Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  On Saturday evening, April 14, 1979, United Artists was screening the new picture, now titled Manhattan, for Woody's friends in the tiny blue screening room on the lobby floor of the MGM Building, on Sixth Avenue. Steven Bach, one of the few people to have seen the script, had flown in from the West Coast, on his way to London. The spring day was mild, and the sky over midtown that afternoon a perfect blue. Quietly Bach slid into his seat. He later said that if there had been two hours in his three years at United Artists that remain in his memory as "pure, unambiguous pleasure, they are those two." After the lights came up, he nodded wordlessly to Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, then strolled down the nearly deserted avenue, humming Gershwin and grinning. In a rush, "all the reasons I had always wanted to live in New York" came back, "all the reasons I had wanted to be in the movie business."

  Like Bach, audiences everywhere were bewitched because possibly no other film has conjured up more perfectly the essence of the big city. Even the critics, most of them at least, found the picture irresistible. Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice raved that Manhattan was "the only truly great American movie of the 1970s." Asked recently if he still ranked it as the outstanding film of the seventies, Sarris thought it was "not the only one. There are others I like from that period. But my test of a movie is whether or not I can look at it again and again. Can you stand to see The Bridge on the River Kwai another ten times? Or Lawrence of Arabia?" But perhaps the ultimate compliment was offered by Maureen Stapleton, who thought Manhattan was so beautiful, so romantic that "it almost makes you forget all the dog poop on the streets." It would be his biggest commercial success, earning a healthy $45.7 million ($137 million in today’s dollars).

  Manhattan, Woody's third script with Marshall Brickman, would turn out to be their last collaboration for more than a dozen years. Like Ralph Rosenblum, Brickman had made key contributions to Woody's success as a filmmaker. Just as Rosenblum tightened rambling footage and turned potential flops into hits, it was Brickman who helped Woody find strong structures to support his inspired stories. In terms of craftsmanship, Woody's most outstanding scripts would be Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan, the films he wrote with Brickman. While Woody never had a shortage of creative ideas, he was apt to go off the track whenever he had to construct a story by himself.

  Always self-effacing, Brickman never made a peep about his second-class status in the collaboration. Rosenblum, however, was not the sort to take a backseat and took credit for having more or less single-handedly saved Annie Hall and Take the Money and Run, which was probably one reason for Woody's annoyance over Rosenblum's book. The truth, of course, is that nothing Rosenblum did in the editing room mattered had not Woody shot brilliant material in the first place. Similarly, Brickman's talent for organization was irrelevant without Woody's original creativity.

  Tales of New York Life:

  Earl Wilson: What kind of girls do you like?

  Woody: Uh ... yeah ... well... practically all kinds.

  Wilson: Any kind, just so they're breathing?

  Woody: No, it isn't even necessary in my case. I've had some that didn't breathe and it didn't bother me.

  —Woody Allen interview, 1972

  The tall, moony girl with the tattersall vest and the long braid down the middle of her back looked like an Annie Hall paper doll. Once he had scrawled his signature, she bent over him and planted a tender kiss on his cheek, then handed him a white rose. The place was full of fabulous young creatures lined up quietly near the bandstand, bobbing up and down to "Shine On, Harvest Moon," waiting with their paper and pens. They stood primly, like young ladies in a debutante receiving line. The next one, overcome by his presence, left her ballpoint behind. Down the line he could see a pre-Raphaelite beauty in a gauzy white-lace dress sprigged with violets, but reaching him she turned out to be a chatterbox.

  The man who once had trouble getting a date never had to go home alone. If he wanted sex, there was Michael's Pub, his personal Deer Park, a hunting preserve teeming with women. Since there was no dressing room, he sat at a ringside table between shows, accessible to predatory groupies. (Woody never denied the propositions but claimed he didn't respond.) If picking up women failed to satisfy him, neither did his brief relationships with women such as Teri Shields, a tall, blond, heavy-drinking divorcee, who had made a profession out of managing the modeling career of her nubile eleven-year-old daughter, Brooke, who had posed nude for Playboy before Woody cast her as an extra in Annie Hall. He was also involved with Jessica Harper, the actress who appeared in Love and Death.

  These should have been the best years of his life. Instead, he felt that his entire existence had been warped by success. He never got used to the gawkers, freaks, and mutants who looked as if they had escaped from a Diane Arbus photograph, ghouls who ran up to him, shouted his name from buses, collared him in restaurants, stalked him home, even touched him, which made him recoil. Sometimes he felt like "a prisoner in my own home, when I feel like, oh, I don't want to go down and get the papers because some people will say hello to me. So I stay in." When he did go out, especially if it meant walking alone, he felt exposed. Never mind that he had hungered to see his name in lights. Now there was "no place to hide."

  Fame, once his motive for living, then "an inconvenience, a pain in the ass," had now turned into a raging beast. Ultimately, he developed the knack of subtracting himself from the picture. At Michael's Pub he zoned out and fiddled with his mouthpiece, never making eye contact with the audience. Tucking his chin into his armpit, he gazed down or up or to one side, looking less like a jazz musician than a schoolkid hoping not to be called on. To disguise himself on the street, he began wearing a tan fishing hat, which he kept scrunched over his ears like a Saxon helmet, as if dressed for battle. With his face obscured he felt less vulnerable. In time, however, the hat became a trademark around town, and then he hid inside a hooded parka. "He was full of contradictions," said Eric Pleskow. "He didn't want to be recognized but he had a white Rolls. I could never figure it out."

  Most of his fans were harmless, but some of them truly scared him. One night, he was chatting with Vivian Gornick at Michael's Pub, when a man planted himself next to their table. "Love you," he told Woody, who didn't even look up.

  "No, I mean it," the man said. "I just love you. You're my favorite, you're the greatest." He didn't budge.

  "I appreciate it," Woody said at last, "but you can see we want to talk."

  In the blink of an eye, for no reason, the scene shifted and turned ugly. "I don't give a fuck what you want," the man said. As Gornick recalled, "it happened in a second and it was terrifying." She saw a piece of the picture; Woody saw it whole. Since the mid-1960s, when he first tasted fame, he always had "a fear of being shot by a girl or a psychotic fan who imagines some connection between us." Ten years later, after his face appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, the likelihood of a bullet in his head seemed more real than ever. It was little wonder he developed stomach problems.

  The cross was gone. It was a Christian seaside resort, and one Friday afternoon in early November 1979, disgruntled townspeople were looking up at the Ocean Grove Great Auditorium, where yesterday a crucifix had dangled. In its place, a sign blinked HOTEL STARDUST. Ocean Grove is a tiny community of gingerbread houses next door to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where just about everybody is a practicing Methodist, a town so religious that it's illegal on Sundays to drive a car, ride a bicycle, or fly a kite. The sight of Woody's production crew and a platoon of security guards crawling all over their house of worship elicited angry grumbling. It was terrible how the camp-meeting association had sold out to Woody Allen just to get $25,000 and a new cross.

  Throughout the seventies, Woody socialized regularly with Judith Crist, attending her postholiday "Survival Party" every January, entertaining Crist and her family at his apartment or at Sardi's. In addition to reviewing for TV Guide and the Saturday Review, the fifty-seven-year-old critic hosted monthly film weekends at the Tarryto
wn Conference Center thirty-five miles north of the city. At an orgy of food and film in a rustic setting, some two hundred movie buffs would gather Friday evening in time for cocktails and dinner, then spend the next two days watching movies (many of them as yet unreleased), conducting postmortems, and rubbing elbows with creative artists invited to analyze their work. In its eighth season, by now practically an institution, the Judith Crist Film Weekends drew the same kind of knowledgeable people, Crist explained, "who went to art houses on a Saturday night." Woody had appeared several times as the honored guest and made sure to give Crist advance copies of his films to screen for her confreres.

  In early 1979, he telephoned Crist at her country home in Woodstock. He was thinking about setting his new picture against the background of a "film weekend" and hoped she would have no objection. Crist was thrilled. Naturally, he went on, the story itself would be purely fictional; in fact, he was planning to change the sex of the host. Crist immediately objected. And when she insisted her part be played by a woman, Woody, shrewdly, suggested she herself undertake the role. Crist promised to think about it. As he might have predicted, she declined because she was not an actress and "couldn't spend six months in New Jersey." (In the end, she agreed to do a cameo for $250.)

