Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [60]
“The Making of The Group” was the most ambitious project Pauline had undertaken, and the result was anything but a piece of conventional reportage. But by 1965 the movement that would come to be known as the “New Journalism” was under way with a new breed of journalists—Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Michael Herr—employing some of the storytelling techniques of fiction, turning reporting from something dutifully responsible into a highly personal and creative art, which, as the historian Marc Weingarten observed, “changed the way their readers viewed the world.”
The New Journalism movement had been evolving for years, but one article that put it center stage appeared in New York, the Sunday supplement of The New York Herald-Tribune, in April 1965. It was written by the young Tom Wolfe, and the name of it was “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”—an attack on the famously polished and discreet editorial practices of The New Yorker’s editor in chief, William Shawn. To a young renegade such as Wolfe, Shawn’s prudish tastes and obsessively controlled line editing had rendered a once-vital magazine rather dull. As journalism, “Tiny Mummies!” was pure provocation.
Pauline, who had always abhorred the idea of an objective tone in her critical writing, was intrigued by the New Journalists, and “The Making of The Group” was very much in step with their methods. In Picture, her celebrated 1951 account of the filming of MGM’s The Red Badge of Courage, Lillian Ross was meticulously detached, never intruding on the story she was telling. By contrast, Pauline was quick to register shock, dismay, amusement, embarrassment.
When “The Making of The Group” was completed, it had grown to about 25,000 words—far too long for Life to consider publishing. Pauline was enraged that the magazine would turn down an effort on which she had worked so hard in good faith, and she complained loudly to Robert Mills about it, but there was nothing her agent could do: The piece was about ten times longer than anything that Life normally published. What the magazine did put into print were Pauline’s observations of the eight lead actresses, in an article titled “A Goddess Upstages the Girls.” Pauline was particularly tough on Candice Bergen, whom she portrayed as a vapid dilettante with no interest whatsoever in the craft of acting. “What really offended me was the way she wrote about Candy Bergen,” Sidney Lumet recalled. “One of the things Pauline attacked her for was sleeping during rehearsals, for daring not to listen to my brilliant, forty-minute speeches. I adored Candy for just that. For anyone at eighteen—that beautiful, that intelligent, with so much of life ahead, to be a devoted actress by that point, would have struck me as a hopeless neurotic—someone who I could find anywhere between Forty-second and Fifty-second Street. Pauline was asking for someone to be as obsessive as she was.”
The Atlantic Monthly eventually bought the entire piece for $1,900, but Pauline refused the cuts that the editors suggested, and by the fall of 1966, the Atlantic had dropped it. Perhaps it was not only the article’s length but its tone that made editors so nervous. It was Lumet who came off worst in Pauline’s essay, as he was portrayed essentially as an aggressive, ambitious whiz kid from television who was hungry for a commercial movie hit, the kind of director who was apt to get hired in these artistically bankrupt times because “he would not try to reshape the scenario or risk holding up production to do something unscheduled; he wouldn’t plead for a few extra days to get something right.”
“The Making of The Group” would not see the light of day until 1968, when it was published in Pauline’s second book, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. “I had heard it was going to be butchery, and I never read it,” Lumet claimed. “If there’s an unpleasantness to avoid, I avoid it.”
CHAPTER NINE
Pauline’s first column for McCall’s appeared on schedule in the magazine’s February 1966 issue. “The Function of