Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  There was no question that their marriage was a mistake, but he could not bring himself to break free. Bitterly angry at being trapped in a situation he could not resolve, he took out his frustration by constantly diminishing his wife's talents and achievements, belittling and rebuking in much the same way his mother had treated him. Harlene, depressed, redoubled her efforts to please him.

  All day he had been unable to eat, and now it was a little before ten and his heart was pounding. He felt as if he would pass out from stage fright. Waiting backstage at the Blue Angel, one of New York's most sophisticated supper clubs (the cover was $3.50), he listened while Shelley Berman introduced him as a funny young television writer who wanted to try out some of his own material. Neatly dressed in a suit and tie, he trudged out to the microphone and shot a sad-eyed glance at the audience through his thick Harold Lloyd spectacles, looking as startled as a fawn caught in headlights. Customers, drinking Scotch and smoking at the little pink-and-black tables and the banquettes along the quilted walls, stared back and smiled. Standing stiff and frightened under the draped velvet curtains, he began to robotically recite the thirty-minute audition monologue that he had spent months writing and polishing, tightening and rehearsing and timing. Once he got going, he plunged ahead fast and furious, as if he were reciting "The Charge of the Light Brigade"—monotonous, mechanical, looking neither left nor right, what one of his managers would later describe as the equivalent of "a child doing show-and-tell." After a while, the blasts of laughter were coming less frequently until finally the crowd fell eerily quiet, eyes at half mast. At 10:30, fingers still pecking at his jacket, he walked offstage, feeling completely deflated. On that Sunday evening he learned an important lesson: There was a big difference between being funny and creating a comedy act. Killer material meant nothing without personality.

  In His Own Words:

  "It was unspeakably agonizing. All day long I would shake and tremble, thinking about standing up that night before people and trying to be funny."

  —Woody Allen, 1966

  In 1960 the narrow streets of the West Village, Bleecker, MacDougal, and Sullivan, were a neon blur of clubs and coffeehouses offering all kinds of entertainment to middle-class couples from the outer boroughs and slumming uptown couples. The Cafe Wha, the Bitter End, and the Village Vanguard presented a roster of beatnik poets, amateur folksingers, and aspiring comics, all of them holding on to their day jobs because the clubs paid a going rate of five dollars a set. A few weeks after his catastrophic debut at the Blue Angel, Woody began working two shows a night, six nights a week at the Duplex, a club on Grove Street. It was a tiny walk-up on the second floor, with tables bunched together, a postage-stamp stage, and air sooty with cigarette smoke. Solely responsible for his being there were Rollins and Joffe, who were determined to push him into performing. Entering his life at its lowest point, they recognized that he had the originality but not the skill and immediately adopted the role of surrogate parents, babying him, holding his hand virtually every evening. "We smelled that this shy little guy could be a great performer," said Rollins.

  Jack Rollins, twenty-one years Woody's senior, old enough to be a father figure to him, was born Jack Rabinowitz in 1914 and grew up in Brooklyn. A tall, forlorn man with pronounced dark circles under his eyes, he looked like a depressed raccoon who had got hold of a cigar. Early ambitions to become a theatrical producer got sidetracked when he met a folksinging short-order cook and began devoting all his time to developing the career of Harry Belafonte. Charles H. Joffe, twenty-nine, also from Brooklyn, attended Syracuse University and briefly tried to make a living as half of a song-and-comedy act. He then became a junior agent at MCA, one of Hollywood's biggest talent agencies, where he was not particularly successful, either. The two men met when Joffe noticed Rollins trudging along the halls of MCA, hustling his folksinger—no easy task in the days of segregation.

  Together Rollins and Joffe made a splendid team: Rollins had the kind of sweet personality that made him a sensitive handler of people's feelings; Joffe was a fast-talking negotiator. Working out of a messy one-room office on West Fifty-seventh Street, a hole in the wall stacked high with old newspapers, they had a tiny stable of clients. Besides Belafonte, they represented two comics just starting out, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, but no writers because they were not lucrative. Before long, they broached the idea to Woody of doing stand-up. Why drop his best lines into someone else's mouth when he could perform the material himself?

