WOODY ALLEN: A BIOGRAPHY, by John Baxter, Carroll & Graff, $27.
Woody Allen, man and myth, sinner and aesthete, is the subject of British writer John Baxter's thorough new biography of New York's filmmaker laureate. It's an eye-opening peek inside the life and the work of Allen, particularly focusing on where his biography and filmography coincide.In "Woody Allen," Baxter effectively checkmates Allen's decades of proclaiming "My movies aren't based on my life." In film after film, Allen revisits the telling events, people, phobias and influences in his life and shows them to the world in his movies.
Maybe he isn't the loser "Woody" character he presents on the screen. For one thing, "Woody" is nicer than Woody Allen. But Woody and Woody Allen -- real name, Allan Stewart Konigsberg -- are darn close.
From the childhood captured in "Radio Days" to his TV writing days revisited in "Broadway Danny Rose," to the romance the fortysomething Allen had with a 17-year-old ("Manhattan"), Allen has seemed to work out his ever-unresolved life on the screen. After this book, he can stop denying that easily observed fact.
"Anhedonia" was the working title of the film many regard as Allen's masterpiece, "Annie Hall." The word means "the inability to enjoy pleasure," and Baxter connects it to Allen the man. Professional and personal relationships are cast aside, honors are ignored and status and admiration are accepted only grudgingly. Allen may have, at various times, been one of the most respected and beloved American filmmakers and actors. But he doesn't appear to have enjoyed it.
In Baxter's view, the whiny, self-obsessed neurotic captured in the recent documentary, "Wild Man Blues," is just the tip of the annoying iceberg that is Allen.
Baxter documents Allen's early days in show business, the longing for that upper East Side life of wealth and sophistication that drove him, and the people who basically saved him and made his movies more than the simple sketch comedies they had been. Much attention has been given the great cinematographers Allen has used on his films. But it was Ralph Rosenblum, a film editor, who salvaged "Annie Hall" and the other late '70s films that made Allen's reputation.
The book can be appreciated for the calm way it goes through the Allen/Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi Previn debacle that did so much damage to the filmmaker's reputation in the early '90s. On the whole, Baxter goes easy on Allen's sexual peacekeeping even as he is listing them. Still, Baxter tracked down telling quotes from interviews that Allen gave in the 1970s in which he hinted at his fondness for girls and very young women, something he shared with another scandalized clown, Charlie Chaplin.
Baxter also knocks Mia Farrow, the lover whose adopted daughter is now Allen's wife, down off her cross of victimhood. Farrow's mania for adopting children that she cannot afford or even attend to gets a name -- "gathering."
And Baxter notes Allen's carefully put-on air of shunning fortune and publicity when in fact he craves both. For a guy often referred to as "a recluse," Allen manages to turn up in a lot of high-profile places, wearing expensive but cheap-looking hats and clothes that are sure to get him noticed.
Baxter takes many a shot at "authorized" biographer Eric Lax's fawning 1991 biography of Allen, and then racks up a few unforgivable sins of his own. Baxter gets some of the facts wrong; he refers to a scene removed from "Manhattan" at the studio's request (the scene is in the film), and mentions that Peter Sellers was up for a part seven years after the British funnyman's death.
And then, there's this bit of analysis: "Like Billy Wilder's heroes, (Broadway Danny) Rose habitually seizes disaster from the jaws of success." Like Billy Wilder's hero from "The Apartment," perhaps. But Danny Rose resembles no one from anything else Wilder filmed.
Those shortcomings mar an otherwise spot-on take on Allen the man and Allen the artist. This is the critical high ground -- above Allen's defenders, who describe him as a genius; his detractors, who find him unschooled and derivative; and Farrow's troubling assertions that he's a creepy, miserly, mean-spirited pervert.
Baxter found Allan Stewart Konigsberg beneath the invention, Woody Allen, and lets us understand the man behind the myth he has created for himself.