Woody Allen is not large, but he contains multitudes, and some of them show up in his “controversial” autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, which the powers of righteous wokitude finally allowed to be published back in 2020, which I got around to reading in 2021 and am now “reviewing” in 2022.
I have read many autobiographies, and Apropos of Nothing—the title redolent of Woody’s Borscht Belt nihilism—may be the strangest of the lot, a book that, one suspects, might well have never have been written, given Allen’s notorious longing for privacy, had he not been publicly “convicted” of child molestation and thus under enormous pressure to answer those charges in a forum that he could entirely control.
I did not read the section of the book that deals with the scandal, and in fact never read any of the details of the painful, long-running dispute between Allen and Mia Farrow, and never learned the details of their complicated “family”. I don’t like trial by publicity, and generally find the details of the lives of the rich and compulsively self-indulgent too rich for my tastes, leaving me rejoicing in the utter bourgeoisity of my supremely middle-class life. So this review will concentrate almost entirely on pre-Mia Woody, when his life, I think, still maintained some passing resemblance to “normality”.
As I say, I have read many autobiographies. I have never before read one in which the author describes her/his mother as “ugly”. Woody says this of his mother several times. And you thought you had mommy issues.
Woody’s relationships with his parents were, well, fraught as fuck, as the kids like to say. Despite being a loudly self-proclaimed cynic, Woody almost pathetically retails all the lies his dad told him about his supposedly glamorous gangsta life, never dreaming that they might be, you know, entirely untrue. Wikipedia tells us that Martin Konigsberg was a waiter and jewelry engraver. Woody tells us that, before he married his mother “Nettie”, he was a well-connected hustler.
[H]e drives a cab, runs a poolroom, strikes out with assorted scams and makes book. Summers he is paid to go to Saratoga to attend to questionable horse-racing business for Albert Anastasia. Summers upstate were another series of bedtime stories. How he loved that life. Fancy clothes, a big per diem, sexy women, and then somehow he meets my mother. Tilt. How he wound up with Nettie is a mystery on a par with dark matter.
Ha, ha. Well, Woody, if you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting down. Your dad was a liar. He never had any of that fancy Saratoga live style, and, pace Wikipedia, he wasn’t a waiter and jewelry engraver, not really. He was, essentially, a bum, and he married Nettie because he wanted someone who would support him, which she did.
She was the one who kept the family from going under. She worked as a bookkeeper in a flower shop. She ran the household, cooked the meals, paid the bills, made sure there was fresh cheese in the traps while my father peeled off twenties he couldn’t afford and stuffed them into my pocket while I slept.
Woody tells us his dad was constantly giving him money, and also claims that he himself was a card shark as a kid, “cleaning out the unsuspecting, dealing seconds, hopping the cut, and pocketing everyone’s allowance,” which makes me suspect that Marty wasn’t the only Konigsberg who liked to spin a line.
What drove Woody as a kid was anything to escape the hellhole that was his parents’ marriage—the movies and radio, of course, but most of all, it seems likely, what were then called “the columns”, the gossip columns in five New York newspapers—the Herald Tribune, the Journal American, the News, the Post, and the Mirror. Walter Winchell was the king of the columnists, syndicated in a now unbelievable 2,000 papers, along with a nightly radio program. There were at least a dozen, all of them legends in their own time, but not in ours, pouring out an unending stream of banalia—gossip, plugs, smears, sneers, quips, and tips. Earl Wilson, who wrote for the now forgotten (of course) New York Mirror, was one of Woody’s first heroes—“Earl Wilson was the voice of Broadway. His stories and gossip were about show people, plays, movie stars, showgirls, nightclubs, supper clubs,” all about what happened in that heaven called “Manhattan” that was only a subway ride away from home.
The columns taught Woody to write that smarmy, smutty wise guy prose style that has stayed with him all his life, a sort of squid ink that comes squirting out to cover any actual human emotions that might be lurking somewhere near the surface—describing the beatnik chicks who haunted his high school fantasies as “delectable bohemian little kumquats,” for example. This is not how Allen describes the women he really cared about, most notably Louise Lasser, the true love of his life, with whom he lived for eight years of tormented co-dependency, which he writes about with a fair degree of honesty, particularly surprising because their relationship was the precise opposite of the way a control freak like Woody Allen wants to live. And when he writes about women as “delectable little kumquats”, as he does, over and over again throughout the book and throughout his life, he does so to recapture his boyhood fantasies that were first kindled in him when he read “the columns”, read them and believed that that world of snide suck-up and drooling envy was the epitome of “class”.
