Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [148]
In the spring of 1975, Pauline picked up two more honorary degrees. On May 13, Haverford College awarded her a Doctor of Humane Letters; the citation read, in part, “In the twilight land of flickering forms she is an outpost of literacy, keeping Mythos safely chained to Logos. Her service is to the best in our imagined selves.” Five days later she received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Paul E. Bragdon, the president of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. On June 1 she was an honored guest at the hundredth annual commencement of the Massachusetts College of Art. She made a few appearances on the lecture circuit, then returned to New York, where she and Gina packed up their belongings at 333 Central Park West and moved full-time up to Great Barrington. The Turin had simply become too expensive, and her salary at The New Yorker remained too low for it to be feasible for her to maintain a residence in Manhattan. Over the years, she had continued to complain about living in the city, often telling people that life in New York meant being forced to clear off your work area to set the table for dinner. She reveled in the fresh air and quiet of Great Barrington, but the move did present one practical obstacle: She still didn’t drive and relied on Gina as her chauffeur. An arrangement was made with The New Yorker that she would come to town every two weeks, see a group of movies back-to-back, stay at the Royalton Hotel in midtown, and then return to Great Barrington to finish writing her reviews, with express mail services taking the place of bicycle messengers.
As usual she spent much of the summer making preparations for her fall season at The New Yorker. This partly involved reading a stack of books and plays whose film versions were due to be released. As always, she clipped newspaper articles she thought might be pertinent to some of her reviews. She also watched news programs religiously and made careful notes on matters that she thought might be addressed in her own writing.
In July, she made her usual midsummer solo appearance in The New Yorker with a lengthy tribute to Cary Grant that she had been working on for some time. “Cary Grant—The Man from Dream City” was by far the most perceptive analysis of the actor’s appeal that had been written to date. The essay was far more than an appreciation of Grant; it was also a penetrating examination of the screwball comedy genre. There were a few echoes of her view of Herman Mankiewicz in “Raising Kane” when she wrote, “Cary Grant is your dream date—not sexless but sex with civilized grace, sex with mystery. He’s the man of the big city, triumphantly suntanned. Sitting out there in Los Angeles, the expatriate New York writers projected onto him their fantasies of Eastern connoisseurship and suavity.”
Pauline’s comments on the Grant legend were extraordinarily acute. She felt that one of the keys to his appeal was his odd, sexy reticence: “He draws women to him by making them feel he needs them, yet the last thing he would do would be to come right out and say it.” She felt he was “not the modern kind of actor who taps his unconscious in his acting. Part of his charm is that his angers are all externally provoked; there are no internal pressures in him that need worry us, no rage or rebelliousness to churn us up.” Instead, “We could admire him for his timing and nonchalance; we didn’t expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant . . . He appeared before us in his radiantly shallow perfection, and that was all we wanted of him.”
The most influential film that summer was Steven Spielberg’s second feature, Jaws, which Pauline thought showed all the confidence, wit, and command of technique that she admired in his debut theatrical film, The Sugarland Express. Jaws was the kind of jazzy, comedy-inflected thriller she loved, a film