Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography

351 Pages·2005·1.53 MB·English

by  Marion Meade

The Unruly Life of Woody Allen
Marion Meade
For Katharine Rose Sprague
PROLOGUE
Grapes of Wrath
J
ANUARY 13,1992
It was crazy weather for January. A sudden balmy spell swept a froth of
showers and the fresh breezes of April into the city in the dead of winter. On
Fifth Avenue, tangled morning traffic inched south toward the crosstown
intersection at Seventy-second Street. Under a mottled gray sky, packs of MTA
buses, white-and-blue, bunched in twos and threes, crept like a rare breed of
tiger down the puddled asphalt of the Upper East Side, swerving royally past
fortresses guarded by chandeliered lobbies and spiked gates (where you could
buy a full-floor cooperative of eighteen rooms for $14 million); double-parked
limousines studded with diplomatic license plates; and imperial-guard doormen
all armed with glistening black umbrellas and silver whistles. On the side of
every building was clearly posted the constitutional law of the land:
ALL DELIVERIES
MUST GO THROUGH SERVICE ENTRANCE.
Number 930 Fifth Avenue is a creamy-colored chunk of limestone and brick,
its shiny steel-trimmed Art Deco canopy not facing Central Park but located
around the corner on narrow East Seventy-fourth Street. The buildings
shareholders live in big apartments with servants' quarters behind the kitchen
and wood-burning fireplaces. More often than not, they own country houses.
While 930 does not happen to be among the Avenues elite Social Register
addresses—those dozen or so buildings considered white-glove—it is definitely
blue-chip, and folks feel particular about their neighbors. They are partial to
prospective buyers who maintain a modest profile, which is why entertainers
with squealing fans never manage to make it past the co-op board.
Their most famous tenant is a man living in the duplex penthouse, whose
double terraces afford a sweeping view of the park—the Bethesda Fountain, the
lake, and Strawberry Fields to the west. (The penthouse had been written up in
Architectural Digest.) He had purchased the eight-room apartment twenty-two
years earlier, just as he was achieving fame and fortune in films, after being
hailed by one and all as a brilliant young stand-up comedian, the comic’s comic,
and he had lived there in comfort for most of his adult life. In December he
turned fifty-six. He still weighed 128 pounds, but his boyish physique had begun
to show signs of wear, and he looked like a smaller, frailer version of himself.
Even though he scorned face-lifts, as well as nip-and-tucks, his raggedy reddish
hair was stabilized with transplants and dye and combed forward to make
himself look youthful. He continued to sport the uniform of a sixties college
student: cotton sport shirts, cashmere sweaters, khakis, and tweed jackets. To
those who crossed his path in the lobby, he seemed uncommonly reserved. Some
of his neighbors judged him a sweetheart who could always be counted on for
generous donations to the block association. But to others he was a bit of a
sourpuss.
The trouble was that he did not, on the whole, enjoy people very much. There
were plenty of things he did appreciate—the New York Knicks, Groucho's gags,
Mahler's Fourth Symphony—but he had never felt at ease around people (with
some exceptions) or pets and animals (no exceptions). Riding the elevator up to
his penthouse, he was known to face the wall like Greta Garbo or stick his nose
in a paper to avoid conversation.
On this second Monday of January, after sleeping his usual seven hours, he
woke up in his king-size, four-poster, canopy bed with a blue-calico spread.
Outside his window, the skies were overcast and it was sprinkling. When the
weather was gray and drizzly, he felt reassured that life would go on forever.
Sunny days made him want to hide under the covers and think of dying.
A creature of habit, he seldom varied his early-morning routine of treadmill
and shower, followed by having his regular breakfast of prune juice and
Cheerios with raisins and sliced bananas as he read the New York Times. An
article reported that he had attended a cocktail party on Friday night, after a
private screening of a picture produced by his best friend, and that he sipped a
lovely Pavilion Blanc du Chateau Margaux 1986. After finishing the Times, he
practiced his clarinet for an hour and then departed for his editing office.
Ordinarily, he breezed around the city in his black Mercedes sedan, or a rattling
old station wagon, with his driver Don Harris behind the wheel. However, he
preferred walking the thirteen blocks to his office at 575 Park Avenue, usually
following the same route. At the intersection of Seventy-fourth Street and
Madison Avenue, he headed south past Clyde Chemists, which delivers
prescriptions to the luxury buildings on Fifth Avenue; past Ralph Laurens
flagship store where he had shot scenes for Alice, notably the one in which an
invisible Joe Mantegna sneaks into a changing booth with supermodel Elle
Macpherson; past the plush Polo restaurant in the Westbury Hotel—a block of
cherry-red awnings, where you could spend sixteen dollars on a half portion of
fettuccine with fresh crepes, Swiss chard, and mushroom cream; and finally into
the valley of the couture ghetto—the houses of Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani,
Valentino—before turning east to Park Avenue.
This morning, he was working on a new picture with his editor, Sandy Morse,
who had been with him for fourteen movies. At present, the movie's working
tide was "Woody Allen Fall Project '91," but eventually it would be called
Husbands and Wives. Over the years constant experimentation had enabled him
to devise an efficient method of working. He shot scenes in one or two setups;
dispensed with close-ups and worked only in master shots; eliminated actors'
rehearsals and allowed them to change dialogue; and seldom offered direction—
all shortcuts allowing him to finish a picture before he got sick to death of it.
This time, the use of handheld-camera techniques and long takes running up to
nine minutes permitted an even hastier shoot than usual. It was crude, off-the-
cuff filmmaking that, in the hands of a less-confident artist, could have spelled
amateur, but for him it meant principal photography could be completed ahead
of schedule. With every picture, he started out with a strong idea. Unfortunately,
however hard he tried, the original idea, gradually diluted along the way, never
made it to the screen exactly as planned. Personally, he often said, he didn't care
one way or the other what people thought of his films, just as he never saw his
pictures after release and never read reviews. More and more, as he grew older,
he thought of his work as self-therapy, a means, he said, of keeping busy "so I
don't get depressed." But even before the reshoots, he felt good about "Woody
Allen Fall Project '91," which was coming in under budget. Already in the
pipeline was his next project—his twenty-third film—a murder mystery in which
he would play an amateur detective. Shooting would begin in September.
Midway through the day, an assistant ordered takeout for him. It was his
regular lunch, the same type of sandwich that he had eaten for the last forty-five
years—tuna salad (or occasionally turkey for a change), no lettuce, no tomato,
on healthful white bread, followed by a Nesde* Crunch bar or chocolate cake
and coffee. On a typical winter evening, after leaving his office, he could be
found at Madison Square Garden, watching the New York Knicks from his
courtside seats behind the scorer's table. On Monday nights, he would head to
his weekly concert at Michael's Pub on East Fifty-fifth Street, where he had been
playing New Orleans jazz for more than two decades. Afterward, he would go
home, get a bite to eat, usually chocolate-chip cookies washed down with two
glasses of milk, and go to bed.
All things considered, there was much for Woody Allen to feel pleased about.
In recent months, he had earned $2 million for a series of TV commercials
promoting Italy's biggest supermarket chain. And in the bookstores, an adoring
new biography solidified the popular myths about himself and his beloved
leading lady, the golden-haired waif with the Dresden complexion and chiseled
cheekbones.
Midafternoon, Mia Farrow and her four-year-old son, Satchel, who is also
Woody’s son, stepped off the elevator into the foyer of Woody’s penthouse. The
actress reached under the umbrella stand for the key.
In backgrounds, Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow and Allan Stewart
Konigsberg could not have been more dissimilar—a Hollywood blue blood and a
Flatbush frog turned movie prince—but they had been together for a dozen
years, working side by side in thirteen films. As the quintessential Hollywood
couple of the eighties, the new Tracy and Hepburn, Woody and Mia were truly
an unusual pair—even for movie stars. They were not married. They did not
even live together.
