The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (22 page)

The previous day, at the Waldorf Towers, journalist Stephen Silverman had asked Bob Hope what he thought about Woody watching his old pictures.

"Hey," Hope drawled with a curl of the lip, "how 'bout that guy?" and squinted, as though hard of hearing, when asked for his opinion of Woody's films. Finally, he said, "I saw that"—he fumbled for the tide—
"Annie Hall"
Then he lost interest and quickly changed the subject to the Johnny Carson roast he was emceeing that evening. Twenty years later, Hope sounded more charitable about Woody’s pilfering of his comedy style. "Hey, it's an honor to be copied," the ninety-three-year-old comedian said. His favorite Woody Allen picture was, he said,
Take the Money and Run.
"The idea of a cello player with a high school marching band is comic genius. Woody is more than a comic' He's a comedy guru." If Woody offered him a substantial role (but not a cameo), "I would probably say yes. Good sex-symbol roles are hard to come by."

At the Lincoln Center tribute, however, strolling on stage to deliver a twenty-minute monologue, Hope stung like a hornet. Woody Allen, he said contemptuously, was a wonderful kid who wrote, acted, and directed, which would make him "a
near
genius. Not a whole genius but a near genius." Woody’s best friend, Jean Doumanian, sitting in the audience, took umbrage at that remark. As the crowd filed out afterward for a cheese-and-dessert reception, she turned indignantly to Stephen Silverman. "Have you ever heard anything so insulting in your life?" she sniffed.

On Saturday evening, April 14, 1979, United Artists was screening the new picture, now tided
Manhattan,
for Woody’s friends in the tiny blue screening room on the lobby floor of the MGM Building, on Sixth Avenue. Steven Bach, one of the few people to have seen the script, had flown in from the West Coast, on his way to London. The spring day was mild, and the sky over midtown that afternoon a perfect blue. Quietly Bach slid into his seat. He later said that if there had been two hours in his three years at United Artists that remain in his memory as "pure, unambiguous pleasure, they are those two." After the lights came up, he nodded wordlessly to Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, then strolled down the nearly deserted avenue, humming Gershwin and grinning. In a rush, "all the reasons I had always wanted to live in New York" came back, "all the reasons I had wanted to be in the movie business."

Like Bach, audiences everywhere were bewitched because possibly no other film has conjured up more perfectly the essence of the big city. Even the critics, most of them at least, found the picture irresistible. Andrew Sards in the
Village Voice
raved that
Manhattan
was "the only truly great American movie of the 1970s." Asked recently if he still ranked it as the outstanding film of the seventies, Sarris thought it was "not the only one. There are others I like from that period. But my test of a movie is whether or not I can look at it again and again. Can you stand to see
The Bridge on the River Kwai
another ten times? Or
Lawrence of Arabia}"
But perhaps the ultimate compliment was offered by Maureen Stapleton, who thought
Manhattan
was so beautiful, so romantic that "it almost makes you forget all the dog poop on the streets." It would be his biggest commercial success, earning a healthy $45.7 million ($137 million in today’s dollars).

Manhattan,
Woody’s third script with Marshall Brickman, would turn out to be their last collaboration for more than a dozen years. Like Ralph Rosenblum, Brickman had made key contributions to Woody’s success as a filmmaker, just as Rosenblum tightened rambling footage and turned potential flops into hits, it was Brickman who helped Woody find strong structures to support his inspired stories. In terms of craftsmanship, Woody’s most outstanding scripts would be
Sleeper, Annie Hall,
and
Manhattan,
the films he wrote with Brickman. While Woody never had a shortage of creative ideas, he was apt to go off the track whenever he had to construct a story by himself.

Always self-effacing, Brickman never made a peep about his second-class status in the collaboration. Rosenblum, however, was not the sort to take a backseat and took credit for having more or less single-handedly saved
Annie Hall
and
Take the Money and Run,
which was probably one reason for Woody’s annoyance over Rosenblum's book. The truth, of course, is that nothing Rosenblum did in the editing room mattered had not Woody shot brilliant material in the first place. Similarly, Brickman's talent for organization was irrelevant without Woody’s original creativity.

Tales of New York Life: Earl Wilson: What kind of girls do you like? Woody: Uh ... yeah ... well... practically all kinds. Wilson: Any kind, just so they're breathing? Woody: No, it isn't even necessary in my case. I've had some that didn't breathe and it didn't bother me.

—Woody Allen interview, 1972

The tall, moony girl with the tattersall vest and the long braid down the middle of her back looked like an
Annie Hall
paper doll. Once he had scrawled his signature, she bent over him and planted a tender kiss on his cheek, then handed him a white rose. The place was full of fabulous young creatures lined up quietly near the bandstand, bobbing up and down to "Shine On, Harvest Moon," waiting with their paper and pens. They stood primly, like young ladies in a debutante receiving line. The next one, overcome by his presence, left her ballpoint behind. Down the line he could see a pre-Raphaelite beauty in a gauzy white-lace dress sprigged with violets, but reaching him she turned out to be a chatterbox.

The man who once had trouble getting a date never had to go home alone. If he wanted sex, there was Michaels Pub, his personal Deer Park, a hunting preserve teeming with women. Since there was no dressing room, he sat at a ringside table between shows, accessible to predatory groupies. (Woody never denied the propositions but claimed he didn't respond.) If picking up women failed to satisfy him, neither did his brief relationships with women such as Teri Shields, a tall, blond, heavy-drinking divorcee, who had made a profession out of managing the modeling career of her nubile eleven-year-old daughter, Brooke, who had posed nude for
Playboy
before Woody cast her as an extra in
Annie Hall.
He was also involved with Jessica Harper, the actress who appeared in
Love and Death.

These should have been the best years of his life. Instead, he felt that his entire existence had been warped by success. He never got used to the gawk-ers, freaks, and mutants who looked as if they had escaped from a Diane Arbus photograph, ghouls who ran up to him, shouted his name from buses, collared him in restaurants, stalked him home, even touched him, which made him recoil. Sometimes he felt like "a prisoner in my own home, when I feel like, oh, I don't want to go down and get the papers because some people will say hello to me. So I stay in." When he did go out, especially if it meant walking alone, he felt exposed. Never mind that he had hungered to see his name in lights. Now there was "no place to hide."

Fame, once his motive for living, then "an inconvenience, a pain in the ass," had now turned into a raging beast. Ultimately, he developed the knack of subtracting himself from the picture. At Michael's Pub he zoned out and fiddled with his mouthpiece, never making eye contact with the audience. Tucking his chin into his armpit, he gazed down or up or to one side, looking less like a jazz musician than a school kid hoping not to be called on. To disguise himself on the street, he began wearing a tan fishing hat, which he kept scrunched over his ears like a Saxon helmet, as if dressed for battle. With his face obscured he felt less vulnerable. In time, however, the hat became a trademark around town, and then he hid inside a hooded parka. "He was full of contradictions," said Eric Pleskow. "He didn't want to be recognized but he had a white Rolls. I could never figure it out."

Most of his fans were harmless, but some of them truly scared him. One night, he was chatting with Vivian Gornick at Michaels Pub, when a man planted himself next to their table. "Love you," he told Woody, who didn't even look up.

"No, I mean it," the man said. "I just love you. You're my favorite, you're the greatest." He didn't budge.

"I appreciate it," Woody said at last, "but you can see we want to talk."

In the blink of an eye, for no reason, the scene shifted and turned ugly. "I don't give a fuck what you want," the man said. As Gornick recalled, "it happened in a second and it was terrifying." She saw a piece of the picture; Woody saw it whole. Since the mid-1960s, when he first tasted fame, he always had "a fear of being shot by a girl or a psychotic fan who imagines some connection between us." Ten years later, after his face appeared on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
the likelihood of a bullet in his head seemed more real than ever. It was little wonder he developed stomach problems.

The cross was gone. It was a Christian seaside resort, and one Friday afternoon in early November 1979, disgruntled townspeople were looking up at the Ocean Grove Great Auditorium, where yesterday a crucifix had dangled. In its place, a sign blinked HOTEL STARDUST. Ocean Grove is a tiny community of gingerbread houses next door to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where just about everybody is a practicing Methodist, a town so religious that it's illegal on Sundays to drive a car, ride a bicycle, or fly a kite. The sight of Woody's production crew and a platoon of security guards crawling all over their house of worship elicited angry grumbling. It was terrible how the camp-meeting association had sold out to Woody Allen just to get $25,000 and a new cross.

Throughout the seventies, Woody socialized regularly with Judith Crist, attending her post holiday "Survival Party" every January, entertaining Crist and her family at his apartment or at Sardi's. In addition to reviewing for
TV Guide
and the
Saturday Review,
the fifty-seven-year-old critic hosted monthly film weekends at the Tarrytown Conference Center thirty-five miles north of the city. At an orgy of food and film in a rustic setting, some two hundred movie buffs would gather Friday evening in time for cocktails and dinner, then spend the next two days watching movies (many of them as yet unreleased), conducting postmortems, and rubbing elbows with creative artists invited to analyze their work. In its eighth season, by now practically an institution, the Judith Crist Film Weekends drew the same kind of knowledgeable people, Crist explained, "who went to art houses on a Saturday night." Woody had appeared several times as the honored guest and made sure to give Crist advance copies of his films to screen for her confreres.

In early 1979, he telephoned Crist at her country home in Woodstock. He was thinking about setting his new picture against the background of a "film weekend" and hoped she would have no objection. Crist was thrilled. Naturally, he went on, the story itself would be purely fictional; in fact, he was planning to change the sex of the host. Crist immediately objected. And when she insisted her part be played by a woman, Woody, shrewdly, suggested she herself undertake the role. Crist promised to think about it. As he might have predicted, she declined because she was not an actress and "couldn't spend six months in New Jersey." (In the end, she agreed to do a cameo for $250.)

Sandy Bates, like his creator, is a former stand-up comic turned superstar comedy film auteur, who now wants to concentrate on serious drama. "It's about malaise," Woody explained. The story takes place in the mind of a spiritually bankrupted individual poised "on the verge of a nervous breakdown." A first cousin of Alvy Singers, "he's accomplished these things yet they still don't mean anything to him." To make sure he was not mistaken for Sandy, Woody took special precautions to minimize comparisons. In case anyone imagined he might actually be Sandy Bates, he argued loudly that everything in the picture was invented: He never had a girlfriend who had been institutionalized, never dated a French woman with children, fought with studio executives, or employed a chauffeur arrested for mail fraud. Maybe not. But believing that Woody was not Sandy was a lot to ask of audiences who were not, after all, idiots. They took the picture at face value as the most openly autobiographical movie he had ever done.

There was nothing particularly startling about the exterior parallels between Sandy’s career and Woody’s. What was shockingly revelatory, however, were the interiors. Sandy, a suppurating pustule of hatred, despises himself and his success and eviscerates just about everybody he knows, not only his women and the condescending Hollywood moguls, but even his sister's pitiful fat friend who has been raped. At the Stardust Hotel for a weekend retrospective of his work, he is besieged by freaks: the pretentious film critic and her tiresome students, a camp follower who bribes her way into his bed after her husband has driven her from Bridgeport, the man who lurches up to tell him "I'm your biggest fan," before shooting him dead (or so Sandy hallucinates). At the end, Sandy is alive and whining, still a gloriously rich crybaby.

Hollywood Vignettes:

"Directors can get just about any girl they set their sights on. And if they don't have time to look for themselves, they have pimps scouting for them. The presence of pimps in a social setting can be very unpleasant."

—Pauline Kael, 1998

One Wednesday night in November of 1979, Woody was at Elaine's, hunkered down at his table along the wall. As the hour neared midnight, the noise was bouncing off the ceiling, and a fetid cloud of smoky air was hanging over the nobodies stacked up three-deep at the bar. Just as Michael's Pub served Woody in more than one capacity, Elaine's likewise was both restaurant and playground, an uptown annex of the Deer Park. The place was always loaded with attractive women, and Elaine Kaufman would introduce Woody to anyone he fancied. So would Robert Zarem, a regular at Elaine's and a well-known publicity agent for show-business celebrities whom
Newsweek
christened "Super-flack." When Jean Doumanian first arrived in New York from Chicago, she worked for Bobby Zarem. The volatile pitchman, now middle-aged and roly-poly, fueled by an inexhaustible tank of hot air, had become an important cog in New York's publicity machine by his talent for feeding material to gossip columnists. The son of a Savannah shoe distributor, he suffered panic attacks and emotional outbursts, and visited his therapist on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Like Kaufman, Zarem easily fell into the role of serving Woody.