CHAPTER SIX

 

The Medici

 

 

Arthur Krim was a solidly built man, five foot ten, with glasses and dark hair streaked gray. Avuncular in manner, he was an intellectual who could have easily been mistaken for a college professor or a doctor. Born in Manhattan in 1910, he graduated from Columbia Law School, then joined a prestigious New York law firm where he rose rapidly to partner. After serving in the army during World War II, he became president of Eagle Lion Films, his first motion picture experience. In 1951 he and his friend Robert Benjamin took over the venerable United Artists, a one-of-a-kind studio that dated back to 1919, when it was founded by four silent-era superstars— Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks— for the express purpose of retaining control over their enormous earnings. By the late forties, however, the company was losing $100,000 a week and the two surviving owners, Chaplin and Pickford, were only too relieved to sell. Among the classics released by a revitalized UA were The African Queen, High Noon, Marty, and Some Like It Hot. In the 1960s, which brought across-the-board declines in the industry and all-time-low box offices, UA nonetheless continued to prosper with the James Bond, Pink Panther, and Beatles movies.

United Artists was a New York-based motion picture company that seemed made to order for someone like Woody. An oddity in the Hollywood system, a film studio without a physical studio, it had no lot, no wardrobe or property departments, no contract players or star salaries. Its corporate headquarters was located at 729 Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan, 3,000 miles from the movie industry's nerve center. There was a pronounced feeling of family among chairman Krim and his top executives, Bob Benjamin, Eric Pleskow, William Bernstein, and Mike Medavoy. With minimal overhead, they functioned essentially as a financing and distribution company that leased its features from producers for a period of seven years.

In 1966 Woody tried to interest United Artists in financing his first picture, but the studio was unwilling to put up more than $750,000. On the strength of Take the Money and Run, Rollins and Joffe were able to hammer out a three-picture contract that would give their client modest two-million-dollar budgets and fees of $350,000 for writing, directing, and acting. David Picker, head of production, told Woody to go ahead and write whatever he liked. Taking Picker at his word, he submitted The Jazz Baby, a period drama set in New Orleans. The bewildered UA brass went into shock, and Eric Pleskow, for one, would blank out the script so effectively that he lacks all recollection. Woody, untroubled, promptly came back with another screenplay titled El Weirdo (again coauthored with Mickey Rose), which read like a fast-paced cartoon.

Possibly the first draft for El Weirdo was "Viva Vargas! Excerpts from the Diary of a Revolutionary," a story Woody had submitted to The New Yorker the previous year. William Shawn rejected the piece because he felt it ridiculed Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the charismatic guerrilla leader who had been killed in Bolivia two years earlier, but the story was finally published by Evergreen Review. Whichever in fact came first, the story or the script, the idea was appealing enough that Woody determined to tell it in one form or the other.

In El Weirdo, eventually tided Bananas, a sex-starved tester of useless products (for instance, coffins with stereo systems) falls hopelessly in love with a plump blond political activist named Nancy (Louise Lasser), only to be rejected by her because he lacks leadership qualities. "Who's she looking for, Hitler?" Fielding Mellish wonders. But Fielding, having survived constant near-electrocution by his electric blanket during a childhood of habitual bed-wetting, is tougher than he appears. Desperate to win Nancy’s love, he travels to San Marco, a banana republic whose president has just been assassinated in a revolutionary uprising. Joining a band of rebels, he becomes president and returns to the United States in a red-bearded, Castro-type of disguise to promote foreign trade for his country (locusts at popular prices), and gets himself arrested and pardoned. Bananas ends with Fielding's wedding night, covered on television with sports commentator Howard Cosell supplying a live play-by-play.

"Arthur was very much concerned about the irreverence vis-a-vis certain religions," recalled Eric Pleskow. (Certain scenes made fun of the United Jewish Appeal.) "Apart from being in the movie business, he had other dimensions, his activity in Democratic politics, and so he was always concerned with image. In the end, however, Bananas was well received and did us no harm."

