Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  What Arthur Krim and his associates honestly thought of the script for Interiors is unclear. But around 729 Seventh Avenue, office clowns began to call Woody "Ingmar Allen." From the viewpoint of Steven Bach, shortly to inherit Krim's yes-or-no script approval, it was not a thrilling script but he agreed with the studio's decision. "Woody needed to get it out of his system. I felt, in the long run, something good would come of it." In the business, people expressed themselves bluntly. "The Interiors script was really a piece of shit," said an executive, "but everybody said it was wonderful. Woody was their darling, and so he could do anything."

  Among those who felt it was a mistake was Woody's editor. One Friday, a copy of the script arrived by messenger as Ralph Rosenblum was preparing to leave for the country. Over the weekend he settled down to read it but, after a few pages, turned to his wife and said, puzzled, "I think they sent me the wrong script."

  Skimming the manuscript, Davida Rosenblum had a similar reaction. She remembered saying to her husband, "Oh, my God, how could this happen?"

  A few days later, still upset, Rosenblum met Woody for lunch to discuss the new picture, which he thought was "indescribably dreadful." As usual, he was blunt-spoken. "Don't make it."

  "Well, I want to," said Woody.

  For Woody, the amassing of wealth meant nothing compared to his real ambition, which was to be taken seriously. Making a movie for grown-up people was the kind of work that he considered "the real meat and potatoes." His ambition, he told Gene Siskel in 1981, was to make "a series of great films. I would like to try and overreach myself and challenge the great filmmakers. In the next 10 or 15 years of my life, I'd like to make some really wonderful films. Not just commercially successful, but films that I could look at with, say, the films of Akira Kurosawa and Jean Renoir, and say 'Well, my films are perfectly acceptable in that class of filmmaker.' " The success of Annie Hall presented him with the opportunity to change his image.

  Moving Pictures:

  Og: You want to do mankind a service? Tell funnier jokes.

  —Stardust Memories, 1980

  “That's my mother," Louise cried. "And that's my father."

  But plenty of people told him that Interiors was the story of their family, he replied.

  "Oh yeah? They must have all been relatives of mine!" Louise, who had just returned from seeing Woody's new film, was shocked at the exploitation of her own family tragedies, including her mother's suicide. In any case, she continued, "I don't think you got my mother right."

  Eve is a tormented woman in her early sixties who has poisoned the lives of her children and turned into an impossible burden for her husband. An interior designer by profession, she is, in Woody's words, "a New York woman with incredible good taste, style, breeding." Having cracked up more than once, she is also a graduate of several sanatoriums and a few bouts of electric shock treatment. A compulsive perfectionist, who worries about placing the right vase on the right table, she has created a kind of temperature-controlled biosphere where everything—and everybody—must be perfect. When her ex-husband falls in love with another woman, she loses her fragile grip on sanity and walks into the ocean. Her three daughters—played by Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith—are left to react to their mother's suicide while figuring out how to pick up the pieces of their own wrecked lives.

  Principal photography commenced on October 24, 1977. For the first time, Woody remained behind the camera. There was no role for him in this picture, he said (actually he had fragmented himself into all three sisters, plus the icy, judgmental mother). And besides, his presence in a serious drama might invite undesired laughter and dilute the tragic meaning of the story. In the past he always tried to cast friends, people with whom he felt comfortable, but this time he daringly hired two of the theater's most brilliant actresses, Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton, to play the mother and the second wife. "I was very intimidated by the cast," he said. Certainly there was nothing comfortable about directing Page and Stapleton, who made him feel as if he had been thrown into "a snake pit." In contrast to Page, the great grande dame of the theater and the ultimate professional, Stapleton was informal and unpretentious, in some ways even more frightening to Woody, who never encouraged intimacy on the set and never socialized with his actors off the set. People seldom stepped over the line.

  On location in Southampton, Long Island, Stapleton spotted the unapproachable Woody in the hotel lobby one evening. Warned of his peculiarities, she was not the type to let that stand in her way. "I just grabbed his arm and dragged him into the bar. We sat down and had a few beers and we talked. Later some of the guys were stunned because nobody did that. I said, 'What's the big deal?'"

  The headline in Variety read HIGH NOON AT UA.

  In late January 1978, around the time that Interiors wrapped, Arthur Krim stunned Hollywood by abruptly storming out of United Artists and taking with him his top-tier management. Krim in 1967 had sold UA to Transamerica Corporation, a San Francisco-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate whose income derived from operations such as insurance, rental cars, and turbine engines. Disgruntled over Transamerica's management practices and its economy measures, most of all its attempt to run UA like a budget rental-car company, Krim tried without success to buy the company back. By the end of 1977, the situation had apparently become intolerable. Three weeks later, the Medici formed a new company, Orion Pictures, named after the great hunter constellation.

  Krim and his associates were instantly hailed as the white knights of the industry, but this shake-up in the executive suite created a dilemma for Woody, who had three pictures remaining on his contract. He decided to stay but nobody in the industry, or at UA, believed that he would hang around once his contract ended. The exception was Andy Albeck, the new chief executive, who was determined to keep him. "Albeck," reported Steven Bach in his memoir, Final Cut, "had seen Interiors and privately assumed it would be a failure. That wasn't the point." Interestingly, Woody agreed with Albeck. "It's not going to make a dime," he predicted. "I've seen the picture. And I know."

