Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  When Reagan was elected to the White House, I asked Dwan how it felt having one of his former actors as President of the country. Allan laughed and said: “Taught him everything he knows….” By the time Reagan ran for governor of California, the studio factory-system which had created him had fallen apart and was in the process of disintegrating further; his last role was as the arch-villain in a violent thriller Don Siegel* made called The Killers (1964). The one time we ever spoke, at a Hollywood party after his governorship and before any serious moves toward national office, we talked about Allan Dwan. Reagan’s eyes misted warmly; he was so glad to hear Allan was still alive and well. There was a melancholy smile on his face as we talked of pictures. A year before Dwan died, the Academy gave a special evening’s tribute to this last pioneer, and President Reagan sent heartfelt congratulations.

  The Republicans had eventually cast Reagan in the best role of his career, and his long experience in front of cameras served him exceptionally well in the age of television-politics—which John Kennedy had inaugurated in the election of 1960—the first leading-man political star elected to the White House. When Jack Kennedy went into politics, the movies lost a major possibility. Yet have we ever really concluded how good or bad this new TV-fashion of election has been for the country? Jimmy Stewart once expressed the worry to me in his own way: “I don’t know ’bout all this TV all day long now; there’s people acting all the time—they turn the thing on, somebody’s there acting at them. I wonder if that’s good for people—all this acting.”

  Maybe what he meant was that it was becoming difficult to separate reality from fiction, that even the news would inevitably begin to seem like just another show, that all this acting was in some way deadening people’s reactions to genuine emotion, to real tragedy. Perhaps the Vietnam War in our living room, or the assassinations of the Kennedys or Martin Luther King, Jr., had not gained in resonance through accessibility, but had only lost a good portion of their horror by being reduced simply to another hour of TV. If we hadn’t really understood the impact of the movies on our lives, how could we gauge the far more insidious effect of that friendly-seeming tube in the family room? If the giant size of the old screens played a major part in the creation of our pop mythology, couldn’t the smaller-than-life proportions of television reduce reality and help to trivialize it?

  The first star of pictures, the first screen deity, had been female: the lovely, euphoniously named Florence Lawrence. The earliest producers had hoped to keep their players anonymous in order to hold salaries down, but the public demand to know the identity of that beautiful girl of the nickelodeons became impossible to deny. Pickford followed, and Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish, Theda Bara and Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh and Gloria Swanson and Pola Negri, among the silents, and Garbo, who bridged the two eras. Not in the least coincidentally, within less than a decade after these early female stars became screen goddesses, women finally achieved the right to vote (first in Ireland, then England, then the United States). In the talkies, there were Dietrich, and Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, Kate Hepburn and Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Veronica Lake, and Irene Dunne, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner and Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. Since Marilyn Monroe died, there have been no love goddesses; virtually no female stars of equal impact to the males, though Streisand endured longer than most, due also (and initially) to her singing. Most of the girls of TV-land are variations on the Barbie-doll or Playboy image of women; there are fewer than ever female stars and none with the old mythic power.

  The towering male stars of the golden age have been reduced to a mixed bag of TV stars sometimes straining for size, and serious or quasi-serious actors refusing to type themselves into mythic shape. Men of considerable talent and appeal like De Niro, Al Pacino and Tom Hanks have preferred versatility to the old kind of picture-stardom that required a certain consistency of character. Following Brando’s lead, they have avoided a larger-than-life identity to the audience. More contemporary “old-fashioned” movie stars like Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis have found few directors of myth-making ability to fully exploit their qualities, though Eastwood himself understood the principle well and learned to direct so effectively that he has essentially continued to create himself. Only a few other actors today (like Jack Nicholson), and one politician (Bill Clinton), have the really personal identity of the original movie stars with which this book deals.

  Power of the Players

  For Tuesday night, September 11, 2001, I had theater tickets to see Broadway’s Tony-winning musical comedy revival, 42nd Street, but of course that performance was canceled because of the catastrophe at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Following New York mayor Giuliani’s plea for a return to some kind of normality in the face of the unthinkable, most Broadway shows reopened that Thursday evening. I went to see 42nd Street the next night, the first weekend performance of an archetypically lightweight entertainment (based on several Warner Bros. film musicals of the early 1930s) only three days after an unprecedented, apocalyptical slaughter of American innocents. I have never seen or heard an audience so desperate for laughter and gaiety, so loudly and touchingly grateful for two hours of totally uncomplicated escape.

  Sitting there, watching the huge cast of dancers, singers and actors doing their professional best, I wondered how many of them had been personally affected by deaths on September 11th. Though certainly this cataclysmic event bore out with a vengeance John Donne’s famous poem about every person being an integral part of mankind—thus obviating any need to know “for whom the bell tolls,” since “it tolls for thee.” (France’s newspaper Le Monde poignantly echoed that: “Nous sommes tous les Americains.”) What struck me most, therefore, about that performance of 42nd Street was the wonderful indomitability of show-business troupers, and why, after all, it was vitally important that “the show must go on.”

