WOODY, WHITHER WANDER THOU?

WOODY ALLEN ON OUR STREET

      

Woody Allen directing MIDNIGHT IN PARIS 2011.

Just before Christmas, we woke to find parts of rue de l'Odéon cordoned off. Notices taped to lamp-posts advised that a movie, identified only as "WASP 22", would be shooting there for a few days.

It's customary for producers to disguise the title and cast of such productions but most people recognised "WASP" as an acronym for "Woody's Allen's Spring Project", the so-far- unnamed film (shunned by American performers: the cast is entirely French) that would also probably be his last.

      We're used to people filming on our street. In 1760, the Prince de Condé, chronically bankrupt uncle of Louis XVI, sold his Paris estate to the developers, who covered it with apartment buildings. Haussmann's renovations in the 1860s left it untouched, so its narrow streets and the spacious place in front of the Theatre de l'Odéon survived to provide film-makers with a location. The theatre in particular, with its majestic colonnade, is much in demand for films set in Russia. It isn't unusual to see the cobbled forecourt deep in artificial snow while actors in furs and fake beards swelter in August heat.

       Woody, however, wasn't looking for period colour. He'd already done 19th-century Paris in his Napoleonic comedy Love and Death - mostly shot, ironically, in Budapest. Instead, the crew of WASP 22 clustered around Le Coupe Papier, a small bookshop opposite that specialized in books about theatre.

 "Are you going to say hello?" Marie Dominique asked.

            It's twenty years since my biography of Allen, and much had happened to both of us. I couldn't see him halting in the middle of a shoot to catch up, particularly given the scandal swirling around him. My doubts were compounded by the presence in Paris that week of a friend and fellow writer of film biographies who, in one of those concatenations of improbabilities Carl Gustav Jung called "synchronisities", was also writing a book about Allen. Should we make our presence known? Given Allen's chronic paranoia, exacerbated by the vendetta pursued by Mia Farrow, we judged he would feel ambushed, and so observed from our balcony.

            The French have always adulated Allen, an admiration he didn't always return. On his first Paris visit, in 1965, as actor/writer on What's New, Pussycat?, he sequestered himself in his suite at the Hotel George V, emerging only to work and to dine each night at the same restaurant, always on the same meal: soup, fish and crème brulee, washed down with Evian. (Unease with the product of French faucets inspired his play Don't Drink the Water.) For recreation, he played high-stakes poker, and invariably won: throughout his early career as TV writer and stand-up comic, he made more from cards than in salary.

           

Woody with Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Paula Prentiss, Ursula Andress, Edra Gale, Romy Schneider and director Clive Donner (on left)

An incident from the production of What's New, Pussycat? is emblematic of Woody's troubled relationship with Paris. Producer Charles Feldman tempted him to Europe by promising that they would "have fun and chase girls", but Woody didn't share his taste for the tall, languid and leggy (eg Capucine) and recoiled from those potential partners Feldman pushed into his company, preferring the brashly sexy "Peaches La Tour", aka Vicky Tiel, a friend from his stand-up days in New York, who had a job as assistant to the costume designer.

          

 Vicky Tiel.

As the film's director, Clive Donner, had also paid her court, Tiel proposed a contest. ("The crew told us, 'Look, this is the movie business'," she recalled. "'Everyone sleeps with everyone else.'") She would have sex with whomever offered the most generous and imaginative gift on her birthday. Donner gave her a giant box of Godiva chocolates, trumped by Woody with a pinball machine.

            Allen coached Tiel in the choreography of their night together. She was to come to his room, enter silently, undress in the bathroom and join him in bed. No troublesome "date", no foreplay, no conversation. Just sex; empty, true, but free of embarrassment or guilt.

            Naturally it all went wrong. On the day of the proposed assignation, Tiel met Ron Berkeley, part of the entourage of Richard Burton, who has a cameo in the film. In a classic coup de foudre, they fell in love over lunch. When she was supposed to be with Allen, she was in bed with Berkeley, whom she later married.

A crushed Woody never forgot the incident. He refers to it in Manhattan, his character warning his young lover that, if she goes to London, "You'll have a lot of lunches, and… attachments… will form." Elsewhere, one of his comic sketches imagines a different but no less humiliating conclusion. "Peaches" undresses in the bathroom but also takes a shower. As she opens the door, steam billows out, forms a cloud over the bed, and it begins to rain. 

As soon as the film wrapped, Allen fled back to New York, where he was scornful of Paris and the film in numerous media interviews. In time, however, he changed his mind. "In 1965," he said recently, "when I was in Paris for the shoot of What’s New, Pussycat? and fell into undying love with that city, the possibility presented itself for me to stay there—but I returned home to America in a panic. I could kick myself for not making use of that opportunity."

            Tales of humiliation and frustration litter Allen's career - which, as it approaches its conclusion, is increasingly permeated with ironies. Shunned by an industry for which he always manifested contempt, he's blackballed by the club he claimed he didn't want to join, and excoriated by the sex he feared as much as he pursued. Time, of course, will vindicate him, as it vindicated Fatty Arbuckle and the Hollywood Ten, the most venal moguls and arrogant stars. How can convictions exist in a society where, as William Goldman observed, "nobody knows anything."?

But one is left with a sense that such an end was foretold. In Macbeth, Malcolm muses about the stoic, even studied way the traitor Cawdor went to his death. "Nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it. He died/As one that had been studied in his death." Contemplating the classic dying fall of Woody's career, one might almost think, as Malcolm does of Cawdor, that he wrote the script for it long ago.