The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (19 page)

When Penelope Gilliatt
saw Annie Hall,
she bestowed her highest compliment and compared Woody with the genius of Buster Keaton (her all-time cinema hero)
and Annie Hall with The Navigator,
Woody "technically pushes far ahead of anything he has done in the cinema before, playing with ideas in film which he has been experimenting with in prose." This time the enthusiastic Gilliatt was joined by the great majority of critics busily dragging out their superlatives. One of the few exceptions was John Simon, the crusty
National Review
critic, who refused to consider the movie as a fable for his times. Instead, he wrote,
Annie Hall
told him "everything we never wanted to know about Woody s sex life and were afraid he'd tell us anyway." Later, he admitted his difficulties watching any film in which Woody played a romantic role. Tm obsessed with looks. Some people like to eat and I happen to like good-looking people, female or male. Even children. Even dogs. Woody has a good face for a comedian but not for a romantic film. Looking at his face depresses me."

Annie Hall
would become a classic that measured against the best films in history, ranking Number 31 on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the best one hundred movies ever made. It established Woody's reputation as an important artist, catapulting him into the pantheon of great film comedians, where Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, and the Marx brothers dwelled virtually alone. In that spring of 1977, he went from a cerebral neurotic appreciated primarily by sophisticated urban audiences to a new star embraced by the middle class throughout the country. Women in particular seemed to be crazy about the film, and for the first time Woody began to attract a devoted female audience. Even before the movie was released, women's service magazines began hopping on the bandwagon, unaware of his contempt for their typical readers, who "just junk their lives being a housewife raising kids," he thought.
Redbook
arranged for one of its editors to share a tete-a-tete dinner at his penthouse. After martinis, mixed by Woody himself, they adjourned to the dining room, where his housekeeper served a delicious meal, which the editor would describe as "a subtle first course with an egg on top; lovely encircled-with-vegetables fish; hot apple souffle." But in spite of the candles and the classical music, she departed four and a half hours later without asking many questions at all. Apparently reluctant to disturb his Zen-like reverie, she seemed to know little more than when she arrived; indeed, Woody said so little worth quoting that
Redbook
found it necessary to dig up a few humorous quotes from his
New Yorker
pieces. There was "an almost moatlike space" around him, the magazine lamely observed.

Probably no celebrity of the seventies was more socially autistic than Woody. But the media presented him as a lovable eccentric, giving no hint of his disturbing side. As a result, he developed a pristine image in the popular imagination. The feminists were the only group he was unable to charm. Sensing his hostility toward women, both as a filmmaker and a man, they were beginning to view him as something more than a charming oddball. Shortly after his fortieth birthday, in preparation for an article in the
Village Voice,
Vivian Gornick paid a visit to Woody's penthouse. The writer, who is exactly the same age as Woody, came from the same background. The child of working-class Jews, she grew up in the Bronx. Gornick supposed the offscreen and on-screen Woody would be the same man. "I expected to find him living in one room and eating tuna fish out of a can," she said. "I was shocked when I saw how he was living." They sat in his Fifth Avenue lair and sipped chilled white wine and argued about women and men. A long time ago, one night in 1964, she and her friends had seen him perform at the Bitter End. He was, she felt back then, nothing less than "us." His humor, his anguish over growing up smart and anxious were "great stuff. He's a fantastic mimic and he did our lives to a T. It was wild." But over the years his perfect pitch made her laugh less and less. "I began to see the arrested quality of his movies. The shocking thing was that he was forty and still chasing girls, still a schlep who was obviously stuck in his adolescent pursuit of sex."

"Tell me," she said over the wine. "You create out of a woman a foil who ultimately is the object of ridicule. Don't you see that?" He did not.

"Don't you get enough flack from enough women so that you can see that?"

"Listen," he said, "when you're a comic, you're always offending someone. Jews are offended by my rabbi jokes." And besides, he was no chauvinist. He loved women. He couldn't understand why she found his pictures sexist.

She had been watching him trying to get laid for fifteen years, as she struggled to explain, and didn't want to see it portrayed on film one more time. When she viewed
Annie Hall
a few months later, she thought to herself that "Alvy is not much brighter than Annie but he comes out on top. In Jewish comedy, the wild street comics like Berle and King and Brooks would make fun of Jewish women—their wives and their mother-in-laws; Woody Allen made a fool of the shiksa."

After publication of the
Voice
article ("You're Not a Schlep Anymore"), Gornick felt guilty about giving him such a hard time. He could not have been more hospitable, "sweet-tempered, utterly forthcoming." Sometime later, when he called to ask her for a date, she refused to go out with him because "it was one-up-manship. I was sure he wanted to bring me down."

On the Couch:

"When you do comedy, you're not sitting at the grownups' table, you're sitting at the children's table."

—Woody Allen, 1978

Annie Hallv/as
in postproduction when Woody was ready to move on to the next project. In early 1977 Eric Pleskow received a call from Sam Cohn, Woody’s agent at International Creative Management (and an addition to Woody’s personal managers, Rollins and JofTe). A crusty, middle-aged, chain-smoking man fond of dressing in sweaters and loafers, Cohn was one of the most powerful talent agents in the business. Operating almost independently as an agency within an agency, he handled actors as well as directors, producers, and writers. Speaking to Pleskow, Cohn cautiously explained that Woody had some material that was not a typical Woody Allen script. Reading the atypical script, Pleskow and Arthur Krim understood immediately what he meant. Several days later, the UA officers met with Cohn, Charles Joffe, and Jack Rollins. According to Pleskow, "I'm sure they were all set for a knock-down, drag-out fight. But we simply said 'Cool,' or the 1977 equivalent of 'Cool.' We felt that all the great work done by Woody entitled him to do
Interiors.
We cherished the association." So Woody’s new project received the green light.

What Arthur Krim and his associates honestly thought of the script for
Interiors
is unclear. But around 729 Seventh Avenue, office clowns began to call Woody "Ingmar Allen." From the viewpoint of Steven Bach, shortly to inherit Krims yes-or-no script approval, it was not a thrilling script but he agreed with the studios decision. "Woody needed to get it out of his system. I felt, in the long run, something good would come of it." In the business, people expressed themselves bluntly. "The
Interiors
script was really a piece of shit," said an executive, "but everybody said it was wonderful. Woody was their darling, and so he could do anything."

Among those who felt it was a mistake was Woody’s editor. One Friday, a copy of the script arrived by messenger as Ralph Rosenblum was preparing to leave for the country. Over the weekend he settled down to read it but, after a few pages, turned to his wife and said, puzzled, "I think they sent me the wrong script."

Skimming the manuscript, Davida Rosenblum had a similar reaction. She remembered saying to her husband, "Oh, my God, how could this happen?"

A few days later, still upset, Rosenblum met Woody for lunch to discuss the new picture, which he thought was "indescribably dreadful." As usual, he was blunt-spoken. "Don't make it."

"Well, I want to," said Woody.

For Woody, the amassing of wealth meant nothing compared to his real ambition, which was to be taken seriously. Making a movie for grown-up people was the kind of work that he considered "the real meat and potatoes." His ambition, he told Gene Siskel in 1981, was to make "a series of great films. I would like to try and overreach myself and challenge the great filmmakers. In the next 10 or 15 years of my life, I'd like to make some really wonderful films. Not just commercially successful, but films that I could look at with, say, the films of Akira Kurosawa and Jean Renoir, and say
⁴
Well, my films are perfectly acceptable in that class of filmmaker.
¹
" The success of
Annie Hall
presented him with the opportunity to change his image.

Moving Pictures:

Og: You want to do mankind a service? Tell funnier jokes.

—Stardust Memories,
1980

'That's my mother," Louise cried. "And that's my father."

But plenty of people told him that
Interiors
was the story of their family, he replied.

"Oh yeah? They must have all been relatives of mine!" Louise, who had just returned from seeing Woody’s new film, was shocked at the exploitation of her own family tragedies, including her mother’s suicide. In any case, she continued, "I don't think you got my mother right."

Eve is a tormented woman in her early sixties who has poisoned the lives of her children and turned into an impossible burden for her husband. An interior designer by profession, she is, in Woody’s words, "a New York woman with incredible good taste, style, breeding." Having cracked up more than once, she is also a graduate of several sanatoriums and a few bouts of electric shock treatment. A compulsive perfectionist, who worries about placing the right vase on the right table, she has created a kind of temperature-controlled biosphere where everything—and everybody—must be perfect. When her ex-husband falls in love with another woman, she loses her fragile grip on sanity and walks into the ocean. Her three daughters—played by Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith—are left to react to their mother's suicide while figuring out how to pick up the pieces of their own wrecked lives.

Principal photography commenced on October 24, 1977. For the first time, Woody remained behind the camera. There was no role for him in this picture, he said (actually he had fragmented himself into all three sisters, plus the icy, judgmental mother). And besides, his presence in a serious drama might invite undesired laughter and dilute the tragic meaning of the story. In the past he always tried to cast friends, people with whom he felt comfortable, but this time he daringly hired two of the theater's most brilliant actresses, Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton, to play the mother and the second wife. "I was very intimidated by the cast," he said. Certainly there was nothing comfortable about directing Page and Stapleton, who made him feel as if he had been thrown into "a snake pit." In contrast to Page, the great grande dame of the theater and the ultimate professional, Stapleton was informal and unpretentious, in some ways even more frightening to Woody, who never encouraged intimacy on the set and never socialized with his actors off the set. People seldom stepped over the line.

On location in Southampton, Long Island, Stapleton spotted the unapproachable Woody in the hotel lobby one evening. Warned of his peculiarities, she was not the type to let that stand in her way. "I just grabbed his arm and dragged him into the bar. We sat down and had a few beers and we talked. Later some of the guys were stunned because nobody did that. I said, 'What's the big deal?'"

The headline in
Variety
read HIGH NOON AT UA.

In late January 1978, around the time that
Interiors
wrapped, Arthur Krim stunned Hollywood by abruptly storming out of United Artists and taking with him his top-tier management. Krim in 1967 had sold UA to Transamerica Corporation, a San Francisco-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate whose income derived from operations such as insurance, rental cars, and turbine engines. Disgruntled over Transamerica's management practices and its economy measures, most of all its attempt to run UA like a budget rental-car company, Krim tried without success to buy the company back. By the end of 1977, the situation had apparently become intolerable. Three weeks later, the Medici formed a new company, Orion Pictures, named after the great hunter constellation.

Krim and his associates were instantly hailed as the white knights of the industry, but this shake-up in the executive suite created a dilemma for Woody, who had three pictures remaining on his contract. He decided to stay but nobody in the industry, or at UA, believed that he would hang around once his contract ended. The exception was Andy Albeck, the new chief executive, who was determined to keep him. "Albeck," reported Steven Bach in his memoir,
Final Cut,
"had seen
Interiors
and privately assumed it would be a failure. That wasn't the point." Interestingly, Woody agreed with Albeck. "It's not going to make a dime," he predicted. "I've seen the picture. And I know."

Commentary:

"What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values?"

—Pauline Kael, 1980

In
Annie Hall
there is a brief scene, cut during editing, in which Alvy Singer fantasizes about a certain high-school student to whom he was sexually attracted. Playing the role of the student was a pretty, dark-haired, seventeen-year-old from Stuyvesant High School, Class of '77, whom Woody met for the first time on the set. Their romance, unknown to the public, was common knowledge to patrons of Elaine's and readers of New York gossip columns. The
New York Post
reported that "Woody Allen's beautiful new and very young girlfriend is proving quite a distraction for the little genius. They were in Elaine's the other evening—someone said Woody was carrying her books—and only had eyes for each other."