Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [8]
In her warm and friendly yet strong and commanding voice—her diction was immaculate—she could hold forth on an amazing range of topics for one so young. Already she was seized by the power of reading and acquiring more knowledge; like W. B. Yeats’s Wandering Aengus, she had a fire in her head. She spoke in beautifully complete sentences, but she also loved slang and four-letter words, “shit” being a favorite. She was very funny, and her family delighted in her extroverted side. “I was quick to understand things,” she once told the film historian Sam Staggs. “I can remember members of the family asking me to repeat gags I’d pulled on them when we had company.”
While it was an impressive achievement for her older sisters to have graduated from Berkeley, Pauline was not very enthusiastic about their career choices as teachers. She herself had no interest in teaching, which she considered a very ordinary profession. She recognized that Anne was a talented educator, and was always fond of her, even though they had completely different temperaments. As a child, Anne had exhibited a temper, but as she grew older, she became more even-keeled—although her calm demeanor masked a strong will.
Rose, on the other hand, was Pauline’s bête noire from an early age, as Rose resented what she viewed as her younger sister’s egocentricity. Pauline, for her part, soon grew enormously critical of Rose’s middlebrow taste in reading material. Rose favored Liberty and Collier’s magazines and Zane Grey Westerns, while Pauline valued the works that Anne passed her way, including Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
Recalling the sisters’ relationship as adults, Dana Salisbury said, “Pauline looked down with such contempt on my aunt Rose. Pauline loved to be in charge. She had ideas. She was the intellectual. Pauline considered herself smarter than everyone else, and Rose was more conventional in her behavior and refused to kowtow.” As a result Rose and Pauline often squared off against each other, leaving Anne to play the role of the calming oldest sister.
Life in San Francisco was much to Pauline’s liking. The Kaels were now living in an infinitely more diverse and cosmopolitan place, which was fine with Pauline, who always maintained a neutral, detached attitude toward her own Jewish past. Like Rose and Anne, she in no way identified herself, even humorously, as a “nice Jewish girl,” with all that term’s connotations, and friends from the later part of her life do not remember her ever using Yiddish expressions in conversation, even in the offhand way that many urban gentiles do. Only in her thirst for knowledge and culture did Pauline embrace traditional Jewish values, but throughout her life she refrained from thinking of them as “Jewish.” To her, that sort of self-identification was the essence of straitjacketed thinking, and she would have none of it.
San Francisco also placed her in much closer proximity to the arts. Like all other cities, it had been hard hit by the effects of the Depression, yet its performing arts thrived. While audience numbers may have declined during the peak Depression years, touring companies continued to view San Francisco as the most important stop on their West Coast schedule. Martha Graham and Trudi Schoop gave dance recitals; Charlotte Greenwood, Leo Carillo, Ethel Waters, and many other great stars of the New York stage appeared at the President, Tivoli, Curran, and Orpheum theaters. Top-balcony seats at the Curran were only fifty cents, and as they were growing up, Pauline and her sisters attended concerts and plays as often as they could.