Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  He stepped down to laughter and applause, the band struck up again. We wandered around, taking in the sights: Clint Eastwood, Rhonda Fleming, Glenn Ford, Art Linkletter, Hugh O’Brian, Jack Warner, Richard Zanuck, Joanne Carson. Billy Graham was there, too, standing on a rise—overlooking the golf course, and surrounded by a bower of branches, with a kind of glow around him as he talked to several people. Then I noticed he was standing in a floodlight, too. Dr. Kissinger was as charming as ever, Jill St. John by his side. Jack Benny was trading jokes with George Burns, George Jessel, and Vice President Agnew, and when the opportunity came I said hello to Benny, who said that after the President’s “plug,” he’d calculated he had to be a Republican for “at least another eight years.” Then Scatman Crothers sang with gusto a song about Nixon that he’d written for the occasion.

  It was getting late. We worked our way through the crowd and came over to the President, still standing near the band, shaking hands with everyone as they were leaving. We stepped up.

  “Well, thank you, Mr. President,” I said as we shook hands. “I haven’t been won over, but it’s been a nice party.”

  He rode right over that—didn’t hear it—but also didn’t let go of my hand. “I had no idea you were so young,” he said.

  “It’s my name—makes you think of an old fellow with a beard.”

  “Yes—Bogdanovich,” he said as though to confirm agedness in the sound of it. He still held my hand, without awkwardness—not as though he couldn’t find the right moment to let go, but just because he wanted to hold it, I guess. Certainly I wasn’t going to pull it away. “But, you know,” he said, “when you think of some of the great directors of the past—John Ford, for example—he started very young, didn’t he?”

  “He was twenty-two,” I said. “I did a documentary about him.”

  He didn’t seem to hear that, either—went right on with his thought—though he finally took his hand away to make a gesture. “You know, I ran a couple of his films the other day—Apache … ahm, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—was he twenty-two when he made those?”

  “No—oh, no—that was later in his career. I guess he was around fifty when he did those.” I was trying to get over the odd sensation of discussing one of my favorite directors with the President of the United States.

  “Well,” Mr. Nixon said pleasantly, “then you have a long time ahead of you, too.”

  I grinned. “You know, Mr. President,” I said, “you were mentioned in a review of one of my pictures.”

  “Really?” he said, leaning his right ear closer, looking down. “What was that?”

  “Well, this critic [it had been Pauline Kael in The New Yorker] said that the movie I’d made was one that ‘even President Nixon would like.’”

  He threw his head back and laughed. I believe he slapped his thigh. “Well!” he exclaimed, “you don’t know if that’s a compliment or not!”

  “Yeah,” I said, and laughed, too. “But, you know, Dr. Kissinger told me he thought you hadn’t seen it.”

  “Well, I will,” he said. “I will.” He shook hands with Cybill and we started away. “You ought to put her in a picture!” he called after us.

  “I did. That’s the one you haven’t seen.”

  “Oh?” He came after us and leaned in toward me confidentially. “What was the name of that production?”

  “The Last Picture Show.”

  He looked up at me and there were several seconds of silence. He knitted his brow intently. “Ahm—the one in Texas?” he said tentatively.

  “That’s right.”

  “In—ahm—in black and white?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I saw that! Why, that’s a remarkable picture! We ran that at Camp David!” And to my amazement, he launched into a very flattering paragraph about the movie and the actors in it—Ben Johnson in particular—generally confirming Kael’s prediction. Then he turned to Cybill, putting a hand on her arm. “And what part did you play?”

  She said, “Jacy.”

  I said, “She was the one who stripped on the diving board.”

  The President paused. He looked at me, but kept his hand on Cybill’s arm. “Well, everyone gave a remarkable performance in that film,” he said, and then, still not looking at Cybill, but patting her arm as he spoke and with the barest flicker of a smile: “And, of course, I remember you very well now, my dear.”

  We said good-bye again, shook hands and left.

