Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  "Yeah, why?" Woody said.

  "Because then I'd be the next champ," his father bantered.

  Whatever his son did was perfectly acceptable. Once, Marty bought Allan a chemistry set, and Allan dyed Nettie's Persian lamb coat bright yellow. Marty could not have been more delighted. Recollecting the incident years later, he said that Allan "was always doing funny things like that." Most of the time, though, Marty impressed his son as a man who was completely immersed in himself. "He's never let a thought enter his head," Woody came to believe. "When he was young he spent every cent he ever made. Never thought about whether he could pay the bills. He was an affectionate guy, but he never cared about anything."

  When he described his parents' values as God and carpeting, he was probably not referring to his father, who never paid the slightest attention to either religion or home furnishings. Once during the High Holy Days, instead of a trip to temple, Marty boldly marched over to the local Chinese restaurant. When he returned from Joy Fong's, he took a few bites from the cardboard container of his favorite dish of chow mein and began to complain heartily. It was awful. He felt like taking the disgusting mess back. "I'm going to cut off that Chinaman's goddammed pigtail!" he sputtered.

  Although Marty had no use for Jewish dietary rules and consumed whatever took his fancy, Nettie kept kosher and sent her boy to Hebrew school. At home, she kept trying to impress upon him the value of work and success. "Don't waste time!" she yelled again and again, a life lesson that would be ingrained in him. With an abundance of almost manic energy, he threw himself headlong into a variety of pursuits as a youngster, teaching himself magic and practicing card and coin tricks obsessively in front of a mirror for six or seven hours a day. Many years later, Ralph Rosenblum, Woody's first film editor, would marvel at the "Prussian discipline" that enabled him to complete a film one day and then get back in the harness the next to start a new screenplay.

  "His mother was extremely naggy," recalled Jack Victor. "Sometimes Woody couldn't take it and would say very cruel things. When she had cataracts and a patch over one eye, he said, 'Shut up, Mom, or I'll blind your other eye.' "

  Eyewitness:

  "He was small, he was funny, he was smart enough but not exceptionally smart, not an A student. He wasn't going to be a great scientist. But he had this powerful need to be recognized."

  —Elliott Mills

  More than thirty years later, when Woody was asked which fictional character he'd most like to be, he picked Colette's little prepubescent charmer Gigi. He wanted to be in France, "to meander, feather-light, down the boulevards of belle epoque Paris in a little blue sailor dress, my sweet face framed by a flat, disk-shaped hat with two ribbons dangling mischievously past my bangs." He imagined himself awakening in Gigi's little bed with the silk embroidered sheets and eating Gigi's breakfast of soft-boiled eggs with cherries. For dinner there would be a cup of thick chocolate beaten up with an egg yolk. Perhaps toast and a bunch of grapes. Each new day would be a joy. If he couldn't be Gigi, then he wanted to live his life over as a black athlete or a black musician or, better yet, as both, dribbling and shooting for the Knicks and when he got too old for basketball, playing the saxophone or clarinet. Instead, the gangly kid on East Fifteenth Street holed up in a prison of his own making. "I'd eat in the cellar or my bedroom, read my comic books, lock myself in my room and practice the clarinet and my card and coin tricks. It would drive my mother crazy—she'd hear things dropping for hours in the room." Years later, his mother would reassure him he had been a sweet, happy-go-lucky little boy until around the age of five. Then, an amazing thing happened. His personality suddenly changed, and practically overnight, he turned sour and antisocial, she reported. His melancholy made no sense to her. And Woody, having lived under a blanket of sadness for as long as he could remember, could recall no specific incident either. His basic character, he said, has always been "pessimistic, depressed." By his own admission, he regarded all people with suspicion. "I never did believe in any of that business where love is everything."

