The Unruly Life of Woody Allen Read Online Free PDF Page A

jewelry engraver, and cabdriver. He seemed incapable of sticking to one thing for long, subject to a resdessness that would be inherited by his son.
    After five years of marriage, Nettie became pregnant. Even though they were residents of Brooklyn, living then at 1010 Avenue K, she decided to deliver the baby in the Bronx, at Mt. Eden Hospital. Allan Stewart Konigsberg was born on a Sunday evening, at 10:55 P.M. on December 1, 1935, which gave him a sun in Sagittarius and a moon in Aquarius. With his carroty hair, big ears, and milky skin, he looked just like his mother.
    Parenthood did nothing to improve the relationship between the Konigsbergs, but now there was a witness to the rancor. By this time, daily warfare had become practically a way of life. The household pathology was, as Woody remarked years later, "there all the time as soon as I could understand anything."
    Shortly after the baby's first birthday, Nettie found work as a bookkeeper for a Manhattan florist and began traveling back and forth to the city every day. Her son was tended by a succession of caretakers, mosdy ill-educated young women who desperately needed the money and were not terribly interested in the fine points of early childhood development. As Woody later recollected, they invited friends to the house and sat around gossiping all day while he played by himself. Although crib memories tend to be suspect, he claimed to distinctly remember that once, as he was lying in his bed, one of these women shoved a blanket over his face and almost suffocated him.
    In the evenings when his mother returned from work, she had little time for reciting bedtime stories. When he got on her nerves, which was frequently, she wound up spanking him. As a result, he grew up believing that from the cradle he had been unwanted. Nothing would ever convince him otherwise.

    On the Couch:
    "His one regret in life is that he is not someone else."
    —From the jacket copy for Getting Even

    In the sixties, when he was trying to develop his comedy act, Woody got back at his parents by stitching them into his routines. His mother, he riffed, left a live teddy bear in his crib. When he got older she warned him never to be suspicious of strangers. If anybody with candy beckoned him into a car, he should hop right in. Poking fun at relatives is normal for comedians, but Woody's family evidently offered an exceptionally rich lode of material for put-downs and wisecracks. With age, he mellowed and presented Nettie and Marty almost nostalgically in his coming-of-age movie, Radio Days. Even so, his description of their contentious marriage remains basically unchanged.
    "His mother," recalled boyhood friend Jack Freed, "had a hot temper and was always taking a whack at him. Whenever he got her goat, she'd start howling and yelling before taking a good swipe at him. If my mother hit me that hard, I'd have run away crying, but he never cried. He had an amazing ability to restrain his emotions. His mother couldn't control herself at all."
    In 1986, Nettie was a woman of seventy-eight, a resident of Manhattan's Upper East Side, living rent-free at her son's expense in one of the new apartment high-rises. Woody sat his mother on a chair, facing the camera.
    "Did you hit me?" he asked from behind the camera. Making a documentary about her life and the life of Mia Farrows mother, actress Maureen O'Sullivan, two women who seemed to share nothing in common, seemed like an intriguing idea. "Mia’s mother was a movie star all her life and knew nothing else," he explained afterward. "She was Tarzan's mate. She had a Beverly Hills pool and hung around with Bogart and all these people." Maureen was a thoroughbred filly, whereas his own mother was a plow horse, "a typical Jewish-neighborhood cliché in every way," he said.
    The tiny, snowy-haired woman was squinting.
    "I remember you would hit me every day when I was a child."
    Hit him? she asked incredulously. What did that mean? That she whipped