The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (7 page)

Harlene resumed her education at tuition-free Hunter College, and Woody kept busy selling one-liners to radio stars like Peter Lind Hayes. For the time being, they put aside the idea of separation and tried to make a success of married life. Harlene learned how to cook, not always successfully, because Woody complained that everything she made, even coffee, tasted like chicken, and Elliott Mills remembered a dinner of boiled beef hearts and overcooked string beans as the worst meal he had ever eaten. In companionable moments, Harlene and Woody played their recorders together and went to movies.

It took almost three years before they could afford to move. Their new apartment, in a dinky brownstone at 4 East Seventy-eighth Street, was not much of an improvement over their old place, but at least it was on the East Side.

On the subway Woody ran into a kid from the neighborhood with whom he'd gone through PS. 99 and Midwood High. He was miserable, he confided to Jimmy Moore, and had recently begun seeing a therapist. Moore was surprised. "In those days I'd never known anybody so unhappy that he would go to a psychiatrist. But if you did, you certainly didn't talk about it. I wondered what could be bothering him." Woody didn't really know what was bothering him, except "a continual awareness of seemingly unmotivated depression." He found a clinic with sliding-scale fees, all he could afford at the time, and went four or five times a week at fifteen dollars a session.

In spite of depression, his fortunes began to improve after making the acquaintance of several veteran writers who took a professional interest in him. More than anyone else, his most important mentor was Danny Simon, head writer on the Colgate show, and older brother of future playwright Neil Simon. Even though Woody had become a whiz at turning out jokes for Dave Alber's clients and for Herb Shriner, Danny warned him that writing jokes was not enough. He had to build on the gags to create characters and eventually learn how to write sketches. Later Woody would say that everything he knew about the craft of comedy writing—how to do a straight line.

how to cur jokes that don t move the plot, and, most important, how to keep rewriting—he had picked up from Danny Simon.

As Simons protégé, he began to wriggle his way slowly into big-league television comedy, though, to be sure, as a novice without good credentials or track record. After returning from Hollywood, his first job was
Stanley,
a half-hour sitcom starring Buddy Hackett and Carol Burnett. On his writing staff, the roly-poly Hackett had a stable of aces, including Larry Gelbart, Danny Simon, and Lucille Kallen. Intimidated, Woody sat quietly as a baby bird and spoke in whispers. "He was a very timid kid who didn't say much," remembered Hackett. "He was so damned serious about everything." After
Stanley
bombed, Woody worked on Pat Boone's musical variety program,
Chevy Showroom,
another frustrating experience. Many times, Boone remembers, "we'd be standing in the hallway during a break and Woody in his agitated, insistent way would be proposing some wild, drawn-out idea that we both
knew
was never going to make it. I would dissolve in helpless laughter and slide down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. Yer not one of those sketches was ever used on the show."

Like every comedy writer in the fifties. Woody was dying to work on Sid Caesar's
Your Show of Shows,
but there were never any openings. Finally, in 1958 Caesar used him for two NBC specials, which were both broadcast as "Sid Caesars Chevy Show." Woody, thrilled, found himself in the company of writers such as Larry Gelbart, again, and Mel Brooks. The writers' room, Gelbart recalled, resembled "a playpen" full of all-white, all-Jewish, primarily male writers, who were trying to please a time bomb of an employer who habitually drank himself sick. Impossible to work for, Caesar once dangled Mel Brooks from the eleventh-floor office window by his ankles. Brooks, himself manic, habitually referred to young Woody as "that rotten little kid." Asked about Woody in 1997, he characterized him as a person who "never communicated anything memorable. I guess he was truly hiding his light under a bushel." Nevertheless, the rotten little kid was beginning to get a reputation, because in 1958 he and Larry Gelbart won a Sylvania award for the year's best television comedy.

