Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  A native Californian who in her youth had romanticized New York as extravagantly as Woody, the forty-four-year-old Didion had constructed an impressive career as novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and essayist. Training her critical eye on Manhattan, she immediately began finding fault. Woody's characters impressed her as whiny elitists constantly moaning about their lives over expensive meals at Elaine's, perpetual adolescents whose concerns "are those of clever children, ‘class brains,' acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life." Their bad manners were appalling, likewise their eternal dissatisfaction over relationships and their tiresome habits of name-dropping. As for their obsession with externals, Didion especially loathed the scene that everyone seemed to adore, the famous monologue (purloined from Bob Hope's theme song "Thanks for the Memory") in which Isaac lists his reasons to go on living—Groucho Marx, Frank Sinatra, Cezanne's apples, Swedish films, Louis Armstrong's "Potato Head Blues." (Most middle-aged adults would have included their children.) Woody's trivial pleasures, all of them passive, Didion concluded, amounted to nothing more than "the ultimate consumer report." There was nothing in Manhattan—or for that matter in Annie Hall or Interiors—for reasonable people to admire.

  Didion's pitiless essay, immediately famous among the Review's highbrow readership, naturally got under Woody's skin. Didion quickly forgot both the movie and her article because having once written about a film, with a few exceptions, "it leaves my mind altogether." Her sniping didn't leave Woody's mind. As a loyal subscriber of the New York Review of Books, he usually read the paper on the day of arrival, "or else it piles up, and becomes a matter of guilt." Didion's review was sufficiently enraging that two years later, still smarting, he fussed to Gene Siskel that Didion "accused me of things that clearly are not fair. And I felt that just wasn't right." Never would he understand that fairness per se was not the critic's mission, just as never would he devise a surefire way to manipulate them, although in Stardust Memories he got some measure of revenge by depicting them as braying jackasses.

  The disdain of Joan Didion, sweetheart of the New York literati, proved to be merely a warm-up for the hurricane of denunciation that was to follow.

  Vincent Canby championed Stardust Memories as "marvelous" and "breathtaking," but his reaction was atypical. Pauline Kael, who did a drive-by shooting of Annie Hall ("the neurotics version of Abie's Irish Rose"), thought Stardust Memories was an ugly work that degraded the people who liked Woody's pictures, then turned around and presented its creator as their victim. She decided he must be "crazy." The hostility of a stand-up comic toward his audience was remotely understandable, but the contempt of a filmmaker for fans who revered him, whom he bloodied as big-nosed, fat-lipped grotesques, was simply incomprehensible. "The Jewish self-hatred that spills out in this movie could be a great subject, but all it does is spill out," she wrote. If Woody found success so painful, Stardust Memories "should help him stop worrying" because he had just pulled the plug on himself.

  Years later, Kael told friends that her pummeling of Stardust Memories ended her friendship with Woody Allen. "What a shame that he took it so personally," someone commiserated.

  "Oh no," Kael replied. "It was vicious."

  Emerging from the press screening, Andrew Sarris thought that "the way in which he put down both his own family and also people who were swarming over him was very knowingly nasty." His review blasted Stardust Memories for being "the most mean-spirited and misanthropic film I have seen in years and years from anyone" and recommended Woody's latest only to "people who would consider it a privilege to pay $5 to watch Woody gargle in the men's room at Elaine's." In National Review, John Simon branded Woody an "existential sniveler" whose "small, Jewish, and ugly" hero, Sandy, like Woody himself, "has an insatiable yen for big beautiful shiksas, to be conquered as plentifully and publicly as possible." Undoubtedly, Simon's comments about Woody's sex life were injudicious. Likewise, equating Michael's Pub with the Hotel Stardust, Woody's real-life and fictional hunting grounds, was not really fair, either. But when Simon went on to mention personal details—such as Woody's affair with Jessica Harper—that didn't belong in a film review, he went too far. As for Judith Crist, the Tarrytown movie queen memorialized in the film, she first saw it at a critics' screening, where she came down with a sudden case of myopia. "I didn't see myself," she remembered. "Then I paid admission at the Little Carnegie. The second time I also missed myself. I am devout about Woody's talent but I can't remember a single line of the movie. I hate to say it but it is my least favorite Woody film." In the Saturday Review, referring caustically to blatant similarities to Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, Crist called the picture Woody's 9 1/2, and concluded that "what we have here falls into the category of kvetch."

  Generating similar degrees of hostility in customers as well, Stardust Memories did disappointing business. Outside of New York, it opened and closed in three or four weeks. Woody regarded the controversial picture "the best I ever did," and certainly it was his most honest in trying to convey a truth about fame, but nobody wanted to hear it. He expected to catch "a lot of flack." All the same, he was surprised about the extent of the animosity. "So many people were outraged that I dared to suggest an ambivalent love/hate relationship between an audience and a celebrity. This is what happens with celebrities. One day people love you, the next day they want to kill you." Woody had it right. Ten weeks after the opening of Stardust Memories, about a half mile from Woody's house, John Lennon was shot and killed by a fan who had asked for his autograph earlier in the day.

  Caught on Tape:

  "I'm a spartan. I have no bad habits whatsoever."

  —Woody Allen interview, 1977

  As a result of Stardust Memories, the press began gunning for him. In a scathing cover story assigned to one of their crackerjack metropolitan reporters, the New York Times Magazine ripped Woody's Boy Scout image to tatters. Before coming to the Times, Tony Schwartz had been a political columnist at the leftist magazine New Times. Now he specialized in celebrity profiles that exposed clay feet. In Woody's case this meant shining a light into the dark corners of his life, illuminating the spartan Jewish boy next door from Brooklyn, who wore famously rumpled clothes and put art ahead of commerce. Predictably, Schwartz's investigation hit pay dirt. "What Mr. Allen says is often at variance with the way he really lives," he wrote in "The Conflicting Life and Art of Woody Allen."

  According to Schwartz, the spartan lived the extravagant life of a movie star. He had a luxurious penthouse duplex on Fifth Avenue with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park, and it was stuffed with Persian rugs and French provincial tables. He had a trained Cordon Bleu cook doubling as a full-time housekeeper, and a secretary screening his calls. He had a chauffeur driving a new Rolls, cream-colored, about a block long, with smoked windows so that nobody could see him. He had Ralph Lauren make his jackets, Carrier engrave his party invitations. Schwartz uncovered much else, including the personal publicist on retainer solely for the purpose of turning down interviews supposedly because Woody hated discussing his private life. He had the best table at Elaine's. And he had his personal sex buffet full of "young, unattached women, who stood back by the bar" at Michael's Pub, smoking and drinking white wine. About the only possessions Schwartz managed to overlook were Woody's four VIP courtside season tickets at the Garden, behind the scorer’s table, choice seats that set him back more than most people earned in a year (the seats in section 16, row B, cost $232,000 in 1999).

  Eyewitness:

  "She'd make us watch a tape of the show and say, 'What was wrong?' We'd say it wasn't funny. She'd say, 'Okay, now you know what's wrong. Now go and knock 'em dead.' Real depth and direction there, right?"

  —Eddie Murphy's recollection of Jean Doumanian

  "Studio 8H," answered the production assistant. "Hi. This is Mo Golden calling. Is Jean there?"

  The PA put the call on hold. "Jean!" he screamed. "Woody's on the phone!"

  Everyone at Saturday Night Live knew th
e identity of the mysterious Mo Golden. When Jean was talent coordinator, Woody made regular, frequent calls to her private number. After she became producer in the summer of 1980, he was a huge unseen presence hovering over the seventeenth floor. Because earlier he had helped her get the booking job, there was speculation that he was in some way involved in her promotion to producer. That her qualifications were shaky seemed to be reinforced by the incessant phone calls, a virtual Woody hot line, the impression that she could do nothing without consulting him. Aside from the "Mo Golden" calls, she accepted his suggestions about hiring writers and gave his sister a job as researcher.

  From the start, Doumanian alienated her staff. It was not the redecoration of her office (everybody did that), or the robed swami who came up to deliver herbs. It was not even her mispronunciation of words such as Oedipus (she pronounced it "Ode-i-pus"), although this generated plenty of unkind titters. Rather, it was her abrasive management style. People at SNL did not cut other people dead in the hall.

  One day, making conversation, a newly hired writer inquired, "Where are you from?"

  "Why is that important to you?" Jean said suspiciously.