  Commentary:

  "What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values?"

  —Pauline Kael, 1980

  In Annie Hall there is a brief scene, cut during editing, in which Alvy Singer fantasizes about a certain high-school student to whom he was sexually attracted. Playing the role of the student was a pretty, dark-haired, seventeen-year-old from Stuyvesant High School, Class of '77, whom Woody met for the first time on the set. Their romance, unknown to the public, was common knowledge to patrons of Elaine's and readers of New York gossip columns. The New York Post reported that "Woody Allen's beautiful new and very young girlfriend is proving quite a distraction for the little genius. They were in Elaine's the other evening—someone said Woody was carrying her books—and only had eyes for each other."

  Stacey Nelkin considered herself an "extremely sophisticated" girl who had "never dated boys my own age." Born in New York, raised partly in Europe, she was a bright child who was selected for Stuyvesant, one of Manhattan's so-called elite public high schools, by a grueling competitive examination. Ambitious to be an actress, she auditioned for Woody's new movie while still a junior and soon became involved with him off the set. She admitted to being "crazy about him." Friends of Woody's would characterize the besotted young girl as kind of a sex toy for him, expendable at any time. But she believed it was "a real relationship and a mature one that was perfectly normal." Indignant, she reported that "I wasn't underage when I dated Woody. I was 17 and he was 41 but the age difference didn't come up. It was a non-issue." The two-year affair was, she added, "a very moral relationship," not "just about the bedroom."

  However, it seems to have been a one-sided involvement. If Stacey was in love with Woody and fantasized marriage, he made it clear that he was a committed bachelor. Because he never wished to acknowledge her publicly, she had to practically sneak into his apartment bui
lding and was never permitted to spend the night. He insisted she get dressed and go home. Once the sexual attraction died away, he broke off the relationship. In her place, he began to see Jean vanden Heuvel, a forty-four-year-old divorcee and mother of two, whose roots in the film business went deep since her father, Jules Stein, headed MCA, the entertainment conglomerate that owned Universal Studios. Crushed, the cast-off Stacey fled to the West Coast to forget, and even though Woody sent her plane fare to come back and visit, nothing came of the reunion. By that time, he was working on a new script about a middle-aged man dating a seventeen-year-old Dalton student, and there was another young girl in his life, one who was even younger than Stacey.

  Somebody left a white bunny with the doorman. Worshiping fans liked to drop off unsolicited gifts, homemade layer cakes and knitted sweaters, never anything of value, but this was the first time a living creature had been plopped on his doorstep. He hated animals. The elevator operator conveying the news found him to be in high dudgeon. Surely the building didn't imagine he would bring the animal up to his apartment? And what did he know about taking care of a rabbit? In the end, his secretary, Norma Lee Clark, had to call the ASPCA. It was also Clark's job to screen Woody's mail, which had grown to mammoth proportions. Seldom did fans receive a reply. Usually Woody never saw the mail.

  Months after Annie Hall, an enterprising thirteen-year-old from Coral Gables, Florida, who had a crush on Woody, somehow managed to obtain his home address and send him a fan letter. Amazingly, he responded; a few days later, she received a plain brown envelope without a return address. Dear Nancy Jo, the letter read,

  Hard to believe you're 13! When I was 13 I couldn't dress myself, and here you write about one of life's deepest philosophical problems, i.e., existential boredom.

  He wanted to know all about her life. What kind of a city was Coral Gables? What did her parents do for a living? What time did she get up in the morning? Did she get depressed? If she decided to reply, he'd like to know what books she had read and the music she liked (not pop, he hoped). As for himself, he was reshooting scenes from his next movie (Interiors), "which have not come out so good."

  Nancy Jo Sales was a precocious redhead, tall for her age, the child of divorced parents, who had something more in common with Woody than the color of their hair. For a thirteen-year-old, she was remarkably discontent. Apparently a misfit at school, she read nineteenth-century novels and watched Barbara Stanwyck movies. (In her high-school yearbook, she would be inelegantly labeled a "Geek/Freak.") At home, when her mother needed help in the kitchen, she disappeared. Obsessed with Woody, she wrote him several times a day while hiding behind the stacks in her school library. After school she would race home to get mentoring letters that contained reading lists (Proust and Kierkegaard) and instructions on shopping (Mahler's Fourth Symphony, the Bernstein recording, of course). The student-teacher exchange of letters was passed off to Nancy's mother as correspondence with a girl she met at camp.

  In New York, on a shopping trip with her stepmother and one of her stepmother's friends, Nancy Jo decided to send a note to Woody, who immediately telephoned the hotel and invited them to visit. When they arrived at his door, he seemed unsure which one of the three women was Nancy Jo (the stepmother and her friend were barely thirty). In the living room, the older women dominated the conversation with talk of real estate deals and celebrity-watching at Elaine's. As she listened in mortification, Nancy Jo fixed her eyes upon the tray of individually wrapped candies on the coffee table.

