Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  As defeat followed defeat, it seemed as if Woody could do nothing right against his foes. His efforts to remove Elliott Wilk from the case on the grounds of bias had failed, and even his determination to punish Frank Maco came to naught. After four years, the Connecticut Grievance Committee dismissed his ethics complaint against the prosecutor. Although Maco’s actions were sharply criticized on the grounds of insensitivity, he was neither dismissed nor disbarred. At the Litchfield Inn, he celebrated with a lunch of softshell crabs and returned to his job. Although these reverses would have discouraged even the most bullheaded person, they had no effect whatsoever on Woody, who, in the spring of 1996, redoubled his fight for more liberal visitation rights and again confronted Elliott Wilk. As if the previous three years never existed, Woody pushed to see Dylan and Satch on alternate weekends without a chaperon and in the presence of Soon-Yi. This repetitive petition was a mistake, not merely because he had lost every previous round, but also because he seemed oblivious to the true situation: Neither Dylan nor Satch had any desire to see him.

  In his reply, a testy Wilk said that his making such a request only confirmed how "little understanding or empathy" he had with respect to his children. Again the judge vetoed any contact with eleven-year-old Dylan, her emotional state being still "too fragile and unsettled." The very thought of seeing him made her hysterical and she told her therapist she did not want to lay eyes on Woody Allen ever again because of his "boyfriend-girlfriend relationship" with her sister. Both Satch and Moses, now an eighteen-year-old college student, despised him. The verdict was unanimous: Everyone in the family hated him. In the same decision, however, Wilk said he would permit resumption of supervised visitation with Satchel for a test period of four weeks at the office of his therapist, at which time he would reassess the situation. Smarting, Woody was not about to agree to such restrictive terms. Instead, his legal options exhausted, he dreamed out loud about taking revenge on Elliott Wilk—perhaps by filming a documentary about the judge that he would call An Error in Judgment.

  It looked as if the bloody custody battle was finally over. The war, however, continued.

  On a Friday night in late February 1996, Woody arrived at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to board a private jet that would take him to Paris and fourteen other cities, a grand total of twenty-three days of mostly one-night stands. Accompanying him was Soon-Yi, Letty, and Jean Doumanian with her dog, a silver-gray, sixty-pound slobbering weimaraner named Jasmine that he trusted would stay as far from him as possible. As soon as the seat-belt sign went off, a documentary filmmaker and a crew of three went into action.

  His last experience on the road was the stand-up circuit in the seventies, a dismal memory because the monotony of the work practically killed him. The idea of a backbreaking musical road tour, one that paraded his lack of natural musical skill before large audiences in a different city every day, sounded like the last thing he needed. On the contrary, he certainly did not need the money or the aggravation. Usually he warned people he was a "terrible" clarinetist, like Jack Benny on the violin, an amateur who was tolerated by the public and music critics alike because he was a celebrity. But what he needed at the moment was more spectacular ammunition in his continuing public-relations skirmishes with Mia. Like so many of his projects lately, the concert tour was conceived by the head of his brain trust, Jean Doumanian, who was impressed by the enthusiasm of European visitors to Michael’s Pub, and decided that Woody and his band should star in a quality music documentary. The Citizen Kane of this genre was a rock documentary, Don't Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker's transfixing backstage classic that followed a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. Anyone who saw the film never forgot the unobtrusive camera capturing Dylan rushed by screaming fans, Dylan teasing reporters backstage, Dylan bantering with Donovan in his hotel suite, always refusing to suffer fools gladly. In Jean's view, an updated Don't Look Back might be just what the spin doctor ordered to emphasize Woody's charismatic side. The crucial question was, Who would get behind the camera?

  Recently Doumanian had seen a documentary chronicling the life of comics artist Robert Crumb (creator of Fritz the Cat), which was produced by a talented San Francisco filmmaker, Terry Zwigoff, who spent six years studying the counterculture illustrator. The result was an extraordinary film that scooped up a cluster of awards and earned more than $3 million. Doumanian thought that Crumb was "an incredible piece of work and I knew he would be right for this." Learning that Zwigoff had filmed the life of blues musician Howard Armstrong (Louie Bluie, 1985) and also collected old jazz and blues recordings clinched it in her mind. Zwigoff and Allen would be a perfect match.