It was a world that young Allan Konigsberg was determined to enter. He credits his mother with urging him to send in his jokes to the columnists, who were, of course, only too happy to print all the anonymous freebies they could get. One of them, Nick Kenny, was even willing to give him name credit. Seeing his name in print was all the stimulus Woody needed to change it, at age 17, to the dramatically WASPy “Heywood Allen”—though Woody never cops to the “Heywood”, which he may have taken from father and son progressive journalists Heywood and Heywood Hale Broun—pretending, for some obscure reason, that he changed his first name to the familiar “Woody”.
At sixteen Woody had gotten enough column credits to win a job writing “quips” for a big time press agent, Gene Shefrin, who would pass them onto the columnists to be attributed to his clients. While still in high school he was making $45 a week, compared to $40 for his mother, all the encouragement Woody needed to turn his back forever on “school”, which he regarded with utter contempt, a simple extension of his parents’ square, loser, play by the rules world—everything he hated—though Woody does make his classes sound pretty dreary.
Despite his hatred for formal education, Woody spent a miserable semester at NYU in a last gesture of respect to his mother, but soon had something far better in view—writing for Bob Hope.
It’s hard to exaggerate what Bob Hope meant to me. I had adored him since early childhood and to this day never tire of watching his movies. Not all his movies, not the later ones, and not even so much the very early ones. But Monsieur Beaucaire, Casanova’s Big Night, The Great Lover, for example. Yes, the movies are silly and the humor is not Shavian, but Hope himself is such a very great comic persona and his delivery is out of this world.
It's statements like this that make me almost pity Woody. How could anyone—particularly anyone with such an obsessive longing for “class” as Woody Allen—like Bob Hope? I find all of Hope’s “work”—early, middle, late—execrable. Robert Benchley said that the superlative of the adjective “unfunny” was “French clown”—which convinces me that Robert never saw Bob. Bob Hope was never in character, never believable, never focusing on this gag but always wanting to get it done, get it in the can, and on to the next, and the next after that, and the next after that.
As it turns out, Woody doesn’t write for Bob, but he quickly makes the way up the comedy writer’s ladder, making well over $100 a week. He tells the story of his apprenticeship in smarmy, press agent prose, talking about all the great guys he met on the way up, so talented and so helpful—all of which contrasts sharply with all the comments I’ve read by him in interviews in the past—when, according to my not always reliable memory, Woody Allen did not want, did not receive, and did not need any assistance from anyone. He was always the lone wolf, apart from the rest, and better than the rest. To my skeptical mind, it’s very much as if Woody, with all his present-day problems, felt it wiser not to tell his supposed peers the truth—that he considered them a bunch of pathetic, bourgeois sellouts, while he alone held up the banner of artistic integrity and truth.
Woody’s hunger for conventional show biz success is palpable—“I was a hit”, “they loved my stuff”, “we played to huge audiences”—and it comes through constantly, which, combined with all the, well, smarmy suck-up that comprises large portions of the book, make it resemble a conventional show biz biography. There is, in particular, endless name-dropping, both conventionally famous and high brow, that verges on the compulsive. If he doesn’t know them personally, he does know of them. It’s striking that he doesn’t tell us much about the people who inspired him to want “more”, except David Panich, a classic New York character:
an odd and brilliant character whom I owe much to. He was ten years older than me, dazzlingly brilliant, immense erudition, could draw with the precision of Dürer or Dali. He wrote poetry, he read everything, and he played boogie woogie on the piano. He hated modern jazz but had lived among all the great modern jazz giants, Monk, Miles, and had a romance with Charlie Parker’s wife. He was a gifted sculptor who carved the famous carving on Charlie Mingus’s bass. His apartment on Roosevelt Island was like entering a spaceship: ultramodern, his own paintings on the walls, always morbid subject matter, like his poetry.
Panich floated on the edges of several different art worlds but lacked the moxie necessary to enter successfully into any of them, supporting himself as a school teacher. Allen mentions that it was Panich who introduced him to the writer he admired the most, S. J. Perelman—“ He opened my eyes to just how great S. J. Perelman was, superior to all other funny minds, an axiom I hold to this day.”
