The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade

quintessential misfit, the heroic frog who had turned into a prince. Clearly he was a man ever-faithful to his principles, who relied on his own moral compass, however out of whack it might be. People said they wanted to be like him. Metaphorically, wrote the critic Diane Jacobs, the Woody persona held up a mirror to his times by embodying "the struggles of late-twentieth-century urban man."
    All the same, his grip on the consciousness of the sixties is ironic because in many respects his values clashed with the wildly anti-Establishment, psychedelic, miniskirted, love-in and freak-out temperament of the decade. Woody, anti-anti-Establishment, had virtually no interest in the social and political upheavals of the time: segregation in the South, equality of the sexes, the Vietnam War, the student protest movement, the Cold War, or the space race. His political position was to have none. Everyone assumed that as a New York Jew, he must be a meat-and-potatoes liberal Democrat, and that is how he tended to see himself. More accurately, he was a political naif who had lived through the McCarthy years without knowing exactly who McCarthy was. The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Woody was in Los Angeles playing the Crescendo, and he spent that evening with Mort Sahl and Dick Cavett—all of them wisecracking that nobody was going to show up but then nobody had showed up before the assassination either. After agreeing to take part in an actors' antiwar demonstration in 1969, he failed to put in an appearance. During the 1972 presidential campaign, he was invited to perform at a George McGovern fund-raiser but declined because he'd rather "do something beyond humor" like ringing doorbells or handing out leaflets. He did neither. "I'm not really a political person," he told the sixties activist Jerry Rubin, and went on to describe himself as more interested in "the real issues— philosophical issues of life and death," big questions that he would continue to pose time and again as part of his act. (He had no answers.)
    Equally heretical in his personal tastes and habits, he was never a citizen of the permissive Woodstock Nation. He was against doing drugs, and only smoked pot once or twice, which is not surprising because he needed to be in control at all times. Once a smoker of cigarettes and thin cigars, he now smoked nothing. He drank no hard liquor, and wine only sparingly. As for music, he was passionate in his dislike of Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles. "I hate rock," he once declared.
    In the heyday of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, of the three his only interest was sex.

    Tales of New York Life:
    E arl W ilson: D o you know all about sex?
    W oody: I know enough to get through the evening.
    —Interview, 1972

    On a wintry night in 1964, at the Blue Angel, the actor Warren Beatty was sitting at one of the ringside tables with a debonair middle-aged man in a conservative dark suit and tie. Practically everything Woody said made Beatty howl with laughter. Afterward, he turned to his companion to say he really ought to hire Woody. He was positively brilliant. The man in the dark suit, however, had hardly been laughing at all. He was thinking.
    Charles K. Feldman was born for the Hollywood high life. At the age of sixty, he was a connoisseur of the best real estate in Hollywood and on the French Riviera, the most beautiful women, the finest wines, the most lavish hotels and casinos. For all these exotic trappings, he was a consummate businessman. Orphaned in childhood and raised by a wealthy New York couple, he graduated from the University of Michigan, then law school at the University of Southern California, and set up a Hollywood law practice. In 1932, aged only twenty-eight, he became president of Famous Artists, a huge talent agency whose clients over the years had included superstars such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and John Wayne. In the forties, he turned producer with partner Howard Hawks, and eventually became