  Maybe that’s part of what Orson Welles meant when he used to sign off his weekly radio shows: “I remain, as ever, obediently yours.” He once told me that Marlene Dietrich had said to him that she found the phrase amusingly ironic. “It really isn’t, Marlene,” he responded, “I mean it.”

  That was surely the key emotion I felt during the star-studded two-hour telethon that was presented a week after the tragedy to raise money for the victims’ families. The single quality all the various performers had in common during their appearances was an extraordinary lack of ego. None of what they did was about them, but rather about the needs of the audience. Each artist contributed whatever he or she could to a cause far bigger than all of them put together, and you could feel their acute awareness of this. Wasn’t that, finally, what art was meant to be? Clearly Bruce Springsteen’s song on that occasion in four heartbreaking words summed up all New Yorkers’ unspoken cry: “My city in ruins …” Springsteen’s challenged artistry took us poetically in less than five minutes through the entire horror and tragedy of the experience and concluded with just the right sadly hopeful admonition: “Come on, rise up.”

  Joel McCrea as a famous movie director, and Veronica Lake as a starlet, go off and live as hoboes in order to find out what the world’s really like in Preston Sturges’ comedy-drama Sullivan’s Travels (1941). Fourteen years later, I moved scenery for a play Lake starred in.

  It is no coincidence, then, that during the bleak and crushing decade of the Great Depression, the movies’ most singular and valuable contribution was the invention of the screwball comedy (It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, etc.), or that with World War II looming (Europe already in the thick of it), Preston Sturges wrote in Sullivan’s Travels a passionate testament to the crucial and uniquely human need for laughter. He told of a film director (played by Joel McCrea), noted for making ultra-light entertainment, who decides that he wants to create a meaningful social document about “life,” about poverty and suffering. Out into the world he goes with a dime in his pocket to discover what being poor, homeless and on the run is all about. Eventua
lly he finds himself in serious trouble on a horrific Southern chain gang where the only small respite for the miserable prisoners is the Sunday movies they’re allowed to see at a run-down country church nearby. There he watches a silly Disney cartoon that gives him and his fellow convicts the only pleasure they’ve had all week. After he is rescued, flying back to Hollywood, his producers tell him they’re now ready to back his serious film. But Sullivan explains that all he wants to do now is make comedies. “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” he tells them. “Did you know that’s all some people have. It isn’t much but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan. Boy!”

  The most distressing aspect, finally, to the power of the players is how quickly it usually diminishes after their retirement or death. In directing a young actor in 1997, I mentioned as a way of encouraging him that he reminded me of James Cagney; the fellow had no idea who I was talking about. Toward the end of 2002, I told another actor in his twenties to handle the scene more lightly, “more Cary Grant,” I said, and got a totally blank reaction. And these are actors!—people in show business whose job one would think is to be familiar with the great past achievements in their chosen field. The young American audience seems not only to be totally ignorant of these, but to have practically no interest in any film shot earlier than maybe 1980 or 1990. The classics of the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties might as well be in Sanskrit. Silent pictures are not even worth raising as a distant possibility. Black and white is anathema. The great names of the past—many of the players in this book—mean nothing to younger filmgoers. That they are missing untold pleasures, that there is an overflowing treasure of joyful, enriching, edifying experiences waiting for them doesn’t seem to be within their realm of consciousness.

  One of my hopes in compiling this book of encounters, conversations and observations around some of the eloquent stars of the past is to help make them human and accessible to potential new viewers. Also perhaps as something people of or around my generation can use to help pass along to children and friends some of their happiest enthusiasms and experiences. Most movies today simply aren’t as good as pictures used to be, not by a long shot, but try telling that to youngsters who haven’t even the slightest frame of reference by which they might compare the current output.

  The modest goal here is to awaken a few so that maybe they’ll look at what’s out there just waiting to be discovered and relished. My father took me at age five to see Chaplin and Keaton movies at the Museum of Modern Art. I ran older pictures for my daughters starting at the same age; now in their thirties, they love them still. It is such a rich heritage that to allow its disappearance, its descent into obscurity, is to me a criminal deprivation of beauty and profound human achievement. To keep the past alive, then, is among my principal objectives. On the screen, many of these memorable players still breathe, still love, still elicit abundant laughter and tears. Why let their lights go out when they have so very much to give?

  * See chapter in Who the Devil Made It.

  1

  LILLIAN GISH

  Forty-six years ago I saw Lillian Gish in person. It happened in the fall of 1958, I was still living with my parents in Manhattan, and had gone way uptown to the Museum of the City of New York to see a screening of one of D. W. Griffith’s most popular films, Way Down East—among the biggest-grossing pictures of 1920; indeed, of the twenties—when pretty much everybody in the country went to the movies every week. That afternoon, thirty-eight years after its initial release, the crowd wasn’t large and most of them were not especially impressed by the movie, which was represented by a fair 16mm print, projected none too brilliantly, with a spotty musical arrangement—from a number of records, I think it was—piped from a control booth. The audience laughed at the film numerous times—their attitude very superior to the dated social aspects of the hugely popular old Victorian stage melodrama on which the movie was based, about an innocent girl who gets tricked and ends up pregnant with no husband in a small and narrow-minded town.

