The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (12 page)

He doubted it. To him,
The New Yorker was
"hallowed ground." Giving in to Louise's urging, however, he turned the story over to Norma Lee Clark for typing and mailed it out "just as a lark."

Woody’s chess piece landed on the desk of the fiction editor who knew Woody only as a funny stand-up comic. Reading the piece, Roger Angell thought it was "obvious he could write a sentence." But several things bothered him, primarily that "his writing was
exactly
like S. J. Perelmans." Returning the manuscript, he notified the author that he could resubmit the piece if he made some changes in the second half. "The insults and exaggeration after page 6 [sound] forced and reminiscent of Perelman," he explained.

Never had Woody dreamed of being published in
The New Yorker.
Awestruck, he set out to the
New Yorker
office to meet the editor, a man some fifteen years his senior. A child of
The New Yorker,
Roger Angell was the son of legendary fiction editor Katharine Sergeant Angell White and the stepson of the author of
Charlotte's Web,
humorist E. B. White. After an interoffice affair, his mother had divorced his father, New York attorney Ernest Angell, and married White, seven years her junior. A member of an old Boston family, august in manner, Katharine White could be so formidable that Roger Angell, in the office, referred to his mother as "Mrs. White."

Angell wasted no time setting Woody straight. "This is very funny but we already have one of these. We have the original." This brought no argument from Woody, who, having deliberately copied Perelmans style, had apparently succeeded only too well. But AngelPs next objection floored him.

"The piece is too funny," Angell said. There was a laugh in practically every line.

"Fewer laughs?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so." The piece read as if it were a stand-up routine, Angell explained, and written humor didn't work that way.

"The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers" was published on January 20, 1966, followed shortly by two more Perelmanesque essays: "A Little Louder, Please" (a cultured intellectual admits he hates pantomime), then "Yes, but Can the Steam Engine Do This?" (A history of the invention of the sandwich). It was not until the following year that Angell reported to a friend that Woody had almost entirely overcome his compulsion to write like Perelman. (Some critics felt he switched to copying the deceased Robert Benchley.)

Woody's extraordinary discipline amazed Angell. Not only did he accept corrections without argument, but he completed them with lightning speed, often returning the piece promptly the next morning. "In many ways, he was the ideal contributor because he was so quick to respond to suggestions." Sometimes Angells acceptance letters included crumbs of praise: "Mr. Shawn is delighted." William Shawn, the revered editor-in-chief who had been chosen to succeed the magazine's founder, Harold Ross, genuinely admired Woody's writing. From its inception the magazine had always been short on humorists, and by this time Perelman was practically the only great one left. Mr. Shawn, said Angell, "regarded Woody as a gift from God. He loved his work." Shawn recognized Woody's comic literary gift, but it was Angell who had forced him to be specific and precise—and therefore as funny as he could possibly be.

Publication in
The New Yorker
not only lifted Woody's confidence tremendously, but it also eventually would cement his reputation as a master literary humorist. Ever after, many would regard him as a legitimate successor to giants such as S. J. Perelman and Robert Benchley. In the period between 1965 and 1980, he turned out twenty-eight stories in which he roved wildly, taking aim at a variety of targets (the Dead Sea Scrolls, insurance salesmen, UFOs, God, and the Holocaust), and sprinkling his prose with a variety of brand names: Hannah Arendt, Proust, Flaubert, Bellow, O. J. Simpson, and Elaine's restaurant. Perhaps the single most clever piece is "The Whore of Mensa," which recounts the efforts of a private investigator, Kaiser Lupowitz, to break an intellectual call-girl ring, specializing in hookers for the mind instead of the body, whose clientele is made up of Johns with a taste for brainy women, preferably with master's degrees in comparative lit. Into Kaiser's office walks a nubile redhead named Sherry, whose hindquarters remind him of two scoops of vanilla ice cream.

"Shall we begin?" he asks, leading her to the couch.

Dragging on her cigarette, Sherry gets right down to business. "I think we could start by approaching
Billy Budds
Melville's justification of the ways of God to man,
riest-cepast

Not all of Woody’s submissions were accepted. "When he turned somber, it was disappointing," said Angell. "It really wasn't stuff we wanted to run."

