CLOSE-Urr -
bridge parlor on the first floor of a quaint
old Park Avenue hotel. "This is where I
make my films," Allen says, as if he could
be talking about cookies or knishes. The
cluster of offices, editing rooms, and
screening room has the musty ambience of
Grandma's house. In one editing room
there is a display of up-to-date video equip-
ment. Allen says it was bought for review-
ing stock footage used in his hilarious
mock-documentary Zelig (in which he
played, appropriately, the quintessential
Little Man Who Wasn't There) and that he
hates it and it's going. A little too up-to-
date, perhaps.
In some ways it's the suite that time
forgot. Almost too conveniently, it sym-
bolizes Allen's hard-won remove. A big
plump couch at the back of the screening
room is where the Woodman twineth. He
wraps himself in cushions and hugs an
overstuffed pillow to his understuffed
body, the way a kid might build a little play
fortress. He is safe here. But is he too safe?
Or is he just safe enough? These are the
questions we have come to ask. Now fess
Disturbingly Happy
For a supposed recluse, Woody Allen
sure gets a lot of publicity. And for a
supposed neurotic, he certainly sounds
content. In a Rolling Stone interview
in April, he allowed that he dislikes leav-
ing Manhattan, and rarely does; hasn't
hasn't driven a car in 25 years; has
never been to a shopping mall; and
never watches his own films "anyplace,
ever. They disappoint me."
He says that growing up in Flatbush,
he hated school, in part because his
teachers "were backward and anti-
Semitic."
Still, Woody Allen sounds quite hap-
py with his lifestyle, which consists of
making movies and, when they're
finished, starting the next one. He says
his parents, whose basic home values
were "God and carpeting," were
crushed when he flunked out of college
at a time when all of his friends were go-
ing to college to become lawyers and
doctors. But he had confidence in him-
self. "I was lucky I had a talent to be
amusing," he says. "If I hadn't, I would
have been in great peril."
As for the oft-heard criticism that he
should go back to making the kind of
funny movies he used to do, he respond-
ed: "Well, it has never really meant a
thing to me what anyone said. I'm just
sort of going the route I've chosen to
go. If people like it, they like it, and if
they don't, they don't. Crowd pleasing
just never interested me."
Now does that sound unstable?
G.R.
26 . FRIDAY, JULY- 24,-1987
up, Woody. Come clean, ya little runt! Why
I'll shake you and shake you, and I'll shake
the answers out if I have to! Jeez, I
outweigh the guy by about one hundred
pounds. I could really mop up the room
with him.
Maybe it's the fact that he considers
himself a perennial hapless target for
assault that keeps one from dreaming of
laying a hand, or a nasty question, on him.
Besides, this is the guy who made Annie
Hall the first Woody Allen movie people
cried at, as well as Manhattan ("You've got
to have a little faith in people") and Love
and Death ("I'm dead, and they're talking
about wheat") and of course, Hannah and
Her.Sisters ("I had a great time tonight,
really. It was like the Nuremberg Trials").
Not to mention his early knockabout
farces, Take the Money and Run ("I have
a gub pointed at you") and Bananas ("Hey
Ralph, how much is a copy of Orgasm.?").
And Zelig and Sleeper and Broadway
Danny Rose.
At fifty-one, Woody Allen barely looks
forty-one, except when he takes off his
trademark nerdy glasses and rubs his
poached-egg eyes. He is usually described
as having an urban pallor; in fact, his com-
plexion is mildly angelic, something un-
touched by the ravages of nature, like, say,
Loretta Young. When you meet Woody,
who tends to make himself look more
disheveled on the screen, you can under-
stand what has attracted such formidable
women as Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton,
and now, Mia Farrow to him — what they
see in him and what, maybe, they want to
protect. Woody Allen as much as any other
public male made it all right to be anxious
and nervous and scared, particularly about
sexual performance, and still be masculine.
We'll never know how many college boys
got laid with Woody's help.
In Woody's film-making lair, one finds
knickknacks and toys, but no awards.
Annie Hall won four Oscars, including
Best Picture. Best Director and best
original screenplay (with Marshall
Brickman) both went to Woody, but a year
after the ceremony, he claimed still not to
know, or care, where the Oscar statuettes
were. The Oscar represents to Woody that
most dubious of achievements, popularity.
Eventually, though, Woody's Oscars did
show up.
"Now they reside with my father, in his
apartment," he says. "It's my father who
polishes them. They came to my office. My
secretary called up and said, 'What do you
want to do with these?' Well, I'm certain-
ly not going to put Oscars in my house!"
No number of Oscars would cheer him.
"I'm sad to say, it doesn't do much for me
personally. I'm aware of what I think of the
film and what the problems with Hannah
were." Naturally he will be a no-show on
Oscar night in Hollywood. That stupid
clarinet again. Couldn't he break with
"Mia is the one who drives the
tractor and knows how to fix
the TV. I'm the one who turns
to the fashion page and says,
`Look what De la Renta's come
up with.' "
tradition just this once? "No. There'd be no
chance in the world. Not out of any big
drive or anything. It's just not my interest,
or not my bag, not an area I function in.
You'll probably think this is being over-
cute, but I don't mean it that way — I
probably will be playing jazz that night,
as I take that very seriously. I've rarely
missed an evening in fifteen years. It's one
of the pleasures of my life. We play on Mon-
day evenings, and the Academy Awards are
Monday evenings."
Woody says that if he couldn't have been
Woody Allen, he would like to have been
Louis Armstrong, that's how much his
music means to him. He would also gladly
trade places with Marlon Brando ("his in-
fluence is like the Big Bang theory; it's still
expanding"), but not with the late Cary
Grant, who came to see him one night at
Michael's Pub, stayed for three hours, and
brought along copies of Allen's books to be
autographed, which astounded Woody no
end. "He was stunning to look at and
wonderfully charming," he recalls.
Those who follow Woody's work closely
also tend to follow his life closely. When he
started directing in 1968, he was still fresh
from stand-up comedy, his pictures were
joke parades, and he was a footloose sprite
who seemed to have read and digested the
Playboy Philosophy. Annie Hall showed he
was capable of writing fleshed-out,
believable characters, of playing someone
with dimension himself, and of giving fun-
ny lines to characters other than those
played by him He had also gone from an
alliance with the daffy Lasser to the seem-
ingly more substantial Keaton. Manhattan
found him expressing middle-aged yearn-
ings for an affair with a much younger girl
(Mariel Hemingway), and Hannah and Her
Sisters ends with Woody's character
fathering a child, suggesting that his
romance with Mia Farrow had seriously
domesticated him.
"I am more domesticated to the degree
that since I've been going with Mia, she
has so many children that that aspect of
my life has come into focus a little more,"
he says. "But we don't live together. I still
live by myself. I think I'm more aware of
the domestic side of life perhaps, but not
really domesticated." While Woody has
been changing women, women have been
changing, and Allen says he thinks the
women's movement has permeated his life