Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [223]
At The New Yorker, meanwhile, Terrence Rafferty had been moved into the first-ranking film critic’s position. Initially, Pauline had supported him, but she grew to believe that his approach was too dry and that he wasn’t focusing on the right movies or responding to them in the proper way. To back up Rafferty, Robert Gottlieb hired Pauline’s friend Michael Sragow. She was delighted that James Wolcott had landed a staff position at the award-winning Texas Monthly—one of the smartest magazines around. She prodded Polly Frost in the direction of movie criticism, and Frost eventually began reviewing for Harper’s Bazaar and Elle. Pauline regularly read Steve Vineberg’s work for The Threepenny Review, and encouraged his work as a stage director. She came to see a production of John Guare’s Marco Polo Sings a Solo that Vineberg staged, and urged him to move to New York to try his work as a director full-time; she was baffled when he told her that he loved his job at the College of the Holy Cross and wanted to keep it. The passing of time had done nothing to diminish her disdain for academic life.
There remained a serious degree of competition among the Paulettes, one that heated up if it was felt that she was favoring one—as when she recommended David Edelstein over the others for a series of positions. (She began telling friends that she thought Edelstein should succeed Terrence Rafferty at The New Yorker.) Often, there were extreme tensions in the Great Barrington house if a group of Paulettes had been invited for a weekend; the sense of competitiveness over who was closest to Pauline was almost palpable. One person who remained wary of many of the rowdier and more outspoken Paulettes was Gina, who regarded some of them as users and manipulators, and was skeptical about her mother’s intense engagement with them.
Many of the Paulettes were hesitant about introducing their wives and girlfriends to their mentor. When James Wolcott became seriously involved with the talented writer and editor Laura Jacobs, who eventually became his wife, he told her that he wasn’t going to introduce her to Pauline because Pauline wouldn’t like her. Besides Polly Frost, however, she was fond of Stephanie Zacharek, another critic for The Boston Phoenix, who eventually married the film critic and essayist Charles Taylor, whose career Pauline had followed with interest for some time. Zacharek had idolized Pauline when she was growing up, and the day that Taylor took her to meet Pauline in Great Barrington, Zacharek was extremely nervous. She was an attractive redhead, and Pauline put her at ease immediately by opening the door and saying, “Oh—you have Annette O’Toole’s hair!”
Oddly enough, she had rather kind feelings toward Molly Haskell, who was married to her chief agitator, Andrew Sarris. Pauline was quick to point out that she thought Sarris had a lively intelligence, and that she had refrained from commenting on his work after “Circles and Squares”—the so-called feud between them was mostly maintained by Sarris over the years. “Pauline felt that Molly, once she married Sarris, really hampered herself,” observed Wolcott, “because there was no way that she was not going to bow to his greater authority. She felt that Molly never became the critic she might have been, because she took up so many of Andy’s tastes and sensibilities. Even when she differed, she had to explain why she differed.”
Similarly, Pauline often regretted that the wives of important artists took such a backseat to their husbands. When she had dinner with Satyajit Ray, a director whose work she had admired for decades, she found his wife, Bijoya, to be extremely bright and poised. But she noticed that when Ray began to speak, Bijoya became silently adoring. At one point in their conversation, Pauline mildly challenged one of Ray’s opinions about a movie. The director froze, and his wife gave Pauline a look to indicate