Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [68]
For weeks William Shawn had been pondering some of the points Pauline had raised in her essay on Bonnie and Clyde. The New Yorker had a long history of movie critics who traded in light, above-it-all dismissals of the pictures they reviewed, a school of criticism that owed much more to the brittle wit of a Dorothy Parker than to the searching curiosity of a James Agee; John McCarten, particularly, had represented this school of criticism, peering at the movies he covered as imperiously as Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s icon, peered through his monocle. Shawn decided that a different approach was needed. He wanted someone in tune with the way movies were now, who could speak to the rabid movie-loving audience that had come along in the last decade. Pauline’s piece on Bonnie and Clyde had been a test, and she had passed. Shawn phoned her and told her that he wanted her to succeed Brendan Gill as movie critic for six months a year, alternating with Penelope Gilliatt. She was to begin in January.
It is tempting—however wrongly—for those of us examining the lives of writers, actors, and other artists of the mid–twentieth century to see those lives unfold with the rhythm and pace of an old-fashioned three-act Broadway play. Act I entails the long, slow study and preparation for a brilliant career, Act II the vintage years of that career, Act III the inevitable decline to the end.
Pauline’s Act I had lasted an unusually long time. At age forty-eight, her prolonged apprenticeship was finally completed. What she felt now was the opposite of stage fright: it was an inability to remain standing in the wings any longer, a driving urgency to make her entrance and get on with the best part of the play.
CHAPTER TEN
By the mid-1960s The New Yorker had long since attained iconic status among its readers. The longtime subscribers who stacked copies of the magazine on their coffee tables felt that it brought something into their homes that no other magazine could come close to offering. In those days the magazine focused principally on cultural and literary matters; while it did frequently run profiles of political figures, it was not primarily concerned with up-to-the-minute journalism that probed troubling social issues and the machinations of contemporary politics. The image of New York that the magazine presented to its readers everywhere was that of a sophisticated, unconventional city where it was possible to seek out the very best in culture twenty-four hours a day, a place where the traditional values and habits of thought that might hamstring the rest of the country did not come into play. A reader in the Midwest or on the Pacific Coast might never come close to touching down at LaGuardia Airport—yet he could feel, through the pages of The New Yorker, that he possessed an intimate knowledge of the city and of the city’s sensibility. In 1940 a piece of promotional literature outlined the magazine’s ethic succinctly: “You cannot keep The New Yorker out of the hands of New York–minded people, wherever they are. For, unlike the myriad points in which New York–minded people live, New York is not a tack on a map, not a city, not an island nor an evening at ‘21.’ The New Yorker is a mood, a point of view. It is found wherever people are electrically sensitive to new ideas, eager for new things to do, new things to buy, new urbanities for living.”
Many longtime readers of the magazine, however, had begun to feel that the image of sophistication it peddled was as outmoded as the old black-and-white movies featuring chic café singers on nightclub sets the size of the roof of the Empire State Building. These critics believed