Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  “Vaddya mean? It’s goink to be part of you.”

  “It’s not gonna be part of me. I don’t even know what’s it’s about, don’t tell me it’s gonna be part of me.”

  “Well, come on up here.” Yablans went upstairs to find Bluhdorn with the three directors in the conference room. Smiling broadly, teeth flashing like Chiclets, Bluhdorn said, “Vaddya think of dat, Frank? Is dis a great idea or vat?”

  Yablans replied, “I think it’s shit. I think it’s the worst, stupidest, dumbest idea I ever heard in my life. And I’m not gonna have any part of it. Why don’t you just give ’em the company, Charlie? What the fuck are you paying me for?”

  “Frank, vaddya talkink about?”

  “You guys are on an ego trip, you’re gonna make a bunch of crap, you’re not exclusive, you’re gonna go off and do films for other people, and we’ll get the dregs.”

  “Don’t be like dis, Frank, don’t be like dis. Be nice.”

  At this point Friedkin, who was getting increasingly agitated, leaped up and yelled, “Frank, you’re really full of shit. You’re a fucking asshole, as a matter of fact, and I don’t know what we’re doing sitting here talking to you about this anyway.” Bluhdorn pleaded with him to stay. Friedkin replied, “Fuck both you guys,” and stalked out.

  Despite this inauspicious beginning, the three directors were intrigued enough—both with the artistic freedom and with the promise of big profits down the road—to proceed, provided Evans, whom Coppola detested, was kept in his cage. Yablans was still opposed. The last thing he needed was a satellite company siphoning money out of his budget to produce pictures over which he had no control. He blamed the whole thing on Francis. “Coppola was playing Charlie like a Stradivarius,” he says. “Forty percent of the whole idea was probably his. He was passing himself off as, Poor little me, all I wanna do is make my films, walking around in Puma sneakers and a corduroy suit, while he was flying in on Learjets and using stretch limos. He was a true Mercedes Marxist.” But Yablans went along with it, thinking, There is no way this can work, they’ll eat each other alive. They’re the Arab League, a company built on egos. Give a director the power to go off and do anything he wants to do with absolute impunity, you’ll get nothing but garbage. “I wasn’t going to allow it to happen,” he says. “But it was clear to me, if it was going to fail, it had to come from them. It had to implode.” So he sat back and watched the fun.

  Coppola invited Bogdanovich and Friedkin up to San Francisco, hosted dinners for them at his Broadway home. Friedkin says, improbably, that Lucas served the food while the three directors talked among themselves: “He was still Francis’s assistant, one of those guys hanging around him for scraps.” Coppola presided over the tiny filmmaking community in San Francisco more like Louis XIV than the Godfather. No hiding behind walled compounds for him. He was much too flamboyant. Coppola was the sun that lit the sky and made the grass grow. He was the source of all work, the source of all pleasure. Tom Luddy was his Talleyrand. He ran the Pacific Film Archive, which allowed him to pass prints to Francis for private viewings in Coppola’s screening room, to parade a glittering array of celebrity foreign directors through Zoetrope to pay their respects to the king. Every night there was a dinner, a screening, an event. Luddy was seeing Alice Waters, whose innovative restaurant, Chez Panisse, became the Zoetrope commissary. Francis’s home was the site of a nonstop party. Young women were asked if they wanted to join Francis. “It was no secret that Francis was a major pussy hound,” says Marcia Lucas. “Ellie used to be around for half an hour or so, and then she’d disappear, go upstairs with the kids, and Francis would be feeling up some babe in the pool. I was hurt and embarrassed for Ellie, and I thought Francis was pretty disgusting, the way he treated his wife.” Ellie had become Kay Corleone. Coppola always wanted Friedkin to move up to the Bay Area and work with him. Says Billy, “I loved Francis, but the very thought of getting closer to him or being a part of his circle was repellent to me.”

  Friedkin was already involved with The Exorcist, but promised to do his next picture for the Directors Company. Peter Bart suggested Bogdanovich do a project he had developed called Addie Pray (the title was eventually changed to Paper Moon), as his first picture. The story was set in the Depression, and turned on the prickly relationship between an itinerant con man and his precocious daughter.

