Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  March of Time:

  "It must have been 1963 or 1964 when David [Brown] and I first heard him perform at the Blue Angel. He was just starting. I remember being so annoyed because there were some out-of-towners from Wisconsin or the South Bronx talking and talking through the jokes and they wouldn't stop. So I threw buttered rolls at them."

  —Helen Gurley Brown

  By 1962 Woody was establishing a national reputation as the hottest comic in the country. While the earliest notice of him came from influential local papers such as the New York Times, which suggested he might be potentially a special comic ("a Chaplin-esque victim with an S. J. Perelman sense of the bizarre and a Mort Sahl delivery"), he kept dogging the big national magazines for coverage. Grateful for any scrap of attention, he greeted each article in Time, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post with joy and turned into a relentless writer of thank-you notes. To Rogers E. M. W/hitaker, the railroading buff who covered the club scene for The New Yorker, he wrote that his favorable reviews were "by far my most satisfying achievement" in his nightclub career. A local newspaper reporter received a mannerly, typed bread-and-butter note: While he was usually disappointed by the way his interviews read, he found her piece both enjoyable and helpful. To almost everybody he extended a standard invitation to meet him for a drink.

  An old hand at press agentry and hype, he easily borrowed the tactics of David Alber to promote his own career and diligently embarked on what would become a lifetime of self-marketing, manipulating the media to his own advantage. His coquettish handling of the press—coyly standing in the paparazzi line of fire, pleading for attention while feigning reluctance— would become known as Woody Allen Disease. As a newcomer, however, the shrewdest weapon in his arsenal of stratagems would be down-home modesty. He said solemnly to the New York Times Magazine that his reactions to everyday situations "seem normal to me, but completely hilarious to everyone else, and most of the time I can't figure out why."

  Not long after Harlene flew to Chihuahua for a Mexican divorce in November of 1962, he mentioned her onstage for the first time. He and his wife, he confided, couldn't decide whether to vacation in Bermuda or file for divorce; they settled on divorce because a holiday lasts two weeks, but a divorce is forever. Sure enough, the line got a laugh.

  As part of the separation agreement, he promised to pay a lump sum of $1,750, followed by an extremely modest $75 a week in alimony for the rest of her life, or until she remarried. Should he be continuously employed with a running contract, the sum would be increased to $125. "Leaving when she did, just as he was about to make it, she got a bad deal out of the whole thing," said a friend. "The settlement was peanuts." After the divorce, all contact between them ceased and so when his alimony payments became erratic, Harlene apparently couldn't bring herself to complain.

  Judging by some of Woody's statements to the media over the years, Harlene's behavior during their six years together could not have been more exemplary: She was a studious young woman who ground away at her studies and got straight As at Hunter, when she was not playing the piano or painting. The starter marriage had been "really a great experience," but their interests grew "diverse" until they finally went their friendly ways. That was not exactly the truth because, according to Louise Lasser, never did Woody have a kind word to say about his former wife in private. And in public, even though he and Harlene were no longer married, she continued to play a major role in his life. Unable to resist the urge to punish her, he slyly began adding Harlene one-liners to his act on a regular basis, until at times these mischievous bad-boy zingers threatened to become the centerpiece. Lobbing verbal grenades, he regularly referred to her as Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame. At various times, he described her as a "weird woman" who had half a dozen sex-change operations "but couldn't find anything she liked." Marrying her was a stupid mistake because when he first introduced her to his parents, "they approved but the dog died"; the first time she cooked him a dinner he almost choked to death on a bone in her chocolate pudding; on her birthday he gave her an electric chair that he passed off as a hair dryer; the American Museum of Natural History used one of her shoes to reconstruct a dinosaur; she was so bumble-brained that after burning herself on a hot stove, "it took her two minutes to think of the word ouch." The nastiest joke, however, imagined her being raped: "My first wife lives on the Upper West Side and I read in the paper the other day that she was violated on her way home—knowing my first wife, it was not a moving violation."

