Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Toward the end of his senior year, his uncompensated contributions to Earl Wilson suddenly paid dividends with a part-time job at a Madison Avenue public relations agency representing celebrities such as Arthur Murray, Guy Lombardo, and Sammy Kaye. To attract attention to their clients, David O. Alber Associates planted newspaper items that made them sound witty, as if funny lines automatically popped out of their mouths. In fact, when Woody in his saddle shoes finally met Dave Alber, he already had a reputation. Recalled then publicist Eddie Jaffe, "There were dozens of people submitting gags but Woody was one of the best." Alber offered him twenty five dollars a week for twenty hours of work, more money than he could earn delivering for Padow's Pharmacy or pinning at the bowling alleys. He was ecstatic. Until he became acquainted with Wilson and Alber, he had never known adult praise, but with his new parent surrogates, "my life began being special." With classes on the early shift, he was dismissed at one. "I would get on the subway," he said, "the train quite crowded, and straphanging, I'd take out a pencil," and by the time he got off he'd have whipped up forty or fifty jokes. It was "no big deal."

  When he graduated from Midwood High in 1953, the Epilog yearbook carried a blank space alongside his photograph. Of the 720 students in the Class of '53, he was the only one who had not participated in a single extracurricular activity. If there had been a student voted least likely to succeed, he was it.

  In September Woody's friends went to college: Jack and Elliott to City College of New York; Jerry to Dickinson; and Woody was accepted at New York University. Determined that her son make something of himself, Nettie planned for him a career in pharmacy, completely disregarding his aversion to school, which he would always think of as "a terrible, terrible nasty experience." She also dismissed the fact that he had acquired a manager, Harvey Meltzer, the older brother of a classmate, with whom he signed a five-year contract that gave Harvey a 25 percent commission. So far no work had materialized, and in any case, Nettie never considered show business a sensible job. But what made her imagine Woody would be happy as a pharmacist is hard to fathom.

  As a compromise, he enrolled at New York University as a film major, not because of any desire to make films but because it was an easy course. Hoping to get by with a minimum of effort, he took what the school called a limited program—three courses, including Spanish, English, and Motion Picture Production. However, riding the subway to school was too great a temptation for a consummate truant. As the train approached West Fourth Street in the Village, the stop for N.Y.U., a voice kept telling him, "Don't get off here. Keep going." In Times Square he spent the morning skylarking at the Automat, with coffee and the morning papers, browsing in the Circle Magic Shop, then slipping into the Paramount for an early feature. In the afternoons, he trekked across town to the Alber office, where his salary had been increased to forty dollars. Half the time he never got to class; to make matters worse, he seldom cracked a book. At the end of the first semester, he flunked Spanish and English, and barely passed motion picture production. N.Y.U. dropped him. Taking a defiant stance, he insisted that he "couldn't care less." His mother, he later joked, ran into the bathroom and tried to kill herself with an overdose of mah-jongg tiles. Nettie was not the sort to fall apart. What she actually did was swing into action and push the university to give him a second chance. The administration agreed, on the condition that he enroll in the summer session and bring up his grades. But one of the deans said pityingly that he just didn't seem to be college material and predicted what a grim future would befall him unless he started studying. In his opinion, the dean added, since Woody seemed to be maladjusted, it might be a good idea for him to see a psychiatrist.

  Woody strenuously objected to the idea that he might be a misfit. He was already a person of some small importance, he told the dean. He was gainfully employed as a writer for a show business publicist and also sold jokes to the television comedian Herb Shriner. But that news only seemed to confirm the dean's opinion of his instability. Theatrical people are, he is said to have replied, "all strange."

  That winter of 1954, to please his mother, he enrolled in a night course in motion picture production at the City College of New York, where he lasted an even shorter time than at N.Y.U. After only a few weeks, "I was given a Section Eight," he laughed, "the only one awarded by a nonmilitary institution." Nettie was understandably upset. Here she had bent over backward to give him a college education, but he threw it all away.

  Snapshots: Outside a friend’s house with Bryna Goldstein, he poses in a Marlon Brando slouch, with the actor’s trademark white T-shirt, jacket, and tight jeans. His hands are stuffed into his pockets, his hair slicked back, his jaw thrust forward in surly rebellion. He is bursting with sultry sexual aggression.