  Woody thought the suggestion was preposterous. Getting up in front of an audience terrified him. Not only did making a spectacle of himself require a kind of nerve that he definitely didn't possess, but, he pointed out, he was earning good money as a comedy writer. By now he had made his Broadway debut as well, with the contribution of two skits to From A to Z, a revue starring Hermione Gingold that had run for twenty-one performances. On the other hand, his whining about his dead-end job, his hellish marriage, anything and everything, intensified. For the next two years, he continued to write for Garry Moore, while Rollins and Joffe continued to hound him.

  The advantage of a cut-rate club like the Duplex was that Woody could be really bad but nobody would know. (And he didn't have to pay for the privilege of performing.) There was no salary, cab fares, or wardrobe. There weren't even many customers, eight or ten maybe, most of them juiced and more interested in talking to one another than hearing him. Rollins recalled the audience response as "zero." Woody would remember "a Godforsaken, mostly empty club at 1 A.M. and then nobody would laugh. I wanted to die." Having no idea how to move onstage, he grabbed the microphone and ambled up and down like a caged ferret. No performance was complete unless he tangled the cord around his neck. Sometimes Rollins worried that "he was going to choke himself." Basically, he had the body language of a schoolboy called upon to recite.

  Oblivious to hecklers, he would "stoically go through with his lines and do his 25 minutes like they weren't there," remembered Rollins. He passed the time between sets huddled at a table with Jack and Charlie, sighing deeply, endlessly grumbling about having to perform for a bunch of "dogs with high-pitched ears." It was insane. He had a knot in his stomach, he was earning nothing. Look how terribly he was suffering. "Listen, fellahs, do you think I should continue this?"

  If it's too difficult, he should quit, Rollins and Joffe told him. After all, it was him on the stage, not them. But Woody ignored them. He enjoyed whining. It was the essential Allan Konigsberg. The next night the "why me?" lamentations would begin all over again. Did they think he should go on? And they would repeat, like good straight men, "Well, we think so if you can bear it."

  Frequently Woody's high-school gang came by to offer encouragement and act as laughers. "He got sick and threw up," recalled Elliott Mills. "It wasn't easy. He was never a traditional borscht belt comedian. He couldn't spritz. All he could do was tell stories."

  Woody's last show was at 12:30, and an hour later he would be out on Sheridan Square with Charlie Joffe. Uptown there were always places to go, Eddie Condon’s on Fifty-fourth Street, the Wilbur De Paris Band on Fifty-second. At 2 a.m. Broadway was jumping. You went to Jack Dempsey’s clam bar, or to the Optimo cigar store with its window of phone booths facing the street, or you could sit in Hanson's Drugstore, specializing in Max Factor No. 2 pancake and burgers—full of showgirls from the Latin Quarter. Lindy's and the Stage Deli were clubhouses where comics and their agents and flacks convened for bagels and nervous yocks until all hours of the morning, a scene that Woody would paint so brilliantly twenty years later in Broadway Danny Rose. There was no reason to go home.

  The city after midnight was not a place you saw comedians' wives, not a place wives wanted to be. Between the Garry Moore Show by day and the Duplex at night, Harlene got frozen outside of Woody s life.

  Shortly after Woody began performing at the Duplex, an actor friend from Tamiment, Bob Dishy, came to see the show with a date who had been, until recently, a student at Brandeis Univer
sity. Although Louise Lasser majored in political science, she always won a featured role in student musicals—not surprising because she was also a talented singer with a Judy Garland-type of voice (two years later she would replace Barbra Streisand in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale). After her junior year at Brandeis, suffering from bouts of depression, she returned home to study acting. Immediately enamored of the petite strawberry blonde with the endearing toothy smile, Woody invited her and Dishy to his apartment. Then, on New Year's Eve, 1960, Louise invited him and Harlene to celebrate the evening at the apartment of her parents, who lived just a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue. At the party, Louise tried to befriend Harlene but sensed her hostility and concluded that she must have "known something." But at that point there was nothing to know, except that Louise had developed a huge crush on Woody.

