Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [178]
Many people who knew her well speculated that her hiring by Paramount had all been part of an elaborate plan by Beatty after her damning review of Heaven Can Wait. “Warren’s power to charm cannot be overestimated,” observed the actor-writer Buck Henry. “Everyone he has ever worked with has had knock-down drag-out fights with him, and yet they—or at least many of them—come back for more. And the fact is that he is great fun to spend time with when there isn’t some horrible problem.” Pauline, however, seems never to have accused Beatty of tricking her. In interviews after leaving Hollywood, she always stressed how fairly and decently she had been treated by Beatty. She gently dismissed the whole matter by saying that she had underestimated the demands of movie producing—that she had realized, early on, that she was not the kind of person to corral a group of creative people and ride herd on them until they did what she wanted. “An awful lot of the time in Hollywood was spent mulling over the same things,” she said, “because you talk to people and two days later they come back and talk over the same problems, and I got very impatient. It’s hard not to show it.”
There was truth in all of this—but the biggest truth of all was that she simply missed writing, and the power base that had gone with it. Now that she gotten a close view of what went on in Hollywood, she felt that she had gained an advantage that no other film critic really had. Now she really knew something about how movies were—or weren’t—made, and she could impart that knowledge to her readers. She did discuss other career possibilities—Kenneth Ziffren recalled that there was some talk about how she might use her talents effectively in the theater—but in the end, she decided that what she wanted most was to return to The New Yorker.
While she was still in Hollywood, she had lunch with Paul Schrader at Nickodell’s, an old-time Melrose Place restaurant that was the unofficial commissary of Paramount Pictures. Once they had gotten settled in, Schrader explained his reason for wanting to see her. Pauline had commented to someone at an industry party that he was a good writer who would never make a good director. From Schrader’s viewpoint, this was extremely damaging: She was, after all, speaking not to her readers in the pages of The New Yorker but to people in the movie business who would make decisions about whether or not to hire him. “You are trying to destroy my career from the inside,” Schrader told her, “and I’ve got to call you on it.” Schrader recalls that Pauline gave him a “typical kind of mealy-mouthed response—‘I didn’t really mean it that way’—like any politician.”
In the meantime, The New Yorker was having some rather public problems of its own. In March, shortly after Pauline had written her farewell review of The Warriors, the magazine had published a profile of the celebrated British author Graham Greene, written by Penelope Gilliatt. In April, William Shawn received a letter from the writer Michael Mewshaw, who offered compelling evidence that Gilliatt was guilty of plagiarism: Entire sentences and phrases, as well as a number of paraphrased ideas and sentences, had been lifted directly from an article Mewshaw had written for The Nation in mid-1977, one that was later reprinted in both The London Magazine and the Italian publication Grazia. Gilliatt’s final paragraph had consisted of fourteen sentences, eight of which were stolen from Mewshaw. Mewshaw’s attorney had urged him to pursue high-cost damages, but because the magazine had a high reputation, and because it had run positive reviews of two of his novels, Mewshaw asked Shawn for only $1,000, in addition to a printed acknowledgment that Gilliatt had plagiarized his piece.
A few days later Shawn received a letter from Graham