Once, during a conversation, Angell got a disturbing glimpse into Woody’s thinking. Angell said to him, "I certainly hope you're not one of those writers who think humor isn't important enough for a man to be remembered for."

I am.

"Writing humor is a serious business," Angell argued. "Do you mean it’s not serious enough for you?"

"I do mean that," Woody insisted.

In 1980 Woody stopped writing for the magazine because, he informed Angell, the demands of filmmaking simply left him no time. It was only half true. Writing "little souffles" had begun to bore him. He noticed that "guys like S. J. Perelman and Robert Benchley, guys who I idolize, ended up with endless volumes of casuals' and it was a dead end." As always, dead ends depressed him. Just as he had lost interest in being a stand-up comedian, he also became dissatisfied with writing for
The New Yorker,
although, Angell recalled, "there was no falling out or cooling off. We would have been distressed if he had continued to write for anyone else." In the fifteen intervening years their correspondence catches the tone of a literary partnership that seldom—maybe never—rose above the impersonal. Woody’s letters always began "Dear Roger" and always ended "Woody Allen," as if he were writing to his accountant. The gentlemanly Angell, as much a mentor to him as Rollins and Joffe, treated him with unfailing cheer and diplomacy. As the years passed, he displayed increasing affection. Woody, on the other hand, remained completely businesslike, always keeping a distance. Outside of the magazine, the two men observed the usual author-editor amenities: Woody asked Angell and his wife Carol to movie screenings and New Year's Eve parties; the editor invited his author to Christmas parties and stopped by Michaels Pub to hear him play Dixieland jazz.

By the late seventies, the magazine was regularly rejecting about half of his submissions. In cover letters, Woody would urge Angell to discard unsatisfactory pieces. Some stories, such as "My Speech to the Graduates," read as if written by a nightclub comic, Angell noted, and continued apologetically, "Sorry to let you down." Some stories ("The Condemned" and "Confessions of a Burglar") were rescued by heavy editing; others, such as "The Lunatics Tale," in which a man switches the brains of his scholarly wife and sexy mistress, were returned because "almost every sentence seemed to need some kind of revision." Among the pieces subsequently sold to other publications such as
The New Republic
and
The Kenyon Review
were "Remembering Needle-man," "Nefarious Times We Live In," and "Retribution." Departure from
The New Yorker
marked the end of his prose-writing career.

Stand-Up:

"I kid my ex-wife all the time but she was animal. She was not technically animal officially. Officially she was reptile."

—"What's New, Pussycat?" Monologue

Though a divorcee at twenty-three, Harlene did not sit around pining. Hoping to lead the bohemian life, she settled down in Italy, where she studied art in Florence and reportedly enjoyed several exciting romances. Returning to the United States, she moved into a modest apartment in the West Village, dressed like a hippie, and hung around with people who practiced meditation and yoga. Despite a first-rate education, she seemed unable to find a position commensurate with her abilities and eventually supported herself by secretarial jobs, one of these in the psychology department at Yeshiva University.

It seems unlikely that Harlene was unaware of Woody s jokes about her. Nevertheless, she chose to ignore the situation until 1964, when he displayed photographs of her and her sister on a national television show "while holding me up to ridicule," as she put it. Making sport of her in inconspicuous nightclubs was annoying; demeaning her on prime-time television made her mad, so much so that her attorney formally protested. Woody promised to stop.

Three years later, Harriet Van Home, television critic for the
New York World Journal Tribune,
devoted an entire column, "Woody Sways on His Pedestal," to his mean-spirited treatment of his ex-wife. "So you thought women were the vindictive sex?" Van Home wrote. "Well, you haven't heard Woody Allen discussing his last duchess." The previous night she had watched him on two shows—
Perry Como
and
The Tonight Show
—"licking his wounded pride with the tongue of an adder." If his ex-wife had to endure his antics in silence, Van Home hoped it was sweetened by "a splendid settlement and throngs of dashing beaux." Because unless she bought an hour of prime television time, what recourse did Harlene have?

Harlene lost no time rushing to court with a $1 million lawsuit charging Woody, the National Broadcasting Company, and its affiliates with defamation of character, citing repeated acts of libel described as "statements attributing to me lack of chastity and morality." She meticulously compiled examples of the "wicked and malicious" material, including the crack about rape and the moving violation. (And by the way, he owed her nearly $8,000 in back alimony.)

