Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [157]
In her spare time Pauline continued to be a TV news junkie, and nothing that transpired on the American political and cultural scenes seemed to escape her notice. She was an avid TV watcher in other ways, too, some of her favorites being The Carol Burnett Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the comedy phenomenon that had premiered on NBC in the fall of 1975, Saturday Night Live. She was less enthusiastic about many of the well-intentioned made-for-television films of the time, though she did like her friend Lamont Johnson’s The Execution of Private Slovik, starring Martin Sheen. (It made up for her distaste for Johnson’s Lipstick, a graphic rape drama starring Margaux and Mariel Hemingway that had been hampered by studio interference. When Johnson ran into Pauline at a screening of the film in New York, she got up from her seat as the final credits were rolling and whispered, “I’m not going to write about this one, darling.”)
As 1976 drew to a close, Pauline expressed her growing disappointment in Barbra Streisand, whose latest film, A Star Is Born, represented what she felt was another step in the wrong direction. Most stars, at some point, become obsessed with delivering the image that they want their public to believe in—and often, the one that the public itself wants to believe. For Pauline, Streisand had now reached this juncture in her career. Her portrayal of Esther Hoffman in A Star Is Born was in effect a rejection of her earlier brash New York Jewish girl persona. The bigger the star she was becoming, the more she seemed to want to be loved. Pauline found “she acts a virtuous person by not using much energy. She seems at half-mast, out of it, and you don’t get engrossed in reading her face, because she’s reading it for you. She wants to make sure we get what’s going on all the time. That kills any illusion—that and the camera, which is always on her a second too soon, and seconds too long, emphasizing how admirable she is, how strong yet loving. How gracious, too.” A Star Is Born was done in because all the sting was taken out of the plot—now it was “a drippy love story about two people who love each other selflessly.” She felt that Streisand had taken a one-dimensional, colorless role, with no indication in the script that Esther might have a hint of ruthless ambition that would make her rise to stardom more interesting.
The musical orchestrations, which Pauline characterized as “fake gospel, fake soul, fake disco, or fake something else” didn’t help, either. But the saddest waste, as far as she was concerned, was of her beloved star. “Streisand has more talent than she knows what to do with, and the heart of a lion,” she wrote. “But she’s made a movie about the unassuming, unaffected person she wants us to think she is, and the image is so truthless she can’t play it.”
John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion had written the script, but later they all but disowned the picture after it was turned over to Streisand and her coproducer husband, Jon Peters. After Pauline’s damning review appeared, Dunne wrote to her, “Yours was the only notice I saw that proceeded from the proper assumptions about the story and the kind of star it attracted.... To give Barbra her due, she always knew that, given the nature of the material, the man had to have the better part. She asked us to switch the parts around, but we said the man would come out like Chance Wayne [the gigolo in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird