In Search of Woody Allen

The worst part about reading Woody Allen’s winning and witty memoir, Apropos of Nothing, is finding a bookshop willing to sell it. It’s essentially been banned in New York City bookstores, as I found when I went to three of my local shops and asked the (often pierced and tattooed) person behind the counter where I might find a copy.

At the first shop the gender-fluid young person at the desk tapped dutifully at the computer keyboard and then looked up and said, “Yeah, we don’t have that one.”

“You sold out? Are you ordering more?”

A withering glance, and then: “We aren’t planning to carry it, so, um, no.”

So I moved on. At my second stop, I got a quick head shake and a “Nope, not here,” delivered in a breezy and non-judgmental tone which I appreciated. At my third, a sad shake of the head and a simple, “No no,” as if I should have known better than to inquire about the possibility of purchasing the recently-published autobiography of an internationally acclaimed film director at a bookshop in his hometown. I felt like a guy ordering a bacon cheeseburger at a halal restaurant.

Woody Allen is an eighty-five-year-old who has been a professional in the entertainment industry since the 1950s. He has worked with some of the most famous and talented people in show business; found success in television, movies and the stage; and would have a bookcase groaning with award statuettes were he ever to bother to show up to the ceremonies to collect them. The long arc of his career starts at the birth of television in live comedy and variety shows, traces its way through smoky hipster stand-up comedy nightclubs of the 1960s, hurtles through knock-off big-screen sex comedies, soars higher with his own idiosyncratic and critically acclaimed masterpieces of American film, and eventually comes thudding down to earth thanks to a messy family scandal.

A quick recap of the plot, for those readers who may need it. In 1993, Woody Allen was accused of molesting his seven-year-old daughter Dylan. He categorically denied it at the time, and during a subsequent court proceeding the matter was exhaustively investigated, resulting in all charges being dropped. He also famously married Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow, after a five-year relationship that began when Soon-Yi was barely twenty-one.

In other words, just the kind of alt-family non-binary transgressive blurring of rules and lines you’d think bookstore types would love. Give him a made-up exotic name and they’d be holding book signings for him.

The small, independent bookshops of Man­hattan, apparently, don’t see it that way. So I did what I should have done at the very beginning, what you’re not supposed to do if you care about books and literary things, and I ordered the book on Amazon. It arrived at my door in forty-eight hours, in a simple Amazon envelope, unaccompanied by scornful snorts or offended eyebrows.

Look, I did my best to support my local bookstores, but they apparently have a rule: if we don’t approve of it, you’re not allowed to read it.

On the other hand, it was a lot easier for me to buy the book than it was for Woody Allen to find a publisher. When the book was originally announced, the publisher, Hachette, crowed proudly about landing the memoirs of an American cultural icon. But as the book neared publication, the house faced a public rebuke from Dylan and her brother, Ronan—who is also published by a Hachette division. Ronan is a best-selling author and is a well-known chronicler of the #MeToo movement. In response to Hachette’s decision to publish his father’s memoirs, Ronan Farrow announced that he would no longer allow Hachette to publish his works. Undeterred, the CEO of the company made a bold and unequivocal statement reaffirming his commitment to publishing Allen’s book: “We do not allow anyone’s publishing program to interfere with anyone else’s.”

A few days later, after a fractious meeting with near-mutinous employees, came the equivocations. “On second thought, maybe we do,” was the message sent when the book was pulled from the Hachette list and the rights were returned to the author. The publishing of Apropos of Nothing fell to an outfit called Skyhorse, perhaps best known for publishing Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s disgraced former attorney, and Alan Dershowitz, an attorney who defies categorisation.

So when the book finally arrived in my hands, it had taken a tortuous and nearly fatal journey to get there. Which leaves the reader with an odd feeling, because the book isn’t a tendentious and inflamed thing at all. It’s a lilting, shaggy-dog set of memories and reflections, an utterly charming stroll through the best parts of American popular culture. Parts are laugh-out-loud funny, parts are disarmingly self-deprecating and honest, but all of it is light and breezy and without a trace of rancour. And if you’re a fan of Allen’s movies—and even if you’re not—his voice and mannerisms are etched so permanently in your head that you don’t so much read his book as imagine he’s sitting next to you, spinning it all like the best show-business story ever.

The book starts in a long-lost New York, with a young Woody going to the movies and being transported:

The pop music of the day was Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey. So here I am inundated with such beautiful music and movies. First, a double feature every week, then as the years pass, I go more and more. Such excitement to enter the Midwood Saturday morning while the house lights were still on and a small crowd bought their candy and filed in as some pop record played to keep the seat takers from mutinying till the lights dimmed. Harry James—“I’ll Get By”. The sconce shades were red, the fixtures gold brass, the carpets red. At last the lights go down and the curtains part and the silver screen lights up with a logo that makes the heart salivate, if I may mix my metaphors, with Pavlovian anticipation. I saw them all, every comedy, any cowboy movie, love story, pirate picture, war film.

