The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (4 page)

The tiny, snowy-haired woman was squinting.

"I remember you would hit me every day when I was a child."

Hit him? she asked incredulously. What did that mean? That she whipped him?

"No, but you were always slapping me."

His insistence on dredging up the past made her testy. Of course she smacked him. What did he expect, a saint? He was a stubborn kid, never listening to her when she corrected him, jumping around and pulling off his clothes, making her crazy. But she refused to stand for any monkey business. "You were too active and too much of a child for me," she said. "I wasn't that good to you because I was very strict, which I regret."

Her daughter, on the other hand, had been a cuddly, docile child. "I was much sweeter to Letty than I was to you," she reminded him. Two Mothers
was harder than he anticipated. He never finished it.

CHAPTER TWO

The Purple Rose of Midwood

The year is 1935, the setting a New Jersey factory town on a wintry afternoon. Cecilia, a timid waitress at a diner, is watching the new picture at the Jewel for the fifth time. By this time she is drawn willy-nilly into the lives of the screen people, whose existences are defined by penthouses, black maids, and the inevitable white piano. Over sounds of laughter and clinking glasses, the guests sip dry martinis and hold forth about excursions down the Nile. Wearing a safari suit and pith helmet, Tom Explorer-Adventurer-Archeologist-Poet Baxter has been whisked to Manhattan for a madcap weekend. His jaw is square, his smile creamy. He looks even more of a heartthrob than he did yesterday when Cecilia had seen the movie only four times. Pretty soon she is not even thinking about going home to her husband, an unemployed boozer who slaps her around.

While she is slumped in her seat gazing, rapt, at Tom Baxter, something extraordinary begins to happen. Out of the blue he faces the audience and returns her gaze, looking directly into her face, flicking his eyes back and forth over her Lillian Gish hat and neatly buttoned brown coat. And then he speaks, in the coolest screen voice ever manufactured in Hollywood: "My God," he says, "you must really love this picture." And the next thing Cecilia knows, he is hopping off the screen into the dark of the theater and declaring his love for her. Tom Baxter is everything she has ever wanted in a man: good looks, nice manners, devotion, wealth. Of course he is fictional, Cecilia must admit, "but you can't have everything."

Cecilia is fictional, too, a character in the 1985 movie
The Purple Rose of Cairo.
No role Woody Allen created was more Allan Konigsbergs alter ego, his fictional soul mate, than Cecilia, who, like himself, discovers that the make-believe world of the movies is "a total, total joy."

When he was five, he saw
Snow White and the Seven Dwarf
and took to cinema like an acolyte to the Mass. Over the next ten years, he watched thousands of pictures. After
Pinocchio
and
Bambi
came the war movies, Phil Silvers and Carmen Miranda in
Four Jills in a Jeep,
then all the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures the week they were released because Hope was his favorite comedian, and tons of Westerns because his father loved cowboys. He cried over little Roddy McDowall in
The White Cliffs of Dover,
and swashbuckling Tyrone Power in
The Black Swan.
A few years later his filmgoing companion became cousin Rita Wishnick, five years older and also a movie addict, and together they sniffled over
Casablanca.

Within walking distance of his house were two dozen movie houses. The neighborhood's main theater was the Midwood on Avenue J. His other favorites were the Vogue, the Elm, the Triangle, the Avalon, the Kingsway on Kings Highway, and on Nostrand Avenue, the cavernous Patio, whose lobby fountain was stocked with darting goldfish. At the decayed Kent, a double feature cost eleven cents, if you didn't mind the rats scurrying in the dark and the sound of freight trains passing underneath, and years later he shot interior scenes there for
The Purple Rose of Cairo.
In wintertime, on Saturday mornings at eleven, he would be the first shivering person in line at the Mid-wood for the double feature beginning at noon. But all summer long, when there was no school, he went to the movies every day. His friends had parents nagging them to go out and play in the sun, but Allan hated the hot weather, and his parents seemed not to care what he did. Under a caramel midafternoon sun, when the silvery trolley tracks along Coney Island Avenue were burning hot, he paid twenty-five cents and disappeared into the air-cooled darkness with his popcorn and a supply of Milk Duds. After seeing the double feature three times, he staggered, as he later recalled, "into the ugly light," creeping woozily home with his shirt sticking to his shoulders, expelled from paradise.

All during the war, the Konigsbergs seemed unable to settle down. From the house at Fourteenth and J, they moved a half-dozen times in the neighborhood, usually sharing an apartment with Nettie's sister Sadie and her husband, Joe. Woody remembered "cousins and uncles running in and out of rooms." At one point, they lived almost a year at the beach, a happy time that he would re-create in
Radio Days,
followed by a brief stopover in suburban Port Chester, New York, twenty-five miles north of the city, that would leave him with a lifelong antipathy toward grass and trees. When the family returned to the old Midwood neighborhood in 1945, the Konigsbergs and Wishnicks took a semiattached frame house on a leafy street near the elevated train track, at 1144 East Fifteenth Street. This is the house where Allan would live from age ten to seventeen, sharing a room with his cousin Rita, while his two-year-old sister, Ellen (nicknamed Letty), slept with their parents, and the third bedroom was occupied by his uncle and aunt. The house still stands, spic-and-span, its front entrance moved to the side of the house and a picture window and porch added—now owned by a young couple with three children.

Allan, ten years old, short and underdeveloped, felt insecure about his looks, and he usually wore a sad-sack expression on his pale face. Although he appeared to be timid, and in fact would make a career of playing a born loser, he was neither bashful nor repressed. Like his mother he was high-strung, moody, and prickly edged; around adults he had a fresh attitude. "One day," recalled Jack Freed, who lived next door, "we were playing in an overgrown lot near the old ice company when we noticed this strange redheaded kid lurking around. Just to be ornery we started throwing stones to chase him away." Soon, however, he and Al began chumming around together, against the wishes of Jacks father, who thought that the new friend was a bad influence. "I don't want you hanging around Allan," he warned. "He's never going to amount to anything." According to Jacks older sister, Doris, "He was a wild kid, somewhat of a hellion. He seemed to be constantly in trouble at school."

In the fall of 1940, Woody entered P.S. 99 (now the Isaac Asimov School), the same four-story, redbrick school that his father attended, but showed no aptitude for learning and figured out how to avoid school by pretending to be sick. Behavior problems coupled with bad grades brought Nettie to school so frequently that his classmates knew her on sight. At home, she rode herd on him, to no avail. "He had intellectual capability but he just wasn't interested," said Jack Freed, who continued to hang around with Al despite his fathers warnings. "Even in high school, he did just enough homework to get by."

Because he never developed a passion for books, reading was a chore. The only form of literature that gave him pleasure was comic books, and evidently he became an omnivorous speed reader of the Superman, Batman, and Mickey Mouse series, sometimes covering fifty comics in the course of a day. "But lots of kids were big readers of comics," commented Jack Freed. "And he was growing up in a household where nobody directed him toward reading great books." Despite the comics, he found himself able to write "real prose in school compositions. There was never a week when the composition I wrote was not the one that was read to the class." Not until his teens did he accept the theoretical importance of reading, but it was too late by then—he found it boring. The great books that taught him about life— how to talk, to look, to eat, to make yourself attractive—were the movies.

With an academic career largely spent loafing in class, playing truant, and sneaking off to movies, he wound up basically uneducated. It didn't trouble him, and the mature Woody would be proud of having learned "nothing of value in school, in elementary school, high school, or my year of college." Everything of importance came from movies and comics. "All kinds of valties, social behavior. Some from radio programs, too. But nothing of value from school. Once they teach you to read and write, forget it." Years later when he was in his thirties, he confided to an interviewer that "I wake up in the morning and clutch on to my bed and thank God I don't have to go to school." Over the years his recollections of school tended to take on a Solzhenitsyn-like gloss. You could almost imagine he had spent twelve years deep in the Urals, in some forced labor camp, consorting with murderers and thieves, curled up with his comic books.

Moving Pictures:

A
LLAN
F
ELIX
: My parents didn't get divorced . . . although I begged them to.

—Play It Again, Sam,
1972

"They were the oddest couple," as a friend of Woody s described Nettie and Marty Konigsberg. "They had nothing whatsoever to say to each other." In fact. Jack Victor added, "I never heard them exchange a single word." Jack was one of Woody's closest friends; the others were Elliott Mills and Gerald Epstein. Later, a fourth boy, Mickey Rose, a transfer student from Crown Heights, would join the group. Typical of the neighborhood, the boys came from various economic backgrounds. Jack's father was a pants presser. Elliott's father worked in Wall Street brokerage houses as a margin clerk. Jerrys father was an attorney whose clients included Rocky Graziano, and his family lived several blocks farther west in the grander section of Midwood in a thirteen-room house. Mickey's parents were divorced, and his mother had been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall.

Eccentric as Woody always portrays them, his parents may not have differed greatly from the other lower-middle-class, second-generation children of immigrants, struggling to get by during the Depression. For whatever reason they made an imperfect match, but since divorce was not customary, they soldiered on and made the best of the situation. Looking back, Woody's friends report that Nettie and Marty were "a trip," "hysterical," "a riot," which must be true because Woody himself would convulse his audiences by recounting their marital foibles. Growing up as the couple's son was another matter, not the slightest bit amusing. In later life, he complained about never once being taken to a museum or a Broadway show, never owning a piano. But cultural deprivation was the least part of it. Despite the birth of Woody's baby sister, Letty, in 1943, the marriage continued to deteriorate.

Superficially, things seemed much better: The Depression was over, the wartime economy was booming, two incomes made life relatively comfortable. Unlike the Dickensian childhood of his Woody Allen character, Allan Konigsberg received a generous allowance of seven dollars a week, more pocket money than any of his friends had, and his father was always slipping him an extra dollar or two. Finally Marty had settled down to a steady job at Sammy's Bowery Follies, a Gay Nineties saloon offering vaudeville entertainment, located in Manhattan on the Bowery. Known as the poor mans Stork Club, the nightclub was as popular a tourist mecca as the Statue of Liberty. At Sammy's, the Third Avenue el rumbled overhead as bums and drifters mingled with GIs on leave; the walls were covered with framed photographs of its famous patrons, including Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy. In fact there were so many political and show business celebrities there that Weegee, the legendary news photographer, made the club one of his regular nightly stops. For close to twenty years, Marty worked there as a bartender, bouncer, or night manager. "When we came home from school," said Jack Freed, "he was just getting up and we would find him in his bathrobe watching Westerns on Channel 11."

"Marty was a small-time hustler," said Elliott Mills. "Whatever you wanted, he got. You wanted a typewriter, he got you a typewriter. Of course it had no serial numbers." Not only did Marty mix in the nightclub scene, but he also reportedly toted a gun—supposedly because he had to ride the subway late at night—and carried a police badge. (Nettie's brother, a jeweler, manufactured them for the NYPD.)

Sammy's formed the backdrop of Woody’s adolescence. But oddly, his father working in a famous club surrounded by showgirls and vaudeville acts didn't seem to interest him. As far as Jack Victor knew, "he never stepped foot in Sammy's. He certainly never talked about it." At Woody’s bar mitzvah party, however, some of the guests were friends of Marty's from Sammy's, and they were delighted when young Allan smeared on blackface to do an imitation of Larry Parks as Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer.

Unlike Woody's mother, his father tended to be easygoing and affectionate. To twit his son he would say, "I wish you were the champ of the world."

"Yeah, why?" Woody said.

"Because then I'd be the next champ," his father bantered.

Whatever his son did was perfectly acceptable. Once, Marty bought Allan a chemistry set, and Allan dyed Netties Persian lamb coat bright yellow. Marty could not have been more delighted. Recollecting the incident years later, he said that Allan "was always doing funny things like that." Most of the time, though, Marty impressed his son as a man who was completely immersed in himself. "He's never let a thought enter his head," Woody came to believe. "When he was young he spent every cent he ever made. Never thought about whether he could pay the bills. He was an affectionate guy but he never cared about anything."