What falls away : a memoir (26 page)

We didn't have much of a social life. I can recall our going to three parties in a dozen years. I introduced him to all my brothers and sisters, and I tried to share my friends—Leonard Gershe, Maria Roach, Tom Stoppard, Stephen Sondheim, Betty Comden, Nancy Sinatra, Liza, John Williams, Casey, John Tavener, the Styrons, and Yul, Eileen, and the Kanins—but really he wasn't comfortable with them. He enjoyed the Kanins, but although Ruth thought well of his work, she didn't like him. "It was the cause of one of our few quarrels in over forty years," Garson told

me. "We had had dinner, the four of us, and walking home Ruth said, 'He may be brilliantly talented, but he's no good. I wouldn't trust him from here to the end of the block.' "

Apart from the ever present Jean Doumanian and her boyfriend whom I liked very much. Woody was most comfortable with his chilly but eager-to-please assistant, Jane, and his costume designer, Jeffrey. I never knew anybody, man or woman, who cared so much about clothes as Woody Allen. He pored over Vo^e magazine each month. His own "casual, rumpled look" was in fact carefully assembled: the linen suits and tweed jackets were tailor-made, his shirts were the finest Sea Island cotton, his sweaters were cashmere, in grays and browns. He never failed to notice and comment on what people were wearing, and he was intensely contemptuous of a poor choice in style, color, or fabric. That my sister Steffi could wear a pink T-shirt left him confounded and dismayed.

When we went out to dinner, it was Woody who decided which restaurant, and what time, and who would join us, and the topics of discussion, and when to leave. Invariably he paid the check.

We almost never saw his sister. We had dinner with her, or maybe it was lunch, only once in a dozen years. His parents were there too. It was somebody's birthday, an awkward, awful affair, as was every encounter with his parents. I grew up m Beverly Hills. I went to convent schools. I have moved in circles where people are polite to one another. I never saw anyone treat another person the way he behaved with his parents.

O^ course with the Horowitzes it was a different story. Vladimir and Wanda Horowitz were the only friends we made as a couple. When we were introduced, Wanda said, "Mr. Woody Allen, you look the same as you do in the movies. No worse, no better."

No matter what restaurant we went to, Horowitz ate the same thing: Woody's assistant had to call ahead to make sure his sole, boiled potato, asparagus, and creme caramel were available. While we ate, Woody's chauffeur went to Times Square to pick up the next mornmg's New York Times, which Vladimir had to have every night or he couldn't sleep. From the start of the meal he fretted about getting it.

When we went to their brownstone to pick them up, Horowitz would immediately ask us about the weather, "How is it outside?" he would say. And we would tell him it was warm or coldish. Then while we chatted over a drink, he would phone the weather at ten- or fifteen-minute intervals until we left.

He had a television in his living room, and a VCR with the control panel covered with black tape, so that he couldn't push any wrong buttons. It was somehow comforting that the world's greatest pianist couldn't figure out his VCR. He watched two movies every night. I asked what kind of movies he liked. "I don't care what I watch," he shrugged. "The store just sends them to me."

Before we went out, no matter what the climate, he took time to carefully pull on his black leather gloves, working them meticulously over each famous finger. Once, while we were in the car heading for the restaurant, he pointed out the window, exclaiming, "Wanda look! A bicycle)!' And then he laughed for a good long time. Woody said the reason he liked Vladimir was because "he's crazier than I am." Wanda, who herself was a riot, was always grumbling about how she had spent her whole life taking care of two men— her father, Arturo Toscanini, and then Horowitz.

Woody and I were watching the news when we learned of Vladimir's death in 1989. Of that moment, Woodv said in his biography, we were "not exactly stunned, but Mia and I were saddened. Within a minute we agreed to call Wanda. Then one of the kids ran into the room. The cat had jumped up on the kitchen table. We hurried to get the

cat off while the other kids came marching in demandmg dinner. Suddenly the enormity of the passmg of a human life was becommg history. The more pressmg trivialities of life interfered. Mia was immediately the hard-pressed mother, grabbing the cat and ladling out the pasta. 'See how life goes on?' she said to me. It's a concept that causes m.e great trouble when I stop to think about it, which is often. That is, just how fragile and fleeting life is in the relentless flow of minor necessities that make up day-to-day existence."

