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

ruefully admitted, "born with the real equipment," a fact he refused to face for many years. And when he did, he nonetheless continued the habit of practicing every day, rain or shine, at least a half hour, but more often two hours.
    The summer he was seventeen, word got around that a stag film was coming to the Jewel—a Swedish movie that actually showed a woman swimming stark naked. Excited, he made sure to be the first customer in line on opening day, to get a seat with an unobstructed view of the screen. Summer with Monika was about a girl (Harriet Andersson) who runs away to spend the summer with her boyfriend and gets pregnant. Woody, rapt and horny, had no idea who directed it, "nor did I care," he wrote later. The power of the movie, its erotic poetry and sadomasochistic undertones, escaped him entirely. The only scene that remained in his memory was the shot of Harriet Anders-son disrobing. Following his first exposure to Ingmar Bergman, he was soon captivated by another of his films, The Naked Night This time, as he "sat forward for an hour and a half, my eyes bulging," he did notice the name of the director, then promptly forgot it when he walked out. Finally, several years later, he saw Wild Strawberries and developed what he called "a lifelong addiction" to Bergmans films.
    During high school, he and his friends were regular visitors to the Jewel, where they saw all the so-called art pictures: Chaplin's Limelight, the work of Jacques Tati, Rene Clair, and Jean Renoir. They took an instant liking to Terry-Thomas and Alastair Sim, in fact to all of the British comic actors, and they also loved American classics, too. When Gone With the Wind was revived at the Midwood, Woody was eager to see it again because he was in love with Scarlett O'Hara, who "drove me crazy." "Because he was the dominant person in our crowd," Jack Victor remembered, "we all saw it every day that week, twice each day, ten times altogether."

    Memorabilia:
    Roses are red,
    Violets are blue,
    Alan Ladd is handsome,
    So what!
    — A LLAN K ONIGSBERG, 1949, written in the autograph book of a P.S. 99 classmate

    After graduating from P.S. 99, Woody went to Midwood High School and entered the college-preparatory program. Academically one of the first-rate schools in the city, Midwood was a competitive place full of high-achievers, the postwar optimists and competers, well-off white kids who hadn't the slightest doubt they were the best and the brightest and whose second- and third-generation Jewish parents, having made the world safe for democracy, were pushing them to excel. Students regularly won Westinghouse science scholarships, and it wasn't unusual for 99 percent of the senior class to go to college. Alan Lapidus, one of Woody's schoolmates, said that Midwood "was the kind of school where everybody was involved in something but Allan got involved in nothing. He was a short, funny-looking kid, too scrawny to be athletic, although he definitely tried." As editor of both the school newspaper and the yearbook, Lapidus was a class leader and one of the cool crowd, who also happened to be a close friend of Bryna Goldstein, the object of one of Woody's crushes.
    Loathing Midwood even more than P.S. 99, Woody arrived there at the very last minute in the morning and left the minute the bell rang. "He was bright and knew how to talk, but he never did a lick of work," said Gladys Bernstein, a math and science teacher. "He was a slippery rascal who came late to class, carried on, and got a lot of 65s." Throughout his life, he painted the school as a sewer presided over by "emotionally disturbed teachers," for which Midwood faculty would never forgive him. Years later he would dredge up his favorite childhood memory of "getting up in the morning, having my big piece of chocolate cake and milk for breakfast, my parents still asleep, going out, presumably to Midwood High School but not going to Midwood High School." Instead, he took the train to Times