The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (21 page)

"What do you want to do with them?"

"Well," he said sarcastically, "I'm certainly not going to put Oscars in my house!" His parents, nevertheless, made room in their china cabinet.

In its first year of release,
Annie Hall
grossed $25 million (domestic), a figure that climbed to an estimated $100 million (worldwide) over the next decade. As Woody is fond of pointing out, however, the picture earned less than any other Academy Award-winning best picture.

Eyewitness:

"He hit his high point with
Annie Hall.
That scene in the LA parking lot is truly funny. And also the picture
[Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)]
where the psychiatrist s in bed with a sheep, and not just any sheep but a sheep who's wearing a garter belt! But the serious films don't work because Woody doesn't know a lot about interpersonal relationships and so he doesn't have a lot to say—he's not philosophically profound."

—Elliott Mills

For years Woody had been currying favor with the major film critics—people such as Penelope Gillian, Judith Crist, even the acerbic Pauline Kael—women whom he saw socially for lunch and dinner, and for whom he arranged special previews of his pictures and handwrote funny little complimentary notes on yellow-lined legal paper. But it was Vincent Canby, the powerful
Times
critic, whose good opinion he most craved and who championed him over the years with the same kind of rah-rah cheerleading Pauline Kael had given to Warren Beatty and Robert Altman. Canby's notices were to mystify a younger generation of film critics. "Everybody is entitled to their opinion but Canby was a fanatic about Woody," said Neil Rosen, a New York television Movie critic. "New Yorkers would line up around the block solely based on his accolades. Sometimes it was warranted because the guy is a comedic genius but not in every movie. Woody Allen could make a movie called
The Barking Dog
and Vincent Canby would compliment him on the brilliance of the barking. He could film a piece of human excrement and Canby would write about the brilliance of it all and people would pay money to watch it."

A few days after seeing
Annie Hall,
Canby wrote a column in which he called Woody "America's Ingmar Bergman," a notion that generated instant sneers and jeers but would be forgotten by neither reviewers nor filmgoers. In the estimation of the pugnacious John Simon, Canby's remark "helped ruin Allen" because he took it as gospel. "John has no sense of humor whatsoever," said Canby, who, waving a dismissive hand, stands by his words. "Once you write words like 'comic genius' or 'American Bergman,' you immediately think oh my god, what have I done. But what I meant was that his place in American cinema is like Bergmans in Sweden. As a personal filmmaker he towers over everybody else. Nobody has ever come close to him."*

When
Interiors
was released in the summer of 1978, after a year of advance hype, Canby devoted four columns in the daily and Sunday
Times
to a discussion of the film. Two decades later, he admits that "I didn't like the picture at the time. It was not his natural form. However, I warmed to it later because making
Interiors
took great courage."

No other critic gave Woody credit for courage, or for anything else for that matter. It was almost universally panned. Even though Penelope Gilliatt called the film "a giant step forward" in American cinema, her predictable enthusiasm was drowned out by dissident colleagues merrily dismantling Woody’s efforts.
Interiors
reminded Pauline Kael of "a handbook of art-film mannerisms," so chilling that it might have been directed by the suicidal Eve herself "from the grave." Similar Grand Guignol images were conjured up by Stanley Kauffmann, who called it a "tour of the Ingmar Bergman Room at Madame Tussaud s" wax museum. It took John Simon two columns to adequately document the magnitude of the "disaster" perpetrated on a gullible public by a man with "a Bergman complex." The "hackneyed" dialogue, the "derivative" camera work, and the sorry acting of Diane Keaton ("a vacuum cleaner in heat") made him "roll over with helpless laughter." Such snotty cracks would eventually make Simon persona non grata at Woody Allen screenings. Looking back, Simon said recently that he was "tough on everyone, but I like to think I'm fair. I was no harder on Woody Allen than I was on others. He was desperate to have it both ways, the little Jewish schmuck, who was the epitome of a loser and yet comes out on top. That was too much

In 1978, Woody had an opportunity to meet Ingmar Bergman when the Swede, together with his wife and longtime companion, Liv Ullman, was visiting New York Ullmans suggestion that they meet for dinner reportedly made Woody anxious. Aside from his limited social accomplishments, he disliked one-on-one meetings with celebrities because it always turned out to be, he said, a meaningless exchange of compliments. When he hesitated, Ullman assured him that Bergman appreciated his work and had requested the meeting.

To Woody, Bergman was the greatest filmmaker who ever lived. Still, for all his eminence, the sixty-year-old director's career seemed to be in decline. In 1976, he had angrily left Sweden for several years after being charged with income tax fraud, charges that were eventually dropped.

The evening turned out to be perfectly pleasant. At Bergman's hotel room, dinner was ordered from room service, and the two men spent the entire time talking shop, mostly commiserating about the frustrations they faced as personal filmmakers whose pictures never managed to generate big lines at the box office.

The blisteringly negative press for
Interiors
put Woody in a bad mood. The critics, he grumped, were not "charitable."

If reviewers were mean to him, so were moviegoing audiences, because the picture that cost United Artists $10 million would earn back only $4.6 million in rentals. What's more, some of Woody’s personal friends and biggest admirers could only shake their heads. To Roger Angell,
Interiors
was "that sad, miserable movie, the Jewish idea of how Protestants view death."

The question is, What happened?
Interiors,
a study in muted beige and earth tones, its silent tableaux photographed by Gordon Willis against blank walls or the rolling ocean, could not have looked more stylishly handsome. It was finely performed for the most part, too, winning Maureen Stapleton an Oscar nomination. Nevertheless, it was stupefyingly dull, "a bore," said UA's Steven Bach. "I just hated it." A possible explanation may be that, unlike
Annie Hall,
where the writing came out of Woody’s own life and the people he knew, his
Interiors
characters appeared to be strangers to him. Except for Stapleton's character, they were people that other writers—Ingmar Bergman or Eugene O'Neill—knew best. Detouring in from distant works of art, confused and lost, they seem to be searching for their authors.

During the cutting of
Interiors,
Woody and Ralph Rosenblum ate lunch at a Hunan restaurant on Broadway, not far from Rosenblum's brownstone on Eighty-fourth Street. As they approached the restaurant one day, a teenage girl spotted Woody from across the street and dashed gleefully toward them. Charging through the plate-glass doors, she arrived breathless at the table to ask for an autograph just as they were sitting down. Woody, studying the menu, didn't look up.

No, he murmured.

Crushed, she slunk out.

"Why don't you give her the autograph?" asked Rosenblum, sympathetic.

Woody’s anxiety about the new film exhibited itself in an unusually high level of tension between them. "By the time we finished
Interiors,"
Rosenblum wrote, "we both sensed that our decade-long collaboration was nearing an end." Not only did he have little enthusiasm for the film, but after
Annie Hall,
there seems to have been a falling out. Some in the business held Woody responsible for the fact that Rosenblum was passed over for an Oscar nomination, and perhaps Rosenblum himself believed this to be true. In any case, around this time he began to write a book (with Robert Karen) about film editing,
When the Shooting Stops... the Cutting Begins,
including much of his personal history, and asked Woody to write the preface. But when Woody saw the galleys, he angrily reneged. Not only did Rosenblum take a great deal of credit for much of Woody’s best work but he also described outtakes from
Annie Hall in
such detail that Woody felt they would be unusable in another film. And besides, he always assumed that relations between a director and editor would be confidential, and here was Rosenblum broadcasting his personal affairs, making critical remarks about his foibles. In ten years, Rosenblum wrote damningly, "we've never shared a heartfelt concern, an uninhibited laugh, an open display of despair or anger."

After Rosenblum's departure, Woody set up his own editing room in a suite of offices in the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue. A knowledgeable editor himself by this time, he knew what he wanted, which was to be the boss. He hired Susan Morse, one of Rosenblum's assistants, who was in her mid-twenties. Unlike Rosenblum, Sandy Morse was a comfortable person, easy to get along with.

Moving Pictures:

Mary: What do you do, Tracy?

Tracy: I go to high school.

—Manhattan,
1979

In Woody's next film,
Manhattan,
the hero is a forty-two-year-old television comedy writer working on his first novel (by dictating his prose into a tape recorder) and a divorced daddy sowing his post marital wild oats with a new girlfriend. Tracy, seventeen and a student at an East Side private school, sexually liberated, is deeply infatuated with her middle-aged lover. Isaac Davis's best friends are a happily married couple: Yale, a college professor, and his wife, Emily, who don't find anything peculiar about Isaac's affair with a teenager who still does homework. Isaac, however, is shocked to learn that Yale is having an affair with Mary Wilke, a member of the local intelligentsia who is reviewing Tolstoy's letters for a literary magazine and tossing off a novelization. Then things happen: Yale breaks off with Mary for the sake of his marriage; Isaac discards Tracy to take up with the snobbish Mary; then the partners change again when Yale leaves Emily for Mary. Alone again, Isaac mourns his lost chance and tries to win Tracy back, in vain.

The starting point for this unconventional fable of a May-December romance, another collaboration with Marshall Brickman, is clearly Woody's affair with Stacey Nelkin. But plenty of pageantry got added along the way: Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," bursts of fireworks flaring over the towers of Manhattan, the notion that Woody regretted the loss of his nymphet. As Stacey herself would remark, "the thing that always seemed strange to me is that Mariel Hemingway played it much younger. She acted in such an innocent and naive way. That just wasn't me." Evidently Nelkin did not know about the existence of Nancy Jo Sales. Woody seems to have seamlessly woven together the two young women to create the character of Tracy, who has had affairs with three boys before meeting Isaac.

By casting the gloriously six-feet-tall, sixteen-year-old granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway as the mistress, Woody made viewers forget that Isaac was barely on the right side of statutory rape. Of course, Mariel, in real life much more than a coltish child, had made her film debut at fourteen, and by this time she and her older sister, Margaux, a successful model who lived life in the fast lane, happened to be the toasts of swinging New York. After principal photography and retakes were completed, Mariel invited Woody to come out west and visit her family in Ketchum, Idaho. As luck would have it, the next day it snowed and Mariel*s father proposed they take Woody for a hike to show him the natural beauty of the land.

"So I'm off like a goat to the top of the mountain," Mariel Hemingway recalled, "and this poor little man is schlepping through the snow. Its not like he was out of shape, but this was high altitude." Every so often, she yelled back, "Are you OK?"

All Woody could answer was, "Ayyyy." First thing next morning, he telephoned for a private jet to rescue him.

Back home in the safe countryside north of Bloomingdale's, he and Sandy Morse were finishing up the editing of "Woody Allen No. 3>" and then catastrophe struck again, when he woke one morning stricken with complete loss of hearing in one ear. Having just spent several days on the sound track, he could not help remembering that George Gershwin's dizziness and headaches had led to an expected—and rapid—death due to a suspected brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight. (Gershwin, like Woody, was a notorious hypochondriac.) Within hours, Woody was scheduling tests and preparing for the worst. That weekend, lying motionless in his bed, asking himself "if this is it," he wondered if the thing had spread to his spine and should he attempt to sleep with every woman he knew. The prospect of his life going down the tubes was "terrifying to me, absolutely terrifying."

Although the tests found no sign of illness, he would never forget the worst experience of his life, which he converted into comedy in
Hannah and Her Sisters
("I'm dying! I'm dying! I know it!"). Soon his attention turned to matters even more strenuously scary: the screening of twenty-one Bob Hope films from start to finish. That spring, the Film Society of Lincoln Center was planning to honor Hope's achievements, and because Woody repeatedly claimed that Hope had been his major influence, the Society asked him to compile and narrate a sixty-minute film tribute to the comedian, an anthology that he tided "My Favorite Comedian." Avery Fisher Hall on the night of the black-tie gala was sold out, the 2,700 ticket holders including a swarm of celebrities—people such as Diane Keaton, Kurt Vonnegut, and Andy Warhol, everybody but Woody himself, who was conveniently in Paris. Dick Cavett, co narrator of the film and emcee of the gala, explained that the thought of appearing at this sort of gathering made Woody "break out in a rash." One of the attendees, Andrew Sarris, recalled that "lots of people who bought tickets were under the misapprehension Woody would appear." Having spent $250 for a seat, some were annoyed but none more than the guest of honor.