CHAPTER FIVE
The "Coatcheck Girl"
It was 5 A.M. and chilly on a June morning in San Francisco, and in his excitement Woody cut his nose while shaving. Within the hour, he was heading toward San Quentin, the city's famous maximum-security prison, where he was scheduled to shoot in the laundry and dining hall, with the cooperation, he hoped, of a hundred inmates. If he could not help feeling trepidation about the convicts, who, he reminded himself, "hadn't seen a woman in years, much less a fair-skinned Jew," the fact remained that he had every reason in the world to feel lucky. After frustrating months of haggling, in which Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe had failed to convince United Artists that their client needed absolute artistic control, they finally cobbled together a deal with Palomar Pictures. The newly formed subsidiary of the American Broadcasting Company put up roughly $1.5 million for the novice filmmaker to write, direct, and act, notwithstanding the fact that he had no directing experience, no discernible acting talent, and only a single real screenwriting credit. The day before beginning principal photography, Woody seemed relaxed about his first picture. "The way I look at it," he told the unit publicist, "the less I know, the better. Directing and acting will be no harder than just acting." Since he wrote the script, he knew exactly what he wanted. "So," he continued, "I don't anticipate problems."
Actually, he was flying by the seat of his pants. Not only did he require the help of Mickey Rose, his high-school friend from Midwood, to complete a shooting script, but he also felt shaky about most aspects of film production— rudimentary decisions like where to put the camera and how many takes. Insecure, but brimming with chutzpah, he wired Carlo Di Palma, the Italian director of photography for Michaelangelo Antonioni, and one of the most well-known cinematographers in the world at that time. "Can you come and shoot my first movie?" he inquired. (He had to settle for a television photographer whose biggest credit was Bonanza.) As for directing a movie, he was better equipped to direct traffic. In fact, he dreaded the thought of daily contact with a bunch of people he barely knew. "That's the worst problem of movie directing for me," he said, "the fact that I loathe group activity," which by its very nature was the heart and soul of film production. To avoid directing, he first asked a British director, Val Guest, whom he knew from Casino Royale, then approached an American icon, Jerry Lewis.
Lewis was diplomatic. It was "a great honor" and he was "thrilled to be asked." Unfortunately, he had "other commitments."
But it wouldn't take much time at all, Woody wheedled. Only eight weeks.
Lewis just laughed. "Woody, I spend twenty-eight weeks in prep. Shooting in eight weeks? We're talking thirty-six weeks." Do it yourself, he suggested.
Take the Money and Run is a pseudodocumentary that traces the career of a neurotic petty criminal, Virgil Starkwell, and his ambition to make the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, an unlikely fantasy because Virgil is hopelessly incompetent when it comes to planning and executing crimes. In one memorable scene, he waits in line to rob a bank and finally hands the teller a note: "Please put $50,000 into this bag and act natural." But the teller can't read his handwriting.
Virgil courteously proceeds to read the holdup note to him. "Because," he continues, "I am pointing a gun at you."
Meanwhile, the teller is continuing to examine the note. "That looks like 'gub,' " he replies. "That doesn't look like 'gun.' " What happens next is that Virgil is sent to the bank manager's office because none of the tellers can dispense $50,000 without proper authorization.
By means of interviews with his friends and family, the picture describes Virgil's early childhood, his failed music career, and his relationship with a pretty girl (Janet Margolin) he meets on a park bench. After fifteen minutes he wants to marry her; after thirty minutes he has forgotten about stealing her purse. Despite his marriage, the bumbling Virgil eventually ends up in prison again, this time serving an eight-hundred-year sentence.
The idea for the stickup scene might have originated in 1965 during an interview with The Realist. Editor Paul Krassner mentioned having seen a recent news item about a botched robbery in Painesville, Ohio. The teller, smiling politely at the gunman, announced, "I'm sorry but my window is now closed. You'll have to take this to another teller." According to the interview, Woody replied, "I can empathize with the robber."
Moving Pictures:
Virgil Starkwell: In prison the psychiatrist asked me if I had a girl and did I think sex was dirty. I said, "It is if you do it right."
—Take the Money and Run, 1969
The main lesson Woody learned from Charles Feldman, who died in 1968, was that functioning inside the Hollywood system was impossible for him. In his heart he knew that the whole "body rhythm of the place," the time-wasting lunches with ten different writers, the mandatory negotiations with actors who weren't available for six months, would surely drive him crazy. "I don't like the way studios make films," he said in 1998. Instead, he wanted nothing less than total independence.
He was not the only one. By 1968 a clutch of rebellious young filmmakers was becoming known to the public—Dennis Hopper, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, George Lucas—all of them talented newcomers who identified with Woody's mistrust of the studios and his determination to control his work. Recognizing that the studio system was collapsing, the new generation of directors resembled fuzzy chicks just poked from their shells, scurrying around to figure out how to play the power game, how to push aside the old boys' club and become Warners and Zanucks themselves. Several months earlier, Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty had released Bonnie and Clyde; now Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made Easy Rider, and soon there would be a drove of extraordinary films to herald Hollywood's new golden age: Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, American Graffiti, and still later, Chinatown, Star Wars, and Raging Bull. With a kind of religious fervor, directors like Dennis Hopper proclaimed themselves spiritual innovators, revolutionaries who had overthrown the oppressor and intended to use the Hollywood system to make "little, personal, honest films," a sentiment endorsed by George Lucas with the Marxist cry of "the power is with the people now. The workers have the means of production!" Suddenly nothing seemed impossible for this latest bunch of young movie junkies with their gargantuan ambitions.
Meanwhile, Woody was hoping to carve out a niche for himself, no easy task because of several noticeable handicaps. In spite of intuitive comic talent, he had trouble with the basic techniques of screenwriting. At this time, he remained ignorant of timing and motion, how the great film comedians— Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx brothers—used a plot as a base upon which to build their jokes and keep the comic energy flowing. One analyst of his early work belittled him as "the master of coitus interruptus of cinematic humor," which was harsh but not inaccurate. In Take the Money and Run, for example, Woody had no idea how to end the bank-robbing scene; and the prison-breakout sequence in which Virgil is chased by guards also goes nowhere because Woody couldn't figure out the visual comic opportunities (think about Buster Keaton in Cops and how he expanded and milked a similar situation for fifteen minutes). At a loss for an ending, Woody shows Virgil being led back to his cell. Challenged to master the craft, Woody lazily fell back on filming his nightclub routines. In Take the Money and Run, in fact in every film until Annie Hall, his characters tend to be stick figures, the stories verbal cartoons. In time he would improve as a screenwriter—and be nominated for an Academy Award thirteen times (a record) in the category of best original screenplay—but all too often, his early scripts were clumsy.
Another of his weaknesses was his acting. In What's New, Pussycat? he squeaked through by presenting himself as a stand-up comic doubling as an actor. But in Take the Money and Run, in the leading role, it was hard to overlook his twitchy mannerisms, especially the frenzied gestures that suggested "a bad case of St. Vitus dance" to Stanley Kauffmann, who thirty years later still saw Woody as "a frantic amateur."
Returning from San Francisco in August 1968, after bringing in his first film on schedule and under budget, Woody appeared to be a man without a care in the world. Through the fall of 1968 and early winter of 1969, he worked with an editor to whittle Take the Money and Run into a sensible story. By this time, he had a finished print, complete with titles, music, and sound effects, but something had gone terribly wrong, and so he was almost tempted to give up. At no screening did an audience laugh, not even the servicemen they enticed from the USO in Times Square, guys with presumably nothing better to do. Not until Palomar Pictures threatened to shelve the picture did Woody acknowledge the serious trouble he was in.
Ralph Rosenblum was ten years older than Woody, a bearded, burly six-footer with a leonine head. Born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, the film editor had a reputation for being difficult and opinionated, a combative man whose temper had been known to erupt explosively in the cutting room. In January 1969, at a dilapidated screening room on West Forty-third Street, Rosenblum got his first look at Take the Money and Run. It was, he thought, primitively shot and yet "very unusual," because it rocketed from the high brilliance of the Marx Brothers all the way down to "a slapped-together home movie." However choppy and uneven, it was nevertheless "packed with funny material," clearly the work of a "very fresh mind." So the situation was not hopeless. As the lights went on, a jittery Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe hurried over to get his reaction. Could he fix it? Joffe asked. Rosenblum made a point of stalling. "He asked to see the script," recalled his widow Davida Rosenblum. "Before deciding, he wanted to know what had been discarded."
At a restaurant on Madison Avenue, Woody and the editor met for the first time. When Rosenblum arrived, Woody was alone at a corner table eating his dinner. While Rosenblum was not exactly anticipating a head-on conflict, he had edited two dozen features and known plenty of first-time prima donna directors ashamed to show their ignorance but relieved to dump their messes on his doorstep. Woody, however, hiding his mouth behind his napkin as he chewed, did not seem to be a bit arrogant and proceeded to spill out his troubles in the most self-effacing way. Rosenblum could not help being taken with the modest young director. Take the Money and Run, Woody said sadly, had turned out to be a "negative experience," and now he was "stuck with a bad picture" just when he was scheduled to go on the road with a play. Several days later, a truck delivered two hundred boxes of film to Rosenblum's office and the next two weeks, a period he would remember as "one of the most pleasurable in all my years of editing," were occupied screening the outtakes. While Woody was away, Rosenblum performed deep surgery in the editing room. He carefully moved scenes around, restored others that had been cut, extended still others, and replaced music. Given Woody's haphazard plotting, it "didn't matter too much where one scene or another ended up." Only the closing shot, a grotesque Bonnie and Clyde scene showing Virgil Starkwell's bullet-torn body, offended him, and he suggested shooting a new ending. When Rosenblum finished, Woody had more than a movie. He had a hit.
In his debut as a filmmaker, Woody established a signature cinematic style—a style seemingly inspired by such humorists as Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman—whose most distinctive features were equal amounts of absurd parodies and anarchistic gags, delivered by means of the kind of wild, comic pacing usually associated with Looney Tunes animation. The Newsweek reviewer called the movie "a silly symphony that can put the zing back into life." While visually inventive (Virgil plays cello in a marching band) and chock-full of ingenious verbal gags, the shortcomings of Take the Money and Run were obvious as well. The picture was choppy, repetitious, and unpolished. What's more, it often came across as a stand-up routine, a problem immediately pointed out by the New York Times critic Vincent Canby when he labeled the film "the cinematic equivalent to one of Allen's best night-club monologues." Yet these flaws counted for little in the end. What made the movie special was precisely its rough amateurism, combined with Woody's awkward performance replete with stuttering ums and ahs. Hopefuls longing to make a movie of their own—and there were many—came away inspired. Those content to watch films had the refreshing impression that the filmmaker, a real person for a change, was actually having fun, and it was true. As Woody later told critic Diane Jacobs, he got "more of a personal kick out of just being funny" in movies such as Take the Money and Run than he ever would later on.
That summer of 1969, when Take the Money and Run opened, Woody had reason to feel encouraged. Of course, reviews were mixed but few critics seemed immune to the freshness of a thrilling new talent. Embracing him as their new darling, some major magazines were left hungering for more and predicting, as did Newsweek, that "the results ought to be brilliant."
In the history of film, Take the Money and Run had a special significance: Woody's first feature marked the introduction of a much loved stock character of the movies, the nebbishy neurotic who would take his place alongside Chaplin's Little Tramp and Keaton's Great Stoneface.
