Apropos of Nothing

by Woody Allen

For Soon-Yi, the best. I had her eating out of my hand and then I noticed my arm was missing.

Mom had five sisters, one homelier than the next, with Mom arguably the homeliest of the swarm. Let me put it this way: Freud’s Oedipal theory that all us men unconsciously want to kill our fathers and marry our mothers hits a brick wall when it comes to my mother.

I frankly found her too strict and pushy, but it was because she wanted me to “amount to something.” She glimpsed the results of an IQ test I took at five or six, and while I won’t tell you the figure, it impressed my mother. It was recommended that I be sent off to Hunter College special school for sharp kids, but the long train ride every day from Brooklyn into Manhattan was too grueling for my mother or my aunt, who alternated taking me on the subway.

When I returned to New York, having played with the Turk Murphy Band, I was no longer satisfied playing alone and got together some guys to play at our houses once a week. The rest is history—but so is the Holocaust.

On the evolutionary scale, I always regarded all animals as failed humans.

End of digression, and if I haven’t lost you totally I’ll get back to the main theme of the book: man’s search for god in a pointless, violent universe.

They asked me my goal in life. I said, to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race and see if it could be mass-produced in plastic.

So I’ve had many years of treatment and my conclusion is, yes, it has helped me, but not as much as I’d hoped and not in the way I’d imagined. I made zero progress on the deep issues; fears and conflicts and weaknesses I had at seventeen and twenty, I still have.

After all, we are an accident of physics. And an awkward accident at that. Not the product of intelligent design but, if anything, the work of a crass bungler.

I knew I was in trouble when, in one philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn’t exist.

the three of us spent the evening talking, watching TV maybe. She was quite pretty and very charming and I didn’t realize how much she impressed me until I awoke in the middle of the night with a burning desire to marry her and live on the moon.

“I’m going to buy a jazz record. Feel like taking a walk?”

She smiled and said hello, and as I stared at her, smitten, I never dreamed that one day she would be my wife and eventually we’d part but remain friends for life, and now I’m eighty-four and she’s eighty-one and if Chekhov were alive, he’d know what I’m groping for. She was Louise Lasser; the Ls in her name were formed with the tongue, which was immediately sexual. The Ss didn’t hurt, either. She had just dropped out in her final year from Brandeis. She was a blond, beautiful creature, and while years of terrible illness and suffering have taken a great toll on her, you must believe me when I say she was a knockout.

Okay, no one was as devastating as Bardot, but at twenty and with that ponytail, Louise somehow gave off a reminiscent vibe. She also resembled the very young, remarkably beautiful Mia Farrow and would get sent newspaper photos of Mia with notes from friends and acquaintances saying, I thought this was you. Many years later I once showed a photo of young Louise to Mia’s son, Fletcher, and asked him who it was. “It’s Mom, isn’t it?” he said.

And one afternoon we were at the Museum of Modern Art having coffee in their restaurant, and for whatever reason I was looking at Louise and felt, ohmigod, I love this woman. I never felt like this about anyone before. Now I see what they’re talking about. And somewhere in heaven, that same character that toyed sadistically with Job had come across my picture in the files and was rubbing his hands together with anticipatory glee.

It turned out Louise’s mother had some serious mental problems, and when I say serious I mean she was in and out of institutions and needed shock treatment for bouts of at least depression.

I really wanted this to turn out right. For one thing, when I asked Louise why she had dropped out of Brandeis in her final year it turned out, upon persistent questioning, to have been some psychological problems, not just to pursue acting and singing, as she had

In my family there would have been no suspicion of mental problems, as nothing short of running naked down the street brandishing a meat cleaver was recognized as odd behavior.

Louise and I would go together for eight years before we married. During that time we lived together on and off, mostly on. In that eight-year ride on the Wild Mouse, she would be unfaithful, on diets, in and out of hospitals, on grass, on drugs, recreational and medicinal, manic, very self-deprecating (see After the Fall by Arthur Miller), followed abruptly by a category 5 hurricane of euphoria, trying to act, trying to sing, trying to stay alive, trying to be my girlfriend, incredibly exciting to be with on the good days (which got fewer and fewer), deceitful, charming, helpful and encouraging to my career, maddening, adorable, sad, full of sharp insights, always funny.

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.

They hit it off, and he tried managing her abortive singing career but she proved to be unmanageable and too erratic to make it work.

And by sexy I will give only one example because it’s embarrassing. The tip of the iceberg. We’re sitting at a restaurant, having placed our orders. I am looking forward to my succulent Nova Scotia appetizer. She is suddenly overcome with lust. I have done nothing to provoke this except to be my usual loving, amusing, buoyant self. “Come on,” she says, rising. “Where?” says I, salivating over the imminent delivery of a plate of lox. “I feel like making love,” she says. “But I ordered my appetizer,” I complain. “Let’s go,” she says, wanting what she wants when she wants it.

OK, now back to life with Louise, or The Agony and the Ecstasy. Let’s just say we had ups and downs, breaking up, coming back together, breaking up.

We got off to a bad start because weeks after we married I had to go to London to appear in what turned out to be one of the worst, dumbest wastes of celluloid in film history, Casino Royale. Louise did not want to come. I would be gone for months. We’d just tied the knot. She might visit, but essentially this was a golden opportunity for her to run amuck with other men. When I got wind of what was going on I must say I didn’t resist the many delectable temptations in swinging London. Some marriage.

there came a day Louise and I decided to divorce and her father, a mensch to the end, brokered a split that was fair to both of us and we parted great friends. We have always remained great and loyal friends.

