Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [169]
In addition to her growing dissatisfaction with the run of new movies, Pauline was not particularly happy with her situation at The New Yorker. She continued to do battle with William Shawn over tone and language in her copy, and after more than ten years of the same arguments, she was suffering from battle fatigue. Shawn, for his part, was just as exasperated as he once had been about Pauline’s insistence on using sexual and scatological language that he deemed inappropriate for the magazine. Their arguments had lost none of their sting over the years; as always, Pauline seemed to enjoy pushing Shawn to the limits, trying to find a crack in his gentlemanly decorum. “I can remember a couple of times, at least, seeing him turn so red when they would start arguing,” remembered William Whitworth, who served as Pauline’s immediate editor for a time in the 1970s. “She would never let it go. Shawn had had a heart attack, and I thought a couple of times that he might fall over on the floor right there in the office. She was the only person in the process who didn’t treat him the way the world of journalism did, and the way the rest of us did, as a very special little person—which he was. She treated him like one of the guys and talked to him that way, with a lot of wisecracks.”
One memorable confrontation with Shawn came in late 1978, when Pauline submitted her review of Goin’ South, a raucous Western comedy starring and directed by Jack Nicholson. “The problem Shawn had with her over and over had to do with her trying to sneak naughty words into the text and being really overtly, lip-smackingly appreciative of any sexual situations in the movie and wanting to make those as vivid as possible,” said Whitworth. In the opening sentence of her review of Goin’ South, Pauline rendered a vivid description of Nicholson, an actor she was still trying to come to terms with: “He bats his eyelids, wiggles his eyebrows, and gives us a rooster-that-fully-intends-to-jump-the-hen smile.” Shawn’s note in the galley margin read, “This piece pushes her earthiness at us, as if she wants to see how far she can push us, too. It’s the tone of the whole review.”
Later in the same review she wrote of the actor, “He’s like a young kid pretending to be an old coot, chawing toothlessly and dancing with his bottom close to the earth.” Shawn wrote in the margin, “Her earthiness, her focus on body functions.” The description of Nicholson’s bottom being close to the earth was deleted, as was a later reference to Nicholson’s being “a commercial for cunnilingus.” Shawn circled the phrase and wrote, “This has to come out. We can’t or won’t print it.” Whitworth recalled that in all the years he worked at The New Yorker, he never saw Shawn make such an adamant decree; it was his customary style to try to get his way via gentle persuasion.
Late in 1978 a film was released that Pauline thought had a good deal of the guts and vision that the decade’s greatest films had shown. Michael Cimino’s second feature, The Deer Hunter, concerned a group of Pennsylvania steel-mill workers whose lives are shattered by their experience serving in Vietnam. Robert De Niro starred as the distant, mysterious Michael, who saves his buddy Nick (Christopher Walken) when they are captured by the Vietcong and, in the movie’s most harrowing sequence, forced to play a deadly game of Russian roulette. As a director, Cimino was not afraid to be expansive: the Russian Orthodox wedding sequence, which became famous, went on for twenty-five minutes. (Rutanya Alda, who played the bride, Angela, recalled that the filming of it required sixteen- and eighteen-hour working days, with Cimino shooting all of the rehearsals to catch the most spontaneous moments.) Pauline thought the film’s “long takes and sweeping, panning movements are like visual equivalents of Bruckner and Mahler: majestic, yet muffled,” and that despite its structural flaws, it was “an astonishing