More than fifty actresses came to read for the part. Among the finalists was a pretty twenty-two-year-old girl with long brown hair, blue eyes, and high, round cheekbones. Obviously high-strung, she was a bundle of physical tics: She fiddled with her hair, rubbed her nose, fluttered large hands that seemed barely under control. Inside her cheek bulged a wad of gum, which she kept chawing on like a baseball player with a tobacco habit. At the Broadhurst Theater, Woody climbed up onstage to read with her. The girl was good, he decided, but too tall. To measure her, he stood her up against him, back to back. "It was like being in third grade," he remembered. "But we were just about the same height." Not quite. In her stocking feet she was five feet seven. He was five feet six in shoes. No matter: He was very taken with the big girl.
Not long after returning from San Francisco, he had begun production for his second stage play. Play It Again, Sam is a romantic comedy about a daydreaming film reviewer who gets a girl by taking advice from the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. Allan Felix is a twerpy intellectual living in Greenwich Village, a graduate of Midwood High, who writes criticism for Film Quarterly. He has just been abandoned by his sexy young wife who finally got fed up with his movie fantasies. Shattered, he begs his best friend, Dick, and his wife, Linda, to fix him up with women but manages to bollix up his dates. Before long, he finds himself attracted to Linda, a woman who is just as neurotic and insecure as he is (her neglectful husband is obsessed by his business deals). When Dick is out of town on business, Allan and Linda sleep together, but the next morning, both of them have second thoughts. Allan feels guilty cuckolding his best friend and—in a parody of the closing scene in Casablanca—decides to do the right thing. He gives up Linda for the higher moral value of friendship. As the credits roll, Allan walks into the fog to the strains of "As Time Goes By."
Since the Allan Felix character was obviously a fictionalized version of himself, Woody decided to play the part in spite of his lack of training as a theatrical actor. The role of Allan's friend was given to Tony Roberts, and that left only the part of the wife to be cast. The role went to the big gawky girl with the gum. Later Woody claimed that Diane Keaton had made him feel insecure. "She was a Broadway star and who was I? A cabaret comedian who had never been on stage before." Keaton was hardly a Broadway star. In fact, she had done little of note. Her stage experience was limited to the rock musical Hair, in which she was a member of the chorus and understudied the lead. Only a few weeks before auditioning for Woody did she get to take over the role. In Hair, she was known less for her talent than for being the only cast member who refused to go nude during the finale.
Diane Keaton's childhood was conventional southern California. Born Diane Hall in 1946, she grew up in Santa Ana, a city south of Los Angeles, where her father was a civil engineer and owner of a consulting firm. In the Hall household—there were two younger sisters and a brother—the star was Dorothy Hall, a great beauty who had been Mrs. Los Angeles in the Mrs. America contest. From her early years, Diane would remember sitting in the audience and watching her mother in the spotlight. "Oh God, it was so amazing," she thought. "I want to be on that stage, too." After a year at Santa Ana College, still aching to have her name in lights, she headed for New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse, which led to a job in summer stock. Joining Actor’s Equity, she learned the union already had a Diane Hall and changed her name to Dorrie Keaton, her sister’s name and her mother's maiden name. Not long afterward she changed it a second time, to Diane Keaton. When she met Woody, she was living alone on the Upper West Side in a shabby one-room, roach-infested apartment with the tub in the kitchen.
During rehearsals, Woody and Diane clicked immediately. It was obvious that she had a crush on him. "I'd seen him on television before and I thought he was real cute," she later recalled. Woody thought she was "very charming to be around and of course you always get the impulse with Diane to protect her." He was still married, but after Christmas, when the company moved to Washington, D.C., for the pre-Broadway tryout, he and Diane became lovers.
On stage and off, Keaton was a mix of eccentricities. Her acting leaned heavily on a collection of dithering and blithering mannerisms that would so annoy one critic that he awarded her, a decade hence, "the Sandy Dennis Prize for Instant Deliquesence." In personal conversation, jittery and inarticulate, she tended to flutter through a rich repertoire of stutters and stammers and giggles—"God!'s" and "Well, uhs"; "gees" and "sures." Unconventional in appearance, she dressed herself in clothing purchased in thrift shops. "She was the type," Woody recalled, "that would come in with, you know, a football jersey and a skirt.. . and combat boots and, you know, over mittens." Few woman would have felt truly comfortable in some of her outlandish getups—including a tiny minidress with brilliant green tights, and orange clogs with three-inch soles—but Diane had the flair to pull them off. Woody was openly smitten.
"When I first met her," he said later, "her mind was completely blank." Far from being a drawback, this was precisely the sort of unequal relationship he preferred. There is no doubt that his newly beloved, eleven years younger, was unformed and guileless, lacking in formal education. But underneath she was not "a coatcheck girl," as he seemed to think, nor was she "a complete idiot." As a self-appointed mentor, he suggested books to improve her mind and psychotherapy for her immaturity, even offering to pay for her sessions. She seized the opportunity.
Woody's throat hurt. In his dressing room, on the makeup table, alongside paperbacks of Selections from Kierkegaard and Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers, he kept a blender, a can of chocolate syrup, and a jar of honey. The highbrow books were for show. The other paraphernalia had a serious purpose; he was whipping up malteds to gain weight and the honey was medicinal because his throat was usually raw from the strain of trying to project his untrained voice across the footlights.
Aside from preoccupations with his voice, life as a stage actor turned out to be surprisingly pleasurable for Woody. He had his days free to write or relax. In the evenings, he and Diane would walk together to the theater district, strolling down Broadway to Forty-fourth Street. Shortly after eight o'clock, the curtain went up, and he spent the next ninety minutes onstage in the company of people he liked. Now that the play was doing nicely at the box office, he had stopped biting his nails and felt completely comfortable about the text. Afterward, cast members went out for a late supper before heading home. "It was the easiest job in the world!" he said years later.
Broadway critics tended to be lukewarm. Some dismissed Woody's play as little more than a diverting evening at the theater. Clive Barnes of the New York Times wished he had treated the subject more seriously, while Walter Kerr thought he had copied George Axelrod's seven-year-itch fantasy of a lonely man, sexually obsessed and dreaming about babes. However, none of the nitpicking criticisms mattered to theatergoers, who found the work funny and entertaining. As a result, Play It Again, Sam settled in for 453 performances on Broadway, and a London production starring Dudley Moore had an equally successful run.
Playing opposite Diane, Woody came across as an immensely attractive performer. Even though he continued to portray the nebbish, and would do so until he made Annie Hall in 1977, audiences glimpsed a more earthy side of him with Diane, who obviously liked him. It was easy to see why: He was smart, confident, and absolutely sexually appealing, despite his glasses and funny clumps of red hair. And it was not hard to imagine him in bed with a woman, in contrast to the typical comic, whose character was usually about as erotic as Mr. Magoo.
The special chemistry between Woody and Diane worked beautifully for both of them but would have an even greater impact on Keaton's career. In the long run, her association with Woody would mean more important film roles and eventually an Oscar for Annie Hall. On the other hand, it would take years to erase her public image as Woody's girl.
Four years later, Play It Again, Sam would be released as a film starring Woody and Diane. The rights were sold to Paramount Pictures, which initially intended to cast it with stars, but a number of actors turned down the roles. By the time the project finally got rolling in the fall of 1971, Woody was sufficiently famous from Take the Money and Run and Bananas to be per-fectly eligible. Although he agreed to write the screen adaptation, he had no interest in directing the finished script. Because he had put Sam behind him and moved on to new projects, Paramount hired the experienced Herbert Ross, who made a few notable changes, chiefly shifting the locale from New York to San Francisco. Lavishly praised as a funny, smoothly made situation comedy, Play It Again, Sam would become Woody's biggest box-office success so far and make him a mass-audience star. The picture has become a classic.
Throughout the run of the stage play, obsessively in love with Diane, he was intent on disentangling himself from his marriage. Even though he and Louise had amicably agreed to separate, they continued to live together. When she finally moved out in June of 1969, he could not bear to inform his parents of the breakup. At the very moment when the movers were loading up the van, hoisting some of Louise's bookcases out of a window onto Seventy-ninth Street, Marty Konigsberg arrived at the door.
