Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette

      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 was her main occupation those days, as well as her privilege, though one might wish she would stop mixing politics with art quite so ferociously.”³² He thus shared the dismissive attitude toward youthful protest that Judy expresses in What’s Up, Doc? After learning that Judy has been kicked out of college for blowing up a classroom, Howard asks, with a hint of concern, “Political activism?” “No,” she corrects him. “Chemistry major.”

      In his documentary Directed by John Ford, there is a justly famous sequence in which Bogdanovich is heard firing questions at the director of Stagecoach and The Searchers, who is posed in front of a vista in Monument Valley but is in no mood to answer. I always loved one question in particular: “Would you agree that the point of Fort Apache,” he asks, “was that the tradition of the army was more important than one individual?” Well, as both Bogdanovich and Ford knew, there is more than this to Fort Apache, but still … even to ask such a question is so wonderfully out of touch with the zeitgeist of the early 1970s! “The tradition of the army”—what a phrase!

      Better still are Bogdanovich’s on-screen conversations with Ford’s frequent collaborators, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Their thoughts are, of course, wonderfully insightful, but equally instructive are the glimpses we get of a youthful, dark-haired Bogdanovich, seen in over-the-shoulder shots at the edge of the frame before the camera moves in on the interview subjects—the slow dolly in being one of his signature visual tropes here and throughout his work. As Wayne tells an anecdote or Stewart cracks a joke, we see Bogdanovich chuckle, as if to confirm how close he is—how sympathetic, how understanding—to these men, each of whom is old enough to be his father.

      Peter Bogdanovich shows Ryan O’Neal how it’s done on the set of What’s Up, Doc? Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store.

      Wrote journalist Tad Friend in a New Yorker profile of Bogdanovich in 2002: “His films transported audiences to a time before drugs, race riots, and polyester pants—a time when you drove your jalopy with high hopes to the spring dance.”³³ It is right to emphasize his films’ nostalgic disposition, which comes across in offhand, incidental details such as the radios playing Hank Williams’s song “Kaw-Liga” in The Last Picture Show and the copies of the Saturday Evening Post hovered over by characters in Nickelodeon. But he was no tortured soul finding distraction from life’s miseries by making escapist fare: Peter Bogdanovich was, at this point in his life, as footloose and fancy free as his films were. As proof, consider a wonderful publicity still from What’s Up, Doc?: on one side is Bogdanovich—smartly dressed in one of those candy-striped shirts Biskind mentions—acting out a scene for Ryan O’Neal, and on the other is O’Neal imitating him precisely. Why do I suspect that Bogdanovich would have been perfectly happy if O’Neal had called it a day and allowed the director himself to do the part?

      The differences between Peter Bogdanovich and me were not insignificant. He had been a teenager in Manhattan in the 1950s; I was a teenager in Ohio in the 1990s and early 2000s. His father was a painter; my father was a banker. He