The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (11 page)

On the strength
oiPussycat,
Woody received $75,000 to develop
Kagi No Kagi,
a Japanese James Bond-genre spy picture that, unsuccessfully dubbed into an English version, had proved an incredible mess. He wrote loony new dialogue, completely contrary to the action, which he put in the mouths of the Japanese actors. (Heroic spy Phil Moskowitz searches for the world s best egg-salad recipe.) Afterward, Woody disliked the film so much that he sued to prevent its release but changed his mind when
What's Up, Tiger Lily?
received decent notices. Andrew Sarris thought it was "one of the funniest movies of the year and the most creative job of dubbing dialogue" he had ever heard.

Thanks to Charles Feldman, Woody now had two screen credits and a budding career as an actor, a line of work for which he had no particular native talent. Still, two years later he appeared in his second Feldman film,
Casino Royale,
a spoof of the James Bond films, with Peter Sellers and David Niven. Woody is 007 s nephew, Little Jimmy Bond, who is eventually unmasked as the evil head of the crime organization SMERSH. (The sex-obsessed Dr. Noah is planning to release a bacillus germ that will make all women beautiful and destroy all men over four feet six.) An outstanding supporting cast (Orson Welles, John Huston, and William Holden) could not save
Casino Royale
from turning into "an unredeemingly moronic enterprise," Woody said. Watching the dailies during shooting provided him with a valuable Baedeker, "a handbook of how not to make a film."

Rashomon:

"He was very loyal. If you were his friend and if he said he had a commitment to you then you were his friend 24 hours a day. It was a lifetime commitment. He would write you every day or call you every day, and I believe that is why he has such a good reputation with the people he knows."

—B
ryna
G
oldstein
E
ill

"WOODY ALLEN at various places and times unknown to me in shows, broadcasts, in conversation and otherwise, did deface and ridicule me, his former wife."

—H
arlene
A
llen

"If I were to close my eyes and imagine Woody, something I would keep with me is just the image of him watching
Cries and Whispers.
... Him being swept away. I've seen it on his face. I've seen it. It's moved me. It makes me love him."

—D
iane
K
eaton

"Many things about him were hidden from me and I was always frightened of him and I didn't fully understand him. I thought he was shy, but there are sociopathic tendencies. ... I had a limited grasp of what he was."

—M
ia
F
arrow

"Every day I raced home from school hoping to find one of the brown envelopes in our mail box. When there wasn't one, I was despondent, and when there was, I felt a thrill I have not since experienced—except perhaps when getting an unexpected check. Either way, I would spend the afternoons composing and polishing another letter to my mentor."

—N
ancy Jo
S
ales

"He's dependable, helpful, he works hard, he's ethical, he saves string."

—M
arshall
B
rickman

"Life is difficult for Woody. He's one of the unfortunate tormented people. His mind is working all the time. So is a sweet side and a silly side and a sexual side. One night I couldn't sleep, and I thought, Tm lying next to one of America's foremost humorists.'"

—L
ouise
L
asser

It was a gray Wednesday in February 1966, with two to four inches of snow being predicted. Around eight that evening, Woody arrived at the Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-second Street to do two shows (for $6,000 a week). Regardless of the weather, the Royal Box was almost sold out—among the intrepid patrons, Jack Victor and his fiancee, whom Woody had invited for dinner. After the first show, a waiter came over bearing an invitation to go upstairs to Woody’s suite. There, they were surprised to find a makeshift wedding reception in progress because Woody and Louise had been married that afternoon.

Several weeks earlier, they took blood tests without telling anyone. Both of them had misgivings. The decision to go through with the marriage was made at the last minute, so spur-of-the-moment that Woody had to run out and buy a $ 1.98 wedding band at a Times Square novelty shop. It is hard to tell which of them was more reluctant. After living together for five years, it was probably Louise.