In spite of his aversion to the country, he began leaving the city every summer to work at Tamiment, a resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, renowned as a borscht belt farm club for writers. (Herman Wouk memorialized the resort as South Wind in
Marjorie Morningstar.)
For many years, Max Liebman had produced the Saturday night shows at Tamiment Playhouse with the fresh young talents of Danny Kaye, Carol Burnett, Sid Caesar, Jerome Robbins, Mary Rodgers, and Danny and Neil Simon. The productions were said to be the equal of Broadway theater. Helping to write and stage—and sometimes act in—a different show every weekend, Woody found himself toiling around the clock. In his spare hours, he sat on the porch, chewing packs of spearmint gum, practicing his clarinet, and reading. "People joked that the books were marriage manuals," said Mary Rodgers, who, with Marshall Barer, was there at Tamiment working on the music and lyrics for a one-hour version of what eventually became
Once Upon a Mattress.
Woody, at the tender age of twenty-three, "already had a reputation for being a genius," said Rodgers. Actress Jane Connell agreed that he was impressive, "confident of what he had to offer and even though very shy, never kowtowing to anyone."

For Woody, the atmosphere at Tamiment was irresistible, a "George S. Kaufmanesque stage door feeling" that made him feel part of show business. Less enamored of the place was Harlene, called "Mrs. Woody" by the staff, who earned extra money typing scripts and "always had a cold," recalled Mary Rodgers. "Actually, I think it was an allergy to the mountains, or maybe to Woody." Like the other performers, Harlene and Woody lived in a one-room cabin and shared a toilet with the cabin next door, but the lack of privacy didn't seem to bother them. They were "Hansel and Gretel," said Jane Connell, "little kids who seemed more like brother and sister than passionate lovers. Harlene looked a bit like Olive Oyl in the comics." Behind his wife's back, slyly mocking their marriage, Woody told the other players that he knew nothing about sex on their wedding night and talked to a rabbi, who advised him not to worry. "All you do is mount her like a young bull." The story, despite many repetitions, never failed to make people laugh. The sniffling Harlene did not utter a word, "didn't show her feelings," reported producer Moe Hack. "She could take a lot of punishment."

In four years Woody became a successful writer for television's biggest comedy stars. In 1960, he went to work for the
Garry Moore Show
at a weekly salary of $1,700 (the equivalent of $9,300 today). It was quite a lot of money, but, characteristic of his negative attitude. Woody was still miserable. The greater his success, the more impatient and dissatisfied he was. Writing for others, he decided, was "a blind alley," not much different from working in Macy's. Around friends, he made no secret of his boredom in the comedy trenches. He was just writing "to earn a living," hacking around from show to show, always worried that the star would be dropped for poor ratings. In no time, he began treating the Moore show like Midwood High, a place to avoid if at all possible. When he did show up, he arrived late, goofed off, and needled the other writers. His manager, Harvey Meltzer, was a cautious man who warned him to take it easy and develop his talent slowly and systematically, advice that Woody stubbornly refused to follow. When their five-year contract expired in 1958, Woody dumped his manager, to the relief of Meltzer, who later complained that Woody was "making me sick what he was putting me through." On the recommendation of a friend from Tamiment, Woody then hooked up with two agents who did not require him to sign a contract. Unlike Meltzer, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe took only a flat 15 percent commission.

The other thorn in his side, not as easy to remove as Meltzer, was Harlene. Now twenty-one, adopting a beatnik uniform of black skirts, leotards, pierced ears, and no makeup, she was a junior at Hunter, where she studied philosophy and German. By this time she held show business in low regard. It pained her to see her husband, a man obviously capable of serious work, wasting his talent on the lowest form of writing. Every so often her disdain reached the point where she would entice Woody into high-flown intellectual debates, which only infuriated him. However, it was probably her browbeating that shamed him into filling the gigantic craters in his education. To build his vocabulary, he began keeping lists of new words, and he also followed her courses, either by reading along with her or engaging a tutor from Columbia University to help him delve into the great works of philosophy and literature he had once considered impenetrable. Even so, it must have been grueling for a man whose best reading experiences had been comic books. "There have been very few things I can say in my life that were fun to read," he was to admit. "Even a great book like
Crime and Punishment
was not a joy to read." More enjoyable were magazines such as
The New Yorker,
which published the prose of S. J. Perelman, an "unremittingly hilarious" humorist in his opinion.