And what he liked best were movies about rich people who lived uptown, what he calls “champagne comedies”:

I loved stories that took place in penthouses where the elevator opened into the apartment and corks popped, where suave men who spoke witty dialogue romanced beautiful women who lounged around the house in what someone now might wear to a wedding at Buckingham Palace.

One of the delights of this book is that we, of course, know how it turns out. We know that Allen eventually gets out of Brooklyn and onto Fifth Avenue and a penthouse apartment of his own, which lends the early part of the book a classic American tone. It’s a show-business rags-to-riches yarn, the story of a funny kid who turned his daydreams into a pile of dollars, a version of The Great Gatsby—complete with dazzling parties, rich New Yorkers, and a judicious name change. James Gatz becomes Jay Gatsby, and Allan Konigsberg becomes Woody Allen, though of the two of them it’s Allen who is the more honest.

“I don’t have an intellectual neuron in my head,” Allan declares—and repeats several times throughout the book. It tickles him that people see him as a smartypants, as a reader of philosophy, as a guy who thinks big thoughts. “I have no insights, no lofty thoughts, no understanding of most poems that do not begin, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’,” he declares:

What I do have, however, is a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and I propose that it is these specs, combined with a flair for appropriating snippets from erudite sources too deep for me to grasp but which can be utilized in my work to give the deceptive impression of knowing more than I do that keeps this fairy tale afloat.

And just in case we’re not buying it, he itemises his ignorance:

You would be shocked to know what I don’t know and haven’t read or seen. After all, I am a director, a writer. I’ve never seen a live production of Hamlet. I’ve never seen Our Town, in any version. I never read Ulysses, Don Quixote, Lolita, Catch-22, 1984, no Virginia Woolf, no E.M. Forster, no D.H. Lawrence. Nothing by the Brontës or Dickens. On the other hand, I’m one of the few guys in my peer group who read Joseph Goebbels’s novel. Yes, Goebbels, the gimpy little suppository who flacked for the Fuhrer tried his hand at a novel called Michael, and don’t you think the main character had all the anxiety of the nervous lover anxious for the girl to like him.

He reels off a few more confessions—he hasn’t seen Ben Hur or Mr Deeds Goes to Town—and it all seems effortlessly casual and improvised. He’s in the middle of talking about his schooldays and he keeps dropping asides and flash-forwards, like an avuncular story-teller pretending to lose his place, when in fact he’s simply softening us up for what’s to come. It’s impossible to tell if Allen is being disingenuous here—it’s all awfully entertaining and genuinely shocking that a famous American film director hasn’t seen Mr Smith Goes to Washington—but whatever it is, it’s excellent story craft. The next section of the memoir recounts his nearly unimpeded rise to the top, amid critical acclaim, financial windfalls and plenty of sex. It’s a smart move to have established early on that he knows that he’s full of it.

If you’ve been paying attention to American culture for the past fifty years, you already know the highpoints of the second half of the book. Woody Allen goes from sketch comedy writer to stand-up comic—with a few hiccups along the way—and emerges, in the early 1970s, as a comic powerhouse. From there he delivers an astonishing number of movies—nearly one a year for thirty years—including some of the funniest and smartest pictures ever made by an American. He also made some absolute stinkers, about which he is both honest and witty.

During that time, Woody Allen’s studio partners gave him absolute artistic control over every aspect of his projects, something rare in the movie business. Allen could write, direct and cast each picture as he saw fit. The successes and failures of each project could be attributed to Woody Allen alone, and his work reflects that idiosyncratic and singular vision. Actors and actresses clamoured to work with him, despite the low budgets and low pay of his productions. Actresses especially: Allen’s movies have garnered two Best Actress Oscar winners—Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine—as well as four Best Supporting Actress Oscar winners and six nominations.

And then came the Troubles. During Allen’s long relationship with Mia Farrow, they maintained separate homes—Farrow’s apartment was directly across Central Park from Allen’s, and when they had children together, Allen would walk across the park to be with them in the morning and at bedtime. It was already a strange relationship, and then it got stranger.

In 1977, Mia Farrow and her then-husband Andre Previn had adopted a girl, Soon-Yi, who had been abandoned on the streets of Seoul. Soon-Yi lived with Farrow, and over time the Farrow household included fourteen children, three of whom were the biological offspring of Farrow and Previn, one of whom of Farrow and Allen.

In 1992, Soon-Yi began a sexual relationship with Woody Allen, who was at that time her adopted mother’s on-again-off-again boyfriend. Mia Farrow discovered this, the story hit the tabloids, it was the source of late-night talkshow jokes and stand-up comedy routines for weeks. By the way, this is not the strange part.

