The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (16 page)
Read The Unruly Life of Woody Allen Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Performing Arts, #Individual Director, #Entertainment & Performing Arts
With the release of two hit films back to back, Woody was having a very good year. In May of 1972, the screen adaptation
of Play It Again, Sam
followed
What's Up, Doc?
into Radio City Music Hall. Critics split into two camps: the negative, who had been expecting another Marx brothers cartoon like
Bananas,
and the positive, who thought Woody’s decision to broaden his appeal with a personal romantic comedy had paid off. Only four months later,
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
opened to stinging notices and packed theaters. Soaring on word of mouth, it would become one of the top ten moneymakers of the year, despite the fact that notices universally panned it for tasteless material and too few laughs. At a Chicago screening, embarrassed critics even walked out, one of whom loudly sputtered "Yuck!" Woody’s champion at the
New York Times,
Vincent Canby, deemed it clever but not particularly funny, and Dr. David Reuben was offended. (Eventually he endorsed its "humor, charm, and good taste, the best movie Woody Allen ever made.") None of this counted at the box office, however, where audiences found Woody’s sex manual utterly irresistible.
Moving Pictures:
L
una: It's hard to believe you haven't had sex for two hundred years.
Miles: Two hundred and four if you count my marriage.
—Sleeper, 1973
In 1973 Miles Monroe, a former clarinet player with the Ragtime Rascals, is part-owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Store on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. One morning, he goes into St. Vincents Hospital for what is supposed to be routine surgery on a peptic ulcer, but complications develop and he fails to regain consciousness. The doctors wrap him in aluminum foil and freeze him. Two hundred years later, society has retooled and the United States is a totalitarian state run by an albino fascist dictator. Rebel scientists trying to overthrow the government decide to revive Miles, the only person alive without an identification number. The bespectacled Miles, resembling a giant baked potato wrapped in tin foil, comes to in the year 2173. Expecting to wake up at St. Vincent's, he is naturally confused, more worried about his rent, now 2,400 months overdue, than about being a revolutionary hero. To avoid being captured by the thought police and reprogrammed, he disguises himself as a robot and winds up working for a socialite poet named Luna (Diane Keaton), whose work has been influenced by Rod McKuen. They join the underground movement and kidnap the Leaders nose (all that is left after an assassination attempt) before he can be reconstructed by cloning.
Again Woody used a collaborator, this time a thirty-one-year-old television producer named Marshall Brickman. Born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a Polish Jew who came to the United States by way of Brazil, Brickman grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in music. In 1963 he met Woody at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where Brickman was a banjo player with The Tarriers, folksingers managed by Rollins and Joffe, and Woody was performing stand-up. Brickman, who also played guitar and bass, later toured with John and Michelle Phillips before they joined the Mamas and the Papas, and finally switched to television comedy writing for
Candid Camera
and
The Tonight Show,
before producing
The Dick Cavett Show.
Although Brickman and Woody seemed to be opposite in temperament, with Brickman generally sociable and cheerful, they shared a similar comic sensibility. When someone once asked him to compare himself to Woody, he answered, "I'm taller."
Unlike Woody's collaboration with Mickey Rose, in which they worked on a script together. Woody and Brickman worked out the plot to
Sleeper
during long walks, often through Central Park. Then Woody went home and wrote the draft, which Brickman would later read and comment upon. A talented craftsman, Brickman's strength was in understanding how to structure a story, an area in which Woody did less well.
Sleeper
was not their first attempt at collaboration. Several years earlier, there had been another script, but it failed to find a producer. This time there was no problem getting UAs approval and a budget of $2 million. With seven weeks allotted for filming, shooting began in Denver in the spring of 1973, and by summer had moved to Hollywood, to the old David O. Selznick lot in Culver City, where
Gone With the Wind was
filmed. Nestled amid the gigantic concrete buildings, Woody noticed a three-room cottage surrounded by a garden of daisies and a picket fence. Told that it had once been Clark Gables dressing room bungalow, he promptly commandeered it for his office.
