loud and clear from the group: “Oh, shit.” She was no less skeptical about marriage than she had ever been—and the thought that Friedman would now have an even greater claim on Gina’s attention was jarring to her.
Friedman and Pauline often disagreed. She became very angry one evening when he said that all actors were stupid, and on another occasion when, after several drinks, he pronounced, “Movies are not art.” He characterized Pauline’s relationship with Gina as “a distant closeness” and recognized that, as independent as Pauline was, she needed Gina to be close by. Gina, for her part, clearly harbored certain resentments against Pauline. She was angry with herself that she had not rebelled against her mother and insisted on having a proper education—a point on which many of Pauline’s friends sympathized with her. Mother and daughter had one important trait in common: they were both self-contained about their emotions, very conscious of not allowing tensions between them to be played out before others. Friedman recalled a time when Gina was hospitalized for some minor surgery. “Pauline sort of showed a little affection,” he recalled, “and Gina was annoyed by it. As close as they seemed, they were not demonstrative.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For some years Billy Abrahams had been urging Pauline to publish a collection of her capsule reviews, which by now were an institution in The New Yorker’s front-of-book section. She had amassed more than eleven thousand of these pieces, some of them dating back to her days writing program notes for the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Noting the success that Leonard Maltin had had with his own collection of brief reviews, Abrahams urged her to gather her own, and when it became clear that Lays of Ancient Hollywood would not materialize, the project became a priority. Videocassettes of movies were soon to hit the market, and Abrahams knew that if movies on tape led to the anticipated revolution in home viewing, Pauline’s book was likely to be very popular indeed. She chose the title herself—5001 Nights at the Movies. Assembling and editing the collection was a massive task, but when Holt, Rinehart and Winston brought it out in 1982, The Boston Globe’s Mark Sweeney called it “an incomparable dip-in book,” and the Chicago Tribune’s Richard Christiansen dubbed it “a browser’s delight.” It sold very well and eventually had even greater success as a paperback—the only thing that baffled readers was the inclusion of movies such as Car Wash and Straight, Place and Show, with the Ritz Brothers—at the expense of staples such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that she altered her view of at least one film, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang she had called it “one of the most profound emotional experiences in the history of film”; now she still found it great, but qualified her opinion, judging that the slow rhythm might make viewers feel that they were “dying with the priest. The film may raise the question in your mind: Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is?”
Whatever her feelings about the quality of the films she was reviewing, Pauline’s enthusiasm for writing was undiminished. William Whitworth once observed that of all the staff writers at The New Yorker, no one exhibited the zeal for sitting down to work that she did. By now she was no longer pleased with Daniel Menaker as her direct editor, and requested that he be replaced. William Shawn called Menaker in and said, “I don’t want you to take this personally. You lasted a long time with her. But Miss Kael feels that you may not have the time and attention to give her the sort of editorial help she needs.” Pauline’s idea of the attention she wished for from an editor primarily involved sitting in her office and reading her column aloud to him, with a small electric fan blowing behind her. “Whenever she came across something that she felt didn’t sound like her, she would change it. I had been learning all along from other writers that when you have a genuine voice, you have to listen to it and listen to it carefully. The dark side of that was incredible tedium, after a while. It was more like being a silent witness than it was being an editor. I suppose my impatience showed through.”
In 1983 Pauline received the Award for Distinguished Journalism from the Newswomen’s Club of New York.