The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (2 page)

That night, he failed to show up at Michaels Pub for his weekly performance. For several hours, he remained in Mia’s room. Although he was not quite sure what to tell her, he continued to assure her of his love, she would later recall. The escapade with her daughter, he said, was an insignificant flirtation, "a tepid little affair" that had run its course anyway. He told her that they would get through this bad time and hopefully build a stronger relationship. It might even turn out to be a positive experience for Soon-Yi in the long run. Certainly the girl had not been exploited. She was, after all, an adult who had not been forced to do anything against her will. As he reminded Mia, he was not Soon-Yis father or stepfather, not even a father figure. Throughout his explanations, Mia barely listened. She was unable to stop crying. Afterward, reporting to a friend, she described her humiliation as "a meltdown of my very core." Woody, too, would remember that she sounded incoherent, "beside herself in rage and anger." Unprepared to play this sort of richly emotional scene, he fled from the apartment when it became more than he could bear.

An hour later, as Mia and the children were having supper, he reappeared. In the kitchen, he stood silently behind the table at first and watched them eating. Nobody spoke to him. Stone-faced, they stared into their plates. In desperation, he sat down at the table and started "chatting with the two little ones, said hi to everybody" as if nothing had happened, Mia would remember. But one by one the older children picked up their plates and left the room.

Almost anywhere in the world, Woody Allen was a household name. With a face as familiar as that of Elvis or Marilyn, he was famous enough to be known by his first name. Everyone recognized the sober demeanor, the trademark black-rimmed glasses, the floppy tan hat that he adopted as a public disguise but which seldom fooled anyone. After thirty years in the spotlight—as comic actor, movie star, author, serious director, amateur musician, maverick filmmaker, and professional neurotic—he was a living legend considered by many to be Americas most brilliant humorist, an artist of indisputable originality, a master of irony, the darling of the intelligentsia. Incredibly, he had turned out no fewer than twenty-one features, some classics of the screen and a number of clinkers, but still a formidable record matched by few contemporary filmmakers.

Numbers, however, did not begin to convey his universal appeal. Between 1968 and 1977, he had done nothing less than make the whole world love him and his movies. How could anyone forget
Take the Money and Run
and the most hilarious bank holdup ever filmed, the obvious absurdity of an incompetent crook with crummy penmanship hoping to succeed with a handwritten note? He had us roaring in
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask),
when his frantic medieval court jester tries to pick the lock of the queens chastity belt. "I must think of something quickly," he murmurs to himself, "because before you know it the Renaissance will be here, and we'll all be painting." And who else but Woody could create the sheer fun of
Bananas,
when his character feeds the rebel troops by ordering takeout from a local greasy spoon: "A thousand grilled cheese sandwiches, three hundred tuna fish, two hundred b.l.t. s (one on a roll), and coleslaw for a thousand, mayo on the side."

Beyond the laughter, Woody set himself apart by playing the game on his own terms. A nonconformist off the screen, he wore his independence as a kind of badge and lived as he pleased. He hated to compromise but when he did, it was dramatic. In his younger days, he once escorted First Lady Betty Ford to a black-tie gala benefit for Martha Grahams dance company. At the Uris Theater, he made his entrance with the presidents wife, and, in the manner of a movie star caught in flagrante delicto, announced to reporters that "we're just good friends." Mrs. Ford wore a purple chiffon dress; he was clad in a tuxedo and black tie, and his feet were encased in white sneakers, an outfit that demanded immediate attention.

Likewise, he bravely thumbed his nose at the Hollywood establishment and created his idiosyncratic pictures on the fringes of the system. From sketch comedies, he progressed to subtle, sophisticated romances such as
Annie Hall,
and crashed the ranks of Chaplin, Keaton, Welles, and Bergman (whom he unashamedly confessed was his idol) as an auteur, who wrote, directed, produced, acted in, and otherwise controlled every aspect of his own work. Even though he had spent only four or five days in the movie capital in the last twenty years, his place in the Hollywood pantheon of superstars could not have been more solid. Hardly an actor alive, offered a chance to work in a Woody Allen film, would not happily accept the sort of walk-on roles normally reserved for unknowns and cut his price to work for union scale. Some accepted roles without asking to see the script.