There was no question that their marriage was a mistake, but he could not bring himself to break free. Bitterly angry at being trapped in a situation he could not resolve, he took out his frustration by constantly diminishing his wifes talents and achievements, belittling and rebuking in much the same way his mother had treated him. Harlene, depressed, redoubled her efforts to please him.

All day he had been unable to eat, and now it was a little before ten and his heart was pounding. He felt as if he would pass out from stage fright. Waiting backstage at the Blue Angel, one of New York's most sophisticated supper clubs (the cover was $3.50), he listened while Shelley Berman introduced him as a funny young television writer who wanted to try out some of his own material. Neatly dressed in a suit and tie, he trudged out to the microphone and shot a sad-eyed glance at the audience through his thick Harold Lloyd spectacles, looking as startled as a fawn caught in headlights. Customers, drinking Scotch and smoking at the little pink-and-black tables and the banquettes along the quilted walls, stared back and smiled. Standing stiff and frightened under the draped velvet curtains, he began to robotically recite the thirty-minute audition monologue that he had spent months writing and polishing, tightening and rehearsing and timing. Once he got going, he plunged ahead fast and furious, as if he were reciting "The Charge of the

Light Brigade"—monotonous, mechanical, looking neither left nor right, what one of his managers would later describe as the equivalent of "a child doing show-and-tell." After a while, the blasts of laughter were coming less frequently until finally the crowd fell eerily quiet, eyes at half mast. At 10:30, fingers still pecking at his jacket, he walked offstage, feeling completely deflated. On that Sunday evening he learned an important lesson: There was a big difference between being funny and creating a comedy act. Killer material meant nothing without personality.

In His Own Words:

"It was unspeakably agonizing. All day long I would shake and tremble, thinking about standing up that night before people and trying to be funny."

—
W
OODY
A
LLEN, 1966

In 1960 the narrow streets of the West Village, Bleecker, MacDougal, and Sullivan, were a neon blur of clubs and coffeehouses offering all kinds of entertainment to middle-class couples from the outer boroughs and slumming uptown couples. The Cafe Wha, the Bitter End, and the Village Vanguard presented a roster of beatnik poets, amateur folksingers, and aspiring comics, all of them holding on to their day jobs because the clubs paid a going rate of five dollars a set. A few weeks after his catastrophic debut at the Blue Angel, Woody began working two shows a night, six nights a week at the Duplex, a club on Grove Street. It was a tiny walk-up on the second floor, with tables bunched together, a postage-stamp stage, and air sooty with cigarette smoke. Solely responsible for his being there were Rollins and Joffe, who were determined to push him into performing. Entering his life at its lowest point, they recognized that he had the originality but not the skill and immediately adopted the role of surrogate parents, babying him, holding his hand virtually every evening. "We
smelled
that this shy little guy could be a great performer," said Rollins.

Jack Rollins, eleven years Woody's senior, old enough to be a father figure to him, was born Jack Rabinowitz in 1914 and grew up in Brooklyn. A tall, forlorn man with pronounced dark circles under his eyes, he looked like a depressed raccoon who had got hold of a cigar. Early ambitions to become a theatrical producer got sidetracked when he met a folksinging short-order cook and began devoting all his time to developing the career of Harry Bela-fonte. Charles H. Joffe, twenty-nine, also from Brooklyn, attended Syracuse University and briefly tried to make a living as half of a song-and-comedy act. He then became a junior agent at MCA, one of Hollywood's biggest talent agencies, where he was not particularly successful, either. The two men met when Joffe noticed Rollins trudging along the halls of MCA, hustling his folksinger—no easy task in the days of segregation.

Together Rollins and Joffe made a splendid team: Rollins had the kind of sweet personality that made him a sensitive handler of people’s feelings; Joffe was a fast-talking negotiator. Working out of a messy one-room office on West Fifty-seventh Street, a hole in the wall stacked high with old newspapers, they had a tiny stable of clients. Besides Belafonte, they represented two comics just starting out, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, but no writers because they were not lucrative. Before long, rhey broached the idea to Woody of doing stand-up. Why drop his best lines into someone else's mouth when he could perform the material himself?