  Carter at the Beverly Wilshire

  Four years later, Warren Beatty was on the phone. “You wanna meet Carter?” he asked in a velvety whisper. “I’m having a few people over to meet him on Sunday—you and Cybill wanna come? Ask some tough questions.”

  As we walked into the Beverly Wilshire suite that Warren had hired for the cocktail party, guests were arriving in droves. The Secret Service was well represented, as were the caterers, but the crowd was still manageable enough for Warren to meet us at the door and at least take us into the main room.

  In no time the place was packed. Art Buchwald, Carroll O’Connor, James Caan and Tony Randall, Peter Falk, Diana Ross, Dinah Shore, Buck Henry and Paul Simon, Sidney Poitier, Hugh Hefner, all the non-Republican studio heads—precious few of those. Most of the Hollywood brass were over at Lew Wasserman’s house where there had been a dinner party that same evening for Carter. Everyone at Warren’s looked thrilled to be there. Movie people, used to leading fantasy lives, seem to always experience a special rush when exposed to the glamorous side of political power.

  By the time Jimmy Carter got there, the crush in the room was so thick you could tell he had arrived only from the agitation of the crowd, and pretty soon, everyone was trying to have a private moment with the candidate. I turned to find him beside Cybill Shepherd and me. Confronted by his smiling visage, I couldn’t think of anything relevant to say so I simply pointed out that we were both wearing the same suit. Gray herringbone. Carter looked at mine and said, “Indeed we are.” His was adorned with one of those peanut campaign buttons he wore in the lapel. Cybill said, somewhat suggestively, “Ooo, I like your peanut.” Carter grinned broadly at this and said he was glad to hear it. Cybill blushed. Carter blushed. Warren cut right in with Carroll O’Connor and our time in the sun was over.

  Warren finally asked for quiet and eventually the din subsided so that he could be heard. With just the right edge of ironic mockery, he scored a few lightly irreverent jokes off Carter—who appeared to enjoy them as much as everyone else—and managed with some charm to combine an attitude of suave superiority and shit-kicking humility into precisely the right mix to fit the mood of the group. Just in case anyone was casting, Warren was doing a splendid audition for a swinging Secretary of State. At the appropriate moment, he stepped down and turned it over to Carter.

  The future President’s most appreciated remark had to do with his own bravery—considering his host’s amorous reputation—in showing up at all for a Warren Beatty cocktail party. This not only got a big laugh but achieved the desired goal of putting him morally one-up on everybody in the room. When he went on to say that he had heard of everyone gathered about long before they had heard of him, I would guess he secured most of the available votes.

  With some grace, he then moved casually into a more serious vein, explained some of his most popular positions and opened the scene to questions. Diana Ross asked very earnestly if Mr. Carter would tell why he thought he was qualified to be President, an obvious cue to recite one’s résumé, which Carter patiently proceeded to do. Before long Jimmy Caan interrupted with a longish go-team speech in which he expressed his general enthusiasm for Carter, giving virtually no reasons, but plenty of boyish good-fellowship: “You’ve got my vote.”

  With some trepidation, I asked if Mr. Carter intended to do anything about secrecy in government, especially as it related to the maneuvers of the CIA and the FBI. He replied briskly that the heads of these agencies would be appointed from among people he knew and could trust
and that they would be directly answerable to him. I don’t know what response I had expected but I wasn’t entirely happy. Possibly I’d hoped for something more rousing.

  Then Carroll O’Connor was into his speech, expressing loud disapproval of Carter’s then recent defense of the Russian author Solzhenitsyn. This caused consternation and embarrassment, since it was not a fashionable opinion around the room, and a lot of the looks that flashed around reflected the thought that maybe Carroll had been playing Archie Bunker too long. Carter, realizing that the question was unpopular, gave a short, succinct reply that left Carroll visibly dissatisfied and everyone else relieved.

  At this point, Tony Randall launched into one of his favorite subjects—the need for greater government subsidy of the arts—in particular the formation of a national theater. Carter danced lightly around this for a time, speaking of all the fine cultural events he had observed in Georgia, allowing as how a good concert was a wonderful thing for folks to see. Tony was not to be easily appeased and he pressed for Carter’s assurance that a national theater would become a reality during his term of office. Carter sidestepped with good humor, didn’t answer yes or no or barely even maybe.

