The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (27 page)

"It was an impossible situation," recalled Steven Bach, who was head of worldwide production for United Artists at the time. "I knew it and he knew it but neither one of us could say so."

One afternoon in the fall of 1980, Woody met with Bach at the Russian Tea Room on West Fifty-seventh Street, next door to the Rollins and Joffe office. He was polite but poker-faced. Finally his contract with UA was coming to an end. In 1978, when Krim and the Medici formed Orion Pictures, Woody clung to an old-fashioned sense of honor about professional commitments and stayed on to make
Interiors, Manhattan,
and
Stardust Memories.
All this time, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe played dumb and kept telling UA they knew nothing of Woody’s plans and had no influence over his decision. However, they kept repeating like a mantra, "Arthur is like a
father
to Woody."

"It was perfectly clear to me that we were not going to get to keep him," Bach said. "But
trying to
keep him was my most important single function in three years, more important than
Heaven’s Gate
[the notorious thirty-six million dollar debacle that helped sink the studio and became a generic term for calamity]. If
Heaven's Gate
had opened as disastrously as it did on one day, and Woody had agreed to stay at UA the next day. United Artists would still be in business as of old. It was that important."

In spite of an extremely generous counteroffer, Steven Bach and UA failed, and in December 1980, Woody decamped to Orion. The new deal paid him 15 percent of a pictures gross receipts, which he would divvy up with Rollins and Joffe and Robert Greenhut, his producer since
Annie Hall
Soon after, he began developing his first film project with the twin themes of conformity and celebrity, a subject he had explored in
Stardust Memories
but that continued to preoccupy him. Despite the drubbing he took for that picture, he was not finished with the issue of unhappiness born of success and fame and refused to drop material that the public cared nothing about. In his first offering for Orion, smarting from accusations that he relied too heavily on Bergman and Fellini, he came up with a concept that was original from start to finish. And for good measure, he quietly remade
Stardust Memories.

Set during the late '20s and early '30s, the story purports to be a real documentary about Leonard Zelig, a man who wants so badly to be liked that he tries to fit in everywhere. Insecure and anxious, he can't help assuming the personality, even the appearance, of people he meets. For example, contact with a black musician makes him change into a black musician; conversation with a psychiatrist transforms him into a learned doctor, and so forth. As a consequence of this miraculous talent, Zelig the Human Chameleon quickly becomes an international celebrity feted with ticker-tape parades and merchandised with board games and dolls, songs and dance crazes. At the same time, fame takes its toll and "the price he paid was being an unhappy, empty human being," Woody explained. In the end, Leonard walks off into the sunset after falling in love with his psychiatrist (played by Mia). Cured, he loses his neuroses and becomes an ordinary man.

Technically, the film was brilliant. To integrate a modern-day character into historical footage, Woody, his cinematographer Gordon Willis, and editor Sandy Morse used more than thirty hours of stock footage from old newsreels, photographs, and radio broadcasts, as well as seventy-five hours of newly shot black-and-white footage that simulated historical scenes. To capture the sounds of the past, they recorded them using microphones made in 1928, when sound technology was in its infancy. By use of mattes (optical devices), new material could be superimposed on old footage, resulting in a startling scene showing Leonard at an actual rally for Hitler. In order to embed Woody's image into a thirties newsreel, new footage had to be painstakingly aged to match the graininess of the old. The result was a seamless match that demonstrated Woody’s consummate skill as a technician.

In the spring of 1981, before principal photography was scheduled to begin on his human chameleon picture, Woody grew panicky. He was pathologically fearful of free time and here he was, becalmed, with nothing to do. To sustain himself, he decided to toss off "a bon-bon, a little dessert," basically a home movie to show off the delicate beauty of his photogenic new girlfriend. It would be a homespun, summertime idyll with people chasing butterflies and playing badminton and show the country "the way I want it to be, with golden vistas, and flowers, animals, moon, stars, all in 1906," he told Roger Ebert. In six days he completed the script for
Summer Nights,
a romantic comedy set at the turn of the century that brings together three couples for a weekend. Woody plays Andrew, a stockbroker who dabbles as an inventor (his latest: a flying bicycle), and Mary Steenburgen is his sexually inhibited wife. They are joined by Andrews best friend, Maxwell, a lecherous doctor accompanied by an oversexed nurse (Tony Roberts and Julie Hagerty), and a pompous elderly philosopher and his sexy young fiancé (Jose Ferrer and Mia). No sooner have these free-thinking couples assembled than they begin regrouping in a game of sexual musical chairs. By mid-June Woody was preparing to shoot in pastoral Pocantico Hills, New York, on the grounds of the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown.

Working for Woody showed Mia an entirely different side of her lover, who could be severe and sarcastic with his actors. In a scene that required Jose Ferrer to say, "These are not my teeth," Woody was unhappy with his reading of the line and put Ferrer through the ringer by shooting it over and over. Tension began to build. The seventy-two-year-old Ferrer, a widely respected actor and director of stage and screen, grew increasingly upset. After take number thirty, he finally refused to do the scene one more time and yelled angrily that Woody had melted him into a mass of fears. Woody, observed Andrew Sarris, "is almost a ventriloquist and all his actors are marionettes. Its his nature. He has to be on top."

If Woody could intimidate Jose Ferrer so easily, he had no trouble making Mia feel like "a rank amateur," she would write. Worried about her acting, she began frantically fishing for reassurance, but no comfort was forthcoming. As a world-class whiner himself, he lacked patience with women who complained. Suffering second thoughts about her Woody film debut, she told him that on future pictures she did not want to act but would like to be his assistant, to which he retorted, "Its hard work." Understandably, this blistering rebuke magnified her jitters. Before long, Mia found plenty of other reasons to worry. The weather was miserably hot and humid, and she had to be encased in a sweaty iron corset for the frilly period costumes; her hair was set in torturous curlers to produce Mary Pickford ringlets. She developed fierce headaches, and by the middle of shooting, she also had an ulcer and dosed herself every four hours on Tagamet. To make matters worse, there were unexpected problems with her sister Stephanie, who had been hired as her stand-in. Mia was close to Steffi, who was divorced and lived with her son only a few blocks away, but Mia soon regretted her presence on the film because she straggled around after Woody in a flirtatious way. During breaks the two of them would go off together, laughing and relaxing under a tree, while Mia, confined to her camper with corset and curls, boiled with jealousy. Their flirtatious camaraderie made her so suspicious that she wondered if they were sleeping together.

Woody retitled his erotic comedy
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.
In fact, it owes more to Bergmans
Smiles of a Summer Night
than to Shakespeare, although Woody scoffed at the notion that he had deconstructed the Swedes turn-of-the-century boudoir farce with its sexual chases and carnal round dances. Photographed so beautifully by Gordon Willis that it seems to be a painting in motion, an animated Renoir's
Luncheon after the Boating Party, Sex Comedy
is the most visually gorgeous of all Woody's films. Stanley Kauffmann thought the picture was "easily his best-directed film, much better than his last,
Stardust Memories,
which finished last in the Fellini Sweepstakes"—but still found Woody to be an inept writer. Unlike his previous films, Kauffmann was later to say, which had been "cobbled together,"
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
had "a sense of control and fluency. He now knew how to use a camera gracefully and was becoming a very good director." Nearly everyone else found fault. "Watching Woody in the woods wasn't much fun," grumbled Gene Siskel in the
Chicago Tribune.
"Little sex and less comedy," John Simon huffed in
National Review,
Pauline Kael took Woody to task for presenting "tableaux that suggest the Nelson Rockefeller collection of imitation works of art." At the box office, the bon-bon proved an expensive financial disaster, and Mia's performance resulted in a Razzie Award as Worst Actress of 1982.

For the first time in his show-business career, Woody received back-to-back pans. He badly needed a hit.

To give authenticity to his pseudodocumentary about the chameleon man, Woody wanted to use guest-star interviews with real people, interspersed with archival newsreel footage and antique photos. It was intended to be a takeoff of
Reds,
a picture that costarred Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton (his current girlfriend) as American journalist John Reed and his lover, Louise Bryant. Embellishing Beatty's film were interviews with Rebecca West and other witnesses to the history of the Bolshevik revolution. Unlike Beatty's real-life witnesses, Woody's intellectuals were asked to utter serious opinions on a fictional figure from the twenties, a man supposed to be more famous than Charles Lindbergh. Trolling for celebrities, Woody wrote to Greta Garbo and asked if she would like to be in one of his movies. She did not reply, nor did a letter to Jack Dempsey produce results because the Manassas Mauler, now in his late eighties, was suffering from poor health. Woody was more successful with Lillian Gish, whose career had spanned the entire century. The First Lady of the Silent Screen, now an energetic eighty-five and still working, was happy to comply. The interview was disappointing, however, and he decided not to use it in the film.

Finally he persuaded Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, and Dr. Bruno Bettelheim to discuss Leonard Zelig's place in history. Bellow, for instance, was given lines like: "Therefore his sickness was also at the root of his salvation. It was his very disorder that made a hero of him." As usual. Woody failed to reveal what the film was about, and by the time Bellow found out it was too late. Had he known, he would have backed out of it because the picture made him look "foolish," he thought. The $5,000 payment did not compensate for being taken advantage of. If the Nobel prize winner couldn't figure out what Woody was up to, neither could Susan Son-tag. Years later, she was appearing at an Oregon arts program when a member of the audience asked about the
Zelig
cameo. Sontag got snippy. "Next question," she said impatiently.

A moderate commercial hit,
Zelig
turned out to be a critical winner; its sophisticated special effects received glowing reviews, the best since
Manhattan,
and some writers compared it to
Citizen Kane.
Looking back, Andrew Sarris thought that critics probably oversold the picture to their readers. To begin with, he said, "we New York critics tend to identify with Woody. We have roughly the same kind of politics and we laugh at the same things. He has us in his pocket." In 1983 Woody singled out several critics, Sarris among them, and arranged private screenings for them, a shrewd move that paid off nicely. Afterward, Sarris felt he "had been had by Woody" and should have been more cautious in his estimation of
Zelig.
In any case, its sophisticated special effects succeeded in dazzling viewers.
Newsweek's
Jack Kroll spoke for the majority when he called
Zelig
"a brilliant cinematic collage that is pure magic," and to Vincent Canby, it was nothing less than the perfection of ideas Woody had been systematically exploring in every film since
Take the Money and Run.
Few critics or viewers realized how intensely personal the picture was for Woody, nor did they associate its themes with
Stardust Memories.
Like Leonard Zelig, Woody was a famous figure who, forced to battle the beast of celebrity, continued to feel like a poor lost sheep once known as Allan Konigsberg. Only Pauline Kael was impolite enough to bring this up, writing that despite Woody's claims to the contrary, his films could not be more autobiographical; he is constantly showing audiences how

bad he feels about himself. All the adulation in the world could not keep Woody—and Charlie Chaplin—from feeling "utterly alone and lost, like wormy nothings," she concluded in her best Ma Barker style.

The most peculiar admirer of
Zeligvsas
Oona O'Neill Chaplin, the widow of Charlie Chaplin, now an elderly, bedridden alcoholic living in Switzerland. One evening, in a boozy stupor, she excitedly watched a
Zelig
videotape four times, under the illusion that each viewing was the first. Delighted with footage that showed her husband clowning with Marion Davies on a tennis court at William Randolph Hearsts San Simeon, she instructed her daughter to send Woody a telegram. "Say he's incredible," she said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Pushing the Baby Cart

In the gloom of the Russian Tea Room on a bright July afternoon in 1982, Woody was sitting in his usual booth up front by the bar with Roger Ebert, expounding on the perfect love affair. "You've got to realize," he said in a serious tone, "that a relationship is always better if you don't actually have to live with the other person."

The
Chicago Sun-Times
critic was listening politely. "Really?" he said, as if studying the mating rituals of a Yanomami Indian.