Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [212]
Although Gleiberman was as flattered by Pauline’s attention as most of her protégés were, he also was very aware of the complexities involved in her mentorship. He believed that she was most comfortable when her younger “discoveries” did work she could respect and honestly praise, work that showed originality and spark, yet she was also quite conscious of keeping them in the position of being an acolyte. It was the same complex that David Denby had observed years earlier, and in many cases the fate of the Paulettes seemed to rest on the question of their individual temperament: How willing were they were to remain in Pauline’s shadow?
In the 1980s The Boston Phoenix served as a kind of farm team for the Paulettes who had their eye on success in bigger, New York jobs: Janet Maslin, Steven Schiff, and David Edelstein had all put in their time at the Phoenix before moving on to higher-profile reviewing posts. Gleiberman took this route as well, and had spent two and a half years on the newspaper, happily working as a second-string movie critic, when he received a call from Clay Felker. The genius behind New York was now in decline, and was trying to revive some of his lost glory by starting a small newspaper, a sort of precursor to the successful Seven Days, known as The East Side Express. He had read some of Gleiberman’s reviews in the Phoenix and asked him to be his first-string movie critic. Gleiberman agreed, staying on at the Phoenix while freelancing for Felker’s publication.
Once Gleiberman began working for the short-lived East Side Express, he found himself reviewing many of the same films Pauline wrote about for The New Yorker. Often he disagreed with her—Bob Fosse’s Star 80, which he liked and Pauline detested, being a case in point. His career advanced to the point that he was put up for membership in the National Society of Film Critics, which initially he was denied. When discussing his disappointment about that decision with Pauline one day, she told him that she felt that a number of the members had not believed his work for The East Side Express to be at the same level of what he was doing for the Phoenix.
“Nobody was reading my reviews in The East Side Express,” Gleiberman recalled. “They read what you sent in. I knew she was lying to me. And what I said to myself was, I cannot trust what she’s saying. And I decided right there to end my friendship with Pauline, because I realized that she would lie to her critic acolytes in order to keep them in line. She was a great, fascinating woman who had her dark side.” There was no dramatic falling-out between Pauline and Gleiberman; they remained on cordial but relatively distant terms for the rest of her life. But Gleiberman’s experience with her was as shocking, perhaps even traumatic, as, in a different way, Denby’s had been. Gleiberman always considered himself the truest of all the Paulettes because he had realized that he had to be himself. “To be true to what Pauline taught us,” he said, “you had to break with her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
For years one of the chief topics of conversation among staff members at The New Yorker had been the eventual retirement of William Shawn. There was much concern about the magazine’s lack of a succession plan. Given The New Yorker’s love of promoting from within, various staff members had been put forth as possible heirs to Shawn’s mantle, and all were deemed unsuitable for one reason or another. By the mid-1980s the magazine industry had changed as dramatically as the movie industry had: Few if any other publications now had the same degree of sensitivity about the separation of editorial and advertising departments. Making money and capturing the endlessly sought-after young demographic were more