Вуди Аллен - Apropos of Nothing

I began to see that it was magic books that counted, and they were among the first books I read, if not the first. I understood that to buy a piece of equipment that anyone could purchase and learn to perform was not worth my time or the lunch money I saved by going hungry in school. The real deal was learning the secrets of sleight of hand from books and practice, endless practice, to palm coins or steal from the bottom of the deck, cut and restore ropes and manipulate silk handkerchiefs, billiard balls, and cigarettes. And that was what I practiced, digital dexterity. I thought I got pretty good, but when I see the level of sleight of hand today, one’s breath is taken away. Practicing as much as Jascha Heifetz or Glenn Gould, there are any number of artists who are their equal in dedication to this other demanding field of exotic art. But I’m not one of them, and this is my story, so let me get on with it.

Simultaneous with being bitten by the magic bug and already a movie addict who longed to live on Fifth Avenue, shake my own cocktails, and have a sharp bantering relationship with a beautiful woman on loan from Paramount who would share my penthouse, I experienced another apocalyptic event. A few years earlier, at eleven, I had developed the practice of taking the subway to my beloved city across the river, and spending my allowance on a day in Manhattan. This was unheard of for a kid of that age, but I had plenty of freedom, or else my parents didn’t care if I was kidnapped. While I could never get a date to go with me, sometimes my friend Andrew would go along. Andrew also had a little letch for show business and was a good-looking kid whose parents had some dough and spoiled him much worse than I was spoiled, so much so that he ended up jumping out a window in his twenties when real life made its grinning appearance. Poor Andrew. Narcotics to escape, then the open window in the hospital. But these two precocious dreamers rode sporadically to Times Square, walked around, picked a movie to see, ate at Roth’s or McGinnis’s, and did the town till our stash played out. I loved walking on Park and Fifth Avenue and into Central Park. It was the Manhattan of the Hollywood movies I grew up escaping into.

One such Saturday we couldn’t find a movie we wanted to see, and searching the newspaper we noticed on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn a movie house called the Flatbush Theatre. They were playing some low-grade comedy by the Ritz Brothers or Olsen and Johnson that we wanted to see. We grabbed the subway back to Brooklyn, found the Flatbush Theatre on Flatbush and Church Avenues, and discovered that in addition to the movies there were five acts of live vaudeville. So the film ends, the curtains part, and onstage there’s a full orchestra, Al Goodman with drummer Willie Krieger. I then see five acts of vaudeville: a singer, a tap dancer, acrobats, another singer, a comedian. I’m blown apart. I thrilled to every moment of those second raters crooning their rendition of “Sorrento” or clicking their tap shoes to “Tea for Two.” And the corny jokes and spot-on impressions of Cagney and Gable, of Bing Crosby and Bette Davis. I’m so taken with vaudeville, I return every weekend for years, never missing a single Saturday until the theater closes and reopens as a legit house with Three Men on a Horse . It was comedians I loved most, and soon, by bringing a pencil and writing down their acts on the torn-up inside of the Good and Plenty box I could do every routine, every impersonation, of every Hollywood star, and I was certain that somewhere between comedy and magic, I was going to wind up performing.

By fourteen, this would happen and here’s how: My stage debut was at a local social club, and a nice man named Abe Stern booked me with no audition out of sheer generosity, paying me two dollars, which was probably a legitimate fee given what his budget must’ve been. I did a few uninspired magic tricks using my sister as a stooge. Her job was to sit in the audience and scream, “I saw him put the egg under his arm!” Of course, I had faked putting it there. And the crowd reacted like a lynch mob, demanding I raise my arm so they could catch me hiding the egg and humiliate me, but it was somewhere else. I would then lift my arm and show it empty. I had vanished it into the trick bag. There were a half dozen other effects just as thrilling as the egg bag, and as the audience fought the onset of narcolepsy, I exited and hoped the boss got his two bucks worth. I also remember auditioning for the Magic Clown TV show, a Sunday morning show for little kids, and I chose for my audition trick, the Passé Passé bottles, a trick using two whiskey bottles. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. But I noticed that whenever I inflicted my fatal prestidigitation on audiences, my spontaneous patter, as I marched around the stage quacking nervously, would always break up the crowd. It never crossed my mind afterward that I had some potential as a comic, but only that I was a failed magician. Not to waste all the hours I spent practicing sleight of hand before a mirror, I decided I should use my technical ability with cards to cheat people, take their money and, as Max Shulman—a very funny writer who, along with Mickey Spillane accounted for any reading I might be caught doing—said, “Get rich, sleep till noon, and screw ’em all.”

It was announced there was to be a talent show at school. I thought I might do some impressions. Impersonations, they were called then. I don’t know when they magically changed into impressions. I did Cagney, Gable, Peter Lorre. As I was waiting my turn to audition, I watched another boy perform. He auditioned as a comic but not with some jokes cribbed from the Reader’s Digest or 1000 Jokes . He didn’t begin like some of those square, cringe-inducing teachers who tried to leaven an assembly with wit: “It seems these two dentists…” No, Jerry Epstein did a professional routine with opening remarks, funny one-liners, material about war movies and gangster films. His act was the real article. After school, I sidled up to him near the huge snow mound on the street near P.S. 99. (I neglected to tell you that it was winter, a very snowy one.) We talked and hit it off, not just about comedy but also baseball. We’d go on to play for the same PAL baseball team. He was a good left-handed first baseman. I played second base.

That’s the other misconception about me, other than I’m an intellectual; people think because I’m on the smaller side and I wear those glasses, I couldn’t have been much of an athlete. But they’re wrong. I was track medal fast, a very fine baseball player with fantasies of pursuing that as a career, which only faded when I was suddenly hired as a gag writer. I was a schoolyard basketball player who could catch a football and throw it a mile. I do not expect you to take my word for this, but if any of you readers ever run into guys from the old neighborhood, ask them. When I happen to run into one of them, they always get on the subject of my skill as a ball player and, for some reason, never my movies. Many will also tell you about my ability at a poker table. In my thirties, I used to play night after night from about nine till the sun came up and made enough to live well and buy a Nolde watercolor and a Kokoschka drawing. I only stopped because David Merrick said he had been a player, too, but he one day realized what a time waster it was. It rang a bell, so I quit.

Same abrupt quitting of baseball. When I was older, I still played softball in the Broadway Show League, a game I never loved. As I walked toward my outfield position one day, a younger player said to me, “Mr. Allen, don’t worry. If there’s anything you can’t get, I’ll help you.” I looked at him and thought, Are you kidding me? Any ball hit to the outfield I can chase down, autograph, and then catch. Moments later, a line drive got past me, a drive I would’ve caught behind my back in my earlier days. I put down my glove, walked off the field, asked to be replaced, and never went near a bat, ball, or glove again. The humiliation was so intense; I can feel the shame as I write this.