Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [46]
Do you really want to be endlessly confirmed in the opinions you already hold? Don’t you even want to hear a good case made for other points of view, so that you can test and sharpen your own theories? . . . I sometimes get the impression that KPFA likes the loose, vague, tiresome political interviews and discussions because they make the station seem like an open platform for anyone who wants to talk. I think this impression is deceptive because so much of the talk seems to be of the same general nature. The consequences of this kind of programming are that the air is full of droning sounds, that no other speakers are obtainable. More likely, no one from KPFA has ever approached them.
She had also grown weary of the station management’s continued prodding of their unpaid commentators to make on-air pitches for donations and to recruit new subscribers:
And you I suppose will go on guiltily turning your dollars over to this station, feeling that with each contribution you are a better person for it. You’re paying off the liberal debt. You feel as if you’re really doing something even if no one will tell you exactly what. It’s all a big union of self-sacrificing dedicated staff and self-sacrificial listeners. A kind of osmosis. They give you guilt. You give them money.
KPFA’s management was stunned by this public airing of grievances, although it was really no different from what she had long been saying to them directly. Relations between Pauline and Trevor Thomas deteriorated until finally she decided she had had enough, and on her March 27, 1963, broadcast, she resigned over the air. She calculated that she had delivered around one million words over the station’s airwaves, and she had come to the conclusion that “a million words delivered without remuneration is a rather major folly.” After considering the matter, she had decided that “if KPFA is not a station where we can have open discussions of station policy and get answers to questions, then I see no reason to donate my time.... If they want me back on the air, they can pay me. . . . After a million words for love, I think I should turn professional.”
The response from listeners was overwhelming; Thomson received so many canceled subscriptions and angry letters accusing him of suppression that he had to send out a form letter, assuring subscribers that Pauline had not been fired, “although some of her charges made that an attractive possibility.” Thomas went on to assure listeners that Pauline was welcome to return to the station anytime she liked.
In 1963 Pauline applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to support her during the writing of a book she had been contemplating for some time. She planned it as a serious look at the state of contemporary movies, with special emphasis on the audience’s response to them—a particular interest of hers—and what that response said about the way the culture was changing. In spite of the fact that she had regularly badgered him in her essays, she lost no time in contacting Esquire’s Dwight Macdonald for a letter of reference. Although Pauline considered herself the better writer of the two, she was fond of Macdonald; their frequently opposing views of many of the new movies had not derailed their mutual respect for each other. (Macdonald’s son Nick had also developed a crush on Gina.) In the fall of 1963 Macdonald wrote to Pauline, “Despite your implacable harassment of me in print, I have, as a good Christian atheist, turned the other cheek and written a fulsome recommendation of your project to the Guggenheim people.” He told her that he hoped she got the fellowship because her project was “one of the best I’ve read in many years of (mostly unsuccessful) recommending people for Gug-genheims. Maybe THE best.” In his letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, Macdonald wrote that Pauline was right when she said in her application that “the most urgent task for American film criticism” was to provide “a rationale