Woody, p.12
Woody, page 12
The Laff Movie, where Woody’s father took him, played the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges twenty-four hours a day; beside it was the all-night Horn & Hardart Automat, where aspiring performers, varied eccentrics, and socialist proselytizers gathered with their newspapers in their back pockets (New York had eight major newspapers then). The RKO Palace, once the beacon of vaudeville, revived eight acts along with headliners Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Betty Hutton, Belle Baker, Smith and Dale, Buddy Hackett, and Eddie Fisher. Lindy’s, where show-business royalty mingled with the wannabes and Winchell wrote his column, was the heart of the area, its cheesecake legendary. Jack Dempsey’s restaurant was nearby, Dempsey often sitting at a table by the front window. The resplendent Winter Garden Theatre, Jolson’s home base, still stood, as did Toffenetti’s, with its giant strawberry cheesecake in the window. The Paramount Theatre at Forty-third Street starred Sinatra and Tony Bennett and was the apex of theaters in New York City. The Colony Record Shop was a center of the music industry, as was the Brill Building with its songwriters and song pluggers several streets away. Nightclubs were still in their glory: the Copacabana and the Latin Quarter were the meccas, but there were also Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe; the Old Roumanian, starring Sadie Banks; Monte Proser’s La Vie en Rose (where Dorothy Dandridge and scores of others got their starts). Forty-second Street movie theaters stayed open all night. Hanson’s drugstore with its soda fountain was also open all night, and Broadway denizens, song pluggers, and singers like Bobby Darin hung out there for hours. So it was good to be alive in those days—not least of all because there was absolutely no fear: New Yorkers often stayed up all night there when they could.
This was the vibrant show-business world that Woody Allen imbibed as a young man, and—as the Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin soundtracks of his films, the ambience of Broadway Danny Rose, and the Times Square rooftop scenes of Radio Days attest—it is still embedded in his heart.
This was only one aspect of the beauty and intensity of New York that captivated him, but what hovered about all of it was a quality of innocence that cannot fully be recaptured.
* * *
What he continued to hate was traditional education. He enrolled at New York University as a film major and took three courses: Spanish, English, and motion picture production. He almost never went to class. At the end of the first semester he flunked Spanish and English and barely passed motion picture production. New York University expelled him. He tried a night course in motion picture production at City College in 1954 and was expelled again. He tried a course in dramatic writing; he enrolled in a photography class and never attended it.
“I got him into psychoanalysis when he was twenty,” Jerry Epstein told me. “I was waiting to be an analyst myself, and I eventually became a student and graduate at the New York Psychoanalytical Institute. I referred him to the clinic there. He was suffering. A lot. Woody had a lot of anxiety. We’re talking about five-times-a-week analysis. He was seen for fifty cents a session: two dollars and fifty cents a week.”
Allen was related to the noted, highly successful comedy writer and playwright Abe Burrows; his uncle had married Burrows’s aunt. Burrows had cowritten some of the great Broadway hits of the fifties, including Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Can-Can. Allen went to Burrows in 1956 for advice and told him he wanted to be a television writer. Burrows urged him to think beyond that, to consider writing for the theater. In his 1980 memoir, Honest, Abe, Burrows recalled his first meeting with Allen. He was bowled over by his talent. “One day he phoned me,” Burrows wrote, “told me he was Nettie’s son, and asked if we could meet. The next day he came to my house. A wispy little fellow, very innocent look, but there was an interesting gleam in his eyes.…
“Woody asked me if I would like to see some of his work. It can be very painful to read a bunch of jokes by a new, inexperienced comedy writer, but in this case I had no choice. Woody handed me two pages of jokes. I politely started to read them, and wow! His stuff was dazzling.” Burrows observed that none of the thirty jokes were ones he could ever have thought of.
Frequently I hear a good crack somebody makes and I laugh and give him a polite note. What I’m thinking is that given the same setup, I would have thought of the same punch line. But Woody’s jokes seemed to come from a different world.
Burrows cited one of the thirty jokes Woody had given him, about his wife sinking his boats. It would soon be one of Woody’s biggest jokes in his stand-up routine as he rose to stardom, and it’s indicative of just how fully ready Woody was in 1956 at the age of twenty-one.
Burrows wrote letters of recommendation for Woody to Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, and Peter Lind Hayes, a well-known comedian with his own radio program. Caesar turned him down (but would later hire him). Woody then went to see Hayes, who hired him. Burrows noted that comedy writers start out imitating well-known writers who are successful, often stealing their jokes. “But Woody is inimitable,” he wrote. “The comics and the comedy writers who try to copy his stuff never come close because Woody’s wit and style are part of Woody himself. He writes like Woody Allen, he acts like Woody Allen, and he looks like Woody Allen. He’s a tough act to copy.”
At NBC he found a mentor—the first of many who took an intense interest in him—in the comedy writer Danny Simon, brother of Neil Simon. He said of Simon, “Danny is one of the most important people to my career … for teaching me the fundamentals of how to construct sketches and, even more, for the psychological boost of having someone that accomplished believe in me.” Allen has often said, “Everything I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.” Woody told Eric Lax, “He turned my professional career around completely.” Simon gave him a sense of certainty about his own judgment of his own work and that of others. “One of the many things he instilled in me, because he had it, was an unyielding self-confidence, an unyielding sense in your own convictions, and I’ve never lost it. So everyone in town could be saying that the sketches on a particular show were funny, but if he said they weren’t funny, he couldn’t be swayed. And when he thought something was funny and somebody screwed it up he would not lose confidence but show you how to do it so it worked. He’d say, ‘Of course it’s not funny. But if you do it this way, acting it out, it is funny.’” Simon helped Allen find work in Hollywood, and he was soon, by the age of nineteen, writing comedy for Bob Hope, Garry Moore, Ed Sullivan, Candid Camera, and The Tonight Show. Allen said, “I was seventeen years old and I was earning more money than my parents put together had ever earned in their life.… The kids in my neighborhood were earning I don’t know what—the minimum wage was like 55 cents an hour or something and I was earning like sixteen hundred dollars a week.” In 1953 he left New York University to become a gag writer for Garry Moore and Sid Caesar. His salary then was $1,500 a week, but to his parents, especially his mother, he was a failure.
Woody met Harlene Rosen in 1953. He was eighteen and Harlene was fifteen. She played the piano in Woody’s jazz band along with Jack Victor, Elliott Mills, and Jerry Epstein. “Woody wasn’t that terrible with girls,” Jack Victor recalled. “He was average. None of us dated a lot. But there was no one special until Harlene. He had no real relationship until he met her. She was soft, nice. She was quiet and all that, but you couldn’t push her around. When we played the East Midwood Jewish Center, we needed a piano player. That’s where we met Harlene. Her mother had been a professional singer and was a difficult person, kind of cold. She did not care for Woody, a college dropout. Harlene’s father, Julius Rosen, had a shoe store on Kings Highway.”
“The thing at the East Midwood Jewish Center was hysterical,” Elliott Mills remembered. “Harlene got all panicked because she was playing in public for the first time. She blew up to about three hundred notes a minute, an incredible tempo. We couldn’t keep up with that.”
“After that, we played music at Harlene’s house,” Jack Victor said. “Elliott or Mickey Rose [another friend of Woody’s, who collaborated on writing Take the Money and Run and Bananas with him and died in 2013] played the drums. Harlene’s father had been a trumpet player and once in a while he played with us.
“Harlene had a wry sense of humor. She took Woody with a grain of salt. She would laugh at his things. He felt at ease with her, I think. A lot of Jewish girls at that time were pretty bitchy. And Harlene wasn’t.”
Woody first proposed marriage to Harlene, a lovely petite brunette, in 1955, the same year he lost his job with David Alber. They were still virgins. He began working for $169 a week as part of the NBC Writers’ Development Program. He was then offered the chance to write comedy in Hollywood for the Colgate Comedy Hour. He would be one of eight writers on the show. Woody flew to Hollywood on his own and lived a lonely existence at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel on Yucca and Grace Streets, sharing a suite with another writer, Milt Rosen. He wrote Harlene twenty-page letters every day.
Jack Victor shared with me some of the letters Woody wrote him in 1956 from Hollywood. The letters disclosed his loneliness, his yearning to be back in Brooklyn with his constant friends Jerry, Jack, and Elliott, his ambivalent attitude toward Harlene, his centeredness and seriousness of purpose, including his immersion in New Orleans jazz, about which he shows considerable knowledge and love—especially for George Lewis, Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, and Muggsy Spanier—and his warmth, affection, and support for his friend Jack, whom he keeps urging to have the courage to approach and date girls. He seemed especially close to Jack because of their mutual idealism and interest in literature and art. Woody urged Jack to join a local synagogue in Brooklyn to meet girls as he had done. Apparently he had not changed his name yet, as he signed off “Alan” or “Al” and, once, “the Woodster.”
He had already written a sketch for Bob Hope and Kathryn Grayson. He noted that Los Angeles was sunny and warm, houses pink against white streets, but he soon got tired and bored with it. He ate at the Brown Derby every day and was running all over town. The other writers on the program—Danny Simon (head writer on the program), Arnie Rosen, and Coleman Jacoby—all of whom he described as TV big shots, were staying at his motel. He suddenly announced that he was married to Harlene Rosen. He had kept urging her to join him and get married. The couple were married in Los Angeles by a rabbi on March 15, 1956. Allen’s and Harlene’s parents were not present. He was clearly quickly bored with marriage and eager to resume his walks and talks and listening to jazz with Jack.
The marriage was on the rocks nearly from the start. “Woody wrote me regularly from California,” Jack Victor told me, “but especially during the honeymoon. I could see it wasn’t a honeymoon anymore. There were problems. It just didn’t work out, really.”
On April 28 Woody told Jack he and Harlene were leaving Hollywood on May 8, but would see Kid Ory play at a joint in Beverly Hills the day before. He was going to Las Vegas to gamble for two days, then to New Orleans for two days to hear jazz, visit George Lewis on St. Philip Street, and in general case the town. He would return to New York and live in Harlene’s parents’ den for a month, and then they would rent an apartment near Central Park.
The Colgate program had been canceled after a month due to poor ratings, and Woody and Harlene were forced to live with Harlene’s parents for a while in Manhattan. They soon moved into a one-room apartment at 110 East Sixty-first Street. Shortly afterward they relocated to a brownstone at 311 West Seventy-fifth Street. Harlene resumed her studies in philosophy at Hunter College, and Woody resumed his psychoanalysis. He was writing jokes for TV programs; again his state of disenchantment was mirrored in his attitude toward these programs in Annie Hall. Woody and Harlene played their recorders together, and Harlene tried unsuccessfully to cook. “I visited them at West Seventy-fifth Street,” Elliott Mills recalled. “It was a divided crazy apartment. It had a monster chandelier that must have [once] been at the center of somebody’s living room. In their apartment it was right on the edge of the wall.
“A huge water bug came up in the bathroom,” Elliott added. “Woody was terrified of those things. And he had this huge insecticide can. He was furiously spraying it, jumping around. He was waltzing around with this spray gun trying to get this bug. Harlene was making fun of him. She went into the bathroom and smashed the bug with a broom. Later, in Annie Hall, he transformed the bug into a lobster, then a spider ‘the size of a Buick.’” He always does riffs on what actually happened.”
Harlene wanted Woody to take up more serious writing. She was really not into show business, jazz, movies, or gambling at all. Woody, who read only comic books, was angry and competitive with her and began to read the classics and philosophy. Based on his later sardonic satires of philosophical writing, he could not have been enamored of them in the first place. But he embarked on a course of self-improvement, keeping a list of new words to build his vocabulary, assiduously followed her courses, and read the books that she was assigned to read. He even hired a tutor to assist him in studying philosophy and spent an hour a day with his friend Len Maxwell at an art show, followed by a discussion about it on the way home.
It was a marriage mired in stumbling inexperience. “I think Woody was bored,” Jerry Epstein said. Considering his rocky and ambivalent relationship with his own mother, it’s not surprising that Woody’s first venture into an intimate relationship with a woman faltered badly.
Allen was writing jokes for many of Danny Simon’s shows, and in 1957 Simon recommended him for a job at Tamiment, the resort near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, that served as a training ground for writers. Founded by the socialist Rand School of Social Science, Tamiment had a 1,200-seat theater, dance hall, boating lake, and golf course. Simon had urged Allen to venture beyond writing jokes into creating characters and sketches, and thought that Tamiment would be the right place to develop those skills. Moe Hack had succeeded Max Liebman (the producer of Your Show of Shows) as producer of Tamiment’s famous Saturday-night shows. The lodge was a hotbed of talent: Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks had performed there; Neil and Danny Simon wrote sketches. An entirely new show was written, not improvised, by the writers in residence every single week. It was a very valuable experience for a young writer. Tamiment also served as a showcase for Broadway and TV producers, who would come in to see the shows and recruit new talent. One book musical was done each year. Once Upon a Mattress was written there. Both Carol Burnett and Larry Kert, who would go on to play the role of Tony in West Side Story, were at Tamiment in 1955. The atmosphere of old show business and of the “stage door” world was congenial to Woody, and his strenuous work ethic was entirely suited to the Tamiment experience. He jumped in with alacrity. Marshall Brickman, collaborator with Allen on Manhattan, Sleeper, and Annie Hall, would say of the pressure of writing for such a strenuous deadline: “You knew the train was leaving the station, and you had to be on it.”
Allen became an actor almost by accident. A member of the company at Tamiment, lyricist Marshall Barer, said in Writers’ Theater that “Woody certainly did not come to Tamiment to be a performer, but performing was almost imposed upon him by the other writers.” He recalled sitting at a writers’ conference at Tamiment listening to Allen read one of his sketches and discuss who should be in it. Suddenly an idea struck everyone at once: “Woody, do it yourself!” they all shouted. “You can perform it better than anyone we have here.” Allen reluctantly agreed. He moved into sketch writing and directing in much the same way. In the second season he began creating sketches in rehearsal through cast improvisations. In the process he moved from being a joke writer to a writer of comedy sketches. He also directed and acted for the first time. “The directing was purely out of self-preservation,” Allen would say later, “and was not the fulfillment of some long-time desire to direct.” Dissatisfied with the way the resident director worked out sketches, Allen insisted during the second season that he be allowed to direct his own work. He would demonstrate to the actors how characters and situations should be played. Allen, Barer recalled, “would select the cast, set the scene, throw out a premise and invite everyone to contribute suggestions.”
Sid Weedman, who was at Tamiment for three seasons starting in 1956, told me that “Everybody lived in long wooden barracks. Woody and Harlene lived in one room with a bath. I almost never saw Harlene. Woody performed a sketch called ‘Opening Night.’ It had four theater seats facing the audience. Woody, his ‘mother,’ and two ‘aunts’ sat there. The women were talking about everybody in the imaginary audience. ‘This is my son. He wrote this movie. He’s such a talent.’ They were just raving about him, telling the audience what a genius their son and nephew is. Then the sketch starts, and one of them says, ‘That’s not me, is it? Why, I never said anything like that!’ So they’re watching themselves being portrayed. By the end of the sketch they’re berating him, and one of them beats him over the head with her pocketbook.
“We passed each other backstage, but he was not an outgoing person, and I was. To me he was just kind of a bump on a log. Actually he was a nervous wreck. He had confidence when he wrote, but he had a lack of confidence in a lot of things in life, I think. He didn’t socialize; he was just by himself a lot. The other writers would interact, hanging out at lunchtime. But the sketch was a bitch and the biggest hit of the season.” Other sketches by Allen were equally hilarious, including a convicts’ stage show. The convicts present annual awards for Best Murder, Best Assault with a Deadly Weapon, and Best Robbery. Another sketch, “The Mad Baker,” was about a giant chocolate cake that terrorized the countryside. “Psychological Warfare,” clearly inspired by Allen’s psychoanalysis, was set on a battleground. A group of men enter dressed like American GIs but without conventional weaponry. The sergeant discusses their plan of attack: “Hit them in the ego, hit them in the id, hit them in their inferiority complexes, and if that doesn’t work, hit them below the belt and we’ll go back to the old way!” Then the “enemy” enters and begins to battle with the sergeant:
