Woody Allen: Rabbit Running

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It was more like the appendix. His salary was a miserable $25 a week. After a false start as a collegian at New York University and City College, he went back to being a full-time funnyman—first for the late Herb Shriner (for $75 a week), then for Singer Pat Boone, Garry Moore, Art Carney and Sid Caesar. By the time he went to work for Caesar, Woody was making $1,500 a week. He had also acquired three new fields to mine for comedy: an apartment, an analyst, and a wife, Harlene Rosen. He was 19, she was 16. The marriage lasted five nettling, unsettling years. Allen learned to deal with melancholy by furnishing it with a punch line. "For a while we pondered whether to take a vacation or get a divorce. We decided that a trip to Bermuda is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have."

Vulgar Parlance. The gag illustrates Allen's reliance on a comic device that is as old as Aristophanes—the principle of inversion or, in more vulgar parlance, the old switcheroo. Woody's divorce joke, in fact, is merely an updated version of a line used by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. "If I ever get married," drawls Algernon, "I'll certainly try to forget the fact. . . Divorces are made in Heaven." For a time, Allen used so many switches that friends in the trade referred to him as Allen Woody. He carried a sword on the street, he said; in case of an attack it turned into a cane, so people would feel sorry for him. He carried a bullet in his breast pocket; someone threw a Bible at him and the bullet saved his life.

At parties and story conferences, Allen tossed off these lunatic lines in a tone that seemed to blush for its presumption. Only a polished comic, he thought, could do them proper injustice. So Allen's managers, Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, decided to buff him until he shone. After all, 15% of a writer's salary barely pays the office rent. But 15% of a star. . .

In 1961 Allen made his debut as a performer at a dim Greenwich Village boîte called the Duplex. It was a fairly unusual première: few audiences, after all, have ever seen a man turn pale green every night. "It was the worst year of my life," admits Woody. "I'd feel this fear in my stomach every morning, the minute I woke up, and it would be there until I went on at 11 o'clock at night. I was trying to be cerebral. I was writing for dogs with high-pitched ears."

Making Tracks. There were few barks and many bites. Even Joffe confesses, "Woody was just awful. Of course he had good lines. But he was so scared and embarrassed and—rabbity. If you gave him an excuse not to go on, he'd take it. Woody quit five or six times. We'd sit up all night talking him out of it."