be sure, over the course of his first four films, Bogdanovich had assembled a top-flight crew (including cinematographer László Kovács, designer Polly Platt, editor Verna Fields, and production associate Frank Marshall) and a lively group of actors (including both O’Neals, Madeline Kahn, Randy Quaid, Duilio Del Prete, and John Hillerman), and it is impossible to overstate the importance of their contributions. Yet audiences were coming to see the work of one artist, not a collective, and the studios knew that he was their biggest selling point.
When What’s Up, Doc? opened in New York, the marquee gave the game away, as Bogdanovich later recalled: “The biggest kick I got was seeing my name on the marquee when I hadn’t even asked for them to put it there. My name circled the marquee: PETER BOGDANOVICH’S COMEDY.”24 The message was loud and clear: the director was the one who mattered to the public. The same thinking accounts for the prominence Bogdanovich was given in the trailers for What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon (and later for Daisy Miller and Saint Jack). There he is, front and center in behind-the-scenes footage—setting up shots, showing his performers how to play a given scene, and generally mugging for the camera.
“Hello,” he says to the camera in the trailer for What’s Up, Doc?, “I’m Peter Bogdanovich”—before pretending to forget the title of “this little picture we’re making today.” But none of the pictures were “little” as long as this was the guy who was directing them. The trailer for Daisy Miller, too, gets mileage out of the evolving Bogdanovich legend. A snippet from Paper Moon is shown before a voice-over solemnly intones: “Last year Peter Bogdanovich gave you the moon.” We see a shot of the director behind the camera of his latest film, as the voice-over continues: “This year, Peter Bogdanovich has made a movie in color: Daisy Miller, starring Cybill Shepherd.”
Paper Moon was the inaugural release of the Directors Company, a production company that Paramount Pictures put together for Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin, affording them total control over their films if they kept their budgets reasonable. The idea, said studio president Frank Yablans, was to combine “such forceful talents as these with a climate where their creative skills can be utilized to their highest degrees.”25 Well, Coppola’s contribution to the Directors Company was the interesting but commercially underwhelming film The Conversation, and Friedkin departed before making a film. In the end, Paper Moon was by far the transitory company’s biggest hit.
Of course, there is more to Bogdanovich’s story than the triumphant narrative sketched here so far: films that didn’t go over with the public, films that were recut by studios, and even films that never found their way to the screen. In his book of interviews with directors, Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich quotes Josef von Sternberg on the subject of careers that start off smashingly but don’t proceed as planned: “Yes, but there were a few pages after that.”26 And so there were for Bogdanovich.
Peter Bogdanovich directing Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show. Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store.
But it was not only his career—fabled and fascinating as it was—that intrigued me. My mother, a movie buff, first told me about him, but she was aware of him mostly for his personal life, having followed his relationship with Cybill Shepherd—front and center in the media in the 1970s—which hastened the end of his marriage to Polly Platt. In fact, after I had seen The Last Picture Show, my mother proudly informed me that she had purchased the very issue of Glamour magazine in which Bogdanovich had reportedly first seen Shepherd’s likeness. He was stumped about who to cast in the role of Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show and then he saw … well, the rest is history.
For my mother and eventually for me, the man who went on to live with the Glamour girl in a beautifully appointed house nestled in Bel Air was inseparable from the man who made the movies. When I was a teenager, I was a fan of many American films made in the 1970s—that was why my mother suggested I see Peter Bogdanovich’s—but few of their directors had lives I actually wanted to live. Sure, I liked The Last Detail, but I could scarcely comprehend Hal Ashby’s counterculture lifestyle. And I loved Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I could not really connect with Steven Spielberg’s nerdy obsession with film technology.
It was different with Peter Bogdanovich, whose life—especially up to the point we have reached so far, the release of Paper Moon—seemed both conventional enough to relate to and opulent enough to aspire to. Coming of age in Manhattan, he benefitted from his not-wealthy parents’ willingness to scrimp and save in order to send him to the pricey Collegiate School and “a snazzy boys’ camp,” as he once put it,27 as well as from their backing when it came to his artistic interests. In Who the Devil Made It, he wrote of the things he was taken to as a boy, including operas at the Met, shows on- and off-Broadway, and silent movies at the Museum of Modern Art.28 The last item on the list is most crucial, but not for the obvious reason. Because many of the movies he and his father took in at the museum were silent, he explained, “seeing these pictures gave me also a better connection to, and understanding of, my father’s past.” He continued, “Which is why the young people’s rejection of old movies … is also a rejection of family values and respect for age.”29
Well, would any of his peers harp on the need for family values or bemoan a lack of respect for age? Doubtful. By contrast, it seemed to me, Peter Bogdanovich was cut from a different, more clean-living cloth—in spite of his transgressions. Yes, his marriage to Polly Platt was wrecked in the wake of his affair with Cybill Shepherd, but those facts alone don’t tell the tale. His diaries from the mid- and late 1960s evince overwhelming tenderness for his wife, unconditional love for their two young children, Antonia and Alexandra, as well as surprising comfort with the pleasures of domesticity. That he was nuts about Shepherd threw a monkey wrench into what had been, to that point, an admirably conducted life, but it is a feeling comprehensible to anyone who has been swept off his or her feet. As Judy says in What’s Up, Doc?, “Listen, you can’t fight a tidal wave.” Decades later, Bogdanovich struck a more sober tone: “I’d been a faithful husband for nine years, but I now felt powerless to stop the momentum.” To put it another way, there were good times to be had with Shepherd, but they came at a cost. “I know my daughters have suffered,” he added, “and I have tried to make up for it ever since.”30
At least he looked back on the romance (and its fallout) with appropriately mixed emotions—and, besides, what is one divorce in Hollywood? My admiration for him was undiminished. For the most part, in the 1970s Peter Bogdanovich was having a grand time the old-fashioned way. His services were required to fashion a montage in tribute to Charlie Chaplin at the Academy Awards in 1972. He got a call to host The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was away. He concocted a musical inspired by a book of Cole Porter lyrics that Cybill Shepherd happened to give him one Christmas. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind paints the following picture of Peter Bogdanovich in this period: “He had become a bit of a dandy, wearing candy-striped shirts with white collars, occasionally improved by an ascot. He sported a gold signet ring with his initials on it. He relished invitations to the White House, didn’t mind a bit that it was Nixon who was doing the inviting.”31 If Biskind is trying to be sarcastic in this passage, he fails, at least as far as I am concerned. (He also gets one detail wrong: Bogdanovich wears a bandana, not—as widely reported—an ascot.) I don’t know about you, but all of this sounded pretty good to me, including the visit to the Nixon White House. What is so bad about that? I thought. My parents voted for Nixon in ’72.
Politics? Not for him. In fact, he chastised those “politically minded” stars who declined to attend the American Film Institute’s tribute to John Ford due to Nixon’s presence there. “Jane Fonda, I believe, even picketed,” he wrote a few years later. “But then, that