  These sorts of jokes follow in the tradition of Milton Berle, or Henny Youngman with his "Take my wife, please!" or any of the older borscht belt comics who regularly insulted Jewish women, usually their wives or mothers-in-law. Woody, too, was unkind to his mother, but there was no one he treated so scornfully as the spurned Harlene. So unmistakable was his hostility that sensitive patrons could not help noticing. At the Blue Angel one night, a heckler yelled, "Who keeps you warm at night!" But that was rare. Usually his Harlene jokes guaranteed huge laughs. Even his friends who had always been enormously fond of her found themselves laughing uproariously, then feeling guilty. The trouble was, admitted Jack Victor, "the jokes were funny."

  Upon leaving Harlene, Woody continued to live in the same neighborhood with Louise. After the studio on Seventy-seventh Street, they took a bigger apartment on East Eightieth Street before renting at 784 Park Avenue, an expensive doorman apartment building at the corner of East Seventy-fourth. The fancy address pleased him, but the apartment itself turned out to be dingy because it faced a brick wall. Living with Louise had its ups and downs, too. For all her fairy-tale facade—her beauty, talent, intelligence, and wealth— she was emotionally frail, an insecure young woman who knew of no other way to relate to a man except in a child-father relationship. Her mother’s illness meant she had been brought up mostly by her father, a controlling man who indulged and pampered her. Woody, too, began to treat her as a kittenish little girl in need of supervision. Her low sense of self-regard seemed excessive.When he was working at the Bitter End and they were still living in the studio, she insisted on taking a waitress job at the club to be near him. The sight of her hustling around with coffee while he was doing his act was terribly distracting, he protested. But she enjoyed waiting tables, she replied. He suggested, "Why don't you be my maid instead?" and offered her fifty dollars a week to clean the apartment.

  As it happened, he could have paid Louise a lot more than fifty dollars. With the days of the little oddball places behind him, Rollins and Joffe were booking him into the best clubs in the country: the Blue Angel and the Americana Hotel's Royal Box in New York, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, the Crescendo in Los Angeles. He was pulling in $4,000 to $5,000 a week, which translates into $21,000 to $26,000 today. But through the winter of 1963 and the spring of 1964, it was television that triggered his breakthrough into significant wealth and fame. As a guest on the late-night shows hosted by Johnny Carson and Steve Allen, he quickly established himself as the most talked-about comic of the season, famous for droll one-liners and scintillating off-the-cuff repartee. Ironically, Woody had a low opinion of TV, which he dismissed as "junk." It made no difference, because its viewers could not get enough of him. Once he was able to attract the attention of the entire country, exposure that only television can afford, his career blasted off like a rocket shimmying toward the Milky Way.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What’s New Pussycat?

  On a steamy afternoon just before the Fourth of July weekend in 1964, Woody arrived at Washington National Airport. In the men's room he changed from jeans and sneakers into a rented tuxedo and proceeded to the White House, where he was invited to attend a state dinner in honor of the president of Costa Rica.

  Woody detested parties, which were always full of people he had never met before, indeed, never particularly wanted to meet. For him, he liked to say, telling jokes for a living was the perfect job because it meant he didn't have to be around people. "I go up o
n stage, I do my act, they laugh, I go home." Of course, an invitation to the White House was altogether different. For a working-class boy brought up on Fifteenth and K in Midwood, two generations removed from Leon Cherry's luncheonette on East Eighteenth Street, it was an enormously surreal moment, proof that he had made it. Shaking hands with President Lyndon Johnson at the reception, he strolled around and chatted with some of the eminent guests, among them Reverend Billy Graham, Jimmy Durante, and Richard Rodgers. Awestruck, Woody later said that the magnificence of the eighteenth-century mansion and the dignity of the military band almost made him feel as if were stepping into a scene from Gone With the Wind.

