Woody Allen: Rabbit Running

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If not Woody, who? Nobody, really. The Allen persona — the urban boy-chik as social misfit — is, of course, an act, a put-on, no more the real performer than Chaplin's tramp or Jack Benny's miser. Still it does contain grains of truth, along with lecithin, gum arabic and .2% sodium benzoate to retard spoilage. Like all great comedians, Allen consumes his roots, and very often the public schleprechaun blurs into the private comic who would rather talk about anything but himself. As he admits, even his most outrageous gags are a form of autobiography, a reflection in the amusement-park mirror he calls a mind.

He was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Flatbush. His father, Martin Konigsberg, had a light brush with show biz — he once served as a waiter at Sammy's Bowery Follies — but spent most of his life dabbling in the jewelry business. A poor boy in the urban maze is usually a constant dreamer. Sometimes he dreams of sex: young Allen Stewart, as Woody recalls, was preoccupied with girls whose bodies wouldn't quit probably because his own seemed to give up when he was 14. Sometimes he dreams of assuming authority — or flouting it. In high school, Allen tried to become a featherweight boxer, and spent many an afternoon fleeing the truant officer. Out of experience came a typical self-deprecatory gag. "I wanted to be an FBI man," Woody will moan. "But you have to be five-foot-seven and have 20/20 vision. Then I toyed with becoming a master criminal—but you have to be five-foot-seven and have 20/20 vision."

This ability to merchandise his misery provided Allen's escape from the ghetto. His IQ may have been astronomical, but the figures on his exams at Midwood High School bottomed out below C level. "It was a school for emotionally disturbed teachers," he says. "I failed to make the chess team because of my height." Lines like that fractured Allen Konigsberg's fellow juniors. For laughs—and a few bread crumbs—the class clown sent them on to columnists under an assumed name.

"My first printed joke," he recalls, "was in a gossip column. It read: 'Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. prices—over people's salaries.' " Dreadful by any standards, and thus ideal for the likes of Winchell, Ed Sullivan and Earl Wilson, whose columns ate up more material than the gypsy moth caterpillar. Allen placed a dozen lines at a time. Their frequency, if not their quality, caught the notice of a pressagent named Dave Alber, who signed up Woody, then 17, to write japes for other people's credit. "Every day after school," he remembers, "I would take the subway to Manhattan, and knock out 30 to 40 gags for famous people to say. I was thrilled. I thought I was in the heart of show business."