Woody Allen: Rabbit Running

(8 of 8)

So he is. It takes no tarot deck to foresee a day, 30 years hence, when the last surviving movie theaters will be mounting Woody Allen festivals containing hours of the best sight and sound gags of the epoch.

But can Allen be something more than the undisputed master of one-liners? Can he actually write an unfrivolous play? A serious work? In his own apartment on Upper Fifth Avenue, Woody Allen remains as curious as the next man—and the next man, he worries, is tapping the phone and peering through the keyhole. The pad is neoclassic Allen. The windows have been widened, the duplex thoroughly decorated ("It looks," says Cavett, "like the set for the George Arliss movie, The Man Who Played God"). On the terrace, the meticulously arranged Japanese garden features live plants and coiled-up rubber snakes to frighten away the pigeons. One afternoon, a rubber snake fell from the terrace and landed on a lady below. She sued, of course.

In the Sunshine. A few other aspects of the comic's life are new: his steady girl friend Diane Keaton, for instance, the best friend's winsomely sympathetic wife in Play It Again, Sam. He has learned how to relax by playing a competent clarinet with a traditional Dixieland band in public—sans gags. But Allen remains wedded to a demonic schedule. "Woody's life is his work," says Diane. "He is just not a relaxer. I can't imagine him lounging around the pool in the sunshine in that white skin." Admits Woody: "I have to work every day. Otherwise I hear voices nagging me on and on." The voices are no longer of parents or classmates, managers or audiences. "The only race I run now," Allen figures, "is with myself."

It is a race worth running, even on a muddy track, and with tough competition. And suppose the rabbit were to go all the way—Woody Allen, dramatist. That just might be what Allen Stewart Konigsberg has been searching for all his life: the biggest one-liner of them all