Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  In her own family, the news that she was pregnant with Woody's child shocked the children, particularly Soon-Yi, who "just hated him," recalled her sister Lark. She burst into angry tears and cried that Woody was ugly and awful-tempered, and the baby would be just like him. In the outside world, the news was greeted with skepticism. On The Tonight Show, Garry Shandling jokingly predicted that the baby would be born on a Monday night "so of course Woody won’t be there to accept it. He'll be playing his clarinet at Michael's Pub."

  A few years earlier the pregnancy might have inspired Woody to marry. If he needed no piece of paper to prove his commitment, a child might one day view it differently. But their relationship had grown complicated, and apparently not even Mia felt that the birth of a baby was sufficient reason for marriage. She charged into Woody's dressing room at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios and warned him not to become emotionally attached to the child because, she said, "I don't think this relationship is going to go anyplace," a threat that left him shaking. As he knew full well, he had no parental rights over Dylan. In his bones he must have sensed that should he and Mia split up, she would never let him see Dylan again.

  That summer he took the family to Europe, where they toured Paris, Stockholm, Venice, and Luxembourg by van and limo, with the capable Jane Martin smoothing the way. During the days the family went sight-seeing while Woody holed up in the separate room that Jane always booked so that he might have a private bath and privacy for writing. In London, in the middle of an interview with the BBC, he was asked how he felt about becoming a father at his age. He replied, "I hope it’s a she. That would be very important for me." Back in New York, those hopes were dashed when amniocentesis showed that the child would be a boy. After hearing the results of the test, he became disinterested in the new baby. Unlike most expectant fathers, he never wanted to touch Mia's stomach or feel the fetus kick. A few weeks before her due date, he told Roger Ebert that "I love Dylan so much that I would be pleasantly surprised if I love the baby we are having as much as the one we adopted." Although he liked to refer to himself as Dylan's adoptive father, he was not her legal parent, nor did the attorneys he had consulted offer hope of that ever happening.

  On a Saturday morning, December 19, 1987, a nine-pound four-ounce son was delivered by cesarean section at New York University Medical Center. Because Woody felt reluctant about participating, Casey Pascal acted as Mia's Lamaze coach during labor. At the last minute, however, he overcame his squeamishness and decided to be present in the delivery room, but told Mia that he would leave if he felt queasy In the end, he remained for the entire procedure, even though, he said later, it was "not my idea of a fun Saturday morning."

  In the hospital, he and Mia began fighting over the name for their child. She refused to name the boy Ingmar, and she was not crazy about his second choice, either—Satchel, after Leroy "Satchel" Paige, a black baseball player who was the most famous pitcher in the Negro Leagues in the forties. Woody was adamant, and in the end she went along. But she gave Satchel her own family surnames—O'Sullivan Farrow. Filling out the birth certificate form, she omitted Woody's name altogether, an oversight on the part of the hospital, she told him when he objected. Besides, she was unsure if he wanted his name on the certificate of an illegitimate child. When she came home from the hospital, he tried to be helpful and picked up the tab for a private nurse, but they remained at odds. Mia's recovery from the cesarean was slow. As for Satchel, he was a colicky infant who seemed to scream night and day. During the first week, she used a supplemental nutrition system, thin tubes taped to each breast to carry formula from a plastic bottle to the nursing baby. Ignoring the practical point of the tubes—to assist newborns with sucking problems—Woody regarded the device as unnecessary. The idea of breast-feeding made him uneasy.

  Every morning he dropped by Mia's apartment to have breakfast with Dylan. Sometimes he would find her crying outside Mia's closed bedroom door. Usually Dylan glued herself to Mia whenever she was feeding Satchel, which Woody could not help noticing, and he also understood—up to a point—that sibling rivalry with a newborn was normal. Nevertheless, he decided that Dylan was being neglected and that it was his duty to make up for her mother's lack of attention. His efforts to spend even more time with his little daughter was upsetting to Mia. He was monopolizing Dylan, she complained, while at the same time he never touched or held his son. In these conflicts, one thing led to another, and soon, she was accusing him of finding her unattractive, which infuriated Woody. Possibly her complaints cut too close to the bone. Turned off by the process of pregnancy, birth, and lactation, he may not have found her enticing. She also looked matronly, not her usual slender, ethereal self. Eventually the birth of Satchel would expose all the painful fault lines in their relationship.