"We both decided to do it," she explained later, "because the relationship wasn't moving forward and we thought that maybe marriage would make things different." The ceremony took place in the living room of her father and new stepmothers apartment at 155 East Fiftieth Street. Nettie and Marty Konigsberg were not invited. The only witnesses were Mickey and Judy Rose, and Woody’s new best friend, Jean Doumanian. Supreme Court Justice George Postel, a personal friend of the Lassers, had never seen Woody’s act, indeed had never heard of Woody Allen. During the ceremony, Postel turned to Louise and intoned, "Do you take Woody Herman to be your husband?"

"No!" she exclaimed.

Afterward, Postel assured them that no couple married by him had ever divorced, words that Louise never forgot because minutes after the ceremony she could not help asking herself, "Should I stay married?"

On the surface, they seemed extremely happy together. In the months following the wedding, they moved into a $900-a-month, six-room apartment on the top two floors of a townhouse at 100 East Seventy-ninth Street. Their new home, decorated by a fashionable interior designer, Olga San Giuliano, had Aubusson rugs, designer window treatments, and silk-covered walls with three Gloria Vanderbilt oils and drawings by Matisse and Kokoschka. There was a formal dining room furnished with French antiques, a billiard room, and upstairs, for their bedroom, they had picked out a four-poster canopy bed. But for all the fine furniture and the art, the duplex remained mosdy unfurnished. A wood-paneled room, with a magnificent Aubusson on the floor, was sort of a storeroom containing nothing but a ragtag collection of useless presents they had given to each other (a jukebox and a Hammond organ), and in the corner a movie projector and screen were untidily stacked next to an air conditioner in a wicker clothes hamper and a couple of unopened cartons.

Overseeing the household was a staff of two, a cook and a Filipino valet who turned out to be a drinker and had to be dismissed. Attempting to be social, Woody and Louise dutifully entertained journalists and critics with dinners of scrod, peas, salad, and several choices of dessert. On New Year's Eve, 1966, they planned a disco party. Special invitations designed by Louise went out to 150 of their friends. The day of the party, however, a mention in Earl Wilson's
Post
column resulted in more than five hundred gate-crashers. When Louise saw all the people she began to cry, and Woody took her outside. In despair, they sat down on the curb and then, he recalled, "we went down to the corner and had a sandwich at the drugstore. We had to get out of there." When they got back to the house, people were still pushing their way inside. "Whose party is this?" Louise overheard someone asking. The next day, a neighbor returned one of their Matisse drawings he had found on the stairs.

On their first wedding anniversary, Louise thoughtfully presented Woody with a traditional paper anniversary gift of an autographed letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that mentioned Harry Houdini, which Woody framed. (It still hangs on his wall.) But after a year, the relationship was already unraveling. Like Houdini, Woody became an escape artist by disappearing behind a wall of hobbies. Increasingly silent and reclusive, he installed an old billiard table that he bought from McGirrs pool hall and had taken to playing by himself. During this time, Louise would describe Woody s response to her attempts at starting a conversation: "He keeps shooting billiards. It's sort of hard to talk to him that way."

In the fall of 1967, she played a leading role in a Broadway musical,
Henry, Sweet Henry,
opposite Don Ameche. On opening night, Woody sent her a sweet telegram: "I'm bringing 500 mice to your opening. Please be grand." Louise, greatly talented, was also greatly troubled, and Woody had his work cut out for him. Extremely depressed, subject to disturbing mood and weight swings, she kept herself afloat with a variety of pills and daily sessions with her analyst, who warned that marriage to Woody was killing her artistic fulfillment. Actually the burden of sustaining the marriage fell on Woody, who would worry when she slept all day and wind up calling her analyst to check on her medication. Louise's condition, depicted in the Dor-rie character (Charlotte Rampling) in
Stardust Memories,
would seriously affect their marriage. In those years, he told Eric Lax, Louise was extraordinary but "crazy as a loon." At first, it was worth it because he could be sure of her having two good weeks a month. Eventually, however, she was having two good
days
a month. When he saw
After the Fall,
Arthur Miller's 1964 drama inspired by his marriage to a near-psychotic Marilyn Monroe, he immediately saw the similarities between the two women.

Of course, Woody, admittedly "finicky and touchy," was a difficult husband. Aside from his crabby moods, he demonstrated a junkielike addiction to work that alarmed Louise. In the morning while she was still asleep, he woke up early and began writing. All day long he was sealed off in his workroom. If she knocked, he usually called out, "Hiya, Louise, come on in," in the tone of a cranky father to his little girl. And barely three months after the wedding, he bolted ofT to London with Charlie Joffe for the filming of
Casino Royale.
To pass the time, he shopped for jazz records, played poker, and, lounging on his hotel bed with a pad and pencil, began writing a play about a family from Newark, unsophisticated folks like the Konigsbergs, who are accused of spying while vacationing behind the Iron Curtain.
Yankee Come Home
is full of oddball characters and comic touches that make it seem like a dramatic version of his nightclub act, with one laugh on top of the next.

Renamed
Don't Drink the Water,
the play opened on Broadway in the fall of 1966, with Lou Jacobi and Kay Medford as the American couple and Tony Roberts as the ambassadors son who falls in love with their daughter. As the opening had approached, Woody was filled with dread. Displeased with some of the actors, he had premonitions of disaster, which were confirmed in Philadelphia during the pre-Broadway tryout when his efforts were critically mauled. There were plenty of laughs, reported
Variety,
but "the story and staging format suggest pre-World War II farce." Woody would never take rejection well. Hoping the comedy would work in New York but fearful of the critics, he conveniently disappeared on opening night and wound up playing billiards at McGirrs pool hall on Eighth Avenue. In what would become a lifelong pattern, he fled from the painful prospect of seeing his work judged while insisting that he cared nothing for the world s opinion.

There was no doubt it was "a terrible play," he said later, "just a group of a million gags all strung together." New York newspaper critics tended to agree. But audiences seemed to enjoy it, and the show had a respectable run of eighteen months. Joseph Levine purchased film rights but rejected Woody’s request to direct and instead hired Howard Morris, a television comic from
Your Show of Shows.
Released in 1969 with Jackie Gleason, it proved to be a dud at the box office, maybe because it looked like just another episode of
The Honeymooners.
After selling the film rights, Woody took no further interest and refused to see it.

Some people anesthetized with booze; Woody wrote. For years he had been jotting down ideas on slips of paper and tossing them into a drawer. Unlike most writers, he never saw a blank sheet of paper that intimidated him, never suffered a moment of artistic paralysis. In
1965
he hired a private secretary, a woman from Joplin, Missouri, by the name of Norma Lee Clark, and the first thing he did was empty his makeshift archive and deliver a valise stuffed with paper. Typed, the material came to nearly two hundred pages.

Aside from typing, Norma Lees duties were to screen his calls, sort mail, and arrange appointments. She worked out of the Rollins and Joffe office on West Fifty-seventh Street and communicated with her employer by intercom several times a day, "every 20 minutes if he's in a nervous state," she reported. Their relationship remained strictly impersonal. Not only did he see Norma Lee infrequently, he seemed to be totally uninterested in her as a person. Asked about Woody in 1980, after fifteen years in his employ, she said that he was a "very easy and undemanding" boss who didn't encourage intimacy. "I don't think Woody has ever asked me a personal question."

Outside of her regular job, Woody’s secretary was an aspiring writer of Regency Romance novels. Clients visiting the Rollins and Joffe office remember her poring over stacks of Harlequin paperbacks as she taught herself the novelistic formula. Over the next twenty years, working in the shadow of a prolific celebrity, perhaps inspired by the productivity of her employer, Norma Lee would publish sixteen titles, including
The Impulsive Miss Pymbroke, The Daring Duchess,
and her most popular,
Lady Jane
("She was once a nobody. Now she was a woman with a past. ...").

In the fall of 1965,
Playboy
asked Woody to submit a story. He did an essay on chess, about a pair of refined but dotty gendemen by the names of Allen and Mittleman playing an increasingly nasty game by mail. When Louise read their exchange of letters, she thought the story was much too literary for what was essentially a girlie magazine.

"This is a good piece of writing," she said. "It s the kind of thing
The New Yorker
might be interested in."