I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery.
Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly Life offers a quick summary of Allen’s life, a matter of which I was largely ignorant. Of course I knew that Allen was a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the old neighborhood. Allen Koenigsberg attended P. S. 99 on East 10 Street near Avenue K (where my cousin Louie was also a student). In addition, I knew, from Louie, that P. S. 99's principal was Eudora Fletcher and that, in the very inventive chameleon movie, Woody gave Ms. Fletcher's name to the psychiatrist who takes Zelig under her wing.
But cousin Louie did not know, or did not bother to tell me, that Allen was a frequent patron of the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue and that it's rumored that it was at the Kent that the interior scenes in The Purple Rose of Cairo were filmed. I've seen Purple Rose recently and if it wasn't the Kent, it sure looks like the Kent of my memory. The Kent, along with its sister theater, the Leader, was one of my own childhood haunts. In fact, it was my father’s aunt Manya, substitute cashier, who sometimes sat in the box office and took my quarter.
It was not at the Kent but at the Jewel Theater on Kings Highway that Allen encountered Ingmar Bergman for the first time. Well, not exactly Bergman himself. It was Harriet Andersson disrobing in Summer with Monika that seems to have caught Allen's attention. Unruly Life reports that Allen sat “with eyes bulging” to watch this and other early Bergman films.
Allen’s protruding orbs brought to mind the impact that those shocking 1950s Scandinavian films had on the days of my early adolescence. It was at the Kent (aunt Manya must not have been on duty that day) that I once watched a Danish film in which there was a very brief flash of a woman in naked silhouette. All I can remember is that I sat through to watch the picture again — it might even have been a double feature — and that by the time the silhouette appeared a second time, my poor bladder was so swollen (I was afraid to leave my seat for fear of missing the moment) that it was about to rupture. How embarrassing it would have been to die of an aneurysm of the urinary tract simply to catch a glimpse of Harriet Andersson or one of her friends.
In the 1950s, naked bodies were simply not on view. Never at all, at least not in my slice of the universe. I doubt that anyone from the post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution generation can imagine how nude-deprived were those severely repressed years. Bodies, women's bodies, were so rare and mysterious that a brief and evanescent flash of shadowed skin, circa 1953, could remain in the memory for more than fifty years.
Which is why I retain the warmest feelings for Coney Island Avenue's Kent Theater.
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