The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (49 page)

His safari into "quality" television a mistake, he turned to the legitimate theater. A theatrical producer, Julian Schlossberg, hoped to mount a triple bill of one-act comedies by celebrated playwrights. The three plays he had in mind were by David Mamet, Elaine May, and Woody Allen, but when Schlossberg contacted Woody about
Death Knocks,
he received a chilly response. The short story in play format concerns a middle-aged New York garment manufacturer who challenges Death to a game of gin rummy. A parody of Ingmar Bergmans
The Seventh Seal,
it was written in 1968 for
The New Yorker.
Woody said it was old and dated. Jean Doumanian, intrigued by Schlossbergs trilogy concept, suggested he write a brand-new play.

"If I can think of anything," he promised.

In
Central Park West,
a story of infidelity and May-December sex on the Upper West Side, all the characters have slept with one another: the psychoanalyst, her philandering lawyer husband who has been laying her best friend, the supposed best friend and her husband, and one of the shrinks patients, a beautiful young woman of twenty-one. Under the umbrella title of
Death Defying Acts,
Woody's seventy-minute comedy of New York manners was joined by David Mamet s
An Interview
and Elaine May's
Hotline.
Jean Doumanian was named coproducer, Letty Aronson associate producer, and Michael Blakemore director. A company of talented actors, including the Tony Award-winning Linda Lavin, was assembled, and rehearsals commenced in early January of 1995, followed by a brief tryout in Stamford,

Connecticut.
Death Defying Acts
was scheduled to open at the Variety Arts Theatre on Second Avenue on March 6.

It was a crisp, cold day in the East Village. At Johns Italian Restaurant, Michael Blakemore dug into a bowl of pasta dripping with olive oil and punched up with handfuls of pungent chopped garlic and washed the meal down with a carafe of red wine. Returning to the theater, he learned that Woody was waiting out front in his parked car to hand him revisions. Blakemore clambered into the toasty backseat of the Mercedes while Woody frantically flipped through a sheaf of notes. Once inside the car, the director began worrying about his breath. He feared that the aroma of garlic was a tad overpowering. But Woody appeared to be oblivious. Later, during the intermission, Jean Doumanian informed Blakemore that Woody loathed the odor of garlic, whereupon Blakemore could not help feeling a frisson of perverse satisfaction.

Michael Blakemore, a handsome, smooth-voiced man of sixty-six, had recently directed two Broadway hits,
City of Angels
and
Lettice & Lovage.
In England he was known as clever but difficult, his longtime foe being Peter Hall after they had argued over the artistic direction of Britain's National Theatre. In recent years, Blakemore had spent so much time working in New York that he was able to detect fresh scratches on the furniture of his favorite hotel, the Michelangelo.

Evidently Blakemore suspected from the outset that in directing this triple bill of one-act plays, he might be treading into dangerous territory. In his journal, he began jotting down notes that he envisioned as "a very personal account of working with three playwrights who were also directors—a very difficult situation whoever the personalities were." Needless to say, the situation was fraught with more peril when one of the playwrights was reputed to be a world-class neurotic. Still, he was unprepared for outright pathology. Before long, one fact became clear: Woody Allen operated in "manic-depressive cycles." One day he would love the performance, then the next day hate it: "This performance was a great step backward," he chided Blakemore. "That was terrible!
Just terrible

As rehearsals continued, Woody Allen, the perfectionist movie director, was constantly breathing down Blakemore's neck, trying to undermine his authority, warning he was too soft on the actors, pelting him with instructions on how to perform his job. The pace was slow, the blocking precious, Linda Lavin's performance "cutesy," he informed Blakemore. Why didn't he make the actors buckle down? Blakemore, wearing an oatmeal-colored scarf thrown over his canvas jacket, looked the picture of cool confidence. Underneath, he was hissing like a pot ready to boil over as Woody handed him notes that said "just awful."
"Still
shit." Blakemore's favorite scrawl read "PATHTIC
[sic]"
In calm moods. Woody could be lucid, direct, even stimulating. A shadow of a smile would appear on his pale face as he tried to be pleasant. But usually he was in a state of high anxiety. Gazing at him, Blakemore sometimes wondered "which of us was going mad." In his diary he was able to vent his anger, but still found himself arriving at rehearsals in "an icy rage." Had his wife not informed him of a depressing call from their bank manager about their finances, he would have quit the production.

