Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Praise for WHO THE HELL’S IN IT

  “His books are guilty pleasures, full of astutee observations and irresistible anecdotes.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Who the Hell’s in It is a big, expansive anthology that reveals Mr. Bogdanovich’s vast knowledge of film and disarming skill as a raconteur.”

  —The New York Times

  “Bogdanovich’s remembrances need no justification; with his sure eye and store of knowledge, just about anything he has to say about film bears listening to…. Who the Hell’s in It makes a sturdy and enjoyable textbook.”

  —The Hollywood Reporter

  “There’s something for just about every sort of film buff: from Bogart and Bacall to Sinatra and Martin; from John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart to John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara…. Those who like classic movies will fall in love with this book.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A collection of personal stories and observations about many of the greatest Hollywood stars from the point of view of an intimate fan. A completely unique, moving book full of Bogdanovich’s well-known expertise and limitless affection for anyone and anything to do with good movies.”

  —WES ANDERSON, writer-director of

  The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore

  “Bogdanovich analyzes movie stars’ peccadillos and blind spots with an actor’s eye for human frailty.”

  —New York Press

  “Bogdanovich’s admiration for his subjects is unmistakable…. [His] enthusiasm makes one want to go out and watch a movie that stars the person he’s profiling—he even makes suggestions as to which ones—and that’s undoubtedly a good thing.

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Who the Hell’s in It’s pages are filled with the makings of idols old and new, portraits of their lives and their jobs. If you love movies, you’ll love this book.”

  —North Hollywood Bi-Weekly

  ALSO BY PETER BOGDANOVICH

  Movie of the Week (1999)

  Who the Devil Made It (1997)

  A Moment with Miss Gish (1995)

  This Is Orson Welles (1992; expanded 1998), with Orson Welles

  A Year and a Day Engagement Calendar (annually, 1991–98; a.k.a. The White Goddess Engagement Diary, based on works by Robert Graves; editor)

  The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980 (1984)

  Pieces of Time (1973; expanded 1985)

  Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (1970)

  Fritz Lang in America (1969)

  John Ford (1967; expanded 1978)

  The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (1963)

  The Cinema of Howard Hawks (1962)

  The Cinema of Orson Welles (1961)

  To the memory

  of

  Audrey Hepburn,

  John Cassavetes,

  Sal Mineo,

  River Phoenix,

  Madeline Kahn,

  John Ritter,

  and

  Dorothy Stratten

  Each gone from us

  so much too soon

  In pictures, personalities are it, you know. It isn’t acting per se as it’s known in the theater. You’d bring some kid in who just blazed off the screen—a girl or a fellow would hit you instantly. That’s what we looked for—some photographic quality, some mysterious hidden thing certain people have…. The great movie stars learned the technique and a few mannerisms and a few moves and became sort of public idols. They couldn’t do anything wrong, if you liked them—no matter what they did; it wasn’t what they played.

  —ALLAN DWAN

  Actors are like children. They must be coddled, and sometimes, spanked.

  —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  You and your directors! For me, it’s all about the acting—movies are, you know. Pictures are ultimately about the performances.

  —ORSON WELLES

  That’s the great thing about the movies…. After you learn—and if you’re good and Gawd helps ya and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across—then what you’re doing is—you’re giving people little … tiny pieces of time … that they never forget.

  —JAMES STEWART

  Contents

  Introduction: The Magical Art

  1 LILLIAN GISH

  2 HUMPHREY BOGART

  3 MARLON BRANDO

  4 STELLA ADLER

  5 MONTGOMERY CLIFT

  6 CARY GRANT

  7 JACK LEMMON

  8 JERRY LEWIS

  9 DEAN MARTIN

  10 SAL MINEO

  11 JAMES STEWART

  12 JOHN WAYNE

  13 HENRY FONDA

  14 BORIS KARLOFF

  15 JOHN CASSAVETES

  16 CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  17 JAMES CAGNEY

  18 MARLENE DIETRICH

  19 ANTHONY PERKINS

  20 FRANK SINATRA

  21 BEN GAZZARA

  22 AUDREY HEPBURN

  23 SIDNEY POITIER

  24 RIVER PHOENIX

  25 MARILYN MONROE

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  THE MAGICAL ART

  Some thirty years ago, in Rome, Orson Welles and I were having a late-night drink in his suite at the Eden Hotel. We had spent a couple of hours taping our conversation for a book about his career. The tape machine, much to Orson’s relief, was off now and stowed by the door. Of course, it was always at those times that Welles made the best comments. He had been going on about one of his favorite heresies—that directors, and indeed the whole job of directing, were highly overrated. For Orson, motion pictures were essentially about the performances.

  When I remarked that a certain film was well directed but not well acted, Welles responded that he couldn’t separate those qualities and if it wasn’t well acted, then what good was it? Obviously, he said, he agreed that the highest level of great direction—with picturemakers he most admired, like Jean Renoir or John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks—certainly ranked among the fine arts. But that the average director, even some of the most successful, with long, distinguished careers, did not make the difference that really good performances do.