  Everyone was pleased when Terry Zwigoff said he was interested in making the film. Of course, from Zwigoff’s viewpoint, an authorized film would mean loss of independence, but a budget in the neighborhood of $500,000 would make it financially worth his while. Tempted, he cautioned Woody that he "wouldn't take it easy on him," and Woody replied that was precisely what made Crumb so special. Only a few weeks before the concert tour was scheduled to begin, Zwigoff, perhaps realizing that he was not going to retain final approval after all, bowed out. Making no secret of his unhappiness, he complained to Entertainment Weekly, "They were like, 'Who do you think you are, Orson Welles?'" Insiders speculated that the problem was Jean Doumanian, who evidently was not shy about boasting that Woody didn't get final cut on her projects—"I do." (Zwigoff denied that he left over the issue of final cut, citing personal reasons.) Undaunted, Doumanian quickly hand-picked a replacement for Zwigoff.

  Winner of two Academy Awards, Barbara Kopple had been the darling of the documentary film business for almost two decades. Although she possessed a self-effacing manner and a pretty, baby-doll face, she was, in fact, a fearless, highly manipulative filmmaker who had made several outstanding documentaries: one, about the labor struggles of Kentucky coal miners (Harlan County, U.S.A.); the other, about Minnesota meatpacking plant strikers (American Dream). Some thought her greatest film was Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, a 1993 television documentary. From the beginning of her career, by presenting herself as a breathless, helpless little girl, an affect not unlike Mia Farrow's, Kopple learned how to get what she wanted, and that included bursting into tears if the occasion demanded it. Now in her fifties, she still wore her coal-black hair long and straight with a center part, a resolutely seventies hairstyle reminiscent of the one worn by the actress Valerie Bertinelli.

  In early February, Kopple visited Woody at his apartment to discuss the project, and for a half hour they made small talk about everything but the film and the tour. Finally, Kopple recalled, "30 minutes went by and I knew I had to say something." Out of desperation, she asked if he was looking forward to the tour.

  "No," he groaned. "I have too much to do here." Besides, the thought of visiting all those cities depressed him. It was at that moment, Kopple said, she decided to make the film. Avoiding the issue of final cut, she asked instead for "total access," which included the right to take her camera anywhere she liked to record his private moments offstage. "I told Woody I wouldn't do it any other way," she said. In fact, she had fallen in love with her subject.

  Woody slipped out of a white terry-cloth robe and tiptoed to the edge of a private swimming pool in Milan's regal Principe de Savoia. He was followed by Soon-Yi, who was wearing a matching robe over a black-and-white bikini. In his light blue swim trunks, he tumbled into the water and paddled a few laps before announcing he was tired of swimming and was going to get out of the pool to read the International Herald Tribune. Soon-Yi raised an eyebrow. "Just one more time," he told her uncertainly.

  "A few more times," she coaxed. Sometimes she spoke to him as if he were a recalcitrant patient who refused to take his medicine.

  Throughout the entire three weeks of the tour, Woody remained hooked up to a wireless mike sixteen hours a day. Often he did not know when the camera was rolling, so he stayed in character. Incredib
ly, not once did Kopple manage to catch him with his guard down, which made the documentary sound scripted and led a film critic at Newsweek to later call it "the only Woody Allen film not directed by Allen." Soon-Yi, in what amounted to her screen debut, was obviously struggling to overcome her self-consciousness and sounded a bit tense. She did, however, firmly dispel her aunt's insinuation that she was stupid. Rounding out the supporting cast was Letty, taking a dizzy Diane Keaton role ("He's a rock star!") and doing her best to hog every frame.

  Although tickets for the concerts sold out in three or four hours, critics were not always kind. His playing provoked malice and mirth from the British press, with one paper writing that "while he is a better clarinetist than Naomi Campbell is a novelist, he would be well advised not to give up his day job." It did not take long for Woody to feel claustrophobic, and he soon tired of slogging through the dirty ice and slush of a European winter, hopping from airports to marble-lobbied hotels to theaters where heavy-jowled men made speeches and rich dowagers offered autograph books. As the air began leaking out of the touring balloon, he fretted constantly. Would the hotel laundry send back his underwear with holes? Would he fall prey to a crazed gondolier and get his throat cut? Could he rent the hotel room next door in order to have a bathroom separate from Soon-Yi?

