“I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.”
HIS deciduous, mud-red hair has been dried in a wind tunnel. His posture would be unsatisfactory for a question mark. His adenoidal diction suggests that he learned English from records —played at the wrong speed. He has the kind of profile that should not be painted but wallpapered.
Peering dolefully at the world through weed-colored glasses, Woody Allen looks like a one-man illustration of the blind leading the halt. Nonetheless, at 36, he has become one of America’s funniest writers and certainly its most unfettered comedian. He is also among its most amply rewarded artists. He has produced three bestselling record albums, and written two Broadway hits. Six movies using the Allen talent have grossed more than $35 million. The New Yorker publishes his prose. His last movie, Play It Again, Sam, is doing brisk business in neighborhood theaters across the U.S., while he is feverishly finishing his latest film, soon to be released, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). The relationship to Dr. David Reuben’s bestseller is tenuous, and the movie will probably deserve an R rating (for Rabelaisian). In it, Gene Wilder plays a doctor madly in love with a sheep; and Allen plays, among other wonders, a sperm cell, a libidinous fail ure named Victor Shakapopolis, a spider, and a court jester caught by a king in the arms of a queen. For the film, Allen has written sketches starring Burt Reynolds, Heather MacRae, Lynn Redgrave and John Carradine as victims of everything from satyriasis to frigidity. Sex is certain to escalate Woody’s current price for writing and directing a film to 10% of the gross. So why is this man weeping?
Family Curse. Well, according to Woody, his ascent has been a series of painful falls. Success hasn’t changed him, Allen insists: he’s still a schlemiel. “I’m afraid of the dark and suspicious of the light,” he says. “I have an intense desire to return to the womb—anybody’s.” Ineptitude, Woody goes on, is a family curse. The Allens date back to Rome, where they catered orgies. They later surfaced in England in 1500—they wanted to go to Italy for the Renaissance, but couldn’t get hotel reservations. They came finally to Brooklyn, where, when Woody was born, the family put a Teddy bear—a live one—into his crib. As a boy, Woody was heavily burdened by the Judaeo-Christian tradition: “When we played softball, I’d steal second, then feel guilty and go back.” He wanted a dog desperately, but there was no money. “So my parents got me an ant. I called it Spot.”
Obscurity and hard luck dogged him as an adult. He got married, but in union there was alimony. “I kept putting my wife under a pedestal.” True, he has enjoyed outsize success, but Allen is 5 ft. 6 in. and 122 Ibs.; almost everything he tries on is too large. His new book, Getting Even, contains a capsule biography of the author. The last line: “His one regret in life is that he is not someone else.”
If not Woody, who? Nobody, really. The Allen persona — the urban boy-chik as social misfit — is, of course, an act, a put-on, no more the real performer than Chaplin’s tramp or Jack Benny’s miser. Still it does contain grains of truth, along with lecithin, gum arabic and .2% sodium benzoate to retard spoilage. Like all great comedians, Allen consumes his roots, and very often the public schleprechaun blurs into the private comic who would rather talk about anything but himself. As he admits, even his most outrageous gags are a form of autobiography, a reflection in the amusement-park mirror he calls a mind.
He was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Flatbush. His father, Martin Konigsberg, had a light brush with show biz — he once served as a waiter at Sammy’s Bowery Follies — but spent most of his life dabbling in the jewelry business. A poor boy in the urban maze is usually a constant dreamer. Sometimes he dreams of sex: young Allen Stewart, as Woody recalls, was preoccupied with girls whose bodies wouldn’t quit probably because his own seemed to give up when he was 14. Sometimes he dreams of assuming authority — or flouting it. In high school, Allen tried to become a featherweight boxer, and spent many an afternoon fleeing the truant officer. Out of experience came a typical self-deprecatory gag. “I wanted to be an FBI man,” Woody will moan. “But you have to be five-foot-seven and have 20/20 vision. Then I toyed with becoming a master criminal—but you have to be five-foot-seven and have 20/20 vision.”
This ability to merchandise his misery provided Allen’s escape from the ghetto. His IQ may have been astronomical, but the figures on his exams at Midwood High School bottomed out below C level. “It was a school for emotionally disturbed teachers,” he says. “I failed to make the chess team because of my height.” Lines like that fractured Allen Konigsberg’s fellow juniors. For laughs—and a few bread crumbs—the class clown sent them on to columnists under an assumed name.
“My first printed joke,” he recalls, “was in a gossip column. It read: ‘Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. prices—over people’s salaries.’ ” Dreadful by any standards, and thus ideal for the likes of Winchell, Ed Sullivan and Earl Wilson, whose columns ate up more material than the gypsy moth caterpillar. Allen placed a dozen lines at a time. Their frequency, if not their quality, caught the notice of a pressagent named Dave Alber, who signed up Woody, then 17, to write japes for other people’s credit. “Every day after school,” he remembers, “I would take the subway to Manhattan, and knock out 30 to 40 gags for famous people to say. I was thrilled. I thought I was in the heart of show business.”
It was more like the appendix. His salary was a miserable $25 a week. After a false start as a collegian at New York University and City College, he went back to being a full-time funnyman—first for the late Herb Shriner (for $75 a week), then for Singer Pat Boone, Garry Moore, Art Carney and Sid Caesar. By the time he went to work for Caesar, Woody was making $1,500 a week. He had also acquired three new fields to mine for comedy: an apartment, an analyst, and a wife, Harlene Rosen. He was 19, she was 16. The marriage lasted five nettling, unsettling years. Allen learned to deal with melancholy by furnishing it with a punch line. “For a while we pondered whether to take a vacation or get a divorce. We decided that a trip to Bermuda is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have.”
Vulgar Parlance. The gag illustrates Allen’s reliance on a comic device that is as old as Aristophanes—the principle of inversion or, in more vulgar parlance, the old switcheroo. Woody’s divorce joke, in fact, is merely an updated version of a line used by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “If I ever get married,” drawls Algernon, “I’ll certainly try to forget the fact. . . Divorces are made in Heaven.” For a time, Allen used so many switches that friends in the trade referred to him as Allen Woody. He carried a sword on the street, he said; in case of an attack it turned into a cane, so people would feel sorry for him. He carried a bullet in his breast pocket; someone threw a Bible at him and the bullet saved his life.
At parties and story conferences, Allen tossed off these lunatic lines in a tone that seemed to blush for its presumption. Only a polished comic, he thought, could do them proper injustice. So Allen’s managers, Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, decided to buff him until he shone. After all, 15% of a writer’s salary barely pays the office rent. But 15% of a star. . .
In 1961 Allen made his debut as a performer at a dim Greenwich Village boîte called the Duplex. It was a fairly unusual première: few audiences, after all, have ever seen a man turn pale green every night. “It was the worst year of my life,” admits Woody. “I’d feel this fear in my stomach every morning, the minute I woke up, and it would be there until I went on at 11 o’clock at night. I was trying to be cerebral. I was writing for dogs with high-pitched ears.”
Making Tracks. There were few barks and many bites. Even Joffe confesses, “Woody was just awful. Of course he had good lines. But he was so scared and embarrassed and—rabbity. If you gave him an excuse not to go on, he’d take it. Woody quit five or six times. We’d sit up all night talking him out of it.”
Eventually, though, the rabbit began making tracks. The Blue Angel in New York, Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, the hungry i in San Francisco, all booked Allen. Soon the head scratching, the awkward pauses, the double-knit eyebrows and paranoid chatter went public on the talk shows. There were bits and pieces of humor drawn from Allen’s wrestling matches with his head candler, but mostly he talked about his old neighborhood, where the kids were so tough they stole hubcaps from moving cars. His parents, Woody said, believed in God and carpeting. As for Harlene, he described her as “extremely childish. One time I was taking a bath and, for no reason at all, she came in and sank my boats.”
Here again were fragments of truth. The undersized childhood, the suffocating early years, the immature marriage, all were carefully packaged for retail. “My material was really true,” he confesses, “except that it was exaggerated.”
Sometimes surrealistically. He spoke of the modern artist who tried to cut off his ear with an electric razor, the Eskimo crooner who sang Night and Day for six months at a time—and the twelve fugitives from a chain gang who escaped by posing as an immense charm bracelet.
The late Producer Charles Feldman thought gags like that belonged on the screen. He signed Woody, then at the Blue Angel, to write the script for a bathroom farce called What’s New, Pussycat? The lines were awful and so was Woody; in a small part, he gave a convincing imitation of a man badly frightened by a producer. With Pussycat, says Allen, “I learned something about picturemaking. When you’re making a big picture for $4,000,000, there are a lot of people around, and they tell you they are PROTECTING THE INVESTMENT. They wanted a girl-girl sex-sex picture to make a fortune. I had something else in mind. They got a girl-girl sex-sex picture which made a fortune.”
More than $14 million, in fact —enough to assure him of a second shot at film making. Before that, he played, improbably, the nephew of one 007 in Casino Royale. Allen got no scenarist’s credit for the film, but audiences could sense his touch throughout. “I have a low threshold of death,” he bleated in one scene, as a firing squad counted down, aiming their rifles at his sunken chest.
In addition to his movie work. Woody put together his first record album (based on his nightclub routines) and wrote his first play—Don’t Drink the Water, about a typical New Jersey family mistaken for spies in Eastern Europe. He had acquired the ultimate badge of show-biz success: his first divorce. Harlene later sued him for defamation of character, citing his repeated insults on the Tonight Show. (“The Museum of Natural History took her shoe and, based on her measurement, they reconstructed a dinosaur.”) In 1966 Allen was married again, this time to Actress Louise Lasser, daughter of S. Jay Lasser, the tax expert. Woody could have used a little of his father-in-law’s advice: his income was around $250,000 a year.
Perfect Sense. It is the mark of the eccentric that he considers himself normal; it is only the world that views him as odd. To Allen, the East 79th Street duplex in Manhattan that he now shared with Louise made perfect sense. It had a striking Aubusson rug, a Tiffany lamp, a newly decorated interior. His old apartment had contained a bed in the middle of the floor—and little else. The new main room held a billiard table —and nothing else. The ceilings concealed tiny spotlights to illuminate pictures on the walls. But there were no pictures on the walls. The Nolde watercolor, the Kokoschka drawing and the Gloria Vanderbilt paintings were stacked up somewhere, awaiting the decision that their owner could not make. The Wurlitzer jukebox was loaded with records but remained unplugged.
Woody scarcely had time to enjoy his oddly luxurious surroundings. He worked, in fact, with a demonic, almost humorless passion—writing parodies and vignettes for The New Yorker, confecting new nightclub and television routines, searching vainly for the ultimate one-liner. Sporadically, he took time out to spice up campaign speeches for New York City Mayor John Lindsay. He also coauthored, directed and starred in a hilarious, self-inflicted wound of a film called Take the Money and Run. It was the first movie over which Allen had total control, and the first in which the quintessential Allen style surfaced, blemishes and all.
Money, the saga of an inept robbing hood, was hip, paranoid and eclectic, and it had the fuzzy continuity of a fever dream—rather like the early Marx Brothers movies, or the last films of W.C. Fields. It also had a fine eye for the human cartoon. Allen, playing the master criminal of his youthful fantasies, stands by while a bank teller tries to decipher his scrawl: “I have a gub.” The holdup man insists that the word is “gun”; the teller consults higher authorities, thereby spiking the heist. Even Allen’s penmanship, it turns out, is masochistic. Occasionally there was a flat, tasteless line, but audiences howled, and the film made money. Allen took it and ran.
