Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  Woody: "I have not been a crutch for her at all. It's been absolutely aboveboard. You could reverse that and think that she's been a crutch to me in many ways; I mean, she's been an enormously supportive person to me on projects."

  Keaton, he says, is "the best person in the world to let read a script, because she's totally ingenuous. She's not trying to be impressive, she doesn't care if it was written by Chekhov. She's perfectly willing to pick it up, read it, and say, 'I think it's boring' or 'I think it's wonderful.' I feel secure working with her. If she tells me something is creepy, I reexamine it."

  In her vocabulary, Keaton alternates "wonderful" and "neat" to indicate her highest approval.

  Alvy (picking up a book): Sylvia Plath. An interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.

  Annie: Oh, yeah, right ...I don't know, some of her poems seemed neat to me.

  Alvy: "Neat?" I hate to tell you this, but it's 1975. "Neat" went out about the turn of the century.

  -Alvy and Annie in their first talk

  "YOU'D NEVER KNOW I T from just a quick meeting with her-or the quality she projects-but Keaton is a genuine intellectual," says Woody. "When you meet her, she is a gangly, sometimes awkward, sweet kind of actress, and you tend to think of the other actresses you meet who are obsessed with the part and agents and parties, and she's not that way at all. She is very responsive to books and ideas. If she reads Camus or Dostoevsky, it doesn't just wash over her. She gets very, very involved with ideas and knows what they're saying and how it affects her life, and life in general. Her personality belies that completely, and that's the most curious thing about her."

  Woody was not exactly Keaton's Henry Higgins. "When I first met her," he says, "all the equipment was there, but she had come from Santa Ana, California, and had not been exposed to any kind of cerebration at all. And she gradually got more and more exposed to theater, literature, poetry, art, and photography. She just took to it naturally."

  That's precisely what Keaton is to Allen: a natural, in her humor, which he agrees is more attitudinal than verbal (or even visual); in her intellectual growth, and, most of all, in her acting. "She wishes she could work on parts the way other actors and actresses do it"-in fact, Keaton points to Robert De Niro and Katharine Hepburn as two of her favorites, for their enthusiasm and "gung-ho attitude" toward the craft of acting-"but she's a natural."

  Woody Allen, of course, is a little biased. But he absolutely swears that being madly in love with Keaton had nothing to do with his instincts. "It was inevitable," he says, "it was just apparent the minute I was acting with her in Play It Again, Sam that she was a major comic talent. And it was confirmed for me by people who would come to the show. I remember Jack Benny came one night and said, 'That girl is going to be gigantic."'

  Allen enthusiastically joins the critics who have taken to calling Keaton "the consummate actress of our generation" (Hollywood Reporter) and "one of the most dazzlingly and beguilingly funny girls in movies in years" (New Yorker). And people close to her-her mother, for one-are saying she'll be the next Hepburn.

  "That is exactly what's happening to her," says Woody. "I've always thought she was born to be a movie star. She's got a real American quality."

  Alvy: I love what you're wearing.

  Annie: Oh, you do, well, this tie was a present from Grammy Hall.

  Alvy: Who? Grammy, Grammy Hall? What'd you do, grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting?

  DIANE AND I SIT, SIDE B Y SIDE , in her two canvasback living room chairs, like fellow passengers on an airplane. She is a touchy talker; her hands are constantly busy, going through her hair, or to my elbow or hand. She does not talk a cappella; there is always accompaniment, whether by her eyes, hands, a crack of a stick of gum or, most often, by an easy, open laugh.

  I ask about her mother. "My mom, Dorothy?" she wants to know. "Um, let's see. We were a very tight family, and I really liked my mother an awful lot. She's a crafty person. She did rock collages, and she became a photographer, too. She's a very emotional, sensitive woman, a journal keeper, a letter writer." But, no, she never wrote professionally. "She doesn't think she's good enough."

  Her father, Jack Hall, 55, is a civil engineer who worked for the city of Santa Ana, then built a business of his own. "He was the one who in my career was really, really, he really, you know, was supportive, in a real emotional sense."