  Sandy Bates, like his creator, is a former stand-up comic turned superstar comedy film auteur, who now wants to concentrate on serious drama. "It's about malaise," Woody explained. The story takes place in the mind of a spiritually bankrupted individual poised "on the verge of a nervous breakdown." A first cousin of Alvy Singer's, "he's accomplished these things yet they still don't mean anything to him." To make sure he was not mistaken for Sandy, Woody took special precautions to minimize comparisons. In case anyone imagined he might actually be Sandy Bates, he argued loudly that everything in the picture was invented: He never had a girlfriend who had been institutionalized, never dated a French woman with children, fought with studio executives, or employed a chauffeur arrested for mail fraud. Maybe not. But believing that Woody was not Sandy was a lot to ask of audiences who were not, after all, idiots. They took the picture at face value as the most openly autobiographical movie he had ever done.

  There was nothing particularly startling about the exterior parallels between Sandy's career and Woody's. What was shockingly revelatory, however, were the interiors. Sandy, a suppurating pustule of hatred, despises himself and his success and eviscerates just about everybody he knows, not only his women and the condescending Hollywood moguls, but even his sister's pitiful fat friend who has been raped. At the Stardust Hotel for a weekend retrospective of his work, he is besieged by freaks: the pretentious film critic and her tiresome students, a camp follower who bribes her way into his bed after her husband has driven her from Bridgeport, the man who lurches up to tell him "I'm your biggest fan," before shooting him dead (or so Sandy hallucinates). At the end, Sandy is alive and whining, still a gloriously rich crybaby.

  Hollywood Vignettes:

  "Directors can get just about any girl they set their sights on. And if they don't have time to look for themselves, they have pimps scouting for them. The presence of pimps in a social setting can be very unpleasant."

  —Pauline Kael, 1998

  One Wednesday night in November of 1979, Woody was at Elaine's, hunkered down at his table along the wall. As the hour neared midnight, the noise was bouncing off the ceiling, and a fetid cloud of smoky air was hanging over the nobodies stacked up three-deep at the bar. Just as Michael's Pub served Woody in more than one capacity, Elaine's likewise was both restaurant and playground, an uptown annex of the Deer Park. The place was always loaded with attractive women, and Elaine Kaufman would introduce Woody to anyone he fancied.

  This particular night Mia Farrow had just walked in with Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira. The Caines had come from the Barrymore Theatre, where they had seen Mia and Anthony Perkins in a new play, Bernard Slade's Romantic Comedy, and were about to join Mick Jagger for dinner. Mia, having done matinee and evening performances, said she was exhausted and should have gone straight home to bed because she knew it would take forever to get served. She did not appear tired. Pale blue veins showed through skin so milkily translucent that it made her look like an anorexic Botticelli. She had a whispery baby-doll voice, the same silken little-girl manner of Jackie Kennedy. When she was twenty-two, she had been on the cover of Life, which depicted her as "a small forsaken animal that snuggles its way into your lap," the kind of creature that men wanted to cuddle "not in an embrace, but fatherlike, because she seems so hopelessly fragile." In truth, Mia was not the sort to snuggle, nor was she "hopelessly fragile," being more accurately a Lolita of vaulting ambition, who pulled off the considerable coup of marrying Frank Sinatra. Yet, at thirty-four, she still retained some of her superficial childlike qualities.

  Woody knew Mia's sister Tisa, a minor actress whom he had cast in Manhattan as Polly, the girl who had the wrong kind of orgasm. (To whom Isaac replied that even his worst orgasms were smack on the money.) Suddenly remembering that after Manhattan Mia had written him a fan letter, he told her how the compliments had made his day.