  Unlike the other new Hollywood directors, Bogdanovich was very much at home in Hollywood, very much embraced his celebrity. He was riding high, busy—although he was too intoxicated with himself to realize it—sowing the seeds of his own destruction. Almost everyone who met him detested him. He was an inveterate name dropper. When he opened his mouth, it was “Orson” this and “Howard” that, “John” something else. He liked to parade his erudition, and had a bad habit of lecturing instead of conversing. As one junior executive put it, “The first time I met him, it was as if I were in the presence of God. I had to go up to him and introduce myself, and he wasn’t about to reciprocate and say his name, because that might indicate that there was some doubt as to who he was.” Preening like a peacock, he told the New York Times in words that would come back to haunt him, “I don’t judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries.... I judge myself against the directors I admire—Hawks, Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Welles, Ford, Renoir, Hitchcock.” Modesty required a demurral: “I certainly don’t think I’m anywhere near as good as they are, but,” he couldn’t help adding, “I think I’m pretty good.”

  When Peter talked about Cybill, he patronized her. “Cybill started out as a whim, an instinct, a little voice in my ear that I listened to. I had an itch, and I scratched it.... She’s very malleable. You can bend her in any direction. She does what she’s told.” It became impossible to pick up a magazine without seeing the two of them beaming toothily from the cover, winsome and smug, as if to say, We’re Peter and Cybill, and you’re not. Cary Grant told him to shut up. “Will you stop telling people you’re in love. Stop telling people you’re happy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re not in love and they’re not happy. And they don’t want to hear it.”

  “But Cary, I thought all the world loves a lover.”

  “Don’t you believe it. It isn’t true. Just remember one thing, Peter, people do not like beautiful people.”

  Adds Bogdanovich, now chastened, “And so, an enormous amount of envy and jealousy and shit hit the fan.”

  When they were not sitting for photographers, the couple haunted the talk shows, appearing regularly on Johnny Carson, for whom Peter became an occasional replacement. 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.

  Bogdanovich shopped around for a home at an address suitable for his new station in the community. With income from Doc, he and Cybill set up housekeeping in a seven-thousand-square-foot Spanish-style hacienda built in 1928 on Copa de Oro in Bel Air, across the street from John Ford’s home. The windows were shaded by picturesque green and white striped awnings that looked out onto a courtyard with a fountain in the center, surrounded by flowers. It was furnished with white couches and heavy European pieces made out of dark wood. The walls were covered by his father’s gloomy paintings, in the heavy gilt frames made by his mother. The hedges were neatly clipped, the pool crystalline, the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud lustrous in the garage, along with his four other vehicles. He still hated to drive, got lost on the UCLA campus every time he left the house if he were behind the wheel himself. “I don’t drive unless I have to. I’m driven,” he said, smiling at his own cleverness. He was said to have nineteen servants. Still, life was not perfect. He complained about the help to visiting journalists, said the grounds weren’t picked up properly. He had always worn glasses, he worried that the pink spots they left on the bridge of his nose might show up in
his press photos. Orson Welles was living in a bedroom off Peter’s study. He turned it into a toxic waste dump full of half-eaten dinners and redolent cigar butts. Cybill couldn’t stand having him around.

  Bogdanovich was determined not to do Addie Pray. He saw it as another Picture Show, a period piece, thought he’d be repeating himself. He had been trying to get a Western off the ground at Warners written by Larry McMurtry, a script that would eventually become Lonesome Dove. He wanted John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Stewart and Fonda committed, Wayne refused. “Naw, it’s kindofa end-of-the-West Western, Pete. I’m not ready to hang up the spurs yet.” Bogdanovich believed Ford sabotaged it, told Wayne not to do it. “It was one thing for me to write a book about him, make a film about him, another thing for me to take three of his stars and make a really great Western,” he says. “It was too much.”

  A couple of months later, Yablans says he got a call from Bogdanovich, who was in New York at the Plaza. “Frank, it’s Peter. I’m sick, you gotta get me the company doctor.”

  “How sick are you?”

  “Very sick, 105, 106, something like that.”

  “God, Peter, if it goes any higher, you could die.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m calling you. You have to get me a doctor.”

