Woody, p.18
Woody, page 18
“Louise was a big part of our lives,” Carol Joffe recalled. “She was an amazingly funny woman. Very offbeat, kind of flaky. Very loving; a very affectionate warm person and quite uninhibited. She was a little nutsy in a good way. Together she and Woody were really funny. Sometimes she’d disappear. She had a birthday. There were about eight of us around the coffee table. Somebody brought in this scrumptious cake. And Louise blew out the candle, we sang Happy Birthday, and then she put her hand into the cake and took a load of it and just smashed it into her mouth. And she said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do this.’ I mean, that’s Louise. She was a nut. She was wild and wonderful and funny. And very sweet with my children and babysat with them. They adored her.”
Right before the marriage Woody wrote dialogue for a Japanese film that he dubbed into English, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? He worked with Louise, Mickey Rose, Frank Buxton, and Len Maxwell. He also created voices for two of the characters. Woody rented a room at the Stanhope Hotel, set up a projector, and ran the film several times. Everyone said whatever came into their minds while the images played. If Woody liked their dialogue, he inserted it. Allen thought the film was dreadful. He tried to sue to keep the film from coming out, but it opened to good reviews and he gave up. Again he had good commercial luck almost against his will, but it wasn’t the kind he really wanted.
Allen’s prodigious output now included, in addition to acting in films he’d written, TV specials, short stories, and plays. He had completed his first play, Don’t Drink the Water, about an unsophisticated Jewish family accused of spying while vacationing behind the Iron Curtain. It opened on Broadway in the fall of 1966 with Lou Jacobi and Kay Medford as the American couple and Tony Roberts as the ambassador’s son who falls in love with their daughter, Anita Gilette. Allen has said it was a “terrible play.” He is right. It is Neil Simon–lite—if that is possible—a humorless, coarse slapstick filled with stereotypical characters. Except for The Floating Light Bulb, Play It Again, Sam, and his one-acters Death and Death Knocks, Allen has never brought his best game to drama; in this play he reverted to Borscht Belt humor and cartoonlike characters. And, as in some of his lesser films, he seems to have tossed them off without real effort, although he is said to have worked hard on the play. But Don’t Drink the Water is his nadir; it would have been a big hit in the Catskills, and it is still a success at dinner theaters. My first reaction was: Could this have actually been written by Allen? But it was. Early reviews were negative. Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Times: “The legend that a show of this sort can have too many jokes for its own good is just that, a legend. Aristophanes would surely have clouted the man who suggested such a thing. What actually happens is that the theatrical current stops flowing, the stage doesn’t fill to the watermark. The one-liners are coming thick and fast, and the reservoir is emptying steadily. Comedy, like any other kind of theater, needs an interior impulse. The impulse comes from the story line and bubbles up into situations that would be funny even if the lines were as straight as can be.… It’s the set-up that counts, not the spangles.” Nevertheless, the play went on to great commercial success, running eighteen months. It was purchased for the screen by Joseph E. Levine and released as a film starring Jackie Gleason in 1969. The film is even worse than the play, and in its second incarnation it finally flopped.
Allen had also begun writing prose and aiming short, S. J. Perelman–like humor pieces at the most prestigious magazine in America, The New Yorker. New Yorker editor Roger Angell found his initial submissions too closely modeled on Perelman’s. He told Allen, “This is very funny but we already have one of these.” As is customary for Allen, he took the criticism to heart and immediately corrected himself, writing originals that have stood the test of time. “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers” was his first publication in The New Yorker, on January 20, 1966. Allen was elated. The story consisted of a series of increasingly hostile letters from two men playing a game of chess by mail. Each man thinks that the other is crazy. He went on to publish “A Little Louder, Please” and “Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?,” an account of the invention of the sandwich. He would contribute some fifty stories to magazines, mainly The New Yorker, from 1965 to 1980 (at the time he said he was tired of writing “little souffles”), and has written for the magazine intermittently since then. Many are memorable, but the pattern of the meshing of the real with the absurd, the surreal, and the paradoxical became somewhat repetitive, as Allen himself came to realize. Unlike the constant surprises and innovations of his films, which have managed to veer off in startling new directions, his prose continued to be recognizably centered on a predictable cleverness and parody, and cut from a certain similar cloth. They did not always call for a second reading, but, as always, Allen was never predictable. He managed to surprise once again when one least expected it. The difference may be more that parody and satire, following a certain pattern, can go only so far, because character is not at the center and parody is not an emotional genre but by nature critical. The films, in contrast, have often been not only entirely different from one another, with an infinite variety of styles and storytelling methods, but far more steeped in characterization and driven by feeling, passion, and personal experience. But still, many of the stories are superb. “A Look at Organized Crime” tells the reader of the structure of the Cosa Nostra: “At the top is the capo di tutti capi, or boss of all bosses. Meetings are held at his house, and he is responsible for supplying cold cuts and ice cubes. Failure to do so means instant death. (Death, incidentally, is one of the worst things that can happen to a Cosa Nostra member, and many prefer simply to pay a fine.)”
Allen was the scourge of every contemporary fad: New Age thinking; est; psychic phenomena; clairvoyance; extrasensory perception; Uri Geller, a spoon-bending illusionist; the supernatural; every form of radical chic—the panaceas that inflame his hatred of Hollywood, where he thinks so many of them seem to originate and flourish. (In Annie Hall at Paul Simon’s chic party, the camera passes among the crowd as Jeff Goldblum calls his guru and says, “I forgot my mantra.”) Allen always chooses common sense, the practical, the real. (In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey’s father replies to his son’s question: “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works!”) In a story in Without Feathers (1975), “Examining Psychic Phenomena,” he imitates the turgid language and mind-set of this genre while simultaneously mocking it: “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?… and after death is it still possible to take showers? Fortunately these questions about psychic phenomena are answered in a soon-to-be-published book, Boo! by Dr. Osgood Mulford Twelge, the noted parapsychologist and professor of ectoplasm at Columbia University.” Allen writes that Twelge has gathered a history of bizarre supernatural incidents, including the experience of two brothers “on opposite parts of the globe, one of whom took a bath while the other suddenly got clean.” The punch line always hurls a rarefied abstraction to earth, ridiculing it by comparing it to the trivial practical matters that really engage us most of the time. Allen demonstrates the absurdity of what he is parodying. And he does so in a language that captures the vernacular, the style and cadence, of the genre of writing he is imitating. Allen sounds like a vaudevillian’s version of Kafka in his takeoff of the writer in “The Diet” (Side Effects, 1986). In this clever parody, the subject is “F.’s” overeating problem, his conflict with his boss, Schnabel. He’s done something wrong, but he doesn’t know what it is. The boss has taken away his chair and given it to his coworker, Richter, who now has two chairs. He seeks justice from the mysterious minister. Meanwhile, his father (reminiscent of the father in Kafka’s The Judgment) rejects him mercilessly (The minister, he tells his son, “has no time for weak failures”) and, as in that story, condemns him to death. The story has a lot of bug imagery (think Metamorphosis): “F.” states that he is “a wretched, abysmal insect, fit for universal loathing.”
Allen deals with his favorite, most dreaded subject in the delightful story structured as a one-act play, “Death Knocks” (Getting Even). (Echoes of this sketch reappear in Deconstructing Harry.) A hooded figure dressed in skintight black clothes tries to make a grand entrance through Nat Ackerman’s window and almost breaks his neck. Ackerman, a dress manufacturer, is not ready to go, and Death, on his very first assignment, is annoyed: “Don’t make a production,” he whines. Death sounds as much like a dress manufacturer as Ackerman does. He’s thirsty and hungry and asks for a Fresca and potato chips or pretzels, maybe: “Put out something.” Nat proposes a game of gin rummy. If he wins, he gets a day’s reprieve. He asks what death is like. “What should it be like? You lie there,” Death replies. The casual banter is, as usual, very Jewish/Yiddish-inflected. In the end Ackerman wins the game; Death has to come back the next day. He’s broke and has to hang out in a down-and-out cafeteria, Bickford’s, for the night. Ackerman is tougher than the indecisive Death, and there’s the likelihood he will keep winning at gin and hold Death, who is broke and a kind of schlump, at bay. Allen had always said that the writer creates in his art the wished-for outcome he cannot achieve in life (as does Alvy with his play at the end of Annie Hall, when Annie leaves Los Angeles, comes back to him, and tells him she loves him). Allen achieves his fondest wish in this play: He outwits death.
In his comic masterpiece “The Whore of Mensa,” Allen created a takeoff of pseudo-tough-talking detective-style prose, imitating the cadences of that genre in telling of cracking a ring of prostitutes who turn men on intellectually. The story begins like any Raymond Chandler narrative. Here is the “tough guy” narrator: “A quivery pat of butter named Word Babcock walked into my office and laid his cards on the table.… He was shaking like the lead singer in a rhumba band. I pushed a glass across the desktop and a bottle of rye I keep handy.” Word had been blackmailed for patronizing mentally stimulating women who could talk about literature: “Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women—they’re not so easy to find on short notice.” These women “will come over and discuss any subject—Proust, Yeats, anthropology, exchange of ideas.… I mean, my wife is great, don’t get me wrong. But she won’t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn’t know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who’s mentally stimulating … and I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t want an involvement—I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave.”
In “Fine Times: An Oral Memoir,” he creates the memoirs of a Mae West–type of speakeasy owner, capturing the character and inverting the clichés of a century of such books: “Originally I danced at the Jewel Club in Chicago for Ned Small.… He was famous for breaking both your legs if you disagreed with him. And he could do it, too, boys.… I danced at Ned’s club. I was his best dancer, boys, a dancer-actress. The other girls just hoofed, but I danced a little story. Like Venus emerging from her bath, only on Broadway and Forty-second Street, and she goes to a nightclub and dances till dawn and then has a massive coronary and loses control of the facial muscles on the left side. Sad stuff, boys; that’s why I got respect.” Just the insertion of “boys” throughout the passage conjures up Mae West and a whole vanished chapter of show business.
And in “If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists (A Fantasy Exploring the Transposition of Temperament),” the first letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother begins: “Dear Theo, Will life ever treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth!”
One can hear vintage Allen in every line. The stories bristle with energy, humor, surrealistic imagery, and all kinds of wordplay. If he has wearied of these “soufflés,” and if they do not resonate nearly so much as his better films, they still have great merit and wit. “He’s not one of the great short story writers,” Phillip Lopate told me. “And partly because he never got beyond the pastiche. In a way he never got beyond S. J. Perelman. So his early love of Bob Hope and Perelman carried him a long way, but it didn’t carry him into substance. He could do a kind of Borscht Belt postmodernism like the Emma Bovary piece, ‘The Kugelmass Episode.’ And it was fun. It really is the kind of thing you can do in The New Yorker. You’re just doing a kind of satirical pastiche.”
In a later interview with Michiko Kakutani in 1987 in The Paris Review, Allen spoke of his experience writing for The New Yorker and his lack of confidence in writing prose as opposed to his certainty in writing comedy:
When I brought something into The New Yorker, I didn’t know what I was standing there with. Their reactions could have been, Oh, this is nothing. You’ve written a lot of words, but this isn’t really anything, or, Young man, this thing is really wonderful. I was happy to accept their judgment of it.… I would have thrown the stuff away and never batted an eyelash.… There are only one or two areas where I feel that kind of security, where I feel my judgment is as good and maybe even better than most people’s judgment. Comedy is one. I feel confident when I’m dealing with things that are funny, whatever the medium.
Allen is often mistakenly perceived as the liberating “freethinker” who champions the very thought and cultural patterns he makes fun of. Whatever his audience thinks is desirable, they project onto him. His neuroses may persist, but there is a bedrock reality that he clings to, the same reality that anchors his relentless work ethic, that makes him eat early, watch a movie or a football game, and go to sleep. He may be frenetic on film and stage, but he is seemingly calm, self-disciplined, and rational in person.
Three months into his new marriage, at the behest of Charles Feldman, Allen flew to London with Charles Joffe for the filming of Casino Royale. It would be this last, despised film over which he again had no control that sealed his determination to have complete autonomy over what he wrote in the future.
Casino Royale would conclude his education in how not to make a movie and how not to survive as a writer in the movies. The results were desperate, forced, phony, hysterical, and hollow. He was disgusted by the whole process of making a film by committee, by the endless time wasting, people spending their lives “taking” lunch, the insane expense, extravagance, bloatedness, impersonality, grandiosity, gimmickry, and sheer stupidity—the insanity—of what he had witnessed while being involved with three vacuous and meaningless films. The experiences of working on Pussycat and Casino Royale must have been on his mind when he wrote the Hollywood party scene in Annie Hall. As Alvy wanders around the party he hears this:
1ST MAN: Well, you take a meeting with him, I’ll take a meeting with you if you’ll take a meeting with Freddy.
2ND MAN: I took a meeting with Freddy. Freddy took a meeting with Charlie. You take a meeting with him.
1ST MAN: All the good meetings are taken.
Then Alvy overhears this conversation about the art of creation Hollywood-style: A man stands talking to a group. He says, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept … and later turn it into an idea.”
Casino Royale, supposedly based on a James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, was produced by Charles K. Feldman and Jerry Bresler at Columbia in 1967. The stellar cast included Allen, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles, Deborah Kerr, Peter O’Toole (in a cameo appearance), Charles Boyer, and George Raft.
Feldman ceremoniously flew Woody to London and set him up at a luxurious hotel. There Woody waited—and waited—for six months before acting in the film, while the three writers and the directors and producers tried to figure out what they were doing. He gambled, worked on his plays and prose, and wandered around London. Later Woody told Stig Björkman that it was “a moronic enterprise from start to finish; everything about it was a stupidity and a waste of celluloid and money. It was another dreadful film experience.”
“Woody told the producers he wanted me to work with him on his portion of Casino Royale,” Frank Buxton told me, “so he and I wrote together the things that Woody did in the film. We would play cards at night. We would show each other magic tricks. Many adult performers started with magic. We all got magic kits when we were kids, with balls and cups, cards, coins in them. I could still do some reasonably good card passes.”
Feldman was attempting a spoof like Pussycat, but this one was worse, far worse, if that was possible. The central character, Sir James Bond (Niven) was a retired secret service agent. An impostor was imitating him, maligning the sacred family name and using it as a way of seducing women. Bond decided to kill the enemy agents, the leader among them being Le Chiffre (Orson Welles). Ultimately Bond finds out that the real brains behind the enemy camp is his sniveling, tiny neurotic nephew, Little Jimmy Bond (Woody). The character of Jimmy is not unlike other Woody personae: He is frustrated by his incompetence at trying to live up to his hero, James Bond. Frustrated, he gives in and becomes a villain instead, and insane.
No one escaped with honor in the film except Allen, whose scenes are its only highlights. The themes accompanying his appearance are already familiar to us: An obsession with beautiful women and his failure to attract them drives him to hatch a plot to make all women beautiful and to kill all men taller than he is. His ineptness with mechanical objects, a player piano or a mechanical horse, also provide the only genuine moments of laughter in the film.
