What falls away : a memoir (23 page)

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near . . .

In the beginning his name felt awkward to me: "Woody." It seemed extreme, and it didn't feel quite real, perhaps because it wasn't. His actual name was Allan Konigsberg. So I asked him, "What do I call you?" hoping maybe he would want me to call him Allan or something. But he said, "I would be pleased if you would call me 'Woody.' "

He thought my name was awkward too. Sometimes I heard him refer to me by my name when he couldn't make the point with "she" or "her"—but he never ever directly called me Mia.

It was hard work keeping Romantic Comedy fresh for so many months, but all in all I was enjoying the run. Woody had a soft spot for thirties-style comedies, so he came to see the play and liked it very much. The whole company knew I was nuts about him.

Sunday nights flew by too quickly. When the waiters began loudly turning chairs up onto the tabletops, we took our cue to leave the restaurant.

I cant wait to see you! I wrote to him.

One summer night, as I stood in the wings o^ the Barry-more Theater waiting to make a second-act entrance, my dresser, Madeleine, rushed up. "It's from Woody Allen.'" she whispered excitedly, putting an envelope into my hands. "His chauffeur is here." On a plain white card Woody wrote

WHATFALLSAWAY Z77

that Sunday was too long to wait, and he asked if I would join him after the following evening's show. It promised to be a clear night and we could go up on his terrace and look at the stars. Yes, I scribbled back.

With that we began seeing each other more frequently. We went to museums and movies and the opera. We walked all over the city with the white Rolls Royce to meet us at our destinations. He showed me the New York he loved: high on a clock tower with a heart-stopping view, he took two wineglasses and a bottle of Chateau Margaux out of a paper bag. It was as if I had stepped into a Woody Allen movie. He was more serious, less humorous, far more confident than in his films; but, I thought, more attractive, more interesting.

My new son Moses was an eager, affectionate, cheerful little fellow with an irresistible smile and a passion for bugs. Before he could be fitted for a brace or begin physical therapy, he needed to have an operation on his leg—the first of two—that he endured without complaint, along with months in a cast, and six years of physical therapy and speech therapy. Woody had not yet met any of my children.

In August 1980, I was the one in the hospital—for major abdominal surgery, my fourth, for complications resulting from the peritonitis in 1974. My stomach pains forced Woody and me to leave Rao's restaurant before we had finished our dinner. Later that night I checked in to the emergency room at New York Hospital.

During my second week in the hospital Woody came to see me and, for the first time, he telephoned me. After that, while I was convalescing on Martha's Vineyard with the children, he called two or three times every day. While on the phone to Woody, I suddenly became aware of the din around me, something I was normally oblivious to. I was, of course, acutely aware that he had lived his forty-five years

entirely without children. He had never dated a woman with even one child. As he put it, "I have zero interest m kids." And if that wasn't clear enough, he talked about his sister, who also lived in Manhattan, with whom he had shared an unusually close childhood. He spoke to her on the phone; he loved her, and he helped her financially, but he avoided her company. He described her as "pushy," and as an example he told me about her unwelcome and futile efforts to involve him with her children when they were younger.

The previous year on Martha's Vineyard had given me time to reflect, in every season and in every conceivable frame of mind. As each attempt to rehabilitate my marriage had failed, I was left with few illusions. I was a smgle mother with seven young children; wonderful as they indeed were, I understood it was unlikely that I would ever again meet a man who would want to become seriously involved with me. That is not to say I was without hope—but hopes are not expectations.

The children and I returned to my mother's apartment in the fall of 1980. I'd played out my run in Romantic Comedy^ and even though it was difficult to leave my home on the Vineyard, I went back to New York because of my feelings for Woody.

He lived in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue directly opposite my apartment, less than a mile across Central Park. We blinked our lights at each other, waved through binoculars, and shook towels out the windows. This relationship, I remember thinking, will be the best of my life. We will be together forever.