  The New York visit marked the end of Nancy Jo's secret life with a movie star. The letters from Woody abruptly ceased. She was never sure why, or what she had done wrong. "It took me a long time, in my teenage way, to get over him," she wrote in 1993. When Woody, the following year, described his nymphet pen pal to an interviewer from the New York Times Magazine, he called her "a nice, intelligent girl" whose letters were precocious in the extreme. He distinctly remembered telling her that "if you're really the age you say you are, it's phenomenal. If you're not, don't write to me again and waste my time. Finally I met her whole family." She was eleven, he thought, no more than a child.

  In January 1978, the prestigious New York Film Critics voted the best picture and screenplay awards to Annie Hall. At the awards dinner, the presenter of the writing honor was to be the famous humorist S.J. Perelman, one of Woody's longtime idols. Having seen the picture three times, Perelman composed some tart remarks chosen especially for Woody's ears. He was not exactly happy, therefore, to arrive at Sardi's and learn that Woody had decided not to accept his award in person. Unlike the Oscars, indisputably a televised circus, the New York critics ceremony was a high-class, low-key private dinner. Perelman couldn't imagine why anyone would boycott it.

  The previous year, Walter Bernstein had hosted a dinner party so that Woody could meet Perelman, who happened to be a friend of Bernstein's. Of course, Perelman was well aware that Woody's New Yorker pieces mimicked his own literary style. Known to be crabby about imitators, the older writer ignored Woody's prose and chose to regard him as a splendid filmmaker. The party turned out to be a disappointment, however, "not completely a disaster," Bernstein recollected, but Woody was withdrawn "and the two men didn't connect in some essential way." At dinner, Bernstein began carving a roast that was resting on a silver platter when the knife began scraping against the bottom of the dish. At the sound, Woody "went berserk, as if hearing nails scratching on a blackboard I guess, and he leaned over and grabbed my arm to make me stop."

  The Sunday after the New York Film Critics awards, Woody and Perelman bumped into each other at Elaine's. Perelman, who had just turned seventy-four, was being treated to a birthday dinner by a friend, Delta Willis. "It was the first time that Mr. Perelman had ever been to this so-called literary establishment," Willis recalled. "When we came in, Elaine Kaufman didn't recognize him and so we were seated around the corner in what is known there as Siberia." A short while later, spotting Woody eating with Marshall Brickman, she encouraged Perelman to send over his calling card. "My dear Mr. Allen," he scrawled. "Won't you please join us for a Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Tonic?" When a waiter delivered the unsigned card, Woody crumpled it up.

  Forty-five minutes later, he rushed back to their table. By then, Perelman and Willis had finished dinner and were drinking espresso. "I thought it was a joke," Woody said sheepishly. Realizing that his absence at the critics dinner might have offended Perelman, he attempted an apology. "There were too many critics there," he deadpanned. Perelman was not amused.

  Accolades and awards for Annie Hall kept coming: the New York and Los Angeles critics, the National Society of Film Critics, the Directors Guild of America, the British Academy, and the Golden Globes. It also received five Oscar nominations—including best picture, actress, actor, director, and writing. The likelihood of Annie Hall winning best picture was considered remote because the competition was exceptionally strong: The Turning Point, Star Wars, Julia, and The Goodbye Girl. Not only had no comedy won best picture since 1960 (The Apartment), but United Artists had won two years running for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975 and Rocky in 1976, and never before had a studio taken top honors three years in a row. Nevertheless, United Artists re-released Annie Hall on four hundred screens and began putting together a campaign to publicize the pictur’s Oscar nominations, the standard ballyhoo in the film industry.

  Resisting vigorously, Woody opposed any mention of the nominations in ads, particularly in New York. As the tug-of-war continued, he reluctantly agreed that UA might mention Oscar outside New York. Red-faced UA publicists, arms twisted out of their sockets, attempted to explain this bizarre procedure as a deliberate creative decision, a refreshing change from the traditional trumped-up Oscar nominations. But Woody had his own way of making his point. Should any local theater take it upon itself to mention the Oscars in its Annie Hall ads, he warned, he would do his best to have the picture yanked from its screen.

  The fiftieth annual Academy Awa
rds were scheduled for Monday, April 4. The previous week, Woody announced he would not be attending the ceremony. "The whole concept of the awards is silly," he told the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Holding up to ridicule Hollywood's biggest night as "a popularity contest," he inveighed against the Academy for being a crass trade association and the Oscars as ego candy "bought and negotiated for." Should he win one of their stupid awards, he didn't want it. That night he planned to be in New York playing jazz because he couldn't let his band down. In an interview with NBC film critic Gene Shalit, he merrily offended the 3,375 members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with everyone else in the movie-factory town. "If it were a special occasion or something, I might do it," he said. "But I'm not interested in an inanimate statuette of a little bald man. I like something with long, blond curls." While the Oscars may be a popularity contest, that had nothing to do with his true reasons for not attending the Academy Awards presentation. Perhaps fearing rejection, he could not bring himself to be present when the fate of his picture was announced to his peers in the industry, as well as millions of television viewers worldwide.