  But midway through the evening, the bubble showed signs of bursting. Suddenly his tux began to itch, and his shoes, also rented, were rubbing blisters on both feet. To make matters worse, there was little to eat on his dinner plate but a filet mignon the size of a half dollar. Before he could make his escape, the band was playing a fox-trot, and Lady Bird Johnson insisted on sweeping him around the dance floor. Mrs. Johnson examined his Raggedy Andy hairstyle. When she inquired jokingly if he might be wearing a wig, he found himself so flustered that he could think of no sufficiently comical comeback. At midnight, he rushed back to the airport and fished his jeans out of the locker, scolding himself for having behaved like "a wallflower." As it turned out, his performance anxiety was completely unjustified because six months later he would be invited to entertain at LBJ's inauguration.

  The next week after his dinner at the White House, his career got another boost. Earlier NBC had asked him to substitute for a vacationing Johnny Carson as guest host of The Tonight Show. All that week he was scrambling to put together material. Before each day's taping, the couch in his office would be blanketed with manila file folders bulging with scraps of paper, jokes scribbled on dog-eared yellow sheets, on cocktail napkins and matchbook covers. Pawing through the odds and ends, he claimed that he hadn't the faintest idea what he was going to say. He was guaranteed to mess up. Moaning about his plight to a Newsday reporter, he said: "What the hell am I doing here anyway?" (Making $2,400 for only five nights' work was the correct answer.) For all his endless offstage self-flagellation, he was never at a loss for words on camera with guests such as comedian Godfrey Cambridge. One evening he invited Louise to appear on the show, without of course informing The Tonight Show audience that she was his live-in girlfriend. By week's end, he had approving television critics joking that Johnny Carson had better get back to New York fast.

  Woody's secret contempt for television did not prevent him from accepting every booking that came his way: Candid Camera, What's My Line, even a folk music series called Hootenanny, he did them all. Most embarrassing was Coliseum, in which he exposed himself in bathing trunks to introduce a magic act called Mr. Electric, "what my wife called me the morning after our honeymoon night," he quipped.

  If Coliseum fell at one end of the spectrum, The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night was at the other. Once you had been on Ed Sullivan, the whole country knew who you were the next morning. Although Woody would be booked many times, his first appearance in 1962 was very nearly his last. At the run-through, he decided to keep his performance fresh for the show and chose to do "Private Life," one of his most popular routines, which included a bit about his wife's cousin who had taken out "orgasmic" insurance. ("If her husband fails to satisfy her sexually, Mutual of Omaha has to pay her every month.") Sullivan, unaware that Woody was making a substitution and why, watched with mounting agitation. If there was one thing Sullivan hated, after commies, homosexuals, and women wearing trousers, it was smut. No sooner had Woody finished than Sullivan began screaming at him. He was a dirty pervert. How dare he pull that filth! But he wouldn't get away with it because he was off the show. "Attitudes like yours are why kids are burning their draft cards," he shouted. Finally, turning to the rehearsal audience, Sullivan begged their pardon.

  Woody was amazed. His impulse, he later confided to Dick Cavett, was to "respond nastily." Instead of shouting back, he "apologized like a shrinking violet. I charmed the pants off him." After that Sullivan was "wonderful" to him and invited him back many times, but Woody would never forget how he had been "humiliated."

  Not so long ago, he was taking any gig offered to him. Now, at twenty-eight, he was a headliner who continually worked the club circuit. A vagabond life on the road, however, meant late nights and empty hotel rooms. In spite of his fear of flying, he went out "for six, seven months at a time without a night off," he said. "I mean seven nights a week. I would go from the Blue Angel to the Hungry i to the Crystal Palace." The worst part was doing two or three sets a night, being absurdly exhausted "and then you have to do it again at two in the morning." As he wrote Groucho Marx, his television appearances coupled with the need to change his act for every nightclub reappearance took a lot out of him. Still, he knew he shouldn't complain because it was better than bagging groceries. At the A&P, of course, you didn't often get Scotched-up wiseguys. After being heckled one night at the Hungry i, Woody turned his back on the audience and did the rest of his act facing upstage. The audience, feeling shortchanged, stomped out. Afterward, the club manager called him into his office. "Don't do that again," he warned. "I had to give thirty refunds."

