Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [173]
Beatty presented her with a persuasive argument for heading west: Wouldn’t it be much better, instead of pointing out where movies had gone wrong after they had been made, if she could perform the same function by analyzing the scripts and advising on casting before production began? Pauline pondered the decision for a long time, and when she learned that the first project she would work on was a James Toback picture called Love and Money that Beatty’s company was set to make, she became much more interested. Love and Money was a noirish drama about a Los Angeles bank employee who becomes involved in financial and political intrigue in Central America. Pauline, believing Toback to be an artist who hadn’t yet been allowed the opportunity to hit his full creative stride, now saw an opportunity to help him. Negotiations between her lawyer, Kenneth Ziffren, and Beatty’s legal team began.
It was not a decision she entered into lightly. Many critics dreamed of going to Hollywood, and most of them, it seemed, had a script tucked away in a drawer, ready to show at the right moment to the stars and directors with whom they came in contact. Some had actually developed serious screenwriting careers, such as Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times movie critic from 1936 to 1940, who had gone west and written John Wayne pictures such as Fort Apache and The Quiet Man. James Agee had worked on an even higher level with the scripts for The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.
With Penelope Gilliatt still occupying her post for half the year, Pauline did not feel that she owed unwavering loyalty to The New Yorker. She had been explicit about her feelings on the matter, and William Shawn had refused to listen—getting rid of Gilliatt seemed something he simply could not and did not want to do. She met with Shawn and told him of her decision. After offering some basic words of caution about the dangers of venturing into the viper’s nest of Hollywood production, he agreed to a leave of absence.
It is surprising that, knowing as much as she did about Hollywood politics, Pauline felt confident in her choice. But she was nearly sixty, aching for a change of pace, and she felt it was then or never. Many of her friends at The New Yorker were saddened by her decision—it felt as if an era was ending, and indeed it was, in more ways than one. Around the time she filed her last column, Nora Ephron wrote to tell her how much she would miss reading her. Her old nemesis Ray Stark also contacted her: “Now we can be friends again—I hope.”
A number of people close to her attempted to talk her out of her plan. Whatever problems she had encountered at The New Yorker, after all, she had essentially been in the company of gentlemen and gentlewomen—too much so, at times, for her taste and temperament. She believed she had been too tough for The New Yorker, and she believed that she was tough enough to withstand anything that Hollywood could hand her. Warren Beatty was famous for being a master manipulator, and several friends warned her that he probably wanted to bring her out to Hollywood to neutralize her. “He wanted to hunt her down, and get her,” observed Paul Schrader. “If she was a twenty-two-year-old starlet, he would get her in one way. If she was a sixty-year-old film critic, he would get her another way.” But Pauline was an enthusiast, and with enthusiasm went a certain naïveté that does not exist in the heart of a true cynic.
On the occasion of her departure, the fact-checking department composed an extended limerick, with numerous jabs at Penelope Gilliatt:
There was a fine writer named