The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (32 page)

Once shooting got under way, Woody realized Maureen O'Sullivan was miscast. Spoiled and selfish in real life, she bore similarities to the character but failed to project those unpleasant qualities in her performance. It was an awkward situation, but reshooting meant he could oust Maureen. He first approached Gena Rowlands before turning to Elaine Stritch, who had no idea this was the second version. "We were well into it before I found out," she said. "But what did I care." Reshooting allowed the removal of Shepard as well. For the role of the weakling writer, he substituted Sam Waterston, a less-glamorous actor who had played one of the men in
Interiors.
When the picture wrapped in the spring of 1987, Woody seemed in no hurry to finish it. His only regret, he announced, was not filming a third version to further develop some of the characters, which made John Simon wail in his review, "What is this: the perfectionism of banality?" The final cost of the project was $10 million, 20 percent over budget.

When
September
opened in the fall of 1988, Stanley Kauffmann wrote sadly that the film was a drastic mistake, not worth making even once, not worth seeing, not worth reviewing. He felt sorry for Woody, who wanted so badly to abandon comedy. One of the very few reviewers to appreciate
September
was Roger Ebert, who thought Woody "as acute an author of serious dialogue as anyone now making movies." In his opinion, there weren't "that many people in America smart enough to appreciate a Woody Allen film." But Woody laid his head on the block, and he got it chopped off, even by admirers such as Richard Schickel. From the beginning of his career, Woody had soaked up ideas from his favorite movies, not only those made by masters such as Fellini and Bergman, but also the films in which Bob Hope had starred.
September,
so obviously "Uncle Vanya—Lite," provoked critics into pointing out his fondness for aping his favorite directors. Pauline Kael called the picture "profoundly derivative and second-rate." What a tragic waste of a career, she lamented; by placing a low value on his talent, by trying to imitate Chekhov, he had turned into "a pseud."

Nobody came to see
September,
which closed in short order and left Woody feeling unusually battered. Reviews barely mentioned Mia's name, or brutally criticized her performance for being, as one reviewer wrote, "Allen's little Max von Sydow in bloomers." After seeing the second version, an unmitigated mess, some people were convinced that the first version must have been even worse. Nobody would know because Woody destroyed the footage.

Undeterred, the following year he appeared to be reprising Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece,
Wild Strawberries,
which would lead some reviewers to christen his seventeenth movie
Wild Raspberries.
The Bergman classic is about a seventy-eight-year-old professor of medicine who travels to a distant university for an honorary degree, meets people from his past along the way, and is plunged back into his childhood. Dr. Izak Borg appears in
Another Woman
in the form of a fifty-year-old professor of German philosophy (Gena Rowlands), who is likewise haunted by memories of her barren past. She has managed her career admirably, but in her private life she is emotionally barricaded from her own feelings. (Woody would describe this chilly character, along with Eve in
Interiors
and Cecilia in
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
as being close to his own emotional makeup.) Through flashbacks and dream sequences, the professor is forced to confront her true self and understand how her coldness and indifference have hurt people.

Mia, seven months' pregnant when shooting began in October 1987, had only a small part as a mealy-mouthed pregnant woman, whose sessions with her psychiatrist drift through the air vent into Marion’s office next door. Mia worked up until a week before Satchel's birth, then returned a month later for reshoots, using a pillow to swell her belly. She had so little interest in the film that she never bothered to see it.

For
Another Woman,
Woody achieved a longtime ambition when he was able to work with Ingmar Bergman's former cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. Woody's coup failed to impress Stanley Kauffmann, who thought that engaging Nykvist was "a pathetic, desperately imitative move." Using the work of innovative artists such as Bergman as stepping-stones to one’s own experiences was fine, but it was quite another thing to become an expatriate from the real world. Woody "has stopped looking at his world," wrote Kauffmann, and instead looks mostly at Bergman films. (Woody, in fact, lived an insulated existence. In twenty-five years, he had not driven a car, nor had he ever visited a shopping mall or a multiplex movie theater.) The similarities to Bergman evoked widespread derision. David Ansen in
Newsweek
dubbed
Another Woman
"Wild Matzos." Pauline Kael admitted not having liked
Wild Strawberries
the first time. "An homage," she sniffed, "is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable."