Allen tells us nothing more about Perelman other than that he admired him intensely, or even if he met him,1 even though Perelman, who wrote scripts for the Marx Brothers back in the day and then “feuilletons”2 for the New Yorker, lived until 1979. Much of Perelman—who wrote numerous parodies of commercial trash—I find tedious and overwritten. Like all of his peers at the New Yorker, with the single exception of James Thurber, it’s very clear that he’s being paid by the word. Perelman’s best pieces, for my money, are “reviews” of cheesy literary genres like science fiction (“Captain Future”) or the once immensely popular (and, of course, thoroughly racist) Fu Manchu series, often quoting the overwrought prose of his literary victims to great effect. Best of all is “Somewhere A Rosco” (which is a handgun), in which he simply quotes large chunks of steamy, “her gown clung to her lush curves like varnish” prose from Spicy Detective,3 almost without comment.
Well, enough about S. J. What’s really striking is that Allen says nothing at all about Ingmar Bergman (other than, again, that he admired him extravagantly), who dared to put on the screen all the angst and torment that, Woody was convinced, people didn’t want to know about. Allen tiptoes to the very edge of despair in a number of his films—lines like “Nothing means anything anyway” come up frequently—sometimes evasively, as an excuse for “bad” behavior, which can’t really be bad because, well, nothing means anything, but sometimes more explicitly as well. In both Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Café Society (2016), people get away with murder and live happily ever after. In the latter film, which I reviewed here, the massive horror of the Holocaust is an obvious subtext. It’s my guess that Allen was so stunned by the unforgiving Northern imagery and content of Bergman’s films that he found it “impossible” not to emulate him (he tells us, for example, that he worked with several of Bergman’s cameramen), but he never tells us why.
If Woody’s book were all suck up and evasion it wouldn’t be worth reading, but it’s not. The most striking portion of the book (for me, at least, since I didn’t read it all) is devoted to the long-running, tormented affair/marriage with Louise Lasser. Allen married his first wife, Harlene Rosen in 1956, when he was 20 and she was 17, a predictable first marriage to a predictably nice Jewish girl, which was predictably disastrous.4 Three years later, Woody left safe, Lower East Side Harlene for her polar opposite, the Upper West Side Shiksa5 Goddess of his dreams and life, Louise Lasser.
Lasser didn’t become at all famous until the 1976 cult classic/total bore Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a parody soap opera presenting Louise/Mary as a innocent, wide-eyed housewife who believes all the crap TV commercials try to sell her, and by then Lasser looked the part, but, according to Woody, in 1959 she was unbelievably glamorous, claiming that people literally mistook her for Brigitte Bardot. But what was really amazing was that she liked Woody Allen.
The Lasser/Allen relationship (they lived together for eight years, married for three of them and divorcing in 1970) was a mating of diagonal angst, the line running from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Lower East. Woody fills us in on the world he thought he was entering, the world he read about in Earl Wilson, the crazy dream he thought could never come true, the dream he was now holding in the palm of his hand:
She was charming, smart as a whip, quick, very funny, and witty; she was educated, raised in a Fifth Avenue duplex like the ones I’d seen on screen at the Midwood [Theater]. She shopped with charge accounts at Tiffany’s and Bergdorf; her father was a highly successful CPA whose red-and-blue tax book appeared in every bookstore in town. Her mother was an interior decorator. Her family took her to the best restaurants where all the maître d’s had known her since she was little. While I was growing up on linoleum eating Del Monte string beans out of a can, she was knocking off escargot on Fifth Avenue, where a liveried doorman would get a cab for her so she could speed off to the theater and after to Giambelli’s restaurant.
But, well, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. And so does the devil.
Probably the most obvious sign something was amiss was her room. Picture a beautifully decorated Fifth Avenue duplex apartment housing father, mother, daughter. The furniture, some of which was designed by the mother, is sleek with every lamp, ashtray, chair, and table, understated and tasteful, arranged with a gentle simplicity. The colors are muted pastels, soft blues and grays, there is much cherrywood. Everything is in place and looks perfect to the eye. One gets the impression the objects have a number on them that corresponds with their number on the table. The effect is meticulous and lovely. One ascends the staircase and comes to Louise’s room. One opens the door to it and sees Hiroshima. The bed unmade, drawers wide open, clothes strewn about, creams, lotions everywhere, jars and squeezed tubes uncapped, the tops God knows where. The bathroom cabinets are wide-open and many items normally used and put back after are on the sink, on the edge of the tub. There is a box on the night table with a half-eaten slice of cold pizza from what day one can’t estimate, along with a wax half cup of coffee with the drowned butt in it.