"What's happening?" he asked.
Not a thing, Woody told his father.
While calling the separation a trial, neither one of them expected to get back together, and Louise would eventually take a twentieth-floor co-op on East Seventy-first Street. After almost ten years together, three of them as Woody's wife, she counted on retaining his allegiance. For a time, this turned out to be the case because he felt protective. After giving her a cameo in Take the Money and Run, he took pains to cast her in three additional films. What's more, they were still sleeping together. For all their problems living under one roof, there had never been any trouble with their sex life. Together they traveled to Mexico for the divorce in the spring of 1970 and spent the night in the same hotel room. Next morning, they appeared in court nervously holding hands. Louise would recall the trip as a larky "good time"; whereas Woody said, deadpan, that the divorce was a "protest against the Viet Nam War."
Nevertheless, he continually fueled Louise's jealousy of Diane Keaton. About a month after the divorce, the summer Woody was in Puerto Rico filming Bananas and living at the San Juan Sheraton with Diane, Louise came to visit. In his hotel room, he pointed to a bureau. "That's Diane's drawer," he said, then began to extol her virtues. Diane was, he insisted, the greatest actress in America and responsible for the best relationship he'd ever had. Louise took the lavish praise for Diane personally and interpreted it to mean that she lacked talent. His flaunting of Keaton that day in San Juan would continue to rankle Louise twenty years later.
Her confidence buckling, she fell into a slump. That Woody was romantically attracted to Diane could not be disputed, but she refused to acknowledge that he loved Diane, or felt any physical passion for her, beliefs that Woody seemed to have encouraged. Once, when Diane returned to California for a month to visit her parents, he invited Louise to stay with him.
In 1970 Woody's income topped $1 million ($4.2 million today). Now that he had a checking account that seemed about as large as the federal budget, he stopped carrying cash and relied on friends for pocket change, nor did he cash checks or visit banks. All such mundane transactions were left to his accountant. Looking for ways to spend his money, he splurged on a Picasso lithograph and German Expressionist paintings, Jacobean furniture, leather-bound volumes of Franz Kafka's work, and a Rolls-Royce complete with driver. An ardent New York Knicks fan, he asked sportscaster Howard Cosell to help him get season tickets at Madison Square Garden (then located at Forty-ninth Street). Even though the seats were "way up in the balcony," he felt lucky to get them and over the years moved down to courtside.
With money rolling in, he was able to afford the penthouse of his dreams. Even before Louise moved out, he decided to buy a co-op in the neighborhood, something not more than "ten blocks from the mainstream." Among the glamorous properties that realtors showed him were a pair of adjoining penthouses on Fifth Avenue, located about a block north of the building where Louise's parents once lived, whose doorman examined his scruffy clothes and made him wait for Louise in the lobby.
The building at 930 Fifth Avenue turned out to be exceptionally conservative. Its co-op board, fearing that the presence of a person such as himself—that is, a person in show business—would inject a sleazy element into the building and upset other tenants, had "grave reservations" about accepting Woody, recalled one of the shareholders. In an interview with the board, Woody argued that he was not the usual show-business person at all; in fact, he was basically asocial, either writing all day or rising early each morning to go out and make movies. He insisted that he had "practically no friends" and would cause no trouble. After numerous reassurances, he was accepted, at which point he turned around and made a request of the board: that he would never be approached in the lobby for an autograph. (This pact was immediately broken when an elderly dowager, living in the building for many years but unaware of the no-autographs agreement, trotted up to him and exclaimed, "Are you Woody Allen?" "No," he said, and turned away.)
