The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (17 page)

Commentary:

"If he took three or four years to make a film, it would be a mess. Not at all funny. His mind works fast. The pace of his life matches the pace of his films."

—Vincent Canby

After completing
Sleeper,
Woody sent Eric Pleskow a note saying he was almost finished with his next script, a contemporary murder mystery about a New York couple who stumble across a crime. Two weeks later, Pleskow was surprised to receive the first draft of a screenplay about the Napoleonic wars, set in Czarist Russia.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I tore it up," said Woody. At a meeting in the UA offices, he explained to the top executives that he wanted to make an early-nineteenth-century picture about the meaninglessness of existence, and he planned to shoot it in Russia. "Krim was one of the most intelligent men ever to head a movie company," said Steven Bach. "He may have been listening with a straight face but I suspect he was thinking, 'Sure disaster. How could this picture possibly attract teenagers in Omaha?' But this was his son and if that's what he wanted to do, that's what he wanted to do." Contrary to what the tide suggests,
Love and Death
was neither serious nor depressing. Boris Dmitrivich Grushenko is a schnook of a pacifist (and a militant coward), who from the moment he enlists in the Czar's army seems headed for trouble. Embroiled in a plot to assassinate Napoleon, he is executed. According to Pleskow, UA regarded Woody as "an exceptional animal in our business, comparable only perhaps to a man like Chaplin. He was never excessive in his demands for himself. That's why we were his people and he was our man."

Their man spent seven months on location in France and Hungary. Though he went over budget by $1 million, the result was his most polished film yet, with none of the home-movie jerkiness of
Bananas
or
Sleeper.
Notices were, for the most part, enthusiastic. Judith Crist in
New York
magazine noted approvingly that he was "going for the character rather than the cartoon" (and she also applauded his acting as "perfection"), while Penelope Gilliatt viewed
Love and Death
as his "most shapely" film. Vincent Canby raved about "Woody's War and Peace," as personal a film as "any American star-writer-director has made since the days of Keaton, Chaplin, and Jerry Lewis." Even Stanley Kaufmann gave him credit for putting the camera "in the right place most of the time."

"Not adjusted for inflation.

Note: As Woody became popular overseas, foreign earnings climbed steadily during this period.

"What about the kid?" said Martin Ritt. "What kid?"

"You know, the funny kid." Ritt finally remembered the name. "Woody Allen."

For a number of years, Martin Ritt, the director, and Walter Bernstein, the screenwriter, had been trying—without success—to make a picture about screenwriters suspected of being communists or Red sympathizers during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into the entertainment industry. During the McCarthy era, a few of these writers, in order to earn a living, hired fronts, nonpolitical people who handed in scripts and passed themselves off as the authors, in return for a percentage of the fee. Both Ritt and Bernstein had been among the blacklisted, which meant this semiautobiographical project was in the nature of a personal crusade for them. Originally a serious drama about a man who was blacklisted, the script was made more salable as a blackish comedy featuring the "front" as the protagonist. Then the project languished for several years because "Columbia wanted a star," said Bernstein, "somebody like Dustin Hoffman or Robert Redford, nobody we wanted." It was obvious to Ritt that Woody's range as an actor was severely limited, yet he was clearly right for the part of Howard Prince, a street-smart coffee-shop cashier and part-time bookie who prospers by fronting for a blacklisted TV writer.

In the fifties, when he seldom read newspapers except for the sports section, Woody knew vaguely of Senator McCarthy as a man with a five o'clock shadow. It was not until 1963 that he became aware of the ugly climate of that period. Appearing at the Hungry i in San Francisco, he got friendly with the stage manager, who was none other than Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten "unfriendly" witnesses. In 1950 Bessie was cited for contempt of Congress and sent to prison after declining to say whether he was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party. Although Bessie was thirty years older than Woody, he treated him as a peer. After returning to New York, an appreciative Woody wrote to thank him for his kindness. During the filming of
Love and Death,
Woody read Bernstein's script and immediately expressed interest, not only because it was "one of the best pieces of material offered to me," but also because he felt drawn to a subject that "expresses me politically." Without his participation, making
The Front
would have been difficult, even though Bernstein said they would surely have tried to satisfy Columbia with Hoffman or George Segal.

In one scene, Woody asked Bernstein to remove a Jewish mother character, but otherwise he made no attempt to impose his ideas on the script. With direction it was a different story, however. Handing over control of the picture to Ritt made him unhappy. On the set, he was "never disrespectful," said

Andrea Marcovicci, who played Woody's idealistic girlfriend, "but I sensed it was hard for him to table his thoughts." According to Walter Bernstein, "Woody is never deliberately cruel but there's a certain lack of tact, to say the least. He's one of the most insensitive sensitive people I know." At the rushes, Bernstein recalled, "he drove Marty crazy by criticizing things in front of everyone, and Marty finally had to ask him to stay away because he was hurting people’s feelings." Woody expressed amazement. "Its the problems that we should be talking about," he told Bernstein. "We don't need to mention the good stuff." It never occurred to him that people needed recognition for a job well done. One problem never mentioned was Woody's costar, the famously irrepressible Zero Mostel, an actor of Falstaffian proportions. Actors passing by his dressing room would hear him bellow, "Shut up out there, I'm farting!" His antics made Woody cringe, recalled Bernstein. "Woody shrinks when anybody touches him. He was always polite to Zero, but it was clear he didn't want to be around him. In the film, you can read it in his body language."

Critics attacked
The Front
for trivializing and romanticizing the blacklist. Other reviewers felt that the credibility of the project was destroyed by casting Woody in a straight role. He dragged down the rest of the cast, Stanley Kauffmann thought, "because they are trying to act and he is doing his night club stuff."

On Monday nights, the tables at Michael's Pub were jammed together so tightly that waiters could barely squeeze through the sea of green-and-white-checked tablecloths. Out in the tiny bar, a hundred jostling fans were penned behind a velvet rope, spilling their $3.20 drinks on one another, just to hear Woody and his clarinet. In the late sixties, he had begun playing New Orleans jazz with a half-dozen musicians, most of them nonprofessionals, including a stockbroker, two teachers, and the owner of a burglar-alarm business. At first they got together in their apartments "for fun," he recalled, but in 1970 made their public debut at Barney Google's, a beer garden on East Eighty-sixth Street. On the strength of Woody's fame as a comedian, the New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra moved on to other clubs but no place kept them very long until they met Gil Wiest, the owner of Michael's Pub on East Fifty-fifth Street. Wiest shrewdly recognized the drawing power of a clarinet-playing celebrity and wondered if presenting the group on a regular basis might attract business, even if the music was strictly amateur. That guess proved correct, with name recognition making up for lack of musical expertise, and now every Monday the restaurant was packed. Whenever a number ended, the crowd applauded wildly, and the bar drinkers tapped their feet, but Woody looked tight-lipped and grim. "Come on. Woody," a woman yelled. "Smile." Seldom did he acknowledge their presence, let alone mingle or smile at them. In fact, one of Wiest's jobs was to make sure nobody got close enough to touch him. It was only Groucho Marx, making a surprise visit one night, who took it upon himself to reach up for Woody’s hand and tinkle a tip of a few pennies into his palm.

Throughout his thirties, Woody's career flourished, but his personal life was stalled. There was no emotional center. After breaking up with Diane, he dated constantly, very often actresses, because they were usually the women he met in the normal course of his work. In show-business circles, he had a reputation for being something of a stud. "Put it this way," said Tony Roberts. "Harpo Marx probably chased the most girls, I chase the second most, and Woody is a close third." Girl chasing seemed to go hand in hand with casual sex. In 1980 he was to admit that for nine years there had not been a single romantic relationship lasting longer than two months.

Though he knew hundreds of people, he had few
friends,
as most people interpret that word. There were several cronies who joined him for various activities—Tony Roberts for tennis, Marshall Brickman for writing—but he was not really on intimate terms with these men. Closest to him of all remained Jean Doumanian, who had been his best friend for almost a decade. With Woody’s support and connections, and her own talent, she gradually moved up in television from Dick Cavett's talk show to Howard Cosell s variety show on ABC, for which she booked celebrities. In 1976, once again with Woody’s help, she rose to a similar position as talent coordinator for
Saturday Night Live,
performing her job with consummate efficiency and style. At
SNL,
a casual place where clean jeans and T-shirts were considered formal wear, Jean wore designer suits and came across as "a very stylish person with a moneyed style that seemed rather French," recalled Karen Roston, the shows costumer. Despite the couturier outfits, Jean was not popular. According to one colleague, she suffered from certain grating mannerisms "as if she had just read Michael Korda's book
Power!
She turned off a lot of people." Another co-worker called her "the kind of person who makes you crazy. I used to tell myself,
⁴
The day will come when I'll be able to get back at her.' "

Highly dependent, Woody was in the habit of telephoning Jean at work several times a day. In the evenings they met for dinner, very often at an Italian restaurant in an unfashionable neighborhood of brick tenements on Second Avenue near Eighty-eighth Street. So seldom did Woody spend an evening at home that Elaine's served as a comfortable and convenient kitchen away from home. The owner, Elaine Kaufman, was a strapping woman with thick eyeglasses. The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who grew up in Queens, she had a knack for self-promotion and preparation of unexceptional meals. In 1963 she opened her Yorkville tavern that soon became a

cherished sanctuary for a number of writers, among them Tom Wolfe, William Styron, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer. Never could the proprietress, a high-school graduate whose first job was clerking in Woolworths, be considered an intellectual, but she read omnivorously and adored gifted young male writers, whom she called her "boys." (She was "Big Mama.") Against all odds, Big Mamas Algonquin Round Table began to flourish.

Of all her literary pets, Woody was her favorite. She doted on him, flattered him, and finally bestowed on him a table of his own—Number 8—in the front, which was reserved every night until ten. In return, he publicized the restaurant by his continual presence and later by shooting scenes for several movies there. By the late seventies, Elaine's had become a renowned restaurant that defined itself as being the popular place to see and be seen, if you had any status at all. Patronized by a mixture of prominent writers and movie stars, politicians and ballplayers, the place filled up night after night with celebrities and the rubberneckers who paid to gawk at them while tucking away giant veal chops, one of the house specialties. (Woody, a picky eater, always ordered fish or pasta.) Hard-pressed to explain why he spent so much time at the city's most obvious celebrity outpost, a kind of Eiffel Tower of mediocre fare, he claimed that he enjoyed the food. What Woody enjoyed was being the center of attention so long as he didn't have to interact with other people, and Elaine Kaufman kept people from bothering him while he ate.

CHAPTER SEVEN

"A Picture About Me"

His birthday was still several days away, but the
New York Times
noticed Woody would be celebrating forty on December 1. Or, as the paper would indelicately word it, entering middle age. Taking a break from filming
The Front,
Woody seemed to be in a truly bubbly mood as he chatted with reporter Mel Gussow during a commemorative interview. Costumed for the role of Howard Prince, in a 1950s business suit, with his tousled hair neatly cropped, Woody looked like a boyish twenty-five. But forty, he insisted, was a marvelous age. Professionally, he took pride in the fact that he had five films under his belt. Physically, he was in pretty good shape, too. "I'm becoming more attractive with age," he said, because he looked less like "a punk." At this rate, he would probably be gorgeous by fifty.