  In His Own Words:

  "It's a healthy thing to fail a couple of times, because then you know you're on the right track."

  —Woody Allen, 1983

  Eyewitness:

  "He's a magpie who picks up ideas from here and there, and makes something of them."

  —Walter Bernstein

  "I was numb," recalled Eric Pleskow, one of the Orion officers. Just after New Year 1987, he learned that Woody wanted to scrap his new release, September, and start again from scratch because he was unhappy with several of the performances. The news sent shock waves through the studio's executive suites. Discarding a picture that had completed principal photography was unusual, if not unheard of. It had never happened in Pleskow's experience. On the other hand, when had Woody liked any of his pictures? At one point, intensely displeased with Manhattan, he offered Orion another film for free if they would agree to junk it. This time, however, he would not be talked out of his decision to shoot the picture twice. "Look at the body of work," Pleskow said defensively years later. "We weren't going to destroy a relationship over that one thing."

  Instead of taking the matter out of Woody's hands, once again the Orion chieftains based business decisions on personal feeling. "We never rejected anything he brought us," Pleskow said emphatically. "Not once. Not at UA, not at Orion. In any case, his scripts are road maps and they are always unique, September included." He added, "This is where the Medici princes come in. There is no other Woody Allen. If you want to be associated with a man like that, you can't apply the ordinary standards and rules of business."

  The story idea for September came, indirectly, from Mia. Strolling around Frog Hollow with Woody one day, she made an offhand remark that Chekhov had set his plays in a country house like hers. "This would make a great setting for a little Russian play or something," she said. "It would be fun to shoot up here. The kids would love it."

  Inspired, Woody wrote a chamber piece with a small cast and a single set, in this case six people in an isolated Vermont summer house who, like the people in Interiors, talk endlessly and accomplish nothing. (Woody does not appear on-screen.) He deliberately gave the film a senseless title "that doesn't suggest anything to anybody until the movie is over," and to most viewers not even then. When shooting at Frog Hollow became out of the question because it was wintertime, Santo Loquasto re-created the house on a sound-stage at Kaufman-Astoria, where shooting began in the fall of 1986.

  September is about a suicidal woman, Lane, who at the age of fourteen accepted the blame for shooting her actress mother's brutish gangster lover (a roman a clef about the Lana Turner-Johnny Stompanato-Cheryl Crane scandal). Twenty-five years later, Lane is recovering from a nervous breakdown, but her boozy movie-star mother is still going strong. Another plot wrinkle involves Lane's unhappiness after she has fallen in love with Peter, an unpublished novelist who lives nearby. In the mother-daughter roles Woody once again cast Mia and Maureen O'Sullivan, and for the writer he chose one of his favorite actors, Christopher Walken (Annie's nutty brother in Annie Hall). Although Woody was eager to use Walken again, disagreements arose. "We couldn't get copacetic," he explained afterward. Walken's replacement was the star playwright—actor Sam S
hepard, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of numerous serious works as well as a heartthrob actor in popular films such as The Right Stuff (he played the astronaut Chuck Yeager). Woody couldn't get copacetic with Shepard, either. Once he gave Shepard permission to improvise a speech, and the actor brazenly launched into a monologue about Montana. Woody almost blew a fuse. In private, he huffed to Dianne Wiest, who was playing Lane's best friend, "Montana? Montana?" No such word was going to appear in his picture.