Sleeper,
a complicated picture requiring intricate sets and special effects, fell behind schedule, and additional photography soon depleted Woody’s $350,000 fee. Under pressure to meet a Christmas release date, he frantically shot and edited simultaneously. Ralph Rosenblum, urgently summoned to Culver City in August, discovered that "tension pervaded every aspect" of the production. Nevertheless,
Sleeper
managed to open as scheduled on December 18 at Radio City Music Hall and received sensational reviews. It was Woody’s first big critical and commercial success, one of the biggest moneymakers of the year. A delighted United Artists signed him to a new five-picture contract that extended his original deal to seven years.
Not until
Sleeper
did Woody begin to attract generally respectful attention from large-circulation newspapers and magazines, some of whose critics now began to view him as the best comic director and actor in the country. Foremost among his admirers was Vincent Canby, the
New York Times
critic whom Woody would credit as one of the significant figures in his career. A reporter for
Variety,
Canby arrived at the
Times
in 1965 to cover show business and succeeded Renata Adler as film critic four years later. In the meantime, he had seen Woody perform stand-up at the Americana Hotel, where he made a point of talking to him "informally between shows one night. I had known little about him and I was knocked out."
Take the Money and Run
impressed him positively as "a night club routine but still a very good movie, and remains one of my favorites. Certainly I had a suspicion that he was up to something unusual." With
Sleeper,
Woody finally crossed over from stand-up to the screen.
At
The New Yorker,
another important review medium, the film department had been shared since 1967 by Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliatt, whose styles could not have been more dissimilar. As the most influential critic of the seventies, Kael redefined film criticism, and critics who followed her thinking would be dubbed "Paulettes." More often than not, her brass-knuckle reviews sounded angry, as if she felt personally offended by a film that did not meet her standards. She wrote as if she were being chased by a posse, which may have been what prompted Warren Beatty to nickname her Ma Barker, after the bank-robbing public enemy. Born in Petaluma, California, she was a tiny, argumentative woman, nondescript in appearance, three times married, who once had been fired by
McCall’s
for knifing
The Sound of Music.
When she arrived at
The New Yorker,
she was almost fifty.
Over the years, Kael would be tight with a number of directors who asked her opinion on scripts, invited her to their sets, and arranged special screenings. If electrified by a picture, she became its personal advocate and went on television to drum up enthusiasm. Crossing the line between criticism and film production, she resigned from
The New Yorker \n
1978 and took a Hollywood job developing film projects for Warren Beatty. (She soon returned to
The New Yorker,
however.)
Among the new-wave directors, Kaels darlings were Arthur Penn, whose
Bonnie and Clyde
she single-handedly rescued from a premature demise, and Robert Altman, whose
Nashville
she had championed as virtually a perfect film. While Woody was not one of her pets, she did appreciate his work, to a point, because she thought his movies made people feel less insecure about their imperfections. In her eyes,
Take the Money and Run
had been nice but nothing special, "a limply good-natured little nothing of a comedy, soft as sneakers." For several years they maintained cordial relations, sometimes appearing together to collegially trade repartee on TV talk shows, but friendship counted for nothing to Kael at her typewriter. After giving
Sleeper
a couple of preliminary swings—"a beautiful little piece of work," "a small classic"—she administered an unexpected jab: If
Sleeper
was the best slapstick comedy of the year, it was only because "there hasn't been any other." Then she moved in for the knockout. Woody's films lacked an antic quality, in fact his humor reminded her of "strip-mining" because he scratched the surface without ever getting close to the mother lode. Psychologizing, she mocked him as hopelessly anal and reserved special scorn for his choice of the clarinet, "an instrument that appeals to controlled, precise people."
The intensity of Kaels attack embarrassed Roger Angell, who urged Woody to ignore her and reminded him of a forthcoming profile by Penelope Gilliatt. By contrast, Gilliatts film critiques tended to be literary, kindhearted, sometimes loopy. She admired Woody, recalled her close friend Andrew Sarris, "beyond belief." A vivacious, red-haired British writer who had once been married to the playwright John Osborne, she had visited Woody the previous summer in Culver City. A boozy dinner at Trader Vic's resulted in whispered confidences over rum punches (virgin punches for himself) and Chinese spareribs. Even then, at the age of forty-two, Gilliatt was known to have a weakness for alcohol, which would eventually contribute to her undoing. Sipping rum punches, she rapidly formed an extravagant opinion of her subject. In New York that fall, Woody invited her to his apartment for more cozy talks. Plying her with chocolate pudding, he confided choice secret tidbits about his first marriage, his analyst, his pigeon problem, the maid he was planning to fire, and his lifelong addiction to Hershey bars.
In writing her
New Yorker
profile, Gilliatt got so carried away by Woody's
puppyish vulnerability that she apparently began to think of him as a pet dog, a cuddly pooch with long red hair hanging around his neck "like a setter s ears." He had "no idea of how nice he looks," she added.
The New Yorker
published the rum-punch piece with a straight face, though some of the writers there found it as nutty as a cuckoo clock. Ved Mehta would later describe this incident as one of those occasions when Gilliatt's work exhibited "a touch of the surreal." Afterward, Gilliatt invited Woody to her daughter Nolan’s birthday party, and he deigned to accept. Another guest, Vincent Canby, recalled that "two dreadful little boys rushed over and one of them asked him to autograph a dollar bill. Woody obliged, and the other kid chimed in, 'Now it’s worth two dollars!
1
and ran off. It was embarrassing but Woody was most gallant about it."
As Woody once admitted in a letter to Roger Angell, Gilliatt s reviews never made much sense to him. In fact, if someone set out to deliberately satirize film criticism, her writing would be the easiest place to begin. On the other hand, he much preferred her to Kael, who despite her brilliance allowed personal problems to color her judgments. But the critic whom he had never liked, he went on, was Stanley Kaufmann, with his school-marmish harping on his amateur acting and directing. Kauffmanns dead-serious advice on how Woody could make funnier comedies made him laugh. If Kaufmann ever made a comedy he'd be eager to see it, he chortled. In any case, he needn't worry about Kauffmann’s reviews because, he said, few people read
The New Republic
anymore.
On the Couch:
"He's made his lunacy work for him. It takes a special kind of genius to successfully use your insanity."
—W
alter
B
ernstein
Spending the better part of the year away from New York meant missing his daily psychotherapy sessions. Undeterred, he would locate a pay phone and talk to his doctor for forty-five minutes while timing himself on his watch. In Freudian analysis for fifteen years, he was now on his third psychiatrist, not counting the clinic he used when he was broke in 1958. (No longer did he actually go to therapy; it came to him, in the evenings or at any hour he preferred.) And yet, those thousands of hours on the couch had not resulted in "one emotionally charged moment," he confessed to the writer Francine Du Plessix Gray in 1974. He never cried, not once. His tearless sessions were blithely dismissed as "in, whine for fifty minutes, out again." The previous year he had switched to a woman, Dr. Kathryn Prescott. "I had these fantasies of what would happen if I was locked in a room with a beautiful, fascinating woman." Nothing happened. He cut back from five to three times a week. Still nothing. Therapy was hideously "dull, dull, dull."
Even though he complained incessantly about analysis, just as he raged and whined about practically everything else in his life, treatment was a definite lifestyle for him. Growing celebrity was accompanied by an even greater need for a shrink, somebody to whom he could unload his grievances each and every day. On top of his childhood phobias (death, darkness, kidnapping, boats, airplanes, most elevators) were now layered a host of fresh fears, typically a cleanliness phobia that prevented his taking baths because immersion in dirty water disgusted him, and eating habits so rigid that at times he could get down nothing but fish. Dining in pizzerias, when his friends ordered pies loaded with sausage and mushrooms, he always stuck to plain cheese.
All of his denials to the contrary, treatment was one of the keys to his professional success. "Underneath," remarked one of his actors, "he has the little twerp syndrome. But look how well he has used it!" Deliberately milking his analysis until being a professional neurotic became pan of his persona was as much a schtick as Jack Benny's stinginess. Acting the part came easily. And pretending treatment was a waste of time allowed him to keep the shades drawn on bigger problems. Although he claimed to be depressed, it never interfered with his work. "I'm disciplined," he admitted. "I can go into a room every morning and churn it out." He might be crazy but he wasn't dysfunctional.