The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade Page A

forty dollars. Half the time he never got to class; to make matters worse, he seldom cracked a book. At the end of the first semester, he flunked Spanish and English, and barely passed motion picture production. N.Y.U. dropped him. Taking a defiant stance, he insisted that he "couldn't care less." His mother, he later joked, ran into the bathroom and tried to kill herself with an overdose of mah-jongg tiles. Nettie was not the sort to fall apart. What she actually did was swing into action and push the university to give him a second chance. The administration agreed, on the condition that he enroll in the summer session and bring up his grades. But one of the deans said pityingly that he just didn't seem to be college material and predicted what a grim future would befall him unless he started studying. In his opinion, the dean added, since Woody seemed to be maladjusted, it might be a good idea for him to see a psychiatrist.
    Woody strenuously objected to the idea that he might be a misfit. He was already a person of some small importance, he told the dean. He was gainfully employed as a writer for a show business publicist and also sold jokes to the television comedian Herb Shriner. But that news only seemed to confirm the deans opinion of his instability. Theatrical people are, he is said to have replied, "all strange."
    That winter of 1954, to please his mother, he enrolled in a night course in motion picture production at the City College of New York, where he lasted an even shorter time than at N.Y.U. After only a few weeks, "I was given a Section Eight," he laughed, "the only one awarded by a nonmilitary institution." Nettie was understandably upset. Here she had bent over backward to give him a college education, but he threw it all away.

    Snapshots: Outside a friend's house with Bryna Goldstein, he poses in a Marlon Brando slouch, with the actors trademark white T-shirt, jacket, and tight jeans. His hands are stuffed into his pockets, his hair slicked back, his jaw thrust forward in surly rebellion. He is bursting with sultry sexual aggression.
    The pretty desirable girls at Midwood High want the tall boys, muscular six-footers with chunky chins. Physically, Woody is exactly the kind ofconventionally geeky-looking guy who cant get a date for the high school prom. With 120 pounds packed on a skinny 5 foot 6 inch frame, he will soon get even odder-looking when he has to get glasses that fall and selects a pair of big black horn-rims.
    When he was eighteen. Woody met a neighborhood girl at the East Mid-wood Jewish Center. Harlene Susan Rosen was small and string-bean slender, with an olive complexion, lovely black eyes, and a cascade of straight dark hair. She had a sweet face, and her only physical defect was a slight ski nose from a less than perfect rhinoplasty. At fifteen, she was attending James Madison High School, where she was an excellent student and also showed some talent for art, piano, and recorder—not surprising, since the Rosens were an artistic household. Woody gravitated toward the Rosens, whom he considered sophisticated, well-off people. Harlene's father played the trumpet, and her mother had once sung with a band. Julius Rosen had become a successful merchant who owned a children's shoe store on Kings Highway, a big corner house at Twenty-third and Avenue R, and a boat. His wife was an attractive, ambitious woman, who, not unnaturally, assumed that her two daughters would marry wealthy men. As for Harlene, she was probably dazzled by the attentions of a worldly older boy, who regaled her with his adventures in the overheated world of show business. Soon they were going steady.
    However, in keeping with the fifties disapproval of premarital sex, they remained virgins. Woody's main interest in any female at this time was hormonal. To get what he wanted, he proposed marriage and bought an engagement ring, much to the dismay of both families, especially Judy Rosen, who had no desire to see one of her