  Diane was the first of four children (she has a brother, Randy, who is a draftsman and a poet; Dorrie, who graduated college with a degree in art; and Robin, a nurse who sings well but "doesn't have the confidence to get out there," according to Mom).

  From the beginning, Diane was a two-sided person-shy and private, with a flip side that longed to be special, to attract attention and approval. For example, her parents (who still live in Southern California) remember how, at age 5 or so, Diane put on productions in the living room, in front of the fireplace, "singing and dancing, just adlibbing. She was always entertainment-oriented, but she was shy about it. She entertained us."

  At age 6, she faced her first real audience, for a recital in Sunday school. She forgot her lines. "I just burst into tears and broke down sobbing, and they had to take me off the stage." But she soon became a regular in the church choir.

  As a teenager, Diane had no boyfriends. To gain attention in junior high, she tried out for the talent shows-unsuccessfully. When she was rejected, she would organize and star in her own neighborhood productions. But she also kept trying at school. "It took a couple of years," she says, good sport in her voice, "before they saw the wonderfulness of my talent, that it should be seen and shared by all."

  "High school," she says, "was a big popularity contest, at least it was for me. Being popu-lar, and that's too bad. I just wish I had a little more sophistication and a better education."

  The telephone in the kitchen rings, and she tells "Max" that she is having an interview and gets off the phone. "Max," it turns out, is Woody Allen. During the Broadway run of Play It Again, Sam, Keaton and Tony Roberts got to calling Allen "Max" because "he didn't like to be recognized on the street." In Annie Hall, Roberts and Allen call each other "Max." (Allen, by the way, calls Keaton "Keaton.")

  In junior college Keaton studied drama, and at age 19 she took off for New York and acting school. While attending acting school, she joined a friend, Guy Gilette, and his brother Pip in a rock and roll band, the Roadrunners. "I played tambourine and danced. I sang a couple of Aretha Franklin songs and `In the Midnight Hour'-let me tell you, that was real bad. I was not, needless to say, a very good rock and roll singer. But I loved it. We'd play around, but not in the city. We'd get ten dollars a gig."

  From there, with only a couple of stops in summer stock, Keaton went on to Broadway, and to Hair, "the American tribal love-rock musical."

  She started out in the chorus (on the Broadway cast album, you can hear her singing her part of Black Boys-"Black boys are so delicious...") and then took over the part of Sheila. Sheila? Keaton sings lightly: "How can people be so heartless?" then switches over, still singing, into "Good morning starshine...." That was a featured role, I remark. "Yeah," she says. "La-di-da."

  Keaton became known, over the years, as the one cast member in Hair who wouldn't remove her clothes at the finale. "I didn't think it meant anything." (Also, she was, is, self-conscious about her body.)

  Diane had breezed through adult life with hardly a political thought in her head, and then, at age 2 3, in Hair, she became only more removed. "I was strongly suspect of things. Hair had a lot of 'peace and love' as what it was saying, and then being a member of it, and knowing all the political things that went on inside, and how important it was for people to get more attention for themselves and who got more publicity. There was a lot of inner rivalry. So I have a tendency not to be political in an outgoing way. I would like to deal with my own-get myself straightened out before I go around sounding off ideas."

  Being in Hair, Keato
n could not help but be influenced in some way by what went on around her. "Drugs were around," she says. "Personally...I smoked dope, but I didn't like it. I wasn't naive. I knew about homosexuals, drugs, masochism...... In Hair? "In life!"

  In your life?

  "No!" She makes a gum-popping sound. "That wouldn't be good. I don't need that. That would really make me crazy!"

  References to her "getting better" pop up regularly in our talks. I ask if, over the last couple of years, she doesn't feel more, as they say, "together"?

  She is uncertain. "I don't know if I want to say I've gotten better." I venture that she has.

  Her eyes widen. She is all hope. "You think so?" she asks.

  Annie and I broke up and I still can't get my mind around that, you know, I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and examining my life and trying to figure out where the screw-up came....

  -Woody Allen as Alvy Singer

  IT WO11Lll SEEM THAT THESE K1Ds had everything going for them: a shared sense of humor, a mutual trust, even dependence, in their film careers, a common interest in the arts and letters. They are both, as Keaton says, "sort of isolated." And finally, there is that remarkable similarity in their heights.

  Woody Allen has gotten to where he can laugh about it. "People tell me all the time that Annie Hall is autobiographical, and I keep telling them that it's not really very autobiographical, but nobody wants to hear that. And one review-one out-oftown review that I had gotten said that in order to really enjoy the picture you had to know a lot about Diane's and my private life together-and of course, this is completely untrue, because I would say 80 percent of the film is totally fabricated." (Which reminds me of Keaton's mother discussing Allen's relationship with her daughter. "Woody's had a very positive influence on her," she said, "very much like Annie Hall." To which Jack Hall added, "It's 8 5 percent true-even to Dorothy and my mother!")

  The debate gives me a way to ask about the breakup. In Annie Hall, it was sudden and straightforward, Annie turning to Alvy and saying, "Let's face it. I don't think our relationship is working." I ask Allen how it was off the screen.

  "It was nothing like that," he replies. "She was not involved with anybody else and she wasn't running away to California. She lived here, and at one point we talked about the idea that we had been living so closely for years and it might be nice, we thought, to try it with her not living here. This was a mutual decision. And if we didn't like that, we'd move back in together again. And she took an apartment, and I helped her move in and all that, and we were very friendly and still seeing each other. I mean, we were still lovers intermittently after that for a while. Gradually, we sort of cooled down and drifted apart more. But it was nothing like in the movie."

  Keaton says she is still uncertain just why she and Allen broke up. "I don't know," she says. "It's very hard to say." But she points out another difference between Annie and Diane: "The point of the movie was that [Alvy Singer] was too isolated and not able to like life, which is what my character says-`You're like an island, all to yourself. I want to go out a little more."' Which, she says, is not exactly her. She laughs: "I mean, lookit my life!"

  Diane Keaton does not care to see her own films, but she saw Annie Hall at a theater in her neighborhood. "I thought it worked emotionally," she says. "I was surprised that in the end, I felt something when we said good-bye."

  How did Keaton allow herself to do Annie Hall, to lay herself (albeit fictionally) on the line?

  "I think," she says, "that being an actor in any case, you lay yourself on the line. Now, this seems more personal, but everything is personal. I'm for it, and I also have my conflicts about it.

  "I'm very involved in expressing myself; hopefully I'm not a fool for doing it: hopefully there's some merit in it; even if it's just amusing, that's okay. It's a balance, you see, you have to watch it. I don't think you ever work out that conflict. So I visit my analyst and we talk about it." She laughs. "I save it for her, she can hear all the horrors. She's a brave soul."

  Keaton started seeing her analyst four years ago-shortly after her split with Woody Allen. He encouraged her. "It's an interesting experience," says Allen, who's had twenty-one years of it. `And certainly one that can't hurt."

  Keaton began with three sessions a week, then increased to five. "Time is very important. It takes a long time. I don't believe in any of these quick, weekend things. It's complete idiocy. It's too much of a jerk-off idea, to me, it's too easy, it's easily taking care of things for the moment. It's like-'Oh, yes!'-like acting in a certain sense, getting it all out: `I feel much better, now my life is'...and of course it isn't, because you really have to examine it."

  Keaton finds herself too concerned and wasting too much time worrying over "the negative aspects of life. Life is nothing but a series of conflicts, in a way, surmounting one and coming to the next." But she is getting better. She knows all about her self-deprecatory act. "Sure, and that's manipulative on my part, to get that response, that you're okay, `It's all right, nice Di.' Absolutely. Lots of times people apologize for something just to make sure they've hit the bottom line and they can do nothing but go up. That's real obvious and it gets real boring. However, in my past I've done an awful lot of apologizing. I always liked to say I'm sorry before anything happened, but I don't do that as much anymore."

