Вуди Аллен: Apropos of Nothing

So now the double feature is over and I leave the comfortable, dark magic of the movie house and reenter Coney Island Avenue, the sun, the traffic, back to the wretched apartment on Avenue K. Back into the clutches of my archenemy, reality. In my movie Sleeper , as part of one comic sequence, by some kind of mind-bending process I imagine I’m Blanche Du Bois from Streetcar Named Desire . I speak in a feminine, southern accent trying to make the sequence funny while Diane Keaton does a perfect Brando. Keaton’s the type who complains, “Oh I can’t do this, I can’t imitate Marlon Brando.” Like the girls in class who tell you how lousy they did on the test and the results come back and they’re straight As. Naturally, her Brando is better than my Blanche, but my point is, in real life I am Blanche. Blanche says, “I don’t want reality, I want magic.” And I have always despised reality and lusted after magic. I tried to be a magician, but found I could only manipulate cards and coins and not the universe.

And so, because of cousin Rita, I was introduced to movies, movie stars, Hollywood with its patriotic morality and miraculous endings; and while I brushed off everything everyone tried to teach me, from my parents to my Spanish teachers when I’d already had the two years of Spanish, Hollywood took. Modern Screen . Photoplay . Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth—their celluloid world was what I learned. The larger-than-life, the superficial, the falsely glamorous, but I do not regret a frame of it. When asked which character in my films is most like me on the screen, you only have to look at Cecilia in Purple Rose of Cairo .

So where was I? Oh, I was born. I was definitely born, and I put it that way because there were three close calls for me not having a life. The first was when my father was one of only three swimmers who made the long swim to shore when his boat sank. The second also involved him, but not so heroically. He was at a family party of some sort with my mother, his fiancée. It was all my mother’s side of the family. They were a bunch of decent, noisy Jews with their makeshift lifestyles. Example of their style: we had a relative named Phil Wasserman, whom I will return to soon, as he was a major contributor to my career in later years. But there was also another relative named Phil Wasserman, equally as important a member of the family and he was always referred to as “the other Phil Wasserman.” So in conversations about either Phil Wasserman, one always had to specify and one did by saying, “I was walking in Manhattan and I ran into the other Phil Wasserman.” Or “I have to buy a gift for the other Phil Wasserman.” As a child I wondered if when he phoned he opened with, “Hi, it’s the other Phil Wasserman.” Or did his wife say, “This is my husband, the other Phil Wasserman”? Or, on his tombstone, does it say, “Here lies the other Phil Wasserman”? Jerry-built as the system was, it worked.

Anyhow, here’s this party and one cousin shows off her new diamond ring. Many oohs and ahhs over its size and beauty, although I’m sure it didn’t approximate the Hope Diamond. Meanwhile, an hour later it’s missing and panic ensues. No one can find the precious jewel. I don’t know how the mystery got solved, but it was discovered my father had stolen it. Well, you can imagine the stunned disbelief. Eyes widened, hands were clapped to heads in the manner of the Yiddish theater, there was a collective “Oy vey” as glasses of sweet wine were put down and chicken legs were abandoned in mid-mastication. Naturally, my mother keeled over and that night the wedding was called off. My birth is now in peril yet again. It was only the charm and smooth talking of my father’s father having a sit-down with my mother’s father that eventually ameliorated this crisis. My father’s father made the promise that his dopey gonif son would never do such a thing again and that he would also get out of the rackets, stop booking bets for the mob, and go straight. With that, he somehow helped my father buy a failing grocery store on Flatbush Avenue, and with some careful planning and hard work, my father managed to double its losses in record time. By now, you realize Dad had no flair for supporting a family, a topic of much stimulating conversation over the years, causing my father many times to angrily pack all his clothes in a valise before unpacking the valise and going back to bed.

My third brush with nonexistence came shortly after birth. At least I was up and running. My mother, who I told you was always forced to work to supplement my father’s many unprofitable enterprises, had to leave me with maids. These were unknown young women, often different from day to day depending on who the agency would send over. My mother would instruct them where the cod liver oil was, that I only drank chocolate milk, and that no matter how cute I looked, not to trust the little momza. I was in a high chair, usually upset when she left although to this day, I don’t know why because she was such a pill, not a fun mother like Billie Burke or Spring Byington. Anyhow, being alone with a stranger every day could prove fatal, and one maid closed me up inside a blanket explaining how simple it would be for her to smother me and then she would put the blanket with me dead in it, in the trash can. Things got pretty warm and airless, bundled up in that blanket. Luckily for me the maid belonged to the variety of crazies who do not act out, rather than the kind who wind up on Page Six in an orange jumpsuit having skipped their clozapine.

As I say, I was lucky, and this good luck has followed me all the days of my life, so far. Its potency cannot be overestimated. People will point to my career and say it can’t be all luck, but they don’t realize how much of it has been the roll of the dice and nothing more.

So while my entrance into the world was threatened and my early existence precarious, I made it alive to Fourteenth Street right off Avenue J in Brooklyn. And while I don’t have many memories of those early years except for drinking a glass of milk directly squeezed from a cow’s udder (which was supposed to thrill me, but I found it warm and disgusting), and breaking away from my mother at some Disney film to try and run down the aisle to touch the screen, there are no other dull anecdotes worth mentioning. Oh yes, I seemed to have been a born paranoid. I can recall my first dwelling, an apartment which my parents shared with Uncle Abe and Aunt Ceil, my mother’s sister. I remember thinking that all the other people in the world, including my mother and father and aunt and uncle, were aliens from another planet who would at some moment remove their masks, revealing the monster faces they really owned, and hack me to pieces. Why such a terrible fantasy, I don’t know. My parents and aunts and uncle, as I said, were good and loving to me.

We first lived in a wonderful neighborhood I came to really appreciate only after it was gone. This was Avenue J, a commercial street, which was no big deal then but now seems to me like a paradise. It had wonderful candy stores, delicatessens with succulent meats, toy stores, a hardware store, delicious Chinese restaurants, a poolroom, a library. There were myriad small stores selling clothing and freshly baked cakes and bread and, of course, the lady who sold pickles, a fearful creature who just sat like the minotaur next to a big barrel of pickles. She was a lump dressed in many sweaters, the layered look in spades. And for five cents, she would dip her hand into the barrel and find a nickel-sized pickle and give it to you, and after decades of dipping that hand into the brine all day, every day, her hand had become pickled. I wondered as a kid, how many gallons of Jergens lotion it would take to get it back to normal. Then there was the Midwood, the movie house I practically lived in. How nice, in those days, in my dinky little neighborhood, there were countless movie houses within walking distance, all showing double features. The poorer ones showed two films, five cartoons, a weekly serial like Batman, and a funny short if it was Robert Benchley and not Joe McDoakes.