Woody, p.24
Woody, page 24
Allen continued to publish his literary parodies of classic literature, scholarly biographies, theological histories, and philosophical treatises in The New Yorker, the New Republic, and other journals. They were usually a mixture of the metaphysical, the mundane, and the colloquial, the paradoxical clash between classical form and funny, outrageous content. They were often Jewish in subject matter and irreverent in their attitude toward Judaism and the Bible. Allen wrote me that he grew up reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, especially the Book of Job. His doubts about the existence of God permeate many of these tales, with their parodies of biblical stories and Jewish religious traditions, and their ridicule of rabbis. Yet he is always looking for some proof of God; failing to find it, he keeps spritzing about it, hocking a chainik (complaining, making a big fuss), somehow hoping against hope that God will surface somewhere, somehow. In “Hasidic Tales,” a woman questions a rabbi about why Jews were not permitted to eat pork. The rabbi replies, “We’re not? Uh oh.” In his version of the story of Job, “The Scrolls,” which Allen published in the New Republic on August 31, 1974, he wrestles with the problem of continuing to believe that God is just despite the reality of the Holocaust. Allen writes of the discovery by a shepherd of six parchment scrolls (as well as two tickets to the Ice Capades) inside large clay jars. The authenticity of the scrolls seems in doubt since “the word Oldsmobile appears several times in the text.” Allen quotes from the scrolls that the Lord sent six plagues, and that Job’s wife was angry, rent her garment, “and then raised the rent but refused to paint.” Allen rewrites Abraham’s command to sacrifice Isaac. God tells him that he was only joking and tweaks Abraham for being so gullible. “It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice.”
Then there is the case of the shirt salesman “smitten by hard times. Neither did any of his merchandise move nor did he prosper.” He beseeches the Lord: “I have kept thy commandments. Why can I not earn a living when mine younger brother cleans up in children’s ready-to-wear?”
And the Lord heard the man and said, “About thy shirts…”
“Yes, Lord,” the man said, falling to his knees.
“Put an alligator over the pocket.”
“Pardon me, Lord?”
“Just do what I’m telling you. You won’t be sorry.”
And the man sewed on to all his shirts a small alligator symbol, and lo and behold, suddenly his merchandise moved like gangbusters and there was much rejoicing while amongst his enemies there was wailing and gnashing of teeth.…
* * *
There are many accounts that dispel the image of Allen as being remote and aloof with people; these accounts come from people who were just starting out in life, who were not his peers. Craig Modderno told me one, and Steve Stoliar told me another. Stoliar is the author of the best book about Groucho Marx, Raised Eyebrows: My Years in Groucho’s House. When he was in his twenties he was Marx’s personal secretary and archivist, living in his home from 1974 to 1977. During that time he made two other friends: Dick Cavett and Woody Allen. Groucho had handed him Cavett’s autobiography and said, “Here, read this. You’ll like it.” Stoliar did like it very much, and wrote Cavett. They began corresponding, and when Marx died, they stayed in touch. One day Cavett wrote him, “By the way, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve shown some of your letters to Woody and he says they’re very well-written.” In 1982, when Stoliar was thirty, Cavett hired him to write for him at HBO and Stoliar moved from Hollywood to New York City.
“One day Cavett called,” Stoliar told me, “and said he noticed that Woody was shooting his latest film in the building around the corner from his apartment. He thought if we just sort of happened to walk in together, I could meet Woody. And I said, ‘He wouldn’t mind?’ And Cavett said, ‘Oh, I didn’t say that. I would fully expect him to say, “Really, Dickie, I wish you hadn’t.”’ So I was already afraid of meeting Woody. We went into this medical office where they were filming. There was a long hallway, and at the end of it there was a door that was open with a brilliant white light coming out of it, emanating from it; it was like the Wizard of Oz. Then the light went out, and I saw Woody and Mia Farrow come out of the office and talk with Cavett. And I’m just standing there, thinking it’s Cavett and Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Then I saw Cavett say something and then point to me, and all three of them turned and looked at me. And I did the standard pantomine of ‘Me?,’ looking behind me, and then I walked down what seemed like a very long hallway and I met them. And Woody said, ‘I’m Woody Allen and this is Miss Farrow and we’re here on the set of our latest motion picture.’ As though this was Entertainment Tonight or something.
