Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [198]
Pauline was also baffled by the latest appearance of Robert De Niro, one of the screen actors in whom she had placed the most hope. De Niro was reunited with Martin Scorsese for The King of Comedy, in which the actor played a sociopath named Rupert Pupkin, who wants nothing more than to become a star TV comic. He obsessively worships Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), star of a Johnny Carson–style late-night program, and when he has exhausted every possible attempt to get Langford to pay attention to him, Rupert kidnaps the star, telling the police he will release him only in exchange for a ten-minute spot on the show.
The King of Comedy turned out to be far more prescient about the future of television than Network ever dreamed of being: Rupert does indeed make a hit with the audience, gets a big book deal, and lands on the cover of several national magazines after serving only a light sentence. At the end of the film, Jerry Langford walks past a store window and sees Rupert on TV. The movie presaged Morton Downey, Jr., and Monica Lewinsky—figures who took the low road as a way of spinning celebrity.
But Pauline dismissed The King of Comedy as “quiet and empty,” and she thought that Scorsese “designs his own form of alienation in this movie—it seems to teeter between jokiness and hate.” Most surprising was her view of De Niro, whom she felt gave a hollow, chilly performance as Pupkin, never endowing him the sort of humanity that might trigger a strong emotional response in the audience. What De Niro achieved in The King of Comedy, she believed, was close to what he had done in Raging Bull. It was “anti-acting”:
Performers such as John Barrymore and Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier have delighted in putting on beards and false noses, yet, no matter how heavy the disguise, they didn’t disappear; they still had spirit, and we could feel the pleasure that they took in playing foul, crookback monsters and misers—drawing us inside and revealing the terrors of the misshapen, the deluded. A great actor merges his soul with that of his characters—or, at least, gives us the illusion that he does. De Niro in disguise denies his characters a soul. It’s not merely that he hollows himself out and becomes Jake La Motta, or Des the priest in True Confessions, or Rupert Pupkin—he makes them hollow, too, and merges with the character’s emptiness.
Since they met in 1980, Gina’s relationship with Warner Friedman had blossomed, and on March 17, 1982, she gave birth to their son, William James. Like Pauline, Gina had a deep desire to have a child, but she was not entirely certain about marriage. Then, on Will’s first birthday, Friedman and Gina invited a group of friends, including Pauline, over to celebrate at Friedman’s house in Sheffield, Massachusetts. He had secretly called a justice of the peace to show up and marry him and Gina before the gathering, and when he announced his plan, Pauline’s voice emerged loud and clear from the group: “Oh, shit.” She was no less skeptical about marriage than she had ever been—and the thought that Friedman would now have an even greater claim on Gina’s attention was jarring to her.
Friedman and Pauline often disagreed. She became very angry one evening when he said that all actors were stupid, and on another occasion when, after several drinks, he pronounced, “Movies are not art.” He characterized Pauline’s relationship with Gina as “a distant closeness” and recognized that, as independent as Pauline was, she needed Gina to be close by. Gina, for her part, clearly harbored certain resentments against Pauline. She was angry with herself that she had not rebelled against her mother and insisted on having a proper education—a point on which many of Pauline’s friends sympathized with her. Mother and daughter had one important trait in common: they were both self-contained about their emotions, very conscious of not allowing tensions between them to be played out before others. Friedman