Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [19]
The composers were immediately taken with Horan and invited him to come to their apartment on East Ninety-fifth Street, where they gave him food and liquor, and invited him to spend the night. Horan protested that he couldn’t take them up on their offer because Pauline was waiting for him at Grand Central. But they persisted, and Horan quickly arranged for Pauline to stay with a friend on Fifth Avenue, while he moved in with Barber and Menotti—not just for a night but for the long term. The two composers gave him the affectionate nickname “Kinch.”
Pauline, left to make her own way in New York, would continue to have conflicted feelings about the degree to which Barber and Menotti had suddenly dominated Horan’s life. Finding herself feeling antagonistic toward them, she recorded some of her feelings in a series of notes that appear to have been preparation for a play script she wanted to write. The “trouble with Bob is he feels guilty. First, feels as tho [sic] he’s whoring,” she wrote. “All right—maybe these homos have fine rich mature relationships—what good is that going to do me? I can’t be a homo no matter how hard I try, or how commercial I get.” (The latter remark underscored her feelings that it was easier to break into New York’s artistic circles if you happened to be a gay man.) She accepted Horan’s attraction to men; what was more difficult for her to accept was the deepening influence that his new mentors had over him.
Horan’s defection left her feeling excluded, which marked the real beginning of her career-long antipathy toward New York and the East Coast artistic establishment. Her upbringing in rural California contrasted wildly with the backgrounds of so many writers and artists she was to meet during her early years in New York, many of whom had come up through the more traditional routes—a cosmopolitan childhood, tony prep schools, Ivy League universities—where they began to make the connections that would serve them later in their careers. By nature Pauline loved painting herself as a rebel, and she found that her Petaluma background was a great help in doing so.
What Pauline needed immediately, in order to survive in New York, was a job. She quickly found one—little to her liking—as governess for a wealthy East Side family. While it gave her access to literary teas and performances at the Metropolitan Opera, she loathed the work itself and resented the fact that she had to dress in proper sports clothes. “I haven’t invested a sou in pleasure clothes,” she wrote to Vi. “So anything you could send would be most gratefully snatched at—but for heaven’s sake, don’t send the taffeta if you can still look terrific in it.”
She was appalled by the cost of housing in New York City but managed to earn enough at her job to afford an apartment in the upper reaches of Park Avenue, just north of the street’s most elegant apartment houses, where the neighborhood began to melt into East Harlem. By late May she no longer had the governess’s post and was frantically looking for work. She spent a good deal of her spare time taking in art shows—and disliking much of what she saw, including an exhibition of Max Ernst’s paintings and the opening of a Henri Rousseau exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Most of the paintings she encountered only intensified her love of Picasso and Miró and Klee. The Nindorf Gallery boasted a generous selection of Klees, and Pauline found that every few weeks she returned there to “look at them all over and feel delighted.”
Sentimental 1940s movies mostly left her cold, although she enjoyed Bette Davis’s 1942 hit, Now, Voyager, which she later dubbed “a schlock classic,” and Casablanca, which had a “special, appealingly schlocky romanticism.” But she was repulsed by Mrs. Miniver, which