The Funny Man

We thought we knew Woody Allen – the neurotic hypochondriac Jewish New York intellectual. Then came his custody battle with Mia Farrow, and he seemed rather different. The worst is over. But can he ever play Woody again?

The Independent on Sunday, January 1994

Woody Allen once said that if he could live his whole life again, he’d do it just the same, except he wouldn’t read Beowulf. Nowadays, in a London hotel suite, post personal scandal, he takes the question with a little more gravitas. ‘My whole life again? Gee. I probably would not have been a filmmaker. I probably would have gone to college. I would not have dropped out of school. I would have educated myself, and have taken that more seriously. I would have probably tried to do something in music or dance. Believe it or not, and it sounds so silly to hear myself say it… me on the stage. I would like to have gone into a more physical profession. I think I could have been a ballet dancer. Seriously, I was very athletic.’

Seriously. He works out every day on modern equipment. This scrawny man, 58, tweed and corduroy and anorak, funny inadequate, thinks that maybe had he trained a little harder, or eaten better, or just had the right breaks, he could have been twirling and pirouetting, lifting lithe young women in the air, and not just in the privacy of his own apartment. He thinks he may have been happier. ‘Sometimes when I work a year on something, shooting out there in the cold and the rain with the stress and the money, when you’ve finished, and it is not such a good film, you think “was it really worth it?’” It probably wasn’t.’

Woody Allen doesn’t have many friends, he says. Not now, not ever, not even in the ballet world. He works out alone in the privacy of his Manhattan apartment. He writes alone ‘until I can’t take the solitude any longer,’ and he plays his clarinet alone each day for an hour or more. But Woody’s not a recluse; it’s not like people think. He used to be reclusive, and his shyness and closeted pursuit of his art meant we never knew that much about how he lived. But then Mia found those nude photos of one of her adopted daughters, and accused him of molesting another daughter in the attic, and then he sued for custody for three children, and then the court and the psychoanalysts and social workers and court reporters jumped aboard, and now we know a little more about Woody Allen, and we find him rather less Woodyish than we did before.

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