The Quintessential Misfit (The Unruly Life of Woody Allen - Marion Meade)

Member Name: Jake Speed

Product:	The Unruly Life of Woody Allen - Marion Meade
Date:	08/11/09 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Mildly compulsive

Disadvantages: Not enough biography

The Unruly Life of Woody Allen is a biography by Marion Meade and was first published in 2000. The book is rather scant regarding Allen's films and work at times and instead focuses almost entirely on the infamous Soon-Yi/Mia Farrow mayhem of the early nineties which saw Allen's carefully controlled and reclusive persona dragged through the tabloids and gossip columns for a good couple of years with lingering and lasting damage to his reputation. In January, 1992, Allen's regular leading actress and girlfriend of 12 years, Mia Farrow, was shocked and angered when she discovered nude Polaroids of her 21-year-old adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn in Allen's New York apartment. A bitter and highly publicised custody battle ensued over their three children and Farrow then claimed that Allen had sexually molested their adopted daughter Dylan. These claims were comprehensively rejected by a court - although not before a judge had stated that Allen's behaviour regarding Soon-Yi was grossly inappropriate. Allen, who lost the custody battle, admitted to an affair with the much younger Soon-Yi - who subsequently became his wife.

Meade begins with a gleefully detailed account of Farrow's fateful visit to Woody Allen's swanky duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue that January day as if setting the scene for a notorious murder. '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. On Fifth Avenue, tangled morning traffic inched south toward the crosstown intersection at 72nd Street. Under a mottled gray sky, packs of M.T.A. buses, white-and-blue, bunched in twos and threes, crept like a rare breed of tiger down the puddled asphalt of the Upper East Side, swerving royally past fortresses guarded by chandeliered lobbies and spiked gates.' Of the 384 pages in my copy of The Unruly Life of Woody Allen very few are not concerned with the Soon-Yi affair - nearly all of the book either dwelling on the episode with a lewd slant or rifling through Allen's life and, occasionally, his films looking for evidence that this fall from grace was inevitable one day. 'Woody represented a new breed of man, the quintessential misfit,' writes Meade of his rise to fame in the sixties before putting him in the stocks and reaching for a basket of soft fruits. Throughout the book, Meade seems to be in mild shock that the bespectacled comic sensation of the sixties she grew up with actually turned out to be a human being in real life.

The fact that Meade is completely obsessed with the Soon-Yi affair and resulting ramifications is somewhat to the detriment of the book as a whole. Meade is obviously capable of writing about Allen's films and work interestingly but largely declines to do so in order to rake up as much scandal and lurid gossip as possible. A real dislike for Woody Allen permeates the book although fellow biographer John Baxter, who also seemed to enjoy himself a great deal doing another sustained hatchet job on Allen, at least had the decency to discuss Allen's films and and life to make his book an actual biography. It's interesting when Meade sketches out Allen's life and work but she doesn't do it enough (we never learn much about Allen's mother for example) and always seems eager to drag us back to that January day in 1992. Woody Allen, we at least learn, was born on December the 1st, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York under the name Allen Stewart Konigsberg to Martin and Nettea Cherrie Konigsberg. The family lived in the lower-middle class Flatbush section of Brooklyn with Allen's younger sister Letty arriving in 1943. The young Woody - who had a strange sense of himself - hated school and underachieved academically but found solace in the large number of cinemas within walking distance of home and soon became reliant on the escapist magic of film, enjoying everything from James Cagney to the Marx Brothers.

Even here though, Meade can't resist informing us that, apparently, the young Woody watched Harriet Andersson disrobing in Ingmar Bergman's film Summer with Monika with 'eyes bulging'. 'Even then,' you half expect Meade to write. 'In the dim, hazy light of the old cinema, he was already sleazily plotting the seduction of his future girlfriend's adopted Korean daughter despite the fact that she wouldn't be born for another twenty or so years.' In 1952, at the age of seventeen, he changed his name to Woody Allen for showbusiness purposes and began sending out jokes to New York newspapers - aware even then that his inventive sense of humour was most likely to be his passport to fame and security. In November of that same year, Woody Allen's first ever published joke appeared in Walter Winchell's column; 'Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had OPS prices - over people's salaries.' The book also contains biographical information on Mia Farrow which is reasonably interesting plus, of course, Allen's relationship with muse and regular co-star Diane Keaton in the seventies.

Meade uses quotes from famous film critics like John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Penelope Gilliatt and Pauline Kael to plug her own lack of interest in writing about Allen's actual body of work - although she does, again with some glee, discuss the increasingly modest returns of his films from his high water mark in the seventies. Of interest too are details on Jean Doumanian, Allen's long term close friend, who enticed him to make films for her company Sweetland in the nineties with ultimately disastrous results. Allen's budgets were slashed and half of his regular crew was dispensed with - this act a popular theory on why Woody Allen films are not as good as they used to be. During production of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion in 2000, Allen was gobsmacked when Doumanian told him he had 48 hours to find alternative funding for the film and a messy lawsuit resulted with Allen claiming Doumanian and her partner Jacqui Safra had skimmed $12 million worth of profits off his films. Doumanian countersued claiming Allen had cheated them out of $19 million and their business partnership and long friendship ends acrimoniously. The formidable Doumanian, claims Meade, was the only woman Woody Allen ever regarded as an equal.

The Unruly Life of Woody Allen has a certain morbid fascination at times and is mildly compulsive for this reason but ultimately fails as a biography because Meade is not interested in writing a biography. Meade is only interested in the more salacious details to Allen's life and his relationship with the notorious Soon-Yi. It's certainly a readable book but one which could have been more rounded and biographical - especially in its treatment of Woody Allen's long body of work.

Summary: So-so