Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [30]
Pauline stumbled along in her writing life. She was accumulating a pile of play scripts, comedies mostly, but she seemed to realize that they weren’t as good as they needed to be. She kept scribbling away in what spare time she could find in the middle of the constant chaos of trying to make ends meet. She coached students in a wide range of subjects. She ran a laundry and tailoring business, Kent Cleaners, just off Market Street in San Francisco, which entailed an inconvenient streetcar ride from her apartment. She took on ghostwriting assignments from time to time.
Still, she prided herself on being able to make do with little. Her struggles didn’t make her hell-bent on success; in some ways, they seemed to deepen her natural distrust of people with money. Decades later, Pauline was chatting with her son-in-law, Warner Friedman, about the whole nature of struggle and hard times.
“I was never hungry in my life,” said Warner.
Pauline went silent and stared at him for a long moment.
“You never were?” she finally asked, stunned and a little angry.
Even when things were at their worst, Pauline had one constant source of pleasure—going to the movies. The end of World War II had signaled the beginning of a new era in American moviegoing. During the war, most of the major Hollywood studios had lost tremendous ground abroad because the European markets were all but closed during hostilities, leaving Holly wood’s export efforts concentrated on the United Kingdom and Latin America. European filmmaking was by necessity cut back dramatically while the war was on, but there were some remarkable examples of filmmaking under duress—notably Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis, made during the occupation of Paris, and Roberto Rossellini’s stunning Rome, Open City, filmed while the Allied and Axis forces were shooting it out in the streets of Rome. With the end of the war there was suddenly a generous supply of foreign films pouring into the United States. American audiences were now finding their way to movies like Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, whose unvarnished honesty was a welcome change to the surfeit of overglamorized, manipulative Hollywood products, full of crashing Max Steiner scores, gauzy photography, and implausible happy endings. Pauline had fallen under the spell of de Sica and the other Italian neorealists while she was still involved with James Broughton. De Sica’s Shoeshine had actually been one of her indelible movie-going experiences:
When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, “Well, I don’t see what was so special about that movie.” I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel? . . . Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine, did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.
But it was a movie Pauline disliked that was to provide the unexpected turning point in this difficult phase of her life. In the fall of 1952, as she and a friend were sitting in a Berkeley coffeehouse arguing about a film they had both seen recently, sitting nearby was Peter D. Martin, who recently had launched a magazine, City Lights, devoted to film commentary. Martin was intrigued by the stream of articulate, independent opinion he heard Pauline expressing, and he asked her if she would like to review the new Chaplin picture, Limelight, for City Lights.
Limelight was a heavy-handed, strangely charmless tale of a down-at-the-heels English comic, Calvero (played by Chaplin), written