Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  On their first wedding anniversary, Louise thoughtfully presented Woody with a traditional paper anniversary gift of an autographed letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that mentioned Harry Houdini, which Woody framed. (It still hangs on his wall.) But after a year, the relationship was already unraveling. Like Houdini, Woody became an escape artist by disappearing behind a wall of hobbies. Increasingly silent and reclusive, he installed an old billiard table that he bought from McGirr's pool hall and had taken to playing by himself. During this time, Louise would describe Woody's response to her attempts at starting a conversation: "He keeps shooting billiards. It's sort of hard to talk to him that way."

  In the fall of 1967, she played a leading role in a Broadway musical, Henry, Sweet Henry, opposite Don Ameche. On opening night, Woody sent her a sweet telegram: "I'm bringing 500 mice to your opening. Please be grand." Louise, greatly talented, was also greatly troubled, and Woody had his work cut out for him. Extremely depressed, subject to disturbing mood and weight swings, she kept herself afloat with a variety of pills and daily sessions with her analyst, who warned that marriage to Woody was killing her artistic fulfillment. Actually the burden of sustaining the marriage fell on Woody, who would worry when she slept all day and wind up calling her analyst to check on her medication. Louise's condition, depicted in the Dorrie character (Charlotte Rampling) in Stardust Memories, would seriously affect their marriage. In those years, he told Eric Lax, Louise was extraordinary but "crazy as a loon." At first, it was worth it because he could be sure of her having two good weeks a month. Eventually, however, she was having two good days a month. When he saw After the Fall, Arthur Miller's 1964 drama inspired by his marriage to a near-psychotic Marilyn Monroe, he immediately saw the similarities between the two women.

  Of course, Woody, admittedly "finicky and touchy," was a difficult husband. Aside from his crabby moods, he demonstrated a junkielike addiction to work that alarmed Louise. In the morning while she was still asleep, he woke up early and began writing. All day long he was sealed off in his workroom. If she knocked, he usually called out, "Hiya, Louise, come on in," in the tone of a cranky father to his little girl. And barely three months after the wedding, he bolted off to London with Charlie Joffe for the filming of Casino Royale. To pass the time, he shopped for jazz records, played poker, and, lounging on his hotel bed with a pad and pencil, began writing a play about a family from Newark, unsophisticated folks like the Konigsbergs, who are accused of spying while vacationing behind the Iron Curtain. Yankee Come Home is full of oddball characters and comic touches that make it seem like a dramatic version of his nightclub act, with one laugh on top of the next.

  Renamed Don't Drink the Water, the play opened on Broadway in the fall of 1966, with Lou Jacobi and Kay Medford as the American couple and Tony Roberts as the ambassador's son who falls in love with their daughter. As the opening had approached, Woody was filled with dread. Displeased with some of the actors, he had premonitions of disaster, which were confirmed in Philadelphia during the pre-Broadway tryout when his efforts were critically mauled. There were plenty of laughs, reported Variety, but "the story and staging format suggest pre-World War II farce." Woody would never take rejection well. Hoping the comedy would work in New York but fearful of the critics, he conveniently disappeared on opening night and wound up playing billiards at McGirr's pool hall on Eighth Avenue. In what would become a lifelong pattern, he fled from the painful prospect of seeing his work judged while insisting that he cared nothing for the world's opinion.

  There was no doubt it was "a terrible play," he said later, "just a group of a million gags all strung together." New York newspaper critics tended to agree. But audiences seemed to enjoy it, and the show had a respectable run of eighteen months. Joseph Levine purchased film rights but rejected Woody's request to direct and instead hired Howard Morris, a television comic from Your Show of Shows. Released in 1969 with Jackie Gleason, it proved to be a dud at the box office, maybe because it looked like just another episode of The Honeymooners. After selling the film rights, Woody took no further interest and refused to see it.

  Some people anesthetized with booze; Woody wrote. For years he had been jotting down ideas on slips of paper and tossing them into a drawer. Unlike most writers, he never saw a blank sheet of paper that intimidated him, never suffered a moment of artistic paralysis. In 1965 he hired a private secretary, a woman from Joplin, Missouri, by the name of Norma Lee Clark, and the first thing he did was empty his makeshift archive and deliver a valise stuffed with paper. Typed, the material came to nearly two hundred pages.