  Once shooting got under way, Woody realized Maureen O'Sullivan was miscast. Spoiled and selfish in real life, she bore similarities to the character but failed to project those unpleasant qualities in her performance. It was an awkward situation, but reshooting meant he could oust Maureen. He first approached Gena Rowlands before turning to Elaine Stritch, who had no idea this was the second version. "We were well into it before I found out," she said. "But what did I care." Reshooting allowed the removal of Shepard as well. For the role of the weakling writer, he substituted Sam Waterston, a less-glamorous actor who had played one of the men in Interiors. When the picture wrapped in the spring of 1987, Woody seemed in no hurry to finish it. His only regret, he announced, was not filming a third version to further develop some of the characters, which made John Simon wail in his review, "What is this: the perfectionism of banality?" The final cost of the project was $10 million, 20 percent over budget.

  When September opened in the fall of 1988, Stanley Kauffmann wrote sadly that the film was a drastic mistake, not worth making even once, not worth seeing, not worth reviewing. He felt sorry for Woody, who wanted so badly to abandon comedy. One of the very few reviewers to appreciate September was Roger Ebert, who thought Woody "as acute an author of serious dialogue as anyone now making movies." In his opinion, there weren't "that many people in America smart enough to appreciate a Woody Allen film." But Woody laid his head on the block, and he got it chopped off, even by admirers such as Richard Schickel. From the beginning of his career, Woody had soaked up ideas from his favorite movies, not only those made by masters such as Fellini and Bergman, but also the films in which Bob Hope had starred. September, so obviously "Uncle Vanya-Lite," provoked critics into pointing out his fondness for aping his favorite directors. Pauline Kael called the picture "profoundly derivative and second-rate." What a tragic waste of a career, she lamented; by placing a low value on his talent, by trying to imitate Chekhov, he had turned into "a pseud."

  Nobody came to see September, which closed in short order and left Woody feeling unusually battered. Reviews barely mentioned Mia's name, or brutally criticized her performance for being, as one reviewer wrote, "Allen's little Max von Sydow in bloomers." After seeing the second version, an unmitigated mess, some people were convinced that the first version must have been even worse. Nobody would know because Woody destroyed the footage.

  Undeterred, the following year he appeared to be reprising Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, which would lead some reviewers to christen his seventeenth movie Wild Raspberries. The Bergman classic is about a seventy-eight-year-old professor of medicine who travels to a distant university for an honorary degree, meets people from his past along the way, and is plunged back into his childhood. Dr. Izak Borg appears in Another Woman in the form of a fifty-year-old professor of German philosophy (Gena Rowlands), who is likewise haunted by memories of her barren past. She has managed her career admirably, but in her private life she is emotionally barricaded from her own feelings. (Woody would describe this chilly character, along with Eve in Interiors and Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo, as being close to his own emotional makeup.) Through flashbacks and dream sequences, the professor is forced to confront her true self and understand how her coldness and indifference have hurt people.

  Mia, seven months' pregnant when shooting began in October 1987, had only a small part as a mealy-mouthed pregnant woman, whose sessions with her psychiatrist drift through the air vent into Marion's office next door. Mia worked up until a week before Satchel's birth, then returned a month later for reshoots, using a pillow to swell her belly. She had so little interest in the film that she never bothered to see it.

  For Another Woman, Woody achieved a longtime ambition when he was able to work with Ingmar Bergman's former cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. Woody's coup failed to impress Stanley Kauffmann, who thought that engaging Nykvist was "a pathetic, desperately imitative move." Using the work of innovative artists such as Bergman as stepping-stones to one's own experiences was fine, but it was quite another thing to become an expatriate from the real world. Woody "has stopped looking at his world," wrote Kauffmann, and instead looks mostly at Bergman films. (Woody, in fact, lived an insulated existence. In twenty-five years, he had not driven a car, nor had he ever visited a shopping mall or a multiplex movie theater.) The similarities to Bergman evoked widespread derision. David Ansen in Newsweek dubbed Another Woman "Wild Matzos." Pauline Kael admitted not having liked Wild Strawberries the first time. "An homage," she sniffed, "is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable."

  On the Couch:

  "Each person has his own obsessions."

