The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade Page A

poor Berkowitzes are shot. We then move to a bastion of the Establishment, the New York Athletic Club, where the Berkowitzes have been stuffed and mounted prominently on a wall. In the end, the joke is on the fraternity of WASPs, whose bylaws exclude Jews from membership.

    March of Time:
    "It must have been 1963 or 1964 when David [Brown] and I first heard him perform at the Blue Angel. He was just starting. I remember being so annoyed because there were some out-of-towners from Wisconsin or the South Bronx talking and talking through the jokes and they wouldn't stop. So I threw buttered rolls at them."
    —H elen G urley B rown

    By 1962 Woody was establishing a national reputation as the hottest comic in the country. While the earliest notice of him came from influential local papers such as the New York Times, which suggested he might be potentially a special comic ("a Chaplin-esque victim with an S. J. Perelman sense of the bizarre and a Mort Sahl delivery"), he kept dogging the big national magazines for coverage. Grateful for any scrap of attention, he greeted each article in Time, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post with joy and turned into a relentless writer of thank-you notes. To Rogers E. M. Whitaker, the railroading buff who covered the club scene for The New Yorker, he wrote that his favorable reviews were "by far my most satisfying achievement" in his nightclub career. A local newspaper reporter received a mannerly, typed bread-and-butter note: While he was usually disappointed by the way his interviews read, he found her piece both enjoyable and helpful. To almost everybody he extended a standard invitation to meet him for a drink.
    An old hand at press agentry and hype, he easily borrowed the tactics of David Alber to promote his own career and diligently embarked on what would become a lifetime of self-marketing, manipulating the media to his own advantage. His coquettish handling of the press—coyly standing in the paparazzi line of fire, pleading for attention while feigning reluctance— would become known as Woody Allen Disease. As a newcomer, however, the shrewdest weapon in his arsenal of stratagems would be down-home modesty. He said solemnly to the New York Times Magazine that his reactions to everyday situations "seem normal to me, but completely hilarious to everyone else, and most of the time I can't figure out why."
    Not long after Harlene flew to Chihuahua for a Mexican divorce in November of 1962, he mentioned her onstage for the first time. He and his wife, he confided, couldn't decide whether to vacation in Bermuda or file for divorce; they settled on divorce because a holiday lasts two weeks, but a divorce is forever. Sure enough, the line got a laugh.
    As part of the separation agreement, he promised to pay a lump sum of $ 1,750, followed by an extremely modest $75 a week in alimony for the rest of her life, or until she remarried. Should he be continuously employed with a running contract, the sum would be increased to $125. "Leaving when she did, just as he was about to make it, she got a bad deal out of the whole thing," said a friend. "The settlement was peanuts." After the divorce, all contact between them ceased and so when his alimony payments became erratic, Harlene apparently couldn't bring herself to complain.
    Judging by some of Woody's statements to the media over the years, Har-lene's behavior during their six years together could not have been more exemplary: She was a studious young woman who ground away at her studies and got straight As at Hunter, when she was not playing the piano or painting. The starter marriage had been "really a great experience," but their interests grew "diverse" until they finally went their friendly ways. That was not exactly the truth because, according to Louise Lasser, never did Woody have a kind word to say about his former wife in private. And in public, even though he and Harlene were no longer married, she continued to play a major role