My children met Woody on an Indian-summer afternoon in late September 1980. The kids and I were returning from the playground, just entenng the lobby of our building, when he arrived early to take me for a walk; they

were holding dripping chocolate ict cream cones, and they all had on hats. Somehow it seemed as if there were more of them when they were wearing hats and eating ice cream. Seven small faces stared up at him: Matthew and Sascha were ten, Soon-Yi was seven going on eight (her age was finally determined through the standard method of X-raying her wrists). Lark was seven, Daisy and Fletcher were six, and Moses, covered with ice cream in his stroller, was two and a half. By then even the littlest kids knew Woody meant a lot to me, so they were curious and sweet and shy with him.

He said my kids were "very cute," and before spring arrived we were all staying at his place on Friday and Saturday nights. At first we carried our stuff back and forth across the park with us: sleeping bags, stuffed animals, pajamas, dolls, toy cars, stamp collections, videotapes, Lego, board ^ames, puzzles, art supplies, books, and snacks. In time, shelves appeared in the back bedroom, then a bunk bed, and we began to leave things there. The kids brought their friends along for sleep-overs. My robe hung in his bathroom. He gave me my own drawer. My hairbrush, soap, and shampoo took their place alongside Diane Keaton's (his girlfriend from more than a decade earlier), which I never presumed to touch, in the cabinet above the sink.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, at around seven-thirty, Woody and I would go for a walk. When we returned, I would get the kids ready, put the room where they slept back in order, and then we would go back to our own apartment, where I would make pancakes for breakfast. Woody wanted to be alone to exercise, see his analyst, write, and practice his clarinet. The kids had their play dates, piano lessons, cheeseburger lunches on Columbus Avenue, and excursions to the playground or the Museum of Natural History.

Woody was never comfortable with the children, but in his way, he tried. He traded his white Rolls for a black

stretch limo big enough to transport us all. On weekend afternoons throughout the fall and winter, he had movies screened for them at his Park Avenue editing rooms. While they polished off deep bowls full of candy left for them by Woody's assistant, they watched the movies of Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Chaplin, Gary Grant, Frank Gapra, John Ford, and every science-fiction and kids' classic right up to the latest Disney and Spielberg. I once left: Daisy and Fletcher with him at his apartment while I went to the doctor. When I returned less than an hour later, he was throwing his hats and gloves into the fire. The kids were ecstatic. "I ran out of things to do," he shrugged.

A postcard, circa 1935, arrived from across the park. It pictured a man in a bowler hat with five small children. Over the top was printed, YOUR FUTURE HUSBAND—YOUR FUTURE CHILDREN.

A French cook named Golette worked for Woody full-time, but he preferred to eat out, except for Mondays, when he played clarinet at an East Side pub, and Sundays, when we had Ghinese take-out together with the children in my kitchen. He never ate our food or used our plates or utensils because of the cats, who had been known to jump onto the table. He couldn't stand the cats.

I missed our first, long dinner dates in quiet restaurants, when we talked until the waiters dislodged us. Now, as had been his custom for years before we met, we joined Jean Doumanian and her boyfriend for dinner. Woody had met Jean in Ghicago when he was a stand-up comedian playing nightclubs; she and her then-husband were fans who kept returning to catch his show. I had been aware of her importance in Woody's life, and I was curious to meet her, but that didn't happen for the first six or more months that we

were dating. In those early days we kept to ourselves, steering clear of high-profile restaurants like Elaine's. So nothing appeared in the gossip columns until the night a photographer came blazing into La Grenouille restaurant. That was when I swallowed my ring.

Although we had dinner with Jean several times a week for almost a dozen years, I never became comfortable with her. Not that she wasn't nice to me, but she had been close to Woody for so long, they talked on the phone several times a day, and she was older than Woody, who was himself a decade my senior. The whole package was intimidating: her breezy, seamless confidence, well-timed remarks, chic all-black wardrobe, perfectly styled black hair, dark eyes, and thin lips on a chalk-white face. Her show-busmess anecdotes were the latest, her other interests were exercise, health food, massages, and acupuncture. I didn't know what to talk to her about.

