Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [63]
It was a disagreement over Hawaii that led Pauline to one of the most enduring of her friendships with a colleague. Joseph Morgenstern was a young critic at Newsweek who had been invited to appear on the entertainment reporter Pat Collins’s radio show to discuss current films. When he arrived at the studio, he found that Pauline was also a guest. “I could hardly get a word in edgewise,” Morgenstern remembered. “The talk turned to Hawaii. At the time, I thought it was just a big, clumsy movie. Pauline said vociferously on the radio that it has a social conscience, talks about smallpox, this and that. But she overpraised it, as was her wont. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the air, and I said it. That goaded her. And as soon as we got off the air, she said, ‘That was fun, honey. Let’s have a cup of coffee!’” It was the beginning of a thirty-six-year friendship.
It had begun to bother Pauline that the youth audience, in particular, didn’t seem more discriminating about the movies it considered “great.” All that seemed to matter was that they felt hip. She regarded this as the worst sort of narcissism, while at the same time dreading that her lack of enthusiasm for many of the new pictures might brand her as some kind of hidebound reactionary. She was particularly troubled by some of the films coming out of Britain, with their bouncing pop-music scores, fast editing, and accelerated camerawork taking in the gritty streets of mod London.
In her November 5, 1966, column for The New Republic, “So Off-beat We Lose the Beat,” she complained that Morgan! was nothing more than “a modernized version of an earlier, romantic primitivist notion that people are conformists, animals are instinctively ‘true’ and, of course, ‘free.’ ” She suspected that Morgan! was “so appealing to college students because it shares their self-view: they accept this mess of cute infantilisms and obsessions and aberrations without expecting the writer and director to straighten it out or resolve it and without themselves feeling a necessity to sort it out.” Yet she was intrigued by the wild enthusiasm the youth audience showed for it and for Georgy Girl. In an obvious jab at Dwight Macdonald, she added, “And if it be said that this is sociology, not aesthetics, the answer is that an aesthetician who gave his time to criticism of current movies would have to be an awful fool. Movie criticism to be of any use whatever must go beyond formal analysis.”
By December Robert Mills felt confident in requesting a raise per New Republic column, as Pauline “could find good use for another one or two hundred dollars a check.” In a short time, however, friction developed, as she often had a difficult time confining herself to the assigned word count. The lack of communication also disturbed her: Sometimes her column was dropped from an issue without explanation. When it did appear in print, it was often in a significantly altered form—either cut or, worse yet, rewritten, with observations and word choices that were not her own. She complained to Mills, but the editors continued to make wholesale changes without consulting her.
Pauline was beginning to turn up as a frequent guest on radio programs and film-critic panel discussions. But their organizers began to anticipate her appearances with equal parts excitement and dread, since she behaved with a candor that sometimes crossed over into rudeness. One such episode took place in the spring of 1966, when Judith Crist invited her to appear on a radio program she was hosting. The other guest was Ginger Rogers, who was about to open on Broadway as Carol Channing’s replacement in the hit musical Hello, Dolly!
Pauline had praised Crist’s critical integrity, and when she showed up to tape the radio show,