Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [29]
He became modest and shy. All the fun had gone out of things: there was no one to quarrel with and shout at; he didn’t have to convince people of his genius—they all agreed with him.
Benjamin becomes morbidly depressed. He longs for the days when someone would say something derogatory about his books. He gets what he’s looking for in Amanda Magill, a glamorous, sharp-tongued reviewer who sums up his life by writing: “Mr. Benjamin Burl’s infatuation with himself has become a national romance.” Amanda has a genius for pointing out to Benjamin that he is a fraud whose talent consists of indulging in literary tricks. The story synopsis ends with Amanda standing over Benjamin as he begins a new novel, smiling, shaking her head and pronouncing, “no”—much to Benjamin’s delight.
All in all, “The Brash Young Man” consisted of a seventeen-page synopsis, but it took one of Columbia’s readers only a little more than three pages to dismiss it: “about the substance and quality of a slick-paper magazine story.” The reader offered a plot rewrite that would conform more closely to the commercial formula for a big-screen romantic comedy but ended with the observation that “its first best chance would be with the magazines.” “The Brash Young Man” went nowhere, but it is quite revealing about Pauline’s own defensiveness where her career was concerned, her frustration at having her talents consistently overlooked, and her fears of what commercial success might bring.
The next several years were to be among the leanest and most stressful of Pauline’s life. They were marked by a maze of unfortunate jobs, taken only out of the desperate need to provide for her daughter. In 1951 a doctor examining Gina detected a heart murmur, and it was eventually discovered that she had been born with a congenital defect: a sizable hole that would require delicate and complicated surgery. Pauline, devastated, had already faced times when she couldn’t scrape together enough money to stay ahead of the rent and keep herself and her daughter properly fed; now she was facing a potentially crippling mountain of medical bills. The consensus was that it might be better to wait to perform the necessary surgery until Gina was a little older and stronger. Anxiety over Gina’s health became a constant in Pauline’s life.
It also signaled the real beginning of what was to be a deep, lifelong, mutually dependent bond between mother and daughter. Many of Pauline’s friends, sometimes teasingly, sometimes seriously, often told her that she was a classic Jewish mother. What they appeared to mean was that she was a nervous mother, worrying over her daughter’s condition. But as Gina grew older, friends and family members sensed another characteristic of classic Jewish motherhood: the conviction that her child was destined to be some kind of creative genius.
While she was determined to see to it that the health issues that threatened Gina were vanquished, having a fragile daughter fulfilled her needs in some way that she could never quite bring herself to admit to anyone. All her life she had wanted to be at the center of someone’s universe—but on her own strict terms. The spell that Gian Carlo Menotti noted that she cast over Bob Horan had faded; by now Horan’s relationship with Menotti and Barber had run aground, and he was no longer a member of the household at Capricorn, all of which had triggered a nervous collapse. Robert Duncan, too, had pulled away from her and gone his own way. In the early 1950s Pauline might have been unsure of most aspects of her future, but she was certain of one thing: Gina needed her more than anyone else ever had.
On November 21, 1952, Judith Kael died at the age of sixty-seven, after a long battle with cancer. Both Philip and Louis were living in Los Angeles by this time, so responsibility for looking after their mother had fallen to Rose, Anne, and Pauline. Most of the caring for Judith seems to have been absorbed by Rose, which served only to heighten the animosity between her