  “Are you going to do Paper Moon?”

  “What! What kind of a question is that to ask me now?”

  “Are you going to do Paper Moon? Because if you don’t give it to me, I don’t give a fuck if you live or die! You can find your own doctor.”

  “You can’t be serious about this.”

  “I’m very serious.”

  “I can’t believe that you’re this cruel.”

  “I’m this cruel, Peter.” (Bogdanovich has no recollection of this exchange.) Peter gave Paper Moon to Platt, asked her to come up with one reason why he should do it. She liked it, reminded him that he was the father of two daughters, and suggested Tatum O’Neal for the girl. Bogdanovich came back with Ryan for her dad. They got excited, but realized that Evans would never go for it because of O’Neal’s affair with MacGraw during Love Story. But Bogdanovich called Evans anyway. As they suspected, Evans wouldn’t have anything to do with Ryan, came up with his usual names, Beatty and Nicholson. Eventually, he changed his mind, but now it was Polly who didn’t want to work on the picture. She thought, Everybody is going to be staring at me, wondering how I’m dealing with it. It’s going to be humiliating. Turning to her estranged husband she said, “Well, I’ll do it if I don’t have to look at Cybill. She can’t come on the set.” Peter agreed.

  Coppola’s first film for the Directors Company was to be The Conversation, from his old script about a detective who uses high-tech sound equipment to do his work and eventually falls into a paranoid funk and autodestructs. Friedkin wasn’t happy about it. “The Conversation was a very obscure rip-off of Antonioni’s Blow-Up but with sound,” he says. Peter didn’t like it any more than Friedkin did: “Francis said it was gonna be a Hitchcock kind of movie, but it didn’t end up being a Hitchcock kind of movie,” he grumbles. But they were not allowed to veto one another’s pictures.

  At a gala press luncheon at “21” in New York, on August 20, Paramount launched the company. Yablans announced, a bit prematurely, as it turned out, “They’ve gone through their growth period. Coppola isn’t interested in filming a pomegranate growing in the desert. They’re all very commercial now.”

  The Conversation wrapped in March, and several weeks later, Friedkin saw a cut at Francis’s home in Napa Valley. He recalls, “I thought it was like watching paint dry or listening to hair grow, and immediately when the lights went up, Francis went around the room and asked each of the hangers-on how much they thought the film was gonna do, and he got all these ludicrous estimates.’ Then he got to me, and I said, ‘Francis, we’ll be lucky to get $500,000 on this picture. I think it’s unintelligible, it’s ridiculous.’ He said, ‘It’s a first cut.’ I said, ‘Whatever it is, you’re asking me, I’m telling you. There’s no story, no nothing. It’s just a collection of shots. I really hated it.’ He said, ‘Well, I hope you’re wrong,’ and I said, ‘So do I.’”

  Paper Moon opened in New York on May 16, 1973, to rave reviews and long lines at the box office. It made $16.5 million in rentals. Bogdanovich was going from hit to hit, critical triumph to critical triumph. It wasn’t doing much for his people skills. If possible, he was becoming even more insufferable. He carried the reviews around with him in his pocket.

  According to the bylaws of the company, each director was entitled to a cut of the others’ pictures. Coppola took $300,000 out of Paper Moon’s profits, and so did Friedkin, who had still directed nothing. Yablans saw this as an opportunity to cause some trouble. “Once they took Peter’s money, it was over,” he says. “I constantly called Peter, said, ‘When are these guys going to make a movie, Peter? Christ! They have your money, what’s going on here?’” It worked; Bogdanovich was furious. “Francis always said he felt he owed it to me,” says Peter. “I kept saying, ‘Could I get it now?’ He never had money again. Billy didn’t feel he owed me anything.”

  Peter was looking for projects to do with Cybill. Ever since Tim Bottoms had given her a copy of the Henry James novella Daisy Miller on the set of The Last Picture Show, she had had her heart set on doing it. Bogdanovich was now ready. “She’s so right for it—as though Henry James had her in mind when he wrote it,” he said, with typical modesty. Woody Allen had lunch with Bogdanovich shortly after it wrapped. Peter spent the whole meal agonizing over whether the credits should read, A Peter Bogdanovich Film of Henry James’s Novella; or Henry James’s Novella Directed by Peter Bogdanovich; or Henry James’s Daisy Miller, a Film by Peter Bogdanovich; or Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, from Henry James’s Novella.

