Woody Allen: Rabbit Running

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Eventually, though, the rabbit began making tracks. The Blue Angel in New York, Mister Kelly's in Chicago, the hungry i in San Francisco, all booked Allen. Soon the head scratching, the awkward pauses, the double-knit eyebrows and paranoid chatter went public on the talk shows. There were bits and pieces of humor drawn from Allen's wrestling matches with his head candler, but mostly he talked about his old neighborhood, where the kids were so tough they stole hubcaps from moving cars. His parents, Woody said, believed in God and carpeting. As for Harlene, he described her as "extremely childish. One time I was taking a bath and, for no reason at all, she came in and sank my boats."

Here again were fragments of truth. The undersized childhood, the suffocating early years, the immature marriage, all were carefully packaged for retail. "My material was really true," he confesses, "except that it was exaggerated."

Sometimes surrealistically. He spoke of the modern artist who tried to cut off his ear with an electric razor, the Eskimo crooner who sang Night and Day for six months at a time—and the twelve fugitives from a chain gang who escaped by posing as an immense charm bracelet.

The late Producer Charles Feldman thought gags like that belonged on the screen. He signed Woody, then at the Blue Angel, to write the script for a bathroom farce called What's New, Pussycat? The lines were awful and so was Woody; in a small part, he gave a convincing imitation of a man badly frightened by a producer. With Pussycat, says Allen, "I learned something about picturemaking. When you're making a big picture for $4,000,000, there are a lot of people around, and they tell you they are PROTECTING THE INVESTMENT. They wanted a girl-girl sex-sex picture to make a fortune. I had something else in mind. They got a girl-girl sex-sex picture which made a fortune."

More than $14 million, in fact —enough to assure him of a second shot at film making. Before that, he played, improbably, the nephew of one 007 in Casino Royale. Allen got no scenarist's credit for the film, but audiences could sense his touch throughout. "I have a low threshold of death," he bleated in one scene, as a firing squad counted down, aiming their rifles at his sunken chest.

In addition to his movie work. Woody put together his first record album (based on his nightclub routines) and wrote his first play—Don't Drink the Water, about a typical New Jersey family mistaken for spies in Eastern Europe. He had acquired the ultimate badge of show-biz success: his first divorce. Harlene later sued him for defamation of character, citing his repeated insults on the Tonight Show. ("The Museum of Natural History took her shoe and, based on her measurement, they reconstructed a dinosaur.") In 1966 Allen was married again, this time to Actress Louise Lasser, daughter of S. Jay Lasser, the tax expert. Woody could have used a little of his father-in-law's advice: his income was around $250,000 a year.