  What he thought about most often, as he approached puberty, was sex, not unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy. Besides sex, he thought about becoming famous, even though nothing in his personality seemed to augur a special destiny. But more frequently he thought about dying, a subject seldom uppermost on the minds of young boys. Without a trigger for his sense of impending doom, he nevertheless had no trouble articulating his apprehension. "I have memories of being very young, probably 6 or 8, and being put to sleep at night." Lying in the dark, thinking "someday I will be dead," he would force himself to imagine the finality of it and suffer hideous depression. In addition to his fear of oblivion, he was also terrified by the dark. Not until much later—his early forties—would he be able to sleep without a night-light, or come home at night without ritually checking every single closet in his apartment to make sure "there wasn't an enemy there out to get me." He unburdened himself years later to Roger Ebert, the film critic, that "not a day goes past when I do not seriously consider the possibility of suicide." At the time of this statement, he was a fifty-one-year-old titan of the movie business, who had been in psychoanalysis for twenty-eight years.

  Occasionally he caught a glimpse of what seemed like happiness. On a school trip to Washington, D.C., his class spent the night at a monastery on the outskirts of the city. For Woody, the cloister was an oasis of tranquillity, and later he would recall wistfully how each morning the monks shuttled calmly up and down the paths, how they knelt and prayed. Their serenity was so "seductive" that he almost wished he could become a Catholic.

  According to Woody, he felt such an intense sense of failure that "everything dissastisfied me." He must have soft-pedaled his insecurities because around his friends he seemed sure of himself. One of those friends, thirty years hence, walked out after seeing Manhattan feeling "very depressed because I never realized how unhappy he was—so much of him was in that movie." To Elliott Mills, "he was full of enthusiasm. He was interested in so many things. And whatever was going on, he had something clever to say." Of course, Mills added, "everybody we knew was funny. His whole family, even his sister, was comical because it was considered a good thing to be funny and come up with a great line. There was a kid in the neighborhood we called Tut. One day some joker phoned the funeral home and reported that Tut was dead. When the mortuary sent a hearse to his home, his mother went hysterical. For years, all somebody had to say was 'Tut is dead,' and we'd pee our pants." Granted, it was not Woody who thought up the Tut caper, but it was the kind of joke the merry pranksters appreciated. In terms of making life funny, Mills said, Woody was "at the further end of the curve."

  Making people laugh was nothing special when it was the air you breathed. "It was just something I could always do," Woody explained, "like some kids had an ear for music, I could be funny." Coming so easily, however, it seemed a gift of no particular value. It surely did not confer on him the respect he craved. Indeed, the laughs that he drew from his classmates in school only annoyed his teachers.

  The Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb in 1949. The following year, the war began in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy declared war against communists at home. Alger Hiss denied furnishing official documents to the Soviets and was convicted of perjury. Shortly, eight sleepy years of the Eisenhower era would begin. The events and people that formed the paranoia of the fifties seemed to have small impact on the wholesome pace of adolescence in Midwood, home to Wingate Field, Cookies on Avenue J, Capri Pizza with its jukebox in the corner and its single bald waiter. "It was a golden age," reminisced Elliott Mills. "Nobody had a lot of money but everybody had brains and everybody was funny. Our heroes were the Dodgers and jazz musicians. There were no drugs or gender problems. Nobody got laid until they got married. It was an idyllic childhood." With both of Woody's parents working, the gang usually congregated at his house, where they hatched complicated plots to get dates and watched the Konigsberg television set, one of the first on the block
. Never again would Woody enjoy such satisfying relationships, a camaraderie based on "exchange of intimate feelings and discussion of what motivated people and how the psyche worked," described Jack Victor. "We dissected everyone we knew."

  At fourteen, Woody had begun to develop a passionate interest in Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophonist whose music he had first heard on a crackly Saturday morning radio show. Immediately enraptured, he bought all Bechet’s records he could find. "I'd come home from school, and put on those records and just do nothing else for hours but play them and replay them," he said. On Sunday afternoons, he and his friends were in the city at Child's Paramount, listening to the house band led by Conrad Janis and dining royally on full-course dinners of Salisbury steak or veal parmigiana for two dollars. One Sunday, they were thrilled to hear Bechet himself, who was making a rare visit back to the States from France and passed through New York. Introduced by Orson Welles, he played the soprano sax. After the concert, Woody went up to shake hands, one of the most unforgettable moments of his life. Half a century later he would proudly tell people that he had seen "Sidney Bechet live."

