The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (20 page)

Stacey Nelkin considered herself an "extremely sophisticated" girl who had "never dated boys my own age." Born in New York, raised pardy in Europe, she was a bright child who was selected for Stuyvesant, one of Manhattans so-called elite public high schools, by a grueling competitive examination. Ambitious to be an actress, she auditioned for Woody's new movie while still a junior and soon became involved with him off the set. She admitted to being "crazy about him." Friends of Woody's would characterize the besotted young girl as kind of a sex toy for him, expendable at any time. But she believed it was "a real relationship and a mature one that was perfectly normal." Indignant, she reported that "I wasn't underage when I dated Woody. I was 17 and he was 41 but the age difference didn't come up. It was a non-issue." The two-year affair was, she added, "a very moral relationship," not "just about the bedroom."

However, it seems to have been a one-sided involvement. If Stacey was in love with Woody and fantasized marriage, he made it clear that he was a committed bachelor. Because he never wished to acknowledge her publicly, she had to practically sneak into his apartment building and was never permitted to spend the night. He insisted she get dressed and go home. Once the sexual attraction died away, he broke off the relationship. In her place, he began to see Jean vanden Heuvel, a forty-four-year-old divorcee and mother of two, whose roots in the film business went deep since her father, Jules Stein, headed MCA, the entertainment conglomerate that owned Universal Studios. Crushed, the cast-off Stacey fled to the West Coast to forget, and even though Woody sent her plane fare to come back and visit, nothing came of the reunion. By that time, he was working on a new script about a middle-aged man dating a seventeen-year-old Dalton student, and there was another young girl in his life, one who was even younger than Stacey.

Somebody left a white bunny with the doorman. Worshiping fans liked to drop off unsolicited gifts, homemade layer cakes and knitted sweaters, never anything of value, but this was the first time a living creature had been plopped on his doorstep. He hated animals. The elevator operator conveying the news found him to be in high dudgeon. Surely the building didn't imagine he would bring the animal up to his apartment? And what did he know about taking care of a rabbit? In the end, his secretary, Norma Lee Clark, had to call the ASPCA. It was also Clark's job to screen Woody’s mail, which had grown to mammoth proportions. Seldom did fans receive a reply. Usually Woody never saw the mail.

Months after
Annie Hall,
an enterprising thirteen-year-old from Coral Gables, Florida, who had a crush on Woody, somehow managed to obtain his home address and send him a fan letter. Amazingly, he responded; a few days later, she received a plain brown envelope without a return address. Dear Nancy Jo, the letter read,

Hard to believe you re 13! When I was 131 couldn't dress myself, and here you write about one of life's deepest philosophical problems, i.e., existential boredom.

He wanted to know all about her life. What kind of a city was Coral Gables? What did her parents do for a living? What time did she get up in the morning? Did she get depressed? If she decided to reply, he'd like to know what books she had read and the music she liked (not pop, he hoped). As for himself, he was reshooting scenes from his next movie
(Interiors),
"which have not come out so good."

Nancy Jo Sales was a precocious redhead, tall for her age, the child of divorced parents, who had something more in common with Woody than the color of their hair. For a thirteen-year-old, she was remarkably discontent. Apparently a misfit at school, she read nineteenth-century novels and watched Barbara Stanwyck movies. (In her high-school yearbook, she would be inelegantly labeled a "Geek/Freak.") At home, when her mother needed help in the kitchen, she disappeared. Obsessed with Woody, she wrote him several times a day while hiding behind the stacks in her school library. After school she would race home to get mentoring letters that contained reading lists (Proust and Kierkegaard) and instructions on shopping (Mahler's Fourth Symphony, the Bernstein recording, of course). The student-teacher exchange of letters was passed off to Nancy's mother as correspondence with a girl she met at camp.

In New York, on a shopping trip with her stepmother and one of her stepmother's friends, Nancy Jo decided to send a note to Woody, who immediately telephoned the hotel and invited them to visit. When they arrived at his door, he seemed unsure which one of the three women was Nancy Jo (the stepmother and her friend were barely thirty). In the living room, the older women dominated the conversation with talk of real estate deals and celebrity-watching at Elaine's. As she listened in mortification, Nancy Jo fixed her eyes upon the tray of individually wrapped candies on the coffee table.

The New York visit marked the end of Nancy Jo's secret life with a movie star. The letters from Woody abruptly ceased. She was never sure why, or what she had done wrong. "It took me a long time, in my teenage way, to get over him," she wrote in 1993. When Woody, the following year, described his nymphet pen pal to an interviewer from the
New York Times Magazine,
he called her "a nice, intelligent girl" whose letters were precocious in the extreme. He distinctly remembered telling her that "if you're really the age you say you are, it's phenomenal. If you're not, don't write to me again and waste my time. Finally I met her whole family." She was eleven, he thought, no more than a child.

In January 1978, the prestigious New York Film Critics voted the best picture and screenplay awards to
Annie Hall.
At the awards dinner, the presenter of the writing honor was to be the famous humorist S. J. Perelman, one of Woody’s longtime idols. Having seen the picture three times, Perelman composed some tart remarks chosen especially for Woody's ears. He was not exactly happy, therefore, to arrive at Sardi's and learn that Woody had decided not to accept his award in person. Unlike the Oscars, indisputably a televised circus, the New York critics ceremony was a high-class, low-key private dinner. Perelman couldn't imagine why anyone would boycott it.

The previous year, Walter Bernstein had hosted a dinner party so that Woody could meet Perelman, who happened to be a friend of Bernstein's. Of course, Perelman was well aware that Woody's
New Yorker
pieces mimicked his own literary style. Known to be crabby about imitators, the older writer ignored Woody's prose and chose to regard him as a splendid filmmaker. The party turned out to be a disappointment, however, "not completely a disaster," Bernstein recollected, but Woody was withdrawn "and the two men didn't connect in some essential way." At dinner, Bernstein began carving a roast that was resting on a silver platter when the knife began scraping against the bottom of the dish. At the sound, Woody "went berserk, as if hearing nails scratching on a blackboard I guess, and he leaned over and grabbed my arm to make me stop."

The Sunday after the New York Film Critics’ awards, Woody and Perelman bumped into each other at Elaine's. Perelman, who had just turned seventy-four, was being treated to a birthday dinner by a friend, Delta Willis. "It was the first time that Mr. Perelman had ever been to this so-called literary establishment," Willis recalled. "When we came in, Elaine Kaufman didn't recognize him and so we were seated around the corner in what is known there as Siberia." A short while later, spotting Woody eating with Marshall Brick-man, she encouraged Perelman to send over his calling card. "My dear Mr. Allen," he scrawled. "Won't you please join us for a Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Tonic?" When a waiter delivered the unsigned card, Woody crumpled it up.

Forty-five minutes later, he rushed back to their table. By then, Perelman and Willis had finished dinner and were drinking espresso. "I thought it was a joke," Woody said sheepishly. Realizing that his absence at the critics dinner might have offended Perelman, he attempted an apology. "There were too many critics there," he deadpanned. Perelman was not amused.

Accolades and awards
for Annie Hall kept
coming: the New York and Los Angeles critics, the National Society of Film Critics, the Directors Guild of America, the British Academy, and the Golden Globes. It also received five Oscar nominations—including best picture, actress, actor, director, and writing. The likelihood of
Annie Hall
winning best picture was considered remote because the competition was exceptionally strong:
The Turning Point, Star Wars, Julia,
and
The Goodbye Girl.
Not only had no comedy won best picture since 1960
(The Apartment),
but United Artists had won two years running for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
in 1975 and
Rocky
in 1976, and never before had a studio taken top honors three years in a row. Nevertheless, United Artists re-released
Annie Hall
on four hundred screens and began putting together a campaign to publicize the pictures Oscar nominations, the standard ballyhoo in the film industry.

Resisting vigorously, Woody opposed any mention of the nominations in ads, particularly in New York. As the tug-of-war continued, he reluctantly agreed that UA might mention Oscar outside New York. Red-faced UA publicists, arms twisted out of their sockets, attempted to explain this bizarre procedure as a deliberate creative decision, a refreshing change from the traditional trumped-up Oscar nominations. But Woody had his own way of making his point. Should any local theater take it upon itself to mention the Oscars in its
Annie Hall
ads, he warned, he would do his best to have the picture yanked from its screen.

The fiftieth annual Academy Awards were scheduled for Monday, April 4. The previous week, Woody announced he would not be attending the ceremony. "The whole concept of the awards is silly," he told the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
Holding up to ridicule Hollywood's biggest night as "a popularity contest," he inveighed against the Academy for being a crass trade association and the Oscars as ego candy "bought and negotiated for." Should he win one of their stupid awards, he didn't want it. That night he planned to be in New York playing jazz because he couldn't let his band down. In an interview with NBC film critic Gene Shalit, he merrily offended the 3,375 members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with everyone else in the movie-factory town. "If it were a special occasion or something, I might do it," he said. "But I'm not interested in an inanimate statuette of a little bald man. I like something with long, blond curls." While the Oscars may be a popularity contest, that had nothing to do with his true reasons for not attending the Academy Awards presentation. Perhaps fearing

rejection, he could not bring himself to be present when the fate of his picture was announced to his peers in the industry, as well as millions of television viewers worldwide.

On Monday evening, in Los Angeles, Diane Keaton arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at 6:30, rigged out in what
Annie Hall
might have worn to the Oscars, a Victorian gown, a long skirt with layered tunic, a high-necked blouse with a rose pinned to the bodice, and boots. Accompanied by her sister, she flapped along the red carpet and made her way to her seat. In New York, meanwhile, Woody pulled up to Michaels Pub wearing his standard winter uniform, a Ralph Lauren plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves, rumpled corduroy slacks, and sneakers, with his scraggly red hair falling in clumps over his ears. Immediately he began to fume because the place was overflowing with photographers and reporters. Throughout the evening, he refused to speak with anyone. At 12:15* he packed his clarinet, grabbed his combat jacket, and ran out a side door to his waiting Rolls-Royce. Usually when he got home on Mondays, he liked to unwind by watching television. That night he did not turn on the set because the Oscars were still being broadcast. Instead he climbed into bed. "I turned my phone off and went to sleep."

CHAPTER EIGHT

Vanity Fair

The next morning Woody went down to the kitchen, where he poured orange juice and heated up a croissant. Once the coffee was brewing, he opened the front door to take in the
New York Times.
As he glanced at the front page, he noticed a small news item in the lower right-hand corner (4 AWARDS TO ALLEN FILM) and started to laugh. "You've got to be kidding," he thought. Hastily opening the paper, the first thing he saw was Diane's photograph, and he couldn't help thinking it was "all very funny." In a major upset,
Annie Hall
had done the inconceivable and walked off with Oscars for best picture, actress, director, and original screenplay. Only in the acting category was he beaten, by Richard Dreyfuss for
The Goodbye Girl.

Checking his answering service, he found "a million messages from people who'd been calling all night," especially from the media, who hounded him for reaction statements. To admit that he was happy went against his nature, and so he said that he felt pleased "for Diane and for everyone involved," but the Oscars meant nothing to him personally.

Woody’s reaction puzzled even those who knew him intimately.

"No joy?" asked Charles Joffe, incredulous.

"I don't have time for that," Woody muttered. It was sad, thought Joffe, who, at the Oscars ceremony, scampered up to the podium with a proud Jack Rollins to accept the best picture award from Jack Nicholson. Joffe, bouncing up and down in excitement, delivered a speech perfectly suited to the occasion. "United Artists had said to Woody, 'Woody, do your thing.' They have allowed Woody to mature into a fine filmmaker." Considering how much Woody owed Arthur Krim and the Medici, it was a fitting tribute but one that many people in the film industry felt he should have made himself.

He did not bother to pick up his Oscar statuettes. Several months later, he confessed to having "no idea" of their whereabouts. Finally the Academy shipped the awards to the Rollins and Joffe office. Norma Lee Clark called her employer.