Mia had nine children, three biological with her former husband, the
prominent conductor Andre Previn, five adopted, and one, Satchel, whom
Woody and Mia had together. Because the commotion made by so many
youngsters jangled Woody’s nerves, Mia had remained on the opposite side of
the park in her eight-room home at 135 Central Park West, the apartment in the
Langham where Woody had filmed the Thanksgiving scenes in Hannah and Her
Sisters. On a clear day, according to local Mia-Woody folklore, the lovers could
gaze at each other across the expanse of Central Park through binoculars and
wave towels. Several weeks earlier, Woody had co-adopted two of Mia’s five
adopted children—Korean-born Moses, thirteen, and six-year-old Dylan. While
he doted on Dylan, Woody never managed to form a strong bond with his own
little boy. Whether for this reason or not, Satchel O'Sullivan Farrow had begun
experiencing emotional difficulties. When playing dress-up, for example, he
didn't care to act the Prince, and instead always pleaded for the part of
Cinderella. His father considered his son wanting to play Cinderella a problem,
and so Satchel began therapy with a clinical psychologist in June of 1990, at
which time he was only two years and seven months old. Instead of consulting
Dr. Susan Coates at her office, Satch had his sessions at his fathers apartment. It
would not do for word to leak out that Woody’s little boy, hardly more than a
baby, who was until recently breastfeeding, was so screwed up that he required a
shrink.
For the hour Satch was closeted with the gender specialist, his mother waited
in the den. In the room where she settled into a chair, there were floor-to-ceiling
bookshelves and a comfortable desk, although Woody did his writing with pencil
and legal pad upstairs on his bed. The coffee table was always cluttered: He
subscribed to National Geographic, The New York Review of Books, The New
Republic, and there were piles of books, as well as bowls of nuts and fancy
candies. To pass the time, Mia thumbed through The Crooked
Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin, rhe philosopher who is Woody’s favored
essayist. When the telephone rang, she answered knowing that it would be
Woody. The previous evening, as on other Sunday nights, they had spent
together in her kitchen eating a meal of takeout Chinese with the kids, but there
was always news to exchange, and so they spoke on the telephone four or five
times a day. After hanging up, she stepped over to the fireplace, where she
reached for a box of tissues on the mantel. Under the box, a stack of Polaroid
photos caught her eye. They showed a naked woman draped across a sofa,
posing suggestively with her legs spread apart, and Mia stared at the pictures in
shock and horror. As she wrote in her autobiography, What Falls Away, "It took
me a moment to realize that it was Soon-Yi," her nineteen-year-old daughter,
who to her knowledge lacked any sexual experience, who had never had a date,
not so much as a phone call from a boy.
Within minutes she was dialing Woody’s office. "I found the pictures!" she
screamed. "Get away from us!" Then she phoned her daughter, who hung up on
her. "Totally traumatized," she felt as if a stake had been hammered through her
heart.
Shortly thereafter, she was seen tearing through the lobby with her son in tow.
Her flushed face and rumpled clothing did not seem extraordinary to Woody’s
neighbors at 930 Fifth. Accustomed to the sight of her yanking around a crew of
kids, her tousled hair looking like a hayloft, one occupant recalled, "She always
looked like she had just left a mental hospital or was on her way to one."
In the dusky air, the lamps along the footpaths were flickering on
automatically as Mia bundled Satchel into a cab and crossed the park with the
photographs tucked in her bag. In the hallway of her apartment, she met one of
her twin sons. "Woody’s been fucking Soon-Yi," she announced to twenty-one-
year-old Sascha. "Call Andre." Then she raced into Soon-Yi s room with the
pictures. Her voice rose to a screech. "What have you done?"
"Twenty minutes after she found the Polaroids," remembered one of Mia's
intimates, "everyone in the family knew about it."