  "Just a friendly question," replied Peter Tauber, who concluded that talking to Jean "was like talking to the great Inca sun god. Jean's office was like a throne room. During writers' meetings, she made us sit on the floor while she sat behind a black onyx desk. Sometimes she would rotate her chair and take a telephone call for a half hour. She'd go out to dinner and leave us waiting. Like we were inferior beings." The friendly Tauber would find himself fired before the new season got under way.

  "She pissed off a lot of people," said Laurie Zaks, who was Jean's secretary before Jean rose to power. "She didn't treat people well. For obvious reasons, it was the wrong job for a person who is not really creative. She was just not equipped to be producer of Saturday Night Live."

  In revenge, the staff adopted Tauber's name for her, the "Ayatollah Doumanian," and leaked nasty stories to the media. As a result, Marvin Kitman of Newsday would respond by nicknaming her "Jean Dobermanpinscher." "Anyone who replaced Lome Michaels would have been in the hot seat," pointed out costumer Karen Roston. Sure enough, the press gleefully mashed Doumanian when the season began in November, wisecracking that the show's trademark opening ("Live from New York, it's Saturday Night") ought to be changed to "Dead from New York, it's Saturday night!"

  In spite of her connections to Woody (and her discovery of Eddie Murphy), Jean Doumanian failed to survive the season. In March 1981, she was replaced by a man. Recalled Karen Roston, "One day I went in and she was not there." According to staff gossip, Jean received a million-dollar settlement.

  Moving Pictures:

  Voice-over: "The first time I ever saw Radio City Music Hall... it was like entering heaven."

  —Radio Days, 1987

  Crowning them "The Couple of the Year," the New York Daily News chronicled Woody and Mia's shopping and dining habits as they cruised around Manhattan. Among Mia's romantic purchases was $260 worth of old movies at Video Shack (including Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M). At Christmas, she was seen in Bloomingdale's, buying a Woody doll. A connoisseur of fine wines, he began running up hefty bills at the D. Sokolin vintners on Madison Avenue. To avoid prying eyes in restaurants, they hid behind menus. No matter, because the press managed to obtain details of their breakfast orders at the Carnegie Delicatessen—where Woody would order Rice Krispies and soft-boiled eggs; Mia, sturgeon on rye bread—and spied on them at Pearl's, his favorite Chinese restaurant, to report them holding hands, crossing their arms over the table. By the end of 1980, the News had Woody proposing.

  When the proposal came it was not of marriage. For Woody, commitment took the form of creating a movie role for Mia, transforming her into his leading lady just as he had with Louise Lasser and Diane Keaton. After Rosemary's Baby, Mia had struggled to become an accomplished actress. All told, she had acted in seventeen motion pictures, performed Chekhov and Gorky with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and played Peter Pan, opposite Danny Kaye as Captain Hook, on a Hallmark Hall of Fame television musical in 1976. (Julie Andrews's singing was dubbed in to replace hers.) Her most memorable role was in a big-budget Hollywood production of The Great Gatsby, in which she played F. Scott Fitzgerald's ethereal heroine Daisy Buchanan, opposite Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. "Every major actress wanted the part," recalled Robert Evans, then head of production at Paramount. "Like Scarlett O'Hara, no matter how big the star, they all had to lower themselves to be tested. Not one actress refused. One morning I opened a letter and a pressed daisy fell out; the note read, 'May I be your Daisy? Love, Mia.' " Mia stole the highly coveted role away from Ali McGraw, Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, and Katharine Ross because the producers decided only she had the right vulnerability, that hint of "spoiled arrogance," Evans recalled. Several weeks into production, however, the executives at Paramount were outraged to learn that Mia was pregnant. Rather than replace her, which would have cost a fortune, the studio was forced to shoot her scenes before her condition showed. In The Great Gatsby, Mia looked so radiant that Time, Inc., chose her as the cover girl for the first issue of its new weekly magazine People. The movie, unfortunately, turned out to be a box-office flop, and Mia's acting proved little more than adequate, causing her dream of superstardom to recede like the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock.

  "It was an impossible situation," recalled Steven Bach, who was head of worldwide production for United Artists at the time. "I knew it and he knew it but neither one of us could say so."