  The pretty, desirable girls at Midwood High want the tall boys, muscular six-footers with chunky chins. Physically, Woody is exactly the kind of conventionally geeky-looking guy who can’t get a date for the high school prom. With 120 pounds packed on a skinny 5 foot 6 inch frame, he will soon get even odder-looking when he has to get glasses that fall and selects a pair of big black horn-rims.

  When he was eighteen, Woody met a neighborhood girl at the East Midwood Jewish Center. Harlene Susan Rosen was small and string-bean slender, with an olive complexion, lovely black eyes, and a cascade of straight dark hair. She had a sweet face, and her only physical defect was a slight ski nose from a less than perfect rhinoplasty. At fifteen, she was attending James Madison High School, where she was an excellent student and also showed some talent for art, piano, and recorder—not surprising, since the Rosens were an artistic household. Woody gravitated toward the Rosens, whom he considered sophisticated, well-off people. Harlene's father played the trumpet, and her mother had once sung with a band. Julius Rosen had become a successful merchant who owned a children's shoe store on Kings Highway, a big corner house at Twenty-third and Avenue R, and a boat. His wife was an attractive, ambitious woman, who, not unnaturally, assumed that her two daughters would marry wealthy men. As for Harlene, she was probably dazzled by the attentions of a worldly older boy, who regaled her with his adventures in the overheated world of show business. Soon they were going steady.

  However, in keeping with the fifties disapproval of premarital sex, they remained virgins. Woody's main interest in any female at this time was hormonal. To get what he wanted, he proposed marriage and bought an engagement ring, much to the dismay of both families, especially Judy Rosen, who had no desire to see one of her daughters with a college dropout earning forty dollars ($243 today) a week. Woody was not deceiving himself, either. Earning money for writing jokes was, he said, "like getting paid to play baseball or something," thrilling but also fool's luck. His drawer full of clippings amounted to the ability to hold the coats of David Alber's clients and make them sound funny. He wanted to be somebody, but he feared ending up as a nonentity: "I don't know what—a delivery boy or a messenger," he later said.

  That bleak winter of 1955, there was an engagement dinner at the Konigsbergs. Unfazed by the occasion, Nettie began hectoring him about getting over his joke-writing foolishness, returning to college, going into a respectable business. How could he support a wife? Finally, Woody could no longer stand Nettie's needling. He grabbed the engagement ring and ran out of the house.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stand-Up

  In the winter of 1956, Woody's life took an unexpected turn when he got a chance to go to Hollywood as a comedy writer on the Colgate Variety Hour, NBC's answer to the top-rated Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. Living at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel, on his own for the first time, he felt confident that he had escaped his humdrum life with his family in Brooklyn. Proudly he raved to friends back home about the lush, sun-soaked good life of southern California; he loved the palm trees rising above the swimming pools, and bragged about stepping out at night to dine at world-famous restaurants such as the Brown Derby.

  Yet, for all his enthusiasm, he felt intense loneliness and wrote severa
l letters a day to Harlene, a freshman at Brooklyn College. In March, he could stand it no longer and impulsively summoned her to Hollywood to get married—a grand, dramatic gesture "as romantic as a movie script," in the eyes of his friends. Harlene, dewy-eyed, dying to get away from home, needed little persuasion to drop out of school and rush to Los Angeles, the elopement guaranteeing automatic transformation into a married lady of independence. On March 15, a rabbi married them at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel. He was twenty, she was seventeen.

  Hardly had the ink dried on the marriage certificate before Woody regretted his decision. Only days later, he was talking about divorce, sourly referring to his bride as "her," and predicting that the relationship had absolutely no chance of working. If not for the stigma of divorce, and the pain it would cause his parents, he let it be known that he was ready to walk out at once. Sex was important to him, but the reality of marriage must have been unnerving. At twenty, he was as well prepared for the day-to-day intimacy of living with a spouse as the average adolescent boy. As though that weren't bad enough, poor ratings caused the Colgate show to fold a month later, and they were forced to return to New York, homeless and broke but pretending to be happy newlyweds. Not only did the entire Hollywood adventure fizzle out prematurely, not only was their teenage marriage off to a terrible start, but Harlene had to ask her parents for her old room so that they would have a place to stay.