A few months after discovering the relationship between Soon-Yi and Allen, Farrow accused Allen of sexually abusing their adopted daughter, Dylan. The charges were investigated by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital, along with the New York Child Welfare Agency, and both agencies cleared Allen of any wrongdoing. By 1993, the case was closed. Part of the Farrow family still maintains Allen’s guilt. Mia, Ronan and Dylan continue to insist that Woody Allen is a paedophile. His adopted son, Moses, his wife Soon-Yi, and the relevant law enforcement authorities, declare him innocent.

Since then, Allen and Soon-Yi have adopted two children of their own. Mia Farrow has also adopted five more children (she seems to collect them) and has named one of them after the judge who heard the molestation case against Allen. That, by the way, is the strange part.

The pace and wit of the book don’t flag during this saga. It’s clearly a painful set of memories for Allen, but his show-business instincts serve him well in the telling. His tone is sharply confident but never self-pitying. He settles the scores with dispassion and, here and there, some pretty big laugh lines.

In the years between the accusations of child molestation and 2014, Allen directed and released nearly twenty pictures. He worked with a lot of famous people—Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Robin Williams, Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant, Sean Penn, Owen Wilson and more—and his movies continued to earn just enough to allow him to make more. The old accusations of sexual abuse were ancient history.

They were revived twenty years later by Ronan, Dylan and Mia Farrow—the children were now in their late twenties—and the scandal spilled out onto front pages once again. But this time, with leverage. Ronan Farrow, Woody’s biological son, was now a celebrity in his own right, with a promising journalism career well under way (he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018) and his own show on MSNBC, a left-leaning cable news channel. In 2014, the son’s star was on the rise and the father’s star was setting. Ronan led the charge against his father, in the pages of the New York Times and the airtime of MSNBC.

As a result, Woody Allen began to be denounced retroactively by many of the actors and producers he had worked with—even those who appeared in his films after the sexual abuse charges had been lodged, investigated and dismissed. His film financing began to dry up, his movies struggled to find distribution, and his memoirs were rejected by his publisher and remain a pain in the neck to buy.

But it bears remembering: Woody Allen wasn’t cancelled because of something that he did, but because of something that he had become. In 1994, Woody Allen was an acclaimed film director at the top of his career. Twenty years later he was nearly eighty. Nothing about the sexual abuse allegations had changed—there was no new evidence, no mystery witnesses came forward. The only difference was, the father was an old man and near the end of his career and the son was becoming a star, and in Hollywood there’s only one way this could go. People sided with the son. People prefer the Young King.

Somehow, Woody Allen recounts this sequence of events without curdling the entire narrative with bitterness and rage. From a distance, it’s a pretty powerful ending to an American life that begins in the hardscrabble streets of Brooklyn and syncopates its way to Fifth Avenue, Hollywood, fame and riches—all to a soundtrack of Gershwin, Kern, Sidney Bechet—only to founder in an age that’s roiled by internet witch hunts and Twitter mobs.

The book is funny all the way through, even at the very end:

Meanwhile, I go about my middle-class life. I practice my horn (or as my mother used to say, “Oy, I have such a headache from him sitting in the bedroom, tweeting on his fife”). I turn out the pages, dote on Soon-Yi, and peel off twenties so my kids can go see movies that are not as good as ones I saw for twelve cents. How would I sum up my life? Lucky. Many stupid mistakes bailed out by luck. My biggest regret? Only that I’ve been given millions to make movies, total artistic control, and I never made a great film. If I could trade my talent for any other person’s, living or dead, who would it be? No contest—Bud Powell. Though Fred Astaire’s right up there. Who in history do I most admire? Shane, but he’s fictional. Any women? There have been so many I’ve admired, from standards like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman to Mae West and my cousin Rita. I’ll finally say, Soon-Yi. Not because if I don’t, she’ll kneecap me with the rolling pin, but because she hit the cruel streets alone at five to try for a better life and despite dreadful obstacles made one for herself.

It’s a book of lessons and stories, a recounting of mistakes and wrongs—both the kind you do to others and the kind they do in return—but it’s also a funny and forgiving book. Because life is funny. And life also requires forgiveness along with the laughs. The final lines in Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall, put it this way:

It reminds me of that old joke—you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, hey doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken. Then the doc says, why don’t you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that’s how I feel about relationships. They’re totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.

I have my copy of Apropos of Nothing sitting on a table near the door of my apartment in New York. My plan is to return to the bookstores I visited when I was looking for a copy, march up to the very Jacobins and bluestockings who sniffed and gasped at me when I asked for it, and offer to lend them my copy. Yes, they should stock the book on their shelves, but they should also read it. Laughter and forgiveness are in short supply everywhere, of course, but nowhere more than at your local bookstore.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, author and journalist who lives in Manhattan. He was writer and co-executive producer of the comedy series Cheers. His most recent book is Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse