Who the Hell's in It

KNOPF, 544 PAGES, $23.80

IT IS HARD FOR me to think of journalist and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich without thinking of Orson Welles, and not just because Bogdanovich has done much to glorify Welles' life and work. Both men got into directing through performance (Welles was a stage and radio wunderkind; Bogdanovich studied acting with Stella Adler). Both had volatile love lives that included relationships with famous women (Welles married and divorced Rita Hayworth and actress Virginia Nicholson; Bogdanovich married and divorced Cybill Shepherd and dated Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten). As directors, both men had their greatest critical successes early (Welles with Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Bogdanovich with Paper Moon, What's Up, Doc? and his very Wellesian breakthrough The Last Picture Show), fell off Hollywood's A-list and eventually became better known as performers than directors. (Welles' post-1950 fame revolved around Hollywood supporting parts and tv appearances; these days, Bogdanovich gets recognized for his role on The Sopranos.)

Bogdanovich invites further comparisons in his new anthology, Who the Hell's in It, by starting the book with yet another Welles ancecdote. But he's not just trading on film buffs' knowledge of a career-defining friendship. He's setting up his thesis: The source of cinema's magic isn't what's behind the camera, but the complex, often damaged people in front of it.

Welles told Bogdanovich that while an expertly directed film "certainly ranked among the fine arts...the average director, even some of the most successful, with long distinguished careers, did not make the difference that really good performances do." Bogdanovich validates Welles' claim throughout his new book about movie stars, a yeasty sequel to the director-centered Who the Devil Made It that's detailed, cleanly written and often moving.

The 25 chapters focus on some of the biggest names Bogdanovich had the privilege of meeting (and one he never met: Humphrey Bogart). He cultivated friendships with many of these legends and even worked with a few. He got Boris Karloff to star in his first film, 1968's Targets, published a book-length conversation with Welles titled This Is Orson Welles, directed Sidney Poitier in a tv sequel to To Sir with Love and nearly directed his friend John Wayne in the True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn.

If you're looking for scandalous gossip, you won't find it here. Bogdanovich has been so immersed in the politics of moviemaking for so long that it's clearly hard for him to say anything truly cutting (in print, at least) even about people who've been dead for years. Beyond that, even as a journalist, Bogdanovich has always seemed more like a knowledgeable fan than a cold-eyed semiotician or historian. Yet Who the Hell's in It amounts to more than name-dropping and nostalgia because it reveals so much about Bogdanovich's artistic temperament.

The man has always had useful things to say about great filmmakers. But whether interviewing them or writing about their films, he always seemed slightly awed by their existence, even when he considered them friends. The reminiscences in Who the Hell's in It are more earthbound. He writes about Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and other screen legends not like a student recounting a stint at a master's knee, but like a lesser-known member of a famous clan telling tales of his brothers and sisters after one too many glasses of wine.

Bogdanovich analyzes movie stars' peccadillos and blind spots with an actor's eye for human frailty. He notes Jack Lemmon's deep insecurity, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin's often lazy attitude toward the craft of screen acting and Adler's inability to quit thinking like an acting coach while watching movies. (While watching Brando and Clift in The Young Lions, he writes, Adler "was so thoroughly engrossed in the intricacies of the actual performances that she didn't really follow the plot and asked me a number of times what was happening.") His front-and-center empathy suggests that after all these years as a director, he still thinks of himself as an actor first.

The Monroe chapter quotes the star's ex-husband Arthur Miller, who believed Monroe's self-loathing and destructive behavior might have been partly due to the "culture of contempt" that drives Hollywood. "It scars the soul," Miller said. Bogdanovich builds on Miller's quote with an anecdote from Welles, who recalled "being at a Hollywood party which Marilyn attended while she was still a lowly starlet, and seeing someone casually pull down the top of her dress in front of people and fondle her."

This image of violation echoes through the book in different guises. Bogdanovich suggests that the entertainment business, which is fueled by lust, greed and aggression, exploits actors (women especially, but men too) when they have power, and then, after they've "made it," keeps them spiritually enslaved by encouraging them to live beyond their means and giving them good reason to trade on their beauty and live in fear of losing it.

The book's briefest chapter describes an encounter with Montgomery Clift. It happened while Bogdanovich was working at a New York movie theater in 1961, a few years after Clift survived a car accident but had to have reconstructive surgery that turned his handsome face into a mask, robbing most of his expressive power. When a drunk-seeming Clift stumbled out of the auditorium, Bogdanovich made small talk with him and then showed him a request book in the lobby that included a note from a moviegoer demanding, "Anything with Montgomery Clift!" Clift began to cry, put his arm around Bogdanovich unsteadily, then returned to his seat.

Bogdanovich's chapter on River Phoenix, whom he directed in The Thing Called Love, is heartbreaking. Ever the director-as-daddy, Bogdanovich dances around rumors of Phoenix's drug use and focuses on his talent and flaky charm. Soon after the actor's death from an overdose, he recalls seeing a tv talk-show host ask Tony Curtis to comment on Phoenix. "Curtis said cryptically, but with considerable weight, that it was 'difficult to comprehend how much envy' there was in Hollywood. The remark resonates."

Bogdanovich says he's only asked for one autograph in his life (Marlon Brando, New Year's Eve, 1954, at the corner of 55th St. and 6th Ave.). But this emotionally transparent memoir suggests that by devoting his life to getting close to movie legends-and convincing them to take part in magazine profiles, documentaries and features-Bogdanovich was engaged in a deeper form of autograph hunting. The signatures are inscribed upon his life.