The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade Page B

daughters with a college dropout earning forty dollars ($243 today) a week. Woody was not deceiving himself, either. Earning money for writing jokes was, he said, "like getting paid to play baseball or something," thrilling but also fool's luck. His drawer full of clippings amounted to the ability to hold the coats of David Alber's clients and make them sound funny. He wanted to be somebody, but he feared ending up as a nonentity: "I don't know what—a delivery boy or a messenger," he later said.
    That bleak winter of 1955, there was an engagement dinner at the Konigsbergs. Unfazed by the occasion, Nettie began hectoring him about getting over his joke-writing foolishness, returning to college, going into a respectable business. How could he support a wife? Finally, Woody could no longer stand Nettie's needling. He grabbed the engagement ring and ran out of the house.

    CHAPTER THREE

    Stand-Up

    In the winter of 1956, Woody's life took an unexpected turn when he got a chance to go to Hollywood as a comedy writer on the Colgate Variety Hour, NBC's answer to the top-rated Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. Living at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel, on his own for the first time, he felt confident that he had escaped his humdrum life with his family in Brooklyn. Proudly he raved to friends back home about the lush, sun-soaked good life of southern California; he loved the palm trees rising above the swimming pools, and bragged about stepping out at night to dine at world-famous restaurants such as the Brown Derby.
    Yet, for all his enthusiasm, he felt intense loneliness and wrote several letters a day to Harlene, a freshman at Brooklyn College. In March, he could stand it no longer and impulsively summoned her to Hollywood to get married—a grand, dramatic gesture "as romantic as a movie script," in the eyes of his friends. Harlene, dewy-eyed, dying to get away from home, needed little persuasion to drop out of school and rush to Los Angeles, the elopement guaranteeing automatic transformation into a married lady of independence. On March 15, a rabbi married them at the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel. He was twenty, she was seventeen.
    Hardly had the ink dried on the marriage certificate before Woody regretted his decision. Only days later, he was talking about divorce, sourly referring to his bride as "her," and predicting that the relationship had absolutely no chance of working. If not for the stigma of divorce, and the pain it would cause his parents, he let it be known that he was ready to walk out at once. Sex was important to him, but the reality of marriage must have been unnerving. At twenty, he was as well prepared for the day-to-day intimacy of living with a spouse as the average adolescent boy. As though that weren't bad enough, poor ratings caused the Colgate show to fold a month later, and they were forced to return to New York, homeless and broke but pretending to be happy newlyweds. Not only did the entire Hollywood adventure fizzle out prematurely, not only was their teenage marriage off to a terrible start, but Harlene had to ask her parents for her old room so that they would have a place to stay.
    That fall they moved into the city and rented a one-room efficiency in a brownstone at 311 West Seventy-fifth Street, just down the block from Riverside Park. In the days before co-op gentrification, rents on the Upper West Side were dirt cheap. Broad boulevards were flanked on either side with Kafkaesque apartment houses, inhabited largely by refugees still speaking in heavy European accents. Crisscrossing the avenues were narrow streets lined with blighted row houses, now chopped up into makeshift walk-ups. Their building had been originally a one-family house, and the apartment presumably a parlor, or at least half of one, because now from the ceiling an elegant chandelier hung smack up against a wall. The long, narrow room made Woody joke about furnishing the place with hurdles.
    Harlene resumed her education at tuition-free