The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (10 page)

A few years after their meeting. Woody remained on friendly terms with the Doumanians when they moved to New York and got a divorce. For Jean, he arranged a job booking celebrities for Dick Cavett's popular television talk show. Over the years John Doumanian would appear as an actor in several of Woody s pictures. It was Jean, however, who would become Woody s most trusted confidant, a sounding board for just about every step he took in life thereafter, from how to dress to how to conduct his love life. "She's pretty, she's intelligent, she's loyal; she's everything you could want," Woody would rave about her. "She's a dream friend." And when they were together, she took charge. "To know Woody, just look at his friends," said writer Peter Tauber. "Jean is emblematic of his very controlled, very orderly side. You can see that he doesn't have room in his life for crazy people."

As the repository of his confidences and kvetches, Jean saw or spoke to him daily, always seeming to be taking his emotional temperature. Late at night Louise would wake up and hear him talking on the phone. Some people assumed there had once been a romance—or that Jean had wanted to marry him—but this was apparently not the case. The relationship, which has turned out to be the longest of his life, remains platonic, and they continue to meet for dinner several times a week. In middle age, he still depends on her as his "closest friend in the world." For him, she is "the person you want to be with when you're waiting for the results of your biopsy." If Woody has a soul mate, it's been Jean, the only woman he has been able to respect as an equal. "He's very lucky to have her," remarked one of her friends, Stephen Silverman, an editor at
People
magazine. "She's been a real crutch."

Stand-Up:

Audience Question
: Would you accept the vice-presidential nomination?

Woody
: I'm apolitical. I have no political convictions whatsoever. I'm a registered pervert.

—"Question and Answer Session," Monologue

Comedy albums were taking a sizable slice of the entertainment market in the sixties. People spent money to stay home and listen to Jonathan Winters, Nichols and May, and Lenny Bruce on their living-room hi-fis. In March 1964, Woody recorded his first album live at Mr. Kelly's.
Woody Allen,
released by Colpix Records, contained thirty-seven minutes of original material; aitogether, eleven routines that included "Private Life," "N.Y.U.," "My Marriage," "My Grandfather," and "Brooklyn." Although the album was nominated for a Grammy, sales did not satisfy Woody, who complained incessandy. How come his career was going great, he grumbled to his publicist Richard O'Brien, but no one bought his album? That didn't stop him from recording two more.

Slowly but surely, his earnings continued to mount, to $250,000 a year ($ 1.3 million today) by the time he turned thirty. Woody attributed his success to "just the throw of the dice." Much of that luck had to do with appearing at precisely the right moment, when the postwar baby boomers, now come of age, were seeking new values and unlikely heroes in unusual places. A decade of so much self-consciousness that it was packaged as a sign of the zodiac, the age of Aquarius was a time in which his comic sensibility proved irresistible. To those who characterized the idealistic sixties, Woody represented a new breed of man, the quintessential misfit, the heroic frog who had turned into a prince. Clearly he was a man ever-faithful to his principles, who relied on his own moral compass, however out of whack it might be. People said they wanted to be like him. Metaphorically, wrote the critic Diane Jacobs, the Woody persona held up a mirror to his times by embodying "the struggles of late-twentieth-century urban man."

All the same, his grip on the consciousness of the sixties is ironic because in many respects his values clashed with the wildly anti-Establishment, psychedelic, miniskirted, love-in and freak-out temperament of the decade. Woody, anti-anti-Establishment, had virtually no interest in the social and political upheavals of the time: segregation in the South, equality of the sexes, the Vietnam War, the student protest movement, the Cold War, or the space race. His political position was to have none. Everyone assumed that as a New York Jew, he must be a meat-and-potatoes liberal Democrat, and that is how he tended to see himself. More accurately, he was a political naif who had lived through the McCarthy years without knowing exactly who McCarthy was. The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Woody was in Los Angeles playing the Crescendo, and he spent that evening with Mort Sahl and Dick Cavett—all of them wisecracking that nobody was going to show up but then nobody had showed up before the assassination either. After agreeing to take part in an actors' antiwar demonstration in 1969, he failed to put in an appearance. During the 1972 presidential campaign, he was invited to perform at a George McGovern fund-raiser but declined because he'd rather "do something beyond humor" like ringing doorbells or handing out leaflets. He did neither. "I'm not really a political person," he told the sixties activist Jerry Rubin, and went on to describe himself as more interested in "the real issues— philosophical issues of life and death," big questions that he would continue to pose time and again as part of his act. (He had no answers.)

