The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (6 page)

"This typewriter will last longer than you will," promised the salesclerk. (Most likely an accurate warranty because he still uses it.)

If Nettie expected the Olympia to improve his grades, she found it didn't make a scrap of difference. If anything, it pushed him further from his studies. But as it turned out, the typewriter changed his life in an odd way that nobody could have predicted. Shortly after acquiring the Olympia, he began tapping out jokes. A distant cousin of his in public relations thought the one-liners were clever and suggested sending them to newspaper columnists, who were always looking for free material to fill space. Before sending out anything, however, Woody decided that he needed a pen name, something that sounded more professional than Allan Konigsberg. "It was an ongoing discussion for months," said Elliott Mills. "We'd be walking along Avenue K to play stickball in the 99 schoolyard, talking about what would sound best. Early on he decided to use his first name as the last name. The problem was the new first name. 'Miles' was a candidate but not a strong one. It dropped out of contention fast when 'Woody' came up."

In the fall of 1952, Allan-Woody began his senior year of high school, with his mind elsewhere as usual. Under his new nom de plume, he began mailing out batches of jokes with a businesslike note: "Enclosed are some gags for your consideration and sent exclusively to you." The first columnist to bite was Nick Kenny at
the New York Daily Mirror.
Woody, utterly thrilled but never satisfied, aspired to better. The hottest Broadway columnist was the
New York Post's
Earl Wilson, the crew-cut, bow-tied homeboy from Ohio who had made good in the big city with his Earl's Pearls quips, his fictitious showgirl Taffy Tuttle, and his B. W. (Beautiful Wife) Rosemary and son

Slugger. On November 25, 1952, Wilson first published a joke of Woody’s about a much-maligned government agency, the Office of Price Stabilization, which was trying to control inflation long after the wars end. The joke ran as follows: "Woody Allen figured out what OPS prices are—Over Peoples Salaries." As the columnist quipped later, "Knowing a sucker when he saw one, he mailed me one-line jokes with postage due."

There was no indication that Wilsons new jokesmith could be a sixteen-year-old. For one thing, he sounded sexually sophisticated. "Its the fallen women who are usually picked up, says Woody Allen." Mostly the jokes swung back and forth between topical subjects, typically observations about the business of living. Already he was working with an attitude, the same one he shared with family and friends, all of whom tended to see things in a ridiculous light without even trying. Eager to be accommodating, Woody was regularly tailoring bons mots for Wilsons showgirl: "Taffy Tutde told Woody Allen she heard of a man who was a six-footer and said, 'Gee, it must take him a long time to put his shoes on.' "

He couldn't get over his good luck. There was his new name "in a column that I had read a million times before with news and gossip of people whose lives I couldn't imagine I would ever touch. But there it was." Woody Allen in the same lofty company as Taffy Tuttle. In the insular little world of Mid-wood High, word of his adventures quickly spread. On February 27, 1953, there was an article about him in the Midwood
Argus
praising the "carrot-topped senior" who has made "quite a name for himself as a gag-writer." Asked for the secret of his success, Woody said, "I just sit down at the typewriter and think funny." By February, he had two dozen clippings. "When Bryna Goldstein first showed me Earl Wilson's column," recalled Alan Lapidus, "and said that Woody Allen was Allan, I was shocked. Nobody had given a second thought to this little schlemiel." Lapidus, who dreamed of being a writer but wound up an architect like his father, would conclude that "Allan was smarter than all of us. We were focused on being wonderful, but the best and the brightest of us never amounted to anything. It was Allan who was looking at the outside world, knew what he wanted, and did it."

Toward the end of his senior year, his uncompensated contributions to Earl Wilson suddenly paid dividends with a part-time job at a Madison Avenue public relations agency representing celebrities such as Arthur Murray, Guy Lombardo, and Sammy Kaye. To attract attention to their clients, David O. Alber Associates planted newspaper items that made them sound witty, as if funny lines automatically popped out of their mouths. In fact, when Woody in his saddle shoes finally met Dave Alber, he already had a reputation. Recalled then publicist Eddie Jaffe, "There were dozens of people submitting gags but Woody was one of the best." Alber offered him twentyfive dollars a week for twenty hours of work, more money than he could earn delivering for Padow's Pharmacy or pinning at the bowling alleys. He was ecstatic. Until he became acquainted with Wilson and Alber, he had never known adult praise, but with his new parent surrogates, "my life began being special." With classes on the early shift, he was dismissed at one. "I would get on the subway," he said, "the train quite crowded, and straphanging, I'd take out a pencil," and by the time he got off he'd have whipped up forty or fifty jokes. It was "no big deal."

