Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [71]
Shawn’s many quirks and phobias have been well documented by various chroniclers of the magazine’s history. He detested the cold and dressed warmly almost year-round. Even on hot days at the office, when the air-conditioning might be on the blink, he would put on a blazer to receive visitors. At lunches with authors, at the Algonquin Hotel, just a block from the magazine’s offices at 25 West Forty-third Street, Shawn’s guests might gorge themselves on steak and martinis, while he ate a bowl of cereal or a slice of toasted pound cake. He prided himself on being the soul of propriety—yet he maintained his relationship with Ross throughout all the years of his marriage to his wife, Cecille. He abhorred the increasing violence and tension of daily life in New York—yet he had given Pauline the space for her lengthy essay on the shockingly violent Bonnie and Clyde.
A number of New Yorker staff members agreed with Ross’s view that Pauline “seemed to seek combat” with Shawn. Pauline was wise enough to realize that at last she had an editor willing to give her the number of words she needed. Indeed, Shawn was famous for his generosity to writers and often hesitated to suggest a word length, preferring to think that the size and scope of the piece would be dictated by the subject matter. With Pauline, he insisted on one rule only: that her written attacks on other critics come to a halt. Such things, he told her, had no place in The New Yorker.
There was nothing remotely posh about The New Yorker’s working environment. The corridors were dingy and disorderly, and the walls seemed always to be in need of a fresh coat of paint. It was a far cry from the plush image of New York publishing promoted in movies like The Best of Everything. “The New Yorker has a long-standing tradition of squalor with which I am loath to interfere,” Shawn once said. When she first joined the magazine staff, Pauline did most of her writing at home but was given a small, nondescript office that she generally used on the days when her pieces were going through various stages of proofs, to make long-distance telephone calls, and to answer mail—and also as a rest stop before and after her wrangles with Shawn.
What is most striking about her reviews in her first years at The New Yorker is their relative brevity; she would sometimes cover two or three films in a single column of “The Current Cinema,” and if the movie didn’t warrant extensive comment, she typically kept her review fairly succinct. She didn’t belabor the plots of bad movies; she often used her reviews of them to make a particular point about a trend she saw in films in general, or about an actor she felt might be seriously going off the track. She often raised her continued concern about the corrupting influences of television. The fast-paced economics of television production had been turning up for years on the big screen. In early 1968 Pauline observed:
The emotional shorthand of television—climaxes with a minimum of preparation—has been developed so that the audience won’t get away. Like the flip-page sex that authors of pulps now put in, so that the man in the drugstore can open the book anywhere and reach within a few pages a passage that makes him want to buy, the television director learns to keep socking the viewers so they won’t get bored, so he won’t lose them. They may have just tuned in, and he’s got to hold them for the commercial.... The men who have learned these lessons graduate to movies, where they try to keep up the same mechanical pace irrespective of subject or meaning, and where, increasingly, they’re working with the flip-page sex authors, who have mastered the knack of turning out a book in ten days and can produce a TV script or a movie script with the practiced indifference to quality