Free Pauline Kael by Brian Kellow Page B

useful spokesman for Big Joy.” At this point, Broughton recalled, Hermy pulled a sparkler from between his legs and showered him with stars, disappearing into the night, just as Broughton’s mother entered the room to check on him.
    A visionary like Broughton might have seemed an unlikely match for a wisecracking, skeptical, resolutely earthbound woman like Pauline, but they had a number of things in common: a California upbringing, a deep feeling for the natural beauty of the west, a difficult mother (like Judith, Broughton’s mother, Olga, was born into comfortable circumstances and was disappointed by the life her husband had carved out for them), and a great love of the arts. Broughton was an immensely likable man—attractive, dynamic, witty, openhearted, and bisexual. Again, Pauline was making a mistake that heterosexual women in the arts often made: They were surrounded by attractive, bright men unafraid to engage in emotional discourse, and they mistakenly thought that a passionate friendship could turn into an enduring romance. And the men, lacking strong gay role models, did their best to conform to what the women wanted them to be.
    “He looked like he was the concept that Marlowe was working on in Doctor Faustus ,” Broughton’s friend Ariel Parkinson said of him. “He was the concept of Mephistopheles!” He also had a remarkably strong sense of self that had made it possible for him to withstand years of adversity that might have sunk a lesser man. James Broughton was the child of a socially ambitious mother who, in her son’s words, “adored babies but disliked children.” The daughter of the president of the San Francisco Bank, she married a man she held in contempt for not being a more aggressive wage-earner. Broughton’s father had died in his mid-thirties, and his mother set about finding herself a new husband; her principal requirement was that he had to be financially secure. But many of her suitors recoiled in the presence of her effeminate son. After Olga came home one night to discover her son decked out in her beaded chiffon evening gown and lamé cloche, she decided that he needed to be taken in hand and given a crash course in masculinity. She passed the responsibility for this on to her current beau, who saw to it that young James wound up in a military academy in San Rafael.
    Educated at Stanford (where his lovers included the future writer and gay activist Harry Hay), Broughton had enjoyed a limited success with his play Summer Fury and was buoyed up by the enthusiastic climate for avant-garde work in San Francisco, venturing into experimental filmmaking. The Bay Area was home to a number of nonnarrative filmmakers who would receive considerable acclaim, including Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. Pauline circulated among them, and once she and Broughton met, she helped sew costumes and do miscellaneous production work on his dreamlike early film Mother’s Day (1948), which Broughton intended as a comment on the tyranny of motherhood, and how it affects children. But Pauline’s involvement in the California underground cinema movement remained limited. “She deplored little magazines, little theater, little films,” Broughton wrote. “She valued the big time, the big number, the big screen.”
    “She was not sympathetic to avant-garde enterprise and did not make any particular attempt to deal with it in her writing,” observed Ernest Callenbach, longtime editor of Film Quarterly . “Documentary was also something that bored her. Broughton said to me once, ‘You have to remember that Pauline is an Ibsenist.’ It’s perfectly true! What she was interested in was plot and character. The visual side of film, although she had an immense visual memory and could remember things well, didn’t interest her as critical material. She was so focused on people and the way the story was told as a drama that she would neglect the things that would make movies interesting.” The filmmaker