Equally heretical in his personal tastes and habits, he was never a citizen of the permissive Woodstock Nation. He was against doing drugs, and only smoked pot once or twice, which is not surprising because he needed to be in control at all times. Once a smoker of cigarettes and thin cigars, he now smoked nothing. He drank no hard liquor, and wine only sparingly. As for music, he was passionate in his dislike of Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles. "I hate rock," he once declared.

In the heyday of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, of the three his only interest was sex.

Tales of New York Life:

E
arl
W
ilson:
D
o you know all about sex?

W
oody: I know enough to get through the evening.

—Interview, 1972

On a wintry night in 1964, at the Blue Angel, the actor Warren Beatty was sitting at one of the ringside tables with a debonair middle-aged man in a conservative dark suit and tie. Practically everything Woody said made Beatty howl with laughter. Afterward, he turned to his companion to say he really ought to hire Woody. He was positively brilliant. The man in the dark suit, however, had hardly been laughing at all. He was thinking.

Charles K. Feldman was born for the Hollywood high life. At the age of sixty, he was a connoisseur of the best real estate in Hollywood and on the French Riviera, the most beautiful women, the finest wines, the most lavish hotels and casinos. For all these exotic trappings, he was a consummate businessman. Orphaned in childhood and raised by a wealthy New York couple, he graduated from the University of Michigan, then law school at the University of Southern California, and set up a Hollywood law practice. In 1932, aged only twenty-eight, he became president of Famous Artists, a huge talent agency whose clients over the years had included superstars such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and John Wayne. In the forties, he turned producer with partner Howard Hawks, and eventually became known for high-quality pictures—for example, Billy Wilder s
The Seven Year Itchy
a tremendous commercial success starring Marilyn Monroe.

That winter in New York, he was seeking a writer for a picture he wanted to make with Beatty, a former client and close friend, who was almost a surrogate son to him. After his debut in
Splendor in the Grass,
the twenty-sevenyear-old Beatty had suddenly become a star big enough to turn down seventy-five scripts a year. As a result of his virile good looks, he also had the women running after him. Answering his phone, he had a breezy stock greeting for his female callers: "What's new, pussycat?" It was, Feldman decided, the perfect title. Feldman decided to make a movie about a natural Don Juan, like the satyrish Warren, who wanted every woman he spotted, and Beatty had agreed to star, but the project had hit a road bump. Optioning a creaky Don Juan comedy,
Lot's Wife
by Czech writer Ladislaus Bus-Fekete, Feldman turned over the property to Billy Wilder's frequent collaborator, the top screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond, to turn into a modern farce but Diamond's script proved to be a disappointment.

Several days after Feldman saw Woody perform at the Blue Angel, he delegated the photographer Sam Shaw to make inquiries. The picture of nonchalance, Shaw strolled into Charlie Joffe's office dressed in sneakers and grungy pants. How much, he asked, did Joffe want for his boy Allen to write a film script? Joffe, unimpressed, barely giving Shaw the time of day, answered $35,000. Shaw nodded approvingly (Feldman had authorized $60,000) and said Feldman would be in touch.

In the end, after much haggling, Joffe was able to increase the sum by throwing in Woody’s services as an actor, hardly a deal sweetener because Woody, who had never sold a screenplay, had never acted, either. Meanwhile, an astonished Woody regarded Feldman's offer as nothing less than an unexpected godsend. As his long-suffering friends and managers could attest, he was continually grumbling about how much he hated being a stand-up, bleating that he'd never had any talent for public performance in the first place, that performing comedy was just as indescribably horrible as writing it. Bemoaning his fate, Woody always had a litany of complaints about fame not being everything it is cracked up to be. Unfortunately, success as a stand-up had turned out to be, as he put it, "a ride I couldn't get off." So this emissary from Hollywood's magic kingdom with his Warren Beatty screenplay was nothing short of the answer to his prayers.

In July of 1964, that same summer he dined at the White House, he left for London in a particularly good mood and checked into the Dorchester Hotel. Finishing a screenplay, it turned out, had been unbelievably easy and now he looked forward to the satisfaction of watching his creative efforts translated to the screen. He quickly discovered, however, that the life of a screenwriter is not all blue skies and sunshine, because Feldman asked for rewrite after rewrite. With each draft, Woody revealed his pique by making his own role fatter and funnier and Beatty s tinier, until the actor backed out in disgust. Feldman promptly stuck Peter O'Toole in the part. As the plot goes, the editor of a Parisian fashion magazine (O'Toole) consults a psychiatrist about curing his addiction. With "pussycats" falling all over him, he has more sex than he can handle. Before long, it is the shrink, Dr. Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers), who, dying of horniness, is going berserk trying to figure out the secrets of his compulsive patient's success. Woody turns up as O'Tooles buddy Victor Shakapopolis, who dresses and undresses strippers at the Crazy Horse saloon for twenty francs a week.

"Not very much," consoles O'Toole.

"It's all I can afford," replies Woody.

Through the summer of 1964 and into the new year, as production got under way in Paris, the realities of moviemaking came as a painful shock to Woody. Misunderstanding the nature of the picture business, he had fancied that his story would reach the screen intact. He no more expected Feldman to change his script than he expected the mogul to have rewritten his club act. In fact, the plain truth was that nobody paid a bit of attention to what he thought about the movie. During the months of production, making no attempt to adapt to his loss of control over the situation, he lived in raw misery. In his hotel room at the Hotel George V, he practiced his clarinet, and every night he patronized the same bistro where he supped on soup and fillet of sole. In Woody s estimation, the script now belonged to Feldman, who had weakened and butchered his work as he turned it into commercial dreck, the idea of movies as a business being a concept Woody would never really comprehend. "They just killed it completely. I fought with everybody all the time." In a fury during rushes one night, he shouted "fuck off" at Feldman, who ignored him. Later, however, he asked Charlie Joffe to make Woody stop cursing. It hurt his feelings.

Humiliated, Woody returned to New York in January 1965 and announced that the picture was so awful he had no intention of seeing it. "It would only bother me," he told the
New York Morning Telegraph.
Privately, he promised himself that he would never do another film "unless I had complete control over it."

What's New, Pussycat?
opened in June to frightful reviews. A disgusted Judith Crist of the
New York Herald Tribune
dismissed the picture as smut, "a shrieking, reeking conglomeration of dirty jokes." Stung by her scornful comments, Woody sent her the original script, then invited Crist and her husband to his home for a dinner that concluded with six desserts. "It was a delightful evening," recalled Crist, who, completely charmed, would remain devoted to Woody from that day forward. In
The New Republic,
Stanley Kauffmann described Woody as an amateur who had no idea how to write for the screen. His material "probably reads hilariously but does not play successfully," an astute observation because this would remain one of Woody s major problems for the next ten years. Almost alone among the critics was Andrew Sarris, the influential
Village Voice
columnist who had introduced American audiences to the French "auteur theory" (the director is the real "author" of a film). Sams could not remember seeing "a more tasteful sex comedy." Familiar with Woody from clubs, he considered him "a terrific stand-up comic, very charismatic, fast on his feet when it came to improvisation. And with his great ear he knew how to deflate pomposity." Sards admitted seeing
Pussycat
four times.

Probably it was to be expected that
What's New, Pussycat?
failed to impress Woody s mother. Attending a screening with Mickey Rose and some of her sons other friends, Nettie saw nothing to make her laugh and afterward dismissed the picture as moronic.

In spite of bad reviews, there was no denying Feldman s business acumen.
Pussycat
turned out to be a solid success, grossing $17.2 million, the fifth biggest moneymaker of the year, and its title song, written by Burt Bacharach and sung by Tom Jones, was also a popular hit.