  A little while later Orson cracked a disparaging remark about a popular contemporary stage and film star, ending with, “Well, you know—actor!” In show-biz circles, particularly among crews and production people, the use of the word “actor …” (said with just the slightest touch of contempt) reads as volumes of recorded experience. It is as much an expletive with or without a preceding “goddamn,” and contains all the negative aspects behind the currently fashionable “diva,” but none of the glitter or charm. “Actor,” which can be hurled like a brick through a window or said under one’s breath, carries a rather mundane connotation of a boringly self-involved, humorless and demanding person, often childish and vain—in other words, tediously high-maintenance. None of this is ever taken to imply that the actor is not a good one.

  Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the Graham Greene–Carol Reed–Alexander Korda thriller The Third Man (1949), the only movie role Welles ever played without makeup. He also wrote the famous “cuckoo clock” speech himself.

  So I asked Orson, Well, if he thought acting was it in theater or film, how could he so disparage “actors,” and how did he himself behave when he was acting? After all, he had done a great deal more of it than directing. Welles replied, nodding boisterously once, “Actor!” We both laughed. Did he mean that when he was acting, he behaved with all the unpleasant connotations behind the pejorative use of “Actor!”? Orson nodded, beaming, almost proudly. “Yup—actor!” He laughed, loud and long.

  This book repeatedly harks back to that e
ssential paradox about actors, male or female. To achieve what they often do so magically and with such humanity, must there always be a childish or a childlike foundation? In order perhaps to preserve some profound sense of innocent vulnerability? Acting does begin with play-acting. There was, in fact, an innocence on some level with all the star-players I met, and almost all actors, young or old. In their varying ways, at various points in their careers, as well, each of the actors in this book has on some level felt an unspoiled, selfless love for the work and the medium itself, whether on stage or screen (see, in particular, the Lillian Gish chapter).

  During the old studio-system days (roughly from about 1915 until the early 1960s) star-players with beauty and peculiarities were the commodities most eagerly sought, most actively exploited, by the entire industry. With the relinquishing of contract talent, the business changed forever. No longer were the combined talents of the best directors, writers, producers and technical craftsmen in the world focused on making the contract players the best they could be. Everybody went on their own, actors preferred to be versatile rather than typed, and the studios—once factories that created entertainment and occasionally art, at the same time helping and mining the talent performing it—ended up having to go picture by picture and pay through the nose for the few stars that supposedly could “open” a movie in the now popular weekly top-ten box-office game, which never existed in the golden age. In the seventies, when the old studio way was already history, Howard Hawks once remarked to me that all through the twenties, thirties, forties, and into the fifties, there were more stars than ever in the history of the world. “And most of them,” he said, “had very little to say about what they should play.” It is a show-biz axiom that many actors and actresses are not necessarily the best judges of what they are best at. But most of the original movie stars had personalities and, as Allan Dwan* put it, they “just blazed off the screen.”

  As the gods and goddesses were for the Greeks, these stars formed a kind of twentieth-century mythology, created by the movies. They were no longer actors playing parts—because all their roles merged into one definitive character, one special folk hero, similar to but not necessarily identical with the original mortal. And this creation became, as director Fritz Lang* used to phrase it, a “valid dramaturgical element.” Robert Aldrich,* who directed James Stewart in one sixties picture, admitted that he and his screenwriter decided to use for their script “what Stewart seems to be.” The great film stars had an authenticity that transcended acting. They became real—not actors or even people playing themselves. They simply were: Cary Grant. John Wayne. Greta Garbo. Clark Gable. Marlene Dietrich.

  With normal fame and success intensified by virtual deification in the United States, of course, it became easy to forget integrity, lose all innocence; to sell out, succeed yet fail within. It is the typically American struggle in the Golden Boy syndrome (prizefighter vs. pianist): What shall it be, brute force or true passion? Money or poetry? The question itself now almost seems dated. But then Faust is an even older story. And as Faust learned, it is dangerous to ignore the immortal soul. This book, therefore, is dedicated to the spirits of all the brilliant players in it, long may they live.

  Unlike my earlier work about directors, Who the Devil Made It, the chapters here are not arranged chronologically in order of the subjects’ births, but rather in a more personal way: with the exception of the first two, and the last, these chapters are arranged roughly in the order that each person came into my life. Since my firsthand experiences with Lillian Gish and Marilyn Monroe were exceptionally brief—the latter not more than a glimpse—I have begun and ended with these two extraordinary women whom I wish I had gotten to know. Standing as vivid antipodes, both in career and character, the two represent the most traditional and archetypal—and most severely limiting—roles of women: virgin and whore. Because a truer understanding of female nature would radically improve relationships between the sexes all over the planet—and thus the planet—the continuing mythic power of Gish and Monroe seems appropriate to bookend these profiles of star power in a “man’s world” ruled by personality.