The success or failure of our movies had little impact on our, or at least my, consciousness, except of course for the New York Times review, which Woody usually had some inside word on, and which he read the minute it hit the stands. The relationships he cultivated on the Times were important too. We had dinner with the major critics of Time and Newsweek. But Woody reserved special contempt for film critics on television. "The Chicago morons" was his label for one high-profile pair. We were always at work on the next project when a film came out, and everyone around us knew not to mention reviews in our presence. Woody advised me not to read them. "J^st keep your head down and do good work," he said.

Other films were offered to me during those years, even some good ones. But with our schedule, and reshoots all through the year, it would have been difficult to take on a separate project. My availability enabled Woody to rewrite and reshoot our scenes whenever he wanted. And truthfully I didn't have much ambition beyond what we were doing. I just wanted to be with him and my kids, not interrupt our routine, and to do good work. I must have been the envy of every actor in the land. If there was a drawback, I didn't see it.

Most of the films we made together were artistic and

critical successes. A couple were even commercial successes. One of these was Hannah and Her Sisters^ which Woody described as "middlebrow." Although the reshoots on Hannah were extensive, he never came up with an ending that satisfied him. Its success confirmed his feelings about its essential mediocrity. "If one of my films is widely accepted," he said, "I am immediately suspicious of it."

His Oscar and other prizes were kept at his parents' house. "The whole concept of awards and being honored is silly," he said. "It's a popularity contest." The fact that Gordon Willis was not even nominated for his superb work on The Godfather and Manhattan was the example Woody always fumed about. So awards had no significance in our lives. I only found out on the day of the broadcast that I had been nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress (for one of the Roses, I forget which), and then only because Woody asked me which photograph they should use on television when they read my name. We didn't watch the show: by dinnertime that night we'd forgotten all about it.

"What would you think about us havmg a baby?" I asked when we had completed Zelig.

After the little cough he gave when he was uncomfortable, he said without looking at me, "Well, I don't know. I would have to think about it." Which meant he would discuss it with his therapist. There were three of us in the relationship: Woody, his shrink, and me. No decisions were ever made without her. He didn't even buy sheets without talking to her. I know that part of several sessions went into his switch from polyester-satin to cotton.

Eventually, with the understanding that I would be responsible for the baby in every way, he (they) agreed.

That Woody had been in psychoanalysis two or three times a week for about thirty years was astonishing to me. I myself had never been to any kind of psychiatrist, and I was

highly skeptical. Woody had no problem admitting that for him therapy was "a crutch," and he credited it with enabling him to work as productively as he had. I couldn't argue with that.

The subject of marriage came up a few times over the years. "It's just a piece of paper," he would say. And intellectually I could see that. His was the more evolved position. Our relationship had to be truer, purer, more responsible, more committed, hetteVj because it stood solely on the quality of its own trust and love. Ours, surely, was the highest form of marriage. He was never kinder or more reassuring than in those moments of my insecurity. "Do I not behave as if we are married?" he would ask, and I would answer that he did. The "piece of paper" was irrelevant. Of course. And the dark thoughts would scamper away.

In 1985 Eileen got sick. She sent me a picture of herself taken in the hospital: there was a tube coming out of her nose, a shower cap on her head, and she had sores all over her mouth with yellowish cream on them. She didn't have her teeth in and she was laughing into the mirror. That same week someone called to tell me that she had died.

I went to the funeral parlor to say good-bye. I worried that they might have fixed her face funny, put makeup on her, or given her a strange smile or something. She looked all right; dead, but all right. She was wearing her good, shiny blue dress, the one she'd worn the night she came to see me on Broadway, and I wondered how they got it on her. Someone once told me that undertakers cut clothes right up the back so they can put them on you after you're stiff. Eileen wouldn't have liked her best blue dress being cut. And she wouldn't have liked the idea of lying around with her eyes closed in front of her friends either. I put my hand on her hand, which was room temperature, and I

thought, Good-bye Eileen, I have loved you all my life, and I will love you until my last thought.