Once again, the critics took special notice of Woody. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby gave early evidence of loving anything Woody did because "when he is good, he is inspired. When he is bad, he's not rotten, he's just not so hot." Others, however, pointed to his still-crude filmmaking and took a dim view of his determination to be an auteur. By confusing the ability to write comedy with the ability to perform it, he ensured that Bananas would be dashed to bits on "the rocks of his acting and direction," wrote Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic. Kauffmann acknowledged in 1998 that he viewed Bananas as "on-the-job training. Woody was learning how to direct by making pictures. There wasn't a film student in the country who couldn't have better directed Bananas. He was a gifted writer whose acting was crude. His idea of acting was to wave his hands. Serious drama meant waving his hands more quickly." As for love scenes, Kauffmann could not appreciate Woody playing a lover. "Watching him kiss a girl—any girl—made me want to look the other way."

Bananas was not a huge moneymaker but it would establish a blueprint for Woody's relationship with UA, who did not expect his films to earn much. In fact, as the years passed and film costs increased (and Woody spent more), his pictures would become even less profitable. "That wasn't the point," a former UA executive said impatiently. "He was our prestige item."

 

 

Hollywood Vignettes:

"Arthur was not a self-made man. He was a born prince."

—Judy Feiffer, former Orion executive

 

 

A special relationship soon developed between Woody and Arthur Krim. A bachelor most of his life, Krim finally married in his fifties. His wife, Mathilde, a physician who was one day to cofound the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), had a daughter from a previous marriage. But Krim would never have children of his own. That fact, some people said, was the reason he showered Woody with what amounted to an adult version of a deluxe train set plus any other toy his heart desired. This plot, a scenario that L. B. Mayer would have approved, was pure Hollywood: Celebrated older man mentors brilliant younger man; ambitious protege repays his powerful benefactor with loyalty and prestige. According to the UA mythology, a "mystical glue" bound the two men together. It was very simple, said one executive: "Woody was the emotional son Arthur never had."

In Woody's eyes, the cultured and magnetic Krim was a heroic personality. Unusual among entertainment moguls, he lived an entirely separate existence as a political activist. He had been a close personal friend and adviser of John F. Kennedy's. It was at Krim’s town house on East Sixty-ninth Street that President Kennedy, in 1962, celebrated after his forty-fifth birthday party in Madison Square Garden, when Marilyn Monroe crooned a sultry "Happy Birthday, Mr. President." Later the Democratic fund-raiser, who reportedly turned down cabinet posts and ambassadorships, would become an adviser to Presidents Johnson and Carter in the fields of civil rights, arms control, and Middle Eastern relations.

This unusual man, and his UA colleagues, bestowed on Woody an extraordinary production deal with patronage that was unprecedented for a commercial artist. Basically, he could make any film he liked on any subject he liked. Woody, however, viewed the blank-check arrangement with restraint and vaguely presented it as "a nice, simple gentlemen's agreement." Once he tried to explain it to an editor at Cinema. There was no interference from his financial backers, he said. "I have absolute control. They don't have approval of the script. They don't have casting approval, they have absolutely nothing." Once in a great while "they"—Krim, or possibly Bob Benjamin or Eric Pleskow— would have something to say. "I always try and give them the courtesy of listening and talking with them. It never comes to anything. They always ask for permission just to come to the set." If he displayed condescension, it was not out of ignorance. He understood full well that the nice gentlemen's agreement, the money with no strings, was an amazing idea for Hollywood. "Had there been no Arthur Krim and UA, Woody's structure could not have evolved any other place in the world," believes Steven Bach, who was to join the studio in 1978 as senior vice president and head of worldwide production. Stanley Kauffmann calls his deal "sui generis, an independent filmmaker who never had to scrounge for money from a father-in-law, whose taproots are in the big money streams of Hollywood. There's been no one else in that position."

The people at UA were well aware of their largess. "Sometimes I felt like the Medici," mused Pleskow, alluding to the princely Florentine family who patronized art and literature during the Renaissance. Granted, films such as Bananas and Sleeper did not really qualify as high culture, but this was Hollywood, and the idea of commissioning an independent filmmaker to develop whatever he fancied was exhilarating. By giving him his head, UA was likely to get a few duds along with very good pictures. Who could imagine what new ideas might flower? And, as Pleskow said with a smile, "we didn't poison anyone."