  By the spring of 1961, however, it was a different story. By then they had been seeing each other secretly for months, meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and taking carriage rides through Central Park. The fact that he was married and living with his wife put a damper on the romance. Whenever the twenty-year-old Louise brought up the subject, he offered the standard explanation of husbands in the process of switching women: He and his wife had grown apart. As soon as Harlene graduated from Hunter in June, they planned to separate. Reassured, Louise felt "that was the nice thing about Woody," who could always take control of situations and defuse her anxiety by saying "exactly what was going to happen, the reasoning behind it, and when." Harlene would not actually graduate until June of 1962, finally getting her degree after six years because periodic shortages of money had forced her to drop out for some semesters and work. Woody and Louise continued to tryst in Central Park, but contrary to Louise's suspicions, it is doubtful that Harlene knew of their affair. Even after the separation, when Woody moved his things to a studio apartment a block away at 14 East Seventy-seventh Street that summer, she continued to wonder if they had done the right thing; maybe with more effort it could have worked out.

  Not that Woody had any regrets. Continuing his pattern of attraction to women above him, he had moved on. Louise represented everything he associated with the brittle Nick and Nora Charles world of Upper East Side wealth and sophistication. If he could have his way, he would have been her. Born in 1940, the only child of a noted tax expert, S. Jay Lasser, and his wife, Paula, Louise grew up living in a Fifth Avenue building and attending exclusive private schools and progressive summer camps. "Whenever I got off the bus," she joked, "Pete Seeger was standing there with a guitar." But despite her privileged upbringing, Louise had emotional problems that seemed to be inherited from her mentally unstable mother, whose illness resulted in repeated hospitalizations. In 1961 Paula Lasser attempted suicide. Emerging from a five-day coma, she demanded to know who had been responsible for saving her life. Informed that it was Louise, she cried, "I'll never forgive her." Three years later she would try again and succeed.

  Louise, "the smartest of all Woody's women," according to a friend of Woody's, was well read, and Woody had to hustle to keep up with her. As he himself was to admit later, "It was only when I started going out with women who were more cultured and made great demands on me that I started to feel I had to keep my end of the conversation up."

  In His Own Words:

  "I never set out to create any image at all."

  —Woody Allen, 1964

  Little by little, the act caught on. By the summer of 1961, Woody moved on to a Village coffeehouse, the Bitter End, where he was paid a pittance, in the high two figures he joked. To the New York Times Magazine, he tried to make everything sound easy. "The simple fundamentals of working in clubs can be unequivocally learned in a month," he declared. In fact, transforming himself into a stand-up comic had taken nearly a year. During those months of experimentation, he accomplished the most creative work of his entire life and invented a verbal comic strip known as "Woody Allen." In some respects, his character was the classic Little Man Against the World—the slender sparrow body, the cartoon face, the thinning red hair, the sorrowful eyes behind thick glasses, the nervous mannerisms: dribbling fingers and the shuffling feet, the mumbled wells, uhs, urns, and ahs, in a singsong New York cadence (which he was working hard to lose). But the material was so surrealistic that he managed to reinvent the little schnook genre and make it his own. Anyone who knew him could see that his awkwardly appealing stock character was "an exaggerated version" of Allan Konigsberg, one that blurred the line between autobiography and comedy.

