Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Slowly but surely, his earnings continued to mount, to $250,000 a year ($1.3 million today) by the time he turned thirty. Woody attributed his success to "just the throw of the dice." Much of that luck had to do with appearing at precisely the right moment, when the postwar baby boomers, now come of age, were seeking new values and unlikely heroes in unusual places. A decade of so much self-consciousness that it was packaged as a sign of the zodiac, the age of Aquarius was a time in which his comic sensibility proved irresistible. To those who characterized the idealistic sixties, Woody represented a new breed of man, the quintessential misfit, the heroic frog who had turned into a prince. Clearly he was a man ever-faithful to his principles, who relied on his own moral compass, however out of whack it might be. People said they wanted to be like him. Metaphorically, wrote the critic Diane Jacobs, the Woody persona held up a mirror to his times by embodying "the struggles of late-twentieth-century urban man."

  All the same, his grip on the consciousness of the sixties is ironic because in many respects his values clashed with the wildly anti-Establishment, psychedelic, miniskirted, love-in and freak-out temperament of the decade. Woody, anti-anti-Establishment, had virtually no interest in the social and political upheavals of the time: segregation in the South, equality of the sexes, the Vietnam War, the student protest movement, the Cold War, or the space race. His political position was to have none. Everyone assumed that as a New York Jew, he must be a meat-and-potatoes liberal Democrat, and that is how he tended to see himself. More accurately, he was a political naif who had lived through the McCarthy years without knowing exactly who McCarthy was. The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Woody was in Los Angeles playing the Crescendo, and he spent that evening with Mort Sahl and Dick Cavett—all of them wisecracking that nobody was going to show up but then nobody had showed up before the assassination either. After agreeing to take part in an actors' antiwar demonstration in 1969, he failed to put in an appearance. During the 1972 presidential campaign, he was invited to perform at a George McGovern fund-raiser but declined because he'd rather "do something beyond humor" like ringing doorbells or handing out leaflets. He did neither. "I'm not really a political person," he told the sixties activist Jerry Rubin, and went on to describe himself as more interested in "the real issues—philosophical issues of life and death," big questions that he would continue to pose time and again as part of his act. (He had no answers.)

  Equally heretical in his personal tastes and habits, he was never a citizen of the permissive Woodstock Nation. He was against doing drugs, and only smoked pot once or twice, which is not surprising because he needed to be in control at all times. Once a smoker of cigarettes and thin cigars, he now smoked nothing. He drank no hard liquor, and wine only sparingly. As for music, he was passionate in his dislike of Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles. "I hate rock," he once declared.

  In the heyday of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, of the three his only interest was sex.

  Tales of New York Life:

  Earl Wilson: Do you know all about sex?

  Woody: I know enough to get through the evening.

  —Interview, 1972

  On a wintry night in 1964, at the Blue Angel, the actor Warren Beatty was sitting at one of the ringside tables with a debonair middle-aged man in a conservative dark suit and tie. Practically everything Woody said made Beatty howl with laughter. Afterward, he turned to his companion to say he really ought to hire Woody. He was positively brilliant. The man in the dark suit, however, had hardly been laughing at all. He was thinking.

  Charles K. Feldman was born for the Hollywood high life. At the age of sixty, he was a connoisseur of the best real estate in Hollywood and on the French Riviera, the most beautiful women, the finest wines, the most lavish hotels and casinos. For all these exotic trappings, he was a consummate businessman. Orphaned in childhood and raised by a wealthy New York couple, he graduated from the University of Michigan, then law school at the University of Southern California, and set up a Hollywood law practice. In 1932, aged only twenty-eight, he became president of Famous Artists, a huge talent agency whose clients over the years had included superstars such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and John Wayne. In the forties, he turned producer with partner Howard Hawks, and eventually became known for high-quality pictures—for example, Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a tremendous commercial success starring Marilyn Monroe.