  Still, Keaton is by no means ready to dump analysis. In fact, she says, if she couldn't afford her shrink, she'd go to a pay-what-you-can clinic, the way Woody Allen did in his leaner years. Keaton-can you believe this?-has had problems with men.

  Back in junior high Diane was constantly fantasizing about sex. "But I must've had a lot of guilt feelings about it because I was very frightened of the whole idea-but I was also very, very caught up with it, too." When she finally got around to making out, she didn't make out so well. "I was scared." And her sex life, early on, was a series of fits, starts, and stops. "I was always getting in relationships where it was 'If he likes me, I'm not interested, and if I like him, he's not interested."' She both feared men (because she feared sex) and distrusted them (because she feared being dumped). "So in the past, I would say good-bye first."

  Aside from her time with Woody Allen, Keaton was in a rut. "I was disgusted with the idea of male-and-female relationships because I had not had anything that I considered really wonderful, so I thought that one way to deal with it would be to not be involved at all, as if that was the way to live, which is of course pathetic."

  In Play It Again. Sam, Diane Keaton turns to Woody Allen the morning after their first night together and asks, "What were you thinking about while we were doing it?"

  "Do you always think about baseball players when you're making love?"

  "Keeps me going."

  "Yeah, " says Diane, "I couldn't figure out why you kept yelling, 'Slide!"'

  In Annie Hall, Woody Allen looks gratefully at Diane Keaton moments after the first time they do it and says, "That was the most fun I've had without laughing."

  I ask Diane Keaton, "In real life, was Woody actually funny in bed?"

  "Oh," she says, "I'd rather not talk about it." But, she adds, she generally approves of "amusing things" happening in one's sexual relations. "I don't want to have anything to do with someone who can't make fun of it once in a while."

  -June 30, 1977

  Rolling Stone

  From Diane's mother, Dorothy Hall, came a letter, calling the story "dazzling! Very close to neat." She thought I'd done a good job pulling together her recollections, which, she now said, were part fact, part "parental license."

  From Woody Allen came a short note, which Rolling Stone was happy to publish: "I thought your story on Diane was accurate, and entertaining, one of the best I've seen."

  And from Diane, a few months later, came a postcard, turning the tables and asking how things were with my life, my wife, my work, San Francisco, and "anything and everything?"

  What a neat set of notes. Writing about motion picture a
ctors.. .1 could get used to this.

  As fate would have it, I wound up writing a movie-or trying to, anyway. And, before that, I got involved in television.

  In 1977, as Rolling Stone prepared to move to New York, it also celebrated its tenth anniversary. Jann hooked up with CBS for a prime-time special and, to insure that Rolling Stone would have substantial input in the show, sent David Felton and me to Los Angeles to join the writing team. He might as well as sent us to join the Los Angeles Rams. We quickly learned that our ideas were too-well, too "Rolling Stone" for the writing and production team. And Jann, who'd envisioned a show jammed with all the big stars the magazine had so kindly featured over the years, learned how busy big stars could suddenly get. We wound up with a production number, "Strawberry Fields Forever," featuring dancing berries, and another one, "Life in the Fast Lane," featuring Leslie Ann Warren doing a Vegas vamp. Other big stars included Ted Nugent, Art Garfunkel, and Melissa Manchester. If there was any salvaging to be done, it was by Steve Martin, Bette Midler, and Gladys Knight & the Pips. John Belushi showed up on the set, but wisely chose to do no more than hang out with David, me, and a couple of others.

  David did write an amusing sketch with Martin and Keith Moon, in which Moon demonstrated the proper way to destroy a hotel room. I wrote a tribute to Elvis Presley, who'd died just before the show would. And, to introduce some segment I've long forgotten, I wrote new lyrics to the Coasters' tune, "That Is Rock and Roll," and had the thrill of the actual Coasterswell, it was four guys who were more or less actual Coasters-recording it for the show.

  The show was so bad that Felton was moved to write an apology for it in Rolling Stone before it aired. It was fair warning, but it didn't stop the critics from putting us on a spitand spitting. Billboard, for one, called it "an utter embarrassment to fans of the magazine for the last decade."