Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [199]
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For some years Billy Abrahams had been urging Pauline to publish a collection of her capsule reviews, which by now were an institution in The New Yorker’s front-of-book section. She had amassed more than eleven thousand of these pieces, some of them dating back to her days writing program notes for the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Noting the success that Leonard Maltin had had with his own collection of brief reviews, Abrahams urged her to gather her own, and when it became clear that Lays of Ancient Hollywood would not materialize, the project became a priority. Videocassettes of movies were soon to hit the market, and Abrahams knew that if movies on tape led to the anticipated revolution in home viewing, Pauline’s book was likely to be very popular indeed. She chose the title herself—5001 Nights at the Movies. Assembling and editing the collection was a massive task, but when Holt, Rinehart and Winston brought it out in 1982, The Boston Globe’s Mark Sweeney called it “an incomparable dip-in book,” and the Chicago Tribune’s Richard Christiansen dubbed it “a browser’s delight.” It sold very well and eventually had even greater success as a paperback—the only thing that baffled readers was the inclusion of movies such as Car Wash and Straight, Place and Show, with the Ritz Brothers—at the expense of staples such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that she altered her view of at least one film, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang she had called it “one of the most profound emotional experiences in the history of film”; now she still found it great, but qualified her opinion, judging that the slow rhythm might make viewers feel that they were “dying with the priest. The film may raise the question in your mind: Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is?”
Whatever her feelings about the quality of the films she was reviewing, Pauline’s enthusiasm for writing was undiminished. William Whitworth once observed that of all the staff writers at The New Yorker, no one exhibited the zeal for sitting down to work that she did. By now she was no longer pleased with Daniel Menaker as her direct editor, and requested that he be replaced. William Shawn called Menaker in and said, “I don’t want you to take this personally. You lasted a long time with her. But Miss Kael feels that you may not have the time and attention to give her the sort of editorial help she needs.” Pauline’s idea of the attention she wished for from an editor primarily involved sitting in her office and reading her column aloud to him, with a small electric fan blowing behind her. “Whenever she came across something that she felt didn’t sound like her, she would change it. I had been learning all along from other writers that when you have a genuine voice, you have to listen to it and listen to it carefully. The dark side of that was incredible tedium, after a while. It was more like being a silent witness than it was being an editor. I suppose my impatience showed through.”
In 1983 Pauline received the Award for Distinguished Journalism from the Newswomen’s Club of New York. She was pleased by the honor, but she had continued to resist any feminist interpretation of her career. She was not comfortable with the increasing labeling of “male” and “female” art and culture and was also ill at ease with the streak of militant anger present in the thinking of so many hard-core feminists. She thought, to paraphrase the writer Suzanne Gordon, that there was a great difference between male objectification and male appreciation, and she did not see that much good could come from the sexes being increasingly isolated from each other.
In June 1983 she turned sixty-four, and was conscious of a certain physical decline. That summer she suffered a long period of back pain