  —Woody Allen, 1985

  Every day around five o'clock, Woody arrived at Mia's house to take Dylan for a walk. "It was like a father coming home from work," recalled Lorrie Pierce, who was at Mia's place to give piano lessons. "Dylan adored him, and very often had made a drawing for him. Together they were extremely intense. When everyone was singing carols on Christmas, he was cuddling Dylan in his lap, kissing her feet and hands. I thought, 'How sweet.' "

  At the age of three, Dylan was an adorable plump little girl with pouty lips and a head of golden, Shirley Temple ringlets. "She was cute as a button," recalled a parent whose child went to the same nursery school. By now she was the focus of Woody's life. At all times, he carried around a pacifier in his pocket. If there was a morsel of food too cumbersome for her little mouth, he chewed it first. In the morning he would creep up to her bed and wait for her to wake. At bedtimes, he was there to spin fairy tales about his own childhood, which he called "Little Woody" stories. Dylan made her film debut at the age of six months as the baby sister in Radio Days and subsequently would appear in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Alice. Whatever the picture, she had the run of the set, like a fantasy playground. George Schindler, a professional magician who played Shandu in "Oedipus Wrecks," remembered how she "played on the camera while they were setting up." Somehow the sight of her made Woody seem like an ordinary baby-talking father.

  It was no surprise that Dylan became spoiled. Woody hired professional shoppers to purchase toys and games. The sight of the nursery, which began to look like a branch of F.A.O. Schwarz, eventually upset Moses, it seemed so excessive. "Look at that," he would shake his head. "Kids don't have all that." The big loser in all this was ten-year-old Moses, who had depended on Woody for affection and now got to spend only a few minutes with him whenever Woody visited the apartment or Frog Hollow.

  If Moses was unhappy, so was his mother, who was observing Woody's behavior with apprehension. Jealous when Dylan paid attention to anyone else, he treated her like a girlfriend. As tensions rose further, Mia complained that he had stopped giving her presents and gave them to the baby.

  "She's a child," he fired back. "Of course I get her presents." Did she expect him to come home with a chocolate egg for her? After that heated discussion, he told himself that Mia was obviously regarding her own daughter as a rival.

  The way he related physically to the baby struck Mia as unhealthy. Watching television, he would wrap himself around her and ignore everyone else, Mia said. When she was naked, he could not take his eyes off her. Even more upsetting, dressed only in his undershorts, he would nestle in bed while reading to her, and encourage her to suck his thumb. During their trip to Paris when Dylan was two, Mia recalled that she confronted him one night at the Ritz Hotel and accused him of lusting after her child. "You look at her in a sexual way," she said. "You fondle her. It's no
t natural. You're all over her." Woody thought she was crazy. Dylan was "the single most important thing in my life" and he had been "a wonderful, wonderful father."

  Woody's need to be always in physical contact with Dylan made others uncomfortable, too. At Frog Hollow one summer afternoon, Tisa Farrow and her mother noticed the peculiar way in which Woody was applying sun lotion to Dylan. He was rubbing his finger in the crack of the child's buttocks. Maureen O'Sullivan reprimanded him, and Mia hastily grabbed the bottle away. Dylan's godmother, Casey Pascal, said that she could not remember having ever seen a man so infatuated with a child. "If there was a roomful of children, he would focus only on Dylan."

  Meanwhile, there was Satchel. Not only did Woody fail to bond with him but he seemed to have no real interest in his son, whom he jokingly called "a little bastard," Mia would recall. Certainly there was no physical resemblance between father and son, who had white-blond, almost silvery hair and blue eyes and was said to look like Mia's dead brother, Michael. From birth, Satchel was a difficult child, colicky and attached to his mother. At three, he remained hyperactive, "wired," said a source close to the family. He was also exceptionally intelligent—talking at the age of seven months—but that seemed to make no difference to his father. At that time, Satch was not yet weaned and Mia rigged up a harness so that he might continue to nurse. The device was nothing that would have bothered the La Leche League but it evidently appalled Woody.