  That winter in New York, he was seeking a writer for a picture he wanted to make with Beatty, a former client and close friend, who was almost a surrogate son to him. After his debut in Splendor in the Grass, the twenty-seven-year-old Beatty had suddenly become a star big enough to turn down seventy-five scripts a year. As a result of his virile good looks, he also had the women running after him. Answering his phone, he had a breezy stock greeting for his female callers: "What's new, pussycat?" It was, Feldman decided, the perfect title. Feldman decided to make a movie about a natural Don Juan, like the satyrish Warren, who wanted every woman he spotted, and Beatty had agreed to star, but the project had hit a road bump. Optioning a creaky Don Juan comedy, Lot’s Wife by Czech writer Ladislaus Bus-Fekete, Feldman turned over the property to Billy Wilder's frequent collaborator, the top screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond, to turn into a modern farce but Diamond's script proved to be a disappointment.

  Several days after Feldman saw Woody perform at the Blue Angel, he delegated the photographer Sam Shaw to make inquiries. The picture of nonchalance, Shaw strolled into Charlie Joffe's office dressed in sneakers and grungy pants. How much, he asked, did Joffe want for his boy Allen to write a film script? Joffe, unimpressed, barely giving Shaw the time of day, answered $35,000. Shaw nodded approvingly (Feldman had authorized $60,000) and said Feldman would be in touch.

  In the end, after much haggling, Joffe was able to increase the sum by throwing in Woody's services as an actor, hardly a deal sweetener because Woody, who had never sold a screenplay, had never acted, either. Meanwhile, an astonished Woody regarded Feldman's offer as nothing less than an unexpected godsend. As his long-suffering friends and managers could attest, he was continually grumbling about how much he hated being a stand-up, bleating that he'd never had any talent for public performance in the first place, that performing comedy was just as indescribably horrible as writing it. Bemoaning his fate, Woody always had a litany of complaints about fame not being everything it is cracked up to be. Unfortunately, success as a stand-up had turned out to be, as he put it, "a ride I couldn't get off." So this emissary from Hollywood's magic kingdom with his Warren Beatty screenplay was nothing short of the answer to his prayers.

  In July of 1964, that same summer he dined at the White House, he left for London in a particularly good mood and checked into the Dorchester Hotel. Finishing a screenplay, it turned out, had been unbelievably easy and now he looked forward to the satisfaction of watching his creative efforts translated to the screen. He quickly discovered, however, that the life of a screenwriter is not all blue skies and sunshine, because Feldman asked for rewrite after rewrite. With each draft, Woody revealed his pique by making his own role fatter and funnier and Beatty's tinier, until the actor backed out in disgust. Feldman promptly stuck Peter O'Toole in the part. As the plot goes, the editor of a Parisian fashion magazine (O'Toole) consults a psychiatrist about curing his addiction. With "pussycats" falling all over him, he has more sex than he can handle. Before long, it is the shrink, Dr. Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers), who, dying of horniness, is going berserk trying to figure out the secrets of his compulsive patient's success. Woody turns up as O'Toole s buddy Victor Shakapopolis, who dresses and undresses strippers at the Crazy Horse saloon for twenty francs a week.

  "Not very much," consoles O'Toole.

  "It's all I can afford," replies Woody.

  Through the summer of 1964 and into the new year, as production got under way in Paris, the realities of moviemaking came as a painful shock to Woody. Misunderstanding the nature of the picture business, he had fancied that his story
would reach the screen intact. He no more expected Feldman to change his script than he expected the mogul to have rewritten his club act. In fact, the plain truth was that nobody paid a bit of attention to what he thought about the movie. During the months of production, making no attempt to adapt to his loss of control over the situation, he lived in raw misery. In his hotel room at the Hotel George V, he practiced his clarinet, and every night he patronized the same bistro where he supped on soup and fillet of sole. In Woody's estimation, the script now belonged to Feldman, who had weakened and butchered his work as he turned it into commercial dreck, the idea of movies as a business being a concept Woody would never really comprehend. "They just killed it completely. I fought with everybody all the time." In a fury during rushes one night, he shouted "fuck off" at Feldman, who ignored him. Later, however, he asked Charlie Joffe to make Woody stop cursing. It hurt his feelings.