  My take on Bogart—which, as an Esquire article in 1964 (Bogie had died in 1957), heralded the beginnings of the Bogart cult—is the only other chapter that deals with someone I didn’t actually know, even a little, or spend time with. The Bogart piece is also the most explicit look at the differences and similarities between the actual star-personality and the iconic image of them. The length of contact and levels of intimacy with the others, of course, vary greatly. From the briefest—with Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando, to pretty brief with James Cagney, Henry Fonda or Charlie Chaplin—all the way to relationships that went on for nearly three decades, as with Cary Grant or James Stewart. Or, as is now for more than four decades, with Jerry Lewis. Portions of this material have appeared previously in other forms (noted either in the text or in the acknowledgments).

  Résumé

  Since the summer I turned sixteen, I’ve been working and living with professional actors. Actually, though hired as a glorified apprentice, I became one of their number within that first innocent summer, landing a lead role by the seventh week. But three years earlier, I had made my stage debut, doing the title part in our sixth grade (Collegiate School, on West 78th Street) production of the E. Y. Harburg–Burton Lane musical, Finian’s Rainbow. My first line was “Eureka! Sharon, come quickly!” My dear mother became my first director when she heard me do a few lines and said, “You better work on that Irish accent.”

  Still, my earliest performances had been at some of my Parents’ intimate dinner parties in their New York apartments—either at 15 West 67th Street (from my infancy to nearly thirteen) or at 90th Street and Riverside Drive (until I was twenty-two)—where after the meal they would ask me to recite—poems like Poe’s “Annabel Lee” or “The Raven,” or Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” or Robert W. Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”—or to read a short short story like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

  In the same period, before I had turned thirteen, I produced and directed—and acted on—three or four radio productions made at home. This was just when dramatic and comic radio programs were fading from the scene; I had grown up on them, thought they were terrific. For Christmas my parents had given me a much-wished-for reel-to-reel Revere tape recorder, and with it I would tape a radio play (usually Suspense), then transcribe it word-for-word in longhand and type it out on my tiny portable typewriter. I would use my own selection of music with a little advice from my father or my uncle Fred Gandolfi and his extraordinary classical record collection (sections of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring). I played every part (including the women), and created all the sound effects by hand or vocally. When my sister Anna was born, I made a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for my mother and played it over the phone while she was in the hospital. I did all my own announcers, too, and had my own call letters: BTBC, Bogdanovich Tape Broadcasting Company.

  Later that same year, having become a teenager, I went to see my first Broadway play (Henry Fonda in Point of No Return by Paul Osborn) and, thereafter, from 1952 to 1964, when I left New York for Los Angeles, I saw nearly every important show on or off Broadway. When I was sixteen or seventeen, my parents used some connections they had to arrange for me to go backstage and meet Charles Laughton, who I believe was playing in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell (which he also directed). He was quite heavy and awfully nice in a slightly gruff yet self-deprecating way. When I told him I wanted to be an actor he said, “Well, you should have no trouble—you’re a good-looking boy. I’ve looked like the hind end of an elephant since I was twenty-one.”

  Edward Everett Horton in characteristic expression, flanked by Katharine Hepburn and Jean Dixon in George Cukor’s film of the Philip Barry play Holiday (1938), starring Cary Grant. Seventeen years later I was Horton’s dresser.

  As a high school freshman (still
at Collegiate), I was the youngest ever to have the lead in the annual school production, playing the heavy in an Agatha Christie–like suspense piece, The Ninth Guest, by Owen Davis. I began cracking my knuckles as a character-thing and then couldn’t stop for about twenty years. All through my thirteen years at Collegiate, I was nicknamed “Bugs,” because of a popular impression I did of Bugs Bunny. At other times, my nicknames fluctuated to Dean or Jerry, or Marlon, but Bugs prevailed. At fifteen, I started Saturday-morning teenage acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, impressed the teacher, actress Eleanor Gould (especially with my Cyrano), and she invited me to become part of the children’s theater and an apprentice with the main company for the summer of 1955 at the Cherry County Playhouse in Traverse City, Michigan.

  The theater had a good resident company with actors from all over the country, especially New York, and each week a different star would come in, rehearse with us for a couple of days, then perform for a week, and move on. It was Star Summer Stock, lots of fun, and virtually gone today. I was more than a month shy of my sixteenth birthday when I left Manhattan (by train) and came back twelve weeks later, having played the lion in The Wizard of Oz, directed and written a kids’ variety show, and done a (silent) butler in Maugham’s The Constant Wife starring Sylvia Sidney. My birthday fell in that week and she gave me a real silent butler, with a handwritten card that read “Oh, you are the silent one!” A reference, I guess, to my being talkative. I wish now that I had talked less and asked more questions.

  The sad truth is that within three years I would have known who each of those ten stars were, and what they had done before arriving in Traverse City, Michigan. Sylvia Sidney, for God’s sake, had worked with Alfred Hitchcock,* Fritz Lang, King Vidor, Josef von Sternberg,* and Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda and Cary Grant, among others. Did I know? No. When I finally met Sylvia Sidney again, about forty-five years later at a Hitchcock centennial celebration, I reminded her of her present and our brief association. Graciously, she pretended to remember. She was thin and fragile, had a hard time stepping up to the podium. Finally, her first words into the mike were: “Getting old is a bitch!” She died a few months later, those questions I would have asked never to be answered.