  With little to do all day but shop, get massages, and eat at three-star Michelin restaurants, Soon-Yi busied herself with improving Woody's manners. She was concerned about the way he treated his musicians, who, except for Eddy Davis, one of New York's leading jazz banjo players, were not the Michael's Pub regulars. For the tour, he invited a select group of six competent professionals from his 1993 recording, "The Bunk Project," all of whom eclipsed Woody in their musical skills but also made his playing sound better. In Europe Woody ignored the band. He never went out of his way to speak with them, had difficulty recalling all their names, and only communicated through Davis. Unlike Woody and his entourage, who toured by private jet and limousine, the band traveled on commercial airlines and by vans, and stayed at separate but ordinary hotels. Soon-Yi felt sorry for them.

  "You should let them all know they're very good," she told Woody.

  Why? he said perversely. He had never been chummy with his sidemen at Michael's Pub.

  Soon-Yi didn't mince words. "Because it's nice to hear," she retorted, reminding him that he looked like "a crazy" when he was in a room with the entire group and spoke only to Davis. He ignored her suggestion. While the pickup band wore professional black outfits, he and Eddy Davis emerged in rumpled, grungy clothing. Personal contact with audiences discomfited him, although eventually he took to throwing them air kisses from a safe distance. More often, standing at hotel windows, he hid behind curtains and peeked out at the crowds, as if he were a Russian czar. Cut off not only from fans but also from talking to the local artists, he was surrounded by his protective coterie of women—Kopple, Soon-Yi, Letty, and Jean, all of whom continually gave him advice. At times, he seemed to be thoroughly manipulated by his handlers, who played on his need to be coddled and adored. "He needs people to help him make decisions," Kopple decided.

  Dissatisfied with the eleven hours of film she had shot, Kopple later staged a Konigsberg family get-together at Marty and Nettie's East Side high-rise. Mentally alert at the age of ninety-seven, Marty was deaf but still had a full head of snow-white hair and ninety-one-year-old Nettie looked like an older, more animated version of Woody. Both of them seemed to be decidedly indifferent to their son and treated him as if he were a nonentity. As he was seated at the dining table, which was next to the china cabinet containing his Academy Award statuettes, Woody turned to his father and showed him his latest medals and awards. Marty picked up one of the plaques. "Look at this engraving," he remarked expertly. Jewelry engraving had been one of his various professions before retirement. From behind the camera Kopple's breathy voice could be heard faintly prodding Nettie. Had she ever imagined her son's fame? With no further prompting, Nettie confided in a raspy voice that she had always known "the kid" had "a terrific brain" as well as a flair for tap dancing, sports, and music, "but never pursued them." She would have preferred him to be a pharmacist. Woody knew this harangue by heart, and cut her off with the reminder that she used to beat him every day with her hand or a strap. It was a miracle he never grew up to be a drug addict, he told her. Or a criminal.

  "I'm sorry," she interrupted, "but you were brought up in a household that knew right from wrong. Don't think for a minute that you are what you are all by yourself."

  "You think you're a big shot," Marty piped in.

  Woody rolled his eyes and changed the subject to "Asian girls." Evidently Letty's son Christopher was also seeing "an Asian girl." Nettie frowned. "Personally I don't think it's right," she croaked. Taking a politically incorrect stance, she warned "that's why the Jews someday will be extinct and that's very bad." Soon-Yi, looking unperturbed, began to laugh. Intent on having the last word, Nettie turned to Kopple and said she always hoped he would "fall in love with a nice Jewish girl," obviously forgetting about his two former wives, both of whom are Jewish.

  As Woody stood up to leave, he smiled weakly. "Truly the lunch from hell," he murmured.