"He knew how to handle us," explained Steven Bach. "He would ask for things, like the latest equipment in a private screening room, things that seemed a little outrageous. But we felt he deserved them. At the worst, you would take a tax deduction. At best, you would keep him happy." Of course Krim and Benjamin gave him "carte blanche," said another person. "He was their family."

 

At the outset, the gentlemen's agreement did not seem at all extraordinary. He impressed the Medici, Pleskow recalled, "as an intelligent young man. No one could foresee that he'd do a film every year." But UA underestimated Woody.

With two pictures under his belt, he was raring to do more. His second film for UA was loosely adapted from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), a best-selling manual by sexologist Dr. David Reuben that supposedly answered patients' dumb questions. Acquiring the option from Paramount (who intended the vehicle for Elliot Gould), Woody never bothered to read the book. Glancing at Reuben's chapter headings, he structured an episodic script using seven questions ("What's a sex pervert?" "Do aphrodisiacs work?"). Then he proceeded to concoct the answers in a series of lunatic sketches that spoofed all sex manuals, Dr. Reuben’s in particular. In one sequence, "What is Sodomy?," an uptight doctor (Gene Wilder) enters into an obsessive affair with a sheep named Daisy, a devotee of frilly lingerie, and winds up in the gutter drinking Woolite. The final sketch, "What Happens During Ejaculation?," a clever parody of Fantastic Voyage, shows what happens in the male body during an orgasm. Woody, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, plays a neurotic sperm who worries about what will become of him. What if this turns out to be ordinary masturbation? What if he winds up on the ceiling?

With the release of two hit films back to back, Woody was having a very good year. In May of 1972, the screen adaptation of Play It Again, Sam followed What's Up, Doc? into Radio City Music Hall. Critics split into two camps: the negative, who had been expecting another Marx brothers cartoon like Bananas, and the positive, who thought Woody's decision to broaden his appeal with a personal romantic comedy had paid off. Only four months later, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex opened to stinging notices and packed theaters. Soaring on word of mouth, it would become one of the top ten moneymakers of the year, despite the fact that notices universally panned it for tasteless material and too few laughs. At a Chicago screening, embarrassed critics even walked out, one of whom loudly sputtered "Yuck!" Woody's champion at the New York Times, Vincent Canby, deemed it clever but not particularly funny, and Dr. David Reuben was offended. (Eventually he endorsed its "humor, charm, and good taste, the best movie Woody Allen ever made.") None of this counted at the box office, however, where audiences found Woody's sex manual utterly irresistible.

 

 

Moving Pictures:

Luna: It's hard to believe you haven't had sex for two hundred years.

Miles: Two hundred and four if you count my marriage.

—Sleeper, 1973

 

 

In 1973 Miles Monroe, a former clarinet player with the Ragtime Rascals, is part-owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Store on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. One morning, he goes into St. Vincent's Hospital for what is supposed to be routine surgery on a peptic ulcer, but complications develop and he fails to regain consciousness. The doctors wrap him in aluminum foil and freeze him. Two hundred years later, society has retooled and the United States is a totalitarian state run by an albino fascist dictator. Rebel scientists trying to overthrow the government decide to revive Miles, the only person alive without an identification number. The bespectacled Miles, resembling a giant baked potato wrapped in tin foil, comes to in the year 2173. Expecting to wake up at St. Vincent's, he is naturally confused, more worried about his rent, now 2,400 months overdue, than about being a revolutionary hero. To avoid being captured by the thought police and reprogrammed, he disguises himself as a robot and winds up working for a socialite poet named Luna (Diane Keaton), whose work has been influenced by Rod McKuen. They join the underground movement and kidnap the Leader’s nose (all that is left after an assassination attempt) before he can be reconstructed by cloning.