  One could sense in the room a split vote for Tony as he continued with what was becoming a mini-filibuster on the subject of arts subsidy. Admittedly Carter was in a difficult position. He couldn’t very well say what he might have been thinking: that he didn’t give one damn about the arts when there were all these hungry people in the country, all this unemployment and all those headaches to deal with overseas. But a bunch of votes were at stake, so Jimmy Carter kept on smiling. Part of Randall’s charm was in playing the scene so that the guest of honor could go on smiling and not seem silly. But the whole occasion ended without a satisfying exit for anyone.

  There was a history of passivity and easy panic operating on Carter’s side that evening. And show people have always been impressed with royalty—which the presidency has devolved into—the regal position being another the movies abdicated in their avid plunge toward everyday respectability. (Orson Welles used to say that one of the great steps downward for the acting profession came when theater star Henry Irving became the first actor to be knighted.) Artists, like presidents, are in the service of the people, though at their most valuable they lead the way. With a touch of the honest politician, an artist perhaps can be more successful in achieving his goals, just as a politician could use a touch of the artist.

  Pop Mythology

  In 1982, I was at the Kennedy Center in Washington on the night they honored five distinguished figures in the arts, among them Cary Grant. Our seats were directly in front of the stage, but none of the honorees ever left their places in the central area of the first balcony, so that all of us in the orchestra had to be satisfied with only a long-shot view of the principals. This had a strangely effective advantage: distanced so far and high above us, they retained some of their larger-than-life qualities—especially Grant, with whose face and voice and movements so many of us had grown up. When I turned along with the rest of the audience to watch attentively as the honored guests assembled, my eyes, like most of the others’, remained on that tall, dashing figure we had admired and emulated for nearly half a century.

  So when President Ronald Reagan entered last, and stood shaking hands with Cary Grant, I had for a moment quite a different vision of the event: surely if this were a scene from a picture, Cary would be playing the President and Ronald his tardy vice president, apologizing boyishly for his lateness. You could almost hear Cary saying: “That’s awright, Ronnie, but try not to let it happen again!”

  Personally, I had always hoped maybe Jimmy Stewart would be President one day—the Jimmy Stewart of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—how comforting that would have been. Or Henry Fonda, who often played presidents or other important political figures, and was always absolutely convincing in the roles. Perhaps the greatest political team in history would have featured Stewart as President, Fonda as Secretary of State, and John Wayne as Chief of the Pentagon; Frank Capra would have been the director. For movie fans, Ronald Reagan never would have been first choice in the key role. Yet it was certainly difficult to argue that Reagan was President not because he had been a movie star. After watching Jimmy Carter win with the Capra approach, the Republicans must have figured they might as well try Hollywood themselves: if Carter was trying to do Jimmy Stewart, why not have Reagan trying to do Jimmy Stewart; he certainly had more experience at it.

  The pop-culture reverberations behind Reagan’s election as leader of the free world resonated forward and backward through our history and confirmed unequivocally a suspicion many people have voiced about the great technological art form of the twentieth century (only five years older than the century itself), which had held the lively attention of the world for as many years as Ronald Reagan had been alive: the first movie-star president for a country unconsciously motivated by large shadows on a white screen. Could anyone refuse to take more seriously now the influence of the movies on our lives and times? Had we examined closely enough what exactly the picture-shows had been doing to us all these years?

  The question had taken on a far more ironic, bizarre and ominous dimension in 1981. A hundred and fifteen years before, an actor had assassinated the President of the United States, but in the second year of the eighties, President Reagan, formerly an actor, was nearly assassinated by a movie fan. This person was inspired not by political motives, but rather by the machinations of a demented fictional character (Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver) portrayed and glorified through the personality of another actor (Robert De Niro) who would, the day after the assassination attempt, win (for his role in Scorsese’s Raging Bull) the Academy Award as best actor of the year. If somebody wrote that scenario for a picture, would anyone believe it? What had happened to the country, and to the movies?

