Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [76]
Pauline did not yet know Streisand personally, but she must have seen in Streisand a great deal of herself. Like Streisand, Pauline was a smart Jewish girl who had refused to alter, even modify her singular talent and her independent approach to life. Each was uncompromising about how she wanted her talent to be presented to the public, and in the years ahead, Pauline would follow Streisand’s career with a close fascination she reserved for very few actors.
It was when writing about performers that Pauline’s gift for imaginative analysis was expressed at its finest. She could not only give an acute assessment of a performance but could offer fascinating insights about what it revealed about the actor’s relationship with his public, or why a particular piece of casting had turned out to be wrongheaded, and even damaging to a career. Shortly after Funny Girl opened, Julie Andrews’s latest vehicle, Star!, a biography of the stage actress Gertrude Lawrence, was released by Twentieth Century–Fox. A musical about Gertrude Lawrence, an actress whose fame was by that time quite remote, was an odd, risky choice for a big-budget film, but it had its intriguing side: The director, Robert Wise, and the screenwriter, William Fairchild, didn’t want to do a standard rags-to-riches show-business biopic; instead they wanted to explore Lawrence’s selfish, manipulative side, and in the process, reveal an untapped side of Andrews’s talents.
Pauline, however, found the results misguided: “Glamour is what Julie Andrews doesn’t have,” she wrote. “She does her duties efficiently but mechanically, like an airline stewardess; she’s pert and cheerful in some professional way that is finally cheerless.” There was a certain tough determination underneath Andrews’s dependable smile that Pauline found the most interesting thing about her, but in the end the actress “merely coarsen[ed] her shining nice-girl image, becoming a nasty Girl Guide.” Star! opened in classy roadshow engagements, but it was pulled from circulation by July 1969, and reedited and rereleased a few months later as Those Were the Happy Times. It flopped all over again, and Pauline was delighted when Streisand unseated Andrews as the movies’ number-one female musical star.
October 1968 also saw the release of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, an uneasy blend of bitchy high comedy and historical drama, starring Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine. Hepburn had recently moved to the front of the herd of the movie industry’s sacred cows: Her longtime companion Spencer Tracy had died the year before, and she subsequently won the Academy Award for their last film together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? It was considered a form of cinematic sacrilege not to respond to her gracefully aging beauty and no-nonsense Yankee spirit. If Streisand had become Pauline’s new movie love, Hepburn plummeted from her pantheon at almost precisely the same moment. Hepburn had always struck Pauline as the toughest and least maudlin of golden-age movie stars—even Bette Davis had done her share of lugubrious soapers, but Hepburn had, for the most part, retained a crisp dignity in the roles she played. But now, Pauline complained, her idol had let her down by succumbing to the public’s affection for her, and by playing up to them and begging them for that affection:
When an actress has been a star for a long time, we know too much about her; for years we have been hearing about her romances or heartbreaks, or whatever the case may be, and all this carries over into her presence on the screen. And if she uses this in a role, she’s sunk. When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be—when they offer