Again Woody used a collaborator, this time a thirty-one-year-old television producer named Marshall Brickman. Born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a Polish Jew who came to the United States by way of Brazil, Brickman grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in music. In 1963 he met Woody at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where Brickman was a banjo player with the Tarriers, folksingers managed by Rollins and Joffe, and Woody was performing stand-up. Brickman, who also played guitar and bass, later toured with John and Michelle Phillips before they joined the Mamas and the Papas, and finally switched to television comedy writing for Candid Camera and The Tonight Show, before producing The Dick Cavett Show. Although Brickman and Woody seemed to be opposite in temperament, with Brickman generally sociable and cheerful, they shared a similar comic sensibility. When someone once asked him to compare himself to Woody, he answered, "I'm taller."

Unlike Woody's collaboration with Mickey Rose, in which they worked on a script together, Woody and Brickman worked out the plot to Sleeper during long walks, often through Central Park. Then Woody went home and wrote the draft, which Brickman would later read and comment upon. A talented craftsman, Brickman's strength was in understanding how to structure a story, an area in which Woody did less well.

Sleeper was not their first attempt at collaboration. Several years earlier, there had been another script, but it failed to find a producer. This time there was no problem getting UA's approval and a budget of $2 million. With seven weeks allotted for filming, shooting began in Denver in the spring of 1973, and by summer had moved to Hollywood, to the old David O. Selznick lot in Culver City, where Gone With the Wind was filmed. Nestled amid the gigantic concrete buildings, Woody noticed a three-room cottage surrounded by a garden of daisies and a picket fence. Told that it had once been Clark Gable's dressing room bungalow, he promptly commandeered it for his office.

Sleeper, a complicated picture requiring intricate sets and special effects, fell behind schedule, and additional photography soon depleted Woody's $350,000 fee. Under pressure to meet a Christmas release date, he frantically shot and edited simultaneously. Ralph Rosenblum, urgently summoned to Culver City in August, discovered that "tension pervaded every aspect" of the production. Nevertheless, Sleeper managed to open as scheduled on December 18 at Radio City Music Hall and received sensational reviews. It was Woody's first big critical and commercial success, one of the biggest moneymakers of the year. A delighted United Artists signed him to a new five-picture contract that extended his original deal to seven years.

Not until Sleeper did Woody begin to attract generally respectful attention from large-circulation newspapers and magazines, some of whose critics now began to view him as the best comic director and actor in the country. Foremost among his admirers was Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic whom Woody would credit as one of the significant figures in his career. A reporter for Variety, Canby arrived at the Times in 1965 to cover show business and succeeded Renata Adler as film critic four years later. In the meantime, he had seen Woody perform stand-up at the Americana Hotel, where he made a point of talking to him "informally between shows one night. I had known little about him and I was knocked out." Take the Money and Run impressed him positively as "a night club routine but still a very good movie, and remains one of my favorites. Certainly I had a suspicion that he was up to something unusual." With Sleeper, Woody finally crossed over from stand-up to the screen.

At The New Yorker, another important review medium, the film department had been shared since 1967 by Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliatt, whose styles could not have been more dissimilar. As the most influential critic of the seventies, Kael redefined film criticism, and critics who followed her thinking would be dubbed "Paulettes." More often than not, her brass-knuckle reviews sounded angry, as if she felt personally offended by a film that did not meet her standards. She wrote as if she were being chased by a posse, which may have been what prompted Warren Beatty to nickname her Ma Barker, after the bank-robbing public enemy. Born in Petaluma, California, she was a tiny, argumentative woman, nondescript in appearance, three times married, who once had been fired by McCall's for knifing The Sound of Music. When she arrived at The New Yorker, she was almost fifty.

Over the years, Kael would be tight with a number of directors who asked her opinion on scripts, invited her to their sets, and arranged special screenings. If electrified by a picture, she became its personal advocate and went on television to drum up enthusiasm. Crossing the line between criticism and film production, she resigned from The New Yorker in 1978 and took a Hollywood job developing film projects for Warren Beatty. (She soon returned to The New Yorker, however.)

Among the new-wave directors, Kael's darlings were Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde she single-handedly rescued from a premature demise, and Robert Altman, whose Nashville she had championed as virtually a perfect film. While Woody was not one of her pets, she did appreciate his work, to a point, because she thought his movies made people feel less insecure about their imperfections. In her eyes, Take the Money and Run had been nice but nothing special, "a limply good-natured little nothing of a comedy, soft as sneakers." For several years they maintained cordial relations, sometimes appearing together to collegially trade repartee on TV talk shows, but friendship counted for nothing to Kael at her typewriter. After giving Sleeper a couple of preliminary swings—"a beautiful little piece of work," "a small classic"—she administered an unexpected jab: If Sleeper was the best slapstick comedy of the year, it was only because "there hasn't been any other." Then she moved in for the knockout. Woody's films lacked an antic quality, in fact his humor reminded her of "strip-mining" because he scratched the surface without ever getting close to the mother lode. Psychologizing, she mocked him as hopelessly anal and reserved special scorn for his choice of the clarinet, "an instrument that appeals to controlled, precise people."

The intensity of Kael's attack embarrassed Roger Angell, who urged Woody to ignore her and reminded him of a forthcoming profile by Penelope Gilliatt. By contrast, Gilliatt's film critiques tended to be literary, kindhearted, sometimes loopy. She admired Woody, recalled her close friend Andrew Sarris, "beyond belief." A vivacious, red-haired British writer who had once been married to the playwright John Osborne, she had visited Woody the previous summer in Culver City. A boozy dinner at Trader Vic's resulted in whispered confidences over rum punches (virgin punches for himself) and Chinese spareribs. Even then, at the age of forty-two, Gilliatt was known to have a weakness for alcohol, which would eventually contribute to her undoing. Sipping rum punches, she rapidly formed an extravagant opinion of her subject. In New York that fall, Woody invited her to his apartment for more cozy talks. Plying her with chocolate pudding, he confided choice secret tidbits about his first marriage, his analyst, his pigeon problem, the maid he was planning to fire, and his lifelong addiction to Hershey bars.

In writing her New Yorker profile, Gilliatt got so carried away by Woody's puppyish vulnerability that she apparently began to think of him as a pet dog, a cuddly pooch with long red hair hanging around his neck "like a setter’s ears." He had "no idea of how nice he looks," she added. The New Yorker published the rum-punch piece with a straight face, though some of the writers there found it as nutty as a cuckoo clock. Ved Mehta would later describe this incident as one of those occasions when Gilliatt's work exhibited "a touch of the surreal." Afterward, Gilliatt invited Woody to her daughter Nolan's birthday party, and he deigned to accept. Another guest, Vincent Canby, recalled that "two dreadful little boys rushed over and one of them asked him to autograph a dollar bill. Woody obliged, and the other kid chimed in, 'Now it's worth two dollars!' and ran off. It was embarrassing but Woody was most gallant about it."

As Woody once admitted in a letter to Roger Angell, Gilliatt's reviews never made much sense to him. In fact, if someone set out to deliberately satirize film criticism, her writing would be the easiest place to begin. On the other hand, he much preferred her to Kael, who despite her brilliance allowed personal problems to color her judgments. But the critic whom he had never liked, he went on, was Stanley Kauffmann, with his school-marmish harping on his amateur acting and directing. Kauffmann's dead-serious advice on how Woody could make funnier comedies made him laugh. If Kauffmann ever made a comedy he'd be eager to see it, he chortled. In any case, he needn't worry about Kauffmann's reviews because, he said, few people read The New Republic anymore.

 

 

On the Couch:

"He's made his lunacy work for him. It takes a special kind of genius to successfully use your insanity."

—Walter Bernstein

 

 

Spending the better part of the year away from New York meant missing his daily psychotherapy sessions. Undeterred, he would locate a pay phone and talk to his doctor for forty-five minutes while timing himself on his watch. In Freudian analysis for fifteen years, he was now on his third psychiatrist, not counting the clinic he used when he was broke in 1958. (No longer did he actually go to therapy; it came to him, in the evenings or at any hour he preferred.) And yet, those thousands of hours on the couch had not resulted in "one emotionally charged moment," he confessed to the writer Francine Du Plessix Gray in 1974. He never cried, not once. His tearless sessions were blithely dismissed as "in, whine for fifty minutes, out again." The previous year he had switched to a woman, Dr. Kathryn Prescott. "I had these fantasies of what would happen if I was locked in a room with a beautiful, fascinating woman." Nothing happened. He cut back from five to three times a week. Still nothing. Therapy was hideously "dull, dull, dull."

