Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [154]
Brustein went on to say that her energetic style was best digested by reading only a few reviews at a time. “It is always an entertaining book,” he wrote, “and piece by piece a brilliant one, but taking it in large doses, you may get frazzled by all the feverish energy, flashing like St. Elmo’s fire, around so many ephemeral works.”
She was likewise criticized for her hyperbole in The Village Voice’s review, written by Richard Gilman—and illustrated with a doctored photo of Pauline wearing star-shaped sunglasses. While acknowledging her formidable gifts as a writer, Gilman wrote, “What she so often practices now, setting the lead for her fellows, is an amalgam of idiosyncratic opinion, star gazing, myth-mongering, politics, sociological punditry, and intervention as a kind of co-worker in the medium. It may be in tune with the times, may be much more satisfying to many readers than the tradition (her popularity of course suggests that it is), but it’s surely different from criticism as we’ve known it.”
Gilman’s most damning words came in characterizing her involvement with directors, writers, and other people in the industry, which he interpreted as a “desire to relieve the lonely detachment of the commentator by an active role, a direct hand in it all. I mean by this her notorious abandonment of critical neutrality, the scandalous apotheosis of Nashville before it was finished; the trafficking with certain directors and screenwriters as evangelist and would-be colleague.”
Pauline was incensed by many of the carping reviews that Reeling received, but at least one of them led to an enduring friendship. Greil Marcus, the rock critic and books columnist for Rolling Stone, published a review of Reeling that also accused her of lapsing into hyperbole. “Everything had to be the greatest, the best, the newest,” he recalled. “And it seemed to be out of control, and I didn’t know what this was about.” When Marcus’s review appeared, Pauline telephoned him at his home in Berkeley. “Did you really mean all that stuff that you wrote about me?” she asked. Marcus said that he did. “Well,” said Pauline, “my daughter agrees with you, but I don’t. I’m coming to Berkeley and would like to meet you.”
The Marcuses invited her to dinner, and when she arrived at their house, she looked around and asked where the other guests were. “She just sort of expected that there would be a big party for her,” Marcus said. “Which it had never occurred to us to do. We had a marvelous time, and she lived up to all our fantasies, which is to say, she was extreme in her opinions—extreme in her likes and dislikes, whether it had to do with movies or books or food or anything.”
The spring of 1976 was occupied with a heavy promotional tour for Reeling , which started with lectures at the College of Marin, Berkeley, the Los Angeles Film Festivals (Filmex), Immaculate Heart College, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. There were numerous radio and television interviews, including an hour-long appearance on Los Angeles’s KNBC-TV. She also was eager to appear on several of the national talk shows whose invitations she had previously declined, including those of Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, and Phil Donahue. She wrote to her editor Billy Abrahams that she would be “happy to do any radio or TV that comes up, but wish to avoid newspaper and magazine interviews, as I am too tempting a target for bitchy reporters.”
By the summer of 1976 Pauline had a new agent, Perry Knowlton of Curtis, Brown Ltd. Peter Davison of the Atlantic Monthly Press was delighted and wrote Knowlton a congratulatory note, advising him, “She is not lacking in exigence as an author, nor, I’m sure you will find, as a client.” But the publisher was relieved that at last she was handling her business affairs over to a proper agent, having been without one since dispensing with Robert Mills’s services several years earlier.
She had a number of new projects in the offing, one