When he graduated from Midwood High in 1953, the
Epilog
yearbook carried a blank space alongside his photograph. Of the 720 students in the Class of '53, he was the only one who had not participated in a single extracurricular activity. If there had been a student voted least likely to succeed, he was it.

In September Woody's friends went to college: Jack and Elliott to City College of New York; Jerry to Dickinson; and Woody was accepted at New York University. Determined that her son make something of himself, Nettie planned for him a career in pharmacy, completely disregarding his aversion to school, which he would always think of as "a terrible, terrible nasty experience." She also dismissed the fact that he had acquired a manager, Harvey Meltzer, the older brother of a classmate, with whom he signed a five-year contract that gave Harvey a 25 percent commission. So far no work had materialized, and in any case, Nettie never considered show business a sensible job. But what made her imagine Woody would be happy as a pharmacist is hard to fathom.

As a compromise, he enrolled at New York University as a film major, not because of any desire to make films but because it was an easy course. Hoping to get by with a minimum of effort, he took what the school called a limited program—three courses, including Spanish, English, and Motion Picture Production. However, riding the subway to school was too great a temptation for a consummate truant. As the train approached West Fourth Street in the Village, the stop for N.Y.U., a voice kept telling him, "Don't get off here. Keep going." In Times Square he spent the morning skylarking at the Automat, with coffee and the morning papers, browsing in the Circle Magic Shop, then slipping into the Paramount for an early feature. In the afternoons, he trekked across town to the Alber office, where his salary had been increased to forty dollars. Half the time he never got to class; to make matters worse, he seldom cracked a book. At the end of the first semester, he flunked Spanish and English, and barely passed motion picture production. N.Y.U. dropped him. Taking a defiant stance, he insisted that he "couldn't care less." His mother, he later joked, ran into the bathroom and tried to kill herself with an overdose of mah-jongg tiles. Nettie was not the sort to fall apart. What she actually did was swing into action and push the university to give him a second chance. The administration agreed, on the condition that he enroll in the summer session and bring up his grades. But one of the deans said pityingly that he just didn't seem to be college material and predicted what a grim future would befall him unless he started studying. In his opinion, the dean added, since Woody seemed to be maladjusted, it might be a good idea for him to see a psychiatrist.

Woody strenuously objected to the idea that he might be a misfit. He was already a person of some small importance, he told the dean. He was gainfully employed as a writer for a show business publicist and also sold jokes to the television comedian Herb Shriner. But that news only seemed to confirm the deans opinion of his instability. Theatrical people are, he is said to have replied, "all strange."

That winter of 1954, to please his mother, he enrolled in a night course in motion picture production at the City College of New York, where he lasted an even shorter time than at N.Y.U. After only a few weeks, "I was given a Section Eight," he laughed, "the only one awarded by a nonmilitary institution." Nettie was understandably upset. Here she had bent over backward to give him a college education, but he threw it all away.

Snapshots:
Outside a friend's house with Bryna Goldstein, he poses in a Marlon Brando slouch, with the actors trademark white T-shirt, jacket, and tight jeans. His hands are stuffed into his pockets, his hair slicked back, his jaw thrust forward in surly rebellion. He is bursting with sultry sexual aggression.

The pretty desirable girls at Midwood High want the tall boys, muscular six-footers with chunky chins. Physically, Woody is exactly the kind ofconventionally geeky-looking guy who cant get a date for the high school prom. With 120 pounds packed on a skinny 5 foot 6 inch frame, he will soon get even odder-looking when he has to get glasses that fall and selects a pair of big black horn-rims.

