The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (15 page)

Another recipient of Woody's generosity was his sister, Letty, a petite redhead with a perky sense of humor and yappy mannerisms reminiscent of her mother. Eight years apart in age, Letty and Woody, as children, seemed to be neither rivals nor equals. Their relationship was affectionate; she worshiped her brother, who in turn felt protective of her. As a grown-up, Letty was always included in the select group invited to see rough cuts of Woody's pictures. In times of crisis, she was one of his most passionate defenders.

After graduation from Brooklyn College, Letty became a teacher. When her first marriage to a neighborhood boy ended in divorce, she married the principal of her school, Sidney Aronson, and had a son, Chris. By the seventies, Letty and Sidney were living comfortably in Manhattan, on Park Avenue, only a few blocks from Woody. Having grown disenchanted with teaching, Letty decided that she wanted a career in television. She managed to find minor positions on Robert Kleins television comedy series and later on
Saturday Night Live.
Throughout the 1980s, she was employed by the Museum of Television & Radio, where her duties included publicity and exhibitions.

When it came to financial support, Woody would be as generous to Letty as he was to his parents. On the other hand, according to Mia Farrow's recollections, he was privately disparaging and avoided her company. Is it coincidence that in every film in which the Woody Allen character has a sister—films such as
Stardust Memories
and
Deconstructing Harry
—the sister character is written to be a perfect horror? It may be that this was the only way Woody could express his resentment of the adorable baby sister doted on by his mother.

The March of Time:

"The inequality of my relationship is a wonderful thing. The fact that I'm with a much younger woman, and much less accomplished woman, works very well. By luck, it's a very happy situation."

—WOODY A
llen, on his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, 1997

For all their affection for each other, Woody and Diane Keaton were incompatible. As time went on, the relationship grew progressively difficult, in part because he was reluctant to face the truth: She was not the "coatcheck" girl he first perceived. Once young and naive, without "a trace of intellectual ism when I first met her," he recalled, she turned into an enthusiastic pupil who worked hard at self-improvement. She read, took classes, and studied photography. Five times a week she visited her therapist. Woody, however, stuck in the role of mentor, still needed her to be subservient. By the time the stage run of
Play It Again, Sam
ended in March 1970, their affair was over. A brief period of living together ended with Diane renting a place of her own. She began to see other men—including Warren Beatty and Al Pacino in the seventies. In some respects she remained, as Woody once depicted her, "a real hayseed, the kind who would chew eight sticks of gum at a time." She still loved to chew gum. Otherwise, she was her own person.

CHAPTER SIX

The Medici

Arthur Krim was a solidly built man, five foot ten, with glasses and dark hair streaked gray. Avuncular in manner, he was an intellectual who JL Jw could have easily been mistaken for a college professor or a doctor. Born in Manhattan in 1910, he graduated from Columbia Law School, then joined a prestigious New York law firm where he rose rapidly to partner. After serving in the army during World War II, he became president of Eagle Lion Films, his first motion picture experience. In 1951 he and his friend Robert Benjamin took over the venerable United Artists, a one-of-a-kind studio that dated back to 1919, when it was founded by four silent-era superstars— Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks— for the express purpose of retaining control over their enormous earnings. By the late forties, however, the company was losing $100,000 a week and the two surviving owners, Chaplin and Pickford, were only too relieved to sell. Among the classics released by a revitalized UA were
The African Queen, High Noon, Marty,
and
Some Like It Hot.
In the 1960s, which brought across-the-board declines in the industry and all-time-low box offices, UA nonetheless continued to prosper with the James Bond, Pink Panther, and Beatles movies.

United Artists was a New York-based motion picture company that seemed made to order for someone like Woody. An oddity in the Hollywood system, a film studio without a physical studio, it had no lot, no wardrobe or property departments, no contract players or star salaries. Its corporate headquarters was located at 729 Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan, 3,000 miles from the movie industry's nerve center. There was a pronounced feeling of family among chairman Krim and his top executives, Bob Benjamin, Eric Pleskow, William Bernstein, and Mike Medavoy. With minimal overhead, they functioned essentially as a financing and distribution company that leased its features from producers for a period of seven years.