  Several months earlier, a photograph of Woody had appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine one Sunday morning. Posing on his roof deck, he was clutching a large black umbrella and gazing into the middle distance with the lugubrious expression of a funeral home director. The flattering article, "The Maturing of Woody Allen," predicted that Woody would become "one of America's major serious film makers." Better yet, it offered him a perfect platform to separate himself from his West Coast contemporaries, the Coppolas and Scorseses with their sex-drugs-and-violence pictures, and to position himself as the American Ingmar Bergman for the eighties. Throughout the interview, in his airy living room filled with plants, against a backdrop of movie-star opulence, Woody sat, barely moving on the edge of his favorite chair. The only time he stood up was to change a Mozart recording to a Beethoven. Of particular interest to him now, he insisted, were feelings, not laughs. In Manhattan, for example, he cut a number of funny scenes because they were "superfluous. They stopped the flow. And sometimes they were too funny." It was an audacious idea, a comedian tossing out material because it was too funny.

  A half mile away, in her apartment on the other side of the park, Mia Farrow tore out the article and slipped it into her dictionary. It was not that she sought out powerful men, but they were the only people who thrilled her.

  Memorabilia:

  Woody Allen

  requests the pleasure of your company

  for New Year's Eve

  on December 31st, at ten o'clock

  4 East 75th Street

  New York

  R.S.V.P.

  Helen Gurley and David Brown, after a preparty dinner at Elaine's, whisked over to the Harkness mansion, home of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, where Woody was hosting a party to ring out the seventies and welcome the eighties. The event was, Helen Gurley Brown said, "a hard ticket. If you were invited you went." Among those who were invited and went were Gloria Vanderbilt and her two boys, and Robert De Niro, looking shockingly fat for a new boxing movie. And Mick Jagger, George Plimpton, Lauren Bacall, and Lillian Hellman. And Norman Mailer, Vincent Canby, Pauline Kael, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bette Midler. And Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Robin Williams, plus hundreds more. Afterward, people talked about it as the last great party of the seventies, perhaps one of the great parties of several decades, as thrilling as Truman Capote's legendary black-and-white ball back in 1966. The evening was masterminded by Jean Doumanian, who had drawn up the guest list—the pop stars of politics, music, literature, fashion, and Hollywood—with the same assiduous attention she applied to booking guests for Saturday Night Live. Woody, dressed in tux and tennis shoes, assumed his post at the foot of the grand staircase, looking like a wobbly Ashley Wilkes on the day of the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. While many of the party guests he barely knew, or had never met, probably never wished to
meet, there were a few whose presence genuinely thrilled him. "Earl 'The Pearl' will be here any minute," he whispered in Roger Angell's ear. Besides Earl Monroe, he also invited another of his favorite Knicks stars, Walt Frazier.

  Harkness House was filled with hyacinths, "everywhere in beautiful jars," remembered Andrea Marcovicci, "tons and tons of hyacinths in the middle of winter on every floor. For the cool and hip, there were discos on two of the upper floors. There were buffet tables with filet mignon and shrimp and lobster. At four o'clock in the morning, a breakfast of eggs and bacon was served. I've never seen a party handled more beautifully." In his diary, Andy Warhol admitted that he was impressed. Woody's party was "the best." It was "wall-to-wall famous people," and he added, "we should have gone earlier."

  The March of Time:

  "Mia gets what she wants."

  —Maureen O'Sullivan (Mia's mother), 1967

  Following the introduction at Elaine's, Woody added Mia Farrow's name to the guest list for his New Year's party. She showed up with her sister Stephanie Farrow and Tony Perkins and his wife, Berry Berenson, but dashed out scarcely a half hour later, before ringing in the new year. Woody, wrapped up in his guests, barely said hello.

  A few days after the party, she sent him a bread-and-butter present, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher by Dr. Lewis Thomas, who had previously written the best-selling The Lives of a Cell. No intellectual herself, Mia was nonetheless skilled at selecting a gift for one, and the Thomas work, a collection of science essays, had been chosen with particular care. Aside from its serious subject, the book itself was a message: She was available. Woody, however, failed to pick up on it. The Medusa and the Snail, along with the bouquets and bottles of champagne sent by other guests, was politely acknowledged by Norma Lee Clark, who phoned to say that Mr. Allen sent a thank you and hoped they could have lunch one day.