The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade Read Free Book Online

"he was full of enthusiasm. He was interested in so many things. And whatever was going on, he had something clever to say." Of course, Mills added, "everybody we knew was funny. His whole family, even his sister, was comical because it was considered a good thing to be funny and come up with a great line. There was a kid in the neighborhood we called Tut. One day some joker phoned the funeral home and reported that Tut was dead. When the mortuary sent a hearse to his home, his mother went hysterical. For years, all somebody had to say was 'Tut is dead/ and we'd pee our pants." Granted, it was not Woody who thought up the Tut caper, but it was the kind of joke the merry pranksters appreciated. In terms of making life funny, Mills said, Woody was "at the further end of the curve."
    Making people laugh was nothing special when it was the air you breathed. "It was just something I could always do," Woody explained, "like some kids had an ear for music, I could be funny." Coming so easily, however, it seemed a gift of no particular value. It surely did not confer on him the respect he craved. Indeed, the laughs that he drew from his classmates in school only annoyed his teachers.
    The Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb in 1949. The following year, the war began in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy declared war against communists at home. Alger Hiss denied furnishing official documents to the Soviets and was convicted of perjury. Shordy, eight sleepy years of the Eisenhower era would begin. The events and people that formed the paranoia of the fifties seemed to have small impact on the wholesome pace of adolescence in Midwood, home to Wingate Field, Cookies on Avenue J, Capri Pizza with its jukebox in the corner and its single bald waiter. "It was a golden age," reminisced Elliott Mills. "Nobody had a lot of money but everybody had brains and everybody was funny. Our heroes were the Dodgers and jazz musicians. There were no drugs or gender problems. Nobody got laid until they got married. It was an idyllic childhood." With both of Woody's parents working, the gang usually congregated at his house, where they hatched complicated plots to get dates and watched the Konigsberg television set, one of the first on the block. Never again would Woody enjoy such satisfying relationships, a camaraderie based on "exchange of intimate feelings and discussion of what motivated people and how the psyche worked," described Jack Victor. "We dissected everyone we knew."
    At fourteen, Woody had begun to develop a passionate interest in Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophonist whose music he had first heard on a crackly Saturday morning radio show. Immediately enraptured, he bought all Bechet's records he could find. "I'd come home from school, and put on those records and just do nothing else for hours but play them and replay them," he said. On Sunday afternoons, he and his friends were in the city at Child's Paramount, listening to the house band led by Conrad Janis and dining royally on full-course dinners of Salisbury steak or veal parmigiana for two dollars. One Sunday, they were thrilled to hear Bechet himself, who was making a rare visit back to the States from France and passed through New York. Introduced by Orson Welles, he played the soprano sax. After the concert, Woody went up to shake hands, one of the most unforgettable moments of his life. Half a century later he would proudly tell people that he had seen "Sidney Bechet live."
    He bought a soprano sax and tried to teach himself to play but found the instrument too difficult and switched to clarinet. An aspiring musician, he began lessons at an upstairs studio on Kings Highway, run by a man who wore a patch over one eye, and later he negotiated two-dollar clarinet lessons from one of Fats Wallers sidemen, who agreed to come to his house, an hour-and-a-half trip from the Bronx. Nobody practiced more diligendy. For all Woody’s effort, he wasn't, as he later