  I was bowled over by the ease and brilliance of the visual storytelling, and by the amazing performance Lillian Gish was giving, and irritated by the stupidity of the audience, which was judging the quality of the film through the mores and values of the current era instead of understanding the work in the context of its own time. Despite themselves they eventually got involved in Miss Gish’s incandescent, mesmerizing performance, and held by the classic assurance of Griffith at his most confident—the father of movie narrative in his prime! Gish’s extended close-up when she realizes her infant child has died in her arms is one of those unforgettable human moments of which only the screen is capable: a reaction shot that can haunt you forever.

  Toward the end, the audience started getting superior again, chortling condescendingly over the much-imitated (from Griffith pictures) race-to-the-rescue: Gish lying unconscious on an ice floe moving rapidly down the freezing Mamaroneck River, the hero desperately trying to save her, leaping from floe to floe to reach her before certain death at the waterfall. Largely also because the projection was too fast (as usual with silent films), the audience began laughing at this masterfully shot and edited action. The fellow running the museum’s performance finally spoke out over the loudspeaker, saying angrily that the sequence they were watching was actually filmed at great peril on the Mamaroneck, that several people were injured and one person drowned during its making. Miss Gish, he went on hotly, had insisted on doing all the ice-floe shots herself, as well as on keeping one hand over the edge and in the freezing waters: to this day she had not entirely recovered the feeling in that hand. The man’s tight little speech mercifully shut the audience up until the end of the picture.

  Lillian Gish in one of her most popular roles, as sister to her blind sibling (played by real sister Dorothy Gish) for D. W. Griffith’s French Revolution epic, Orphans of the Storm (1922), which included a moving and famous ride-to-the-rescue—saving Gish from the guillotine.

  Lillian Gish herself lying on the ice floe as it careens down the swift Mamaroneck River during the climactic sequence of D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).

  This same fellow then introduced Lillian Gish to the startled crowd—none of us had known she was there. Everyone applauded vigorously, to make up for their rudeness and because her work had been genuinely admired. Miss Gish, still beguiling at sixty-five, spoke briefly with strength and eloquence. It was a little difficult to reconcile the luminous larger-than-life young woman we had been watching for two hours with the small and somewhat matronly figure before us. That her art had been silent made hearing her speak disconcerting, too. Taking in Miss Gish required the past images to recede so that she could be brought into present-day focus.

  Lillian Gish as the doomed Mimi with her adoring artist-lover, played by the movies’ top romantic lead, John Gilbert, in King Vidor’s silent film based on the same stories as Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1926).

  For Lillian Gish had been the first virgin hearth goddess of the screen, as Audrey Hepburn was the last. It is no coincidence that for his huge epic of civilization through the ages, Intolerance, Griffith chose Gish to be the Hand at Home That Rocks the Cradle of Life. She remained a valiant and courageous symbol of fortitude and love through all distress: French Revolution in Orphans of the Storm, murderous bigotry in The Scarlet Letter, nature itself and man as predator in The Wind. Images of her in all these self-sacrificing roles—epitomized perhaps in her strong but dying waifs of Broken Blossoms and La Bohème—were what passed before me as the real woman stood there some thirty years later.

  She spoke almost entirely about the sublime genius of D. W. Griffith, who had created Way Down East and other films so beautifully, and made it possible for her and all the actors to perform. Then, in conclusion, with great poise and certitude she said: “But, you know, when we were making pictures in those early days we weren’t making them for the fame or for the money. We weren’t even making them for Mr. Griffith. We we
re making them for that …” and she turned slightly and gestured with a sweep of her arm toward the screen behind her; meaning by this silent moment that all their work had been for the sacred ideal of the medium itself—which was not the cans of film in the booth, but rather the illusion that appeared on the screen.

  I’ve never seen or heard a better description of the purity of a true artist’s purpose. The spirit Miss Gish conveyed to me—now somewhat longer ago than the original release of Way Down East had been then—seems all the more poignant, and distant, in our current self-involved and hypercynical era of decadence. To recapture in the movies the love-innocence her remarks, gestures and enduring work speak toward is no small task. But what a precious goal!

  Born Lillian Diana de Guiche, October 14, 1896, Springfield, OH; died February 27, 1993, New York, NY.

  Selected starring shorts and features (with director):

  1912: An Unseen Enemy (D. W. Griffith); The Musketeers of Pig Alley (Griffith)

  1913: The Mothering Heart (Griffith)

  1914: The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (Griffith); Home Sweet Home (Griffith)

  1915: The Birth of a Nation (Griffith); Enoch Arden (Christy Cabanne)

  1916: An Innocent Magdalene (Allan Dwan); Intolerance (Griffith)

  1918: Hearts of the World (Griffith)

  1919: A Romance of Happy Valley (Griffith); Broken Blossoms (Griffith); True Heart Susie (Griffith); The Greatest Question (Griffith)