Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  The summer of 1988, Woody again traveled to Europe with Mia and the family. Accompanied by the troubleshooting Jane Martin, they set out on a whirlwind vacation that whisked them to five countries, including the Soviet Union, which they visited for only one day after Woody became upset with the primitive local customs. First-class tickets on the Concorde and accommodations at deluxe hotels made it an expensive holiday that cost approximately $425,000. (The following year he chartered a private jet.) Writing on hotel stationery in cities such as Helsinki and Salzburg, he completed an unusual screenplay that encompassed the stories of two lives. A highly regarded ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) is having an affair with a neurotic flight attendant (Anjelica Huston), who is threatening to destroy his career and marriage unless he marries her. Even though Judah Rosenthal is haunted by a childhood memory of his father warning him that God sees everything we do, he arranges to have his bothersome mistress murdered—with neither detection nor punishment. Tormented at first by guilt, the eye doctor is eventually able to live with his cold-blooded deed. The crime of the doctor who gets away with murder is paralleled by the misdemeanors of an idealistic maker of high-minded documentary films that nobody wants to see. The nebbishy Cliff Stern (Woody) is regarded as a fool by his castrating wife (Joanna Gleason) and rich brother-in-law, Lester (Alan Alda), who constantly put him down. Cliff's infatuation with a kindly television producer (Mia) seems to offer an escape from his sexless marriage, but she decides to marry Lester instead. What Judah and Cliff—and Woody, too—share in common is their ability to justify their actions.

  In Crimes and Misdemeanors, a brilliant balance between comedy and drama, Woody turned out a successful film that was serious, witty, and bore no resemblance to Bergman movies. Among the ethical questions that his contemporary New York characters ponder are: Is evil punished? Are good deeds rewarded? Despite its focus on moral issues, this complex comedy would be his biggest commercial hit since Hannah and Her Sisters. Taking in $18 million at the box office, it struck a chord with both critics and audiences. Although critics debated the meaning of the film, the idea was perfectly clear to John Simon, who hailed Woody's courage for tackling the subject and his "guts" to come up with an honest answer: "There is no justice, no rhyme or reason in the universe, no God." The film was, in Simon's opinion, "Allen's first successful blending of drama and comedy, plot and subplot."

  Crimes and Misdemeanors was one of two films Woody released in 1988, quite an accomplishment for even the most industrious auteur. "Oedipus Wrecks" went into production seven months before Crimes. Under the umbrella title New York Stories, Woody and his producer, Robert Greenhut, decided to make a short-story film, three shorts by different filmmakers, a genre that had fallen into disfavor after the forties. But Greenhut believed they could pull together a project exploring various aspects of New York life. Martin Scorsese agreed to contribute a vignette about a Jackson Pollack-type painter ("Life Lessons"), and Francis Ford Coppola cowrote with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sofia, an updated version of the Eloise story, about a twelve-year-old living at the Sherry Netherland hotel ("Life Without Zoe").

  Woody's forty-one minute contribution, "Oedipus Wrecks," was a return to his earlier films and the kind of pure comedy that his fans had been waiting for since Broadway Danny Rose. At the age of fifty-two, he managed to squeeze a few laughs out of his relationship with his mother. Sheldon Mills is a befuddled lawyer whose engagement to a divorced, gentile woman with three children (Mia) horrifies his mother. As Sheldon tells his psychiatrist, he may be middle-aged but his mother still makes him feel like he is in diapers, which is why he wishes she would disappear. Small wonder because Mrs. Millstein (Mae Questel) orders her son around as if she were a prison matron. Sheldon's wish is granted when a magician accidentally dematerializes the matriarch during the course of a magic trick and can't figure out how to bring her back. Sheldon's joy is short-lived, however, because the emasculating Mrs. Millstein reappears as a giant apparition floating in the sky, publicly humiliating him before the entire city. While there was nothing funny about Mrs. Millstein's prototype, the portrait of Nettie Konigsberg, on celluloid, was full of comic invention that showed what Woody could accomplish when he looked at his own life instead of Bergman's films.

  New York Stories, financed and released by Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney, did poorly at the box office. Despite the reputations of the three superstar filmmakers, it grossed a disappointing $10.8 million against an estimated negative cost of $19 million.

  Over the years, Woody wrote a variety of memorable roles for Mia, but at the same time that he showcased her talent, he also subtly undermined her self-confidence. Discouraged from working elsewhere, she came to believe that no other director would want to use her. Eventually the extensive roster of Woody's actors who were nominated or had received an Oscar would include Woody himself, Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Judy Davis, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Mariel Hemingway, Martin Landau, Jennifer Tilly, Chazz Palminteri, and Mira Sorvino. But the Academy snubbed Mia in her ten custom-designed roles. In the late 1980s, as the rift between them widened, Woody seemed to lose interest in writing meaty roles for Mia. (Audiences were also sick of seeing her year after year.) He stuck her in nondescript supporting roles: a pregnant patient (Another Woman); a discarded fiancee ("Oedipus Wrecks"); a bland television producer (Crimes and Misdemeanors). With cheekbones that never seemed to age, her face was still beautiful but she was overweight. In all three of those films, she had to be costumed in baggy sweaters and raincoats, or photographed from the waist up.

  Then, at the end of 1989, Mia suddenly slimmed down to look like her old self, for a picture that Woody titled The Magical Herbs of Doctor Yang. Pampered women such as Alice Tait are common sights in Woody's neighborhood. While their husbands slave away in Wall Street, they keep busy with shopping, massages, and lunches. Sometimes, in their floor-length mink coats, they even pick up their children from expensive nursery schools (such as the ones Satch and Dylan attended). Their luxurious interior-designed apartments are staffed by cooks, nannies, and personal fitness trainers. Alice, unhappily married to a cold, selfish stockbroker (William Hurt), suffers from a bad back. Before long, she is in Chinatown, climbing rickety stairs to the office of a mysterious Dr. Yang, who can see that there is nothing wrong with her back but everything wrong with her life. His diagnosis: She has never followed her own desires. Liberated by means of a dose of potent magical herbs, the demure Alice is able to cut loose for the first time. Not only is she empowered to fly over Manhattan like Peter Pan, she also becomes temporarily invisible and spies on her husband making love to one of his office colleagues. After sorting out her life, Alice Tait finds satisfaction in nunlike celibacy, as she raises her children in a Lower East Side slum and does charitable work for the poor.

  Alice, released in December 1990, was a whimsical, fluffy picture, reassuring evidence that Mia and Woody were still everybody's favorite celebrity mom and dad. On location in the Village, they permitted photographers to snap them with Dylan and Satch, on the swings in Abingdon Square Park, in a cozy family atmosphere. The movie almost seemed a throwback to the old days when Woody had presented an adorable Mia in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, prompting one reviewer to observe that "he seems to have dedicated this funny valentine to his diminutive sweetheart." It was Mia's last good role from Woody.

  Rashomon:

  "He gets wonderful performances, not necessarily by coaching but by having matched the material to the actor. Since 90 percent of his work is in the writing and casting, there's very little to do when he's ready to shoot. If he doesn't like what you're doing, he usually fires you right away."

  —Sydney Pollack

  "They [Woody and Robert Altman] have no understanding of actors whatsoever. They're pisspoor as actors' directors. They may be great filmmakers but they have no respect for actors. Individually, each understands zip about acting. Allen knows even less than Altman, which is nothing."r />
  —Sam Shepard

  "His silences never bothered me. I knew how to play the part and he knew I knew. So let's not sit around and masturbate about acting."

  —Elaine Stritch

  "He spoke to me through an interpreter, as if we were from different countries. [In the recording studio,] I was standing right next to him, and he turned to an assistant and said, 'Tell her to do such and such.' I felt nonexistent. At lunchtime he ordered a tuna fish sandwich. I was not offered so much as a Coke."

  —Marilyn Michaels

  "I always admired Woody. There is no doubt he is one of our very few auteurs with both intelligence and substance. He even has the courage to be both funny and sentimental at times. I would very much like to see his version of the classic Faust legend."

  —Max von Sydow

  "He would shoot a scene, and if he didn't like it he would rewrite it and reshoot it, again and again. His favorite line—and it was not said with any good humor—was 'I'll see you at the reshoots.' Then he would toddle off to his camper and play his clarinet for hours. Being sensitive, I took it personally and wondered if it was my fault we had to reshoot this stuff. Frankly, I thought—I still think—he's an insufferable little prick. But every time I see Broadway Danny Rose I forgive him. I hate him and I love him."

  —Actor

  "He kept telling me, 'Too hammy! No!' But I'm happy he kept badgering me. He took me past the point I thought possible. I wish I could hire him to stand by me in future movies and holler at me, 'That's too phony!' "

  —Geraldine Page

  "Big names want to work on his films. He does quality work but as a person, he's a spoiled little boy, pampered by the New York critics. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

  —Actor

  The entertainment business treated Woody like royalty. William Hurt, one of Hollywood's leading men, won an Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman and yet happily accepted union scale to work for Woody. Hurt could scarcely contain his admiration. On the set of Alice, he turned to Joe Mantegna and enthused, "Do you believe it? We're actually in a Woody Allen movie!"

  If Woody's empty table at Elaine's made more and more people genuflect, others were not so impressed. After Manhattan, Meryl Streep took him to task for being "a womanizer, very self-involved," who got "caught up in the jet-set type of life" and thereby trivialized his talent. His ignorance about acting technique never prevented him from imposing line readings. "No theatricality! We don't want any theater!" he snapped at a seasoned stage actress whom he cast in Radio Days. "It was frightening," she said. "He had me in tears because I could not satisfy him."

  Mostly, however, he came across as the Calvin Coolidge of film directors, famous for cold silences, terse (or nonexistent) instructions, and some of the most unorthodox directing practices in recent memory. Whenever possible, he gave actors only the script pages on which they had lines. In this way, he hoped, the humor would be fresh to audiences. But it made life difficult for actors, who could only guess what the film might be about. An actress in Manhattan, denied information about the plot and discouraged from discussing her role with the director, who was sitting off by himself reading Chekhov, found herself in the dark. "After the first day, I called friends from a pay phone," recalled Karen Ludwig. "I said, 'Please come and rescue me. Nobody will talk to me.' " Neither did Woody speak to Kitty Carlisle Hart, chairwoman of the New York Council on the Arts, whom he hired to sing one of the numbers in Radio Days. The widow of Moss Hart had not made a movie in fifty years, but she knew Woody socially and included him as a dinner guest at her home. She felt warmly toward him, and assumed he reciprocated. But when she arrived at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios, "suddenly he didn't speak to me. He never said hello, good morning, how do you do. And when it was over, he still didn't say boo." Baffled, she went over and asked why in the world he cast her. "You said you could sing," he replied.

  Moving Pictures:

  Alvy Singer: A relationship, I think, is—is like a shark, you know. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

  —Annie Hall, 1977

  Mia was bewildered. After all their years together, how could he possibly have AIDS? There was a long incubation period, he answered. In the fall of 1991 he went ahead with the test, which proved he was HIV negative. By that time, they were no longer regular lovers. Later he would date the disruption of their sex life to the first trimester of her pregnancy, when Mia stopped sleeping with him. After Satch's birth, she also quit spending weekends at Woody's apartment, which effectively ended their private time together. The sleepovers no longer interested the older children, and the younger ones needed her at home.

  Woody was to claim they never slept together again, which Mia called an exaggeration. What neither of them denied, however, was that sex was infrequent. He was unable to perform, according to Mia, but no doubt boredom was a factor. In his screenplay for Crimes and Misdemeanors, his hero says that "once the sex goes, it all goes," and jokes about his sexless marriage: "The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty." Audiences, unaware that the humorous lines demeaned Mia, always roared. Ironically, abstinence was unknown to Woody, who had turned to a variety of women over the years, including actresses working in his films. In the 1980s, he became chummy with one in particular who made herself the subject of gossip among his crew and casts ("he was smitten with her") and also was observed in compromising positions at the Kaufman-Astoria studios by one of Mia's children. Aside from romances on the set, neighbors at 930 Fifth Avenue reported seeing mysterious women coming and going from his apartment—"the floozy brigade," one said.

  Throughout this period, Woody and Mia remained together, and Woody and his attorneys unsuccessfully continued to work on the adoption problem. Even though she was confronted with HIV tests and gossip about Woody's other women, her life in a mess, Mia convinced herself they would remain a team for the rest of their lives. Her main reason for believing he would never leave was his determination to adopt her children. Would he be so eager if their relationship was not permanent? Mia simply could not conceive of such Byzantine plotting. In an interview that seemed to be scripted by Hallmark greeting cards, she hailed him as "a friend to the older children, the father to the youngest three." He was, she insisted, "absolutely besotted" with all of them. To a member of their circle, the household truly did seem touched with magic. "It was like a fairy-tale family because Mia grew up in Hollywood. A person who grows up in that dazzle isn't going to live a typical, normal, everyday life like everyone else anyway."

  Behind the charade of the perfect couple, as the delicate mechanisms of their relationship were quietly rusting, they continued to keep up appearances. Before leaving for work, Woody went over to Mia's and played with Dylan as well as Satch, and in the evening he returned and remained until bedtime. Instead of towing the dead shark out to sea, they went out for dinner once a week. They didn't talk about sex, or love, and there was little touching. Later he was to describe their relationship as "pleasant and convenient. She did her thing and I did mine."

  In 1991 he began writing a screenplay about two couples whose marriages have encountered a midlife crisis. Gabe and Judy Roth (Woody and Mia) open the door of their apartment one evening to greet their best friends, Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis). "Jack and I are getting a divorce," Sally announces. Gabe and Judy are astonished. Before long, Jack is sleeping with an aerobics instructor half his age, Gabe is in danger of being seduced by one of his students, and everyone's life is in chaos. Woody somehow managed to convince Mia that Husbands and Wives was fictional.

  Actually, Woody had a pair of dead sharks on his hands. At the very time that his pretend-marriage was in trouble, it looked as if his twenty-year association with Arthur Krim, which was undoubtedly the most durable "marriage" of his entire life, was also breaking up. Since its inception, Orion Pictures had been underfinanced, and now the last of the small independent companies w
as breathing a death rattle. Beginning in 1990, its stock plummeted, and soon Orion owed close to $500 million in long-term debt and had a negative cash flow of $174 million. By the summer of 1991, Woody's eighty-one-year-old patron was attempting to raise $70 million in survival money so that Orion could distribute five finished pictures (including Woody's Shadows and Fog) languishing in postproduction limbo. Paradoxically, at the moment Krim was trying to stave off bankruptcy, his company had just collected nineteen Oscar nominations, more than any other studio. Dances with Wolves would win Best Picture that year, as would The Silence of the Lambs in 1992. In the eighties, Krim released Amadeus and Platoon (both winning Best Picture Oscars), and Hannah and Her Sisters (a strong contender), but these critical and commercial hits were offset by a string of lackluster pictures earning less than $10 million. September and Another Woman had been financial sinkholes, but Orion's problems went far deeper than Woody's expensive flops. The trouble with Orion, analysts theorized, was a lack of financial resources for marketing their films aggressively. Other critics blamed Krim and his associates for gravitating toward weak stories that were difficult to sell in the first place and then failing to sell them well.