Hostility between the two directors erupted into biological warfare when Blakemore came down with a cold. Having never mastered his terror of germs, Woody deliberately kept his distance lest he be infected by microbial hordes. According to Blakemore, Woody would approach him cautiously holding his overcoat over his nose and mouth "like a nineteenth-century anarchist." What sprang to mind was a character from
The Brothers Karamazov.

That
Death Defying Acts
ran for more than a year was mainly due to Woody's contribution as well as the popularity of Linda Lavin and then her replacement, Valerie Harper, the popular television star from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
Rhoda. A
year passed before Blakemore unburdened himself in an article, "Death Defying Director," in the June 3, 1996, issue of
The New Yorker.
It was payback time. Although the Englishman took a swipe or two at Elaine May (but none at "absent angel" David Mamet, whom he praised for never showing his face in New York), his target was clearly Woody. The Englishman felt that "not being a New Yorker, I can take liberties that others can't." His liberties involved nailing Woody for being Woody—insecure, controlling as well as out of control, and an unsociable crab. He went after his teeth ("tiny") and his handshake ("minimalist"). In a rare moment of chivalry, Blakemore restrained himself from describing how Soon-Yi bossed Woody, instead calling her, euphemistically, a girl who "knows her own mind" and who bore no resemblance to the mousy creature he had seen on television. When Woody read the piece, the part he resented was his fear of germs. He did not pull his coat up like a spy, he protested. Blakemore had no right to make him sound like a crackpot. "People think God knows what when they meet me," he complained.

Woody's twenty-fourth movie, and his first picture with Jean Doumanian, was
Bullets Over Broadway,
the period comedy written with Doug McGrath during the tumultuous year of the custody battle. The central character is a naively idealistic playwright from Pittsburgh who gives up struggling to write for the theater after his play is rewritten by a hoodlum who happens to have the talent of Eugene O'Neill. Although David Shayne, the playwright in the film, was a typical Woody Allen character, Woody decided he was too old for the role and cast twenty-eight-year-old John Cusack, who stood a strapping six feet two inches and bore no resemblance to Woody offscreen. In an amazing transformation, Cusack pulled off a convincing impersonation of Woody—glasses, twitches, and stammers—as Michael Caine had done subtly in
Hannah and Her Sisters.
Dianne Wiest played Helen Sinclair, a high-strung boozy actress who seduces the young playwright. After appearing in three of Woody's films and winning an Oscar for the flighty sister in
Hannah and Her Sisters,
the forty-five-year-old actress had not worked for him in seven years. Playing motherly types in such films as
Parenthood
and caring for her two adopted daughters, Wiest was now a bit chubby.

After the first day of shooting, Woody telephoned Wiest at home to comment on her performance. "Its terrible!" he exclaimed. Wiest remedied the problem by lowering her normal voice to a growl and by apparently studying Rosalind Russell's performance as Auntie Mame. She won a second Oscar as best supporting actress for her role in the film.

Disrespect from the media notwithstanding, Woody still carried clout in the movie business. In choosing a distributor for
Bullets Over Broadway,
Doumanian took the position that Woody was a Tiffany-quality filmmaker. Distributors interested in licensing the film were asked to submit blind bids and make offers based solely on Woody's name and reputation. If this sounded a bit high and mighty, she explained that in the halcyon days of old, Orion and TriStar approved his projects without question. As it turned out, she got four bids and finally settled on Miramax Films, the upstart releasing company headed by a pair of New Yorkers, Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob Weinstein. The Weinsteins had set up shop in their hometown because, joked Bob Weinstein, "the Knicks play in New York City. When they move, we'll think about moving." Harvey Weinstein, a mercurial, cigar-chomping wheeler and dealer who is famous throughout the industry for his management-by-screaming style, had no visible patina of class. Woody liked him, however. Miramax, an independent company with a reputation for spotting and making money on specialty and art films such as Steven Soderbergh's
sex, lies, & videotape,
had recently been acquired by the Disney Company for $80 million. Despite recent successes (six Oscar nominations for
The Crying Game)
_y
it wasn't quite yet a player in the eyes of West Coast Hollywood.

In the case of
Bullets over Broadway
Weinstein instinctively gobbled up the film sight unseen, not even quibbling over Woody's refusal to do the customary publicity. His instincts were right, because
Bullets Over Broadway
received seven Oscar nominations (in the categories of supporting actor and actress, art direction, costume design, director, and original screenplay). Despite the wrenching events of the past two years, Woody had nonetheless managed to pull out of his hat a stylish film that found favor with mainstream audiences. It was a tribute to his toughness—and an answer to his enemies. An exhilarated Jean Doumanian crowed over the nominations, which she hoped would establish once and for all audience disinterest in Woody's personal shortcomings. "Everybody kind of embraced Woody with that and said, 'We're yours and don't think we'll ever go away,' " she said.

In the fall of 1993, Woody had a chance to thank Jean for her years of loyalty. Dining together at an Italian restaurant, Primola, on Second Avenue, she was eating a piece of
bruscetta
when she choked on the hard Italian bread and started to turn blue. Immediately, Woody leaped up and performed the Heimlich maneuver.

Woody had often wondered about the origins of his adopted daughter. To be so intelligent and charming, he decided, Dylan must have inherited "good genes." It was no coincidence that this ongoing obsession with the child kindled the story for his next movie. In
Mighty Aphrodite,
Lenny Weinrib is a sportswriter with a wife half his age—a cold, neglectful, career-driven gallery owner who wants motherhood but cant quite find time for nine months of inconvenience. When Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter) wants to adopt, Lenny reluctantly agrees. Five years later, the marriage is on the rocks, but their son, Max, has turned out to be bright and funny, so special that Lenny grows obsessive about his birth mother. His quest leads to the door of Linda Ash, aka Judy Cum, a sometime porn actress and full-time hooker, who assumes he's a trick and says: "Hello? Are you my 3 o'clock?"

Mighty Aphrodite
(a reference to the Greek goddess of love) ends happily with the prostitute receiving a personality makeover, marrying a nice guy, and having a child. But the point of Woody's narrative—that sometimes the women who put up their babies for adoption are prostitutes—angered adoption agencies. The director of Spence Chapin Adoption Agency noted that adopted children have fantasies about their birth parents, and
Mighty Aphrodite
only "feeds into the message that your birth parent is bad."

By ironic coincidence, the same year that Woody was filming
Mighty Aphrodite,
a Texas paroled convict (larceny, theft, and bail-jumping) claimed that he was Dylan’s birth father. The sixty-year-old man insisted that she was born to his common-law wife while both of them were in prison and given up for adoption without his consent. After letters to Mia threatening to "recapture" Dylan and promising "bloodshed" if she was not handed over, the parolee was arrested in Louisiana and returned to prison. Paroled again in 1997, he disabled an electronic monitoring device and disappeared, but not before making similar threatening phone calls to a Hartford newspaper. When asked to comment, Mia swore that Dylan was not the ex-con's child.

Mighty Aphrodite
brought Woody his twelfth Oscar nomination—tying Billy Wilder s record—for best original screenplay. He failed to win an Academy Award, but Mira Sorvino took home the supporting actress award for her portrayal of the hooker. Even with the Oscar, the picture bombed at the box office with a gross of $6.7 million, a plunge of $7 million from
Bullets over Broadway.

In 1996 the size of Woody s audience continued to melt. He had high hopes for
Everyone Says I Love You,
a retread of the memorable 1938 Kaufmann and Hart comedy
You Can’t Take It With You,
which he had adored as a boy when he fantasized about having a lovable, zany family just like the Sycamores in the play. Woody's fictional family were rich liberal Upper East Siders with the mother and father played by Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda. The sudsy musical comedy had a $20 million budget and less of a plot than an average McDonald's commercial. Stars without musical-comedy training were pressured to sing and dance, mostly without success except for Goldie Hawn. Making every effort to please his audience, Woody offered a smorgasbord of golden oldie tunes, attractive performers (including a cameo by Julia Roberts), and luscious picture-postcard photography in Paris and Venice. A number of critics were enchanted by the film. Roger Ebert, for one, predicted "it would take a heart of stone to resist this movie," an opinion that led to a skirmish on
Sneak Previews
when a disgusted Gene Siskel rated the movie two thumbs down. "He's not funny anymore," Siskel declared, and by the way, he added, when was Woody going to grow up?