When he was eighteen. Woody met a neighborhood girl at the East Mid-wood Jewish Center. Harlene Susan Rosen was small and string-bean slender, with an olive complexion, lovely black eyes, and a cascade of straight dark hair. She had a sweet face, and her only physical defect was a slight ski nose from a less than perfect rhinoplasty. At fifteen, she was attending James Madison High School, where she was an excellent student and also showed some talent for art, piano, and recorder—not surprising, since the Rosens were an artistic household. Woody gravitated toward the Rosens, whom he considered sophisticated, well-off people. Harlene's father played the trumpet, and her mother had once sung with a band. Julius Rosen had become a successful merchant who owned a children's shoe store on Kings Highway, a big corner house at Twenty-third and Avenue R, and a boat. His wife was an attractive, ambitious woman, who, not unnaturally, assumed that her two daughters would marry wealthy men. As for Harlene, she was probably dazzled by the attentions of a worldly older boy, who regaled her with his adventures in the overheated world of show business. Soon they were going steady.

However, in keeping with the fifties disapproval of premarital sex, they remained virgins. Woody's main interest in any female at this time was hormonal. To get what he wanted, he proposed marriage and bought an engagement ring, much to the dismay of both families, especially Judy Rosen, who had no desire to see one of her daughters with a college dropout earning forty dollars ($243 today) a week. Woody was not deceiving himself, either. Earning money for writing jokes was, he said, "like getting paid to play baseball or something," thrilling but also fool's luck. His drawer full of clippings amounted to the ability to hold the coats of David Alber's clients and make them sound funny. He wanted to be somebody, but he feared ending up as a nonentity: "I don't know what—a delivery boy or a messenger," he later said.

That bleak winter of 1955, there was an engagement dinner at the Konigsbergs. Unfazed by the occasion, Nettie began hectoring him about getting over his joke-writing foolishness, returning to college, going into a respectable business. How could he support a wife? Finally, Woody could no longer stand Nettie's needling. He grabbed the engagement ring and ran out of the house.

CHAPTER THREE

Stand-Up

In the winter of 1956, Woody's life took an unexpected turn when he got a chance to go to Hollywood as a comedy writer on the
Colgate Variety Hour,
NBC's answer to the top-rated
Ed Sullivan Show
on CBS. Living at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel, on his own for the first time, he felt confident that he had escaped his humdrum life with his family in Brooklyn. Proudly he raved to friends back home about the lush, sun-soaked good life of southern California; he loved the palm trees rising above the swimming pools, and bragged about stepping out at night to dine at world-famous restaurants such as the Brown Derby.

Yet, for all his enthusiasm, he felt intense loneliness and wrote several letters a day to Harlene, a freshman at Brooklyn College. In March, he could stand it no longer and impulsively summoned her to Hollywood to get married—a grand, dramatic gesture "as romantic as a movie script," in the eyes of his friends. Harlene, dewy-eyed, dying to get away from home, needed little persuasion to drop out of school and rush to Los Angeles, the elopement guaranteeing automatic transformation into a married lady of independence. On March 15, a rabbi married them at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel. He was twenty, she was seventeen.

Hardly had the ink dried on the marriage certificate before Woody regretted his decision. Only days later, he was talking about divorce, sourly referring to his bride as "her," and predicting that the relationship had absolutely no chance of working. If not for the stigma of divorce, and the pain it would cause his parents, he let it be known that he was ready to walk out at once. Sex was important to him, but the reality of marriage must have been unnerving. At twenty, he was as well prepared for the day-to-day intimacy of living with a spouse as the average adolescent boy. As though that weren't bad enough, poor ratings caused the Colgate show to fold a month later, and they were forced to return to New York, homeless and broke but pretending to be happy newlyweds. Not only did the entire Hollywood adventure fizzle out prematurely, not only was their teenage marriage off to a terrible start, but Harlene had to ask her parents for her old room so that they would have a place to stay.

That fall they moved into the city and rented a one-room efficiency in a brownstone at 311 West Seventy-fifth Street, just down the block from Riverside Park. In the days before co-op gentrification, rents on the Upper West Side were dirt cheap. Broad boulevards were flanked on either side with Kafkaesque apartment houses, inhabited largely by refugees still speaking in heavy European accents. Crisscrossing the avenues were narrow streets lined with blighted row houses, now chopped up into makeshift walk-ups. Their building had been originally a one-family house, and the apartment presumably a parlor, or at least half of one, because now from the ceiling an elegant chandelier hung smack up against a wall. The long, narrow room made Woody joke about furnishing the place with hurdles.