The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (14 page)

Since the Allan Felix character was obviously a fictionalized version of himself, Woody decided to play the part in spite of his lack of training as a theatrical actor. The role of Allan's friend was given to Tony Roberts, and that left only the part of the wife to be cast. The role went to the big gawky girl with the gum. Later Woody claimed that Diane Keaton had made him feel insecure. "She was a Broadway star and who was I? A cabaret comedian who had never been on stage before." Keaton was hardly a Broadway star. In fact, she had done little of note. Her stage experience was limited to the rock musical Hair, in which she was a member of the chorus and understudied the lead. Only a few weeks before auditioning for Woody did she get to take over the role. In Hair, she was known less for her talent than for being the only cast member who refused to go nude during the finale.

Diane Keaton’s childhood was conventional southern California. Born Diane Hall in 1946, she grew up in Santa Ana, a city south of Los Angeles, where her father was a civil engineer and owner of a consulting firm. In the Hall household—there were two younger sisters and a brother—the star was Dorothy Hall, a great beauty who had been Mrs. Los Angeles in the Mrs. America contest. From her early years, Diane would remember sitting in the audience and watching her mother in the spotlight. "Oh God, it was so amazing," she thought. "I want to be on that stage, too." After a year at Santa Ana College, still aching to have her name in lights, she headed for New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse, which led to a job in summer stock. Joining Actors Equity, she learned the union already had a Diane Hall and changed her name to Dorrie Keaton, her sisters name and her mother’s maiden name. Not long afterward she changed it a second time, to Diane Keaton. When she met Woody, she was living alone on the Upper West Side in a shabby one-room, roach-infested apartment with the tub in the kitchen.

During rehearsals, Woody and Diane clicked immediately. It was obvious that she had a crush on him. "I'd seen him on television before and I thought he was real cute," she later recalled. Woody thought she was "very charming to be around and of course you always get the impulse with Diane to protect her." He was still married, but after Christmas, when the company moved to Washington, D.C., for the pre-Broadway tryout, he and Diane became lovers.

On stage and off, Keaton was a mix of eccentricities. Her acting leaned heavily on a collection of dithering and blithering mannerisms that would so annoy one critic that he awarded her, a decade hence, "the Sandy Dennis Prize for Instant Deliquesence." In personal conversation, jittery and inarticulate, she tended to flutter through a rich repertoire of stutters and stammers and giggles—"God! s" and "Well, uhs"; "gees" and "sures." Unconventional in appearance, she dressed herself in clothing purchased in thrift shops. "She was the type," Woody recalled, "that would come in with, you know, a football jersey and a skirt. . . and combat boots and, you know, over mittens." Few woman would have felt truly comfortable in some of her outlandish getups—including a tiny minidress with brilliant green tights, and orange clogs with three-inch soles—but Diane had the flair to pull them off. Woody was openly smitten.

"When I first met her," he said later, "her mind was completely blank." Far from being a drawback, this was precisely the sort of unequal relationship he preferred. There is no doubt that his newly beloved, eleven years younger, was unformed and guileless, lacking in formal education. But underneath she was not "a coatcheck girl," as he seemed to think, nor was she "a complete idiot." As a self-appointed mentor, he suggested books to improve her mind and psychotherapy for her immaturity, even offering to pay for her sessions. She seized the opportunity.

Woody’s throat hurt. In his dressing room, on the makeup table, alongside paperbacks of
Selections from Kierkegaard
and
Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers,
he kept a blender, a can of chocolate syrup, and a jar of honey. The highbrow books were for show. The other paraphernalia had a serious purpose; he was whipping up malteds to gain weight and the honey was medicinal because his throat was usually raw from the strain of trying to project his untrained voice across the footlights.

Aside from preoccupations with his voice, life as a stage actor turned out to be surprisingly pleasurable for Woody. He had his days free to write or relax. In the evenings, he and Diane would walk together to the theater district, strolling down Broadway to Forty-fourth Street. Shortly after eight o'clock, the curtain went up, and he spent the next ninety minutes onstage in the company of people he liked. Now that the play was doing nicely at the box office, he had stopped biting his nails and felt completely comfortable about the text. Afterward, cast members went out for a late supper before heading home. "It was the easiest job in the world!" he said years later.

Broadway critics tended to be lukewarm. Some dismissed Woody’s play as little more than a diverting evening at the theater. Clive Barnes of the
New York Times
wished he had treated the subject more seriously, while Walter Kerr thought he had copied George Axelrod's seven-year-itch fantasy of a lonely man, sexually obsessed and dreaming about babes. However, none of the nitpicking criticisms mattered to theatergoers, who found the work funny and entertaining. As a result,
Play It Again, Sam
settled in for 453 performances on Broadway, and a London production starring Dudley Moore had an equally successful run.

Playing opposite Diane, Woody came across as an immensely attractive performer. Even though he continued to portray the nebbish, and would do so until he made
Annie Hall In
1977, audiences glimpsed a more earthy side of him with Diane, who obviously liked him. It was easy to see why: He was smart, confident, and absolutely sexually appealing, despite his glasses and funny clumps of red hair. And it was not hard to imagine him in bed with a woman, in contrast to the typical comic, whose character was usually about as erotic as Mr. Magoo.

The special chemistry between Woody and Diane worked beautifully for both of them but would have an even greater impact on Keaton's career. In the long run, her association with Woody would mean more important film roles and eventually an Oscar for
Annie Hall.
On the other hand, it would take years to erase her public image as Woody's girl.

Four years later,
Play It Again, Sam
would be released as a film starring Woody and Diane. The rights were sold to Paramount Pictures, which initially intended to cast it with stars, but a number of actors turned down the roles. By the time the project finally got rolling in the fall of 1971, Woody was sufficiently famous from
Take the Money and Run
and
Bananas
to be perfectly eligible. Although he agreed to write the screen adaptation, he had no interest in directing the finished script. Because he had put
Sam
behind him and moved on to new projects, Paramount hired the experienced Herbert Ross, who made a few notable changes, chiefly shifting the locale from New York to San Francisco. Lavishly praised as a funny, smoothly made situation comedy,
Play It Again, Sam
would become Woody's biggest box-office success so far and make him a mass-audience star. The picture has become a classic.

Throughout the run of the stage play, obsessively in love with Diane, he was intent on disentangling himself from his marriage. Even though he and Louise had amicably agreed to separate, they continued to live together. When she finally moved out in June of 1969, he could not bear to inform his parents of the breakup. At the very moment when the movers were loading up the van, hoisting some of Louise's bookcases out of a window onto Seventy-ninth Street, Marty Konigsberg arrived at the door.

"What's happening?" he asked.

Not a thing, Woody told his father.

While calling the separation a trial, neither one of them expected to get back together, and Louise would eventually take a twentieth-floor co-op on East Seventy-first Street. After almost ten years together, three of them as Woody's wife, she counted on retaining his allegiance. For a time, this turned out to be the case because he felt protective. After giving her a cameo in
Take the Money and Run,
he took pains to cast her in three additional films. What's more, they were still sleeping together. For all their problems living under one roof, there had never been any trouble with their sex life. Together they traveled to Mexico for the divorce in the spring of 1970 and spent the night in the same hotel room. Next morning, they appeared in court nervously holding hands. Louise would recall the trip as a larky "good time"; whereas Woody said, deadpan, that the divorce was a "protest against the Viet Nam War."

Nevertheless, he continually fueled Louise's jealousy of Diane Keaton. About a month after the divorce, the summer Woody was in Puerto Rico filming
Bananas
and living at the San Juan Sheraton with Diane, Louise came to visit. In his hotel room, he pointed to a bureau. "That's Diane's drawer," he said, then began to extol her virtues. Diane was, he insisted, the greatest actress in America and responsible for the best relationship he'd ever had. Louise took the lavish praise for Diane personally and interpreted it to mean that she lacked talent. His flaunting of Keaton that day in San Juan would continue to rankle Louise twenty years later.

Her confidence buckling, she fell into a slump. That Woody was romantically attracted to Diane could not be disputed, but she refused to acknowledge that he loved Diane, or felt any physical passion for her, beliefs that Woody seemed to have encouraged. Once, when Diane returned to California for a month to visit her parents, he invited Louise to stay with him.

In 1970 Woody’s income topped $1 million ($4.2 million today). Now that he had a checking account that seemed about as large as the federal budget, he stopped carrying cash and relied on friends for pocket change, nor did he cash checks or visit banks. All such mundane transactions were left to his accountant. Looking for ways to spend his money, he splurged on a Picasso lithograph and German Expressionist paintings, Jacobean furniture, leather-bound volumes of Franz Kafka's work, and a Rolls-Royce complete with driver. An ardent New York Knicks fan, he asked sportscaster Howard Cosell to help him get season tickets at Madison Square Garden (then located at Forty-ninth Street). Even though the seats were "way up in the balcony," he felt lucky to get them and over the years moved down to courtside.

With money rolling in, he was able to afford the penthouse of his dreams. Even before Louise moved out, he decided to buy a co-op in the neighborhood, something not more than "ten blocks from the mainstream." Among the glamorous properties that Realtors showed him were a pair of adjoining penthouses on Fifth Avenue, located about a block north of the building where Louise's parents once lived, whose doorman examined his scruffy clothes and made him wait for Louise in the lobby.

The building at 930 Fifth Avenue turned out to be exceptionally conservative. Its co-op board, fearing that the presence of a person such as himself—that is, a person in show business—would inject a sleazy element into the building and upset other tenants, had "grave reservations" about accepting Woody, recalled one of the shareholders. In an interview with the board, Woody argued that he was not the usual show-business person at all; in fact, he was basically asocial, either writing all day or rising early each morning to go out and make movies. He insisted that he had "practically no friends" and would cause no trouble. After numerous reassurances, he was accepted, at which point he turned around and made a request of the board: that he would never be approached in the lobby for an autograph. (This pact was immediately broken when an elderly dowager, living in the building for many years but unaware of the no-autographs agreement, trotted up to him and exclaimed, "Are you Woody Allen?" "No," he said, and turned away.)

Renovations to convert Penthouses A and C into a suitable duplex—a project running into tens of thousands of dollars—meant gutting the property. On the lower floor, a warren of small rooms surrounded by narrow terraces, walls were razed to create spacious living and dining rooms, a library, and a private elevator foyer. External walls were also knocked down and small windows replaced with giant floor-to-ceiling solar glass to provide sweeping views of the park and skyline. There was only one bedroom, which along with its adjoining dressing room took up the entire top floor (no doubt signifying this was the home of a confirmed bachelor). The upper terrace wrapping around the airy master bedroom was turned into a small garden park of lush plants and trees with a pond. (Years later, complaining of bugs, he hardly ever ventured outside.) When
Architectural Digest
ran a photo spread, Woody's interior designer Olga San Giuliano explained how she worked with the "fantasies and inner life" of her client, so that the penthouse might reflect "who he is privately."

During these years, the relationship with his parents remained as ambivalent as ever. Seldom did he show up at family gatherings, and when he did, it was for only a few minutes. After saying hello, he usually disappeared into the bedroom to watch television before beating a hasty departure. For the most part, however, he was a dutiful son and brother who made sure none of the Konigsbergs had to do without. Proudly, he moved Nettie and Marty into the city and bought them a co-op on the Upper East Side as well as a vacation home in Hallandale, north of Miami Beach. His mother, after more than thirty years, retired from her bookkeeping job at the florist shop. His father, still spry at seventy, kept busy with a variety of odd jobs; he sometimes did engraving for a jewelry shop on the Lower East Side or else he breezed around the city delivering packages for the Rollins and JofFe office, where people affectionately called him "Mr. K."

Living comfortably now, neither of the Konigsbergs was in any position to object when their son kidded them in public. They were proud of him, they would insist. Whether Nettie actually saw all of Woody s films is doubtful. But evidently Marty did, going to the box office and paying for a ticket like anyone else. He was not always thrilled, and once remarked to a relative, "I don't understand that crap he's writing."