  Humiliated, Woody returned to New York in January 1965 and announced that the picture was so awful he had no intention of seeing it. "It would only bother me," he told the New York Morning Telegraph. Privately, he promised himself that he would never do another film "unless I had complete control over it."

  What's New, Pussycat? opened in June to frightful reviews. A disgusted Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune dismissed the picture as smut, "a shrieking, reeking conglomeration of dirty jokes." Stung by her scornful comments, Woody sent her the original script, then invited Crist and her husband to his home for a dinner that concluded with six desserts. "It was a delightful evening," recalled Crist, who, completely charmed, would remain devoted to Woody from that day forward. In The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann described Woody as an amateur who had no idea how to write for the screen. His material "probably reads hilariously but does not play successfully," an astute observation because this would remain one of Woody's major problems for the next ten years. Almost alone among the critics was Andrew Sarris, the influential Village Voice columnist who had introduced American audiences to the French "auteur theory" (the director is the real "author" of a film). Sarris could not remember seeing "a more tasteful sex comedy." Familiar with Woody from clubs, he considered him "a terrific stand-up comic, very charismatic, fast on his feet when it came to improvisation. And with his great ear he knew how to deflate pomposity." Sarris admitted seeing Pussycat four times.

  Probably it was to be expected that What's New, Pussycat? failed to impress Woody's mother. Attending a screening with Mickey Rose and some of her son's other friends, Nettie saw nothing to make her laugh and afterward dismissed the picture as moronic.

  In spite of bad reviews, there was no denying Feldman’s business acumen. Pussycat turned out to be a solid success, grossing $17.2 million, the fifth biggest moneymaker of the year, and its title song, written by Burt Bacharach and sung by Tom Jones, was also a popular hit.

  On the strength of Pussycat, Woody received $75,000 to develop Kagi Ni Kagi, a Japanese James Bond-genre spy picture that, unsuccessfully dubbed into an English version, had proved an incredible mess. He wrote loony new dialogue, completely contrary to the action, which he put in the mouths of the Japanese actors. (Heroic spy Phil Moskowitz searches for the world's best egg-salad recipe.) Afterward, Woody disliked the film so much that he sued to prevent its release but changed his mind when What's Up, Tiger Lily? received decent notices. Andrew Sarris thought it was "one of the funniest movies of the year and the most creative job of dubbing dialogue" he had ever heard.

  Thanks to Charles Feldman, Woody now had two screen credits and a budding career as an actor, a line of work for which he had no particular native talent. Still, two years later he appeared in his second Feldman film, Casino Royale, a spoof of the James Bond films, with Peter Sellers and David Niven. Woody is 007's nephew, Little Jimmy Bond, who is eventually unmasked as the evil head of the crime organization SMERSH. (The sex obsessed Dr. Noah is planning to release a bacillus germ that will make all women beautiful and destroy all men over four feet six.) An outstanding supporting cast (Orson Welles, John Huston, and William Holden) could not save Casino Royale from turning into "an unredeemingly moronic enterprise,” Woody said. Watching the dailies during shooting provided him with a valuable Baedeker, "a handbook of how not to make a film."

  Rashomon:

  "He was very loyal. If you were his friend and if he said he had a commitment to you then you were his friend 24 hours a day. It was a lifetime commitment. He would write you every day or call you every day, and I believe that is why he has such a good reputation with the people he knows."

  —Bryna Goldstein Eill

  "WOODY ALLEN at various places and times unknown to me in shows, broadcasts, in conversation and otherwise, did deface and ridicule me, his former wife."

  —Harlene Allen

  "If I were to close my eyes and imagine Woody, something I would keep with me is just the image of him watching Cries and Whispers. .. . Him being swept away. I've seen it on his face. I've seen it. It's moved me. It makes me love him."

  —Diane Keaton

  "Many things about him were hidden from me and I was always frightened of him and I didn't fully understand him. I thought he was shy, but there are sociopathic tendencies.... I had a limited grasp of what he was."

