Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Deconstructing Harry turned out to be Woody's most controversial film since Stardust Memories, primarily owing to the number of film critics and moviegoers it managed to offend. The unpleasant Harry Block was an older version of Sandy Bates, on his hundredth god-awful relationship and his third shrink, a man who still expected the women he mistreated to love him because he was an artist. In the New York Times, Molly Haskell described the picture as "one long diatribe against women, wives, and Jews." Female audiences in particular tended to recoil from Woody's new screen persona, namely the horny senior citizen who becomes involved with pretty young women played by Elisabeth Shue and Julia Roberts. A disgusted Los Angeles Times columnist wondered how many people would want to see Joan Rivers write, direct, and star in movie after movie in which she indulged in sexual liaisons with sexy young men? "Joan in a heavy make-out session with Johnny Depp? Joan lounging in bed, basking in the afterglow with Leonardo DiCaprio?" the writer mused. But Woody, on screen and off, preferred his women very young.

  Equally jolting to filmgoers was a new dirty-talking Woody, whose Harry Block declares: "Beth Kramer's an aggressive, tight-ass, busybody cunt, and it's none of her fucking business how I speak to my son." This extraordinary departure from his neurotic but engaging screen persona was calculated to draw a younger, hipper generation of moviegoers, who, in Jean Doumanian's words, finally "got a film out of Woody they can identify with." That remained to be seen, but some of the younger critics did praise Woody's nerve. "Here's a guy who had been blasted in the press for sexual deviancy," said Neil Rosen. "Instead of defending himself, he said 'Look, I pay hookers, I'm everything they said I was.' He's not an idiot, he knew parallels would be drawn between Harry and himself. But he didn't back away. That was very courageous."

  "Woody's next picture, his twenty-eighth, was Celebrity, about the cult of celebrity and the public's obsession with famous people, a subject with which he could identify. Like his biggest moneymaker, Manhattan, it was filmed in black and white, this time by Sven Nykvist, who had last worked for Woody on Crimes and Misdemeanors, and featured an all-star cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, and Melanie Griffith. Woody's anti-hero is Lee Simon, a lecherous freelance journalist who suffers a mid-thirties crisis, divorces his wife (Davis), and embarks on a quest for life's meaning and a book contract. This time Woody stayed behind the camera and assigned his character to young British actor-director Kenneth Branagh, who is best known for his stellar Shakespearean roles. Rather than creating a character, Branagh did a Woody Allen impersonation, nervous stutters and all, and the director seemed unable to stop him. He recalled taking Branagh aside. "You know," he said, "it seems to me you're doing me."

  "Don't worry," Branagh replied.

  Eventually, Woody recalled, "I just sort of threw in the towel." For some moviegoers, it seemed appropriate that Celebrity began and ended with a plane writing the single word HELP across the Manhattan skyline.

  Miramax Films elected to market Celebrity as an all-star vehicle. In ads, Woody's name appeared in small type, as if the Weinsteins wanted the public not to be aware of his participation. Woody expressed wry amusement. "They're probably ashamed of me," he said. As with most of Woody's pictures, Celebrity had a few flashes of sublime hilarity, but was otherwise a clunky, painfully thin film, a twenty-minute screenplay strung out to two hours. Stanley Kauffmann imagined Woody switching on his word processor and pecking along "hoping that the tapping would lead somewhere. It didn't, but he discovered that he had enough pages for a film anyway." (In reality, Woody still writes on his antique Olympia typewriter.) Dismal reviews lamented Celebrity’ s lack of wit and inspiration; despite a glittering cast, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, and aggressive marketing by Miramax, profits would be disappointing.

  The March of Time:

  "I grew up with Woody. I got old with Woody. He's getting on, not so much making films but simply being in the chase."

  —Andrew Sarris, 1998

  It had been five years since Sweetland Films took charge of Woody’s business. To wring a profit from his movies, Jean Doumanian pledged to cut fat, not muscle, but the numbers did not move in the right direction, and finally there was nothing left but skin and bones. Despite the Los Alamos-type secrecy that surrounded his productions, news leaked out in the spring of 1998 that he had lost virtually every member of his remaining creative team. Those who decamped, presumably unwilling to accept substantial pay reductions, included Sandy Morse, Woody's film editor for twenty-two years; cinematographer Carlo Di Palma; and the set photographer, Brian Hamill. They were replaced by less-expensive personnel. Even the A-list stars who had once happily appeared in Woody's films for cut rates would in the future be working for half of their customary $10,000 a week fee. The only two of Woody's regulars exempt from the pay cuts were his casting director, Juliet Taylor, and Santo Loquasto, the production designer.

  A New York Times article about Woody's financial predicament contained chilly quotes from some of his former associates, who privately blamed the troubles on his affair with Soon-Yi. After the scandal, one of them said off the record, his value was "diluted" and "people weren't knocking down the doors to do business with him." Woody ridiculed the article. "Completely irresponsible journalism," he fumed, adding that it was a hatchet job cooked up by a reporter with "an agenda" to give the impression he was using minor-league people. "But of course that's absurd. We're using top people."

  Increasingly, he seemed insulated from reality, and when unpleasant events intruded, he fell back on denial. With costs averaging $18 to $20 million per feature (and profits in the neighborhood of $6 to $10 million), his pictures regularly lost money, but he pretended not to care. "In today’s American film market," he declared stubbornly to Newsweek's Jack Kroll, "if my films don't make a profit, I know I'm doing something right." Although the exact amount of his compensation was a secret, he continued to take home millions of dollars for each film. He was no spendthrift. "I don't have a boat," he told Kroll. "I don't have a country house. I don't go on elaborate vacations." He was "rich cumulatively because I've done so many films over the years."

  The disintegration of his professional circle continued when he parted company with Sam Cohn, his agent for more than thirty years. In a business of quickie professional marriages, his defection seemed the worst sort of betrayal. "Working with Woody is like holding a puppy," remarked a disgusted film executive. "It's warm and nice, but you know if you hold on too long he's going to piss all over you." Encouraged by Jean, Letty, and Soon-Yi, his personal think tank, he transferred his representation to John Burnham, Diane Keaton's agent at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, whom he hoped would effectively rebuild his business image in Hollywood and find him more acting jobs in mainstream pictures.

  In fact, Woody's recent successes had come from plying his trade as an actor. In 1998 he took the lead in Antz, the story of a heroic misfit ant, which was the first animated feature from the Dreamworks studio of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. Antz was an attempt to do a computer cartoon version of Sleeper, Woody's 1973 hit about a totalitarian society in the twenty-first century. In Antz, Sharon Stone is the voice of the slightly woolly-brained character once played by Diane Keaton, and Woody is Z, a nervous worker ant who has a personality disorder: he thinks too much. The middle child in a family of five million insects, Z’s life is spent toiling in an ant colony in the middle of Central Park. Like Miles Monroe in Sleeper, Z resists regimentation. On the shrink’s couch, he complains of feeling insignificant, but his psychiatrist reminds him that he is. As a disembodied voice, Woody was completely endearing. Unlike his own pictures in recent years, Antz was clever entertainment, which raked in $16.8 million at the box office on opening weekend, more than one of his own films usually earned in several years.

  If he had finally discovered the secret door back into public favor, it was sad but predictable. Time and again, for many in the netherworld of film auteurs, their declining years were spent in p
recisely such endeavors. For instance, Orson Welles, who was forced to scrounge for work after failing to obtain funding for his film projects, was cursed with having to narrate Bugs Bunny Superstar, and Buster Keaton in his later years made Alka-Seltzer television commercials. That modern audiences liked Woody better as a bug than as a human being on the screen must have given even Woody Allen pause for reflection.

  EPILOGUE

  Victim of an Irregular Verb

  In writing about a living figure, there is no way to spin out an ending to the story. When exactly will the subject draw his final breath? Will he leave in a rush or float away? What, if any, secrets will a death certificate or an autopsy report spew forth as a mischievous finale? And of course, in the case of a long-distance runner such as Woody, whose life continues to pour out, there may be surprises yet to come.

  Even so, most of his dreams of adulation and honor came true long ago, although not his striving for a series of serious films that would rank alongside those of the great masters. If his goals fell short by his own yardstick, judging by any other measurement he succeeded far beyond any reasonable expectation. "Who else has written, acted in, and directed his own films over such a length of time?" said Vincent Canby. "In any discipline, that kind of longevity would be mind-boggling. He has dominated the second half of the twentieth century."

  In all possible ways his everyday life approximated his celluloid world, which practically never guaranteed a happy ending. There was always what the philosophers call "the grit in the oyster." In both worlds, he played by his own rules. Having never learned the art of accommodation, he felt no need to please, compromise, collaborate, or regret. "Guilt," says one of his characters in Bullets Over Broadway, "is petty bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe." All the admirable qualities that have won him a unique place in American filmmaking—all his daring, toughness, perfectionism, and fierce artistic independence—have been strangely misapplied in his personal life.

  By following the logic of his heart, Woody paid heavily. The cost of pleasure, marriage or no marriage, added up to millions in legal fees, the loss of his children, and abandonment by his audience, altogether a remarkable price, but he seems not to care. Just as Charlie Chaplin would never be forgiven his transgressions with un-American politics and underage girls, the public’s memories of the sex scandal and accusations of child molestation stubbornly cling like barnacles to Woody's reputation. "There are some things people never forget," muses Andrew Sarris. "After forty years, we still associate the name of Charles Van Doren with the scandal of the quiz show contestants. I don't think Woody's scandal will ever go away either. It has cost him his primary audience. Women in particular abandoned him. The technical definition of incest doesn't matter so much as the fact that he meddled with the family, and you can't do that. In films like Manhattan, he set himself up as a moral paragon, but all that came tumbling down. People decided he was a hypocrite." A contrarian view is offered by Roger Ebert, who contends that "it was the kind of escalating situation people go through during a messy divorce. There was no evidence that he was guilty of the charges. I don't think people think about it now. Life goes on."

  Among film critics—the ubiquitous Greek chorus who for a living has followed Woody's artistic progress over two or three decades—his legacy continues to be debated. The critics have themselves grown old and faded— and in some cases, considerably more mellow. John Simon, after sticking pins in Woody all those years, now asks, "How can you debate whether the Eiffel Tower adds to or detracts from Paris? He's part of the landscape, and we would be poorer without him. His productivity is admirable. Quantity can be impressive because it proves he has energy, ideas, creative spirit. Some people have done their best work in their seventies or eighties. On the other hand, you can outstay your welcome in any field."

  Another detractor who admits that he still arrives at Woody's screenings with a sense of anticipation is Stanley Kauffmann. "He's written some of the funniest lines I know of in films. He's not a major artist but a notable and unique figure who will be remembered by the history books as an object of study and scrutiny." Kauffmann thinks Woody's films have sociological interest. "Like Jules Feiffer, he dramatized modern urban Jewish neuroses. One of the reasons for his critical success is that people recognize his contribution to America's understanding of itself. That's an achievement. Probably the future will think more highly of him than we do."

  Twenty floors beneath Woody's penthouse, a ribbon of night traffic on Fifth Avenue spiraled slowly toward midtown. A half-mile distant on the western edge of Central Park gleamed the tiny white lights of the apartment houses along Central Park West: the Dakota, the San Remo, the Beresford. From his windows Woody could pick out the Langham, to which he once rushed each morning at dawn. No longer did he heed the ghostly Langham, long abandoned by his loved ones, who were carried away on tides of tears and hatred.

  Eight hard years had passed since Mia Farrow beheld the photographs of her daughter on his mantelpiece. On that mild January afternoon in 1992, the long love affair between Woody and Mia—and his adoring public, for that matter—came to an end. Now he went about his business quietly making a picture of his own each year and, every so often, films for other directors. You would think he'd have left the tempestuous years behind him. Not so. For one thing, he has scripted a life meant to be played in the limelight. And don't forget his infinite capacity for pulling rabbits out of hats.

  One sunny Saturday in the spring of 1999, a clump of four or five paparazzi were gathered, without much enthusiasm, outside the Giorgio Armani boutique at Sixty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue waiting for Jerry Seinfeld to leave the store with his girlfriend, Jessica Sklar. Nothing much was happening. Seinfeld and Sklar were not that hot anymore. It was shaping up to be a lazy, routine, boring afternoon, remembered Lawrence Schwartzwald. "We were standing there when all of a sudden—boom!—there were Woody and Soon-Yi coming up the block from Park Avenue. They were coming straight at us, and they were pushing this stroller. What the hell! Look there! Oh, my God! Everybody started shooting." The previous year, when Soon-Yi looked to have "a little belly," Woody had assured the paparazzi that his wife was not pregnant, and so now the excited photographers swarmed around and began peppering the couple with questions.

  "Is the baby yours?" asked Schwartzwald, one of Woody's favorite paparazzo, whose shots appear regularly in the New York Post.

  With the Saturday shoppers coming and going, as the cameras clicked away all at once, Soon-Yi paid no attention to the question. Somewhat reluctantly, Woody finally acknowledged it was indeed their child.

  "How old is it?"

  "I can't tell you that," Woody replied.

  Looking at the baby, Schwartzwald judged it to be "about six weeks or two months old and one hundred percent Asian. There was not one bump on the kid's nose that came from Woody Allen. Then it dawned on me that it was adopted." Walking alongside the stroller, he asked Woody for the child's name.

  "I'll tell you later," Woody said. But when Schwartzwald handed him a business card and pencil, he printed, "BECHET DUMAINE," and in parentheses, he added, "GIRL." Trailed by the paparazzi, Woody and Soon-Yi kept walking until they reached Fifth Avenue, then headed north to their apartment.

  On Sunday morning, Schwartzwald's photo ran on the front page of the Post. By then the media had figured out that the name Bechet was a tribute to Woody's idol, Sidney Bechet. As for Dumaine, it turned out to be the name of a street in New Orleans.

  In the eighteen months since his marriage, Woody appeared to have achieved a degree of serenity. "About nine or ten years ago," recalled Larry Schwartzwald, "he used to look terrified all the time, nervous, twitching, as if he were suffering a perpetual anxiety attack. He never made eye contact. Shaking hands with him was like touching a dead, cold fish. But all that has changed in the last year or so. He's settled. He jokes. He seems happy."

  A few months later, Woody sold his penthouse for $14 million. He bought a $17
-million, five-story townhouse on East Ninety-second Street, where there would be more room to raise a child.

  One thing that he had never made secret was his desire to have a family with Soon-Yi. But why they preferred adoption over the natural method is a mystery. Does she—or he—suffer fertility problems? Was she trying to recreate her own beginnings?

  And what about the Farrow-Allen offspring, who had taken their places in Woody's story as outtakes, like unused footage trimmed but not forgotten? "I went as far as I could go, every legal channel," he said in 1998. Comforting friends assure him that his kids, Satch, Dylan, even Moses, will someday seek him out. He is not so sure. In fact, he has lost all hope of ever seeing them again.

  At the same time, though, his imagination occasionally runs wild, as when he fancied the possibility of resuming a friendship with Mia. "It's not my personality to continue a feud. So if I got a phone call tomorrow saying, 'Let's have a drink and talk things over,' well, I'd be there in a shot. It would be nice." He has a better chance of being struck by a meteoroid.

  Such a fantasia ignores the rancor on both sides. Mia has said she can't imagine trusting men again. "When I introduce them to my children, what do I say: 'Don't diddle with the daughters'?"

  Just as the passage of forty years never deterred Woody from continuing to insult Harlene in his films, his need to even the score with Mia still burns white-hot. At every opportunity, he brands her unfit to raise children. In an interview with Erica Jong for a women's fashion magazine, he savagely undermined Mia's reputation as "a supermother. You just can't provide correct parental attention to thirteen or fourteen kids." He then tendered the eccentric notion that his former lover quarantined her children "in a cultish compound in Connecticut where going out has always been discouraged," thereby conjuring up gruesome images of a Jim Jonesian jungle outpost. Had he wished to go into detail, he hinted darkly, "there are many horrible things I could say." Although the horrible things are left to the imagination, his charges immediately created an almost Pavlovian response from Mia. Shortly thereafter, she invited Inside Edition, a television tabloid show, to tour Frog Hollow, ostensibly to prove to the public that her current household of seven children bore no resemblance to a cult.