  Aside from typing, Norma Lee's duties were to screen his calls, sort mail, and arrange appointments. She worked out of the Rollins and Joffe office on West Fifty-seventh Street and communicated with her employer by intercom several times a day, "every 20 minutes if he's in a nervous state," she reported. Their relationship remained strictly impersonal. Not only did he see Norma Lee infrequently, he seemed to be totally uninterested in her as a person. Asked about Woody in 1980, after fifteen years in his employ, she said that he was a "very easy and undemanding" boss who didn't encourage intimacy. "I don't think Woody has ever asked me a personal question."

  Outside of her regular job, Woody's secretary was an aspiring writer of Regency Romance novels. Clients visiting the Rollins and Joffe office remember her poring over stacks of Harlequin paperbacks as she taught herself the novelistic formula. Over the next twenty years, working in the shadow of a prolific celebrity, perhaps inspired by the productivity of her employer, Norma Lee would publish sixteen titles, including The Impulsive Miss Pymbroke, The Daring Duchess, and her most popular, Lady Jane ("She was once a nobody. Now she was a woman with a past. . . .").

  In the fall of 1965, Playboy asked Woody to submit a story. He did an essay on chess, about a pair of refined but dotty gentlemen by the names of Allen and Mittleman playing an increasingly nasty game by mail. When Louise read their exchange of letters, she thought the story was much too literary for what was essentially a girlie magazine.

  "This is a good piece of writing," she said. "It's the kind of thing The New Yorker might be interested in."

  He doubted it. To him, The New Yorker was "hallowed ground." Giving in to Louise's urging, however, he turned the story over to Norma Lee Clark for typing and mailed it out "just as a lark."

  Woody's chess piece landed on the desk of the fiction editor who knew Woody only as a funny stand-up comic. Reading the piece, Roger Angell thought it was "obvious he could write a sentence." But several things bothered him, primarily that "his writing was exactly like S. J. Perelman's." Returning the manuscript, he notified the author that he could resubmit the piece if he made some changes in the second half. "The insults and exaggeration after page 6 [sound] forced and reminiscent of Perelman," he explained.

  Never had Woody dreamed of being published in The New Yorker. Awestruck, he set out to the New Yorker office to meet the editor, a man some fifteen years his senior. A child of The New Yorker, Roger Angell was the son of legendary fiction editor Katharine Sergeant Angell White and the stepson of the author of Charlotte's Web, humorist E. B. White. After an interoffice affair, his mother had divorced his father, New York attorney Ernest Angell, and married White, seven years her junior. A member of an old Boston family, august in manner, Katharine White could be so formidable that Roger Angell, in the office, referred to his mother as "Mrs. White."

  Angell wasted no time setting Woody straight. "This is very funny but we already have one of these. We have the original." This brought no argument from Woody, who, having deliberately copied Perelman's style, had apparently succeeded only too well. But Angell's next objection floored him.

  "The piece is too funny," Angell said. There was a laugh in practically every line.

  "Fewer laughs?"

  "Yes, I'm afraid so." The piece read as if it were a stand-up routine, Angell explained, and written humor didn't work that way.

  "The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers" was publish
ed on January 20, 1966, followed shortly by two more Perelmanesque essays: "A Little Louder, Please" (a cultured intellectual admits he hates pantomime), then "Yes, but Can the Steam Engine Do This?" (a history of the invention of the sandwich). It was not until the following year that Angell reported to a friend that Woody had almost entirely overcome his compulsion to write like Perelman. (Some critics felt he switched to copying the deceased Robert Benchley.)

  Woody's extraordinary discipline amazed Angell. Not only did he accept corrections without argument, but he completed them with lightning speed, often returning the piece promptly the next morning. "In many ways, he was the ideal contributor because he was so quick to respond to suggestions." Sometimes Angell's acceptance letters included crumbs of praise: "Mr. Shawn is delighted." William Shawn, the revered editor-in-chief who had been chosen to succeed the magazine's founder, Harold Ross, genuinely admired Woody's writing. From its inception the magazine had always been short on humorists, and by this time Perelman was practically the only great one left. Mr. Shawn, said Angell, "regarded Woody as a gift from God. He loved his work." Shawn recognized Woody's comic literary gift, but it was Angell who had forced him to be specific and precise—and therefore as funny as he could possibly be.

  Publication in The New Yorker not only lifted Woody's confidence tremendously, but it also eventually would cement his reputation as a master literary humorist. Ever after, many would regard him as a legitimate successor to giants such as S. J. Perelman and Robert Benchley. In the period between 1965 and 1980, he turned out twenty-eight stories in which he roved wildly, taking aim at a variety of targets (the Dead Sea Scrolls, insurance salesmen, UFOs, God, and the Holocaust), and sprinkling his prose with a variety of brand names: Hannah Arendt, Proust, Flaubert, Bellow, O. J. Simpson, and Elaine's restaurant. Perhaps the single most clever piece is "The Whore of Mensa," which recounts the efforts of a private investigator, Kaiser Lupowitz, to break an intellectual call-girl ring, specializing in hookers for the mind instead of the body, whose clientele is made up of johns with a taste for brainy women, preferably with master's degrees in comparative lit. Into Kaiser's office walks a nubile redhead named Sherry, whose hindquarters remind him of two scoops of vanilla ice cream.

  "Shall we begin?" he asks, leading her to the couch.

  Dragging on her cigarette, Sherry gets right down to business. "I think we could start by approaching Billy Budd as Melville's justification of the ways of God to man, n’est-ce-pas?

  Not all of Woody’s submissions were accepted. "When he turned somber, it was disappointing," said Angell. "It really wasn't stuff we wanted to run."

  Once, during a conversation, Angell got a disturbing glimpse into Woody's thinking. Angell said to him, "I certainly hope you're not one of those writers who think humor isn't important enough for a man to be remembered for."

  “I am.”

  "Writing humor is a serious business," Angell argued. "Do you mean it's not serious enough for you?"

  "I do mean that," Woody insisted.

  In 1980 Woody stopped writing for the magazine because, he informed Angell, the demands of filmmaking simply left him no time. It was only half true. Writing "little souffles" had begun to bore him. He noticed that "guys like S. J. Perelman and Robert Benchley, guys who I idolize, ended up with endless volumes of 'casuals' and it was a dead end." As always, dead ends depressed him. Just as he had lost interest in being a stand-up comedian, he also became dissatisfied with writing for The New Yorker, although, Angell recalled, "there was no falling out or cooling off. We would have been distressed if he had continued to write for anyone else." In the fifteen intervening years their correspondence catches the tone of a literary partnership that seldom—maybe never—rose above the impersonal. Woody's letters always began "Dear Roger" and always ended "Woody Allen," as if he were writing to his accountant. The gentlemanly Angell, as much a mentor to him as Rollins and Joffe, treated him with unfailing cheer and diplomacy. As the years passed, he displayed increasing affection. Woody, on the other hand, remained completely businesslike, always keeping a distance. Outside of the magazine, the two men observed the usual author-editor amenities: Woody asked Angell and his wife Carol to movie screenings and New Year's Eve parties; the editor invited his author to Christmas parties and stopped by Michael’s Pub to hear him play Dixieland jazz.

  By the late seventies, the magazine was regularly rejecting about half of his submissions. In cover letters, Woody would urge Angell to discard unsatisfactory pieces. Some stories, such as "My Speech to the Graduates," read as if written by a nightclub comic, Angell noted, and continued apologetically, "Sorry to let you down." Some stories ("The Condemned" and "Confessions of a Burglar") were rescued by heavy editing; others, such as "The Lunatic's Tale," in which a man switches the brains of his scholarly wife and sexy mistress, were returned because "almost every sentence seemed to need some kind of revision." Among the pieces subsequently sold to other publications such as The New Republic and The Kenyon Review were "Remembering Needleman," "Nefarious Times We Live In," and "Retribution." Departure from The New Yorker marked the end of his prose-writing career.

