Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [227]
In January 1999 an article by the film director Wes Anderson appeared in The New York Times that many of her friends and followers found deeply insulting. “My Private Screening with Pauline Kael” described Anderson’s efforts to arrange a screening of his new film, Rushmore, for her at the Triplex in Great Barrington. Anderson seemed to have intended the piece to be wry, but it came across as mean-spirited and condescending, portraying Pauline as a frail, out-of-touch woman operating in a state of confusion. Anderson wrote a letter to the Times saying that he hadn’t intended to mock her. “I thought, when I read that, this is what’s wrong with Wes Anderson’s movies,” said Steve Vineberg. “The guy is tone deaf.”
As she grew older Pauline became increasingly hunched and began to shrink dramatically: By 2000 she had lost a total of four inches in height. She depended on friends to take her out to dinner and movies and support her to keep her from falling. The worst part about this, she said, laughing, was that she had to make deals to see movies she would otherwise have no interest in viewing: When she persuaded a friend to accompany her to American Psycho, she had to promise to go with that friend to see Keeping the Faith, starring Ben Stiller.
Stephanie Zacharek remembered that even as Pauline’s condition worsened, she seemed amazingly responsive to the world around her; her powers of observation had scarcely dimmed at all. “Sometimes, Charlie and I would go to little shops on the way out to visit her, and I would show her what I had bought—a scarf or something—and I would say, ‘Oh, my God, I shouldn’t be spending money right now.’ And she would say, ‘You have to buy these things when you’re young when you have the figure to wear them, because when you’re older, and you have the money, your figure will be gone.’” Even when she was feeling her worst, there were certain pleasurable constants in her life. Fresh flowers were always welcome—“They’re more delicious than food now,” she once told George and Elizabeth Malko.
As Pauline grew more fragile, her views softened: Pauline in the stormy weather of bad health was far more conciliatory than the Pauline of her younger, feistier days. Ray Sawhill and Polly Frost, David Edelstein, Silvana Nova, and Craig Seligman were on hand as much as possible to help out. Roy Blount, Jr., who lived nearby, was a loyal neighbor, always checking in to see if she needed anything done around the house. Steve Vineberg frequently drove her to doctor’s appointments at Massachusetts General. Once, Vineberg took his visiting mother and Pauline out to lunch at a restaurant in Great Barrington. As he drove along, his mother in the front seat and Pauline in the back, Pauline commented, “You look so restive sitting up there next to your mother. I wish I could sit with my mother.” It was the first time Vineberg could ever recall her mentioning Judith.
Several of Pauline’s other friends, however, noticeably dropped out. “A number of people around any diva start to think that that person’s like them, and start to project,” remarked Polly Frost. “And a good diva, like Pauline, allows people to project. It’s power. But Pauline couldn’t play Pauline anymore, and a lot of people disappeared.” They had seen the power player they desperately wanted her to be, but they hadn’t seen past the persona.
One night in Great Barrington, sometime in the late 1990s, she was having dinner with Taylor and Zacharek. Also dining in the restaurant was George Roy Hill, who also had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Their previous battles—even the letter that