In 1966 Woody tried to interest United Artists in financing his first picture, but the studio was unwilling to put up more than $750,000. On the strength of
Take the Money and Run,
Rollins and Joffe were able to hammer out a three-picture contract that would give their client modest two-million-dollar budgets and fees of $350,000 for writing, directing, and acting. David Picker, head of production, told Woody to go ahead and write whatever he liked. Taking Picker at his word, he submitted
The Jazz Baby,
a period drama set in New Orleans. The bewildered UA brass went into shock, and Eric Pleskow, for one, would blank out the script so effectively that he lacks all recollection. Woody, untroubled, promptly came back with another screenplay titled
El Weirdo
(again coauthored with Mickey Rose), which read like a fast-paced cartoon.

Possibly the first draft for
El Weirdo
was "Viva Vargas! Excerpts from the Diary of a Revolutionary," a story Woody had submitted to
The New Yorker
the previous year. William Shawn rejected the piece because he felt it ridiculed Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the charismatic guerrilla leader who had been killed in Bolivia two years earlier, but the story was finally published by
Evergreen Review.
Whichever in fact came first, the story or the script, the idea was appealing enough that Woody determined to tell it in one form or the other.

In
El Weirdo,
eventually tided
Bananas,
a sex-starved tester of useless products (for instance, coffins with stereo systems) falls hopelessly in love with a plump blond political activist named Nancy (Louise Lasser), only to be rejected by her because he lacks leadership qualities. "Who's she looking for, Hitler?" Fielding Mellish wonders. But Fielding, having survived constant near-electrocution by his electric blanket during a childhood of habitual bed-wetting, is tougher than he appears. Desperate to win Nancys love, he travels to San Marco, a banana republic whose president has just been assassinated in a revolutionary uprising. Joining a band of rebels, he becomes president and returns to the United States in a red-bearded, Castro-type of disguise to promote foreign trade for his country (locusts at popular prices), and gets himself arrested and pardoned.
Bananas
ends with Fielding's wedding night, covered on television with sports commentator Howard Cosell supplying a live play-by-play.

"Arthur was very much concerned about the irreverence vis-a-vis certain religions," recalled Eric Pleskow. (Certain scenes made fun of the United Jewish Appeal.) "Apart from being in the movie business, he had other dimensions, his activity in Democratic politics, and so he was always concerned with image. In the end, however,
Bananas
was well received and did us no harm."

Once again, the critics took special notice of Woody. In the
New York Times,
Vincent Canby gave early evidence of loving anything Woody did because "when he is good, he is inspired. When he is bad, he's not rotten, he's just not so hot." Others, however, pointed to his still-crude filmmaking and took a dim view of his determination to be an auteur. By confusing the ability to write comedy with the ability to perform it, he ensured that
Bananas

would be dashed to bits on "the rocks of his acting and direction," wrote Stanley Kauffmann in
The New Republic.
Kaufmann acknowledged in 1998 that he viewed
Bananas
as "on-the-job training. Woody was learning how to direct by making pictures. There wasn't a film student in the country who couldn't have better directed
Bananas.
He was a gifted writer whose acting was crude. His idea of acting was to wave his hands. Serious drama meant waving his hands more quickly." As for love scenes, Kaufmann could not appreciate Woody playing a lover. "Watching him kiss a girl—any girl—made me want to look the other way."

Bananas was
not a huge moneymaker but it would establish a blueprint for Woody’s relationship with UA, who did not expect his films to earn much. In fact, as the years passed and film costs increased (and Woody spent more), his pictures would become even less profitable. "That wasn't the point," a former UA executive said impatiently. "He was our prestige item."

Hollywood Vignettes:

"Arthur was not a self-made man. He was a born prince."

—J
udy
F
eiffer, former Orion executive

A special relationship soon developed between Woody and Arthur Krim. A bachelor most of his life, Krim finally married in his fifties. His wife, Mathilde, a physician who was one day to cofound the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), had a daughter from a previous marriage. But Krim would never have children of his own. That fact, some people said, was the reason he showered Woody with what amounted to an adult version of a deluxe train set plus any other toy his heart desired. This plot, a scenario that L. B. Mayer would have approved, was pure Hollywood: Celebrated older man mentors brilliant younger man; ambitious protege" repays his powerful benefactor with loyalty and prestige. According to the UA mythology, a "mystical glue" bound the two men together. It was very simple, said one executive: "Woody was the emotional son Arthur never had."

In Woody’s eyes, the cultured and magnetic Krim was a heroic personality. Unusual among entertainment moguls, he lived an entirely separate existence as a political activist. He had been a close personal friend and adviser of John F. Kennedys. It was at Krim's town house on East Sixty-ninth Street that President Kennedy, in 1962, celebrated after his forty-fifth birthday party in Madison Square Garden, when Marilyn Monroe crooned a sultry "Happy Birthday, Mr. President." Later the Democratic fund-raiser, who reportedly turned down cabinet posts and ambassadorships, would become an adviser to Presidents Johnson and Carter in the fields of civil rights, arms control, and Middle Eastern relations.

This unusual man, and his UA colleagues, bestowed on Woody an extraordinary production deal with patronage that was unprecedented for a commercial artist. Basically, he could make any film he liked on any subject he liked. Woody, however, viewed the blank-check arrangement with restraint and vaguely presented it as "a nice, simple gentlemen’s agreement." Once he tried to explain it to an editor at
Cinema.
There was no interference from his financial backers, he said. "I have absolute control. They don't have approval of the script. They don't have casting approval, they have absolutely nothing." Once in a great while "they"—Krim, or possibly Bob Benjamin or Eric Pleskow— would have something to say. "I always try and give them the courtesy of listening and talking with them. It never comes to anything. They always ask for permission just to come to the set." If he displayed condescension, it was not out of ignorance. He understood full well that the nice gentlemen's agreement, the money with no strings, was an amazing idea for Hollywood. "Had there been no Arthur Krim and UA, Woody's structure could not have evolved any other place in the world," believes Steven Bach, who was to join the studio in 1978 as senior vice president and head of worldwide production. Stanley Kauffmann calls his deal "sui generis, an independent filmmaker who never had to scrounge for money from a father-in-law, whose taproots are in the big money streams of Hollywood. There's been no one else in that position."

The people at UA were well aware of their largess. "Sometimes I felt like the Medici," mused Pleskow, alluding to the princely Florentine family who patronized art and literature during the Renaissance. Granted, films such as
Bananas
and
Sleeper
did not really qualify as high culture, but this was Hollywood, and the idea of commissioning an independent filmmaker to develop whatever he fancied was exhilarating. By giving him his head, UA was likely to get a few duds along with very good pictures. Who could imagine what new ideas might flower? And, as Pleskow said with a smile, "we didn't poison anyone."

"He knew how to handle us," explained Steven Bach. "He would ask for things, like the latest equipment in a private screening room, things that seemed a little outrageous. But we felt he deserved them. At the worst, you would take a tax deduction. At best, you would keep him happy." Of course Krim and Benjamin gave him "carte blanche," said another person. "He was their family."

At the outset, the gentlemen’s agreement did not seem at all extraordinary. He impressed the Medici, Pleskow recalled, "as an intelligent young man. No one could foresee that he'd do a film every year." But UA underestimated Woody.

With two pictures under his belt, he was raring to do more. His second film for UA was loosely adapted from
Everything You Always wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask),
a best-selling manual by sexologist Dr. David Reuben that supposedly answered patients' dumb questions. Acquiring the option from Paramount (who intended the vehicle for Elliot Gould), Woody never bothered to read the book. Glancing at Reuben's chapter headings, he structured an episodic script using seven questions ("What's a sex pervert?" "Do aphrodisiacs work?"). Then he proceeded to concoct the answers in a series of lunatic sketches that spoofed all sex manuals, Dr. Reuben's in particular. In one sequence, "What is Sodomy?," an uptight doctor (Gene Wilder) enters into an obsessive affair with a sheep named Daisy, a devotee of frilly lingerie, and winds up in the gutter drinking Woolite. The final sketch, "What Happens During Ejaculation?," a clever parody of
Fantastic Voyage,
shows what happens in the male body during an orgasm. Woody, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, plays a neurotic sperm who worries about what will become of him. What if this turns out to be ordinary masturbation? What if he winds up on the ceiling?