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

Square, arriving just in time for the first show at the Paramount Theater, independent behavior that impressed his friends. "He appeared to be confident of himself and his intellectual capability," said Jack Victor. "All of us thought he was destined for great things."
    Having missed so many classes. Woody repeatedly required tutoring to pass courses. In his sophomore year, presumably hoping for a way to make him buckle down to his studies, his mother decided to get him a typewriter. Not one of Marty's hot deals without serial numbers, but a brand-new Olympia portable, an expensive German model that sold for forty dollars and looked like a tank. In the store, Woody demanded to know if the machine was worth the price.
    "This typewriter will last longer than you will," promised the salesclerk. (Most likely an accurate warranty because he still uses it.)
    If Nettie expected the Olympia to improve his grades, she found it didn't make a scrap of difference. If anything, it pushed him further from his studies. But as it turned out, the typewriter changed his life in an odd way that nobody could have predicted. Shortly after acquiring the Olympia, he began tapping out jokes. A distant cousin of his in public relations thought the one-liners were clever and suggested sending them to newspaper columnists, who were always looking for free material to fill space. Before sending out anything, however, Woody decided that he needed a pen name, something that sounded more professional than Allan Konigsberg. "It was an ongoing discussion for months," said Elliott Mills. "We'd be walking along Avenue K to play stickball in the 99 schoolyard, talking about what would sound best. Early on he decided to use his first name as the last name. The problem was the new first name. 'Miles' was a candidate but not a strong one. It dropped out of contention fast when 'Woody' came up."
    In the fall of 1952, Allan-Woody began his senior year of high school, with his mind elsewhere as usual. Under his new nom de plume, he began mailing out batches of jokes with a businesslike note: "Enclosed are some gags for your consideration and sent exclusively to you." The first columnist to bite was Nick Kenny at the New York Daily Mirror. Woody, utterly thrilled but never satisfied, aspired to better. The hottest Broadway columnist was the New York Post's Earl Wilson, the crew-cut, bow-tied homeboy from Ohio who had made good in the big city with his Earl's Pearls quips, his fictitious showgirl Taffy Tuttle, and his B. W. (Beautiful Wife) Rosemary and son
    Slugger. On November 25, 1952, Wilson first published a joke of Woody’s about a much-maligned government agency, the Office of Price Stabilization, which was trying to control inflation long after the wars end. The joke ran as follows: "Woody Allen figured out what OPS prices are—Over Peoples Salaries." As the columnist quipped later, "Knowing a sucker when he saw one, he mailed me one-line jokes with postage due."
    There was no indication that Wilsons new jokesmith could be a sixteen-year-old. For one thing, he sounded sexually sophisticated. "Its the fallen women who are usually picked up, says Woody Allen." Mostly the jokes swung back and forth between topical subjects, typically observations about the business of living. Already he was working with an attitude, the same one he shared with family and friends, all of whom tended to see things in a ridiculous light without even trying. Eager to be accommodating, Woody was regularly tailoring bons mots for Wilsons showgirl: "Taffy Tutde told Woody Allen she heard of a man who was a six-footer and said, 'Gee, it must take him a long time to put his shoes on.' "
    He couldn't get over his good luck. There was his new name "in a column that I had read a million times before with news and gossip of people whose lives I couldn't imagine I would ever touch. But there it was." Woody Allen in the same lofty company as Taffy Tuttle. In the insular little world of Mid-wood