Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [187]
Pauline was annoyed the following year when the eight Academy Award nominations for The Elephant Man did not include one for Freddie Francis’s cinematography. She was also upset that the Academy ignored her new favorite, Debra Winger, for Urban Cowboy. At the New York Film Critics Circle voting that year, she had gotten behind Melvin and Howard, her friend Irvin Kershner’s sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and—inexplicably—Dressed to Kill for Best Picture; O’Toole, Alan King (for Sidney Lumet’s comedy Just Tell Me What You Want), and Kurt Russell (for Used Cars) for Best Actor; Debra Winger, Mary Steenburgen, Dyan Cannon (for Honeysuckle Rose), and Shelley Duvall (as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s film of the famous comic strip Popeye), for Best Actress. She was chagrined when Ordinary People took the prize for Best Picture, but happy that Melvin and Howard earned citations for Best Director (Jonathan Demme) and Best Screenplay (Bo Goldman).
At The New Yorker Pauline had been edited for some time by Gardner Botsford, someone she was fond of, but eventually there was a reshuffling, and Daniel Menaker was assigned to her. It seemed a good fit: Menaker, who had started at the magazine in 1969 as a fact-checker, was a longtime movie fan, and he was bright and eager to succeed. “I would say that of all of the nonfiction writers I worked with, there certainly was no one else with whom I did less,” recalled Menaker. He noticed early on that she wasn’t seeking from her editor a response to the content of what she wrote. “She wanted someone to help make sure her inflections and feelings were what she meant them to be,” Menaker recalled. “She would be more likely to say, rather than ‘Do you think a comma should go there?,’ ‘Do you think people will get the fact that I sort of admired, but also had real questions about, this particular actor?’ It was more like tonalities. It wasn’t like editing. Well, I guess it was, in a way—she knew what I meant. I was more like a reader or a sounding board or an audience.”
Pauline was well liked by the magazine’s support staff—the copy editors, fact-checkers, and messengers who were more or less at her service. Her rapport with them was not unlike Joan Crawford’s camaraderie with the crew members on her movies. “I don’t think she had a snobby bone in her body toward such people,” said Menaker. “But these people were no threat to her. She had a good common touch, a good, decent comportment with them. There were occasions when I saw her get kind of cross in one way or another, but she very seldom got angry. What she would do is look or act sort of bewildered or flummoxed, and that was a sign of her displeasure.” Most often, Pauline would become aggravated when a fact-checker had unintentionally given away something in a review to a source, but she seldom made an issue out of it.
To close friends Pauline complained that Shawn had, in a subtle way, been treating her differently since her return from Hollywood. Perhaps, having been persuaded despite his original instincts to take her back, he felt compelled to convey his disapproval in other ways. Once it seemed that he might have gotten some degree of perverse enjoyment out of their wrangles over copy—he was well known for being susceptible to the emotional demands of many of the women on the staff. Now he seemed much of the time to avoid her. “She loved to provoke Shawn,” remembered Menaker. “Pauline would put stuff in to madden him—I think she’d even say, ‘This will get his goat.’ ” But Shawn