  One afternoon in the fall of 1980, Woody met with Bach at the Russian Tea Room on West Fifty-seventh Street, next door to the Rollins and Joffe office. He was polite but poker-faced. Finally his contract with UA was coming to an end. In 1978, when Krim and the Medici formed Orion Pictures, Woody clung to an old-fashioned sense of honor about professional commitments and stayed on to make Interiors, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. All this time, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe played dumb and kept telling UA they knew nothing of Woody's plans and had no influence over his decision. However, they kept repeating like a mantra, "Arthur is like a father to Woody."

  "It was perfectly clear to me that we were not going to get to keep him," Bach said. "But trying to keep him was my most important single function in three years, more important than Heaven’s Gate [the notorious thirty-six million dollar debacle that helped sink the studio and became a generic term for calamity]. If Heaven’s Gate had opened as disastrously as it did on one day, and Woody had agreed to stay at UA the next day, United Artists would still be in business as of old. It was that important."

  In spite of an extremely generous counteroffer, Steven Bach and UA failed, and in December 1980, Woody decamped to Orion. The new deal paid him 15 percent of a picture's gross receipts, which he would divvy up with Rollins and Joffe and Robert Greenhut, his producer since Annie Hall. Soon after, he began developing his first film project with the twin themes of conformity and celebrity, a subject he had explored in Stardust Memories but that continued to preoccupy him. Despite the drubbing he took for that picture, he was not finished with the issue of unhappiness born of success and fame and refused to drop material that the public cared nothing about. In his first offering for Orion, smarting from accusations that he relied too heavily on Bergman and Fellini, he came up with a concept that was original from start to finish. And for good measure, he quietly remade Stardust Memories.

  Set during the late '20s and early '30s, the story purports to be a real documentary about Leonard Zelig, a man who wants so badly to be liked that he tries to fit in everywhere. Insecure and anxious, he can't help assuming the personality, even the appearance, of people he meets. For example, contact with a black musician makes him change into a black musician; conversation with a psychiatrist transforms him into a learned doctor, and so forth. As a consequence of this miraculous talent, Zelig the Human Chameleon quickly becomes an international celebrity feted with ticker-tape parades
and merchandised with board games and dolls, songs and dance crazes. At the same time, fame takes its toll and "the price he paid was being an unhappy, empty human being," Woody explained. In the end, Leonard walks off into the sunset after falling in love with his psychiatrist (played by Mia). Cured, he loses his neuroses and becomes an ordinary man.

  Technically, the film was brilliant. To integrate a modern-day character into historical footage, Woody, his cinematographer Gordon Willis, and editor Sandy Morse used more than thirty hours of stock footage from old newsreels, photographs, and radio broadcasts, as well as seventy-five hours of newly shot black-and-white footage that simulated historical scenes. To capture the sounds of the past, they recorded them using microphones made in 1928, when sound technology was in its infancy. By use of mattes (optical devices), new material could be superimposed on old footage, resulting in a startling scene showing Leonard at an actual rally for Hitler. In order to embed Woody's image into a thirties newsreel, new footage had to be painstakingly aged to match the graininess of the old. The result was a seamless match that demonstrated Woody's consummate skill as a technician.

  In the spring of 1981, before principal photography was scheduled to begin on his human chameleon picture, Woody grew panicky. He was pathologically fearful of free time and here he was, becalmed, with nothing to do. To sustain himself, he decided to toss off "a bon-bon, a little dessert," basically a home movie to show off the delicate beauty of his photogenic new girlfriend. It would be a homespun, summertime idyll with people chasing butterflies and playing badminton and show the country "the way I want it to be, with golden vistas, and flowers, animals, moon, stars, all in 1906," he told Roger Ebert. In six days he completed the script for Summer Nights, a romantic comedy set at the turn of the century that brings together three couples for a weekend. Woody plays Andrew, a stockbroker who dabbles as an inventor (his latest: a flying bicycle), and Mary Steenburgen is his sexually inhibited wife. They are joined by Andrew's best friend, Maxwell, a lecherous doctor accompanied by an oversexed nurse (Tony Roberts and Julie Hagerty), and a pompous elderly philosopher and his sexy young fiancee (Jose Ferrer and Mia). No sooner have these free-thinking couples assembled than they begin regrouping in a game of sexual musical chairs. By mid-June Woody was preparing to shoot in pastoral Pocantico Hills, New York, on the grounds of the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown.