The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (34 page)

But Woody's money machine had to make do without him. On December 11, 1991, when the company finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, he had already abandoned the dying shark for TriStar. which, along with its sister operation, Columbia, had been acquired by Sony, the powerful Japanese electronics empire.

Dylan’s and Satchel's problems were becoming harder to ignore. Two years apart in age. they did everything together because Mia liked to pair her children. By three, however, Satch's development rivaled his sister's. Reported an observer, "In intelligence he was off the board. Practically everything caught his interest, from insects to doll houses." When he and Dylan played dress-up, he begged to wear girl's clothing. "I want to be a girl," he cried. "I'm a girl deer, I'm a girl animal." Eventually, his identification with Snow White and other female story characters began to worry Woody, who blamed Mia for being overprotective. But his own relationship with the little boy, now more involved than before, was also troubled. Satch was a rambunctious child, given to tears, demands, sulks, and temper explosions. Mia later alleged in court that on one occasion, Woody reprimanded him by threatening to break one of his legs, which he strongly denied. In contrast to Mia's contemporary parenting style, Woody behaved according to the standards with which he had been brought up. His blunt approach to discipline sounds as if it might have come straight from the mouths of Nettie or Marty.

Later, Mia's lawyers and the media would make much of Woody's supposed inability to take an interest in his son. In some respects, the opposite was true. At Episcopal Nursery School on Park Avenue, where Satch attended preschool, Woody's behavior miffed some of the other parents. "The school had a fast rule. You bring your child and leave," said an Episcopal parent. "If parents hung around, there would be three-year-olds constantly running out into the hall. Well, Woody persuaded Episcopal to make an exception for him. He couldn't detach. What a mess." Disapproval never bothered Woody, who decided the Episcopal parents were aloof and snobbish and transferred Satch to Park Avenue Christian. There he encountered similar problems. "Mr. Allen," said Satch's teacher, "you're upsetting the other parents. You're going to have to break away."

"Satch has no problem breaking away," he replied. "I do." For several hours, until dismissal time, he paced up and down the sidewalk outside the school. "He just adores the boy," a sympathetic mother gushed. "You could see he wanted to be inside the classroom."

As for Dylan, Woody’s behavior around her continued to alarm Mia. When she began policing him, he got angry and called her a "spoilsport." She recalled later in court that "he would creep up in the morning and lay beside her bed and wait for her to wake up." He would bury his head in her stomach or crotch. Mia thought it was "excessive.* As Dylan grew older,

Woody's playfulness seemed to become more ferocious. It upset her. No sooner did Dylan hear his key in the door than she ran away in fear and begged her brothers and sisters to hide her. People who knew the family intimately describe Dylan’s nature—intense, emotional, theatrical—as that of a little drama queen. If she enjoyed a story or video, she begged to hear or see it over and over; indeed, wanted to be Bambi or the Little Mermaid. Woody decided that she seemed to have difficulty sometimes distinguishing fantasy from reality, but Mia did not agree with his assessment. At preschool, Dylan, who was unusually shy and clinging, was upset when she was left alone. Even in her second year at Part Avenue Christian, "she carried on when Mia or the baby-sitter attempted to leave,'
¹
remembered one of the parents. "She had to be pried loose from their necks. On parent-visiting days, Mia and Woody came together, and Mia always held Dylan on her lap."

As tensions escalated. Woody and Mia's life together became a dreary round of arguments about parenting. He thought her close relationship with Satchel was abnormal; she thought the same about him and Dylan. Finally in 1990 both children were evaluated by a clinical psychologist. As Dr. Susan Coates would later testify in court, she understood Mia’s concern about Dylan and Woody. "I did not see it as sexual," Coates said, "but I saw it as inappropriately intense because it excluded everybody else" and placed excessive demands on the girl. As a result of the evaluation, Dylan was referred to Dr. Nancy Schula, a clinical psychologist who helped young children with emotional problems. Dr. Coates herself began working with Woody to modify inappropriate behaviors, which consisted of his putting his face in Dylan's lap, encouraging her to suck his thumb, and constant caressing, among other problems. (After a number of sessions with her. Woody reportedly improved in these areas.) Also around this time, Coates began treating Satch for gender problems. With both tots in therapy, Woody's limo driver was kept busy shuttling them back and forth to their appointments.