Renovations to convert Penthouses A and C into a suitable duplex—a project running into tens of thousands of dollars—meant gutting the property. On the lower floor, a warren of small rooms surrounded by narrow terraces, walls were razed to create spacious living and dining rooms, a library, and a private elevator foyer. External walls were also knocked down and small windows replaced with giant floor-to-ceiling solar glass to provide sweeping views of the park and skyline. There was only one bedroom, which along with its adjoining dressing room took up the entire top floor (no doubt signifying this was the home of a confirmed bachelor). The upper terrace wrapping around the airy master bedroom was turned into a small garden park of lush plants and trees with a pond. (Years later, complaining of bugs, he hardly ever ventured outside.) When Architectural Digest ran a photo spread, Woody's interior designer Olga San Giuliano explained how she worked with the "fantasies and inner life" of her client, so that the penthouse might reflect "who he is privately."
During these years, the relationship with his parents remained as ambivalent as ever. Seldom did he show up at family gatherings, and when he did, it was for only a few minutes. After saying hello, he usually disappeared into the bedroom to watch television before beating a hasty departure. For the most part, however, he was a dutiful son and brother who made sure none of the Konigsbergs had to do without. Proudly, he moved Nettie and Marty into the city and bought them a co-op on the Upper East Side as well as a vacation home in Hallandale, north of Miami Beach. His mother, after more than thirty years, retired from her bookkeeping job at the florist shop. His father, still spry at seventy, kept busy with a variety of odd jobs; he sometimes did engraving for a jewelry shop on the Lower East Side or else he breezed around the city delivering packages for the Rollins and Joffe office, where people affectionately called him "Mr. K."
Living comfortably now, neither of the Konigsbergs was in any position to object when their son kidded them in public. They were proud of him, they would insist. Whether Nettie actually saw all of Woody's films is doubtful. But evidently Marty did, going to the box office and paying for a ticket like anyone else. He was not always thrilled, and once remarked to a relative, "I don't understand that crap he's writing."
Another recipient of Woody’s generosity was his sister, Letty, a petite redhead with a perky sense of humor and yappy mannerisms reminiscent of her mother. Eight years apart in age, Letty and Woody, as children, seemed to be neither rivals nor equals. Their relationship was affectionate; she worshiped her brother, who in turn felt protective of her. As a grown-up, Letty was always included in the select group invited to see rough cuts of Woody's pictures. In times of crisis, she was one of his most passionate defenders.
After graduation from Brooklyn College, Letty became a teacher. When her first marriage to a neighborhood boy ended in divorce, she married the principal of her school, Sidney Aronson, and had a son, Chris. By the seventies, Letty and Sidney were living comfortably in Manhattan, on Park Avenue, only a few blocks from Woody. Having grown disenchanted with teaching, Letty decided that she wanted a career in television. She managed to find minor positions on Robert Klein's television comedy series and later on Saturday Night Live. Throughout the 1980s, she was employed by the Museum of Television & Radio, where her duties included publicity and exhibitions.
When it came to financial support, Woody would be as generous to Letty as he was to his parents. On the other hand, according to Mia Farrow's recollections, he was privately disparaging and avoided her company. Is it coincidence that in every film in which the Woody Allen character has a sister—films such as Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry—the sister character is written to be a perfect horror? It may be that this was the only way Woody could express his resentment of the adorable baby sister doted on by his mother.
The March of Time:
"The inequality of my relationship is a wonderful thing. The fact that I'm with a much younger woman, and much less accomplished woman, works very well. By luck, it's a very happy situation."
—Woody Allen, on his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, 1997
For all their affection for each other, Woody and Diane Keaton were incompatible. As time went on, the relationship grew progressively difficult, in part because he was reluctant to face the truth: She was not the "coatcheck" girl he first perceived. Once young and naive, without "a trace of intellectualism when I first met her," he recalled, she turned into an enthusiastic pupil who worked hard at self-improvement. She read, took classes, and studied photography. Five times a week she visited her therapist. Woody, however, stuck in the role of mentor, still needed her to be subservient. By the time the stage run of Play It Again, Sam ended in March 1970, their affair was over. A brief period of living together ended with Diane renting a place of her own. She began to see other men—including Warren Beatty and Al Pacino in the seventies. In some respects she remained, as Woody once depicted her, "a real hayseed, the kind who would chew eight sticks of gum at a time." She still loved to chew gum. Otherwise, she was her own person.