Peter Bogdanovich: Fool For Love

With his next project, Bogdanovich continued his raid on favored old masters. "I expect to be peed on, but what can you do?" he said while shooting What's Up, Doc?, a throwback to Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, and scores of other screwball-era screwups. Feisty diva Barbra Streisand, playing an update of the foxy man-eaters perfected by Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, called Bogdanovich opinionated and autocratic, "a horny bastard but brilliant." To him, she was a "nice, talented girl." After all, he said, "How could I feel about her the way I do about Carole Lombard or Katharine Hepburn?" thereby indirectly equating himself with Howard Hawks, who had directed both great stars at their madcap apex. In 1972, with the Vietnam War-scarred country thirsty for woozy nostalgia, What's Up, Doc?, which cost about $4 million to make, netted $30 million. Now a bonafide wunderkind, Bogdanovich consolidated his position by forming the Directors Company with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, for which Paramount was to dole out $31 million for four movies from each director. Adroitly timed, too, was the company's first release, Bogdanovich's Paper Moon, with Ryan and Tatum O'Neal as itinerant, Depression-era scam artists. Yet another retrograde item in monochrome, the movie, wrote a critic, marked Bogdanovich as America's "most interesting young director."

Paper Moon's success marked the very peak of Bogdanovich's fame (as a filmmaker, that is), and as the next few years would demonstrate, fame blindsided him harder than most. After nine years of marriage, and a failed attempt at reconciliation, in 1971 he left Platt, who was widely perceived to have played no small role in his first four successes. "It couldn't work out anymore," Bogdanovich once said, "so we had to end it. It had nothing to do with Cybill." Platt, who privately referred to Shepherd as "Miss Rhein-gold," knew she was licked when she heard that Bogdanovich had taken his girlfriend to see a classic Buster Keaton movie. "I don't blame Peter," she said. "If I were a man, I'd leave me for Cybill, too." After the divorce, Platt moved up to writing Pretty Baby, working as the production designer on A Star Is Born and Terms of Endearment, and producing Broadcast News and Say Anything.

Meanwhile, Bogdanovich went gaga, installing himself and Shepherd in a Spanish-style Bel-Air mansion, lining the floors with Oriental rugs, hanging Daumiers on the walls, and adopting two Siamese cats because Orson Welles suggested it. He smoked fat cat cigars (another Welles suggestion), drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, and became a name-dropping guest on talkshows ("Fritz Lang once told me...," "Jean Renoir liked to say..."), during which he would purse his pouty lips, make puppy eyes at the camera, and impersonate celebrities. "The film magazines," wrote one observer, putting it mildly, "came to despise him as a diabolical turncoat."

The Bogdanovich-Shepherd affiliation was quintessentially of the movies. Few moguls, from Griffith and DeMille to Sturges and Preminger, had been able to resist the impulse to mold star women. Yet, unlike his predecessors from the heyday of the casting couch, Bogdanovich was accused of casting the couch instead of the girl. One story referred to Shepherd as his "leading lady and house pet." When reporters inquired about their marital status, Shepherd, who romped with Bogdanovich in matching Brooks Brothers pajamas, cooed: "Living together is so much sexier." He observed, "Neither of us is particularly social. I don't suppose I've been to more than ten persons' homes since I've arrived in this town." During their eight-year relationship, they were the couple Hollywood loved to hate. Still, Bogdanovich guided his inamorata through singing, jazz, and tap dance lessons, and produced an album, Cybill Does It... To Cole Porter, for which he extracted a quote from the gracious Fred Astaire. Chiefly, though, he miscast Shepherd in movies that hastened his decline and rendered her a laughingstock.

Orson Welles told Bogdanovich flat out that Daisy Miller, the Henry James novella he had in mind for his next project, was a bum choice. Welles also let slip, however, that Shepherd was born to play the lead. "It's almost as though it was there waiting for Cybill," Bogdanovich said, picking up Welles's cue but ignoring his warning. At first Bogdanovich planned to star opposite his beloved, and probably had enough clout to force Paramount into letting him, but in the end he chose actor Barry Brown to be his surrogate. Industry insiders, critics, and audiences found the results ludicrous. "Trying to make that little thing he's with into Daisy Miller was hilarious," said veteran director Henry Hathaway. "God almighty couldn't do that." Some of the reviews were even less kind.

Yet, even after Daisy Miller, Bogdanovich shunned projects that did not include Shepherd. He supported her refusal to test for the female lead in The Great Gatsby, and bailed out of directing King of the Gypsies (no room for blondes?), plunging instead into full-on folly-- At Long Last Love (1975). Produced for $15 million, this "musical" was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted. One critic dubbed it "amateur night at the mausoleum." Others compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to a kid from an orphanage trying to play Noel Coward. Hollywood still talks about the gala premiere bash hosted by studio executive Dennis Stanfill on a Fox soundstage opulently decked out as a millionaire's home and attended by such royal waxworks as King Vidor, Roy Rogers, and Freddie Martin Columnist Army Archerd observed that they should have released the party instead. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich's Heaven's Gate, an embarrassment so acute that the director's family referred to it only as "The Debacle."

By this time, The New York Times had dubbed Bogdanovich "love's fool" for continuing to promote Shepherd. His insistence on her playing gangster's moll Virginia Hill killed a deal with producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown for a movie about Las Vegas hood Bugsy Siegel.

Newsweek reported that Columbia threatened to drop Bogdanovich's next project, Nickelodeon (1976), if he tried to cast Shepherd in it. (Model Jane Hitchcock got the role.) But even without the girlfriend, Nickelodeon--starring Burt Reynolds and Ryan O'Neal as pioneer moviemakers--was Bogdanovich's third career strikeout and also a personal blunder. "I think what really screwed us up," he has said, referring to a gulf that had developed between him and Shepherd, "is that we couldn't do Nickelodeon together." Shepherd went to New York to make Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese, then spent months away in Europe shooting such movies as The Silver Bears and The Lady Vanishes. Although she and Bogdanovich remained friends, their agendas split.

Eventually Shepherd returned to Memphis, where she did dinner theater, got married, and raised a daughter. Peter-less, she came back to Hollywood and won full-fledged TV stardom on "Moonlighting," then edged tentatively toward conquering movies in Chances Are. "One of those terrible mistakes of diplomacy," the director once said of his handling of Shepherd. Following the loss of his would-be leading lady and the death of his mother, Bogdanovich threw himself into "more than a year of devastating promiscuity," feasting at that endless sexual smorgasbord, the Playboy mansion.

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