My theory, after years of being in the movies, is that the problem is almost always the script. It’s much harder to write than direct, and a mediocre director can make a good movie from a fine script but a great director cannot make a lousy script into a good movie.

Gordon Willis. Gordon knew it all. I saw him on the phone telling Kodak up in Rochester how much silver nitrate to put in their film.

A few years earlier I had received a fan letter from Mia, who I’d never met and only read about. I always found her very, very beautiful. Mia reminded me of Louise, a good beginning. Her letter praised my latest movie or my work in general, I forget which. But it ended with a sentence I do remember and it was, “Quite simply, I love you.” It was a very nice letter to get from a famous woman and a beautiful one.

Mia turned to me as we were seeing a movie, My Brilliant Career, and said, “I want to have your baby.”

I was totally indifferent to the whole enterprise, caught up in moviemaking. Still, I figured, if it made Mia happy, fine. But that’s not quite how it worked out. I quickly found this tiny baby girl adorable and found myself more and more holding her, playing with her, and completely falling in love with her, delighted to be her father.

Mia was wonderful in both those films, and I always felt she never got her acting due. Many years back Pauline Kael had called me and said, You know who you should work with? Mia Farrow. I had nothing Mia was right for at the time, but it seemed like a reasonable thought and eventually it came to pass, as the author of the King James Version might put it. My relationship with Mia, as I said, had mellowed into a pleasant one, less passionate but still carnal on those occasions when the planets formed a syzygy. And then suddenly it took a rather ominous turn.

Here’s my theory—and mind you, it’s only my take on matters. See what you think. Very early on, as I had described, Mia turned to me when we went to the movies and said, “I want to have your child.” Now it was years later, and she had finally struck pay dirt, impregnated as she was by yours truly.

Mia turned to me and said that she would not be sleeping at my house ever again, that I should not get too close to the upcoming baby, as she had questions about our relationship continuing.

The custody hearing went before Judge Eliot Wilk, who hated me from the minute he set eyes on me, and who could blame him?

Not long after the custody hearing Wilk died of a brain tumor, which was ironic as I was asked early on in the proceedings, by a magazine, if losing the custody of the children wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me, and I said no, the worst thing would be getting an inoperable brain tumor.

One of the saddest things of my life was that I was deprived of the years of raising Dylan and could only dream about showing her Manhattan and the joys of Paris and Rome. To this day, Soon-Yi and I would welcome Dylan with open arms if she’d ever want to reach out to us as Moses did, but so far that’s still only a dream. Anyhow, you think that was a wise judicial decision, given the options available? I think it was not only deliberately cruel to me, but also catastrophic for Dylan, as you will later see.

Sadly, there was also testimony from those witnesses that Satchel had told Mr. Allen, ‘I like you, but I am not supposed to love you.’

Mia had had a romance with previously. I recall when I first dated Mia I was so overmatched. She was beautiful and had grown up among Hollywood royalty. She knew everyone in movies from Bette Davis to Katharine Hepburn to Charles Boyer, and I’d take her for dinner up at Rao’s and first we’d see a Bergman film and she’d tell me about her romance with his brilliant cameraman, Sven Nykvist.

On the car radio en route to dinner the Mozart symphony was being conducted by her ex-husband André Previn, a musical wunderkind, and she knew all the great classical artists, Daniel Barenboim, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman. Meanwhile I’m sitting there hoping to impress this beautiful blonde somehow. Then at Rao’s the jukebox is playing Sinatra—for me, a god, for her, yet another lover, an ex-husband; a million stories and anecdotes about Frank, his family, Palm Springs, Vegas.

who

confounded as I was over how a woman with a pretty figure instinctively knows to turn her head away when you’re driving by in a car trying to see her face.

Mia had Satchel whom she carried on the set during the next film.

They’re all gone. Truffaut, Resnais, Antonioni, De Sica, Kazan. At least Godard is still alive, but he always was a nonconformist.

I spent millions trying to see my daughter, Dylan, to get a less biased judge, couldn’t swing it.

I had faith that in due time, common sense, reason, and the evidence would descend upon even the most phlegmatic mouth breather, but I also picked Hillary to win.

Streetcar is the finest work of art in my lifetime, and I never miss it when it’s on. Problem is, the film version is so definitive that any production pales by comparison. Same trouble with the movie Born Yesterday. The ultimate version was done with Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford.

basically hug them, ply them with money, never say no, and only worry one day they will kill Soon-Yi and myself while we sleep due to some genetic psychosis.

Soon-Yi attends every single school meeting or event, where I find them boring. I go out of a show of parental duty, but as the teacher drones on, my mind is far off devising fresh excuses to avoid jury duty.

It’s true Soon-Yi has a very large and strong personality and does all the deciding on matters that impact our lives like where we live, how many children, what friends we see, how we spend our money, but I’m still the boss regarding any decisions about space travel.

I had to do stand-up recently, having been roped into appearing on an American Film Institute tribute to Diane Keaton. “You’re coming,” she said. “I’ll send congratulations on tape,” I pleaded. “Nope, buster, you’re coming. Not only that, you’re giving me the award.”