  —Mia Farrow

  "Every day I raced home from school hoping to find one of the brown envelopes in our mail box. When there wasn't one, I was despondent, and when there was, I felt a thrill I have not since experienced—except perhaps when getting an unexpected check. Either way, I would spend the afternoons composing and polishing another letter to my mentor."

  —Nancy Jo Sales

  "He's dependable, helpful, he works hard, he's ethical, he saves string."

  —Marshall Brickman

  "Life is difficult for Woody. He's one of the unfortunate tormented people. His mind is working all the time. So is a sweet side and a silly side and a sexual side. One night I couldn't sleep, and I thought, 'I'm lying next to one of America's foremost humorists.' "

  —Louise Lasser

  It was a gray Wednesday in February 1966, with two to four inches of snow being predicted. Around eight that evening, Woody arrived at the Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-second Street to do two shows (for $6,000 a week). Regardless of the weather, the Royal Box was almost sold out—among the intrepid patrons, Jack Victor and his fiancee, whom Woody had invited for dinner. After the first show, a waiter came over bearing an invitation to go upstairs to Woody's suite. There, they were surprised to find a makeshift wedding reception in progress because Woody and Louise had been married that afternoon.

  Several weeks earlier, they took blood tests without telling anyone. Both of them had misgivings. The decision to go through with the marriage was made at the last minute, so spur-of-the-moment that Woody had to run out and buy a $1.98 wedding band at a Times Square novelty shop. It is hard to tell which of them was more reluctant. After living together for five years, it was probably Louise.

  "We both decided to do it," she explained later, "because the relationship wasn't moving forward and we thought that maybe marriage would make things different." The ceremony took place in the living room of her father and new stepmother's apartment at 155 East Fiftieth Street. Nettie and Marty Konigsberg were not invited. The only witnesses were Mickey and Judy Rose, and Woody's new best friend, Jean Doumanian. Supreme Court Justice George Postel, a personal friend of the Lassers, had never seen Woody's act, indeed had never heard of Woody Allen. During the ceremony, Postel turned to Louise and intoned, "Do you take Woody Herman to be your husband?"

  "No!" she exclaimed.

  Afterward, Postel assured them that no couple married by him had ever divorced, words that Louise never forgot because minutes after the ceremony she could not help asking herself, "Should I stay married?"

  On the surface, they seemed extremely happy together. In the months following the wedding, they moved into a $900-a-month, six-room apartment on the top two floors of a townhouse at 100 East Seventy-
ninth Street. Their new home, decorated by a fashionable interior designer, Olga San Giuliano, had Aubusson rugs, designer window treatments, and silk-covered walls hung with three Gloria Vanderbilt oils and drawings by Matisse and Kokoschka. There was a formal dining room furnished with French antiques, a billiard room, and upstairs, for their bedroom, they had picked out a four-poster canopy bed. But for all the fine furniture and the art, the duplex remained mostly unfurnished. A wood-paneled room, with a magnificent Aubusson on the floor, was sort of a storeroom containing nothing but a ragtag collection of useless presents they had given to each other (a jukebox and a Hammond organ), and in the corner a movie projector and screen were untidily stacked next to an air conditioner in a wicker clothes hamper and a couple of unopened cartons.

  Overseeing the household was a staff of two, a cook and a Filipino valet who turned out to be a drinker and had to be dismissed. Attempting to be social, Woody and Louise dutifully entertained journalists and critics with dinners of scrod, peas, salad, and several choices of dessert. On New Year’s Eve, 1966, they planned a disco party. Special invitations designed by Louise went out to 150 of their friends. The day of the party, however, a mention in Earl Wilson's Post column resulted in more than five hundred gate-crashers. When Louise saw all the people she began to cry, and Woody took her outside. In despair, they sat down on the curb and then, he recalled, "we went down to the corner and had a sandwich at the drugstore. We had to get out of there." When they got back to the house, people were still pushing their way inside. "Whose party is this?" Louise overheard someone asking. The next day, a neighbor returned one of their Matisse drawings he had found on the stairs.