  Of course, his urban neurotic did not appear full-blown. In the beginning, all he had was funny material and a woebegone appearance that provoked laughter in itself, but he lacked a theme. His own account of giving birth to his character is not completely trustworthy: "Gradually, the character evolved," he explained at the time. "It didn't evolve deliberately. I just wrote stuff that seemed funny. But the character was assigned to me by the audience. They laughed more at certain things. Naturally I used more of those things." The critics also shared in his creation because, he observed, they "wrote about me as a certain type. So I put more material in the act that would fit that type." In other words, he found his good-boy persona through trial and error.

  What he failed to acknowledge, at least not then, was how much his gropings owed to specific individuals, one of them being Bob Hope and his WASP schlemiel character, the vain, cowardly womanizer who ends up the winner. Only seven years old when his mother took him to see Road to Morocco, Woody knew every Hope film by heart and automatically copied Hope's smart-alecky attitude and superb timing. To Hope's fast one-liners and ad-libbed asides, Woody layered the nervous, stabbing delivery of Mort Sahl, the comic he idolized above all others. However, as he became slightly more comfortable in front of an audience—goaded no doubt by reviewers who had dubbed him "Son of Sahl"—his own unbuttoned personality began to emerge, and the material became more psychological. (Woody, who couldn't care less about JFK and Nixon, steered clear of Sahl's topical material and instead joked about chasing gorgeous women.) In addition to borrowing from Hope and Sahl, he sprinkled his style with bits and pieces from other humorists—S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis—until what finally emerged was a plum pudding distinctly recognizable as the Woody Allen style.

  The political satire of Sahl and the social satire of a hipster such as Lenny Bruce could be appreciated anywhere, but Woody staked out territory that was local and familiar: His neighborhoods existed inside the city limits of Jewish New York, both the Brooklyn of his youth (he joked of pollution destroying German subs off Coney Island) and the exclusive Upper East Side, where as an adult he was easily mugged in the lobby of his Park Avenue building. But in one way or another, the subject of nearly all his humor would be Allan Konigsberg, his complaining little-boy self, with fanciful semiconfessional bits that evoked his own emotional geography: his mother whom he swore must have breast-fed him through falsies; his parents who rented out his room after he had been kidnapped, his screwball grandfather who sold him a gold watch on his deathbed, his experiences at N.Y.U. where he cheated on a metaphysics exam by peeking into the soul of another student.

  In time, the construction of his routines would grow more complex. The fantasy "Down South" tells of his visit to an unnamed southern city. Setting off to a costume party dressed as a ghost, he is offered a lift by a car full of men in white sheets. Soon the Klansmen discover he is worse than bogus, he is a New York Jew. They are not amused, and decide to lynch him on the spot, but Woody manages to calm them with an eloquent discourse on brotherhood. Typically, his routines had conclusions as quietly unexpected as a bang on the head. "Not only did they cut me down and let me go, but that night I sold them two thousand dollars worth of Israel bonds."

  In his most memorable monologue, "The Moose," Woody begins by offering the audience a story they won't believe. "I was hunting in upstate New York and I shot a moose." He straps the moose on the fender of his car, but on
his way home, driving through the Holland Tunnel, the moose wakes up. What's more, the moose begins signaling for an illegal turn. As the routine unfolds and one line collapses hilariously into the next, Woody tries to get rid of the moose. In desperation, he takes him to a sophisticated East Side costume party where the moose mills sociably with the other guests. Not only does he blend in easily, he wins second prize for his costume, first prize having been awarded to a certain married couple named the Berkowitzes who came dressed in, of all things, moose suits. Woody's moose is understandably irritated and during the ensuing confrontation becomes unruly. The three moose knock one another unconscious. Woody grabs two of the moose, straps them to his fender, and hurtles back up to the woods, where he dumps them. The next morning, waking up in their moose suits, the poor Berkowitzes are shot. We then move to a bastion of the Establishment, the New York Athletic Club, where the Berkowitzes have been stuffed and mounted prominently on a wall. In the end, the joke is on the fraternity of WASPs, whose bylaws exclude Jews from membership.