Woody, dumbfounded, refused to admit any wrongdoing. He had meant no disrespect. The only purpose of his "good-natured fun" and "harmless jokes" was to make people laugh, he argued in his reply to the complaint. Nobody takes comics seriously. Suggesting that some conniving attorney had put her up to it, just to squeeze money out of him, he wondered why Harlene waited so long to object.

Privately, he thought she was being too sensitive, and decided there was nothing to worry about. In any case, his attention was drawn to more important problems, such as his current wife: Their relationship had become so rocky that most of their time together was spent quarreling. It seemed that divorce would be unavoidable. Then that summer, in Central Park, he was playing a charity softball game on a team with George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe, when he was hit in the right hand and had to be admitted to the emergency room. The following week he opened at Caesars Palace with his hand in a cast. The accident upset him far more than Harlene s suit, which he continued to ignore.

Woody s mother felt sure that he would lose. Her advice was to "settle for half," $500,000 seeming like a bargain, everything considered. But Woody, feeling fireproof, brushed off her advice, and as a result, Harlene increased the amount to $2 million. Six years later, the matter was settled out of court, when he made a financial settlement and vowed to drop the jokes if she agreed not to discuss their marriage or the terms of the settlement. For three decades, Harlene has kept her word. How much she collected is unknown, but it has been sufficient for her to live comfortably ever since.*

'Whatever the precise nature of the scars, this much seems clear: Woody would never forget or forgive Harlene. She seems to be the model for the archetypical castrator throughout his films: Allan Felix's ex-wife, Nancy, in Play It Again, Sam; Alvy Singers ex-wives, Alison Portchnick, the political activist, and Robin, the literary-intellectual social climber, in Annie Hall; Isaac Davis's ex-wife, Jill, the lesbian memoirist in Manhattan; and Harry Blocks ex-wife, who resembles the Nazi German heavyweight champion, Max Schmeling, in Deconstructing Harry.

Caught on Tape:

W
illiam
F. B
uckley,
J
r
. (reading a question): Mr. Allen, do you think the Israelis should give back the land they won from the Arabs?

W
oody:
N
o
, they should sell it back.

Asked to host a
Kraft Music Hall
special, "Woody Allen Looks at 1967," he invited as his guests Liza Minnelli, Aretha Franklin, and Buckley, the well-known conservative editor of
National Review.

"But I’m not a comedian," Buckley said. "Oh," said Woody, "don't worry about that." Fortunately, Buckley has a good sense of humor.

At thirty-two. Woody stood at a crossroad. Afflicted with boundless energy, he had bounced from television writer and nightclub comic to movie actor, screenwriter, essayist, Broadway playwright, even fashion model because he posed for a series of magazine ads for Smirnoff vodka and Foster Grant sunglasses. That year his various projects earned a half-million dollars—but was he becoming too successful for his own good? The superman output staggered his friend Groucho Marx. "For God's sake," Marx wrote the flashy overachiever in the spring of 1967, "don't have any more success—it's driving me crazy."

CHAPTER FIVE

The "Coatcheck Girl

It was 5 A.M. and chilly on a June morning in San Francisco, and in his excitement Woody cut his nose while shaving. Within the hour, he was heading toward San Quentin, the city's famous maximum-security prison, where he was scheduled to shoot in the laundry and dining hall, with the cooperation, he hoped, of a hundred inmates. If he could not help feeling trepidation about the convicts, who, he reminded himself, "hadn't seen a woman in years, much less a fair-skinned Jew," the fact remained that he had every reason in the world to feel lucky. After frustrating months of haggling, in which Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe had failed to convince United Artists that their client needed absolute artistic control, they finally cobbled together a deal with Palomar Pictures. The newly formed subsidiary of the American Broadcasting Company put up roughly $1.5 million for the novice filmmaker to write, direct, and act, notwithstanding the fact that he had no directing experience, no discernible acting talent, and only a single real screenwriting credit. The day before beginning principal photography, Woody seemed relaxed about his first picture. "The way I look at it," he told the unit publicist, "the less I know, the better. Directing and acting will be no harder than just acting." Since he wrote the script, he knew exactly what he wanted. "So," he continued, "I don't anticipate problems."