  That fall they moved into the city and rented a one-room efficiency in a brownstone at 311 West Seventy-fifth Street, just down the block from Riverside Park. In the days before co-op gentrification, rents on the Upper West Side were dirt cheap. Broad boulevards were flanked on either side with Kafkaesque apartment houses, inhabited largely by refugees still speaking in heavy European accents. Crisscrossing the avenues were narrow streets lined with blighted row houses, now chopped up into makeshift walk-ups. Their building had been originally a one-family house, and the apartment presumably a parlor, or at least half of one, because now from the ceiling an elegant chandelier hung smack up against a wall. The long, narrow room made Woody joke about furnishing the place with hurdles.

  Harlene resumed her education at tuition-free Hunter College, and Woody kept busy selling one-liners to radio stars like Peter Lind Hayes. For the time being, they put aside the idea of separation and tried to make a success of married life. Harlene learned how to cook, not always successfully, because Woody complained that everything she made, even coffee, tasted like chicken, and Elliott Mills remembered a dinner of boiled beef hearts and overcooked string beans as the worst meal he had ever eaten. In companionable moments, Harlene and Woody played their recorders together and went to movies.

  It took almost three years before they could afford to move. Their new apartment, in a dinky brownstone at 4 East Seventy-eighth Street, was not much of an improvement over their old place, but at least it was on the East Side.

  On the subway Woody ran into a kid from the neighborhood with whom he'd gone through P.S. 99 and Midwood High. He was miserable, he confided to Jimmy Moore, and had recently begun seeing a therapist. Moore was surprised. "In those days I'd never known anybody so unhappy that he would go to a psychiatrist. But if you did, you certainly didn't talk about it. I wondered what could be bothering him." Woody didn't really know what was bothering him, except "a continual awareness of seemingly unmotivated depression." He found a clinic with sliding-scale fees, all he could afford at the time, and went four or five times a week at fifteen dollars a session.

  In spite of depression, his fortunes began to improve after making the acquaintance of several veteran writers who took a professional interest in him. More than anyone else, his most important mentor was Danny Simon, head writer on the Colgate show, and older brother of future playwright Neil Simon. Even though Woody had become a whiz at turning out jokes for Dave Alber's clients and for Herb Shriner, Danny warned him that writing jokes was not enough. He had to build on the gags to create characters and eventually learn how to write sketches. Later Woody would say that everything he knew about the craft of comedy writing—how to do a straight line, how to cut jokes that don't move the plot, and, most important, how to keep rewriting—he had picked up from Danny Simon.

  As Simon's protege he began to wriggle his way slowly into big-league television comedy, though, to be sure, as a novice without good credentials or track record. After returning from Hollywood, his first job was Stanley, a half-hour sitcom starring Buddy Hackett and Carol Burnett. On his writing staff, the roly-poly Hackett had a stable of aces, including Larry Gelbart, Danny Simon, and Lucille Kallen. Intimidated, Woody sat quietly as a baby bird and spoke in whispers. "He was a very timid kid who didn't say much," remembered Hackett. "He was so damned serious about everything." After Stanley bombed, Woody worked on Pat Boone's musical variety program, Chevy Showroom, another frustrating experience. Many times, Boone remembers, "we'd be standing in the hallway during a break and Woody in his agitated, insistent way would be proposing some wild, drawn-out idea that we both knew was never going to make it. I would dissolve in helpless laughter and slide down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. Yet not one of those sketches was ever used on the show."

  Like every comedy writer in the fifties, Woody was dying to work on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, but there were never any openings. Finally, in 1958 Caesar used him for two NBC specials, which were both broadcast as "Sid Caesar's Chevy Show." Woody, thrilled, found himself in the company of writers such as Larry Gelbart, again, and Mel Brooks. The writers' room, Gelbart recalled, resembled "a playpen" full of all-white, all-Jewish, primarily male writers, who were trying to please a time bomb of an employer who habitually drank himself sick. Impossible to work for, Caesar once dangled Mel Brooks from the eleventh-floor office window by his ankles. Brooks, himself manic, habitually referred to young Woody as "that rotten little kid." Asked about Woody in 1997, he characterized him as a person who "never communicated anything memorable. I guess he was truly hiding his light under a bushel." Nevertheless, the rotten little kid was beginning to get a reputation, because in 1958 he and Larry Gelbart won a Sylvania award for the year's best television comedy.

