Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [36]
Despite all the reasons she shouldn’t have, Pauline married Edward Landberg. She later told friends that she had cried all through the ceremony, knowing that the marriage was a mistake. She also liked to tell the story that on their wedding night, Landberg fell asleep.
Gina’s observation that her mother never told the same story twice is borne out in Pauline’s puzzling and perverse account of her marriages. Although she delighted in confusing reporters by suggesting to them that she had married two or three times, she was married only once, to Landberg. “We were married for something like a year,” Landberg said decades later. “It was very brief. I didn’t find her sexually attractive, among other things. She was also very bossy, and it wasn’t a happy marriage. It was out of mutual interest.” (Attempts to track down a marriage certificate yielded nothing; Landberg claims not to remember where the marriage took place.) Friends and colleagues agreed that they were a bizarre match. “Pauline and Ed Landberg came for dinner one night,” remembered Ariel Parkinson. “They struck me as having a very tenuous relationship to one another. They weren’t on the same set of vibrations, really.”
Pauline did gain one important thing in her brief union with Landberg—a big step up in living quarters: a handsome, redwood-shingled two-story Craftsman home at 2419 Oregon Street in Berkeley. In the small front yard was a magnificent deodar cedar tree, and in the back was a small garden. The house had a decent-sized front room, a spacious living room with a separate dining area, a kitchen with redwood cabinets, and three upstairs bedrooms. Pauline loved it, and when she and Landberg purchased it, she lost no time in putting her own personal stamp on it, beginning with her vast assortment of books. The downstairs of the house was quite dark, but she had a remedy for that. Pauline was drawn to color, and for years she had been collecting a number of brilliant Tiffany lamps. At the time, they were regarded by many as gaudy junk, but Pauline made a point of picking them up for very little at garage sales and antique shops. She loved the bright, warm pools of light that they cast around the room. The kitchen floor was done in a pattern of bright, Harlequin-colored square tiles by Harry Jacobus: sea green, black, salmon, yellow, mauve. It became her house, not Landberg’s—and soon that was true in the literal sense. Out the back door, on the other side of the small garden, the newlyweds had a little couple’s house built. In a matter of months the marriage had become so rocky that it became Landberg’s new home; he came into the big house mostly for meals and to discuss Cinema Guild business with Pauline, but it was clear that their marriage was doomed. As Landberg bluntly put it, “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman.”
At the Cinema Guild, Pauline supervised all the details of presentation, taking great care to choose the music that was piped in before and in between screenings. Always she selected pieces that connected in some way to what was being shown. One thing she didn’t involve herself in were the theater’s financial affairs. That was Landberg’s territory, and he watched over it obsessively. At each showing of a movie he would stand in the back counting the heads in the audience. Then he would check the ticket count, and if the two numbers didn’t match, the theater staff was expected to make up the difference.
In 1956 Pauline turned out her finest essay to date. Originally published in The Berkeley Book of Modern Writing, No. 3 by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Movies, the Desperate Art” was a critical view of what Pauline felt was the deplorable level of expensive, wide-screen filmmaking in the mid-1950s. It was a chaotic period in Hollywood: The postwar demand for greater realism, and the rise of the Actors Studio in New York, with its emphasis on sense-memory as a way of creating an authentic, emotional moment pulled out of the actor’s personal past, had paved the way for more adult performers and subject