  Had we ever really agreed, though, on what movies were in the first place? There had always been those who’d called them trash, and those who’d called them art, and certainly we knew they often were both, but being the newest form of communication, it had been difficult gaining enough perspective to analyze what their most profound effect might be. Back in the mid-sixties, I’d written that film stars formed the basis for a kind of twentieth-century mythology, without realizing the largest implications of that statement.

  When Fairbanks and Pickford and Chaplin made their tours of Europe in the twenties, they were greeted with a degree of adulation and deification unknown in history; the multitudes that welcomed them in Rome or London went beyond the most fervent hopes of a King or Pope or President. In truth, though “Little Mary” had been dubbed “America’s Sweetheart,” she and Fairbanks together became the only King and Queen the United States has ever had. It was less than happy for Doug and Mary, though, the crowds being so huge that the couple couldn’t leave their hotel in Rome for several days, and though they had been anxious to tour the city, they never did. One night they managed to sneak out to a little pasta restaurant nearby, and as a result of that visit, “The Original” Alfredo’s fettuccine became famous. Doug and Mary sent Alfredo a large serving spoon and fork, engraved with thanks and made of 24-karat gold. To this day, VIP customers of the restaurant are still allowed to eat with them.

  Just a few years later, Dr. Goebbels, one of the chief architects of the Hitler regime, called film “the greatest medium for propaganda ever invented.” When the Nazis took control of Germany, according to Fritz Lang—the country’s leading director then—Goebbels personally asked him to head the newly reorganized film industry of the Third Reich. Lang told me he was polite and agreeable, went to his bank, drew out what funds he had, and that same day left his native land, not to return for nearly thirty years. His wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, with whom he had just made his best film (M), chose to stay and work for Hitler. There were many who remained, among them Leni Riefenstahl, who created Triumph of the Will, a devilishly well-directed and stage
d series of supposedly spontaneous pro-Hitler demonstrations of Wagnerian proportions, which helped (along with other similar films) to create out of the demonic little Führer an overwhelmingly powerful godlike figure—one to rival the sacred larger-than-life heroes of the ancient German sagas. We all know too well the consequences these movies helped to produce.

  The advent of film had brought a new and very different dimension to the art of acting, one not sufficiently understood. Originally, remember, the key to real stardom in pictures had very little to do with the old theatrical concept of a well-crafted performance in a given role. We might speak of Burbage, Booth or Barrymore and their various interpretations of Hamlet, but what always distinguished the true film stars—until things began to change in the sixties—had been their ability to so totally eradicate an audience’s disbelief that no question of artifice remained. They didn’t seem to be playing a role at all but rather to be living out a given situation.

  Though critics of the time spoke with reverence of fine screen performances from Olivier, Gielgud or Guinness, they would note disparagingly that John Wayne “always played himself.” Yet it was Wayne’s unique screen persona which captured and retained for close to forty years of his life a profound believability and trust in audiences over the entire world, one that has continued long after his death: an abiding faith, then, not in his acting, but in his actual being. The adventurousness and indestructibility of the Duke became as fondly familiar to the modern age as the exploits and character of Hercules had been to pre-Christian Europe. To many, his passing seemed strangely inconceivable: How could a god die? His vast continuing popularity into the twenty-first century confirms that he hasn’t.

  I knew pretty well the veteran director who made the picture in which Ronald Reagan gave probably his most genuinely likeable performance: in 1955, Allan Dwan did a little Western, based on a Bret Harte story, called Tennessee’s Partner. Dwan had been directing since 1911; he died in 1982 at the age of ninety-five. I once asked him what kind of actor Reagan had been, and Allan said: “He was a fair actor who followed direction pretty well. One time I told him to ride his horse right by the camera, and as he passed I heard him talking to the horse: ‘Whoa now,’ he was saying, ‘hold up now, damn it!’ but the horse kept on going. We had to send a couple of cowboys to bring him back.”