  In the spring of 1998, Barbara Kopple's road movie was released by Fine Line Films as a 104-minute feature, Wild Man Blues, the title of a famous Jelly Roll Morton—Louis Armstrong collaboration. As usual, Woody was pessimistic about the film's reception. Documentary audiences tended to be limited, especially audiences for pictures about New Orleans jazz. "No one," he predicted, "will be interested in this film." He was not taking into account Kopple, who was regarded in the industry as a famous documentarian, as well as a woman who relentlessly sought attention.

  When Kopple had edited the film to three and a half hours, she invited Woody and Soon-Yi to her East Village film studio to view it. According to Kopple, they huddled silent and bemused, occasionally giggling or breaking into shrieks of laughter. At the end, Woody stood up and said politely, "Very entertaining."

  "Thank you, but that's you," Kopple replied.

  "No, no, no," he said, "that's you."

  Although he brought up several technical questions involving the editing, Kopple later gave the impression that she resisted his professional advice and told him, "Well, the burden is on me."

  "Yes, it is," agreed Woody as he headed for the elevator. Considering everything that he had riding on the film, including Sweetland's half-million-dollar investment, this response sounds suspicious. From the beginning, the premise of the documentary was to restore his image. Despite the sticky question of final cut, the balance of power between Allen and Kopple was never in doubt. On the other hand, Woody wanted everyone to believe he had cut Kopple loose to make her own film, once again demonstrating his extraordinary ability to manipulate the public.

  When Stanley Kauffmann saw Wild Man Blues, he was amazed because it was "the best performance Woody's ever done on film. You see him involved in something he cares about and doing it well. The last scene ridiculing both his parents and himself—the son who never made good with the father—is an Arthur Miller situation. Even if its purpose was to get sympathy it shows him as a human being, not as a star." Most reviewers, however, panned Woody's vanity feature. Going straight to the heart of the matter, the Village Voice reviewed the press kit, and other publications followed suit by calling Woody's advertisement for himself "a blatant attempt to clean up his scandal-tainted image," a slick corporate film "inseparable from p.r. spin." Since it was obviously not a concert film—Kopple repeatedly truncated the musical interludes—critics instead reported on Woody's offstage life with Soon-Yi, who, wrote Roger Ebert, "seems more like the adult in the partnership," a combination of wife, mother, and manager.

  For all its billing as a music documentary, Wild Man Blues was not about jazz but personal relationships, an Annie Hall for the nineties. It was about Alvy Singer in middle age, no longer worrying about why Annie left him because now he has a twent
y-eight- (or twenty-five- or twenty-six-) year-old Asian woman, who has turned out to be the woman of his dreams. Soon-Yi impressed Kopple as a strong, mature woman, highly opinionated, who was also living a fairy-tale romance. "She's able to be her own person, she's able to have anything she wants!" Kopple said, adding that "to find someone you can have fun with, who's a soul mate, who speaks truthfully to you, not just telling you the things you want to hear, that's rare and wonderful." Ironically, Woody succeeded in mesmerizing Kopple, who chose to ignore the fact that Soon-Yi was the daughter of the mother of Woody's three children and the sister of these children. Aside from one remark of Woody's about "the notorious Soon-Yi Previn," the film contained no allusions to the scandal or his children. Most strikingly, there was no mention of Mia, which film writer Bill Luhr likened to "telling the story of O.J. without mentioning Nicole." Not only did Kopple accept the relationship with Soon-Yi as normal, she lost her critical perspective and became a part of her subject's insulated world. In Kopple's eyes, Woody and Soon-Yi were living a Cinderella love story. Another filmmaker might have regarded them differently.

  In His Own Words:

  Erica Jong: Does Soon-Yi miss her mother?

  Woody: Not at all.

  —Marie Claire, 1998

  Several years before meeting Mia, Woody imagined the character of an estranged wife who takes revenge on her husband with a memoir that graphically exposes why their marriage went haywire. In Manhattan, consoling himself with seventeen-year-old Tracy, Isaac Davis muses about how Jill is going to ridicule his "disgusting little moments" and how her book will surely become a best-seller. Naturally, Jill hates him but she's also a bisexual feminist who left him for a woman, which explains everything. An older and wiser Woody might have guessed that Mia, if she ever got her hands on a ghostwriter, would tear his heart out in print.