Soon afterward, the glass-and-wrought-iron door of the Farrow apartment
burst open. Using his personal key, Woody let himself in and headed down the
hall toward Mia’s bedroom. Behind the closed door, he admitted to an affair that
he said had started a few weeks earlier at Christmas. The Polaroids were shot
only the previous night, after dinner, upon their return to his apartment. While
sitting around talking, Soon-Yi spoke of wanting a modeling career and
suggested he take pictures of her. He found a camera, she undressed, they
embarked on an impromptu photo shoot. He recalled having posed her on the
sofa, telling her to "lay back and give me your most erotic poses. Let yourself
go."
These explanations, however, sounded preposterous to Mia. The photographs
did not appear to be posed because Soon-Yi was laughing. They had an eerily
spontaneous quality. Horrified that he had dared to seduce her daughter, Mia also
felt disgusted about the pictures, which looked pornographic and were left in
plain view on the mantel for anyone to see. Astonished by her references to
pornography, Woody replied that no sexual acts were shown and would later
describe the snapshots as nothing but "graphic, erotic pictures taken between two
consenting adults."
That night, he failed to show up at Michaels Pub for his weekly performance.
For several hours, he remained in Mia’s room. Although he was not quite sure
what to tell her, he continued to assure her of his love, she would later recall.
The escapade with her daughter, he said, was an insignificant flirtation, "a tepid
little affair" that had run its course anyway. He told her that they would get
through this bad time and hopefully build a stronger relationship. It might even
turn out to be a positive experience for Soon-Yi in the long run. Certainly the girl
had not been exploited. She was, after all, an adult who had not been forced to
do anything against her will. As he reminded Mia, he was not Soon-Yis father or
stepfather, not even a father figure. Throughout his explanations, Mia barely
listened. She was unable to stop crying. Afterward, reporting to a friend, she
described her humiliation as "a meltdown of my very core." Woody, too, would
remember that she sounded incoherent, "beside herself in rage and anger."
Unprepared to play this sort of richly emotional scene, he fled from the
apartment when it became more than he could bear.
An hour later, as Mia and the children were having supper, he reappeared. In
the kitchen, he stood silently behind the table at first and watched them eating.
Nobody spoke to him. Stonefaced, they stared into their plates. In desperation,
he sat down at the table and started "chatting with the two little ones, said hi to
everybody" as if nothing had happened, Mia would remember. But one by one
the older children picked up their plates and left the room.
Almost anywhere in the world, Woody Allen was a household name. With a
face as familiar as that of Elvis or Marilyn, he was famous enough to be known
by his first name. Everyone recognized the sober demeanor, the trademark black-
rimmed glasses, the floppy tan hat that he adopted as a public disguise but which
seldom fooled anyone. After thirty years in the spotlight—as comic actor, movie
star, author, serious director, amateur musician, maverick filmmaker, and
professional neurotic—he was a living legend considered by many to be
Americas most brilliant humorist, an artist of indisputable originality, a master of
irony, the darling of the intelligentsia. Incredibly, he had turned out no fewer
than twenty-one features, some classics of the screen and a number of clinkers,
but still a formidable record matched by few contemporary filmmakers.
Numbers, however, did not begin to convey his universal appeal. Between
1968 and 1977, he had done nothing less than make the whole world love him
and his movies. How could anyone forget Take the Money and Run and the most
hilarious bank holdup ever filmed, the obvious absurdity of an incompetent
crook with crummy penmanship hoping to succeed with a handwritten note? He
had us roaring in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were
Afraid to Ask), when his frantic medieval court jester tries to pick the lock of the
queens chastity belt. "I must think of something quickly," he murmurs to
himself, "because before you know it the Renaissance will be here, and we'll all
be painting." And who else but Woody could create the sheer fun of Bananas,
when his character feeds the rebel troops by ordering takeout from a local greasy
spoon: "A thousand grilled cheese sandwiches, three hundred tuna fish, two
hundred b.l.t. s (one on a roll), and coleslaw for a thousand, mayo on the side."