Hollywood gods and monsters

Peter Bogdanovich has been through the Hollywood mill and come out the other side relatively sane, if not unscathed.

He was once the most fashionable of directors, thanks to the success of The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc? and Paper Moon, movies once as revered by critics as they were popular at the box office.

This is a difficult feat. But it could not last, and things went downhill from there. It seemed, from the mid-Seventies onward, that he could do nothing right. But his latest effort, The Cat's Meow, about what really happened on magnate Randolph Hearst's yacht when producer Thomas Ince died, suggested a revival might just be on the way.

The reason Bogdanovich's good films were liked by critics is that he knows about Hollywood, and the history of its directors, stars and movies much better than most. The films made that obvious, being, at least in part, homages to Hollywood's better past.

Books about Welles, Ford and Hawks have proved that, as well. He is the buff of buffs, likely to know who played the maid in the obscure 1936 version of some drama or other. So these portraits and conversations of and with the stars are likely to be the real McCoy.

Bogdanovich is not a hagiographer. But he is a fan, so don't expect too many awkward revelations and hostile summations when it comes to Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and Co. He says straight away that, as the gods and goddesses were for the Greeks, so these stars founded a kind of 20th century mythology.

They can be forgiven a lot, even when behaving like monsters. Bogart, for instance, wanted people to think he was a monster. It kept them away from him. But he at least knew the difference between reality and myth, which is more than could be said about his legion of fans.

As Peter Ustinov said: "His real soul was elsewhere." Somewhere far away from the movies, no doubt. Even Lauren Bacall, his great love, admits that he was a difficult man, but also one who deliberately hid his real self from the prying.

Monroe, on the other hand, never knew the difference between her image and real life. Consequently she lived constantly in terror of what was expected of her, both on and off screen. That's why, as Bogdanovich says, "she was in bad trouble from the day she was born". She died a martyr to the system that made her one of the biggest, best-remembered stars of all.

Bogdanovich's portraits are not only very entertaining but much more perceptive than the usual star profiles, often written by those who have to make their subjects more interesting than they are off the screen in order to sell their articles.