  He bought a soprano sax and tried to teach himself to play but found the instrument too difficult and switched to clarinet. An aspiring musician, he began lessons at an upstairs studio on Kings Highway, run by a man who wore a patch over one eye, and later he negotiated two-dollar clarinet lessons from one of Fats Waller’s sidemen, who agreed to come to his house, an hour-and-a-half trip from the Bronx. Nobody practiced more diligently. For all Woody's effort, he wasn't, as he later ruefully admitted, "born with the real equipment," a fact he refused to face for many years. And when he did, he nonetheless continued the habit of practicing every day, rain or shine, at least a half hour, but more often two hours.

  The summer he was seventeen, word got around that a stag film was coming to the Jewel—a Swedish movie that actually showed a woman swimming stark naked. Excited, he made sure to be the first customer in line on opening day, to get a seat with an unobstructed view of the screen. Summer with Monika was about a girl (Harriet Andersson) who runs away to spend the summer with her boyfriend and gets pregnant. Woody, rapt and horny, had no idea who directed it, "nor did I care," he wrote later. The power of the movie, its erotic poetry and sadomasochistic undertones, escaped him entirely. The only scene that remained in his memory was the shot of Harriet Andersson disrobing. Following his first exposure to Ingmar Bergman, he was soon captivated by another of his films, The Naked Night. This time, as he "sat forward for an hour and a half, my eyes bulging," he did notice the name of the director, then promptly forgot it when he walked out. Finally, several years later, he saw Wild Strawberries and developed what he called "a lifelong addiction" to Bergman’s films.

  During high school, he and his friends were regular visitors to the Jewel, where they saw all the so-called art pictures: Chaplin's Limelight, the work of Jacques Tati, Rene Clair, and Jean Renoir. They took an instant liking to Terry-Thomas and Alastair Sim, in fact to all of the British comic actors, and they also loved American classics, too. When Gone With the Wind was revived at the Midwood, Woody was eager to see it again because he was in love with Scarlett O'Hara, who "drove me crazy." "Because he was the dominant person in our crowd," Jack Victor remembered, "we all saw it every day that week, twice each day, ten times altogether."

  Memorabilia:

  Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  Alan Ladd is handsome,

  So what!

  —Allan Konigsberg, 1949, written in the autograph book of a P.S. 99 classmate

  After graduating from P.S. 99, Woody went to Midwood High School and entered the college-preparatory program. Academically one of the first-rate schools in the city, Midwood was a competitive place full of high-achievers, the postwar optimists and competers, well-off white kids who hadn't the slightest doubt they were the best and the brightest and whose second- and third-generation Jewish parents, having made the world safe for democracy, were pushing them to excel. Students regularly won Westinghouse science scholarships, and it wasn't unusual for 99 percent of the senior class to go to college. Alan Lapidus, one of Woody s schoolmates, said that Midwood "was the kind of school where everybody was involved in something but Allan got involved in nothing. He was a short, funny-looking kid, too scrawny to be athletic, although he definitely tried." As editor of both the school newspaper and the yearbook, Lapidus was a class leader and one of the cool crowd, who also happened to be a close friend of Bryna Goldstein, the object of one of Woody's crushes.

  Loathing Midwood even more than P.S. 99, Woody arrived there at the very last minute in the morning and left the minute the bell rang. "He was bright and knew how to talk, but he never did a lick of work," said Gladys Bernstein, a math and science teacher. "He was a slippery rascal who came late to class, carried on, and got a lot of 65s." Throughout his life, he painted the school as a sewer presided over by "emotionally disturbed teachers," for which Midwood faculty would never forgive him. Years later he would dredge up his favorite childhood memory of "getting up in the morning, having my big piece of chocolate cake and milk for breakfast, my parents still asleep, going out, presumably to Midwood High School but not going to Midwood High School." Instead, he took the train to Times Square, arriving just in time for the first show at the Paramount Theater, independent behavior that impressed his friends. "He appeared to be confident of himself and his intellectual capability," said Jack Victor. "All of us thought he was destined for great things."

  Having missed so many classes, Woody repeatedly required tutoring to pass courses. In his sophomore year, presumably hoping for a way to make him buckle down to his studies, his mother decided to get him a typewriter. Not one of Marty's hot deals without serial numbers, but a brand-new Olympia portable, an expensive German model that sold for forty dollars and looked like a tank. In the store, Woody demanded to know if the machine was worth the price.

  "This typewriter will last longer than you will," promised the salesclerk. (Most likely an accurate warranty because he still uses it.)

  If Nettie expected the Olympia to improve his grades, she found it didn't make a scrap of difference. If anything, it pushed him further from his studies. But as it turned out, the typewriter changed his life in an odd way that nobody could have predicted. Shortly after acquiring the Olympia, he began tapping out jokes. A distant cousin of his in public relations thought the one-liners were clever and suggested sending them to newspaper columnists, who were always looking for free material to fill space. Before sending out anything, however, Woody decided that he needed a pen name, something that sounded more professional than Allan Konigsberg. "It was an ongoing discussion for months," said Elliott Mills. "We'd be walking along Avenue K to play stickball in the 99 schoolyard, talking about what would sound best. Early on he decided to use his first name as the last name. The problem was the new first name. 'Miles' was a candidate but not a strong one. It dropped out of contention fast when 'Woody’ came up."

  In the fall of 1952, Allan-Woody began his senior year of high school, with his mind elsewhere as usual. Under his new nom de plume, he began mailing out batches of jokes with a businesslike note: "Enclosed are some gags for your consideration and sent exclusively to you." The first columnist to bite was Nick Kenny at the New York Daily Mirror. Woody, utterly thrilled but never satisfied, aspired to better. The hottest Broadway columnist was the New York Post's Earl Wilson, the crew-cut, bow-tied homeboy from Ohio who had made good in the big city with his Earl's Pearls quips, his fictitious showgirl Taffy Tuttle, and his B. W. (Beautiful Wife) Rosemary and son Slugger. On November 25, 1952, Wilson first published a joke of Woody's about a much-maligned government agency, the Office of Price Stabilization, which was trying to control inflation long after the war's end. The joke ran as follows: "Woody Allen figured out what OPS prices are—Over People's Salaries." As the columnist quipped later, "Knowing a sucker when he saw one, he mailed me one-line jokes wit
h postage due."

  There was no indication that Wilson's new jokesmith could be a sixteen-year-old. For one thing, he sounded sexually sophisticated. "It's the fallen women who are usually picked up, says Woody Allen." Mostly the jokes swung back and forth between topical subjects, typically observations about the business of living. Already he was working with an attitude, the same one he shared with family and friends, all of whom tended to see things in a ridiculous light without even trying. Eager to be accommodating, Woody was regularly tailoring bons mots for Wilson's showgirl: "Taffy Tuttle told Woody Allen she heard of a man who was a six-footer and said, 'Gee, it must take him a long time to put his shoes on.' "

  He couldn't get over his good luck. There was his new name "in a column that I had read a million times before with news and gossip of people whose lives I couldn't imagine I would ever touch. But there it was." Woody Allen in the same lofty company as Taffy Tuttle. In the insular little world of Midwood High, word of his adventures quickly spread. On February 27, 1953, there was an article about him in the Midwood Argus praising the "carrot-topped senior" who has made "quite a name for himself as a gag-writer." Asked for the secret of his success, Woody said, "I just sit down at the typewriter and think funny." By February, he had two dozen clippings. "When Bryna Goldstein first showed me Earl Wilson's column," recalled Alan Lapidus, "and said that Woody Allen was Allan, I was shocked. Nobody had given a second thought to this little schlemiel." Lapidus, who dreamed of being a writer but wound up an architect like his father, would conclude that "Allan was smarter than all of us. We were focused on being wonderful, but the best and the brightest of us never amounted to anything. It was Allan who was looking at the outside world, knew what he wanted, and did it."