Guilty but only of being very, very funny
Stephen Pollard salutes a comic genius and chides his detractors. David Herman enjoys a skilfully navigated journey into the heart of old Europe
WOODY ALLEN’S autobiography has been received as something so morally degenerate that its mere existence is an offence against human decency. Shortly before it was due to be released, staff at its publisher, Hachette, walked out in protest. In a move that should shame those responsible, Hachette caved in and pulped all copies.
Thanks to a small house, Arcade, the book is now available. Reviews have been overwhelmingly awful, as a series of writers have used their given slot to signal their virtue by damning Allen and everything about him.
To hell with that. This is a wonderful book — one of the most entertaining, funny and riveting autobiographies you could read.
Most of its 400 pages — this is no throwaway, read-in-an-evening showbiz memoir — contain something genuinely funny.
If you are a fan of US comedy from the 1950s onwards — and what JC reader isn’t? — this is a book that, for the most part, will have you purring with pleasure. And if, like me, you are more than happy to put up with the films that don’t work for the sheer joy of the ones that do, this is the book you have been waiting for.
All too often, autobiographies linger over childhood far too long, with dreary tales of relatives and neighbours. Allen’s childhood — so familiar from the film scenes inspired by his early years — is instead painted with a kind of brutal affection that will resonate with many Jewish readers.
It is a surprise to learn that, far from the weedy nebbish he often plays, the young Allan Konigsberg was a superb athlete. He is also, he insists, not remotelooked ly the intellectual he is often thought to be. Rather, he is almost “illiterate and uninterested in all things scholarly”.
His account of his early years in showbiz, from his schoolboy gig selling jokes to newspapers through to learning his craft in comedy writers’ rooms in New York (he was thrown out of NYU as a film student for missing classes) and then in Los Angeles, is a beautifully drawn portrait of a bygone age.
He has a wonderful line in self-deprecation, exemplified in his description of his first complete failure: “The filming of Shadows and Fog came off without a hitch except for the movie.”
But there is, of course, something that hangs over the entire book and is responsible for its toxicity: the charges of child abuse that have dogged the latter part of his life.
Merely to suggest he might not be an evil paedophile is to invite opprobrium, as if by doing so one is preventing him from being ‘properly’ cast out from society. Two investigations cleared Allen of molesting Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan — one by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at YaleNew Haven Hospital, which was the place that was actually chosen by Mia Farrow — and one by the New York State Child Welfare Department.
The latter concluded after 14 months: “It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr Allen”. Yale reported that Dylan’s statements had “a rehearsed quality” and were probably “coached or influenced by her mother.”
Allen gives us all this, and more, in devastating detail. Farrow emerges as a manipulative liar with severe mental health issues.
It is, of course, understandable why Woody Allen feels the need to spend nearly a quarter of the book on this, but it does feel like being bludgeoned.
That said, this is a wonderful book that deserves to be enjoyed.
Stephen Pollard is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle