The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (55 page)

EPILOGUE

Victim of an Irregular Verb

In writing about a living figure, there is no way to spin out an ending to the story. When exactly will the subject draw his final breath? Will he leave in a rush or float away? What, if any, secrets will a death certificate or an autopsy report spew forth as a mischievous finale? And of course, in the case of a long-distance runner such as Woody, whose life continues to pour out, there may be surprises yet to come.

Even so, most of his dreams of adulation and honor came true long ago, although not his striving for a series of serious films that would rank alongside those of the great masters. If his goals fell short by his own yardstick, judging by any other measurement he succeeded far beyond any reasonable expectation. "Who else has written, acted in, and directed his own films over such a length of time?" said Vincent Canby. "In any discipline, that kind of longevity would be mind-boggling. He has dominated the second half of the twentieth century."

In all possible ways his everyday life approximated his celluloid world, which practically never guaranteed a happy ending. There was always what the philosophers call "the grit in the oyster." In both worlds, he played by his own rules. Having never learned the art of accommodation, he felt no need to please, compromise, collaborate, or regret. "Guilt," says one of his characters in
Bullets over Broadway,
"is petty bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe." All the admirable qualities that have won him a unique place in American filmmaking—all his daring, toughness, perfectionism, and fierce artistic independence—have been strangely misapplied in his personal life.

By following the logic of his heart, Woody paid heavily. The cost of pleasure, marriage or no marriage, added up to millions in legal fees, the loss of his children, and abandonment by his audience, altogether a remarkable price, but he seems not to care. Just as Charlie Chaplin would never be forgiven his transgressions with un-American politics and underage girls, the publics memories of the sex scandal and accusations of child molestation stubbornly cling like barnacles to Woody s reputation. "There are some things people never forget," muses Andrew Sards. "After forty years, we still associate the name of Charles Van Doren with the scandal of the quiz show contestants. I don't think Woody's scandal will ever go away either. It has cost him his primary audience. Women in particular abandoned him. The technical definition of incest doesn't matter so much as the fact that he meddled with the family, and you can't do that. In films like
Manhattan,
he set himself up as a moral paragon, but all that came tumbling down. People decided he was a hypocrite." A contrarian view is offered by Roger Ebert, who contends that "it was the kind of escalating situation people go through during a messy divorce. There was no evidence that he was guilty of the charges. I don't dunk people think about it now. Life goes on."

Among film critics—the ubiquitous Greek chorus who for a living has followed Woody's artistic progress over two or three decades—his legacy continues to be debated. The critics have themselves grown old and faded— and in some cases, considerably more mellow. John Simon, after sticking pins in Woody all those years, now asks, "How can you debate whether the Eiffel Tower adds to or detracts from Paris? He's part of the landscape, and we would be poorer without him. His productivity is admirable. Quantity can be impressive because it proves he has energy, ideas, creative spirit. Some people have done their best work in their seventies or eighties. On the other hand, you can outstay your welcome in any field."

Another detractor who admits that he still arrives at Woody's screenings with a sense of anticipation is Stanley Kaufmann. "He's written some of the funniest lines I know of in films. He's not a major artist but a notable and unique figure who will be remembered by the history books as an object of study and scrutiny." Kauffmann thinks Woody's films have sociological interest. "Like Jules Feiffer, he dramatized modern urban Jewish neuroses. One of the reasons for his critical success is that people recognize his contribution to America's understanding of itself. That's an achievement. Probably the fixture will think more highly of him than we do."

Twenty floors beneath Woody's penthouse, a ribbon of night traffic on Fifth Avenue spiraled slowly toward midtown. A half-mile distant on the western edge of Central Park gleamed the tiny white lights of the apartment houses along Central Park West: the Dakota, the San Remo, the Beresford. From his windows Woody could pick out the Langham, to which he once rushed each morning at dawn. No longer did he heed the ghostly Langham, long abandoned by his loved ones, who were carried away on tides of tears and hatred.

Eight hard years had passed since Mia Farrow beheld the photographs of her daughter on his mantelpiece. On that mild January afternoon in 1992, the long love affair between Woody and Mia—and his adoring public, for that matter—came to an end. Now he went about his business quietly making a picture of his own each year and, every so often, films for other directors. You would think he'd have left the tempestuous years behind him. Not so. For one thing, he has scripted a life meant to be played in the limelight. And don't forget his infinite capacity for pulling rabbits out of hats.

One sunny Saturday in the spring of 1999, a clump of four or five paparazzi were gathered, without much enthusiasm, outside the Giorgio Armani boutique at Sixty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue waiting for Jerry Seinfeld to leave the store with his girlfriend, Jessica Sklar. Nothing much was happening. Seinfeld and Sklar were not that hot anymore. It was shaping up to be a lazy, routine, boring afternoon, remembered Lawrence Schwartzwald. "We were standing there when all of a sudden—
boom.
¹
—there were Woody and Soon-Yi coming up the block from Park Avenue. They were coming straight at us, and they were pushing this stroller.
What the hell! Look there! Oh, my God!
Everybody started shooting." The previous year, when Soon-Yi looked to have "a little belly," Woody had assured the paparazzi that his wife was not pregnant, and so now the excited photographers swarmed around and began peppering the couple with questions.

"Is the baby yours?" asked Schwartzwald, one of Woody's favorite paparazzo, whose shots appear regularly in the
New York Post.

With the Saturday shoppers coming and going, as the cameras clicked away all at once, Soon-Yi paid no attention to the question. Somewhat reluctantly, Woody finally acknowledged it was indeed their child.

"How old is it?"

"I can't tell you that," Woody replied.

Looking at the baby, Schwartzwald judged it to be "about six weeks or two months old and one hundred percent Asian. There was not one bump on the kid's nose that came from Woody Allen. Then it dawned on me that it was adopted." Walking alongside the stroller, he asked Woody for the child's name.

"I'll tell you later," Woody said. But when Schwartzwald handed him a business card and pencil, he printed, "BECHET DUMAINE," and in parentheses, he added, "GIRL." Trailed by the paparazzi, Woody and Soon-Yi kept walking until they reached Fifth Avenue, then headed north to their apartment.

On Sunday morning, Schwartzwald s photo ran on the front page of the
Post.
By then the media had figured out that the name Bechet was a tribute to Woody's idol, Sidney Bechet. As for Dumaine, it turned out to be the name of a street in New Orleans.

In the eighteen months since his marriage, Woody appeared to have achieved a degree of serenity. "About nine or ten years ago," recalled Larry Schwartzwald, "he used to look terrified all the time, nervous, twitching, as if he writ suffering a perpetual anxiety attack. He never made eye contact. Shaking hands with him was like touching a dead, cold fish. But all that has changed in the last year or so. He's settled. He jokes. He seems happy."

A few months later. Woody sold his penthouse for Sl4 million. He bought a $17-million, five-story townhouse on East Ninety-second Street, where there would be more room to raise a child.

One thing that he had never made secret was his desire to have a family with Soon-Yi. But why they preferred the natural method is a mystery. Was she trying to re-create her own beginnings!

And what about the Farrow-Allen offspring, who had taken their places in Woody's story as outtakes, like unused footage trimmed but not forgotten' 'I went as far as I could go. Every legal channel.* he said in 1998. Comforting friends assure him that his kids. Satch. Dylan, even Moses, will someday seek him out. He is not so sure. In fact, he has lost all hope of ever seeing them again.

At the same time, though, his imagination occasionally runs wild, as when he fancied the possibility of resuming a
friendship with Mia. "It's not my personality to continue a feud. So if 1 got a phone call tomorrow saying, 'Let's have a drink and talk things over,' well. I'd be there in a shot. It would be nice." He has a better chance of being struck by a meteoroid.

Such a fantasia Ignores the rancor on both sides. Mia has said she can't imagine trusting men again. "When 1 introduce them to my children, what do I say: 'Don't diddle with the daughters'?"

Just as the passage of forty years never deterred Woody from continuing to insult Harlene in his films, his need to even the score with Mia still burns white-hot. At every opportunity, he brands her unfit to raise children. In an interview with Erica Jong for a women's fashion magazine, he savagely undermined Mia's reputation as "a supermother. You just can't provide correct parental attention to thirteen or fourteen kids." He then tendered the eccentric notion that his former lover quarantined her children "in a cultish compound In Connecticut where going out has always been discouraged," thereby conjuring up gruesome images of a Jim Jonesian jungle outpost. Had he wished to go into derail, he hinted darkly, "there are many horrible things 1 could say."

Although the horrible things are left to the Imagination, his charges immediately created an almost Pavlovian response from Mia. Shortly thereafter, she invited
Inside Edition,
a television tabloid show, to tour Frog Hollow, ostensibly to prove to the public that her current household of seven children bore no resemblance to a cult-

Woody's adoption of little Bechet chilled Mia. "I don't know how the courts permitted this," she declared. "Especially in light of a judge not allowing Mr Allen to see his own children. I guarantee if you live enough celebrity, you can snow anybody." In case anyone had forgo ran. she added that 'I have a son [Satchel] whose sister is married to his father." Some of Mia's children, she went on 10 report, were in therapy and "some are on antidepresants Woody, who is now sixty-four, appears older than his age. The person who had always been eternally boyish for the camera looks tired and somewhat crumpled. He seems oblivious to his physical changes, however. "I'm very compartmentalized," he remarked edgily. "For better or rot worse, even during all that chaos 1 was able to just snap it off. It's a survival mechanism." Who could say that life cracked him? Who could ever deny that he has outlasted the twists and turnings of experience? On his face, for all to read, are the scars that prove it.

Moving Pictures:

Professor Levy: But we define ourselves by die choices we have —
.
1988

POSTSCRIPT

Harlene Susan Rosen Allen lived in Woodstock, New York, for many years. Insofar as is known, she did not remarry. After winning her lawsuit, she steered clear of her ex-husband and those who wished to pump her for information about him. In 1982 a British writer, Gerald McKnight, tried to win her trust, but she got cold feet at the last minute and refused to meet with him. "We were happy together," she told him on the telephone. "I don t want any scandal." A decade later, another British journalist, Tim Carroll, tracked down Harlene to nearby Phoenicia, New York. Driving up to her house, he glimpsed "a small woman with a shawl wrapped over her head going inside. When I knocked on the door, a muffled voice asked, 'Who is it?* I said that I was calling to see Harlene Allen."

"No such person lives here," she answered.

Fanatical about her privacy, Harlene left Phoenicia without giving a forwarding address.

Louise Lasser lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her Yorkshire terrier. After becoming a popular television star during the seventies in
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
she fell victim to depression, obesity, and cocaine addiction and virtually disappeared from public view. In 1998 she made one of her rare forays into movies in the Todd Solandz film
Happiness.
Although she has little contact with her ex-husband, she continues to care about him "and always will," she said. Like Harlene Allen, she has never remarried after her divorce from Woody.

Diane Keaton’s career thrived in the late nineties with several successful films:
The First Wives Club,
with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler; and
Marvin's Room,
for which she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She has never married, but in 1996, at the age of fifty, she adopted a baby girl whom she named Dexter Dean. They live in a 1926 Mediterranean-style hacienda in Beverly Hills.

Jean Doumanian still handles Woody's films but no longer depends solely on them for her livelihood. Operating from a luxurious office on East Fifty-seventh Street, which occupies the entire twenty-second floor, she recently produced a number of other pictures including David Mamets thriller
The Spanish Prisoner,
and
Just Looking,
the directorial debut of
Seinfeld's
Jason Alexander. She is also part-owner of the Crazy Carrot, a health-food restaurant on Second Avenue.

Jane Read Martin and Douglas McGrath are married and the parents of a son. Jane became associate producer of the Joan Rivers television show and also wrote several children’s picture books. Doug, who received an Oscar nomination as coscreenwriter for
Bullets Over Broadway,
wrote and directed
Emma
(1996), which was based on the novel by Jane Austen and starred Gwyneth Paltrow.