Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [229]
Her vision’s done much to aesthetize.
Here’s to Orson and Bogie and Katie,
And towering over them, Pauline at 80.
In telephone conversations with a number of old friends and colleagues, she expressed regret that she might have treated them unfairly when she was in her heyday. In September 2000, Carrie Rickey received a call from a mutual friend, Francis Davis, who told her that Pauline wanted to speak with her. Rickey called the house in Great Barrington, and in the course of a ninety-minute conversation, Pauline at one point said, “I don’t know what you know, but I know I’ve done some things to you that were not okay.” Rickey told her that it was all in the past and not to burden herself with it. After she hung up the phone, she wept uncontrollably—she had had the conciliatory conversation with Pauline that she had never been able to have with her own mother.
An endless stream of writers still sought her out for interviews, demanding to know what she thought of the current stream of films and directors. There was still an army of readers who felt cut adrift without her to lean on as their guide to the world of moviemaking. Two of the more prominent were Francis Davis, who recorded a lengthy conversation with her that he eventually published in book form as Afterglow, and Susie Linfield, a respected New York journalist and professor who requested Pauline’s permission to write a full-scale biography. Linfield conceived of her book as more of an interior look at Pauline’s life than a conventional biography, and sent Pauline a lengthy and well-presented proposal, but Pauline declined to participate.
In the spring of 2001 Pauline received word that she had been chosen for a prestigious fellowship administered by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program. The Distinguished Lectureship in Criticism, which had previously gone to writers such as Patricia Bosworth and Pauline’s friend Arlene Croce, offered an honorarium of $20,000, to be paid that September, and required one visit to Columbia in the fall or spring semesters, during which time she would present a lecture to the elite of Columbia’s community. Given the state of her health, it was arranged that the balance of her participation would take place via teleconferencing and videoconferencing from Great Barrington. Pauline was as happy about the cash prize as she was about the honor, and she looked forward to the presentation of the fellowship, scheduled for October 4 at Columbia’s Kathryn Miller Bache Theater.
In late August 2001, Polly Frost was sitting with Pauline at her bedside. Frost had never seen Will’s favorite film, Braveheart, and when he began agitating for her to watch it with him, Frost said to Pauline that she thought it was the right thing to do. At one point, the leading lady, Sophie Marceau, lashed out at Mel Gibson. “You tell him, girlie!” whispered Pauline, like the 1930s heroine she had always imagined herself being.
Her friend Dennis Delrogh had been to see Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Redux, with much original footage restored. Delrogh pointed out that Andrew Sarris still hadn’t liked the movie.
“Of course,” said Pauline. “He’s smart.”
Around the same time, Pauline’s old friend Erhard Dortmund telephoned her from Oregon to ask how she was feeling. The nurse brought the telephone to her. After a few whispered exchanges, Pauline asked Dortmund what he was reading. As it happened, he was in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.
On Monday, September 3, 2001, Michael Sragow telephoned Pauline at home. Her voice was weaker than ever, but she told him that Gina had been taking very good care of her. They spoke a bit about mutual friends, including Lamont Johnson. “Isn’t he amazing?” Pauline whispered. Sragow could tell it was impossible for her to speak for much longer, and told her goodbye.
A little less than two hours later, Craig Seligman telephoned Sragow to tell him Pauline had died.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
On November 30, 2001, a memorial tribute to Pauline was presented at the Walter