Moving Pictures:

Sandy Bates: You can make an exception in my case. I'm a celebrity.

it Mrmona.
1980

Meanwhile, the adoption case landed in the lap of Renee Roth, a highly experienced, fifty-three-year-old judge who had been first elected to the Surrogate's Court in 1983.

After almost a half-dozen years, Woody's attorney Paul Martin Weltz decided to make an end run around the Family Court, the usual venue for adoption cases. The statute he was up against denied single people the right to separately adopt the same children. As he recalled later, "I didn't want some clerk to say, 'The statute doesn't permit it. Go away'
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Aware that the exception he sought would fare badly there, the tenacious Weltz instead took the case to Surrogate s Court. Woody Allen, he argued, was a person of superior character, intelligence, and financial means. He also was an outstanding parent, more of a father than many natural fathers. He rose before dawn to see his children and returned to tuck them in at night; he paid for their education and attended PTA meetings. Mia submitted affidavits (without reading them, she said later) attesting to his devotion. Given Woody's celebrity, Roth waived the court’s requirement for a home study; indeed, she did not find it necessary to perform even a superficial investigation. As a result, she failed to discover that Woody's parenting was marginal. He knew little about the children's lives, and even though he attended PTA meetings, he neither read report cards nor knew the names of their teachers.

Weltz's ploy was successful. On December 17, 1991, two weeks after his fifty-sixth birthday, Woody appeared at Surrogates Court accompanied by Mia, Dylan, and Moses. In Renee Roths chambers, a bored Dylan squirmed on Mia's lap and whispered that she wanted to go home. But thirteen-year-old Moses, sitting across the table from his new dad, was grinning from ear to ear. The papers were signed, and so Woody at last became the father of Dylan and Moses.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sidney Kugelmass Meets His Biographers

Sidney Kugelmass, a middle-aged professor of humanities at the City College of New York (uptown campus), has a depressing dream: He is strolling through a meadow, swinging to and fro a picnic basket packed with luscious goodies that are labeled options. Suddenly he looks down and notices the basket has a hole. He is upset to see that some of his options—the best ones, in fact—have disappeared. Describing his dream to Dr. Mandel, Sidney is hoping for sympathy, but the analyst shrugs. Sidney is acting like a big crybaby. AI) right, so his libido is shriveled, his head bald, his overfed wife. Daphne, a porker. What does he expect at his age?

But all he asked was a bit of pleasure, Sidney argues. Look how hard he slaves at CCNY.

Dr. Mandel refuses to listen. "After all,' he grunts, "I'm an analyst, not a magician." Be realistic, he advises.

But realism holds as little attraction for Sidney Kugelmass as for his creator. (In a story written a few months later. Woody reiterated his disdain with masterful brevity: "Qoquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.") Fantasies of adultery continue to consume Sidney, when a slick Brooklyn magician contacts him about a revolutionary new technology. The Great Persky's magic practice rests on an ingenious literary device: Clients are instructed to climb into a Chinese cabinet with a favorite novel (or short story, play, or poem) and Persky will blast them into the chosen work as though they were astronauts shot into space. Skeptical, Sidney inspects the box, which looks cheap and homemade. Obviously, Persky's practice is far from lucrative. But Sidney finally understands what the magician is offering him— the chance to run amok for only twenty dollars.

Sidney selects
Madame Bovary,
a few pages after Leon's departure and before Emma meets Rodolphe. Persky closes the door of his orbiter, taps three limes, and he has liftoff. In a matter of seconds Sidney finds himself touching down in Yonville-l'Abbaye, where fictitious sex with a fictional woman is all he could have hoped for. In the passion of the moment. Sidney invite* his paramour to spend a weekend in New York. Alter checking her into the Plaza and buying her a pair of black velvet slacks by Ralph Lauren, he spares no expense squiring her to Broadway musicals and dinner at Elaine's. When its time for Emma to go home, however, Persky's cabinet malfunctions and repairs must be made. Emma, tired of watching TV all day, with no regard whatsoever for Sidney's bank account, develops a taste for Dom Perignon and caviar and begins filling in the gaps in her wardrobe. Before long, she has enrolled in an acting class at the Neighborhood Playhouse. But finally Emma is cleared for launch.

Swearing off reckless sexual misbehavior, Sidney is nevertheless tempted to sample a recent best-seller, Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint.
Something goes hideously wrong and Persky keels over and dies. Instead of humping Roth's "Monkey," Sidney finds himself trapped instead in a musty textbook.
Remedial Spanish,
being stalked by the word
letter
(to have)—"a large and hairy irregular verb.'

'The Kugelmass Episode," originally published in
The New Yorker,
won the O. Henry Award for best short story of 1978. The needy Sidney Kugd-mass is an ordinary middle-aged adolescent seeking a romantic soul mate. Woody Allen, equally in need and trapped in a "joyless, sexless* relationship, is not much wiser. Throughout that spring, he began contemplating his "options."

Years of experience had honed Woody's skills in manipulation of the media. In hundreds of interviews, he funneled the public all the news he wished them to have, which consisted entirely of information that would enhance his screen persona. As a result, there was surprisingly little in the way of independent assessment of his life, no biography, for example. The dozen or so volumes that had been published were largely earnest film criticism by scholars attempting to analyze the work, not the self-rnythologuer who created it. Woody viewed biographers as the Ebola plague, dangerous, uncontrollable contagions that might squish his public persona into mousse. Not only did he refuse to cooperate with would-be biographers, but he also sued publishers and authors.

At forty-three, Lee Guthrie, a writer from Louisville, Kentucky, was a newspaper reporter, the author of a biography of Cary Grant, and a mother of three—one of whom would grow up to be film actress Sean Young. In ) 977, Guthrie had contracted with Drake Publishers to write about the comedian. In her biography, she quoted titanic chunks of his stand-up material, along with dialogue from film scripts and television specials, and snippets from his
New

Yorker
pieces, all of which she stirred into the manuscript without obtaining or paying for the usual permissions. Woody sued Guthrie and her publisher for copyright infringement, claiming that her unauthorized work unfairly competed with his own plans to write an autobiography. He demanded the defendants recall and destroy all printed copies, as well as search for customers who had purchased the book, and, of course, to cease further publication.

Having crushed the ill-fated Guthrie book, but now feeling more threatened than ever, Woody continued to view biographers as the enemy and himself as a defenseless subject. Approached by Gerald McKnight, a British writer, he rebuffed the would-be biographer with the claim that there was nothing new to report. "You won't get anywhere," one of Woody s employees warned McKnight. "He talks to nobody outside his own tight little circle." On the whole, that proved to be correct, but McKnight managed to uncover several valuable primary sources, including Woody s unsuspecting mother in Florida. Woody, however, took no legal action against McKnights
Woody Allen: Joking Aside,
possibly because it was only published in England.

Lee Israel, on the other hand, was an experienced American biographer who had written lives of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen. She had grown up in Woody s old neighborhood and graduated from Midwood High School in the Class of '57, but having age and birthplace in common with her subject proved of no advantage. By now, Woody s strategy was first to dodge a biographers letter seeking an interview, then to obstruct the research. His employees, knowing to whom they owed their livelihood but loath to acknowledge his iron control, said the usual things employees say in such situations. They were worried about upsetting him, they claimed, when what worried them was losing their jobs. Even former employees became adept at making excuses ("He feels enough books about him have already been written"). Encountering a stream of nervous people who refused to talk without Woody s consent, Lee Israel had no choice but to return her advance to her publishers.

Another would-be writer was Louise Lasser. Ten years following her divorce, after she made a big splash in the television series
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
her memoirs were sought by Toni Morrison, the novelist who was an editor at Random House. Louise pumped out 2,000 pages of transcribed recollections. Alarmed that his former wife was writing her memoirs, Woody must have discouraged her from writing the book. Still dominated by him, realizing she could never write a truthful account of her own life without including their marriage, Louise reluctantly gave up the project.