In 1969 he wrote and starred in a Broadway hit play about a recently divorced nebbish with an acute inability to score. The show, not surprisingly, coincided with the breakup of his marriage to Louise Lasser. Play It Again. Sam—even brighter in the film than onstage—features the visible shade of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, plus several unseen ghosts. “I never had a teacher who made the least impression on me,” Woody says. “If you ask me who are my heroes, the answer is simple and truthful: George S. Kaufman and the Marx Brothers.” In Play It Again, Sam, they are all over the screen; yet somehow Woody’s strabismic vision always remains completely his own. Even Groucho Marx declares, “They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He didn’t. He’s an original. The best. The funniest.”
Willing Writer. Allen’s spoken words often have a slapdash, off-the-cuff quality—most outrageously displayed in his film What’s Up, Tiger Lily, a Japanese melodrama bearing Woody’s hilarious non-sequitur dubbing. Yet his written prose displays the tongue-and-groove perfectionism of a genuine craftsman. “Allen is a marvel of a willing and hard-working writer,” says Roger Angell, fiction editor of The New Yorker. “The first things he submitted to us were funny, but not really written; one heard a stand-up comic —good jokes, but just jokes. Allen has made himself an accomplished writer.”
How accomplished can be seen in a delicious parody called Death Knocks, Woody’s screwball homage to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In Allen’s piece, the game is not chess but gin rummy, and the role of the crusader is played by Nat Ackerman, a dress manufacturer. Death refuses to pay for his losses. “Why should you need money?” Ackerman inquires. Death: “What are you talking about? You’re going to the Beyond—you know how far that is?” Ackerman: “So?” Death: “So where’s gas? Where’s tolls?” Nat: “We’re going by car!” The Chrysler to oblivion could easily have been concocted by S.J. Perelman. The master parodist’s influence shows in another sketch. Notes from the Overfed. Allen writes, after reading Dostoevsky and Weight Watchers magazine on the same plane trip: “I am fat. I am disgustingly fat … My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat … If there is a God, then tell me, Uncle, why there is poverty and baldness? Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?”
In A Look at Organized Crime, he fearlessly exposes the blood code of the Mafia (“Death is one of the worst things that can happen to a Cosa Nostra member, and many prefer simply to pay a fine”). In this, and in most of his other recent pieces, Allen displays a debt to the creator of the Blind Explanation, Robert Benchley (“There is no such place as Budapest”). “Benchley has become a new idol for me,” Allen says today. “Perhaps because everybody else also imitates Perelman’s complicated style, I’ve tried to get simpler, like Benchley, and to write about subjects that really concern me.”
Such as? “Well, from the time I get up till the time I get to sleep, I think constantly about sex and death.” In this he is not too dissimilar from the rest of humankind. But there is a dark side to Allen’s obsession that occasionally hovers above the laughter. From the beginning, for instance, he has been fond of ambiguous God jokes: “The message is, God is love, and you should lay off fatty foods.” God references appear throughout his films and sketches. In a piece called Mr. Big, Allen, a hard-cooked private I, is on the lookout for the Supreme Being. “Somebody with that description just showed up at the morgue,” the cops tell him. “It’s the work of an existentialist.” How can you tell? he argues. “Haphazard way how it was done. Doesn’t seem to be any system followed. Impulse.”
Allen admits that such lines are made of barbed wire. “I write comically because things look that way to me,” he says. “But I’m deadly serious. I don’t watch funny movies; I watch Ingmar Bergman. He’s concerned with the silence of God, and in some small way, so am I. I keep watching movies like The Seventh Seal or Shame again and again and again.” Indeed, as Actor Wilder recalls the making of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, “it was like walking on a Bergman set, people talking in whispers, serious looks on Woody’s face. He communicates through silence.”
