Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Woody's adoption of little Bechet chilled Mia. "I don't know how the courts permitted this," she declared. "Especially in light of a judge not allowing Mr. Allen to see his own children. I guess if you have enough celebrity, you can snow anybody." In case anyone had forgotten, she added that "I have a son [Satchel] whose sister is married to his father." Some of Mia's children, she went on to report, were in therapy and "some are on antidepressants." The person she faulted for all of these fractured lives is "an old pedophile," which was why she felt "frightened" for Bechet Dumaine Allen.

  Woody, who is now sixty-four, appears older than his age. The person who had always been eternally boyish for the camera looks tired and somewhat crumpled. He seems oblivious to his physical changes, however. "I'm very compartmentalized," he remarked edgily. "For better or for worse, even during all that chaos I was able to just snap it off. It's a survival mechanism." Who could say that life cracked him? Who could ever deny that he has outlasted the twists and turnings of experience? On his face, for all to read, are the scars that prove it.

  Moving Pictures:

  Professor Levy: But we define ourselves by the choices we have made.

  —Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1988

  APPENDIX

  Woody in 2010

  In recent years, when some filmmakers rushed to embrace computer-generated visual effects, Woody continued to make traditional pictures that relied on good stories simply told, which was what he had been doing ever since Take the Money and Run. During the first decade of the 21st century he released ten films, one each year like a smoker with a pack-a-day habit. In his case, this kind of disciplined schedule has provided a healthy structure for his life. And in his case, blessed with really, really long-lived parents, the routine will likely keep him going for years to come. In fact, he has no plans to retire and has said he will go on making films as long as he isn’t “dribbling or hooked up.”

  Two of the ten pictures turned out to be hits. Match Point, in 2005, took in $85 million (worldwide), and three years later Vicky Cristina Barcelona earned $96 million. Both films were highly successful, critically and financially. Woody himself believes Match Point to be one of his very best. An artful thriller reminiscent of Crimes and Misdemeanors, the story depicts a group of spoiled London yuppies, and would-be yuppies, who while superficially attractive tend to be quite rotten at heart. Vicky Cristina Barcelona brought him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, his first Oscar since 1995. Not that he suddenly overcame his disdain of such awards, not that he attended the ceremony, but it is hard to deny that recognition for Penelope Cruz’s bravura performance was substantial publicity.

  The remaining bunch of movies did less well, taking in under $40 million a piece. Measured by audience reaction, they fell into two distinct categories: Pretty Good and Flops. Such releases as Scoop, Whatever Works, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger were judged to be entertaining, reflecting the old Woody who could be relied upon for a few memorable bits. Then there were the five years in a row, post-scandal, when he released a string of comedies that did disappointing business. Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Anything Else, and Melinda and Melinda covered a range of comic themes, from hopelessly hairbrained crooks to blind Hollywood directors. Still, they were not especially funny, not even to his core audience who would watch practically anything he made. To some critics it seemed pretty obvious that, having wrecked his life, he was falling apart under the stress of public disapproval. However, this slump now looks more like a period of treading water with minor films not up to his usual standards, rather than a career in decline.

  Ranking lowest in box office value was Cassandra’s Dream. This 2007 crime melodrama about two working class London brothers turned out to be an undercooked project and despite the interesting Irish actor Colin Farrell audiences stayed away. It earned less than $1 million in the U.S. ($22 million worldwide). Unfazed, he bounced back strong with his next project, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, about two American women summering in picturesque Barcelona, a swooning meditation on love, loss, and Latin lovers, which came out a winner.

  Once famous for providing the world with a cinematic Zagat guide to New York, he seldom sets his stories there anymore. His career entered a new phase in 2005 after the money had dried up and he was obliged to look overseas for backing. This led to a difficult departure from his lifelong habit of shooting in his own backyard. And so his stories now took place in London and Spain. This was a wise move because his popularity internationally had never faded. In recent years he’s been getting more than 75 percent of his ticket sales abroad (compared to 50 percent for the average American film).

  For a change of pace, he returned home briefly in 2007 to film a script originally written in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. In Whatever Works, Larry David plays a misanthrope who befriends a homeless girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Boris and Melody’s marriage horrifies everyone, but the old guy’s unrepentant philosophy of life is that happiness should be taken where you find it, that is, do “whatever works.” Not surprisingly, this happens to represent Woody’s own private view.

  For his next films Woody returned to Europe. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, starring seventy-three-year-old Sir Anthony Hopkins, is a comedy about a philandering oldster determined to recapture his lost youth. The tall dark stranger? Nobody but the Grim Reaper himself. The next summer of 2010 found Woody back in Europe, this time in Paris—the city where he filmed ravishing sequences for his musical Everyone Says I Love You in 1995. Midnight in Paris, his 41st film, a romantic comedy that tells of a family trip to Paris, stars Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard and made news by casting a local celebrity. A cameo role featured Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the elegant songwriter-singer-ex-model who is married to the President of France.

  As a filmmaker Woody is a megastar but his enormous success frequently tends to overshadow the rest of his career. For all he has accomplished in movies—41 films as of this writing— he continues to keep busy with side projects. A classic over-achiever, he is also an actor, comedian, playwright, musician, and author. Some of these creative activities have been dropped, as an example he has not acted in his own films since Scoop in 2006, while other interests were picked up or continued. He directed an opera, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, for the Los Angeles Opera, and also played the Montreal Jazz Festival with his New Orleans jazz band, both in 2008.

  As a writer of humorous short fiction he has few equals. After a twenty-year absence from The New Yorker, he started contributing pieces again in 2000, turning out hilarious stories like “Tails of Manhattan,” about Bernie Madoff and a pair of reincarnated lobsters. His literary collections, four volumes published between 1971 and 2007, are now available in digital audiobook editions. Woody himself recorded the readings, a decision he immediately regretted. “I was persuaded in a moment of apathy when I was convinced I had a fatal illness and would not live much longer.” Reading out loud was exhausting, as he told the press, and what’s more he realized that sometimes the written word was meant to be read, not heard.

  At the age of seventy-five, it is not unusual to experience a bit of a creative slump. Even filmmakers—especially filmmakers— tend to run out of gas. By that time of life, Orson Welles was dead, and so were Stanley Kubrick and D.W. Griffith. Physically and mentally, directing is draining; fresh stories don’t grow on trees. Yet with Woody’s amazing work ethic it seems doubtful he will slow down soon.

  Whether or not his work meets with approval does not seem to trouble him. Of course he would welcome fine reviews, huge audiences, blockbuster earnings. Who would not? These issues are not important enough, however, to influence what he writes or how he directs, or even who he casts (although hiring Bruni-Sarkozy certainly seems publicity-motivated). The older he gets, the less he really cares about box office. “I really don’t care if they come or not,” he has insisted.

  When the London Times asked him to look back and name the best of his films, t
he answer was a bit unexpected. Failing to make the cut were some of his masterworks, the very ones his fans adore: Annie Hall, Sleeper, Manhattan, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. The pictures he did chose were: The Purple Rose of Cairo, Zelig, Husbands and Wives, Bullets Over Broadway, Match Point, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It is interesting that half of those starred Mia Farrow.

  In New York he is still (along with the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty) an icon. His ecosystem remains the Upper East Side neighborhood where he has lived since 1959. The editing office, tucked into the first floor of The Beekman, still occupies the same threadbare suite of rooms; the home addresses have changed but little, from the Fifth Avenue penthouse to townhouses on East 92nd and East 70th streets. His children attend private schools. He dines at plush restaurants. As he doesn’t drive, a chauffeur ferries him around. He exists, he has acknowledged, “in a bit of a bubble in New York. I don’t live exactly realistically.” Don’t expect much to change. He likes it that way, down below the radar.

  In his little world, the surroundings have varied hardly at all over the years, and neither have his daily routines: treadmill, shower, a bowl of Cheerios with raisins and a sliced banana for breakfast, clarinet practice. He’s not crazy about change and avoids certain modern technology that most people might consider necessities. He has an iPhone, for instance, but neither owns nor uses a computer. His e-mail is read to him by his secretary, and he dictates his response. He does not have a Kindle (although one of his children does), saying he much prefers watching baseball and basketball to reading books. It goes without saying that he does not browse the Web or post his thoughts on a Twitter account; Woody Allen Facebook pages were created by fans.

  Getting older is the main thing that has changed for him. Like it or not, his hair has gone white, and he worries about death more often than he usually did, which was frequently. Seniors don’t get smarter or wiser, "but your back hurts more, you get more indigestion, your eyesight isn't as good and you need a hearing aid.” Everything about this stage of the game is “a lousy deal.” When he dies, he’d like to be cremated, no memorials, no fuss. He wants his ashes scattered on Madison Avenue.

  His marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, in its twelfth year, is “the one relationship in my life that worked,” he says. The couple has two adopted daughters, Bechet Dumaine and Manzie Tio, twelve and ten, who are named after jazz musicians Sidney Bechet and Manzie Johnson. There is little resemblance between the slender college girl of 1992, brimming with defiance, and Mrs. Woody Allen. Forty years old, she looks like a pleasant, matronly East Side mom, the kind who doesn’t stand out in a crowd. On occasion they are sighted at the theater or at high-end restaurants like Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Mark but it’s Woody who causes passersby to do a double take, not his wife.

  By no means a recluse, he gives personal interviews as appropriate, generally in connection with the release of his latest picture. Dressed in his usual outfit—white or blue shirt, no tie, and khaki trousers— he comes across as genuinely self-effacing when receiving visitors in his Park Avenue office. Chatting easily about himself, he talks about his hearing aid and exercise regimen, how he hates the treadmill, rarely eats meat, and finds aging to be a drag. Dark thoughts are bathed in droll banter: “I’m a firm believer that when you’re dead, naming a street after you doesn’t help your metabolism.” He knows his way around the press, by now a veteran at guarding his privacy and establishing distance. It is hardly surprising that conversations do not involve details about his marriage or his experience as the father of two pre-teen girls. Nobody seems to have inquired why he and Soon-Yi adopted children, or what it’s like raising kids at his age. Or at least these emotional subjects, if broached, went unanswered.

  In spite of his caution, a brazen assault on his personal life occurred in 2007 when a clothing company plastered his image (from Annie Hall) without permission on billboards in Hollywood and New York. American Apparel claimed that its intention was parody, protected under the First Amendment. To make matters worse, there arose the threat of a jury trial which might’ve led to Soon-Yi, or even Mia, being called as a witness. Fuming, Woody sued for $10 million, ended up settling for $5 million.

  A closed chapter is Woody’s relationship with his and Mia’s three children, now adults, who chose to sever contact years ago and have not changed their minds so far. Moses Farrow, thirty-two, is a therapist. Dylan, twenty-five and now called Malone, works as a graphic designer. Both are married. The brutal split between their parents is a nightmare nobody wants to dredge up. Their unforgiving attitude was bluntly summed up by Woody’s twenty-three-year-old son Satchel, now Ronan, who has said that a reunion is simply out of the question. “He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent.”

  Woody’s only biological child has turned out to be a near-genius, who entered Bard College at eleven and graduated from Yale Law School when he was twenty-one. After college, the State Department appointed Ronan as "Special Adviser on Humanitarian and Nongovernmental Affairs," focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan. What kind of father-son relationship would possibly have developed between them under ordinary circumstances is interesting to contemplate.

  For Bechet and Manzie, making sense of such a tangled family configuration may well be a problem. For adopted children, desire to investigate the birth mother is common; but it would also be normal if the Allen girls feel curious about their half siblings at some point. As it is, the situation becomes unusually complex because, technically, their half brothers and sister are their uncles and aunt. At one time such personal information might have been hidden but not when the story has been written about a thousand times and can be retrieved by a click or two on the computer.

  Although his daughters are mostly shielded from the limelight, this is sometimes difficult in Europe. Overseas film productions are scheduled during the summers when they are out of school, and paparazzi have been able to catch informal glimpses of his domestic life. At home, inside the bubble, photo ops are tightly controlled. It is ironic that one of the family’s rare public appearances was an event celebrating the opening of Dylan’s Candy Bar across from Bloomingdale’s. (Owner Dylan Lauren is the daughter of Ralph Lauren.)

  By any yardstick he is special, one of the most unique filmmakers of our time. That, however, is not the way he sees himself. Ambitions can slowly leak away, expectations crack and crash, for all of us. And so his youthful dreams of becoming a great artist degraded some time ago. As he reflected, self-deprecatingly, in 2010, “I still delude myself sometimes and think, ‘Well, maybe I’ll get lucky and something will come out like that.’ But you know, after 40, 41 films, whatever – you start to realize: it’s just not there.”

  Nonetheless, his place is assured. While not Fellini or Kurosawa, his achievements have placed him in a class of his own, an original known all over the world by his first name. Among his peers he is a superstar. In 2002 he made an unannounced appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony—his first ever—asking Hollywood to continue filming in New York after the 9/11 attacks. The crowd bestowed on him a standing ovation, the kind of reception associated with a lifetime achievement award.

  If his formidable body of work still enjoys the admiration of the professionals, the same cannot be said for moviegoers. It’s been eighteen years since Woody read a prepared statement to a hastily convened news conference at the Plaza Hotel, saying that he had never sexually abused his daughter Dylan. And abruptly revealing that the woman he really loved was not Mia Farrow but her daughter Soon-Yi. The story had all the ingredients of a Greek (or a Hollywood) tragedy. Since then, the country has suffered the horrors of terrorist attacks, two wars, and a major recession. The planet having revolved numerous times, it seems reasonable that America shouldn’t give a hoot about one celebrity’s private conduct.

  The critic Roger Ebert once predic
ted that Woody’s domestic woes would eventually bore people to death. His movies—plus common sense—would justly prevail. After a time the breakup with Mia would come to be regarded as ancient history, like an unpleasant divorce, as Ebert suggested. Not only was that a reasonable assumption but it’s also true that public interest generally moves on to chewy fresh gossip.

  Yet Ebert was wrong.

  What happened? Was it bad luck? Perhaps crisis mismanagement? Extraordinarily poor karma?

  Whatever, there is no doubt that fallout from the bad publicity continues to shadow both his career—he never completely won back his female fan base—and his image. Now nearly two decades later, his name appears on every list of Hollywood scandals, along with Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Fatty Arbuckle, and O.J. Simpson. Most people, when it comes down to it, no longer remember precisely what he did. His name, never exactly connected with white picket fences, is more likely to be associated with immorality. Some seem to think he married his daughter. Others feel uncomfortable that his wife is thirty-five years his junior, even though they have no problem with Hugh Hefner cavorting on reality TV with blondes fifty years his junior. It is Soon-Yi, however, who is probably the biggest casualty, her name irrevocably stained by the scandal.