Even though he complained incessantly about analysis, just as he raged and whined about practically everything else in his life, treatment was a definite lifestyle for him. Growing celebrity was accompanied by an even greater need for a shrink, somebody to whom he could unload his grievances each and every day. On top of his childhood phobias (death, darkness, kidnapping, boats, airplanes, most elevators) were now layered a host of fresh fears, typically a cleanliness phobia that prevented his taking baths because immersion in dirty water disgusted him, and eating habits so rigid that at times he could get down nothing but fish. Dining in pizzerias, when his friends ordered pies loaded with sausage and mushrooms, he always stuck to plain cheese.

All of his denials to the contrary, treatment was one of the keys to his professional success. "Underneath," remarked one of his actors, "he has the little twerp syndrome. But look how well he has used it!" Deliberately milking his analysis until being a professional neurotic became part of his persona was as much a schtick as Jack Benny's stinginess. Acting the part came easily. And pretending treatment was a waste of time allowed him to keep the shades drawn on bigger problems. Although he claimed to be depressed, it never interfered with his work. "I'm disciplined," he admitted. "I can go into a room every morning and churn it out." He might be crazy but he wasn't dysfunctional.

 

 

Commentary:

"If he took three or four years to make a film, it would be a mess. Not at all funny. His mind works fast. The pace of his life matches the pace of his films."

—Vincent Canby

 

 

After completing Sleeper, Woody sent Eric Pleskow a note saying he was almost finished with his next script, a contemporary murder mystery about a New York couple who stumble across a crime. Two weeks later, Pleskow was surprised to receive the first draft of a screenplay about the Napoleonic wars, set in Czarist Russia.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I tore it up," said Woody. At a meeting in the UA offices, he explained to the top executives that he wanted to make an early-nineteenth-century picture about the meaninglessness of existence, and he planned to shoot it in Russia. "Krim was one of the most intelligent men ever to head a movie company," said Steven Bach. "He may have been listening with a straight face but I suspect he was thinking, 'Sure disaster. How could this picture possibly attract teenagers in Omaha?' But this was his son and if that's what he wanted to do, that's what he wanted to do." Contrary to what the title suggests, Love and Death was neither serious nor depressing. Boris Dmitrivich Grushenko is a schnook of a pacifist (and a militant coward), who from the moment he enlists in the Czar's army seems headed for trouble. Embroiled in a plot to assassinate Napoleon, he is executed. According to Pleskow, UA regarded Woody as "an exceptional animal in our business, comparable only perhaps to a man like Chaplin. He was never excessive in his demands for himself. That's why we were his people and he was our man."

Their man spent seven months on location in France and Hungary. Though he went over budget by $1 million, the result was his most polished film yet, with none of the home-movie jerkiness of Bananas or Sleeper. Notices were, for the most part, enthusiastic. Judith Crist in New York magazine noted approvingly that he was "going for the character rather than the cartoon" (and she also applauded his acting as "perfection"), while Penelope Gilliatt viewed Love and Death as his "most shapely" film. Vincent Canby raved about "Woody's War and Peace," as personal a film as "any American star-writer-director has made since the days of Keaton, Chaplin, and Jerry Lewis." Even Stanley Kauffmann gave him credit for putting the camera "in the right place most of the time."

 

 

The Box Office: U.S./Canadian rentals in millions* [*Not adjusted for inflation.]

 

1969 Take the Money and Run - $2.6

1971 Bananas - $3.5

1972 Play It Again, Sam - $5.8

1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) - $8.8

1973 Sleeper - $8.3 

1975 Love and Death - $7.4

 

Note: As Woody became popular overseas, foreign earnings climbed steadily during this period.

 

 

"What about the kid?" said Martin Ritt. "What kid?"

"You know, the funny kid." Ritt finally remembered the name. "Woody Allen."

