The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (51 page)

In early February, Kopple visited Woody at his apartment to discuss the project, and for a half hour they made small talk about everything but the film and the tour. Finally, Kopple recalled, "30 minutes went by and I knew I had to say something." Out of desperation, she asked if he was looking forward to the tour.

"No," he groaned. "I have too much to do here." Besides, the thought of visiting all those cities depressed him. It was at that moment, Kopple said, she

deckled co make the film. Avoiding the issue of final cut, she asked instead for "total access," which included the right to take her camera anywhere she liked to record his private moments offstage. "I told Woody I wouldn't do it any other way," she said. In race, she had fallen in love with her subject.

Woody slipped out of a white terry-cloth robe and tiptoed to the edge of a private swimming pool in Milan's regal Principe de Savoia. He was followed by Soon-Yi, who was wearing a matching robe over a black-and-white bikini. In his light blue swim trunks, he tumbled into the water and paddled a few bps before announcing he was tired of swimming and was going to get out of the pool to read the
International Herald Tribune.
Soon-Yi raised an eyebrow. "Just one more time," he told her uncertainly.

"A few more rimes," she coaxed. Sometimes she spoke to him as if he were a recalcitrant patient who refused to take his medicine.

Throughout the entire three weeks of the tour. Woody remained hooked up to a wireless mike sixteen hours a day. Often he did not know when the camera was rolling, so he stayed in character. Incredibly, not once did Kopple manage to catch him with his guard down, which made the documentary sound scripted and led a film critic at
Newsweek
to later call it "the only Woody Allen film not directed by Allen." Soon-Yi, in what amounted to her screen debut, was obviously struggling to overcome her self-consciousness and sounded a bit tense. She did, however, firmly dispel her aunt's insinuation that she was stupid. Rounding out the supporting cast was Letty, taking a dizzy Diane Keaton role ("He's a rock star")-

Although tickets for the concerts sold out in three or four hours, critics were not always kind. His playing provoked malice and mirth from the British press, with one paper writing that "while he is a better clarinetist than Naomi Campbell is a novelist, he would be well advised not to give up his day fob." It did not take long for Woody to feel claustrophobic, and he soon tired of slogging through the dirty ice and slush of a European winter, hopping from airports to marble-lobbied hotels to theaters where heavy-jowled men made speeches and rich dowagers offered autograph books. As the air began leaking out of the touring balloon, he fretted constantly. Would the hotel laundry send back his underwear with holes? Would he fall prey to a crazed gondolier and get his throat cut? Could he rent the hotel room next door in order to have a bathroom separate from Soon-Yi?

With little to do all day but shop, get massages, and cat at three-star Michelin restaurants, Soon-Yi busied herself with improving Woody's manners. She was concerned about the way he treated his musicians, who, except for Eddy Davis, one of New York's leading jazz banjo players, were nor the Michaels Pub regulars. For the tour, he invited a select group of six competent professionals from his 1993 recording, "The Bunk Project," all of whom eclipsed Woody in their musical skills but also made his playing sound better. In Europe Woody ignored the band. He never went out of his way to speak with them, had difficulty recalling all their names, and only communicated through Davis. Unlike Woody and hit entourage, who toured by private jet and limousine, the band traveled on commercial airlines and by vans, and stayed at separate but ordinary hotels. Soon-Yi felt sorry for them.

"You should let them all know they're very good," she told Woody.

Why? he said perversely. He had never been chummy with his sidemen at Michael's Pub.

Soon-Yi didn't mince words. "Because it's nice to hear," she retorted, reminding him that he looked hire "a crazy" when he was in a room with the entire group and spoke only to Davis. He ignored her suggestion. While the pickup band wore professional black outfits, he and Eddy Davis emerged in rumpled, grungy clothing. Personal contact with audiences discomfited him, although eventually he took to throwing them air kisses from a safe distance. More often, standing at hotel windows, he hid behind curtains and peeked out at the crowds, as if he were a Russian czar. Cut off not only from fans but also from talking to the local artists, he was surrounded by his protective coterie of women—Kopple, Soon-Yi, Letty, and Jean, all of whom continually gave him advice. At times, he seemed to be thoroughly manipulated by his handlers, who played on his need to be coddled and adored. "He needs people to help him make decisions," Kopple decided.

Dissatisfied with the eleven hours of film she had shot. Kopple later staged a Konigsberg family get-together at Marty and Nettie's East Side high-rise. Mentally alert at the age of ninety-seven, Marty was deaf but still had a full head of snow-white hair and ninety-one-year-old Nettie looked like an older, more animated version of Woody. Both of them seemed to be decidedly indifferent to their son and treated him as if he were a nonentity. As he was seated at the dining table, which was next to the china cabinet containing his Academy Award statuettes, Woody turned to his father and showed him his latest medals and awards. Marty picked up one of the plaques. "Look at this engraving," he remarked expertly. Jewelry engraving had been one of his various professions before retirement. From behind the camera Kopple s breathy voice could be heard faintly prodding Nettie. Had she ever imagined her son's fame? With no further prompting, Nettie confided in a raspy voice that she had always known "the kid" had "a terrific brain" as well as a flair for tap dancing, sports, and music, "but never pursued them." She would have preferred him to be a pharmacist. Woody knew this harangue by heart, and cut her off with the reminder that she used to beat him every day with her hand or a strap. It was a miracle he never grew up to be a drug addict, he told her. Or a criminal.

"I'm sorry," she interrupted, "but you were brought up in a household that knew right from wrong. Don't think for a minute that you are what you are all by yourself."

"You think you're a big shot," Marty piped in.

Woody rolled his eyes and changed the subject to "Asian girls." Evidently Letty's son Christopher was also seeing "an Asian girl." Nettie frowned. "Personally I don't think it's right," she croaked. Taking a politically incorrect stance, she warned "that's why the Jews someday will be extinct and that's very bad." Soon-Yi, looking unperturbed, began to laugh. Intent on having the last word, Nettie turned to Kopple and said she always hoped he would "fall in love with a nice Jewish girl," obviously forgetting about his two former wives, both of whom are Jewish.

As Woody stood up to leave, he smiled weakly. "Truly the lunch from hell," he murmured.

In the spring of 1998, Barbara Kopple's road movie was released by Fine Line Films as a 104-minute feature.
Wild Man Blues,
the title of a famous Jelly Roll Morton—Louis Armstrong collaboration. As usual, Woody was pessimistic about the film's reception. Documentary audiences tended to be limited, especially audiences for pictures about New Orleans jazz. "No one," he predicted, "will be interested in this film." He was not taking into account Kopple, who was regarded in the industry as a famous documentarian, as well as a woman who relentlessly sought attention.

When Kopple had edited the film to three and a half hours, she invited Woody and Soon-Yi to her East Village film studio to view it. According to Kopple, they huddled silent and bemused, occasionally giggling or breaking into shrieks of laughter. At the end, Woody stood up and said politely, "Very entertaining."

"Thank you, but that's you," Kopple replied.

"No, no, no," he said, "that's
you"

Although he brought up several technical questions involving the editing, Kopple later gave the impression that she resisted his professional advice and told him, "Well, the burden is on me."

"Yes, it is," agreed Woody as he headed for the elevator. Considering everything that he had riding on the film, including Sweedand's half-million-dollar investment, this response sounds suspicious. From the beginning, the premise of the documentary was to restore his image. Despite the sticky question of final cut, the balance of power between Allen and Kopple was never in doubt. On the other hand, Woody wanted everyone to believe he had cut Kopple loose to make her own film, once again demonstrating his extraordinary ability to manipulate the public.

When Stanley Kauffmann saw
Wild Man Blues,
he was amazed because it

was "the best performance Woody's ever done on film. You sec him involved in something he cares about and doing it well. The last scene ridiculing both his parents and himself—the son who never made good with the rather—is an Arthur Miller situation. Even if its purpose was to get sympathy it shows him as a human being, not as a star." Most reviewers, however, panned Woody's vanity feature. Going straight to the heart of the matter, the
Village Voice
reviewed the press kit, and other publications followed suit by calling Woody's advertisement tor himself "a blatant attempt to clean up his scandal-tainted image," a slick corporate film "inseparable from p.r. spin." Since it was obviously not a conceit film—Kopple repeatedly truncated the musical interludes—critics instead reported on Woody's offstage life with Soon-Yi, who, wrote Roger Ebert, "seems more like the adult in the partnership," a combination of wife, mother, and manager.

For all its billing as a music documentary.
Wild Man Blues
was not about jazz but personal relationships, an
Annie Hall
tor the nineties. It was about Alvy Singer in middle age, no longer worrying about why Annie left him because now he has a twenty-eight- (or rwenty-five- or twenry-sbt-) year-old Asian woman, who has turned out to be the woman of his dreams. Soon-Yi impressed Kopple as a strong, mature woman, highly opinionated, who was also living a fairy-tale romance. "She's able to be her own person, she's able to have anything she wants!" Kopple said, adding that "to find someone you can have fun with, who's a soul mate, who speaks truthfully to you, not just telling you the things you want to hear, that's rare and wonderful." Ironically, Woody succeeded in mesmerizing Kopple, who chose to ignore the fact that Soon-Yi was the daughter of the mother of Woody's three children and the sister of these children. Aside from one remark of Woody's about "the notorious Soon-Yi Previn," the film contained no allusions to the scandal or his children. Most strikingly, there was no mention of Mia, which film writer Bill Luhr likened to "telling the story of O.J. without mentioning Nicole." Not only did Kopple accept the relationship with Soon-Yi as normal, she lost her critical perspective and became a pan of her subject's insulated world. In Kopple's eyes, Woody and Soon-Yi were living a Cinderella love story. Another filmmaker might have regarded them differently

In His Own Words:

Erica Jong: Does Soon-Yi miss her mother? Woody: Not at all.

—Marie Claire.
1998

Several years before meeting Mia, Woody imagined the character of an estranged wife who takes revenge on her husband with a memoir that graphically exposes why their marriage went haywire. In
Manhattan,
consoling himself with seventeen-year-old Tracy, Isaac Davis muses about how Jill is going to ridicule his "disgusting little moments" and how her book will surely become a best-seller. Naturally, Jill hates him but she's also a bisexual feminist who left him for a woman, which explains everything. An older and wiser Woody might have guessed that Mia, if she ever got her hands on a ghostwriter, would tear his heart out in print.

In the fall of 1992, barely three months after Woody sued for custody, Mia announced she was going to write her autobiography. Unlike many celebrities who use professional writers as collaborators, Mia promised that she would write the book herself. For all of her hysteria about the custody action and the bombardments of the media, she managed to pull herself together and write a book proposal, consisting of a dozen or so pages about her childhood in Hollywood, which her literary agent submitted to editors at Putnam, Warner Books, and Simon & Schuster. It was eventually sold to Doubleday for an advance reported to be $3 million. The acquiring editor was Nan Talese, a sympathetic partisan of Mia’s during the custody hearing. (Another Doubleday editor who had deluged Mia with phone calls and letters urging her to write a memoir was Jacqueline Onassis.) In terms of celebrity advances, Mia's was respectable but not extraordinary, especially when it was compared to the spectacular sums commanded by Whoopi Goldberg ($6 million), Paul Reiser ($5.6 million), and Marlon Brando ($5 million). Mia’s high-powered literary agent was Lynn Nesbit, with whom Mia had a close, personal relationship. Lynn happened to be the mother of Matthew Previns girlfriend, Priscilla Gilman, whom he had met as an undergraduate at Yale and whom Mia regarded as one of her own daughters. In her literary endeavors, Mia was fortunate to enjoy both the emotional support and literary guidance of two powerhouses in publishing.

At the time of the book deal in 1992, Mia promised that her memoirs would cover her entire life: her movie-star family, her childhood ambition to be a pediatrician in Africa, the marriages to Sinatra and Previn, her acquaintance with such icons as Salvador Dalf and the Beatles. Three years later, however, she was declaring that a portion of the book, perhaps no more than a single chapter, would speak about her dispute with Woody. Instead, she said during an interview, she would focus her thoughts on religion and philosophy: "What is the meaning of things? And who are people anyway? And what to make of what you're given." The idea that she planned to hold forth in her book on weighty philosophical issues sounded unrealistic when the obvious reason for the book—and its large advance—was to dot the
is
and cross the f's on her broken relationship with Woody. Did readers really want to hear about the existential Mia, even if she was married to Frank Sinatra? Their main interest was the Woody Wars. As h transpired, once she had obtained a book contract, Mia found little time for writing. After the custody trial, she needed to cam money as an actress, following
Widow's Peak,
she did
Miami Rhapsody,
in which she played a middle-aged wife whose secret liaisons shocked her children when they discovered them. Her next picture.
Reckless.
was about a happily married housewife who, discovering her husband has hired a hit man to murder her, escapes a violent death by crawling out a window clad in a flannel nightgown. It was a story that no doubt appealed to Mia because of its parallels with her own life. Then, to her dismay, Mia, like most middle-aged screen actresses, found that scripts were scarce.