a slap at Pauline: “Under ordinary circumstances, it would be grossly unfair to single out any one film critic for an ego-puffing practice that is beginning to corrode all film criticism. Still, when the one critic in question has been unduly abusive in print toward the excerpted enthusiasms of others, the temptation to turn the tables over a flagrant lapse in critical decorum becomes well nigh irresistible.” He also snidely commented that given the five-dollar ticket prices, it would behoove the management of the Trans Lux to pipe in excerpts of Le Sacre du Printemps.
At one of Hoyt Spelman’s advertising lunches, Pauline was railing to an enthralled table of listeners about Sarris’s lack of support for Last Tango. Spelman, a great lover of puns, was sitting next to an agency mogul. “That,” he whispered to his luncheon partner, “was her last tango with Sarris.”
Pauline was never above taking on “serious” writers, particularly those who were the darlings of the literary establishment. And in 1972, few authors occupied such an enviable critical position as Joan Didion, one of the most acclaimed essayists of the New Journalism movement. Didion was unquestionably a superb stylist. She had an eye that moved like a roving camera, picking up revelatory plangent details and never focusing on them too hard or for too long. In the 1960s Didion and her husband, the essayist and novelist John Gregory Dunne, had relocated to Los Angeles, where, in addition to their other projects, they pursued screenwriting careers. In 1970 Didion published a second novel, Play It as It Lays, which made use of her Hollywood experience in its account of Maria Wyeth, a sometime actress and model numbly trying to cope with her overwhelming feelings of isolation in Los Angeles. At the time there were a number of women writers who were connecting with a wide readership by