Three By P&P

Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich loved the movies. During a blazing three-year run, Hollywood loved them back.

The Power Couple: Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt in 1968 (Photo by Bruce McBroom via mptvimagestion).

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that marriage between two brilliant creative types can be hell. It’s also true that such arrangements can deliver the goods for the rest of us.

Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich were together from 1962 to 1971, and had two daughters they adored. But they lived for the movies more than for one other, and collaborated on three of the best as their union came spectacularly apart. Peter, a boy wonder who stumbled after a dazzling beginning, resented implications that his first wife was the brains of the outfit. Polly enabled great success for others, but her own potential as a director was never met. At their worst, he tended to talk too much about himself and she tended to drink too much by herself. They just didn’t work, but the films they made did.

Peter died Jan. 6, at 82, after battling Parkinson’s disease. Polly died in 2011 at 72, of ALS. They were apart, professionally and otherwise, far longer than they were together. Peter remarried and divorced again, and Polly, a young widow when she met Peter, remarried and was widowed again. It’s possible to write a tribute to one and breeze past the other (if it were up to them, it might be appreciated). But that would be incomplete, because their fragile partnership of a half-century ago was such a world-beating one.