Speaking with Marc Myers in the January 9 edition of the WSJ, the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter of “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon reflected on his glory days in the 1970s – specifically his time living at his 1928 home Bel Air.
Bogdanovich, 74, recalls the mistake that forced him into bankruptcy, the good times with girlfriend Cybill Shepherd, and memories of a certain frequent houseguest.
Orson Welles was a houseguest off and on over a period of years. He would go off to Europe for six months and then needed a place to stay when he came back. He wasn’t very flush so we offered him the bedroom next to my office. He also had the library next to this bedroom and his own bathroom. Orson liked it there but kept expanding into other rooms. He loved the dining room particularly because of the long, 12-seat dining room table where he would lay out the various scripts he was working on.
One time Cybill was walking through the hall and smelled smoke. She knocked on his door and Orson said loudly that he needed privacy. Later on, the housekeeper told us Orson had had an accident. Apparently, he had put a lit cigar in the pocket of his terry-cloth robe. It caught on fire so he threw it into the bathtub and part of it fell on the carpet and burned a hole in it. A couple of days later, Orson gave Cybill a beautiful coffee-table book on opera, which is a passion of hers. Inside he drew a cartoon of a house burning with a ladybug in the foreground looking panicky. Underneath he wrote: “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home — your house is on fire and so is your houseguest! Love, Orson.”
Shepherd and Bogdanovich split in 1978, but remain friends. She co-stars in his upcoming film “Squirrel to the Nuts” with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.
Bogdanovich’s relationship with the late Dorothy Stratten ended in tragedy in 1980. The director filed for bankruptcy in 1985 after spending $5 million buying back Stratten’s last film, “They All Laughed” from the studio and distributing it himself. He had to move out of his beloved Bel Air home in 1992.
“In 1992, on my final day there, I took a long walk through the empty rooms. The feeling was impossibly heavy. So much had happened there — so much happiness, so much sadness. It was overwhelming. These days I divide my time between apartments in Los Angeles and New York. Over the years I’ve driven past the Bel Air house a number of times but I’ve never been inside again.”
The entire article can be found at online.wsj.com
Bogdanvich was also interviewed for the January 8 edition of The New York Times following his surprise cameo as himself on “The Good Wife.”
The Times’ Dave Itzkoff asked Bogdanovich, “Would your idol Orson Welles ever have done something like this?”
Bogdanovich replied, “Oh, he did. Orson did a lot of TV and radio shows. He hosted ‘The Jack Benny Program’ in the ’40s, on radio. And he did an episode of ‘I Love Lucy,’ which was very funny, ‘Lucy Meets Orson Welles.’ He did Dean Martin’s show a lot. And John Wayne did ‘Lucy,’ too. There’s a lot of precedent.”
The full interview can be found at nytimes.com
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