For a number of years, Martin Ritt, the director, and Walter Bernstein, the screenwriter, had been trying—without success—to make a picture about screenwriters suspected of being communists or Red sympathizers during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into the entertainment industry. During the McCarthy era, a few of these writers, in order to earn a living, hired fronts, nonpolitical people who handed in scripts and passed themselves off as the authors, in return for a percentage of the fee. Both Ritt and Bernstein had been among the blacklisted, which meant this semiautobiographical project was in the nature of a personal crusade for them. Originally a serious drama about a man who was blacklisted, the script was made more salable as a blackish comedy featuring the "front" as the protagonist. Then the project languished for several years because "Columbia wanted a star," said Bernstein, "somebody like Dustin Hoffman or Robert Redford, nobody we wanted." It was obvious to Ritt that Woody's range as an actor was severely limited, yet he was clearly right for the part of Howard Prince, a street-smart coffee-shop cashier and part-time bookie who prospers by fronting for a blacklisted TV writer.

In the fifties, when he seldom read newspapers except for the sports section, Woody knew vaguely of Senator McCarthy as a man with a five o'clock shadow. It was not until 1963 that he became aware of the ugly climate of that period. Appearing at the Hungry i in San Francisco, he got friendly with the stage manager, who was none other than Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten "unfriendly" witnesses. In 1950 Bessie was cited for contempt of Congress and sent to prison after declining to say whether he was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party. Although Bessie was thirty years older than Woody, he treated him as a peer. After returning to New York, an appreciative Woody wrote to thank him for his kindness. During the filming of Love and Death, Woody read Bernstein's script and immediately expressed interest, not only because it was "one of the best pieces of material offered to me," but also because he felt drawn to a subject that "expresses me politically." Without his participation, making The Front would have been difficult, even though Bernstein said they would surely have tried to satisfy Columbia with Hoffman or George Segal.

In one scene, Woody asked Bernstein to remove a Jewish mother character, but otherwise he made no attempt to impose his ideas on the script. With direction it was a different story, however. Handing over control of the picture to Ritt made him unhappy. On the set, he was "never disrespectful," said Andrea Marcovicci, who played Woody's idealistic girlfriend, "but I sensed it was hard for him to table his thoughts." According to Walter Bernstein, "Woody is never deliberately cruel but there's a certain lack of tact, to say the least. He's one of the most insensitive sensitive people I know." At the rushes, Bernstein recalled, "he drove Marty crazy by criticizing things in front of everyone, and Marty finally had to ask him to stay away because he was hurting people's feelings." Woody expressed amazement. "It's the problems that we should be talking about," he told Bernstein. "We don't need to mention the good stuff." It never occurred to him that people needed recognition for a job well done. One problem never mentioned was Woody's costar, the famously irrepressible Zero Mostel, an actor of Falstaffian proportions. Actors passing by his dressing room would hear him bellow, "Shut up out there, I'm farting!" His antics made Woody cringe, recalled Bernstein. "Woody shrinks when anybody touches him. He was always polite to Zero, but it was clear he didn't want to be around him. In the film, you can read it in his body language."

Critics attacked The Front for trivializing and romanticizing the blacklist. Other reviewers felt that the credibility of the project was destroyed by casting Woody in a straight role. He dragged down the rest of the cast, Stanley Kauffmann thought, "because they are trying to act and he is doing his night club stuff."

 

On Monday nights, the tables at Michael's Pub were jammed together so tightly that waiters could barely squeeze through the sea of green-and-white-checked tablecloths. Out in the tiny bar, a hundred jostling fans were penned behind a velvet rope, spilling their $3.20 drinks on one another, just to hear Woody and his clarinet. In the late sixties, he had begun playing New Orleans jazz with a half-dozen musicians, most of them nonprofessionals, including a stockbroker, two teachers, and the owner of a burglar-alarm business. At first they got together in their apartments "for fun," he recalled, but in 1970 made their public debut at Barney Google's, a beer garden on East Eighty-sixth Street. On the strength of Woody's fame as a comedian, the New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra moved on to other clubs but no place kept them very long until they met Gil Wiest, the owner of Michael's Pub on East Fifty-fifth Street. Wiest shrewdly recognized the drawing power of a clarinet-playing celebrity and wondered if presenting the group on a regular basis might attract business, even if the music was strictly amateur. That guess proved correct, with name recognition making up for lack of musical expertise, and now every Monday the restaurant was packed. Whenever a number ended, the crowd applauded wildly, and the bar drinkers tapped their feet, but Woody looked tight-lipped and grim. "Come on, Woody," a woman yelled. "Smile." Seldom did he acknowledge their presence, let alone mingle or smile at them. In fact, one of Wiest's jobs was to make sure nobody got close enough to touch him. It was only Groucho Marx, making a surprise visit one night, who took it upon himself to reach up for Woody's hand and tinkle a tip of a few pennies into his palm.

Throughout his thirties, Woody's career flourished, but his personal life was stalled. There was no emotional center. After breaking up with Diane, he dated constantly, very often actresses, because they were usually the women he met in the normal course of his work. In show-business circles, he had a reputation for being something of a stud. "Put it this way," said Tony Roberts. "Harpo Marx probably chased the most girls, I chase the second most, and Woody is a close third." Girl chasing seemed to go hand in hand with casual sex. In 1980 he was to admit that for nine years there had not been a single romantic relationship lasting longer than two months.

Though he knew hundreds of people, he had few friends, as most people interpret that word. There were several cronies who joined him for various activities—Tony Roberts for tennis, Marshall Brickman for writing—but he was not really on intimate terms with these men. Closest to him of all remained Jean Doumanian, who had been his best friend for almost a decade. With Woody's support and connections, and her own talent, she gradually moved up in television from Dick Cavett's talk show to Howard Cosell's variety show on ABC, for which she booked celebrities. In 1976, once again with Woody's help, she rose to a similar position as talent coordinator for Saturday Night Live, performing her job with consummate efficiency and style. At SNL, a casual place where clean jeans and T-shirts were considered formal wear, Jean wore designer suits and came across as "a very stylish person with a moneyed style that seemed rather French," recalled Karen Roston, the show's costumer. Despite the couturier outfits, Jean was not popular. According to one colleague, she suffered from certain grating mannerisms "as if she had just read Michael Korda's book Power! She turned off a lot of people." Another co-worker called her "the kind of person who makes you crazy. I used to tell myself, 'The day will come when I'll be able to get back at her.' "

Highly dependent, Woody was in the habit of telephoning Jean at work several times a day. In the evenings they met for dinner, very often at an Italian restaurant in an unfashionable neighborhood of brick tenements on Second Avenue near Eighty-eighth Street. So seldom did Woody spend an evening at home that Elaine's served as a comfortable and convenient kitchen away from home. The owner, Elaine Kaufman, was a strapping woman with thick eyeglasses. The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who grew up in Queens, she had a knack for self-promotion and preparation of unexceptional meals. In 1963 she opened her Yorkville tavern that soon became a cherished sanctuary for a number of writers, among them Tom Wolfe, William Styron, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer. Never could the proprietress, a high-school graduate whose first job was clerking in Woolworth's, be considered an intellectual, but she read omnivorously and adored gifted young male writers, whom she called her "boys." (She was "Big Mama.") Against all odds, Big Mama's Algonquin Round Table began to flourish.

Of all her literary pets, Woody was her favorite. She doted on him, flattered him, and finally bestowed on him a table of his own—Number 8—in the front, which was reserved every night until ten. In return, he publicized the restaurant by his continual presence and later by shooting scenes for several movies there. By the late seventies, Elaine's had become a renowned restaurant that defined itself as being the popular place to see and be seen, if you had any status at all. Patronized by a mixture of prominent writers and movie stars, politicians and ballplayers, the place filled up night after night with celebrities and the rubberneckers who paid to gawk at them while tucking away giant veal chops, one of the house specialties. (Woody, a picky eater, always ordered fish or pasta.) Hard-pressed to explain why he spent so much time at the city's most obvious celebrity outpost, a kind of Eiffel Tower of mediocre fare, he claimed that he enjoyed the food. What Woody enjoyed was being the center of attention so long as he didn't have to interact with other people, and Elaine Kaufman kept people from bothering him while he ate.