“And what followed,” Stoliar continued, “was remarkable for its lack of remarkableness. It was just the four of us talking very comfortably. I was not snubbed; I mean, he knew who I was. And Cavett had said I’m okay. It meant that I was not only a drooling fan, even though I was. Woody mentioned he had tried to contact Greta Garbo when he was working on Zelig and he never heard from her. And Cavett said, ‘Well, did you send it to 132 East Fifty-eighth Street?’ Woody said yes. And I said, ‘You probably put the wrong apartment number on it.’ And Woody nodded seriously and said, ‘That was probably my mistake.’ Like yeah, you put Greta Garbo at 1A and she’s at 2A so it never got to her.
“So what they were filming was a scene in Hannah and Her Sisters, a flashback where Woody and Mia go to a doctor who informs them they can’t have children. And now whenever I see that scene, I know that’s the day I met him. And it was very comfortable.
“Cavett’s show was canceled, and I moved back to LA in 1985. And my correspondence with Woody began. When I started to think about writing a book about my Groucho years, I wrote to tell him. He wrote back that he thought it was a great idea, and there’d never really been a great one. When I finished I sent the manuscript to Woody, and he sent me back a letter that remains one of the proudest moments of my life. Because it was this effusive handwritten letter saying it’s one of the best books about a show-business icon he’d ever read. I asked him if we could use what he said on the dust jacket, and he wrote back and said it’s okay to use it, but just make sure your name is bigger than mine and include my comments with others. My book came out and did okay. I wrote to Woody about the lack of TV promotion for it, and he wrote back that can you imagine if Dickens or Tolstoy had to worry about going on television to promote their book? He said your book is a fine one and welcome to the club of people who try to do decent honest work and find it’s hard getting a big audience.
“I have only seen Woody in the flesh one time since New York. He came out here very briefly to shoot scenes for Scenes from a Mall [a rare instance of Woody acting in someone else’s film] and sent me a letter saying feel free to drop by the set, we can chat a little. So my wife, Angelique, and I went to the Beverly Center. Finally he came out of his dressing room, He said, ‘I’ll be glad when this is over,’ and his voice was slurry and weird. And I thought to myself, Oh God, it’s happened; he’s become old, he’s had a stroke, this is terrible. And then I looked and I saw the half-eaten Snickers bar in his hand. The other half was stuck in his cheek. He told me he had gone with Cavett to see Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca at a nightclub, and how Coca was quite old and frail. But as soon as they came out and started to perform, all the years melted away. So Woody and I talked about how there’s something about those troupers, those people who went through vaudeville, the rough times, who don’t let old age and illness get them down. They’re able to hit their mark when they have to.
“And then, in 2008, my wife died suddenly. And Cavett informed him of that. So I’ve gotten periodic letters in my grief recovery from Woody that have meant a whole lot to me. Because part of him is very nuts-and-bolts realistic about things, and certainly not saccharine or sentimental. But he’ll say things like ‘I know like it will never get better, but somehow we’re hardwired to deal with things like that. And it will get better even if it doesn’t seem like it ever will.’ And then in a later letter, saying something like ‘I can tell you’re doing better by the tone.’ It’s like, gee, you remember the tone of the letter I wrote you six months ago.
“I told him I was going to be writing a book about my life with Angelique, and the difficulty of going it alone after the sudden death of my spouse. And he wrote me, and he said he couldn’t believe I felt up to writing about this. He would stick his head in the sand ostrich-like until the worst of it passed over. It meant the world to me that he was essentially saying, ‘You’re doing something that I don’t think I could do.’ Because I have so much admiration for him, for all that he has accomplished and continues to accomplish.
“So between all those years, there’ve just been these wonderful, conversational letters—over forty of them—where he’d fill me in on what he was working on, something in the news that caught his attention, film reviews, jokes—and invariably he would end up with, Keep in touch, let me know how you’re doing. Especially in the depths of my depression over my wife’s death, to see that New York postmark brightened up my day. Once I was talking to Cavett on the phone and he said, ‘Well, Woody and I went for a walk in Central Park and I said, “Stoliar made an interesting observation.”’ And I had the feeling, Wow, Dick Cavett is talking about me with Woody Allen. Cavett continued, ‘Stoliar said that you and I are now older than Spencer Tracy was in Judgment at Nuremberg. And Woody stopped and stared at the ground and said, “Do you mind if we sit down for a minute?” And we both sat down on a bench in Central Park and Woody just kind of stared at the ground for a minute, taking that in.’”
