In the writing-by-numbers school of show-biz biography, the fashion for many years has been to start off with a cliff-hanging moment well into the subject's life and then, with the reader on tenterhooks, to go back to the cradle and earlier - fiddling on rooftops in the Ukraine, for instance. One can imagine a few likely beginnings:
Jean-Paul Marat sighed with pleasure as he took a look at the thermostat on the evening of July 13th, 1793. The bath-water was exactly as he liked it: at blood temperature.
"Mary, if it's another Pinter play," Abraham Lincoln said, "I'm going home after Act One."
Or
It was a lovely morning in June as Napoleon's train chugged into Waterloo.
Marion Meade's biography of Woody Allen starts exactly as one would expect. After establishing the subject's age (56), weight (128 pounds) and tipple (Pavillon Blanc de Chateau Margaux '86), the author gets down to the nitty and gritty: Mia Farrow, looking for a tissue in Allen's apartment, discovers nude photographs of her 19-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. Then, sure enough, back we go to the Brooklyn home of the Konigsbergs at 968, East 14th Street, in 1935.
We are off down yet another well-travelled road on a journey which might be aptly re-titled The Unruly Prose of Marion Meade, and the way is lined with syntactical potholes which deny us the sweet mercy of sleep. Consider, for example, Meade's way with a simile. "With the precision of a Panzer commander, the eighty-one year old actress lobbed faxes into the city's new outlets." (How does one lob a fax precisely? Oh, enough with pussy-footing, how does a Panzer commander lob a fax precisely?) Or: "The children were suddenly buzzing around the media jackals like a surly Greek chorus." (A buzzing and surly Greek chorus?) Or: ". . . Mia, guarding the Polaroids as closely as the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination." (So she was involved with that as well).
There are other pleasures. "His mood would have swung 360 degrees" (think of it). And when one reads " `Oh, Gene' he fussed", there is inevitably the memory of Ring Lardner's imperishable " `Shut up', he explained." There are helpful asides, such as when the author tells us that Mighty Aphrodite is "a reference to the Greek goddess of love." And there are examples of scholarly research by Meade, as when a doorman apotheosises Woody Allen as "a very nice guy, a genius, and a great tipper". This, by the way, was confided to television crews who "descended on Woody's building like" - well, what else? - "marauding Visigoths".
Meade bustles us through Woody's years as a gag writer, which included a stint on Your Show of Shows for the maniacal Sid Caesar, who once suspended Mel Brooks by the heels from an 11th storey window and, alas, balked at letting go. Allen evolved into a stand-up comic and in the meantime had two wives, Harlean Rosen, whom he made fun of in his routines, and an actress named Louise Lasser. The only Jewish joke that he did not tell was Marilyn Monroe's apocryphal remark to Arthur Miller's Yiddishermomma: "What do they do with the rest of the matzo?"
After What's New, Pussycat? he moved on to pooh-bahdom, becoming auteur and icon. Even a goy could not help but love the hapless little schlemiel who whined through what looked like a stuck-on nose about his inability to get laid. Actually, Woody was doing fine: his happy hunting ground was Peter's Pub where on Monday nights he played clarinet - rather badly.
Woody affected to be unworldly, but had two Rolls-Royces; he went to great pains - and expensive tailors - to show that he cared not at all about clothes; and although he professed to be reclusive, he displayed himself at the Number One table in Elaine's restaurant, where the food was and still is virtually inedible - memorably, while once looking for the men's room, I was instructed to "turn left at Norman Mailer".
When he met Mia Farrow, she had been twice divorced, from Frank Sinatra, who sent a minion to do the dumping as if she were a thieving housemaid, and Andre Previn. And here I have to declare what amounts to a double interest, for I am glad to be a friend of the lady and was close to her late mother. Anyone who thinks that film stars are the "just plain folks" they pretend to be probably believes in the tooth fairy, free lunches and airline advertisements. Not for an instant, however, do I recognise Maureen O'Sullivan in Meade's unblinking smear that she was "spoiled and selfish in real life".
Nor have I seen a sign that Mia Farrow was ever "a Lolita of vaulting ambition". The contrary is true: she takes acting chores, not because she is driven but to support her family. "I wasn't bad," she once told me, "in The Purple Rose of Cairo". Meade, in fact, says as much, contradicting herself. She drags us through every sleazy moment of the Mia-Woody scandal, emptying into the casserole whatever ingredient comes to hand.
As usual, the lawyers grew fat, and nearly everyone else, Farrow, Allen and the children emerged scarred. An exception perhaps is Soon-Li, who seems not to be very bright, which has probably nothing to do with the fact that she married Woody Allen. There is no analysis here of the films; Meade quotes from both the profit-and-loss figures and the critics, and lends particular weight to the judgments of John Simon, who is to the arts - theatre and film - as Cromwell was to Drogheda.
The author likes to believe that Allen's career is in decline and suggests that this may be his come-uppance. It is more probable that he has simply made too many films too quickly, and the public needs a rest. A small blessing, however, is that no worse book seems likely to come in the year ahead.
Marion Meade has written a life of Dorothy Parker, entitled What Fresh Hell is This. She took the words out of this reviewer's mouth, and meanwhile I am reminded of a much-quoted long-ago review by the same Mrs Parker: "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
Hugh Leonard is a playwright, currently writing a novel, A Wild People