WAFP 1984-85 began like all the other WAFPs: weighing one idea against another. After endless talk over many months, he finally settled on a subject that had long intrigued him—sisters. He had been close to Janet Margolin, his leading lady in Take the Money and Run, and her two sisters; then with Diane Keaton and her two sisters; and now there was me and my three sisters. My youngest sister Tisa had even played a role in his film Manhattan. While we walked, worked, ate, slept, and lived our lives, the story of Hannah was fleshed out, detail by familiar detail.

Fmally he placed a fresh script in my hands with instructions that I could play whichever sister I wanted, but he felt I should be Hannah, the more complex and enigmatic of the sisters, he said, whose stillness and internal strength he likened to the quality Al Pacino projected in The Godfather.

It was the first time I criticized one of his scripts. To me, the characters seemed self-indulgent and dissolute in predictable ways. The script was wordy but it said nothing. Woody didn't disagree, and tried to switch over to the alternative idea (which might have been a murder mystery, I forget), but preproduction was already in progress and we had to proceed. It was my mother's stunned, chill reaction to the script that enabled me to see how he had taken many of the personal circumstances and themes of our lives, and, it seemed, had distorted them into cartoonish characterizations.

At the same time he was my partner. I loved him. I could trust him with my life. And he was a writer: this is what writers do. All is grist for the mill. Relatives have always grumbled. He had taken the ordinary stuff of our lives and lifiied It into art. We were honored and outraged.

And a small sick feeling stirred deep inside me. What I

shared with nobody was my fear that Hannah and Her Sisters had openly and clearly spelled out his feelings for my sister. But this was fiction, I told myself, or at most a fantasy m-spired by passing thoughts. Even President Carter had fantasies. And Woody was a morally superior person. Besides, my sister was now happily married with a newborn baby, mv godson. So I put those thoughts out of my mind. My mother and I played our mother-daughter roles, and she was fabulous. My old friend Michael Came, who five years earlier had introduced Woody and me, played my husband.

Much o^ Hannah was filmed in my own apartment, which we were also living in—the children and I, Mary the dog, a cat, three chinchillas, two hamsters, six mice, assorted fish, a canary, and Edna the parrot. The place was pandemonium. The rooms were clogged with equipment, forty people arrived at dawn crowding into any available space, our personal treasures were spirited away to who-knew-where. The kitchen was an active set for weeks (we ordered out). Some nights I literally couldn't find my bed. In its own way it was a little Zen lesson—a shove toward acceptance and letting go, finding serenity in the center of chaos.

It was strange to be shooting scenes in my own rooms— my kitchen, my pots, my own kids saying lines, Michael Came in my bathroom, wearing a robe, rummaging through my medicine cabinet. Or me lying in my own bed kissing Michael, with Woody watching.

Years later, I was in bed late at night flicking through the channels, and just at that moment I happened to catch my bedroom on television, and the same bed I was actually lying on, and me. Even my television was on television. I think I screamed.

The commotion, and not being able to find anything, sometimes got me a little crazy. But the kids loved it. All of them appear in the movie. Moses, Fletcher, and Daisy played my screen children, so they got to stay home from

school (they were tutored). The cat has never been the same.

Two years had passed and still we had not conceived a child. I was nearly forty. The notion of adoption was not appealing to Woody, but finally, after I assured him once again that the child would be entirely my responsibility, and he told me it would not end our relationship, I applied to adopt a child.

But it was not a topic we could discuss. During the waiting period, as we walked in Central Park, in a swell of excitement and against my better judgment, I began babbling about the baby, and he cut me off. "Look, I don't care about the baby. What I care about is my work."

Given everything he had said, and the awful, undeniable fact that he had "zero interest" in my seven children, who were as dear as any on earth and who one by one had given up trying to win his heart; given all this, I don't know how I still hoped that he would love this child, that she would be the one to open his heart, and that through her, he would learn to love without suspicion; that through her, he would see that a person other than himself, with needs and interests distinct from his, can exist not as a threat, but as one worthy of respect and love. And discovering this, he would surely acknowledge all my children, he would see who they are as human souls, and in knowing them, how could he not love them? And then he would know all they mean to me, and finally he would understand who I am; and knowing my heart, he would feel safe and love me back with certainty. In loving this child, he would place her needs before his own—he would begin to hope on her behalf, and in doing that he would have access to a purer, deeper connection to life; and we would all be there together, a family. That is what I hoped.