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

beginning at noon. But all summer long, when there was no school, he went to the movies every day. His friends had parents nagging them to go out and play in the sun, but Allan hated the hot weather, and his parents seemed not to care what he did. Under a caramel midafternoon sun, when the silvery trolley tracks along Coney Island Avenue were burning hot, he paid twenty-five cents and disappeared into the air-cooled darkness with his popcorn and a supply of Milk Duds. After seeing the double feature three times, he staggered, as he later recalled, "into the ugly light," creeping woozily home with his shirt sticking to his shoulders, expelled from paradise.
    All during the war, the Konigsbergs seemed unable to settle down. From the house at Fourteenth and J, they moved a half-dozen times in the neighborhood, usually sharing an apartment with Nettie's sister Sadie and her husband, Joe. Woody remembered "cousins and uncles running in and out of rooms." At one point, they lived almost a year at the beach, a happy time that he would re-create in Radio Days, followed by a brief stopover in suburban Port Chester, New York, twenty-five miles north of the city, that would leave him with a lifelong antipathy toward grass and trees. When the family returned to the old Midwood neighborhood in 1945, the Konigsbergs and Wishnicks took a semiattached frame house on a leafy street near the elevated train track, at 1144 East Fifteenth Street. This is the house where Allan would live from age ten to seventeen, sharing a room with his cousin Rita, while his two-year-old sister, Ellen (nicknamed Letty), slept with their parents, and the third bedroom was occupied by his uncle and aunt. The house still stands, spic-and-span, its front entrance moved to the side of the house and a picture window and porch added—now owned by a young couple with three children.
    Allan, ten years old, short and underdeveloped, felt insecure about his looks, and he usually wore a sad-sack expression on his pale face. Although he appeared to be timid, and in fact would make a career of playing a born loser, he was neither bashful nor repressed. Like his mother he was high-strung, moody, and prickly edged; around adults he had a fresh attitude. "One day," recalled Jack Freed, who lived next door, "we were playing in an overgrown lot near the old ice company when we noticed this strange redheaded kid lurking around. Just to be ornery we started throwing stones to chase him away." Soon, however, he and Al began chumming around together, against the wishes of Jacks father, who thought that the new friend was a bad influence. "I don't want you hanging around Allan," he warned. "He's never going to amount to anything." According to Jacks older sister, Doris, "He was a wild kid, somewhat of a hellion. He seemed to be constantly in trouble at school."
    In the fall of 1940, Woody entered P.S. 99 (now the Isaac Asimov School), the same four-story, redbrick school that his father attended, but showed no aptitude for learning and figured out how to avoid school by pretending to be sick. Behavior problems coupled with bad grades brought Nettie to school so frequently that his classmates knew her on sight. At home, she rode herd on him, to no avail. "He had intellectual capability but he just wasn't interested," said Jack Freed, who continued to hang around with Al despite his fathers warnings. "Even in high school, he did just enough homework to get by."
    Because he never developed a passion for books, reading was a chore. The only form of literature that gave him pleasure was comic books, and evidently he became an omnivorous speed reader of the Superman, Batman, and Mickey Mouse series, sometimes covering fifty comics in the course of a day. "But lots of kids were big readers of comics," commented Jack Freed. "And he was growing up in a household where nobody directed him toward reading great books." Despite the comics, he found himself able to write "real prose in school