Woody, p.11
Woody, page 11
“And Woody found in humor a great avenue for the tragedy, the mishegoss [the craziness] of what we call the manmade world. This world around us. Because with humor your immune system goes up, and it’s a force of life.”
And, of course, he loved movies from the start. He led his flock (Elliott, Jack, Jerry, and Mickey) to the multitude of theaters in the neighborhood almost every day. There was a revival of Gone With the Wind at the Kent in Brooklyn, and he had some of his friends go with him (for two showings) the entire seven days of its run. The grand Midwood Theater (which his grandfather Isaac had owned in palmier days) was around the corner on Avenue J. In summer he went to the movies every day with popcorn and Milk Duds.
For Allen, movies were an escape throughout his childhood. He saw Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, the films of Preston Sturges, the Marx Brothers, and Frank Capra at an impressionable age, and they transported him into a different world. “You would leave your poor house behind and all your problems with school and family,” he told Stig Björkman, “and you would go into the cinema, and they would have penthouses and white telephones and the women were lovely and the men always had an appropriate witticism to say and things were funny, but they always turned out well and the heroes were genuine heroes.” He has often spoken of the contrast between the grim reality of life and the luminous fantasies of the movies. This contrast is a constant leitmotif in his work, most especially in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, and Play It Again, Sam.
Allen feels that those early experiences in the movie houses had a crushing influence on him and on many of his friends well into late middle age because they made it so difficult to adjust to the harsh and often brutal realities of real life. The reality they felt was true was an illusion, and one that was impossible to surmount. “When you sat in those movie theaters,” he said, “you thought it was real.” The impulse of the writer was to reshape reality and make sure that things came out well in the end—as Alvy Singer does in Annie Hall when, in his first play, he rewrites reality so that Annie does not reject him and decides to marry him and return to New York from Los Angeles—which Allen loathes above all cities and regards as the snakepit of the world.
Allen’s little-known and imperfect—but moving—Broadway play, The Floating Light Bulb, dealt with the desire to escape from life through the fantasy of magic. Produced by the Lincoln Center Theater Company, it debuted on April 27, 1981, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York City. It is his finest play, a great leap from the dreadful Don’t Drink the Water and some steps ahead of the charming Play It Again, Sam. Its obscurity is unjustified. The play starred Beatrice Arthur and Danny Aiello and was directed by Ulu Grosbard. It was named one of the outstanding plays of the 1981–82 Broadway season and was included in the notable Otis Guernsey’s Best Plays series. It is a key to the young Allen and to a road not taken in his life. The play depicts a young Allen stand-in, Paul, as a stammerer who escapes from the reality around him with magic tricks and the dream that success in magic will bring him power and social acceptance. This is clearly not the feisty Woody who surmounted his environment and escaped Brooklyn at such an early age. Allen’s childhood friends told me that Allen never had a stammer and was basically in charge of his life from the start. It could be interpreted as the Woody who might have been, or Woody at an earlier stage, or lingering depressive strands of the inner Woody’s darker memories of his childhood.
In the play Allen created a deracinated Brooklyn Jewish milieu devoid of the raucous festivity of Radio Days, with its happy tumult of an extended family bursting the seams of the household. The aunts, cousins, uncles, and neighbors are absent, and we are left with Paul, a little-seen brother, and the festering, disintegrating relationship between mother and father. There is also a “gentleman caller.” And lest there be any doubt that this is Allen talking, the overriding subject is magic, the same subject that reappears over and over again in his films—as recently as his 2014 Magic in the Moonlight. And where does Paul escape to when he gets out of the house? New York, the Automat, the magic shops—Woody’s usual destinations as a young man.
The play, set in 1945, is painful, somber, and intimate. Its atmosphere is one of despair, futility, and depression. This is a world, the playwright is telling us, you either escape from or die. Allen wrote in the stage directions that the Pollacks live in “an apartment reeking of hopelessness and neglect” that “looks out on the bleak brick courtyard in the back and rear of the surrounding buildings, giving one the feeling of being at the bottom of a well.” The raffish father, Max, who never finds a niche in life, is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s real father but devoid of his wastrel charm. He goes from job to job. He is a consummate loser pursued by loan sharks, and cheats on his wife. Enid, the mother, has a muted affection for her son; she says of him, “He’s one of those people … that goes his whole life drifting, dreaming, dependent—in his own private world—with someone always having to take care of him.” She cannot overcome her own feelings of desperation, working as a clerk selling hosiery and grasping at straws: get-rich quick schemes such as selling “personalized matchbooks” or tropical fish, and asking her sister for money. She laments lost catches like Herb Glass, “a crackerjack foot specialist [who] worshipped me” and a wild boy she calls “the Kissing Bandit.”
Allen has never ceased talking about his hatred of public school, which is expressed by Paul in the play to Enid:
PAUL: I can’t go to school. I’m n-not going back.
ENID: You’re not?
PAUL: I can’t do it. There are so many faces. I can’t breathe. I get confused in the halls … everything’s closing in.
ENID: Don’t give me that nonsense! What’s wrong with you? Where do you run off to when you don’t go to school?
PAUL: Out.
ENID: Out where? Where?
PAUL: S-sometimes I j-just w-walk around and sit and r-read the p-paper at th-the Automat and th-then w-walk t-to the m-magic shop and l-look around.
ENID: Naturally. The magic shop. I should have known.
His mother accuses Paul of being “different,” that he is vulnerable and shielding himself from reality with floating light bulb tricks. She fears he will not make it in life: “You’re different because you live in your world of Chinese boxes and silk handkerchiefs and marvelous effects. Unfortunately that is not the real world, as you will learn soon enough.”
She goes on to voice the same objections to a show-business career for Paul that Woody’s mother expressed over and over again: You couldn’t count on show business. Millions tried and most failed. He would need something to fall back on—a real job. A profession.
Paul tries to escape from her hectoring and says he needs to “practice.” She replies: “Good, Paul. Practice.… Learn magic. That’s exactly what we need around here—more tricks and illusions.” There are traces of Woody’s real mother in the way Enid tries to pressure the men in the family to be productive, to work hard, and to succeed.
In the most poignant scene (somewhat reminiscent but not at all imitative of the scene in The Glass Menagerie when the mother tries to find a savior for her daughter, Laura), Enid arranges to have Jerry Wexler, a small-time talent agent whom she mistakenly thinks is an important producer, “audition” Paul in the apartment. Wexler boasts about his obscure clients the way Broadway Danny Rose talks up his one-legged tap dancer and hopeless ventriloquist, Barney Dunn. Wexler mentions a talking dog who sings “Little Sir Echo” (Allen, in one of the many charming instances of his cribbing from his own work, actually sang “Little Sir Echo” to a talking dog on a television show in 1965; he also boxed with a giraffe) and two Armenian boxers who performed “Ave Maria” while fighting. Paul, as “The Great Pollack,” begins to do his magic act: “I h-have here this o-ordinary p-piece of n-newspaper, which I f-fold into the sh-shape of a c-cone. And an ordinary p-pitcher of m-milk. I p-pour the milk into the c-cone, thusly.” He sets the pitcher back on the table. “Presto!” When he takes a corner of the newspaper and with a flourish opens up the cone, the milk has vanished.
Paul proceeds to do several more magic tricks successfully, but then he begins to fall apart: He apologizes for his stuttering, he begins to tremble, he loses his nerve and is unable to continue. He runs into his room, slams the door, and locks it.
The scene is naked and painful, and it could conceivably stem directly from Allen’s childhood memories, perhaps a hidden recollection of one of his most humiliating early experiences. Allen, sometimes eager to deflect biographers from scavenging around in his life, told Diane Jacobs in … But We Need the Eggs that a model for Paul was a boy in his childhood: “I would pass by this particular house, and there was a seventeen-year-old kid who would sit by the window and shuffle cards constantly. He was his mother’s cross to bear—there’s no question about it.” Jacobs bought this explanation and wrote that “autobiographical comparisons” ended with Paul’s obsession with magic. She accurately wrote that Allen was totally unlike “the painfully shy, stuttering Paul [who] hasn’t the stamina or drive to envision a real-life application for his art behind ‘prrracticing.’” It’s certainly true that Allen’s father was affectionate and loving, and the father in the play is distant and self-absorbed. Paul is sixteen in the play, and Allen, at that age, was an aggressive, assertive young man on the make.
The Paul of the play could have been written as a much younger man, and might contain within his character aspects of a younger Allen. Perhaps significantly Allen was really ten in 1945. Allen has always been churlish about any attempts to link his real life to his art, and resents any suggestions of vulnerability unless he admits to them himself. Who of us does not share that need for self-protectiveness? But some of The Floating Light Bulb seems to ring too true and too close to aspects of his own experience to let us take his denials entirely at face value. The character of Paul may have been Allen’s innermost fear. Allen as a boy was bullied yet aggressive; he was ambitious and determined yet a mediocre student and scoreless with chicks. It is possible that Paul was what Allen feared lurked inside him: a loser, oppressed by his mother—someone who would never live out his dreams.
Allen follows the scene in which Paul fails at magic with a lovely one that seems more a matter of invention than of experience. Jerry Wexler, with a few drinks in him, begins to find Enid beautiful, and she in turn is drawn to him. The scene comes to a sad denouement when Jerry announces that he is leaving Brooklyn to join his ailing mother in Phoenix. Enid is shattered. In the evening Max tells Enid he is leaving for good. Enid in her fury strikes him with Paul’s magic cane, and a bouquet of paper flowers flutters out. Magic has betrayed Paul and Enid and, like Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo, they are left as dreamers coping with the compromises of reality.
Walter Kerr perceptively wrote of the play in the New York Times that while Paul is depicted as a “born loser”:
I did not know Mr. Allen himself as a lad of 15.… But I will lay you bets that anyone on the block … knew perfectly well that he was a comer. Shyness is nothing if there’s quality inside it. It finds its way out. But Mr. Allen was so determined to Chekhovize the boy—and, for that matter, everyone else in his play—that he won’t give the kid a chance. And I think that’s the beginning of what’s wrong with the play.
Kerr went on to write that the play had “an honestly detailed background” and “shrewdly observed, affectionately written characters,” but regrets that Paul is written as a “boy who won’t fight back. He lapses into silence, retreats to his room, leaves his mother banging her fists purposelessly against his locked door.” He found the play’s hopelessness too predetermined and arbitrary, Paul’s audition breakdown unbelievable: “We know that the boy is a capable enough magician. Why, then, must he make such a mess that he breaks down entirely, fleeing for his sealed-off room for good?” He noted that “it is all so arbitrary; failure has been forced on these likeable people by Mr. Allen.” He wrote that Allen’s writing “suddenly leapt to such funny responsive, touching life” in the “lovely” scene between the mother and Wexler (Jack Weston) “because he is at last dealing with a character—perhaps two characters—he has observed at a little distance rather than intimately lived with.… The moment Mr. Weston enters in the second half … Mr. Allen’s imagination takes off, does a zany and original little dance of its own.”
The play is somber and grim (these are certainly aspects of Allen’s own personality; he has said that in forty years of analysis he never told a joke), but it is affecting and it is not, as some have suggested, a replication of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams may well have been an inspiration, but artists are entitled to be inspired by, without imitating, fellow artists. The play is wholly serious—a dangerous road for Allen when he tried it in Interiors, Another Woman, September, and Shadows and Fog. (Another play apparently born of his life experience, A Second-Hand Memory, was produced off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in 2004 and was really pummeled by the critics. That play, unlike any other Allen has written, was never published, and I have not been able to locate a copy.) But here he knows his world and his characters, and he is working out of his life experience. In those almost unwatchable, lugubrious films he imagined what his WASP characters were like, but did not really know them at all. They turned into abstractions, deadly boring ones at that. Here he is at home, and if the play does not entirely work, as Kerr indicated, it has many fine moments and is yet another instance of Allen’s expansive gifts.
We also learn some significant things from The Floating Light Bulb about Allen’s childhood and, in retrospect, how he escaped that world. (In The Floating Light Bulb only the father escapes.) His is a gigantic success story against the odds, but genius always has an element of the inexplicable. “When you talk about genius,” Jerry Epstein said, “Woody sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when he was six months old. Really sang it. He had locution when he was eight months old. He could have a conversation at that age.”
* * *
Many of us have crippling, devastating childhoods, but few of us find ways of transmuting that pain into art. Retreating to the basement of his parents’ home, eating his meals alone, practicing his magic, his coin and card tricks, practicing the clarinet, he achieved a unique comic perspective—a comedic talent that is so instinctive he cannot fully understand it himself—a talent that from the beginning would bring him great financial success. He was absolutely certain of his gifts. And he was a whirlwind. His story is one of limitless ambition, success, and triumph, interlaced with the sorrows and pain of someone who cannot fully outrun a childhood that had some desolation and sorrow. But if he does try to have it both ways—to insist on both his normality and his endless phobias and fears—he doesn’t mind letting us in on the latter as long as he is the one telling the story, in control, shifting the gears, writing the scenarios. We know he was scorched by the early years despite the “warm food, milk and cookies,” and, as he freely admits, he still lives in a condition he has defined as “anhedonia”—his original title for Annie Hall—an inability to experience joy in life. “Writing saved his life,” says Woody Allen as Harry Block at the end of Deconstructing Harry.
3. The Real Broadway Danny Rose
WOODY ALLEN BEGAN his performing career at thirteen, singing Al Jolson songs at his bar mitzvah. At sixteen he was doing his magic act at Young Israel of Brooklyn, the East Midwood Jewish Center, and Weinstein’s Majestic Bungalow Colony in the Catskills. He was writing comedy while still in high school, using his pen name and selling jokes to the columnists Earl Wilson, Walter Winchell, and Leonard Lyons. Jack Victor recalls Allen proudly showing him his first published joke in Earl Wilson’s column on November 25, 1952: “It’s the fallen women who are usually picked up, says Woody Allen.” The jokes soon appeared in all the columns; “Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had OPS prices—over people’s salaries.” He placed many in Earl Wilson’s column “Earl’s Pearls”: “Taffy Tuttle heard of a man who was a six-footer, and told Woody Allen: ‘Gee, it must take him a long time to put his shoes on.’”
“I was sixteen years old when I got my first job,” Allen told The Paris Review. “It was as a comedy writer for an advertising agency in New York [David Alber]. I would come into the agency every single day after school and I would write jokes for them. They would attribute these jokes to their clients and put them in the newspaper columns. I would get on the subway—the train quite crowded—and, strap-hanging, I’d take out a pencil and by the time I’d gotten out I’d have written forty or fifty jokes … fifty jokes a day for years.… Believe me, it was no big deal.” He quickly became a comedy writer, first for the TV personality Herb Shriner. After leaving Shriner, he got a job as a staff writer at NBC. He was enrolled in the NBC Writers’ Development Program, which was formed to find writers for the Colgate Comedy Hour.
He virtually abandoned Midwood High School, where he participated in no activities and detested his teachers. He recalled later “getting up in the morning, having my big piece of chocolate cake and milk for breakfast, my parents still asleep, going out, presumably to Midwood High School but not going [there].” He took the subway to Times Square and the Paramount Theatre.
Allen told Eric Lax that when he was six years old, he had first seen Times Square with his father. “It was during World War II … He would take me from the train station on Avenue J in Brooklyn and we’d ride into New York. [We’d] go to the Automat. [We’d] go to the Circle Magic Shop, which had a big arcade downstairs. We’d go to the arcades on Forty-second Street—my father loved to shoot the rifles. It was dazzling.”
The Times Square Allen encountered was not the metallic Times Square of today, nor was it the snakepit of crime and prostitution it became in the 1970s. It had the show-business innocence of Broadway Danny Rose; it was a world of live stage shows and vaudevillians and hoofers getting by at the many small hotels on the side streets, of record shops and sheet music stores. It was a Damon Runyon and Billy Rose world. The Metropole was not the stripper’s palace it became later; it was the home of great New Orleans jazz, with Max Kaminsky, Wild Bill Davison, and Pee Wee Russell playing on the bar, the doors wide open, and the music drifting sweetly into the street.
