Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [180]
She was stunned when she discovered that Shawn did not want her to rejoin the staff. She had assumed that, given her reputation, it would be relatively easy to work out the details. Her fame was at its height. Her new publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, where Billy Abrahams had recently moved, was preparing to bring out her new collection. And now, after all she had done to raise the magazine’s visibility and attract younger readers, Shawn was saying he didn’t want her.
Pauline delivered the shocking news to the staff editor William Whitworth, who immediately went to Shawn’s office to discuss the matter. It was an unwritten rule that one was not supposed to question Shawn’s staff decisions, but Whitworth managed to bring up the matter of Pauline tactfully. “He went into a long explanation that she had corrupted herself by adopting the ways and standards of Hollywood,” Whitworth remembered. “He talked for some time. When something was immoral, that was one of the magic words for him—‘corrupted.’ He would explain it to you like a teacher or a theologian—at length. I went away just stunned. It was so unexpected and impractical. This was when movies were really something in the culture. I just thought she was tremendously important to us.”
Whitworth appealed to Shawn a few days later, pointing out that the leave of absence that Pauline had taken implied that she would be able to return when her Hollywood period was finished. It was the kind of point of honor on which Shawn was always quite vulnerable, and after listening to Whitworth’s entreaties, he reluctantly agreed that Pauline could resume her position. Eventually it was worked out that she would begin writing full-time for the magazine in the fall of 1980.
In the years to come Pauline would always be extremely reticent about the details of her time in Hollywood. If pressed by an interviewer, she would give her own carefully orchestrated version of what had transpired, but the experience had clearly left its mark on her. As Jeanine Basinger said, “I had the feeling that what had happened to her there shocked her. She was not a woman who failed at things. She had a sense of shame and failure, and I think she buried it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In April 1980 Holt, Rinehart and Winston brought out Pauline’s new collection of reviews, titled When the Lights Go Down (a title suggested by a stranger she met a dinner party in Los Angeles). The new volume covered her reviews and essays from July 1975 to March 1979. Now that her reputation as America’s foremost movie critic seemed all but unassailable, it was ironic that she could no longer expect unqualified raves when she published a new book. Her impact and influence had to be examined closely for subtext and possible negative influences.
Taking note of her increasing tendency to rhapsodize on the page, Michael Wood in The New York Times Book Review wrote, “What has happened, I think, is not that she has lost her touch or her taste, but that she has tried to ride her enthusiasms too hard and her astringent language won’t take it. I can’t think of a single bad film she’s praised, but her recent work is littered with extravagant claims for merely amiable or seriously skewed movies.” Wood pointed out, in his largely favorable review, that she was extremely persuasive about audiences’ potentially damaging leeriness about violence in “Fear of Movies,” and he stressed, “Whatever mellowness has crept into