  Stand-Up:

  "I kid my ex-wife all the time but she was animal. She was not technically animal officially. Officially she was reptile."

  —"What's New, Pussycat?" Monologue

  Though a divorcee at twenty-three, Harlene did not sit around pining. Hoping to lead the bohemian life, she settled down in Italy, where she studied art in Florence and reportedly enjoyed several exciting romances. Returning to the United States, she moved into a modest apartment in the West Village, dressed like a hippie, and hung around with people who practiced meditation and yoga. Despite a first-rate education, she seemed unable to find a position commensurate with her abilities and eventually supported herself by secretarial jobs, one of these in the psychology department at Yeshiva University.

  It seems unlikely that Harlene was unaware of Woody's jokes about her. Nevertheless, she chose to ignore the situation until 1964, when he displayed photographs of her and her sister on a national television show "while holding me up to ridicule," as she put it. Making sport of her in inconspicuous nightclubs was annoying; demeaning her on prime-time television made her mad, so much so that her attorney formally protested. Woody promised to stop.

  Three years later, Harriet Van Horne, television critic for the New York World Journal Tribune, devoted an entire column, "Woody Sways on His Pedestal," to his mean-spirited treatment of his ex-wife. "So you thought women were the vindictive sex?" Van Horne wrote. "Well, you haven't heard Woody Allen discussing his last duchess." The previous night she had watched him on two shows—Perry Como and The Tonight Show—"licking his wounded pride with the tongue of an adder." If his ex-wife had to endure his antics in silence, Van Horne hoped it was sweetened by "a splendid settlement and throngs of dashing beaux." Because unless she bought an hour of prime television time, what recourse did Harlene have?

  Harlene lost no time rushing to court with a $1 million lawsuit charging Woody, the National Broadcasting Company, and its affiliates with defamation of character, citing repeated acts of libel described as "statements attributing to me lack of chastity and morality." She meticulously compiled examples of the "wicked and malicious" material, including the crack about rape and the moving violation. (And by the way, he owed her nearly $8,000 in back alimony.)

  Woody, dumbfounded, refused to admit any wrongdoing. He had meant no disrespect. The only purpose of his "good-natured fun" and "harmless jokes" was to make people laugh, he argued in his reply to the complaint. Nobody takes comics seriously. Suggesting that some conniving attorney had put her up to it, just to squeeze money out of him, he wondered why Harlene waited so long to object.

  Privately, he thought she was being too sensitive, and decided there was nothing to worry about. In any case, his attention was drawn to more important problems, such as his current wife: Their relationship had become so rocky that most of their time together wa
s spent quarreling. It seemed that divorce would be unavoidable. Then that summer, in Central Park, he was playing a charity softball game on a team with George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe, when he was hit in the right hand and had to be admitted to the emergency room. The following week he opened at Caesars Palace with his hand in a cast. The accident upset him far more than Harlene’s suit, which he continued to ignore.

  Woody's mother felt sure that he would lose. Her advice was to "settle for half," $500,000 seeming like a bargain, everything considered. But Woody, feeling fireproof, brushed off her advice, and as a result, Harlene increased the amount to $2 million. Six years later, the matter was settled out of court, when he made a financial settlement and vowed to drop the jokes if she agreed not to discuss their marriage or the terms of the settlement. For three decades, Harlene has kept her word. How much she collected is unknown, but it has been sufficient for her to live comfortably ever since.*

  [*Whatever the precise nature of the scars, this much seems clear: Woody would never forget or forgive Harlene. She seems to be the model for the archetypical castrator throughout his films: Allan Felix's ex-wife, Nancy, in Play It Again, Sam; Alvy Singer's ex-wives, Alison Portchnick, the political activist, and Robin, the literary-intellectual social climber, in Annie Hall; Isaac Davis's ex-wife, Jill, the lesbian memoirist in Manhattan; and Harry Blocks ex-wife, who resembles the Nazi German heavyweight champion, Max Schmeling, in Deconstructing Harry.]

  Caught on Tape:

  William F. Buckley, Jr. (reading a question): Mr. Allen, do you think the Israelis should give back the land they won from the Arabs?

  Woody: No, they should sell it back.