The Unruly Life of Woody Allen Read Online Free PDF

him?
    "No, but you were always slapping me."
    His insistence on dredging up the past made her testy. Of course she smacked him. What did he expect, a saint? He was a stubborn kid, never listening to her when she corrected him, jumping around and pulling off his clothes, making her crazy. But she refused to stand for any monkey business. "You were too active and too much of a child for me," she said. "I wasn't that good to you because I was very strict, which I regret."
    Her daughter, on the other hand, had been a cuddly, docile child. "I was much sweeter to Letty than I was to you," she reminded him. Two Mothers was harder than he anticipated. He never finished it.

    CHAPTER TWO

    The Purple Rose of Midwood

    The year is 1935, the setting a New Jersey factory town on a wintry afternoon. Cecilia, a timid waitress at a diner, is watching the new picture at the Jewel for the fifth time. By this time she is drawn willy-nilly into the lives of the screen people, whose existences are defined by penthouses, black maids, and the inevitable white piano. Over sounds of laughter and clinking glasses, the guests sip dry martinis and hold forth about excursions down the Nile. Wearing a safari suit and pith helmet, Tom Explorer-Adventurer-Archeologist-Poet Baxter has been whisked to Manhattan for a madcap weekend. His jaw is square, his smile creamy. He looks even more of a heartthrob than he did yesterday when Cecilia had seen the movie only four times. Pretty soon she is not even thinking about going home to her husband, an unemployed boozer who slaps her around.
    While she is slumped in her seat gazing, rapt, at Tom Baxter, something extraordinary begins to happen. Out of the blue he faces the audience and returns her gaze, looking directly into her face, flicking his eyes back and forth over her Lillian Gish hat and neatly buttoned brown coat. And then he speaks, in the coolest screen voice ever manufactured in Hollywood: "My God," he says, "you must really love this picture." And the next thing Cecilia knows, he is hopping off the screen into the dark of the theater and declaring his love for her. Tom Baxter is everything she has ever wanted in a man: good looks, nice manners, devotion, wealth. Of course he is fictional, Cecilia must admit, "but you can't have everything."
    Cecilia is fictional, too, a character in the 1985 movie The Purple Rose of Cairo. No role Woody Allen created was more Allan Konigsbergs alter ego, his fictional soul mate, than Cecilia, who, like himself, discovers that the make-believe world of the movies is "a total, total joy."
    When he was five, he saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarf and took to cinema like an acolyte to the Mass. Over the next ten years, he watched thousands of pictures. After Pinocchio and Bambi came the war movies, Phil Silvers and Carmen Miranda in Four Jills in a Jeep, then all the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures the week they were released because Hope was his favorite comedian, and tons of Westerns because his father loved cowboys. He cried over little Roddy McDowall in The White Cliffs of Dover, and swashbuckling Tyrone Power in The Black Swan. A few years later his filmgoing companion became cousin Rita Wishnick, five years older and also a movie addict, and together they sniffled over Casablanca.
    Within walking distance of his house were two dozen movie houses. The neighborhood's main theater was the Midwood on Avenue J. His other favorites were the Vogue, the Elm, the Triangle, the Avalon, the Kingsway on Kings Highway, and on Nostrand Avenue, the cavernous Patio, whose lobby fountain was stocked with darting goldfish. At the decayed Kent, a double feature cost eleven cents, if you didn't mind the rats scurrying in the dark and the sound of freight trains passing underneath, and years later he shot interior scenes there for The Purple Rose of Cairo. In wintertime, on Saturday mornings at eleven, he would be the first shivering person in line at the Mid-wood for the double feature