Woody, p.20
Woody, page 20
The film opened to rave reviews in New York on August 18, 1969. Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times: “It has the texture of a collage—blackout sketches, sight gags, fake cinéma vérité interviews, old newsreel footage, parodies of all sorts of other movies … and the kind of pacing—or maybe it’s just momentum—that carries the viewer over the bad gags to the good ones.”
Woody’s character was indelibly etched on the mind of the audience: the nebbish, the neurotic, the schlemiel. It was a character suited to modern times even as Chaplin’s tramp and Keaton’s great stone face—perhaps partly because they were so identified with what was by now a remote era of silent films—receded from the audience’s memory.
The audience hungered for more Woody, and would continue to do so for the next forty-five years—and counting.
Woody is dismissive of Take the Money and Run as a primitive collection of gags, but I rate it among his twenty-five best. It is so fresh, so startling, so unendingly funny—even at the twentieth viewing. Woody fully emerged in it as a landmark talent, a character the audience waited to see on-screen. And it was the same Woody, essentially the same character that Allen would utilize for fifty—or sixty—more years: sex-starved, lecherous, romantic, put-upon, wisecracking, a mechanical dunce, Jewish and brazen about it, employing a humor based on paradox, absurdity, incongruity, and audacity. The novelist Jennifer Belle’s grandmother saw it and pronounced Woody “the eighth wonder of the world,” the same phrase Jack Rollins used about him.
They were right.
Kevin Thomas wrote of Virgil in the Los Angeles Times that “Starkwell is so appealingly hapless you don’t think of him as a criminal at all but rather as a kind of everyman in [whom] we can all recognize our sense of frustrated helplessness at being at the mercy of a toweringly indifferent universe. It is, in a very true sense, a film of the absurd.”
There are those who continue to see Woody’s films as a veiled autobiography, but whether they are any more so than any artist’s creative expression is a matter for conjecture. I do not view them solely that way, particularly since there is such a tremendous range of subject matter and a vast variety of themes, styles, characters, and settings. They do not stray far from his main thematic and personal obsessions, but that is true of many artists.
Louise Lasser would tell Robert Higgins, “There is a great deal of fury in Woody, an attraction to the element of danger, the unpredictability of the situation. And crime is a rebellion against the Establishment—like robbing banks, it’s rebellious—and Woody’s a rebel.”
Jerry Epstein recalls that he and Woody were attracted to crime and criminals when they were growing up. “Remember, the epigraph of Take the Money and Run is ‘Crime Lives.’ Woody and I used to pore over an encyclopedia of criminology. Think of his other movies that deal with crime [the Mafia family in Broadway Danny Rose; Cheech and Nick Valenti in Bullets over Broadway; the murderer who threatens Sally White in Radio Days; the murderous brothers in Cassandra’s Dream; the murdering social climber in Match Point; the pimp in Mighty Aphrodite; the congenial murderer, Paul House, in Manhattan Murder Mystery; Charles Ferry, the ex-convict in Everyone Says I Love You; the assassin in Stardust Memories; and Judah Rosenthal in Crimes and Misdemeanors].
“My practice for a time was at East Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan. The street’s called the ‘mental block’ because it has the highest proportion of psychiatrists in the city. I used to meet Lou Lynd, another psychoanalyst I sent Woody to, on the street, and we would schmooze. He was practicing in an office down the street from me. We would commonly get around to talking about Woody. Lou said to me, ‘Woody did so well with me. But the one thing I missed—I’m taking responsibility for it—I didn’t seek to socialize him.’
“The thing about Woody,” Dr. Epstein explained, “he lives in the instant, jumping from one sensory impression, or experience, to the next. The things he does, says, writes, have to be short. Everything has to be quick because he’s governed by the moment. He’s not governed by time. In sum, he lives in the ‘empire of the instant.’
“So analysis was the wrong treatment for Woody. Because analysis makes you reflect on your past. And that’s very painful for a person like him. It would take the form of: ‘Please don’t draw me back to the instant before. Because I’m done with that. I’ve extracted everything I need to get from it. And I don’t want to be drawn back to it. Governed by the moment. Moment to moment to moment.’ Over the many years he was in analytic treatment he told me he never once told a joke while on the couch.”
Reflecting on Allen’s development in later years, Epstein remembered that “Woody has always taken the position of having to get away with something. Like he would do with Mia and Soon-Yi. He had to get away with something, and he was caught. There’s no feeling of guilt in him, nor of conscience. It’s always your fault and it’s always your responsibility. He doesn’t feel he has any complicity in the mutual process that’s going on. The onus is always on you. So you always have to live up to the standard that he sets for people to abide by, what he deems to be the ideal, and, incidentally, to his advantage. In relationships he adheres to the mantra of dominant relationships. Me real, you shadow. Nevertheless he experiences constant anxiety, as for him catastrophe is always around the corner.
“As Woody became richer and richer,” Epstein related, “the themes of his films have turned from the middle class to the upper middle class or the upper rich class he identifies with. It’s all about the money and safety it brings for him. When you’re in that higher echelon of privileged society, you become more and more frightened of death and buy into the belief that money can act as a hedge against it.
“As to relationships, he now has an enduring one with Soon-Yi of a certain sort. Because as he said to me, ‘She’s not interested in my work.’ It’s understandable. Her work has been with special-needs children. So she has, to my mind, a special-needs child that she’s taking care of.
“He’s had ways of being good to people. He called me after many years of silence in 2000 when I had a heart attack, and we walked in Central Park together. Then when my brother, Sandy, died in 1991, Woody called me to express his condolences. And he said to me that Sandy was the greatest influence on his humor of any person. Then he shocked me by saying that he and Sandy had a relationship, that they spoke a lot. My brother had never told me of this.
“Sandy was incredibly funny. Woody had offered to write for Sandy in the seventies. Sandy was a lawyer by then. He said to Sandy, ‘Go out to Las Vegas and do a stand-up comedy act and I’ll write for you for free.’ He thought so much of his talent. But Sandy turned it down. He said to Woody, ‘I have three children. I’m married. How am I going to earn a living? I don’t know if I’ll make enough money. There’s no fixed income to count on.’ So he had the opportunity to go and believe in himself and just do it. And he would have the funniest guy in America writing for him. How could he fail? My brother was such a great comedian himself, he couldn’t fail. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t do that. But he couldn’t be faulted. It would take an act of faith to take such a leap that most people do not ever risk. It was a generous act on Woody’s part. But it was hurtful to tell me in that way that they’d had a secret relationship.”
In 1968, just before making Take the Money and Run, Allen reflected on the nature of being a comedian in an interview with Larry Wilde for a book called The Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Allen had already arrived; other contributors to the book included Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Danny Thomas, and George Burns. Allen’s writing habits were formed: He said he wrote on matchbooks and napkins and threw his ideas in a drawer at home. When the time came he laid them out in his room and went over them. This was the very process Allen would describe in the 2012 Woody Allen: A Documentary, produced by Robert Weide.
Allen said he didn’t think one could learn to write jokes, that it was “purely inborn.” The key thing wasn’t the jokes, “It’s the individual himself. When I first started … the same jokes I did at that time that got nothing for me, now will get roars, and not because I am more known. It’s the funny-character emergence that does it.” He stated he did not know why people laughed at him. “The only thing I can surmise is that there is something about me they are responding to, above and beyond the material, something in myself that I don’t see. I don’t believe the performer knows what’s funny about himself, or can see it.… They can never stand outside themselves enough to know what it is.”
Asked what was most difficult about being a comedian, he responded (one is reminded of the 3:00 a.m. scene at Lake Tahoe between Allen and Craig Modderno, when Allen was so reluctant to go onstage for a second show), “The pressure. It’s very hard to constantly have to go before the public and get laughs.… If they are not roaring, you’re in trouble. You have to be great all the time.… You’ve got that pressure of facing an audience—get them laughing for forty minutes. You go to your dressing room, and in an hour you have to do it again for the second show that night or the third, and the next night you have to do it all over again, and this goes on year after year.”
Asked what counsel he could give new comedians, he said, “When I first became a comedian, I thought, gee, I write funny material, I bet I could get up and just read this to people and they would laugh. I tried that. I took the sheets of paper out in the nightclub and it meant nothing to the audience. They wanted something else entirely. What they want is an intimacy with the person. They want to like the person and find the person funny as a human being.”
Wilde wondered if there was anything else a comedian could do to advance his career. Allen offered advice that was really a statement of principle and a foreshadowing of the paths he would take for the next forty-eight years: He envisioned “the chap who really will discipline himself and develop. I mean really hard work. Writing material for yourself, not believing your press notices whether they are good or bad, constantly doing new things, constantly moving into new areas—movies, Broadway—studying new projects, constantly risking everything without ever thinking about the money or how it will hurt or build your career. Just thinking about work.”
Wilde asked if this meant taking risks and not caring about failing. Allen replied, “Right! Once you start to think about do the newspapers like me, or did the audience like me, or am I making enough money, or should I be doing this? The only important thoughts are: Am I being as funny as possible in as many different ways. Once you view the rewards too tantalizingly, you’re dead. Then you start accepting and turning down jobs on the basis of how it affects your income tax. Then you might as well be working in Macy’s, except that the money is better in this business.”
Woody began production on his second stage play, Play It Again, Sam, in 1969. He was soon secretly entangled with Diane Keaton, who had auditioned for the play and been cast. Keaton hailed from Santa Ana, south of Los Angeles. Her father was a civil engineer; her mother had been a Mrs. Los Angeles. Keaton had come to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and her first important role on Broadway had been in the musical Hair. She was the only member of the cast who refused to take her clothes off. Louise was aware of the romantic connection between them, and she moved out of their apartment in June 1969. The marriage was over.
After ten years of trying to make the marriage work, Woody and Louise traveled to Mexico for a divorce in the spring of 1970. They held hands while appearing in court, which was emblematic of the affection and tenderness they still felt for each other and which had kept them together against the odds for a long time. “We had a good time,” Lasser said of the trip. “We stayed together that night in the same hotel room. We had a lot of what now appear contradictions like that. Because at the time we were still drawn together.” Lasser may have been much more drawn to Woody than he was to her at that point. His infatuation with Diane Keaton had begun. Lasser suffered a nervous breakdown soon afterward. He would continue to have both a personal and professional connection with Louise. In May 1970 Allen cast Lasser to star opposite him in Bananas.
Lasser has warm and good memories of Woody. She told Eric Lax in On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy (1975), “The worst thing in the world could happen to him and he could go in that room and write.… Considering how obsessed he is, he was really terrific to live with. There was never anything fragile about his work. He gets up and goes in and writes, but you can disturb him at any time. He’s not moody. He is demanding in that you pretty much have to do something when he wants. He’s very specific.… He’s ritualistic about a lot of things, like the food he eats and the time he eats.”
Allen spoke of both Diane Keaton and Lasser in an interview in the New York Times, with writer Natalie Gittelson in 1979. He said, “They both had more to give me than I had to give them. I couldn’t have accomplished half of what I accomplished without Louise.… [She] is a great woman, a great companion. Her comprehension of life is very great.”
In a 2014 interview Lasser said that “The relationship didn’t fully dissipate until a couple of years after we got divorced.” Asked if they were still in touch, she said, “We speak not that often, but he usually invites me to come at Thanksgiving. They live a block away. And I’ve gone a few times. But it’s all different. And your life goes different ways. It was such a strong part of my life, so public, in a sense, that you don’t just put it away, like ‘oh, when I went out with so-and-so.’ I think he talks about this relationship as the crazy relationship too.… It’s very strange when you’re that close to someone and then you’re not. But you speak, but you don’t know which part of you is having that conversation. And yet you do have an affection for that person.”
In another interview that year with Interview Magazine, she said, “It’s so great when people meet someone they can stretch with, that you want to be better than you are and they can stretch you.… I’ll forever be influenced by his work. A lot of my best work comes from his work.”
Allen was enamored of Keaton from the time he met her (at her audition for Play It Again, Sam), and very intimidated. His initial behavior with her seems an echo of the way Vicky Tiel described his behavior with women. “Outside of rehearsal, I was frightened to talk to her,” he told Jonathan Moor, author of Diane Keaton, “and she was frightened to talk to me, and we’d go home separately every night, and nothing ever happened.” This situation prevailed during out-of-town tryouts, but they became lovers by the time the play reached Broadway. Soon after, Lasser moved out of Allen’s apartment and Keaton moved in. Author and film critic Foster Hirsch wrote of Keaton’s appeal to Allen in his book about Allen:
Like many Jewish romantics he is drawn to shiksas whose pretty blonde blandness represents both forbidden fruit and the incarnation of the American dream.… Now Keaton is as deeply and intensely goyische as Woody is Jewish. Tall, lanky, with even features and a bland voice, Keaton is the real thing: a dyed-in-the-wool Californian Gentile.
Play It Again, Sam premiered at the Broadhurst Theater on February 12, 1969, and was an immediate hit, running 453 performances on Broadway. Allen added “Broadway actor and star” to his list of credentials. And he was becoming a good playwright: The play is a huge step ahead of Don’t Drink the Water. But that would be faint praise. Play It Again, Sam, despite Allen’s stated indifference to it, is a very good play. He knows his character (himself) well, and, unlike Don’t Drink the Water, which is saturated with his contempt for the individuals and the shallow Jewish milieu, here, of course, he loves him. Allen is once again the sex-starved writer, nervous, shy, insecure, a movie critic and nerd who fantasizes that Humphrey Bogart appears in his life to counsel him on how to win a woman and to become a man of courage and honor. The play begins with the voice of Bogart from a scene in The Maltese Falcon.
Allan Felix has just been divorced by his wife and is trying to put his life together again with the help of his best friends, Dick Christie (Tony Roberts), a slick Wall Street executive, and his neurotic wife, Linda (Diane Keaton). They try to set him up with a girl, and in one of the funniest scenes veering on slapstick Allen had ever done to that point, he completely screws up the opportunity and drives the befuddled girl away. (The scene is expanded and enhanced in the film version.) Linda, who shares many of his anxieties and fears, deeply identifies with him and is drawn to him, especially while Dick is away on business. Allan invites Linda over in the evening and is at a loss as to whether he should try to seduce her, and if so, how to do it. Bogart materializes at key moments, advising him on the moves he should make.
Play It Again, Sam is charming and adroit and holds up well. Allen’s dialogue is continuously fresh and funny: He sidles up to a cute girl at the museum looking at a Franz Kline painting and tries to engage her in conversation.
ALLAN: What does it say to you?
GIRL: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous, lonely emptiness of existence—nothingness—the predicament of man, forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void—with nothing but waste, horror and degradation—forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.
ALLAN: What are you doing Saturday night?
GIRL: Committing suicide.
ALLAN: What about Friday night?
Beneath the wisecracks, the one-liners, the hilarity, there is emotional resonance in the sense of utter frustration and unrequited lust that Allen depicts so well, tapping into an experience he went through at an earlier time in his life. Has anyone in film or the theater written about heterosexual lust and yearning so palpably, so desperately as Allen has? Has any male character practically frothed at the mouth (okay, “dribbled,” as Allen puts it) over women in public like this?
Allen may have contempt for his comic gift, but it is utterly unique.
During the rehearsals for Play It Again, Sam, “I fell for Allan [Allan Felix, Woody’s character in the play] as scripted, but for Woody as well,” Keaton wrote in her memoir, Then Again. “How could I not? I was in love with him before I knew him.… Our entire family used to gather around the TV set and watch him on Johnny Carson.… He was even better-looking in real life. He had a great body, and he was physically very graceful.
