Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Sunday, October 09, 2005


And again on the subject of The New Yorker and movie ad-blurbists, last year a blogger complained that Pauline Kael never said "Nobody I knew voted for Nixon." But here is his defense (and I bring it up because it pops up first when you type "kael nixon" in Google, a link I posted earlier):

Yesterday, though, I got an email from Craig Seligman, author of the fine Sontag and Kael. Here's what Craig said:

Kael told me the story of that mysterious quotation when it appeared in (I think) The Wall Street Journal several years ago. She never said it, and she was irked by the fact that it was so often attributed to her. Apparently a reporter, or somebody, asked her to comment on Nixon's election, and she replied that she couldn't because she didn't even know anyone who had voted for Nixon. And the story got garbled. I may have garbled the story myself slightly, since some years have passed since she told me, but the point is: she never said it. Which is easy to believe, because I never knew her to make patently stupid statements, and when she joked or was outrageous it was never with the kind of naivete that you would have to assume to make a statement like that.

The upshot is that people who know nothing about her or her work are constantly berating her for saying something she never said and never would have said. [Emphasis added.]

We can see the Gordon Geckos at the CON-SER-VA-TIVE EDITION spreading such half-truths; but even Kael's defender had to admit (and from a possibly faulty memory) the poet laureate of movie reviews didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon. Perhaps she didn't say it as a matter of principle, but to defend her against the charge is mere semantics. Most likely she hardly ever knew conservatives or Republicans -- not out of prejudice, she just never hung around them; they weren't in her movie circle. And she wasn't free from prejudice. I remember one review from the early seventies of some Universal picture about the wives of Vietnam soldiers that made fun of their primness and the fact they didn't have any books in their living rooms. We recognize the aliterate streak in Mid-America, but Pauline Kael was not the most open-minded of people on such days. Let us not forget she made loud fun of The Sound of Music because of its wholesome clientele. No, Pauline Kael never knew anyone who voted for Nixon, figuratively and quite possibly literally; and like Bill Bennett, she should have thought when she opened her mouth.

P. S. at 8:00 p.m., October 22: I found the title: it's Limbo, a made-for-TV-style theatrical of 1972, and an early starring vehicle for Kate Jackson. Now to find Ms. Nobody-I-Knew-Voted-for-Nixon's review. (It's possible Penelope Gilliatt, an equally fatuous blurbist and scenarist, wrote it, but I don't think so.)

I should have thought to use IMDB.

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