Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [130]
Part of the problem Pauline had with Mailer’s take on Monroe was that he was trying to mine the legend for more than it was worth. “Who knows what to think about Marilyn Monroe or about those who turn her sickness to metaphor?” Pauline wondered. “I wish they’d let her die.” She found that Mailer inflated Monroe’s career “to cosmic proportions. She becomes ‘a proud, inviolate artist,’ and he suggests that ‘one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.’ He pumps so much wind into his subject that he’s trying to make Marilyn Monroe worthy of him, a subject to compare with the Pentagon and the moon.”
Yet she found some of his insights impressively acute. He was especially good on Monroe’s early years in an orphanage and how they may have been the foundation of her constant lying and a need to compartmentalize her life. “His strength—when he gets rolling—isn’t in Freudian guesses but in his fusing his knowledge of how people behave with his worst suspicions of where they really live,” wrote Pauline. She also admired his description of the Hollywood machine and “the psychological and sexual rewards the studio system offered executives.”
The book was a case of split personality, as Pauline saw it: “a rip-off all right but a rip-off with genius.” She admitted that Mailer came up with “a runaway string of perceptions and you have to recognize that, though it’s a bumpy ride, the book still goes like a streak.” Ultimately, however, Marilyn suffered from the author’s need to inflate its subject and wallow in his own theorizing; in the end, it became “Mailer’s way to perform character assassination with the freedom of a novelist who has created fictional characters.” The book finally was undone for her by “malevolence that needs to be recognized . . . Neither the world nor Marilyn Monroe’s life should be seen in Norman Mailer’s image.”
Pauline’s review of Marilyn became one of the most widely discussed pieces of criticism of the year, and, as she had predicted, it did nothing to prevent the book from being one of the year’s most popular releases. Her appearance in the New York Times Book Review did, however, lead to a baffling encounter with William Shawn. When she dropped by The New Yorker offices over the summer, she ran into him, and he asked her why she hadn’t let him have the review for the magazine. “What for?” Pauline replied. “You wouldn’t have printed it.”
“That’s right,” Shawn sighed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the summer of 1973 Pauline was, like so many other Americans, riveted by the television coverage of the Watergate hearings. She knew that “The Current Cinema” was not the place for political grandstanding, but she made her feelings about the Nixon administration known while appearing on a symposium in Manhattan in early 1973. As Newsweek quoted her: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are, I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
When she returned to her New Yorker post in the fall of 1973, she offered her observations on the dominant mood in the country: “The Watergate hearings have overshadowed the movies this summer, yet the corruption that Watergate has come to stand for can be seen as the culmination of what American movies have been saying for almost a decade.” The country was sinking deeper into a state of hopelessness. “The Vietnam War has barely been mentioned on the screen,” Pauline wrote, but she rightly felt that you could sense its presence in many of the era’s most intriguing films, from They