On the Couch:

"Each person has his own obsessions."

—Woody Allen, 1985

Every day around five o'clock, Woody arrived at Mia’s house to take Dylan for a walk. "It was like a father coming home from work," recalled Lorrie Pierce, who was at Mia's place to give piano lessons. "Dylan adored him, and very often had made a drawing for him. Together they were extremely intense. When everyone was singing carols on Christmas, he was cuddling Dylan in his lap, kissing her feet and hands. I thought, 'How sweet.' "

At the age of three, Dylan was an adorable plump little girl with pouty lips and a head of golden, Shirley Temple ringlets. "She was cute as a button," recalled a parent whose child went to the same nursery school. By now she was the focus of Woody's life. At all times, he carried around a pacifier in his pocket. If there was a morsel of food too cumbersome for her little mouth, he chewed it first. In the morning he would creep up to her bed and wait for her to wake. At bedtimes, he was there to spin fairy tales about his own childhood, which he called "Little Woody" stories. Dylan made her film debut at the age of six months as the baby sister in
Radio Days
and subsequently would appear in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
and
Alice.
Whatever the picture, she had the run of the set, like a fantasy playground. George Schindler, a professional magician who played Shandu in "Oedipus Wrecks," remembered how she "played on the camera while they were setting up." Somehow the sight of her made Woody seem like an ordinary baby-talking father.

It was no surprise that Dylan became spoiled. Woody hired professional shoppers to purchase toys and games. The sight of the nursery, which began to look like a branch of F.A.O. Schwarz, eventually upset Moses, it seemed so excessive. "Look at that," he would shake his head. "Kids don't have all that." The big loser in all this was ten-year-old Moses, who had depended on Woody for affection and now got to spend only a few minutes with him whenever Woody visited the apartment or Frog Hollow.

If Moses was unhappy, so was his mother, who was observing Woody’s behavior with apprehension. Jealous when Dylan paid attention to anyone else, he treated her like a girlfriend. As tensions rose further, Mia complained that he had stopped giving her presents and gave them to the baby.

"She's a child," he fired back. "Of course I get her presents." Did she expect him to come home with a chocolate egg for her? After that heated discussion, he told himself that Mia was obviously regarding her own daughter as a rival.

The way he related physically to the baby struck Mia as unhealthy. Watching television, he would wrap himself around her and ignore everyone else, Mia said. When she was naked, he could not take his eyes off her. Even more upsetting, dressed only in his undershorts, he would nestle in bed while reading to her, and encourage her to suck his thumb. During their trip to Paris when Dylan was two, Mia recalled that she confronted him one night at the Ritz Hotel and accused him of lusting after her child. "You look at her in a sexual way," she said. "You fondle her. It's not natural. You're all over her." Woody thought she was crazy. Dylan was "the single most important thing in my life" and he had been "a wonderful, wonderful father."

Woody's need to be always in physical contact with Dylan made others uncomfortable, too. At Frog Hollow one summer afternoon, Tisa Farrow and her mother noticed the peculiar way in which Woody was applying sun lotion to Dylan. He was rubbing his finger in the crack of the child's buttocks. Maureen O'Sullivan reprimanded him, and Mia hastily grabbed the bottle away. Dylan’s godmother, Casey Pascal, said that she could not remember having ever seen a man so infatuated with a child. "If there was a roomful of children, he would focus only on Dylan."

Meanwhile, there was Satchel. Not only did Woody fail to bond with him but he seemed to have no real interest in his son, whom he jokingly called "a little bastard," Mia would recall. Certainly there was no physical resemblance between father and son, who had white-blond, almost silvery hair and blue eyes and was said to look like Mia's dead brother, Michael. From birth. Satchel was a difficult child, colicky and attached to his mother. At three, he remained hyperactive, "wired," said a source close to the family. He was also exceptionally intelligent—talking at the age of seven months—but that seemed to make no difference to his father. At that time, Satch was not yet weaned and Mia rigged up a harness so that he might continue to nurse. The device was nothing that would have bothered the La Leche League but it evidently appalled Woody.

The summer of 1988, Woody again traveled to Europe with Mia and the family. Accompanied by the troubleshooting Jane Martin, they set out on a whirlwind vacation that whisked them to five countries, including the Soviet Union, which they visited for only one day after Woody became upset with the primitive local customs. First-class tickets on the Concorde and accommodations at deluxe hotels made it an expensive holiday that cost approximately $425,000. (The following year he chartered a private jet.) Writing on hotel stationery in cities such as Helsinki and Salzburg, he completed an unusual screenplay that encompassed the stories of two lives. A highly regarded ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) is having an affair with a neurotic flight attendant (Anjelica Huston), who is threatening to destroy his career and marriage unless he marries her. Even though Judah Rosenthal is haunted by a childhood memory of his father warning him that God sees everything we do, he arranges to have his bothersome mistress murdered—with neither detection nor punishment. Tormented at first by guilt, the eye doctor is eventually able to live with his cold-blooded deed. The crime of the doctor who gets away with murder is paralleled by the misdemeanors of an idealistic maker of high-minded documentary films that nobody wants to see. The nebbishy Cliff Stern (Woody) is regarded as a fool by his castrating wife (Joanna Gleason) and rich brother-in-law, Lester (Alan Alda), who constantly put him down. Cliffs infatuation with a kindly television producer (Mia) seems to offer an escape from his sexless marriage, but she decides to marry Lester instead. What Judah and Cliff—and Woody, too—share in common is their ability to justify their actions.

In
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
a brilliant balance between comedy and drama, Woody turned out a successful film that was serious, witty, and bore no resemblance to Bergman movies. Among the ethical questions that his contemporary New York characters ponder are: Is evil punished? Are good deeds rewarded? Despite its focus on moral issues, this complex comedy would be his biggest commercial hit since
Hannah and Her Sisters.
Taking in $18 million at the box office, it struck a chord with both critics and audiences. Although critics debated the meaning of the film, the idea was perfectly clear to John Simon, who hailed Woody’s courage for tackling the subject and his "guts" to come up with an honest answer: "There is no justice, no rhyme or reason in the universe, no God." The film was, in Simons opinion, "Aliens first successful blending of drama and comedy, plot and subplot."

Crimes and Misdemeanors
was one of two films Woody released in 1988, quite an accomplishment for even the most industrious auteur. "Oedipus Wrecks" went into production seven months before
Crimes.
Under the umbrella title
New York Stories,
Woody and his producer, Robert Greenhut, decided to make a short-story film, three shorts by different filmmakers, a genre that had fallen into disfavor after the forties. But Greenhut believed they could pull together a project exploring various aspects of New York life. Martin Scorsese agreed to contribute a vignette about a Jackson Pollack-type painter ("Life Lessons"), and Francis Ford Coppola cowrote with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sofia, an updated version of the Eloise story, about a twelve-year-old living at the Sherry Netherland hotel ("Life Without Zoe").

Woody’s forty-one minute contribution, "Oedipus Wrecks," was a return to his earlier films and the kind of pure comedy that his fans had been waiting for since
Broadway Danny Rose.
At the age of fifty-two, he managed to squeeze a few laughs out of his relationship with his mother. Sheldon Mills is a befuddled lawyer whose engagement to a divorced, gentile woman with three children (Mia) horrifies his mother. As Sheldon tells his psychiatrist, he may be middle-aged but his mother still makes him feel like he is in diapers, which is why he wishes she would disappear. Small wonder because Mrs. Millstein (Mae Questel) orders her son around as if she were a prison matron. Sheldon's wish is granted when a magician accidentally dematerializes the matriarch during the course of a magic trick and can't figure out how to bring her back. Sheldon's joy is short-lived, however, because the emasculating Mrs. Millstein reappears as a giant apparition floating in the sky, publicly humiliating him before the entire city. While there was nothing funny about Mrs. Millsteins prototype, the portrait of Nettie Konigsberg, on celluloid, was full of comic invention that showed what Woody could accomplish when he looked at his own life instead of Bergmans films.