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Cloud In the Silver Lining
By his senior year in high school, Allen was earning $1,600 a week writing for television, for stars like Sid Caesar, and later for the "Tonight" show, Ed Sullivan and others. His first movie script, in 1965, was "What's New, Pussycat?," which he says the studio mangled. He vowed he'd never let anyone else change his dialogue, and after "Take the Money and Run," in 1969, nobody did.
He dislikes looking back, if only because his life seems wispy to him in hindsight and death is a punch line that turns the past and present into cruel farce.
  "I never wanted movies to be an end," Woody Allen says. "I wanted them to be a means so that I could have a decent life." (By Cary Conover For The Washington Post) |
"It's like the two trains at the beginning of my movie 'Stardust Memories,' " he says. "There's a train with these gorgeous winners on it, and a train with all the losers in it. You want to be on the train with the winners, but five minutes later, you're pulling into the same depot. My 70-plus years will be spent better than those of a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. But we'll wind up in the same place."
No consolation. Not religion, not drugs. There isn't even the pleasure of gaining wisdom.
"There's an upside to going from 19 to 25 because you stop making the Three Stooges mistakes you make when you're a teenager," he says. "But once you get up in years, like seventies, there's nothing good about it. The dynamite women you see on the street, that world is gone to you.
"You know, it's inappropriate," he mutters, as though he's about to think better of discussing this. "One of the great pastimes of my life was eyeing girls in short skirts, and that's gone. They're unavailable to you, and in the few cases where you could work your magic, it's to no practical avail because you can't plan a future if you're 70 and she's 22. So your flirtation life goes, which is a big part of everybody's enjoyment in life."
But how about this? Thanks to Woody Allen, a couple of generations of nebbishy non-jocks were able to get dates. He created the archetype of the nerd who lands the babe. Can he look back on that achievement with some joy?
"No. Because I was always the guy struggling on the outside to get in. I remember being in Chicago and I was invited to the Playboy mansion. This was a long time ago. And this bevy of beautiful girls was there and I couldn't get to first base with any of them. And this guy I was with said, 'They only talk to me because I'm with you. I can go to bed with them because I'm with you.' And I am me! And I'm not in bed with any of them."
He isn't knocking his past girlfriends, and no disrespect to his wife, whom he has often called the best thing that ever happened to his romantic life. It's just that he missed out on the whole groupie experience. And like a lot of things, it leaves him feeling cheated.
"For me, being famous didn't help me that much. It helped a little. Warren Beatty once said to me many years ago, being a star is like being in a whorehouse with a credit card, and I never found that. For me, it was like being in a whorehouse with a credit card that had expired."
