Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [90]
Unlike many critics who insisted on maintaining a stance of complete neutrality and distance toward their subjects, Pauline enjoyed making a blatant show of her support. When she was in the company of artists of whose work she approved, she could be enormously warm and encouraging. Many of her colleagues, among them Joseph Morgenstern, were uncomfortable with this aspect of her personality, but Pauline saw no reason to remain aloof in such circumstances.
She was also quite willing to confront the artists she considered failures and could be dismissive and fault-finding with them. Because she believed she was simply expressing her honest opinion rather than seeking to do harm, she was often naïvely baffled when the objects of her scorn reacted negatively to her criticism. A mutual friend had put her together with Mart Crowley, whose The Boys in the Band—the story of a group of gay men who play out their longings and regrets in high, bitchy style during a birthday celebration—had been a tremendous hit Off-Broadway and then had transferred to Broadway for another highly successful run. Pauline attended a performance of the piece in the company of the playwright and afterward, at the home of the mutual friend, she excoriated Crowley, telling him she found the play empty, cheaply theatrical, and superficial. As they talked and drank, Pauline became ever more abusive, until Crowley, stunned and wounded, got up and retired to another room. After a couple of hours, during which she got increasingly drunk, Pauline sought out Crowley to tell him that the next time she saw him he would no doubt be very rich and famous. (William Friedkin’s screen version of The Boys in the Band was even more offensive to her; she thought Friedkin had compounded the play’s problems with too many lingering close-ups aimed at currying sympathy for his poor, suffering-through-their-wisecracks characters.)
In March 1970 Pauline—more unwillingly than ever—again made way for Penelope Gilliatt to take over “The Current Cinema.” She continued to complain to her friends that, while The New Yorker might offer a lively, informed readership—she delighted in the letters she constantly received from her readers—it did not, on a six-month schedule, pay enough to allow her to live comfortably in New York.
The city itself continued to challenge her. After five years she still hadn’t grown accustomed to its noise and chaos and aggression; she once told a reporter that while her tone on the printed page might be quite assertive, she was not, in life, a particularly assertive person. (This was only partly true; in an argument, she could be quite formidable.) She despised the greased machinations of the city’s social network, the way so many gifted and deserving individuals were looked down upon because they didn’t have money or an Ivy League education—while socially connected people of lesser talent generally had an easier time of it.
She was often most comfortable in the company of people like herself, who came from the West Coast or the Midwest—anywhere but the carved-in-marble runway to success that New York represented. She answered as much of her fan mail as she could, often in great detail. If a young film fan approached her, either at a screening or by mail, telling her that he wanted to be a critic, she was usually happy to provide good counsel. Several close friends attributed this to her egalitarian, West Coast roots, the simple background that she might not care to discuss in any depth, but that clearly she had not forgotten.
In time she found an