Roddy McDowall Pulls Out All the F-Stops

When he was in his mid-teens, Roddy McDowall started taking pictures of his friends. Now it is a minor source of anguish to him that he didn’t start even sooner, because most of his friends were classic figures in Hollywood history and too many of them had slipped forever into history before his lens found them.

McDowall had begun acting in movies in Britain when he was only 10. He came to Hollywood in 1941, fleeing the Blitz. That year “How Green Was My Valley” made him a child star. “My Friend Flicka” and “Lassie Come Home,” with his young friend Elizabeth Taylor, confirmed his star status in 1943.

He started organizing and saving his portraits in 1947, when he was negotiating that difficult but, in his case, eminently successful journey out of child roles and into adulthood. He was Malcolm in Orson Welles’ 1948 filming of “Macbeth.” He left Hollywood for Broadway and roles in “No Time for Sergeants” and other successes.

“I read somewhere--this was in the ‘60s,” McDowall said the other day, “that John Gielgud had written a fan letter to Ethel Merman. And I thought, ‘Wow! What a fascinating pair of opposites.’ ”

The notion became a 1968 book called “Double Exposure,” McDowall’s portraits with an appreciative text by another star.

“Louise Brooks wrote about Buster Keaton. Anita Loos wrote about Brooks. Kate Hepburn wrote about Lauren Bacall. Henry Miller wrote about Jennifer Jones. Noel Coward wrote about Larry Olivier, and so on. It was lovely fun.”

Now McDowall has published “Double Exposure II,” sized for the larger coffee tables (Morrow: $60, 272 pages). The juxtapositions are once again amusing and often fascinating.

Fred Astaire, whom McDowall photographed in Siena, Italy, in 1968 when they were shooting “Midas Run,” gets an admiring paragraph from Mikhail Baryshnikov, who says, “When I first saw Astaire’s movies, it was very discouraging, I thought everybody in America was that good, and I felt, ‘You’re never gonna dance, kid.’ ”

Tom Cruise gets a funny, free-form tribute from Paul Newman: “A cornucopia of contradiction. . . . Has the acting courage of a gorilla. No inhibitions. . . . The rascal is everywhere.”

“I tell them,” McDowall says, “anything from one line to three pages. No parameters beyond that.” The subjects don’t get to read the text; the writers seldom see the photographs ahead of time, although Mitchum saw and responded to a shot of Henry Hathaway standing in a graveyard location for “Five Card Stud” in Durango, Mexico, in 1968. Mitchum and McDowall were both in the film.

Hathaway is wearing a white hat. Out of uniform, Mitchum wrote: “Off the set he wore the white hat of compassion, geniality and true, honest generosity. The moment he walked on the set, chewing his cigar, breathing fire, he donned the black hat of Simon Legree, lashing out at incompetence, inattention, and rigidly intolerant of any effort which fell short of his own total dedication.”

The earliest of the 116 portraits is of Elizabeth Taylor as a 17-year-old in 1949, smiling sweetly into the camera and looking like a Midwestern prom queen. The tribute is by Ava Gardner: “Elizabeth’s beauty doesn’t come from the shape of her face or nose or mouth or even those magnificent eyes, it comes from an inner strength and energy that very few people are blessed with.”

In a 1981 portrait, Bette Davis seems to have been caught in mid-sentence, holding to her chest a pillow that reads, “Old Age Ain’t for Sissies.” “The brave, extravagant, willful and vulnerable souls she has fashioned carry an echo,” Robert Wagner writes. “They have had an enormous influence on our society.”

There are appreciations as well of Billy Wilder by David Hockney, Jean Arthur by Wilder, Mae West by Ringo Starr, Vivien Leigh by John Gielgud, Vincent Price by Deanna Durbin, Andre Previn charmingly revealed as a book lover by Tom Stoppard.

It’s an imaginative collation and McDowall’s portraits are artful and unforced, leaving no doubt that what was sought was the truth of the subject rather than a clever image.

McDowall is an impassioned believer in photography, including not only stills but film and tape, as a way of seizing the moment before it gets away.

“That’s why home movies are worth their weight in gold,” he says. “In a month they’re nostalgia, and they’re moving because what they show is already gone. The tapes we’re shooting now, easy and inexpensive, will have the same sort of impact as old newsreels.”

Some of McDowall’s home movies are, in fact, classic films and it is not less bemusing for him to see his childhood. “I used to think, ‘What can I do to put some character in my face?’ Now I say, ‘What can I do to take it all out.’

“As objectively as I can, I look at myself and say, ‘Well, the kid wasn’t so bad looking.’ Yet I’m also thinking: ‘What a formless kid I was.’ It sometimes worries me when I’m about to see one of the old things. I can’t wait to say, ‘Oh, my God.’

“And yet if I look at ‘How Green Was My Valley,’ it seems to me very succinct, very special, my work. I was 13. I look at the young me and think, ‘It’s a strange thing you were that accomplished.’ I don’t know where it came from.”

McDowall continues to work, playing a comic vampire killer not long ago in “Fright Night II.” But, he says: “I feel as Henry Fonda did that every job I get may be my last. I’m one of those creatures born to be working. I feel better when I’m working. I don’t like it when I’m not working and I’ve never worked as much as I want to.”

There will, in time, be a “Double Exposure III.” The portrait file is far from exhausted.