The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade Page B

in his life. Unable to resist the urge to punish her, he slyly began adding Harlene one-liners to his act on a regular basis, until at times these mischievous bad-boy zingers threatened to become the centerpiece. Lobbing verbal grenades, he regularly referred to her as Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame. At various times, he described her as a "weird woman" who had half a dozen sex-change operations "but couldn't find anything she liked." Marrying her was a stupid mistake because when he first introduced her to his parents, "they approved but the dog died"; the first time she cooked him a dinner he almost choked to death on a bone in her chocolate pudding; on her birthday he gave her an electric chair that he passed off as a hair dryer; the American Museum of Natural History used one of her shoes to reconstruct a dinosaur; she was so bumble-brained that after burning herself on a hot stove, "it took her two minutes to think of the word ouch." The nastiest joke, however, imagined her being raped: "My first wife lives on the Upper West Side and I read in the paper the other day that she was violated on her way home—knowing my first wife, it was not a moving violation."
    These sorts of jokes follow in the tradition of Milton Berle, or Henny Youngman with his "Take my wife, please!" or any of the older borscht belt comics who regularly insulted Jewish women, usually their wives or mothersin-law. Woody, too, was unkind to his mother, but there was no one he treated so scornfully as the spurned Harlene. So unmistakable was his hostility that sensitive patrons could not help noticing. At the Blue Angel one night, a heckler yelled, "Who keeps you warm at night!" But that was rare. Usually his Harlene jokes guaranteed huge laughs. Even his friends who had always been enormously fond of her found themselves laughing uproariously, then feeling guilty. The trouble was, admitted Jack Victor, "the jokes were funny."
    Upon leaving Harlene, Woody continued to live in the same neighborhood with Louise. After the studio on Seventy-seventh Street, they took a bigger apartment on East Eightieth Street before renting at 784 Park Avenue, an expensive doorman apartment building at the corner of East Seventy-fourth. The fancy address pleased him, but the apartment itself turned out to be dingy because it faced a brick wall. Living with Louise had its ups and downs, too. For all her fairy-tale facade—her beauty, talent, intelligence, and wealth— she was emotionally frail, an insecure young woman who knew of no other way to relate to a man except in a child-father relationship. Her mothers illness meant she had been brought up mostly by her father, a controlling man who indulged and pampered her. Woody, too, began to treat her as a kittenish little girl in need of supervision. Her low sense of self-regard seemed excessive. When he was working at the Bitter End and they were still living in the studio, she insisted on taking a waitress job at the club to be near him. The sight of her hustling around with coffee while he was doing his act was terribly distracting, he protested. But she enjoyed waiting tables, she replied. He suggested, "Why don't you be my maid instead?" and offered her fifty dollars a week to clean the apartment.
    As it happened, he could have paid Louise a lot more than fifty dollars. With the days of the little oddball places behind him, Rollins and Joffe were booking him into the best clubs in the country: the Blue Angel and the Americana Hotels Royal Box in New York, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, the Crescendo in Los Angeles. He was pulling in $4,000 to $5,000 a week, which translates into $21,000 to $26,000 today. But through the winter of 1963 and the spring of 1964, it was television that triggered his breakthrough into significant wealth and fame. As a guest on the late-night shows hosted by Johnny Carson and Steve Allen, he quickly established himself as the most talked-about comic of the