Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  It was a crisp, cold day in the East Village. At John's Italian Restaurant, Michael Blakemore dug into a bowl of pasta dripping with olive oil and punched up with handfuls of pungent chopped garlic and washed the meal down with a carafe of red wine. Returning to the theater, he learned that Woody was waiting out front in his parked car to hand him revisions. Blakemore clambered into the toasty backseat of the Mercedes while Woody frantically flipped through a sheaf of notes. Once inside the car, the director began worrying about his breath. He feared that the aroma of garlic was a tad overpowering. But Woody appeared to be oblivious. Later, during the intermission, Jean Doumanian informed Blakemore that Woody loathed the odor of garlic, whereupon Blakemore could not help feeling a frisson of perverse satisfaction.

  Michael Blakemore, a handsome, smooth-voiced man of sixty-six, had recently directed two Broadway hits, City of Angels and Lettice & Lovage. In England he was known as clever but difficult, his longtime foe being Peter Hall after they had argued over the artistic direction of Britain's National Theatre. In recent years, Blakemore had spent so much time working in New York that he was able to detect fresh scratches on the furniture of his favorite hotel, the Michelangelo.

  Evidently Blakemore suspected from the outset that in directing this triple bill of one-act plays, he might be treading into dangerous territory. In his journal, he began jotting down notes that he envisioned as "a very personal account of working with three playwrights who were also directors—a very difficult situation whoever the personalities were." Needless to say, the situation was fraught with more peril when one of the playwrights was reputed to be a world-class neurotic. Still, he was unprepared for outright pathology. Before long, one fact became clear: Woody Allen operated in "manic-depressive cycles." One day he would love the performance, then the next day hate it: "This performance was a great step backward," he chided Blakemore. "That was terrible! Just terrible!"

  As rehearsals continued, Woody Allen, the perfectionist movie director, was constantly breathing down Blakemore's neck, trying to undermine his authority, warning he was too soft on the actors, pelting him with instructions on how to perform his job. The pace was slow, the blocking precious, Linda Lavin's performance "cutesy," he informed Blakemore. Why didn't he make the actors buckle down? Blakemore, wearing an oatmeal-colored scarf thrown over his canvas jacket, looked the picture of cool confidence. Underneath, he was hissing like a pot ready to boil over as Woody handed him notes that said "just awful." "Still shit." Blakemore's favorite scrawl read "PATHTIC [sic]." In calm moods, Woody could be lucid, direct, even stimulating. A shadow of a smile would appear on his pale face as he tried to be pleasant. But usually he was in a state of high anxiety. Gazing at him, Blakemore sometimes wondered "which of us was going mad." In his diary he was able to vent his anger, but still found himself arriving at rehearsals in "an icy rage." Had his wife not informed him of a depressing call from their bank manager about their finances, he would have quit the production.

  Hostility between the two directors erupted into biological warfare when Blakemore came down with a cold. Having never mastered his terror of germs, Woody deliberately kept his distance lest he be infected by microbial hordes. According to Blakemore, Woody would approach him cautiously holding his overcoat over his nose and mouth "like a nineteenth-century anarchist." What sprang to mind was a character from The Brothers Karamazov.

  That Death Defying Acts ran for more than a year was mainly due to Woody's contribution as well as the popularity of Linda Lavin and then her replacement, Valerie Harper, the popular television star from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda. A year passed before Blakemore unburdened himself in an article, "Death Defying Director," in the June 3, 1996, issue of The New Yorker. It was payback time. Although the Englishman took a swipe or two at Elaine May (but none at "absent angel" David Mamet, whom he praised for never showing his face in New York), his target was clearly Woody. The Englishman felt that "not being a New Yorker, I can take liberties that others can't." His liberties involved nailing Woody for being Woody—insecure, controlling as well as out of control, and an unsociable crab. He went after his teeth ("tiny") and his handshake ("minimalist"). In a rare moment of chivalry, Blakemore restrained himself from describing how Soon-Yi bossed Woody, instead calling her, euphemistically, a girl who "knows her own mind" and who bore no resemblance to the mousy creature he had seen on television. When Woody read the piece, the part he resented was his fear of germs. He did not pull his coat up like a spy, he protested. Blakemore had no right to make him sound like a crackpot. "People think God knows what when they meet me," he complained.

  Woody's twenty-fourth movie, and his first picture with Jean Doumanian, was Bullets Over Broadway, the period comedy written with Doug McGrath during the tumultuous year of the custody battle. The central character is a naively idealistic playwright from Pittsburgh who gives up struggling to write for the theater after his play is rewritten by a hoodlum who happens to have the talent of Eugene O'Neill. Although David Shayne, the playwright in the film, was a typical Woody Allen character, Woody decided he was too old for the role and cast twenty-eight-year-old John Cusack, who stood a strapping six feet two inches and bore no resemblance to Woody offscreen. In an amazing transformation, Cusack pulled off a convincing impersonation of Woody—glasses, twitches, and stammers—as Michael Caine had done subtly in Hannah and Her Sisters. Dianne Wiest played Helen Sinclair, a high-strung boozy actress who seduces the young playwright. After appearing in three of Woody’s films and winning an Oscar for the flighty sister in Hannah and Her Sisters, the forty-five-year-old actress had not worked for him in seven years. Playing motherly types in such films as Parenthood and. caring for her two adopted daughters, Wiest was now a bit chubby.

  After the first day of shooting, Woody telephoned Wiest at home to comment on her performance. "It's terrible!" he exclaimed. Wiest remedied the problem by lowering her normal voice to a growl and by apparently studying Rosalind Russell's performance as Auntie Mame. She won a second Oscar as best supporting actress for her role in the film.

  Disrespect from the media notwithstanding, Woody still carried clout in the movie business. In choosing a distributor for Bullets Over Broadway, Doumanian took the position that Woody was a Tiffany-quality filmmaker. Distributors interested in licensing the film were asked to submit blind bids and make offers based solely on Woody's name and reputation. If this sounded a bit high and mighty, she explained that in the halcyon days of old, Orion and TriStar approved his projects without question. As it turned out, she got four bids and finally settled on Miramax Films, the upstart releasing company headed by a pair of New Yorkers, Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob Weinstein. The Weinsteins had set up shop in their hometown because, joked Bob Weinstein, "the Knicks play in New York City. When they move, we'll think about moving." Harvey Weinstein, a mercurial, cigar-chomping wheeler and dealer who is famous throughout the industry for his management-by-screaming style, had no visible patina of class. Woody liked him, however. Miramax, an independent company with a reputation for spotting and making money on specialty and art films such as Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, & videotape, had recently been acquired by the Disney Company for $80 million. Despite recent successes (six Oscar nominations for The Crying Game), it wasn't quite yet a player in the eyes of West Coast Hollywood.

  In the case of Bullets Over Broadway, Weinstein instinctively gobbled up the film sight unseen, not even quibbling over Woody's refusal to do the customary publicity. His instincts were right, because Bullets Over Broadway received seven Oscar nominations (in the categories of supporting actor and actress, art direction, costume design, director, and original screenplay). Despite the wrenching events of the past two years, Woody had nonetheless managed to pull out of his hat a stylish film that found favor with mainstream audiences. It was a tribute to his toughness—and an answer to his enemies. An exhilarated Jean Doumanian crowed over the nominations, which she hoped would establish once and for all audience disinterest
in Woody's personal shortcomings. "Everybody kind of embraced Woody with that and said, 'We're yours and don't think we'll ever go away,' " she said.

  In the fall of 1993, Woody had a chance to thank Jean for her years of loyalty. Dining together at an Italian restaurant, Primola, on Second Avenue, she was eating a piece of bruscetta when she choked on the hard Italian bread and started to turn blue. Immediately, Woody leaped up and performed the Heimlich maneuver.

  Woody had often wondered about the origins of his adopted daughter. To be so intelligent and charming, he decided, Dylan must have inherited "good genes." It was no coincidence that this ongoing obsession with the child kindled the story for his next movie. In Mighty Aphrodite, Lenny Weinrib is a sportswriter with a wife half his age—a cold, neglectful, career-driven gallery owner who wants motherhood but can't quite find time for nine months of inconvenience. When Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter) wants to adopt, Lenny reluctantly agrees. Five years later, the marriage is on the rocks, but their son, Max, has turned out to be bright and funny, so special that Lenny grows obsessive about his birth mother. His quest leads to the door of Linda Ash, aka Judy Cum, a sometime porn actress and full-time hooker, who assumes he's a trick and says: "Hello? Are you my 3 o'clock?"

  Mighty Aphrodite (a reference to the Greek goddess of love) ends happily with the prostitute receiving a personality makeover, marrying a nice guy, and having a child. But the point of Woody's narrative—that sometimes the women who put up their babies for adoption are prostitutes—angered adoption agencies. The director of Spence Chapin Adoption Agency noted that adopted children have fantasies about their birth parents, and Mighty Aphrodite only "feeds into the message that your birth parent is bad."

  By ironic coincidence, the same year that Woody was filming Mighty Aphrodite, a Texas paroled convict (larceny, theft, and bail-jumping) claimed that he was Dylan's birth father. The sixty-year-old man insisted that she was born to his common-law wife while both of them were in prison and given up for adoption without his consent. After letters to Mia threatening to "recapture" Dylan and promising "bloodshed" if she was not handed over, the parolee was arrested in Louisiana and returned to prison. Paroled again in 1997, he disabled an electronic monitoring device and disappeared, but not before making similar threatening phone calls to a Hartford newspaper. When asked to comment, Mia swore that Dylan was not the ex-con's child.

  Mighty Aphrodite brought Woody his twelfth Oscar nomination—tying Billy Wilder’s record—for best original screenplay. He failed to win an Academy Award, but Mira Sorvino took home the supporting actress award for her portrayal of the hooker. Even with the Oscar, the picture bombed at the box office with a gross of $6.7 million, a plunge of $7 million from Bullets Over Broadway.

  In 1996 the size of Woody's audience continued to melt. He had high hopes for Everyone Says I Love You, a retread of the memorable 1938 Kaufman and Hart comedy You Can't Take It With You, which he had adored as a boy when he fantasized about having a lovable, zany family just like the Sycamores in the play. Woody's fictional family were rich liberal Upper East Siders with the mother and father played by Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda. The sudsy musical comedy had a $20 million budget and less of a plot than an average McDonald's commercial. Stars without musical-comedy training were pressured to sing and dance, mostly without success except for Goldie Hawn. Making every effort to please his audience, Woody offered a smorgasbord of golden oldie tunes, attractive performers (including a cameo by Julia Roberts), and luscious picture-postcard photography in Paris and Venice. A number of critics were enchanted by the film. Roger Ebert, for one, predicted "it would take a heart of stone to resist this movie," an opinion that led to a skirmish on Sneak Previews when a disgusted Gene Siskel rated the movie two thumbs down. "He's not funny anymore," Siskel declared, and by the way, he added, when was Woody going to grow up?

  Ebert was indignant. "Oh, Gene," he fussed.

  Filmgoer apathy for Everyone Says I Love You was reflected in the box-office revenue that never managed to hit $10 million, in woeful contrast to a dog such as Beavis and Butt-head Do America, another new release that took in $20 million during its opening weekend.

  The Box Office: Domestic grosses in millions

  1986 Hannah and Her Sisters - $40.1

  1987 Radio Days - $14.7

  1987 September - $0.4

  1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors - $18.0

  1990 Alice - $5.9

  1991 Shadows and Fog - $2.7

  1992 Husbands and Wives - $10.5

  1993 Manhattan Murder Mystery - $11.3

  1994 Bullets Over Broadway - $13.4

  1995 Mighty Aphrodite - $6.7

  1996 Everyone Says I Love You - $9.7

  1997 Deconstructing Harry - $10.6

  1998 Celebrity - $5.0

  1999 Sweet and Lowdown - $4.0

  2000 Small Time Crooks - $16.6

  It was inevitable. The titillating scandal of Woody, Mia, and Soon-Yi retreated into history, to be replaced by fresher Hollywood scandals: the thirteen-year-old boy who alleged he had been molested by Michael Jackson; the black book of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss; the breakup of Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson; the O. J. Simpson and Menendez brothers murder trials.

  Those expecting Woody to join Roman Polanski in the gulag of exiled directors were surprised to encounter a Woody on the defensive. The star-makers who had once convinced him of his own genius were long retired from the playing field, but Woody, as seasonally as the birds migrated south, threw himself into a new project every fall and released a new feature in October or December, in time to be considered for the Oscars.

  As the market for his films shrank, he felt terrified that his time as an innovative filmmaker had passed, just as the end had come for Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Altman, indeed for most of the brash, young filmmakers of the seventies, except for Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. He was keenly aware he could not continue to make the same kind of film, in which he needed only to be "Woody Allen" to sell tickets. (In fact, there was now a generation of young moviegoers who had never seen Annie Hall or Sleeper, to whom Woody Allen was a scrawny comedian who couldn't act and who had slept with his girlfriend’s daughter.) Obviously, staying au courant, retooling his product, was a matter of economic necessity, reluctant as he was to acknowledge it. Fighting to reclaim his reputation and fatten his grosses, he began to woo a broader range of moviegoers, and that meant playing it safe with fluffy, feel-good stories geared to some of those folks who spent their time visiting shopping malls and seeing Bruce Willis pictures, in short, the mass audience he had derided long ago.

  Approaching his sixtieth birthday, he was prepared to forego risky films such as Interiors, Shadows and Fog, and the ill-considered Chekhovian September. In his eagerness to please his new audience, he visually dazzled them with Busby Berkeley chorus lines of singing and dancing Grouchos, Peter Pan dance numbers filmed in Paris against a background of the Seine, and twenties costume pictures complete with Art Deco sets and antique roadsters. All of his recent comedies were sleek and handsome, but they were also popcorn pictures, distressingly devoid of substance or ideas. Auteur filmmaking gave way to a new genre, potboiler auteur. In contrast, a film such as Crimes and Misdemeanors now seemed as weighty as Bergman’s Seventh Seal.

  More than the cars and costumes, his most conspicuous practice, first seen with Shadows and Fog, was to freshen up his pictures with a clever kind of froufrou window dressing that consisted of top stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kenneth Branagh, Julia Roberts, Goldie Hawn, Kirstie Alley, Robin Williams, Helena Bonham Carter, Elisabeth Shue, Winona Ryder, Ed Norton, and Drew Barrymore, among many others. Since he could not possibly match their customary fees, he had to take potluck and hope to catch them between pictures, or not get them at all. (In this way, for example, he managed to get a week of Robin Williams's time for $10,000 when he was between film roles that paid him millions.)

  N
othing worked. His consistently pitiful grosses of recent years utterly mystified him, he said. He could understand why so few people wanted to see an esoteric picture such as Shadows and Fog, but why hadn't Husbands and Wives and Manhattan Murder Mystery taken off? He couldn't figure out what had happened with Bullets Over Broadway, which received good notices and seven Oscar nominations (and in which he did not appear). Wanting to believe that the sex scandal had not cost him his audience, he insisted that his films had never been a huge draw in this country, except in a few big cities, and his grosses "were never any good, and they're not good now."

  There was a time, in the seventies, when his grosses were quite respectable. In fact, in the years between 1975 and 1979, his films were among the top ten box-office draws. It was not until Stardust Memories that his career peaked commercially and began a downward slide. By the nineties, when he received the biggest box-office response of his entire career, it was for something else—his personal, offscreen drama, which, ironically, played to packed houses in big cities and small.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Getting Even

  Year after year, to regain his children, Woody had feverishly poured money and hope into the stew of lawsuits he had kept simmering on the back burner, a kettle that by now had almost burned dry. At the end of 1995, his weekly visits with Satch were suspended after Satch claimed his father physically abused him, an episode Woody vehemently denied. The boy told his therapist that he "hated and feared" his father and was not looking forward to any more visits. Furthermore, the therapist reported to Elliott Wilk, the child "suffered from nightmares and stomach aches."