Besides considerable gifts as an artist, he excelled at confecting his own personal mythology. His most marvelous accomplishment was "Woody Allen," an extremely intricate, layered work composed of autobiography, masterful marketing, and good old-fashioned show business. On stage and screen, he always played the same lovable, self-mocking character, exactly as Chaplin kept portraying his mischievous Little Tramp throughout much of his career. And while Chaplin fans knew better than to confuse the performer with his performance, there was a blurring of the line between Woody and his fictional character, an ageless Peter Pan, endlessly self-deprecating and over-analyzing.

By January 13, 1992, the fictionalized Woody Allen had been enshrined as Americas comic sweetheart for as long as most people could remember. As the Ingrid Bergman of film comedians, he was a moral paragon, sanctified beyond all common sense as Americas favorite comedy saint by adoring fans who believed he could do no wrong. "Woody Allen,
c'est moi,"
argued the critic Richard Schickel, one of his earliest supporters, who claimed to know instinctively "where he's coming from and, equally instinctively, I have some sense of where he's going."

While professionals such as Schickel continued to analyze Woody’s comic experiments, we simple fans loved his films wholeheartedly. We knew that each year he would Turn out some utterly fresh delight, and wc rushed to see his latest creation as soon as it opened. In our excitement, we thought nothing of waiting in lines that snaked around the block; indeed, this ritual was apparently part of the price of admission. Afterward, we emerged smiling and feeling good, eager to pass along the most delicious bits to our friends. Usually we went back to see his films a second and third time because they were truly worth viewing again. If we were lucky, an art house might run a Woody film festival, or a film society screen a retrospective. With the coming of VCRs, when all the old favorites could be enjoyed again at home, we took the opportunity to introduce our children to movies such as
Sleeper,

As to his feelings about us, the question appeared to be curiously answered in
Stardust Memories,
in which he painted his affectionate fans as ghouls. That didn't mean we abandoned him. Instead, we automatically struggled to understand the wretchedness that drove him. When in that film somebody accuses his character of being an atheist, he retorted, "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition." That grouchy response seemed to explain everything, more or less. Still, baffling or not, he was our national treasure, not because he always made great films but because he was invariably fascinating, even when he failed. So we paid no attention to what reviewers wrote. Whether Vincent Canby composed a love letter or a truculent Pauline Kael tore a movie to bits did not seem to matter. The important question was: What would he think of next? Would he skid ahead to 2173 and become a household robot? Could he top his chase of an immense terrorist breast over hill and dale before capturing it with an equally immense bra? Get himself executed in Czarist Russia and return to life with a report that death isn't so horrible, at least no worse than an evening with an insurance salesman? Who else but Woody could possibly have imagined diving into a male body during intercourse, as a timid sperm nervously awaiting ejaculation?

Throughout his nearly three decades of celebrity, no scandal ever smudged his golden reputation, almost an impossibility in the entertainment industry, where the road between fame and the dead end of a career is pocked with land mines. Indeed, if any show business figure seemed blessed with a healthy bank account of public affection, it was Woody. The notion that he might be capable of committing a dishonorable act was hard to imagine. We had no doubts that the real Woody was somewhat, but not very, different from the autobiographical character on screen; and while he seemed just like us, we also conjectured that he had to be different, more sensitive, more of a perfectionist and a depressive, and probably a lot nuttier than we were. In
Annie Hall,
young Alvy Singers fear that the universe is expanding causes his mother to yell in exasperation, "What is that your business?!" Like the baffled Mrs. Singer, we didn't understand what made him tick either—but we accepted him on faith because we liked and trusted him. The obvious integrity of his conduct made him "one of the good guys," said his friend Walter Bernstein. Certainly we had no doubt about his worth as an artist. He was what the political writer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. referred to as "the most original comic genius in American films since Chaplin and Keaton." To which we said amen.

On that warm rainy night in January 1992, it must have been pretty hard to appreciate the significance of what had just happened. That Mia would be deeply hurt was to be expected. He knew that whenever they fought, calls immediately went forth to the telephone company and a locksmith. He knew it never took more than a few days before she forgave him and turned over the new number and key. This crisis over Soon-Yi was different, of course. Mia would put him through hell for a while. Even so, past experience suggested that it, too, would blow over eventually.

CHAPTER ONE

God and Carpeting

He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.... New York was his town. And it always would be.

So go the opening lines of
Manhattan,
one of the twenty-nine pictures that, all together, form a cumulative portrait of Woody Aliens life— documents comparable in obsession if not in depth to the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past.
His most hugely popular film, as well as his biggest commercial success,
Manhattan
is Woody s anthem to the island, not the whole of it but a particular slice that he likes to call "the Zone." The exclusive Silk Stocking District of New York's Upper East Side runs north-south from Ninety-sixth Street to Fifty-ninth, and from Fifth Avenue to the East River. In the 10021 ZIP code area, there is a little swath of real estate—perhaps a half-dozen blocks below Seventy-second Street—where the median family income of homeowners is more than $700,000 a year. This is Woody Allen country, where there is no squalor or deprivation, no immigrants, virtually no blacks or Latinos in view except those wearing uniforms, and little crime that doesn't involve property. The typical criminal is a snatcher of gold chains.

The very first time Woody Allen set foot in the Upper East Side he was a small boy, trailing saucer-eyed behind his father, up and down leafy boulevards where middle-aged English nannies wheeled brand-new English baby carriages and great swatches of scarlet and gold spring tulips floated up the middle of Park Avenue. In this place that seemed to be his spiritual home, the adult Woody later recalled thinking that there was "something wonderful about the way the streets feel here," and those feelings have stayed with him throughout the years.

Whenever he leaves his home, in his rumpled khaki chinos and pullover sweater, he is able to curl back into his dreams of yesteryear and surround himself with the remembered tableaux of those nannies trudging past the uniformed doormen and chauffeurs. In sixty years, the streets have changed
very
little. It is he who has traversed far beyond his romantic fantasies to become the districts very own poet laureate.

Deep in the heart of Brooklyn, south of Flatbush, is the neighborhood of Midwood. The distance between the buildings along upper Fifth Avenue and the candy stores of Avenue J, Midwoods major thoroughfare, is barely more than twelve miles. Measured by subway stops, Midwood is twenty stations away on the D train that rumbles across the Manhattan Bridge. By car, the trip is an easy thirty-two minutes. But the two areas might as well be a thousand miles apart. Midwood in the 1930s was a comfortably middle-class, upwardly mobile, heterogenous neighborhood of mostly Jews and a few Italians. On the quiet, tree-lined blocks were small semidetached houses; on the cross streets, the typical sturdy six-floor apartment buildings; and to the east between Coney Island Avenue and Ocean Parkway, the expensive homes. From the raucous markets of Avenue J wafted the dizzying smells of buttery dough: crunchy, dense rye breads, gooey
rugelach
oozing raspberry jam, as well as delicious cinnamon-laced
babkas.
To their oilcloth-covered tables in freshly mopped linoleum kitchens, all the Jewish Midwood housewives carted ingredients to make matzo ball soup and brisket swimming in gravy.

The Konigsbergs lived only a few doors away from the hum of traffic on Avenue J, at 968 East Fourteenth Street, on the upper floor of a redbrick house they had occupied since the birth of their son. Still standing today, it is an imposing example of hybrid Brooklyn architecture, part Tudor cottage and part Italian villa, bristling with a fussy balustrade, a windowed turret, and ornamental brick doodads. The family—father, mother, and son, Allan—were mashed into the apartment with Nettie Konigsbergs sister Ceil and her husband, Abe Cohen. Too many people in too few rooms made daily living somewhat volatile. Most of the time the child was surrounded by people who spoke to one another in loud voices and waved their hands, all of which made quite a powerful impression. As an adult, detesting family turmoil and the forced intimacy of overcrowded households. Woody would be obsessive about solitude.