the Heart, which Kael had reviewed for the October 23, 1971, The New Yorker. He told her that, having seen the film again recently, he had found it sentimental and unconvincing, and wondered if she still recalled it with enthusiasm.
“Yes,” said Kael, “I do.”
“Really?” pressed the questioner.
After a stiff silence punctuated only by the clearing of throats and the rustling of programs, Kael fixed her gaze on the man for a moment and gave him a catnip smile.
“Listen,” she finally asked. “Do you remember your first fuck?”
“Sure,” he answered, flushing, struggling to hang on to his composure. “Of course I do.”
“Well, honey,” said Kael, after another perfectly weighed silence, “just wait thirty years.”
This was the Kael that her army of readers at The New Yorker had come to worship—bold, clear-eyed, pithy, a brilliant critical thinker unafraid of a flash of showmanship. Do you remember your first fuck? was, as well as a laugh line, a perfect description of the effect that Pauline always wanted the movies to have on her. She had made similar pronouncements on many occasions. She had discovered her passion for the screen early on, as a child growing up in the farming community of Petaluma, California. It was a passion that grew during her adolescence; through her time as a student at Berkeley; her hardscrabble years when she struggled at a demoralizing series of dead-end jobs to support herself and her only child, Gina; her protracted apprenticeship as a critic for obscure film magazines; up to her emergence, when she was nearing fifty, as the most famous, distinctive, and influential movie critic The New Yorker ever had. And her love of the movies reached its apex from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, a period she regarded as equivalent to some of the great literary epochs in history. Her involvement with her subject matter was anything but casual; it was as tumultuous and irrational and possessive as the most volatile love affair. “Definitely her engagement was libidinal,” observed her friend the film critic Hal Hinson. “She took notes constantly at screenings, that nubby little pencil going constantly throughout the movie. That engagement was as erotic as any erotic engagement could be.... Pauline’s presence was essential, and you felt what she felt: that she was at the center of the culture, and that movies were at the center of the culture.”
“I am the most grateful human being in the whole world for what Hollywood has given me,” Joan Crawford once said with straight-faced sincerity, in a late-career interview. “It’s given me my education—it’s given me everything that I’ve ever earned.” Pauline Kael, who dismissed Crawford as an actress, might easily have said something along those lines. Her love of the movies was nothing short of life-giving: It sustained her in ways that nothing and no one else in her life ever could, or ever did.
CHAPTER ONE
From the beginning of her career Pauline Kael seemed intensely proud of the fact that she came from the American west. There were elements of both careerism and reverse snobbery in this: She took great pains to paint herself as a western rebel, an independent, plain-speaking thinker who owed nothing to what she considered to be the hidebound thinking of the East Coast literary and critical establishment. While she often gave the impression of being a second- or third-generation Californian, her parents were actually only in the process of settling into their life on the West Coast at the time she was born.
For most of her life, Kael’s mother, Judith Yetta Friedman, projected the identity of the classic displaced person. She was born on December 21, 1884, in Pruszków, Poland, a town whose population hovered around 16,000 in the early years of the twentieth century. Kael later claimed that her mother’s father was a tax collector for Tsar Alexander II.
Judith prized a solid, first-rate education above most other things in life, but during her formative years, such a thing was mostly out of reach for even the brightest of young women. A proper education was a privilege reserved for men, and Judith never stopped resenting the way women were denied opportunities in the Old World. “Judith Kael resented her lot in life, which was to be a breeder,” said her grandson, Bret Wallach. Pauline Kael may well have had her mother in mind when she reviewed the 1983 film Yentl, directed by and starring one of her favorite performers, Barbra Streisand. Based on a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yentl tells