'Who the Hell's in It': Breathless

WHO THE HELL'S IN IT Portraits and Conversations. By Peter Bogdanovich. Illustrated. 528 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

WHEN Peter Bogdanovich first met John Wayne in 1965, on the set of Howard Hawks's "El Dorado," the two talked for more than an hour about various directors and the process of moviemaking. Wayne was finally called away, but he said to Bogdanovich: "Jeez, it was good talkin' about -- pictures! Christ, the only thing anybody ever talks to me about these days is -- politics and cancer!"

Wayne's comment may be the best possible advertisement for "Who the Hell's in It," a collection of 25 portraits of Hollywood stars, many of them royalty from its golden age (Wayne, James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich), and a few who weren't destined for royalty but earned Bogdanovich's admiration and affection nonetheless (River Phoenix, Sal Mineo). Bogdanovich has been writing about movies longer than he's been making them, and he's been watching them -- carefully -- for much longer than that. A number of the interviews were conducted as long as 40 years ago, when he was on assignment for Esquire and other magazines, and portions of the book have appeared elsewhere in other forms: an anecdote about Richard Nixon's lascivious recollections of Cybill Shepherd's performance in Bogdanovich's "Last Picture Show," for example, will be familiar to anyone who's read his "Pieces of Time."

Maybe for that reason much of "Who the Hell's in It" feels cobbled together from bits of the past, instead of being a fresh, spontaneous piece of work. What's more, Bogdanovich, who seems never to have outgrown his youthful movie-fan enthusiasm, is plainly dazzled by his subjects. When he tells the story of how, as a teenager in 1954, he approached Marlon Brando for an autograph on a New York street, his breathlessness has an anxious, hypercharged charm. The young Bogdanovich fumbles for a pen and paper, and then for something to say. When you encounter someone famous, he observes, "the mind goes into overload -- there is suddenly so much to talk about that no words at all can formulate themselves." (He later realized Brando was wearing the work pants and gray-checked jacket that were his costume in "On the Waterfront"; he'd worn it home from that day's shooting.)

But you don't have to read very carefully to pick up on a certain amount of aggressiveness, and maybe downright peskiness, in Bogdanovich's approach. "Who the Hell's in It" is almost as much about himself as it is about his subjects. He lets us know he became friendly with many of the stars he interviewed, mentioning, for instance, that over the 25 years he knew Cary Grant, he'd occasionally phone him "on some pretext or other" just to relish the sound of Grant's voice and the jaunty blazer-and-foulard elegance of his speech. Bogdanovich is a lively writer, and sometimes an eloquent one, but he might have cultivated a more original voice if he hadn't been so desperate for his subjects to like him. Compared with, say, Kenneth Tynan (the gold standard in celebrity-profile writing), Bogdanovich always seems to be trying too hard. The respect Tynan felt for his subjects comes off as a rosy glow; Bogdanovich's is more like a sweaty sheen.

And yet "Who the Hell's in It" is largely a likable, entertaining book. Bogdanovich may have been something of a nuisance to Grant. But people like Grant, Stewart, Dietrich and Jerry Lewis have given him a great deal of their time over the years, in interviews and sometimes socially as well; in addition to genuinely liking him, they must have recognized the seriousness beneath his star-struck eagerness. Unlike so many younger celebrity interviewers (Bogdanovich, who is in his 60's, counts as an old-timer), he would approach each star not just with reams of movie trivia but also with a carefully cultivated understanding of the performer's work. If this seems fundamental, consider how rarely "journalists" working the celebrity beat today ever seem to bother with basics. On the red carpet of the Golden Globes earlier this year, Lisa Ling of NBC asked Johnny Depp what role he'd like to play next. When, with utmost politeness, he answered Mae West or, because he thought he might be too old for that, maybe Carol Channing, his boyish, playful joke sailed clear over her head. Her face remained a frozen, beaming blank.

But comparing Bogdanovich with Lisa Ling (which would certainly be damning him with faint praise) is not the point. In truth, no one seems to know how to talk to celebrities these days, neither television reporters nor print journalists. Reading these profiles, you get the sense that Bogdanovich is a talker who learned to be a listener. He began his career as an actor, and as a teenager he was lucky enough to play a nonspeaking butler in a summer stock production with Sylvia Sidney. Afterward, she sent him a real silent butler with a card reading, "Oh, you are the silent one!" Sheepishly, Bogdanovich writes: "A reference, I guess, to my being talkative. I wish now that I had talked less and asked more questions."

Bogdanovich may still talk too much, but it may well be that his talking -- and, more specifically, his understanding of what it means to be an actor -- is the very thing that has helped put his subjects at ease. Some chapters in "Who the Hell's in It" are richer than others, but nearly every one yields a kernel of insight into what makes actors different from (or even the same as) you and me. Bogdanovich tells a wrenching anecdote about how Gena Rowlands, several years after the death of her husband and collaborator, John Cassavetes, saw some early television footage of them together and marveled: "God! We were both so young!" Only to turn away until the clip was over: "I can't look at that," she said.

From time to time, Bogdanovich meets a fellow talker and gets the goods by simply letting him go. In one long, often rambling chapter, Jerry Lewis speaks candidly about the incalculable gifts and the insecurities of his partner, Dean Martin, and of how magnificent (and intimate) the decade they spent together doing live shows and movies was: "It was an incredible time. The 10 years with him -- nobody would ever understand it that way. Because we had the fun in the dressing room waiting to go on to have the fun. And then, of course, the third section of fun was counting the money. Like two . . . chimps in a zoo."

BOGDANOVICH indulges in occasional unnecessary gossipmongering -- speculating about who slept with whom on this or that set -- but for the most part, he's more fascinated by tales of old Hollywood high jinks and glamour. We learn that in their early years in Hollywood, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, close friends through their whole lives, shared a house that was overrun by stray cats. (In an attempt to get the cats to scram, a cousin of Stewart's, visiting from Princeton, painted one of them purple. Stewart explained: "The idea was -- that when the other cats saw it, they'd all say, 'Look at that -- purple -- let's get outta here!' " Needless to say, the tactic didn't work.) And when Bogdanovich meets Marlene Dietrich (who, not surprisingly, takes her sweet time warming up to him), he confides that he's trying to stop smoking. "Oh, don't," she says to him. "I stopped 10 years ago and I've been miserable ever since." There seems to be something of the perpetual schoolboy about Bogdanovich. But then, how many of us have gotten advice -- even bad advice -- from the likes of Marlene Dietrich? Peter Bogdanovich may talk first and listen later, but the approach hasn't failed him. Sometimes, maybe, an unsilent butler is just the man for the job.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon.