The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (29 page)

To portray the floozy girlfriend, hard as nails and straight out of
Guys and Dolls,
Mia got busy transforming herself into an Italian-American with teased blond hair, dark glasses, and a nasal Brooklyn accent. She was no problem. The problem was casting the singer. To get a cross between a third-rate Vic Damone and a Buddy Hackett, Woody saw scores of candidates, even considered well-known ethnic actors such as Robert De Niro and Danny Aiello. Nobody seemed right. In desperation, his casting director cruised Colony Records on Broadway, scooping up all the schmaltzy albums she could find. One of them,
Can I Depend on You?,
containing original compositions, including "Agit'a," a novelty song about indigestion, was by an Italian-American singer by the name of Nick Apollo Forte. "So we started tracking him down and found him singing in Watcrbury," Juliet Taylor recalled. "It's as though he had been waiting for this big break."

Taylor's discovery in person was a beefy, dimpled crooner of forty-five, precisely right for the part of Lou Canova. According to Forte, "they just went bananas over me." As Jack Rollins remarked to him, "It was a great day when you met Woody but it was a better day when he met you." Forre felt reborn.

Nick Apollo Forte had never acted before. A nightclub singer, cocktail pianist, songwriter, and part-time tuna fisherman, he lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife and seven children. Forte was frustrated. His club act and ethnic and country albums enabled him to educate his kids and put in an octagonal, in-ground swimming pool in his backyard, but he was tired of working Holiday Inns for $100 a night. His dream was to play Las Vegas and Atlantic City, with luck, maybe even the Grand Ole Opry. According to Forte, he had never seen a Woody Allen picture.

Principal photography on
Broadway Danny Rose
began in the fall of 1982. Typically, Woody did few takes, on average four, but he preferred two. Most actors caught on immediately but if not, Woody corrected them or rewrote the lines. Or fired them. In the case of Nick Forte, not easily replaceable, he found himself giving acting lessons. Forte, who considered himself "easy to work with," didn't hold this against Woody, who he concluded must be "a perfectionist." In one scene, Danny Rose and Lou Canova are supposed to cross the street, but Forte, as Woody recalled it, "just couldn't get it." After plodding through the scene fifty times, the greatest number of takes Allen had done before (or since), the singer finally got it right, by which time Woody was ready to dial his therapist.

No matter, because Forte, quite rightly, received raves from the critics, who felt he stole the movie with a standout supporting performance that should earn an Oscar nomination. His telephone would not stop ringing. He was signed by International Creative Management, one of the biggest talent agencies in the business. Johnny Carson invited him to appear on
The Tonight Show,
and Gene Siskel wrote him up for the
Chicago Tribune.
Fielding job offers, he got four nights at the Sands Hotel in Atlantic City, and, from NBC, a forty-thousand-dollar contract for a sitcom pilot. Just to be on the safe side, however, he sunk his movie earnings into a commercial fishing boat for giant tuna.

Six months later, the brilliant career was over. The phone never rang. NBC replaced him with James Coco, and Johnny Carson forgot him. His agent was fired for mismanagement. Even the giant tunas let him down.

Favorable reviews did not translate into a healthy box office for
Broadway Danny Rose,
which grossed a measly $10.6 million. The picture received two Oscar nominations for Woody's direction and screenwriting, but the Academy ignored Nick Apollo Forte. Mia, for once not playing herself, gave one of the best performances of her career and received a Golden Globe nomination from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

In the middle of shooting
Broadway Danny Rose,
Woody hired a personal assistant. Jane Read Martin, a graduate of Denison University, began her career at NBC on
Saturday Night Live
as a girl Friday to one of the regular players, Jane Curtin, before becoming Jean Doumanian's secretary. Martin was a tall, smiling blonde of twenty-four, flexible and conveniently single, but her main qualification for the job seemed to be unquestioning adulation. She was a fanatical admirer of Woody Allen.

Jane s father, Henry, was a
New Yorker
cartoonist, and her older sister, Ann, would shortly became a best-selling author of a paperback series of children's books about baby-sitting (The Baby-Sitters Club). By the mid-nineties, Ann M. Martin would sell 130 million copies, making her the Jackie Collins of preteen-girl readers and a millionaire presiding over a booming mini-industry, with licensing agreements for dolls, board games, and a TV series. Jane, meanwhile, was struggling to make a career in television production.

Martin's duties were extensive. Since her boss disliked talking to people, she became his alter ego, anticipating his needs, fielding requests for his time and attention, straightening up messes. She knew how to get things done. In his personal affairs, she acted as Woody's Swiss guard and shielded him from aggravation, providing a kind of buffer between him and the outside world. She attended to the menial jobs that celebrities need not do for themselves, the thank you, gifts, flowers, and returned phone calls. When Woody had to travel, it was Jane who planned the itineraries and handled reservations. For good measure, to ensure things went smoothly, she accompanied Woody and Mia on their trips to Europe. As time passed, Jane wielded more and more power.

The competent personal assistant completed the trilogy of Woody’s female support system: Mia, his mate at home, Jean Doumanian to provide faithful sorrel support, and Jane Martin as his adoring office wife, who fussed over him from morning until night, developing inevitably a powerful rivalry with his home wife. Unlike Norma Lee Clark, the prissy secretary to whom Woody never uttered a personal word in ten years, Martin saw herself as Woody's friend. Holed up downtown at the Rollins and Joffe office, Clark continued to screen calls, sort mail, and write romances. But Martins ten- to twelve-hour days left no time for anything but Woody. To the joking suggestion that she would be the perfect person to write a book about him, she laughed and said she couldn't because "she would be sued. She knows too much."

'Not adjusted for inflation.

Woody had always preferred dreams to real life. By the time he was ten, he discovered his two ideal refuges from reality: the gloomy Konigsberg cellar, where he could thumb through his comic books in peace, and dark movie houses, where he doted on romantic comedies about people whose lives were lived in penthouses and nightclubs. In November of 1983, he began shooting a film in which he used some of this autobiographical material.

The Purple Rose of Cairo
is about a waitress living in a small town during the Depression. She is an ardent movie fan who has managed to break through the wall between flesh and fantasy. Cecilia peels a fictional character ofT the screen and pulls him into the nonfictional audience at the Jewel theater. Of course, film buffs could not help recognizing the plots similiarity to a previous movie. In 1924 Buster Keaton filmed
Sherlock, Jr.,
about a movie projectionist who, after dozing off, climbs through the screen and is drawn into the celluloid action of the picture. The very mention of Keaton’s silent comedy made Woody huffy.
Sherlock, Jr.
was "in no remote way an inspiration," he said a bit testily, and besides, Keaton had never been a favorite of his. Favorite or not, he might well have been copying Keaton’s classic, just as he borrowed from Ingmar Bergman and George S. Kaufman, among others. On the other hand, he may have simply been massaging Woody Allen. In his 1977
New Yorker
story, "The Kugelmass Episode," a college professor achieves a similar type of fantasy when he enters a magicians literary cabinet and finds himself a character in
Madame Bovary.

Although the movie-fan story seemed to be truly about himself as a kid, Woody decided not to play the starry Cecilia. Emphatically distancing himself—"there was just no part for me," he insisted—he gave the role to Mia.

Principal photography began in Piermont, New York, a small town on the Hudson River that had the correct gritty look of a thirties factory area. (Some interiors were filmed in Midwood, at the Kent theater, where Woody went as a boy.) Shooting got off to a bad start. For his hero, Tom Baxter, Woody hired Michael Keaton at $250,000, a quarter of his normal fee. But after ten days he had second thoughts and abruptly replaced him, which involved scrapping the footage and buying him out. (Woody said Keaton didn't look like a 1935 person after all, but word leaked out from the location that Woody was not pleased with his scenes.) After approaching Kevin Kline, he hastily signed Jeff Daniels, who had been acclaimed for his performance in
Terms of Endearment

Never completely satisfied with any of his films, Woody would nevertheless rank
The Purple Rose of Cairo
as his best picture, at least the one that came closest to his original concept. Later on, he also admitted that Cecilia, of all his created characters, was the one with whom he most closely identified.
Purple Rose
received some of the best reviews of his career. In the opinion of

Time's
Richard Schickel, it was nothing less than "one of the best movies about movies ever made." For a change, even the hard-nosed Pauline Kael seemed impressed by the writing and characterizations: "This is the first Woody Allen movie in which a whole batch of actors really interact and spark each other." Among the minority was Woody’s passionate detractor John Simon, who compared the picture to an unpopular vegetable: "I say a purple rose is a purple rose, whether as film or as film-within-film, and either way, its spinach and to hell with it." At the box office, however, audiences too must have smelled spinach because they stayed away. Despite superb reviews, the picture lost money.

For Woody personally,
The Purple Rose of Cairo
would be memorable. One day he was auditioning women to play prostitutes in the brothel scene. As he sat in his office and the door opened and closed, bunches of actresses routinely came and went. In one of the groups, however, he was captivated by a particular woman in her mid-thirties, not really young, not traditionally pretty, either. What's more, she seemed to be handicapped by a peculiar squint, a quavery, Minnie Mouse speaking voice, and a dismaying number of nervous mannerisms. Still, she was the one who "lit up the room," and he immediately decided to use her. After displaying Dianne Wiest in a spectacular cameo, he subsequently elevated her to stardom and she repaid him with interest—three Oscars for
Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days,
and
Bullets Over Broadway
He was to describe her, as he once said reverently of Diane Keaton, as "one of the greatest actresses in America," and his flirtatious manner around her would eventually cause Mia to become suspicious about the nature of their off-camera relationship.

At the time, however, it was Mia who occupied the central position in his life and work.
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
her fourth picture with him, firmly established her in the public imagination as Woody's muse. Hereafter, whenever he released a new film, everyone knew the leading character was fashioned for her special capability. Woody never talked of love; he talked of loyalty, dependability, and obedience. Mia would show up on the set and do whatever he asked. "If you ask her to play nasty, she does it," he said. "If you want her to play something sexy, she does it." In Andrew Sarris's view, Mia had been "more interesting in other things" and Woody, by imposing line readings, only "diminished her." But these early Mia-Woody films struck Vincent Canby as "love letters. He obviously admired her tremendously. She'd always been an accomplished actress—though never a comedienne—and he got performances from her that no other director ever could have gotten."

Soon after meeting Woody, Mia more or less stopped looking for work. Her pay was not extravagant by any means—$150,000 a picture with gradual increases to $375,000—but it was sufficient to live on. Twice she ventured
off
on her own (a voice-over for an animated film,
The Last Unicorn,
in 1982, followed by a cameo in
Supergirl,
a disastrous British offshoot of
Superman)
but he discouraged her from working elsewhere. In practical terms, his shooting schedule made other films difficult. Year in, year out, he would start shooting in September or October and continue right through Christmas, sometimes into February. Then, after a few weeks' layoff, he would begin reshoots, sometimes extensive reshoots, more than half of the picture, as one phase of production seemed to segue into the next. In June, when he began preproduction for his next project, she and the children moved to Frog Hollow for the summer. "And that was my life," she said. In time, she convinced herself that working for another director would have damaged their personal relationship.

For all her experience as an actress, she lacked the single essential ingredient for becoming a big star: ambition. Children were her main priority. Collaboration with Woody meant job security and convenience. Unlike most film actors, who must leave home for extended periods in order to work, she could remain in New York in what amounted to regular nine-to-five employment. Her children, along with their baby-sitters, accompanied her to work, thus turning every set into a nursery and day care center.