Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

Save $7.80 at Amazon.com! Read chapter 1

Marion Meade’s The Unruly Life of Woody Allen claims to be the first independent investigation of Woody Allen’s personal life. It also claims to be a comprehensive biography-arguably a more difficult task. Meade gives a thorough account of Allen’s shocking fall from grace, beginning and ending with his romantic attraction to Soon-Yi, adopted daughter of live-in girlfriend Mia Farrow. The book is entertaining, compelling, and difficult to put down; under Meade’s steady hand, the Soon-Yi affair comes to life in all its lurid, seamy glory, marring Allen’s prior accomplishments with its lewd taint.

Meade frames her premise-that Allen had always tended towards much younger women-through Farrow’s reaction to the Soon-Yi affair. Wandering through Allen’s apartment (reader in tow), Farrow discovers pornographic polaroids of Soon-Yi, and her understandably enraged response becomes the interpretive lens through which readers inevitably evaluate all succeeding information.

Meade’s selection of facts is generally even-handed; however, her decision to structure The Unruly Life of Woody Allen around a devastating act of infidelity and paternal irresponsibility creates an omnipresent bias against Allen. Meade’s focus on this event makes the biography resemble a detective novel: she examines Allen’s life hoping to find some context for his affair with Soon-Yi, and thus to explain or understand Allen, although certainly not to excuse or condone him.

Not surprisingly, Meade’s search uncovers a lengthy trail of warning signs dating back to Allen’s earliest relationships. Filmgoers knew for years that Allen led a conflicted moral life on-screen; somehow it never occurred to them that perhaps Allen wasn’t just acting. Meade makes meaningful observations on the dangers of blurring the lines between fantasy and reality; Farrow’s wealthy upbringing and Allen’s social selfishness and belief in his public persona both contribute to their public humiliation. Meade holds everyone responsible for idealizing and thus enabling celebrities; the tragedy is not that these people are not moral paragons, but that time and again the public equates genius with morality.

Meade demonstrates great skill in slowly and methodically weaving the story’s various components together. She is loyal to the Woody/Soon-Yi plot throughout, and each new character serves as a touchstone for the emotional eccentricities and personal difficulties that build until Allen’s problems publicly and catastrophically explode in the early 1990s. Arthur Krim, Allen’s most reliable Hollywood investor and the legendary chairman of first United Artists and later Orion Pictures, goes bankrupt in 1991 after having financed 19 Allen films since 1966. Despite a more-or-less successful record of media management, Allen finds himself unknowingly photographed holding hands with Soon-Yi courtside at a 1990 Knicks game. As Jean Doumanian, Allen’s closest friend and “the only woman [Allen] has been able to respect as an equal” draws closer to Allen’s professional life, he draws closer to personal disaster. Doumanian heads up her own motion picture production company in 1991; Allen’s decision to work under her budgetary discretion two years later leads to the dismemberment of “almost the entire production team Woody had assembled since Annie Hall.” Meade brings every facet of Allen’s life together in 1992, which she presents as the climactic center of Allen’s life.

The Unruly Life of Woody Allen spends an excessive number of pages detailing Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi: more than half the book deals with Allen’s life after 1990, not to mention a lengthy mini-biography of Farrow. And, as if she were afraid that readers would somehow avoid viewing Allen through her cunning structural bias, Meade seeds the text with suggestive remarks designed to reinforce traditional assumptions. Discussing Allen’s general professional and personal relationships of 1970, for example, Meade interrupts an interesting anecdote concerning Allen and Diane Keaton with an observation Allen made about Soon-Yi in 1997: “The inequality of my relationship is a wonderful thing. The fact that I’m with a much younger woman, and much less accomplished woman, works very well. By luck, it’s a very happy situation.” Are readers then to infer that Allen’s relationship with Keaton was inappropriate? Suddenly back in the biographical present of 1970, the next paragraph details their break-up. Explicitly equating Keaton with Soon-Yi fits Meade’s interpretive model, but it also testifies to her essential thematic myopia. The quest to understand Allen’s social transgression consumes Meade, and her obsession infects interesting facts that need no deeper meaning, no sinister ulterior significance.

Insofar as The Unruly Life of Woody Allen resembles a detective novel, Meade’s writing style successfully pulls readers along from start to finish: dangling tantalizing clues, unsubtly hinting at the conclusion, and effectively holding one’s attention throughout. Meade convincingly argues that Allen’s popularity rested on popular assumptions, and she privileges readers with examples of idiosyncratic deviations from the norm. Certain depictions, however, cross into the clichéd. The opening paragraph reads like an Edward Bulwer Lytton novel: “It was crazy weather for January. A sudden balmy spell swept a froth of showers and the fresh breezes of April into the city in the dead of winter.” Prose that would seem stylized or hackneyed in a work of fiction fares little better as atmospheric backdrop and distracts from the book’s more attractive qualities. Despite its faults, however, the rags-to-riches story of nerd made good made bad can’t help but appeal to today’s educated audience. That Meade never settles on a motive is something of a relief; at least she leaves readers some room for interpretive latitude.

Meade writes from the distinct perspective of one who knew him as a writer on the Sid Caesar show, bought opening-day tickets for Annie Hall, read “The Kugelmass Episode” in The New Yorker-in short, one who was growing up as Allen’s comedic career matured. At times, this perspective is myopic-Meade tends to speak as though her social impressions and contextual knowledge are given, a phenomenon that might strike readers outside the 40-60-year-old demographic as awkward and alien. When Meade characterizes Allen as a moral paragon to those maturing in the sixties-“Woody represented a new breed of man, the quintessential misfit… Clearly he was a man ever-faithful to his principles, who relied on his own moral compass, however out of whack it might be”-one suspects that her critical stance rests on a very particular cultural relationship to Allen that other generations can’t understand. Her decision to define Allen’s career vis-à-vis the evolution of the entertainment industry and other similarly broad issues only marks Meade’s conclusion as distinctly the outgrowth of one opinion-hers. In her acknowledgements, Meade mentions her daughter, “who was always there when I needed her, and whose observations as a youthful Woody Allen fan added immeasurably to my understanding.” Allen might well be the sociopathic, neurotic, unruly figure Meade finds at the end of her investigation; as a “youthful Woody Allen fan” myself, however, I was hoping for more biography and less drama.

That Meade herself bought into the pre-1992 “ideal” Allen seems clear from her systematic attack on everything he touched, as though the Soon-Yi affair could annihilate both artistic merit and professional credibility. Meade never quite transcends this bias, and her book never quite transcends its heavily sensationalized subject. As an examination of the extent to which one event can shape public opinion towards celebrities, The Unruly Life of Woody Allen does a fine job. As a comprehensive, even-handed examination of a great humorist and filmmaker-a biography, in other words-it disappoints.