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By Root 2163 0

of the sixties was lost on me—this kind of movie never made it to the Tillamook Coliseum—but I devoured “Notes on 280 Movies” at the back of the book. Movie criticism to me meant the reviews in The Oregonian, written by the local critic, who, I could tell even at that early age, couldn’t write. But here was a woman who could—her sentences had such drive and pulse and snap that they took complete hold of me. I found I committed great chunks of them to memory, the way, as a good little schoolboy, you’re supposed to memorize “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. I knew, of course, that at Beaver Elementary School, you couldn’t really stand up in the classroom and recite, “Author-director Joseph Mankiewicz’s bad taste, exhibited with verve, is more fun than careful, mousy, dehydrated good taste,” and not expect your classmates to wonder if you’d lost it. So I kept reading Pauline Kael quietly. This wasn’t diligent reading, like my progression through the novels of John Steinbeck. This was impassioned reading.

When I was eighteen, my parents gave me a subscription to The New Yorker, and all through college—the late 1970s and early 1980s, I went to the movies with a kind of breathless excitement; there were very few films that opened in my little college town that I didn’t see. And Pauline Kael was my guide. She explained things to me, introduced me to things I hadn’t seen, angered me when I thought she’d been unfair or prejudiced. Best of all, by her example, she toughened me up intellectually. I don’t know at which point it occurred to me that I really didn’t know much about her life, beyond the bare externals that she revealed in interviews—her pride in her West Coast roots, her preference for country living over New York City—but I wondered why, with the unceasing flow of biographies, no one had attempted to write the story of Kael’s life. Partly, I found out, it was because she had consistently discouraged any such attempts. She had memorably stated her position in the introduction to her final published collection, For Keeps, in 1994: “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” I took her point. Pauline’s life was not a highly dramatic or even a particularly eventful one in terms of marriages and love affairs. I discovered to my surprise that she had not traveled widely, and that her curiosity had been unflagging but in some ways oddly limited. Her life had been consumed by reading and going to the movies and writing about them. Still, she had known many important and gifted people in both the moviemaking and literary worlds, and she had lived through, responded to, and influenced some very exciting times. Maybe her life wouldn’t make a book that was chock-full of thrilling events. But I was sure there was a way to show how her life was really a spectacular playing out of her own artistic enthusiasms, to show how she interacted with the changing world of movies.

There were a few disappointments along the way. I sought the cooperation of Pauline’s daughter, Gina James. She promised she would give the matter serious thought, but eventually decided against participating in any way. She was a kind and friendly presence on the other end of the phone, however, and to my knowledge she has not done anything to stand in the way of the book. For that I am grateful to her.

The majority of Pauline’s friends wanted to talk about her, wanted to talk about what she had brought into their lives, and what they missed about her now that she was gone.

Much of my central research was conducted at Pauline’s archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. This is a wonderful institution I have made use of while working on earlier books, and I am grateful to the Lilly’s courteous, efficient, supportive staff. For someone who claimed she didn’t want a biography written, Pauline preserved much of her past meticulously. My thanks to Indiana University for giving it such a good home, and for maintaining it so well.

As I delved into the film history of the 1960s and