* * *
Love and Death, released in 1975, was Allen’s parody of the works of the Russian artists he loved—Dostoyevsky and the Tolstoy of War and Peace—with references to Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Battleship Potemkin. Allen plays Boris, a coward (with touches of Bob Hope and Groucho) who doesn’t want to participate in the war against Napoleon but becomes an inadvertent hero. Boris gains the love of his cousin Sonia (Keaton), who decides that she and Boris will assassinate Napoleon. Still, it’s the same old Woody in his horn-rims (which also appear in Sleeper) and squeaky voice: schlemiel and stud, coward and hero. The references, as always, are often Jewish and/or contemporary: insurance salesmen as tormentors or “My Uncle Sasha picking up a check,” and with Yiddishisms thrown in for good measure (meeskite). And there are cheerleaders at the battle scenes. Allen superimposes his usual sexual frustrations and longings: On their wedding bed, when he tries to touch his wife, she says, “Don’t; not here.” In a childhood scene, Boris meets Death and asks him, “What happens after we die? Heaven? Hell? God? Are there girls?”
“By incorporating aspects of diverse (even antithetical) comic approaches [Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Hope, and Groucho] into his own unique comic outlook,” film critic Douglas Brode wrote, “Allen establishes himself as the end-product of the various styles that preceded him, all yoked together in one movie and one man.”
Like many of Allen’s films, Love and Death was panned by Stanley Kauffmann, the movie critic for the New Republic. Paul D. Zimmerman in Newsweek wrote that “we catch him at his best—more nervous, desperate and inspired than ever before. If there is a jittery edge to our laughter, it is because Allen, in this comic response to the angst of death, is treating something of a common problem.… [The film] bristles with Allen’s private terrors, which connect with our own.”
John Simon found the film a step backward from Sleeper: “a curious olio of night-club patter, revue sketches, and one-liners, most of them quite funny but uneasily stitched together. What comes out resembles a movie only as something midway between a crazy quilt and a potato sack resembles a suit of clothes.… There is a grave problem with Love and Death, hilarious as much of it may be. This sort of film wears thin too easily; laughter that is largely pointless becomes in the end exhausting.… We could have gotten roughly the same effect from laughing gas, sneezing powder or a mutual tickling session with a friendly prankster.”
Nevertheless, in spite of his criticism, Simon added a significant paragraph that, despite his negative reaction to the film, expressed appreciation of Allen and held out hopes for his future development. He wrote that his response to the film was “particularly saddening because Woody Allen is more than merely funny; at his best, he exhibits a penetrating intelligence—indeed, intellect—well beyond the mental means of our run-of-the-mill farceurs. Such intelligence can uncover, ridicule, and perhaps laugh out of existence genuine evils, and a little, a very little, of this elixir survives even in the anomic laugh-fest of Love and Death. But the movie stoops far too often to such things as a facile sight gag about a convention of village idiots that, when you come right down to it, yields laughter that leaves you with a bad taste in the soul.”
The film was yet another big moneymaker, grossing $20.1 million, the equivalent of $80.8 million today, and still ranks sixth among all of Allen’s films. These early films—Everything, Sleeper, and Love and Death—still outpace most of Allen’s more recent films, even Match Point, Bullets over Broadway, and Vicky Christina Barcelona.
* * *
Death, Allen’s one-act play, was published in 1975. Allen may have been influenced by Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit and Eugène Ionesco’s The Killer, but as with almost all of his work, the result is an autonomous one that stands on its own. Both Dürrenmatt and Ionesco dealt with the ominous visit of murderous strangers and the outbreak of madness in their wake. Allen’s play can be seen as an allegory of Nazism or of revolutionary movements that wind up like the murderous regimes they have initially opposed. His play is much more successful than its later incarnation as a film in 1990, Shadows and Fog, with its Brechtian overtones, underscored by its Kurt Weill / Threepenny Opera music, and burdened by its contradictory tones of drama and occasional comedy, with Allen sometimes injecting his “Woody” shtick into it.
In Death, a maniacal murderer is loose in an anonymous town. Kleinman (Allen) is the nebbish whom the townspeople wake from a warm bed and insist he take part in the vigilantes’ hunt for the killer. Since he is an Allen stand-in, Kleinman is ashamed of his own cowardice and wants to be left alone. Instead he finds himself in the middle of the manhunt, but no one seems to be able to tell him what the plan of action is. All of Kleinman’s questions are rebuffed, and he is treated with suspicion. He is the outsider, slightly comical, and we know we are never far from Woody, for Kleinman tells us, “I have a great fear of death! I’d rather do almost anything else than die!” When one of the men, Hacker, is murdered, the tension increases, and then the doctor is mortally shot as well. It turns out that Hacker was shot because he is a member of a “rival faction.” This is news to Kleinman, who knows nothing of factions. One of the men asks him, “You know about the rival faction, don’t you?” Kleinman replies, “I don’t know anything! I’m lost in the night.”
The play treats life as without rhyme or reason. What is certain is the constancy of human madness, of history’s chaos as it is shaped by irrational men. Faction upon faction forms, and they plan to kill one another. The anti-Hacker faction threatens Kleinman: Whose side is he on? In the tinderbox of violent revolutionary movements, one cannot remain neutral. Whichever side he joins, he will be killed by the other side. Allen’s deeply cynical feelings about political and social movements inform the play: The allegiances drown in blood and become indistinguishable from one another. While searching for the murderer, the townspeople turn into murderers and have no compunction about it. Whoever ultimately wins will write the version of events that suits their side (which is the theme of the dinner-table discussion, as articulated by the anarchist aunt in Judah Rosenthal’s Orthodox Jewish family in Crimes and Misdemeanors).
The atmosphere is one of utter confusion and chaos, and Allen renders it convincingly. The men challenge Kleinman: “Choose now, Kleinman, the moment is here!” Kleinman, the voice of reason, replies, “We’ll kill each other and the maniac’ll remain loose. Don’t you see?…” The men reject Kleinman’s neutrality and discuss killing him. One man tells Kleinman, “I’ve got a good mind to cut your throat, the way you shilly-shally.” No one objects. Earlier we hear echoes of anti-Semitism in the men and the policeman addressing Kleinman as “You stupid vermin” and “You worm.”
The townspeople find a solution in Spiro, the telepath. A clairvoyant, he will solve the case by sniffing around. Spiro sniffs Kleinman and declares that he is the murderer. The men and Gina, the town prostitute, gang up on Kleinman and decide to hang him. At the last minute the real murderer is discovered in the act of trying to strangle someone else. They all run off, and Kleinman, alone, is suddenly confronted by the real killer, who closely resembles him. Kleinman asks him why he kills. He replies, “I’m a screwball. You think I know?”
The maniac kills Kleinman. As he lies dying, the other men come upon him and ask if he’s afraid to die. In true Woodyesque fashion, Kleinman replies, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Soon after that the killer is spotted by the railroad tracks.
The men run off, leaving Kleinman to die.
Death is a successful one-acter. Like most of Allen’s plays, except Play It Again, Sam and The Floating Light Bulb, it doesn’t blaze with some of the originality and intensity of his best films. The play is not exactly derivative, but its Kafkaesque echoes and Kleinman’s characterization, yet another version of the Woody persona, keep it in a minor key. As a parable of twentieth-century madness, however, the play does resonate.
In 1976 Allen agreed to star in a film which he had not written and would not direct, The Front. The film dealt with the blacklist of Hollywood writers and artists that began in the late 1940s as a result of growing panic about the postwar international threat of Communism posed by the Soviet Union’s aggression in Eastern Europe and North Korea’s invasion of the South. Right-wingers in charge of the House Un-American Activities Committee saw a growing internal threat posed by the American Communist Party’s allegiance to Stalin and the USSR. They thought that Communist screenwriters would seek to impose their ideology on the films they were involved in. Hundreds of actors and writers were told they could clear their names only by becoming informers on their friends and families. If they didn’t, they could not work in the film industry.