Woody will spend the next twelve years of his life both pursuing his own career with manic intensity and success while providing endless emotional support to this goddess/trainwreck, who was never able to turn what Woody describes as breathtaking beauty into the least measure of success.
In all my future writing over the years she remained my blond lady of the sonnets. When I did a scene acting with Anjelica Huston and duplicated Louise’s bedroom, that terrific actress looked at me incredulously and said, “Who did you ever know who had a room like this?”—and I’m thinking, Oh, just some girl I married.
And so we see that Woody, who fled the emotional wreckage of his childhood in an obsessive search for control, embraced a new form of emotional wreckage all over again as an adult. Despite his hard-nosed, career first, last, and always, take no prisoners pose, he was a compulsive care-giver as well, to the point of masochism.
While Louise Lasser was turning his emotional life upside down, Woody’s career as a performer was jumpstarted by the example of Mort Sahl, whom he first saw on stage in 1959. Allen praises him passionately in the book—“I wanted to do what he did, I wanted to be like him, I wanted to be him.”—but it’s a statement he made earlier about Sahl that sticks in my mind: “Back in the fifties, we were all waiting for something, but we didn’t know what it was. That something was Mort Sahl.”
Mort Sahl wasn’t afraid of the audience. He wasn’t afraid to let them know he was smarter, and sharper, and harder than they were. You had to keep up with Mort. He made his audiences run. He didn’t pandar. He didn’t tell mother in law jokes, or ugly girl jokes, or fat girl jokes, or dumb girl jokes, or woman driver jokes. He wasn’t afraid to let the crowd know he was Jewish, but he was the opposite of Borscht Belt Jewish, which is exactly what Woody and the rest were trying to get away from. Mort showed them how. You didn’t have to be the nerdy writer standing in the wings, watching the big Neanderthals in their fancy tuxes getting the big yuks and the big bucks while you stood off in the corner being noble and virtuous and poor and envious. You could be the big guy yourself, and you could get up on that stage and be yourself, or at least the self that you wanted the public to see.
Woody’s standup career was taking off in the sixties, when I was in college, but I confess I never much cared for him. He reminded me of Lily Tomlin, who broke it big at the tail end of the sixties. They were both funny, often, but their basic act, it seems to me, was pandaring to the new, greatly expanded population of college graduates, letting us cool kids laugh at those dumb asses who barely made it through high school. Despite Allen’s heated insistence in this book that he never “worked dirty”, he certainly worked smirky, following his first love, Bob Hope. For example:
Bob Hope, circa 1970, introducing a member of the “All American Football Team”: “He’s the only member of his class to major in the geography of Raquel Welch!”
Woody Allen: “If I’m reincarnated, I’d like to come back as the body stocking of Raquel Welch!”
I didn’t care for any of Woody’s early films, like Take the Money and Run, or Bananas, or Sleeper, which struck me as mere random collections of random gags. Annie Hall, which I thought received a ridiculous amount of praise, didn’t strike as much of an improvement—Woody making New York jokes about LA, Woody and his pal lusting over the gal with the “VPL”—“visible panty lines”. Most of all, his work—all of his work—is thoroughly deformed by his relentless misogyny. Nettie may have escaped her due punishment, but, in Woody Allen’s films, the rest of her sex isn’t so lucky.
In Woody Allen’s films, women are invariably promiscuous, invariably calculating, never trustworthy. They always let you down. If only we could consume them as heartlessly as they consume us! If only we could consume them as casually as kumquats! How happy life would be!
Well, with all that negativity surging through my sensibility, it’s “amazing” that I very much enjoyed his next film, Manhattan (1979), the most successful—that I’ve seen, anyway—of his many odes to his beloved isle of dreams.
Shot in creamy, dreamy black and white, in 2.35-1 widescreen format, Manhattan is a visual tone poem of Allen’s fantasy New York, the stuff that dreams are made of, all the noise and crowds filtered out, as though one could have all of Central Park to one’s self6 on a perfect spring day, the great buildings silhouetted against the sky—silent, reassuring presences that guarantee everlasting power and peace. When the images say so much, one hardly needs a story at all!