Sometimes the shadow of Bergman is unrecognizably fitted with cap and bells. In Bananas, Allen’s most personal film, two groups of cloaked mourners carrying crucified figures from some penitential Latin ritual vie for the same parking space; the solemnity of the processional dissolves into a hilarious brawl. The devout might wince at the seeming irreverence, but everything is insultable in Allen’s anything-for-a-one-liner aesthetic. The script’s most outrageous joke has a buxom black woman taking the stand and giving her name: “J. Edgar Hoover.” “I didn’t have that joke until the woman came in for casting,” recalls Allen. “She looked like Hoover, so I wrote it in.” Funny. Yet, as Nietzsche observed, a joke is an epitaph on an emotion. In the Allen oeuvre, there is sometimes a certain lack of real feeling, a casual and unconsidered irreverence that sows salt in its own turf.
Sex Comedy. Allen simply cannot leave sacred cows unbutchered. Sometimes he is killingly funny: other times, he is overkillingly vulgar. He is likely to be considered both, with Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. “It’s the first real sex comedy,” he says. “I don’t think Pillow Talk or // Happened One Night are sex comedies. I’m talking about everything from achieving orgasm to homosexuality to prostitution. In this movie we go outside, through, around and inside the body. I may never get another date.”
A recent film asked the question: Is There Sex after Death? For Allen, the interrogation should be reversed. Will there be Death after Sex?
“Well—in a way,” he answers. “This summer, for the first time in my life, I’m going to write a deadly serious play —a pure drama.”
At this, the Allenite experiences an involuntary shudder. When the clown plays Hamlet, the experience is almost invariably catastrophic. And when he writes it… Is this the end of the paranoid’s paranoid?
“Woody will never let go of the comic character,” predicts his pal Dick Cavett. “Of all the things he’s worked on, the one that took the most energy and revision was his own stand-up routine. And he never turns off his comic mind. We can be talking away at a cash register after lunch and he’ll start scribbling a new one-liner on the back of the check.” Besides, Woody couldn’t stop being funny if he wanted to. No one watching him in Play It Again, Sam as he holds up a record jacket, only to have the LP take off like a Frisbee, can doubt the words of an agent who recently watched Woody trip over his shoelaces on Fifth Avenue. “My God,” he said, “he’s a natural.”
So he is. It takes no tarot deck to foresee a day, 30 years hence, when the last surviving movie theaters will be mounting Woody Allen festivals containing hours of the best sight and sound gags of the epoch.
But can Allen be something more than the undisputed master of one-liners? Can he actually write an unfrivolous play? A serious work? In his own apartment on Upper Fifth Avenue, Woody Allen remains as curious as the next man—and the next man, he worries, is tapping the phone and peering through the keyhole. The pad is neoclassic Allen. The windows have been widened, the duplex thoroughly decorated (“It looks,” says Cavett, “like the set for the George Arliss movie, The Man Who Played God”). On the terrace, the meticulously arranged Japanese garden features live plants and coiled-up rubber snakes to frighten away the pigeons. One afternoon, a rubber snake fell from the terrace and landed on a lady below. She sued, of course.
In the Sunshine. A few other aspects of the comic’s life are new: his steady girl friend Diane Keaton, for instance, the best friend’s winsomely sympathetic wife in Play It Again, Sam. He has learned how to relax by playing a competent clarinet with a traditional Dixieland band in public—sans gags. But Allen remains wedded to a demonic schedule. “Woody’s life is his work,” says Diane. “He is just not a relaxer. I can’t imagine him lounging around the pool in the sunshine in that white skin.” Admits Woody: “I have to work every day. Otherwise I hear voices nagging me on and on.” The voices are no longer of parents or classmates, managers or audiences. “The only race I run now,” Allen figures, “is with myself.”
It is a race worth running, even on a muddy track, and with tough competition. And suppose the rabbit were to go all the way—Woody Allen, dramatist. That just might be what Allen Stewart Konigsberg has been searching for all his life: the biggest one-liner of them all
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