  But the picture created more friction among the three directors. “The next thing I knew was that Peter was making Daisy Miller, starring his girlfriend who had no discernible acting ability whatsoever,” says Friedkin. “He never talked to me about it. I only got the script because it was contractual. I looked at this thing and I thought, What the fuck is going on around here? Peter was pussy-struck. He could not see that Cybill was not a great actress. He was just using this company as a vanity press. I reminded him that we all had an agreement that we weren’t going to take projects like that, that no other studio would make with us and dump them into this company.

  “The Directors Company was an amazing thing and it was ultimately destroyed in a Machiavellian way by Yablans,” Friedkin continues. “He even let Cybill do a record album called Cybill Does It to Cole Porter, and he put up a gigantic billboard for it on the Sunset Strip, all of which was part of his design to undo the company. After all, this was not Barbra Streisand. This was a woman who had never sung professionally, never released a record. Frank knew that if he encouraged Peter along that path...”

  Meanwhile, Peter marched blithely ahead. He was feeling generous toward Polly. “I’ll give you a job anytime you want.” But she didn’t want to work with him anymore. Paper Moon was also his last hit. Bogdanovich and Platt had made a singularly creative team, and when she withdrew, Bogdanovich lost, at the very least, a person who could say no. Despite protestations to the contrary, he surrounded himself with yes-men. Says Paul Lewis, who had worked with him on Doc, “I don’t think it had to do with Polly, I think it had to do with his own ego. He believed that he became Orson Welles. And he wasn’t.”

  When Daisy Miller, his second picture for the Directors Company, came out in New York on May 22, 1974, Bogdanovich got his first bad reviews. Bad wasn’t the word for it; the film got killed by the very same critics who had hailed him as a genius a year earlier for Paper Moon. The hammer fell hard on Shepherd. One critic wrote that she was considered “a no-talent dame with nice boobs and a toothpaste smile and all the star quality of a dead hamster.” Said Shepherd: “After Daisy, I could walk in a room and feel a concentrated hatred.”

  Bogdanovi
ch was stung by the notices: “When someone yells, ‘You’re a motherfucker!’ right in your face, you don’t forget it.... You stop reading them. Then some of it gets back to you anyway—friends tell you the meanest parts.” One of the reasons the picture flopped was because both male leads were so unappealing. It was no accident. “I begged him, said, ‘Peter, this is a romance,’” recalls Sue Mengers. “But he resisted. He always protected himself against attractive leading men opposite Cybill, with actors he could feel superior to unless he could make them look like him, the way he put glasses and a hat on Ryan in What’s Up, Doc?” Still, the picture was a respectable failure with classy and difficult material. It would get worse.

  Daisy Miller was, however, the last straw for the Directors Company. After the two flops, “Billy said he wanted out,” says Bogdanovich. “We said, ‘You haven’t even made a picture.’ He said, ‘Well, I can get more money elsewhere.’ He chose the cash over the freedom. The company didn’t work because Billy didn’t want it to go on.” Says Friedkin, “I could see what Frank was doing in letting these vanity projects go forward, and I was not gonna put my next picture through a company that had a management that was trying to sabotage the company. I withdrew.”

  From the outside, it looked like three brats fighting over the spoils. Says Bob Rafelson, “They all wanted to do BBS again. But that was gone. This wasn’t young guys trying to fight for a statement. These guys were trying to fight for 10 percent of the gross from first dollar, and were pissed off that the other guy didn’t make a hit film.”

  AFTER PAPER MOON, Platt got a call from Altman. He asked her to design Thieves Like Us. She had just done the ’30s in Paper Moon, she was tired, she wanted to spend time with her girls. But she also wanted to meet him. She flew to New York, stayed at the Pierre. “He was not in good shape,” she recalls. “He liked me because he couldn’t seduce me. He tried in every way. He and his wife were right next door to me, and the minute she left he came on to me. He said he had affairs with all the women he worked with.”