Read Online The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade - Free Book Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Individual Director
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Hunter College, and Woody kept busy selling one-liners to radio stars like Peter Lind Hayes. For the time being, they put aside the idea of separation and tried to make a success of married life. Harlene learned how to cook, not always successfully, because Woody complained that everything she made, even coffee, tasted like chicken, and Elliott Mills remembered a dinner of boiled beef hearts and overcooked string beans as the worst meal he had ever eaten. In companionable moments, Harlene and Woody played their recorders together and went to movies.
It took almost three years before they could afford to move. Their new apartment, in a dinky brownstone at 4 East Seventy-eighth Street, was not much of an improvement over their old place, but at least it was on the East Side.
On the subway Woody ran into a kid from the neighborhood with whom he'd gone through PS. 99 and Midwood High. He was miserable, he confided to Jimmy Moore, and had recently begun seeing a therapist. Moore was surprised. "In those days I'd never known anybody so unhappy that he would go to a psychiatrist. But if you did, you certainly didn't talk about it. I wondered what could be bothering him." Woody didn't really know what was bothering him, except "a continual awareness of seemingly unmotivated depression." He found a clinic with sliding-scale fees, all he could afford at the time, and went four or five times a week at fifteen dollars a session.
In spite of depression, his fortunes began to improve after making the acquaintance of several veteran writers who took a professional interest in him. More than anyone else, his most important mentor was Danny Simon, head writer on the Colgate show, and older brother of future playwright Neil Simon. Even though Woody had become a whiz at turning out jokes for Dave Alber's clients and for Herb Shriner, Danny warned him that writing jokes was not enough. He had to build on the gags to create characters and eventually learn how to write sketches. Later Woody would say that everything he knew about the craft of comedy writing—how to do a straight line.
how to cur jokes that don t move the plot, and, most important, how to keep rewriting—he had picked up from Danny Simon.
As Simons protégé, he began to wriggle his way slowly into big-league television comedy, though, to be sure, as a novice without good credentials or track record. After returning from Hollywood, his first job was Stanley, a half-hour sitcom starring Buddy Hackett and Carol Burnett. On his writing staff, the roly-poly Hackett had a stable of aces, including Larry Gelbart, Danny Simon, and Lucille Kallen. Intimidated, Woody sat quietly as a baby bird and spoke in whispers. "He was a very timid kid who didn't say much," remembered Hackett. "He was so damned serious about everything." After Stanley bombed, Woody worked on Pat Boone's musical variety program, Chevy Showroom, another frustrating experience. Many times, Boone remembers, "we'd be standing in the hallway during a break and Woody in his agitated, insistent way would be proposing some wild, drawn-out idea that we both knew was never going to make it. I would dissolve in helpless laughter and slide down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. Yer not one of those sketches was ever used on the show."
Like every comedy writer in the fifties. Woody was dying to work on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, but there were never any openings. Finally, in 1958 Caesar used him for two NBC specials, which were both broadcast as "Sid Caesars Chevy Show." Woody, thrilled, found himself in the company of writers such as Larry Gelbart, again, and Mel Brooks. The writers' room, Gelbart recalled, resembled "a playpen" full of all-white, all-Jewish, primarily male writers, who were trying to please a time bomb of an employer who habitually drank himself sick. Impossible to work for, Caesar once dangled Mel Brooks from the eleventh-floor office window by his ankles. Brooks, himself manic, habitually
It took almost three years before they could afford to move. Their new apartment, in a dinky brownstone at 4 East Seventy-eighth Street, was not much of an improvement over their old place, but at least it was on the East Side.
On the subway Woody ran into a kid from the neighborhood with whom he'd gone through PS. 99 and Midwood High. He was miserable, he confided to Jimmy Moore, and had recently begun seeing a therapist. Moore was surprised. "In those days I'd never known anybody so unhappy that he would go to a psychiatrist. But if you did, you certainly didn't talk about it. I wondered what could be bothering him." Woody didn't really know what was bothering him, except "a continual awareness of seemingly unmotivated depression." He found a clinic with sliding-scale fees, all he could afford at the time, and went four or five times a week at fifteen dollars a session.
In spite of depression, his fortunes began to improve after making the acquaintance of several veteran writers who took a professional interest in him. More than anyone else, his most important mentor was Danny Simon, head writer on the Colgate show, and older brother of future playwright Neil Simon. Even though Woody had become a whiz at turning out jokes for Dave Alber's clients and for Herb Shriner, Danny warned him that writing jokes was not enough. He had to build on the gags to create characters and eventually learn how to write sketches. Later Woody would say that everything he knew about the craft of comedy writing—how to do a straight line.
how to cur jokes that don t move the plot, and, most important, how to keep rewriting—he had picked up from Danny Simon.
As Simons protégé, he began to wriggle his way slowly into big-league television comedy, though, to be sure, as a novice without good credentials or track record. After returning from Hollywood, his first job was Stanley, a half-hour sitcom starring Buddy Hackett and Carol Burnett. On his writing staff, the roly-poly Hackett had a stable of aces, including Larry Gelbart, Danny Simon, and Lucille Kallen. Intimidated, Woody sat quietly as a baby bird and spoke in whispers. "He was a very timid kid who didn't say much," remembered Hackett. "He was so damned serious about everything." After Stanley bombed, Woody worked on Pat Boone's musical variety program, Chevy Showroom, another frustrating experience. Many times, Boone remembers, "we'd be standing in the hallway during a break and Woody in his agitated, insistent way would be proposing some wild, drawn-out idea that we both knew was never going to make it. I would dissolve in helpless laughter and slide down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. Yer not one of those sketches was ever used on the show."
Like every comedy writer in the fifties. Woody was dying to work on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, but there were never any openings. Finally, in 1958 Caesar used him for two NBC specials, which were both broadcast as "Sid Caesars Chevy Show." Woody, thrilled, found himself in the company of writers such as Larry Gelbart, again, and Mel Brooks. The writers' room, Gelbart recalled, resembled "a playpen" full of all-white, all-Jewish, primarily male writers, who were trying to please a time bomb of an employer who habitually drank himself sick. Impossible to work for, Caesar once dangled Mel Brooks from the eleventh-floor office window by his ankles. Brooks, himself manic, habitually
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