Woody Allen by John Baxter HarperCollins £19.99 in UK
There is the memory of leaving a movie house on the Upper East Side after a screening of Fellini's Amarcord. A seemingly well-heeled New Yorker, addressing no one in particular and everybody in general, stood alone on the pavement and said loudly: "But I didn't like it!" He spoke in dismay, in loneliness. Fellini was the current godhead, and the moviegoer was calamitously out of step, an unbranded steer, a maverick. It was as if he were admitting to a social disease; today, one might have described him as incorrect.
He might have been the archetypal Woody Allen nebbish of the earlier comedies, or equally he might have been the off-screen Allen, the willing inmate of a ghetto bounded by the East and Hudson rivers. Watching the characters in, say, Crimes and Misdemeanours and Hus- bands and Wives, one is reminded of the kind of state-of-the-art automobile that claims to analyse itself a fearful number of times a second. With Allen's people, however, the constant self-analysis leaves no time for spontaneity. One is reminded of the New York matron who approached Noel Coward after the first act of a Broadway play and asked: "Sir Coward, should we like this?"
John Baxter has written a biography that is both fair and unsparing, especially when he confronts the paradox of a filmmaker who, when satirising the incestuousness of Manhattan society, contrives to shoot himself in both feet. He is a comedian so dyspeptic that he often seems not to get his own jokes. He is a fan-hating recluse who eats in Elaine's where, in spite of the terrible food, celebrities go to be gawked at. He is a neardandy who - a neat trick - dresses carefully to suggest an utter disregard for style. He loathes to be recognised by his fans, yet goes about in a cream-coloured, chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Mia Farrow, who may, understandably, be prejudiced, says that no man cares more for the opinion of the world.
He hates to be anywhere other than New York, although he did make one of this reviewer's favourite Allen films, Everybody Says I Love You, in Venice. In the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion, who is a Californian, castigated Allen for his hermetic self-regard. Writing of Manhattan, Interiors and Annie Hall, she said:
The characters in these films are at best trying. They are morose. They have bad manners. They seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask each other hard questions and then, usually in another restaurant, listen raptly to third-party analyses of their own questions and answers. "How come you guys got divorced?" they ask each other with real interest, and, on a more rhetorical level: "Why are you so hostile?" and "Why can't you consider my needs?"
One might almost suggest that the TV series Frasier has better Woody Allen scripts than those written by Woody Allen, for there the self-mockery is at least intentional. Allen probably most bitterly despises what he does best: the kind of dialogue one hears in Bullets over Broadway, as when Diane Wiest's boozy Tallulah-like actress orders "Two martinis, very dry". The young playwright she is seducing says, "How did you know what I drink?", to which she replies "Oh, did you want one, too?" Allen is no longer the whiny Jewish wimp who cannot get laid. Now, as often as not, he is the only sympathetic character in view, a wry, much put-upon autodidact-cum-observer (this reviewer has not yet seen his latest film, Deconstructing Harry). He has moved onwards from the cinematic gag-books of Bananas, Take the Money and Run and Sleeper to the urban comedies of manners - bad manners, as Ms Didion observed.
Meryl Streep, who was in Manhattan, said: "Woody has the potential to be America's Chekhov, but instead he's still caught up in the jet-set crowd type of life, trivialising his talent." This is unfair. Allen may not have had Chekhovian aspirations, but he is not trivial. In his infatuation with Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini he has done his best to teach his grandparents how to suck eggs.
As regards Bergman, he adroitly used his own A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy to poke affectionate fun at Smiles of a Summer Night, which on stage became Sondheim's A Little Night Music. However, the sincerest form of flattery worked less well with Interiors and September; in these, the austere photography would not have disgraced Per- sona or Scenes from a Marriage, and Allen used Bergman-inspired groupings to suggest alienation and emotional aridity. Where he failed was in trying to turn his dysfunctional Americans into Swedish Calvinists. It was dourness for its own sake, a kind of painting by numbers.
Another hommage - this time to Fellini - was Stardust Memories. Fellini's 81/2 is rich in self-mockery while reflecting the mental and emotional turmoil of a director who was afflicted by a creative block. It was an essay in self-analysis: a combination of childhood memories and sexual wish-fulfilment. There was a wonderful image of the director controlling his women with a liontamer's whip and chair. Allen was more concerned with settling a few scores. In the film he plays Sandy Bates, whose work is being honoured at a film seminar. During the actual shooting, there were, as always, rewrites, and the mood of the film became sour and martyred. Bates's fans are shown as gawking morons. Other characters are exploitative parasites. There is a fantasy in which extraterrestrials land and, instead of dispensing the asked-for wisdom, advise him to do mankind a service: "Tell funnier jokes." In the end, as if uncannily predicting the death of John Lennon a few months later, Bates/Allen is murdered by a fan. Again, he misses the point. 81/2 is, like all of Fellini's work, life-affirming; whereas Stardust Memories is a prolonged and misanthropic whine.
Allen was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx in January, 1935. He began his career by writing gags for the then new media of television, graduating to Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, which was brilliantly recreated in Richard Benjamin's film My Favourite Year. He became a stand-up comic, and his first film as a performer and writer was What's New, Pussycat? Today, this is a dodo; in the Swinging Sixties it was a hit a showcase for the egos of the Peters O'Toole and Sellers.
Allen's first marriage was to Harlene Rosen; he was twenty and she was seventeen; and one wonders if he took their rabbi's advice to "Mount her like a young bull". His second wife was an actress named Louise Lasser, who is depicted in Stardust Memories as a carping neurotic. It is unarguable that most of the people in Woody Allen films are a far cry from loveable; you would not wish to have them to the house for Christmas, but there is warmth in the women played by Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. Love seems to have thawed the permafrost of his misanthropy.
The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose and Radio Days have a beguiling generosity of spirit. Allaen and Farrow were at the time the best-known couple in America. Farrow, according to Allen's biographer, had bedded every available male, excepting, just possibly, the present Pope; now, after two marriages, she lived across Central Park from Allen in a separate apartment. He paid her $200,000 per film, which was a fraction of what she could have earned in Hollywood. She needed the money to support her children, some adopted, others her own by her previous husband, Andre Previn.
Allen disliked children, with the exception of the little girl, Dylan, whom Farrow adopted at birth - she would later allege that his attraction to the child was inappropriate. He was against the idea of becoming a father and was dismayed when it happened. Farrow believed that he lost interest following the birth of their son, Satchel. At any rate, one day in Allen's apartment, she discovered what were described as "split beaver" photographs of her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, a Korean girl whose mother, a prostitute, had abandoned her on the streets of Seoul.
Allen declared himself to be in love with Soon-li, although it might be argued that the Polaroids Farrow had discovered - pictures that emphasised the vagina - were less akin to affection than photographic rape. Mr Baxter suggests that the fuss was much ado about very little: sleeping with the young and not very bright daughter of a girlfriend he was about to ditch might be a lapse of taste, but it was hardly indictable. To Farrow, however, given her Catholic upbringing and deep sense of family, it was a betrayal, even a kind of incest. And with so many women vying for the honour of being shafted by Woody Allen, his seduction of Soon-Yi took on the aspects of an act of revenge against Farrow for involving him in parenthood.
At any rate, there was a great scandal that went on until, as happens, people got tired of it. Allen went on making pictures, and married Soon-Yi, with whom he will no doubt live neurotically ever after. As a coda to his excellent biography, Mr Baxter quotes the aptly-named Harry Block, the hero of Deconstructing Harry: "He had long ago come to this conclusion: all people know the same truth." What the truth is, Harry/Woody does not say, but it may be that nothing lasts.