But of course we do have a story, a (mostly) reasonable plot featuring mostly believable people, rather than a random collection of Woody Allen jokes thrown at us from random directions. In fact, on paper—so to speak—Manhattan almost sounds like a confessional. Woody’s character, Isaac Davies (note the “Jewish” first name) is a twice-divorced TV writer—what Woody would have been if he hadn’t had the nerve to go into standup. A bit of a cliché, certainly, but what’s really bad is that Ike’s ex-wife (which one isn’t clear) is writing a tell-all book about their marriage—certainly one of Woody’s deepest fears.
Except that, well, Isaac doesn’t seem to have it so tough. He’s “dating” “Tracy” (a barely legal Mariel Hemingway), a stunning 17-year-old WASP goddess, who, like all WASP goddesses—all of the ones worth fucking, anyway—is attending the no doubt supremely exclusive “Dalton School”7 (to drive this home, we are given a supremely unnecessary shot of her exiting the school’s classy iron gate, with a great big “Dalton School” sign on it). In a bit too Manhattany bit, he shows her off to his friends, “Yale” (Michael Murphy) and his wife “Emily” (Anne Byrne), who respond as though she were a piece of fine china, even after Woody tells them (and us) that she’s underage. Well, what’s more chic than statutory rape? This is New York, after all!8
Yeah, one can quibble over whether the age difference is gross or charming, but Tracy/Mariel seems to have the necessary aplomb to carry it all off—it’s something they teach at Dalton, one guesses—and, anyway, we’re off to the races with the real plot—Yale, perhaps a bit embarrassed to be so conventional as to have a wife, shows off his mistress “Mary” (Diane Keaton) to Isaac, a bit unwisely, since Isaac quickly falls in love with her—largely, one thinks (I confess that I’m supplying the subtext here), because Tracy, in her absurd and utter innocence, is possibly contemplating—even assuming—the ultimate horror of horrors, marriage! Well, commitment is one thing Isaac Davies/Woody Allen don’t need, and what better way of avoiding it than by falling in love with a woman who tells you she’s “trouble”? (I also have to confess that Isaac has a great comeback line—“Hey, trouble’s my middle name.” He wants dysfunction!)
In its shifting sexual alliances, and the fear and longing for commitment, Manhattan can resemble, at its best, Bergman’s Smiles on a Summer Night9 and Jean Renoir’s stunning Rules of the Game, which I strongly suspect heavily influenced Smiles and which I reviewed for the Bright Lights Film Journal. Both of the earlier films draw inspiration from Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, best known in the U.S. through the Mozart opera, and in Manhattan four of the leads attend a performance of Mozart’s 40th symphony.
Unfortunately, Woody’s neuroses pull us a long way from Ingmar, Jean, Pierre, and Wolfgang. In particular, his obsession with making sure that we know that Isaac is “better” than anyone else becomes ridiculous. Ike doesn’t cheat on Tracy with Mary. Instead, he informs her that they “need to see other people”. We also learn, in classic Woody style, that Isaac didn’t take Tracy’s virginity. (God forbid that he should have that responsibility!) No, it was some “boys” at camp—so she’s not only promiscuous but precociously so. Naturally, those callow youths didn’t really satisfy her, but now that she’s with a “real” man, she urges him to try out his deepest, darkest fantasies with her. “I’m shocked,” stammers Isaac, a bit put out to discover that the shiksa goddess of his dreams is a compulsive slut. Go figure!
But that’s still not enough. Isaac has to quit his sellout TV writer’s job to become a “real” writer—a novelist! So he quits his fancy place, which we never see, and moves into a real novelist’s apartment, where it’s just him and the typewriter.
But even that’s not enough for Woody. Lots of people talk about writing novels. Isaac’s really writing one! In a truly pathetic chunk of expository dialogue, shoehorned into the film with absolutely zero credibility, Emily (Yale’s wife, remember?) tries to cheer up Isaac, who’s despondent for some reason, by telling him that he’s not just talking about writing a novel, he’s written three chapters! Three chapters! And, not only that, it’s been accepted by a publisher! And, not only that, a real publisher! (Maybe Knopf. I’ve forgotten.)
But (again) it’s not enough for Isaac to be virtuous. Others must be less so. Mary insists on writing novelizations of movies—because they pay well, she says, which I find hard to believe—even though, Isaac tells her, she writes great short stories! And (of course) she ultimately betrays him, going back to Yale, who leaves Emily to marry her.
There are times when Manhattan captures the flavor of life on the Upper West Side—the constant longing for something better, the notion that what you don’t have must be better than what you do have, because anything a schmuck like you has isn’t worth the having, the quasi-incestuous shifting of sexual and marital alliances as a way of constantly starting life over, offering at least the pretense if not the substance of youth, realized much more honestly in Noah Baumbach’s The Myerowitz Stories, though the ending is a bit soft, and the director doesn’t seem to be aware of just how incestuous the relationship between dad Adam Sandler and daughter Grace Van Patten comes across.10
The problem is, Woody wants it all. He wants to be “better” than anyone else, and he wants to screw the 17-year-old shiksa goddess. In a fairly touching closing scene, he lets Tracy lecture Isaac on the need for trust, assuring him that, even though she’s going to London to study (acting, of course), she will come back for him, forcing him, in effect, to admit that his constant attempts to portray their affair as a charming interlude with no real consequence is a coverup for his real longing to have her “forever”. The tremulous smile Woody gives the camera in the closing shot, of Isaac girding up his loins to believe in people and trust in them, is moving, but drawn a bit too heavily from the classic shot of an equally tremulous Little Tramp at the end of Chaplin’s classic City Lights, though in Chaplin’s case, the “meaning” is deliberately left doubtful at best. The flower girl probably isn’t going to accept him as her husband. Still, one has to give Allen credit for deliberately turning his back on his usual “nothing means anything” shtick.
Post Manhattan Woody had dozens of films still to make, but, for the most part, I haven’t been keeping up. In my review of Café Society, Woody’s ode to Earl Wilson’s New York, I found and discussed many of the same themes that come up in Manhattan, Woody alternately longing for shallowness and depth, wishing he could be suave and heartless but also longing desperately for the true, innocent love he can’t stop believing in.
In real life, I’m afraid, Woody has been quite a bit of a glutton, and the results are not always charming to see. I’ll conclude with an anecdote that Woody tells in his book, withholding a few details for dramatic effect. It seems a friend of Woody’s has been in Europe and has seen one of Woody’s old pals, “Jerry”, and Jerry sure wishes Woody could stop by for a visit the next time he’s on the Continent. Woody says sure, as you know I’m a great admirer of Jerry’s talent and achievement. Let him know I’m coming. A year later, Woody and Soon-Yi are headed for an island in Greece. When they arrive at Jerry’s place, they’re more than stunned. Sure, he was doing well, but this! As it turns out, it’s another Jerry, a Russian billionaire oligarch, not quite the kind of guy Woody would want to spend time with.
Well, if you’re the least bit clever, you might have figured out that “Jerry” (the “real” Jerry) was Roman Polanski. Why Woody Allen would go out of his way to heap praise on Roman, other than as a gesture of contempt towards us pissant civilians, who simply can’t understand genius, is impossible for me to fathom. Such a heartless display of entitlement on the part of someone constantly moaning about the shallowness and cruelty of others is, well, unimpressive. I like to think that anyone who’s heard of Lester Young can’t be all bad, but, sometimes, Woody makes me wonder.
1. It’s quite likely that Woody felt he already knew all he needed to know about neurotic, self-hating Jews.
2. French for “little leaves”, i.e., short literary pieces. Word can spell this word.
3. Prior to World War II, there were a number of “spicy” monthly magazines—Spicy Detective, Spicy Western, etc. available for lonely male readers.
4. Woody doesn’t mention that, a little further down the road, Rosen sued him for defamation when he joked that if she had been assaulted and “violated”, as was reported in the news, “it wasn’t a moving violation”. Like many big shots, Woody doesn’t have much patience with ex-wives, unless they’re famous.
5. Word is so pathetically tight-assed it pretends it doesn’t know what a “shiksa” is. Go figure!
6. Since I’d never heard of the Dalton School, I had to reason this out for myself as follows: 1) Woody Allen is obsessed with classy WASP chicks; 2) the Dalton School must be a school attended by classy WASP chicks.
7. I did have Central Park all to myself once, though it was during a pretty intense snowstorm. Still a lot of fun.
8. The age of consent in New York is a rather fussy 18. Take the train down to Philly and it’s 17. If you want “background” on the possible sources for “Tracy”, you can check out Woody Allen’s Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired ‘Manhattan’.
9. In 1982, Allen made A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, explicitly based on the Bergman film. I found it thoroughly insipid, confirming my earlier lack of enthusiasm for Allen’s work that Manhattan had largely contradicted.
10. Hey, what’s wrong with a guy loving his daughter? Isn’t that his job?
Perhaps as his name suggests Woody is obsessed with what Trump denied was the same as his “small hands”