  In spite of his aversion to the country, he began leaving the city every summer to work at Tamiment, a resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, renowned as a borscht belt farm club for writers. (Herman Wouk memorialized the resort as South Wind in Marjorie Morningstar.) For many years, Max Liebman had produced the Saturday night shows at Tamiment Playhouse with the fresh young talents of Danny Kaye, Carol Burnett, Sid Caesar, Jerome Robbins, Mary Rodgers, and Danny and Neil Simon. The productions were said to be the equal of Broadway theater. Helping to write and stage—and sometimes act in—a different show every weekend, Woody found himself toiling around the clock. In his spare hours, he sat on the porch, chewing packs of spearmint gum, practicing his clarinet, and reading. "People joked that the books were marriage manuals," said Mary Rodgers, who, with Marshall Barer, was there at Tamiment working on the music and lyrics for a one-hour version of what eventually became Once Upon a Mattress. Woody, at the tender age of twenty-three, "already had a reputation for being a genius," said Rodgers. Actress Jane Connell agreed that he was impressive, "confident of what he had to offer and even though very shy, never kowtowing to anyone."

  For Woody, the atmosphere at Tamiment was irresistible, a "George S. Kaufmanesque stage door feeling" that made him feel part of show business. Less enamored of the place was Harlene, called "Mrs. Woody" by the staff, who earned extra money typing scripts and "always had a cold," recalled Mary Rodgers. "Actually, I think it was an allergy to the mountains, or maybe to Woody." Like the other performers, Harlene and Woody lived in a one-room cabin and shared a toilet with the cabin next door, but the lack of privacy didn't seem to bother them. They were "Hansel and Gretel," said Jane Connell, "little kids who seemed more like brother and sister than passionate lovers. Harlene looked a bit like Olive Oyl in the comics." Behind his wife's back, slyly mocking their marriag
e, Woody told the other players that he knew nothing about sex on their wedding night and talked to a rabbi, who advised him not to worry. "All you do is mount her like a young bull." The story, despite many repetitions, never failed to make people laugh. The sniffling Harlene did not utter a word, "didn't show her feelings," reported producer Moe Hack. "She could take a lot of punishment."

  In four years Woody became a successful writer for television's biggest comedy stars. In 1960, he went to work for the Garry Moore Show at a weekly salary of $1,700 (the equivalent of $9,300 today). It was quite a lot of money, but, characteristic of his negative attitude, Woody was still miserable. The greater his success, the more impatient and dissatisfied he was. Writing for others, he decided, was "a blind alley," not much different from working in Macy's. Around friends, he made no secret of his boredom in the comedy trenches. He was just writing "to earn a living," hacking around from show to show, always worried that the star would be dropped for poor ratings. In no time, he began treating the Moore show like Midwood High, a place to avoid if at all possible. When he did show up, he arrived late, goofed off, and needled the other writers. His manager, Harvey Meltzer, was a cautious man who warned him to take it easy and develop his talent slowly and systematically, advice that Woody stubbornly refused to follow. When their five-year contract expired in 1958, Woody dumped his manager, to the relief of Meltzer, who later complained that Woody was "making me sick what he was putting me through." On the recommendation of a friend from Tamiment, Woody then hooked up with two agents who did not require him to sign a contract. Unlike Meltzer, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe took only a flat 15 percent commission.

  The other thorn in his side, not as easy to remove as Meltzer, was Harlene. Now twenty-one, adopting a beatnik uniform of black skirts, leotards, pierced ears, and no makeup, she was a junior at Hunter, where she studied philosophy and German. By this time she held show business in low regard. It pained her to see her husband, a man obviously capable of serious work, wasting his talent on the lowest form of writing. Every so often her disdain reached the point where she would entice Woody into high-flown intellectual debates, which only infuriated him. However, it was probably her browbeating that shamed him into filling the gigantic craters in his education. To build his vocabulary, he began keeping lists of new words, and he also followed her courses, either by reading along with her or engaging a tutor from Columbia University to help him delve into the great works of philosophy and literature he had once considered impenetrable. Even so, it must have been grueling for a man whose best reading experiences had been comic books. "There have been very few things I can say in my life that were fun to read," he was to admit. "Even a great book like Crime and Punishment was not a joy to read." More enjoyable were magazines such as The New Yorker, which published the prose of S. J. Perelman, an "unremittingly hilarious" humorist in his opinion.