  Yet, there were also bright spots. One evening in Chicago, he and Jack Rollins got to talking with a young couple at a coffee shop across the street from Mr. Kelly's. Rollins mentioned that he had to leave town and worried that Woody might get lonely. Soon Woody was seeing the couple almost every night. John Doumanian, thirty-three, was a big teddy bear of an Armenian, good-humored and jolly. He worked for Capitol Records, and his pretty wife, Jean, was a buyer for a small women's boutique. Jean Karabas was born in 1937 and grew up in Chicago, where her parents, Greek immigrants, operated a restaurant. With long jet-black hair and pale skin, a very thin figure and elegant wardrobe, every stitch of it black, she had the anorexic look of an Addams Family character. One of her detractors likened her to "a Greek widow, who dresses dark and eats black strap molasses," an allusion to her preference for organic food. Woody enjoyed their company, especially the twenty-seven-year-old Jean, who, he thought, had a surprisingly great sense of style and sophistication for a midwesterner. It was tough to make her laugh though. Instead she would say, "That is soo funny."

  As it turned out, Woody and Jean were similar. Both had grown up in traditional households, both burned hot with ambition, both had made mistakes and married young. They had the same tightly wound personalities, precise and meticulous, and tended to have difficulty relating to people. There was "a wonderful side to her," said Laurie Zaks, a television producer who worked for Jean in the seventies. "She was great to her family and friends. But there was also her angry side. I sensed that she'd been through tough times along the way. There was a lot of old anger she had never dealt with."

  A few years after their meeting, Woody remained on friendly terms with the Doumanians when they moved to New York and got a divorce. For Jean, he arranged a job booking celebrities for Dick Cavett's popular television talk show. Over the years John Doumanian would appear as an actor in several of Woody's pictures. It was Jean, however, who would become Woody's most trusted confidant, a sounding board for just about every step he took in life thereafter, from how to dress to how to conduct his love life. "She's pretty, she's intelligent, she's loyal; she's everything you could want," Woody would rave about her. "She's a dream friend." And when they were together, she took charge. "To know Woody, just look at his friends," said writer Peter Tauber. "Jean is emblematic of his very controlled, very orderly side. You can see that he doesn't have room in his life for crazy people."

  As the repository of his confidences and kvetches, Jean saw or spoke to him daily, always seeming to be taking his emotional temperature. Late at night Louise would wake up and hear him talking on the phone. Some people assumed there had once been a romance—or that Jean had wanted to marry him—but this was apparently not the case. The relationship
, which has turned out to be the longest of his life, remains platonic, and they continue to meet for dinner several times a week. In middle age, he still depends on her as his "closest friend in the world." For him, she is "the person you want to be with when you're waiting for the results of your biopsy." If Woody has a soul mate, it's been Jean, the only woman he has been able to respect as an equal. "He's very lucky to have her," remarked one of her friends, Stephen Silverman, an editor at People magazine. "She's been a real crutch."

  Stand-Up:

  Audience Question: Would you accept the vice-presidential nomination?

  Woody: I'm apolitical. I have no political convictions whatsoever. I'm a registered pervert.

  —"Question and Answer Session," Monologue

  Comedy albums were taking a sizable slice of the entertainment market in the sixties. People spent money to stay home and listen to Jonathan Winters, Nichols and May, and Lenny Bruce on their living-room hi-fis. In March 1964, Woody recorded his first album live at Mr. Kelly's. Woody Allen, released by Colpix Records, contained thirty-seven minutes of original material; altogether, eleven routines that included "Private Life," "N.Y.U.," "My Marriage," "My Grandfather," and "Brooklyn." Although the album was nominated for a Grammy, sales did not satisfy Woody, who complained incessantly. How come his career was going great, he grumbled to his publicist Richard O'Brien, but no one bought his album? That didn't stop him from recording two more.