When Woody suffered from a kind of chronic sty that none of his doctors could cure, Jean brought her herbalist up from Chinatown to the Fifth Avenue penthouse. The old fellow produced a cat's whisker and stuck it into Woody's tear ducts: it had no effect at all on the sties. This departure from traditional medicine aside, Woody Allen was connected to his doctors like no one I ever heard of: he had a doctor for every single part of his body. He carried around his doctors' home numbers, he rushed to the doctor before a twinge could reach symptom status. If he felt the least bit unwell, he would take his temperature at ten-minute intervals. He kept his own thermometer at my apartment. In his pocket he carried a silver box full of pills for any conceivable ailment. Whenever one of his movies came out, he'd have a screening for his doctors and their wives. It was called "the doctors' screening," and the room was always full.

On the weekends Woody and I went to the screening room, where we watched movies old and new, and drank red wme before dinner, a smgle bottle of which might cost as much as five hundred dollars. I got to see The Bicycle Thief, which was every bit as great as Frank had told me. The last scene of that movie was the only time that I may have seen Woodv shed a tear, although it's possible that his stv was itching.

Sometimes we brought one, two, or three of the children along with us to dirmer. They were made much of wherever we went. In time the Russian Tea Room became their favorite restaurant and a tradition for birthdays. Our booth was in the left corner, by the maitre d', under the picture of Ruth Gordon.

Now our walks around the East Side were filled with talk about the film he was writmg for the summer of 1981. When one day he asked if I would like to be in that movie, a wild banshee jumped into my mouth and said loudly that I wasn't much of an actress so maybe I'd better not. Woody looked surprised, but he was reassuring. "In the past," he said, "actresses who have worked with me have tended to come off very well." I agreed, but my thoughts flew in all directions. I wanted to work with him, I had been hoping to work with him: it was what every actor in the world would wish for and I was no exception. I should be thrilled. Except now that he had asked—it felt strange to be offered a role because I was "the girlfnend." And what if I didn't measure up? What would happen then? I couldn't imagine what It would be like doing scenes with him, and with him as the director-boss and boyfriend. Life was complicated enough.

Maybe it was automatic after two broken marriages, that a sort of generic fear would set in: fear that comes from feeling unsafe, fear that his feelmgs were nothmg like mine —It was hard to know what he really felt—fear of something in him, or something not there in him, fear of surren-

dering my last shred of power. So I would draw myself up to my full height and be the first to declare my ineligibility. Get a jump on things.

Wait a minute. He's wonderful, and he loves me. Only the other day he complimented me on my male logic and said ours is the best relationship he's ever had. It's a miracle, don't screw it up. From here it seems possible that we could love each other forever. Anyway, Fm qualified to work with him! I have prizes. I was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I'm a "wonderful actress," he said, and Judith Crist, a critic friend of his, has been telling him for years to use me, so one day we might have worked together anyway. That's what he said. So. It will only be great. And fun: we'll get to be together all the time and we'll grow even closer. I will do the best work of my life and the kids will be proud of me, and he wiU be proud of me and therefore love and respect me more. And besides, I have to work— i{ I took a job someplace else, that would hurt the relationship.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was filmed on the Rockefeller estate about an hour outside the city. Except for the nearly steady air traffic, it was an ideal site for this turn-of-the-century piece. It was summer and the children usually accompanied me to work, quickly disappearing into the woods and along the stream on business of their own.

The film was shot almost entirely outdoors with the incomparable Gordon Willis as cinematographer. Our days were spent waiting for moments of perfect light. Meanwhile I was in the camper (Woody and I shared one through thirteen films), wearing a robe, with my hair tightly wrapped around cone-shaped curlers, my torso compressed mto a killer corset. Bleary-eyed from a pulverizing headache (the curlers, the corset, the heat, the humidity, the nerves), I just wished I could be my sister out there looking adorable in her jeans and baseball cap and straight hair, lounging in