Pauline Kael was my mentor

Picture it: I’m 16, sweaty and sebaceous, facing the doorman of an old building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side: “I’m here to see Pauline Kael?” I can vouch for the question mark, 45 years on, not because of any uncanny Nabokovian recall, but because, even now, that first afternoon with her doesn’t seem as if it could possibly have happened.