Apropos of Nothing

So here I am, single, about to cast Play It Again, Sam the play with Tony Roberts as my costar. All we need is to find the right girl to play Linda, the female lead. The director is Joe Hardy, a fine director who knows what he's doing. He and I sat in the back of the theater auditioning one talented actress after another. There's a lot of talent out there and not enough good roles. Sandy Meisnter was a famous, highly respected acting teacher in New York who ran the Neighborhood Playhouse, where so many terrific actors emerged. Somewhere, he collared David Merrick and raved about a girl in his class that he found to be sensational. Her name was Diane Keaton. Real name Diane Hall, but there already was an actress with that name and the union does not permit one to use a name already in use.

So after this buildup, we're all sitting in the theater waiting for Keaton to audition. In walks a lanky young girl. Let me put it this way: If Huckleberry Finn had been a very beautiful woman, that's who was up there onstage. Keaton, who apologizes for waking up in the morning, a rube from Orange County, denizen of swap meets and tuna melts; an emigrant to Manhattan who came here and works as a coat-check girl, who had worked the candy concession in a movie house in Orange County and was fired for eating all the candy herself, tried making the few obligatory hello lines to us all. This was a yokel who spoke of her Grammy Hall, the boarder George who got a free turkey from his union every Christmas, and answered compliments with "Honest injun?" But what can I tell you, she was great. Great in every way. One talks about a personality that lights up a room, she lit up a boulevard. Adorable, funny, totally original in style, real, fresh. When she left we knew we had to go through the other scheduled actresses, but in our minds she had the part.

Rehearsals under Joe Hardy went smoothly. Tony Roberts was like a kid in a candy store, since the show had a half-dozen pretty girls

Woody Allen is a writer, director, and actor. He has been a stand-up comedian and a published author. He lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife of twenty-two years, Soon-Yi, and their two daughters, Manzie and Bechet. He is an avid jazz enthusiast and devoted sports fan. In his own words, he regrets that he has never made a great film, though he says he is still trying.

"A lively tale of growing up lower-middle-class in Brooklyn; a gossipy account of scrambling up the comedy ladder from tabloid gag writer to Oscar winner . . . This memoir is for the most part a pleasure to read and entertaining company. . . . You'd have to be a real sourpuss not to laugh at the fusillade of one-liners, two-liners, three-liners and so on."-Peter Biskind, Los Angeles Times

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"An enjoyable excursion into the mind, personality, and delicious whimsy of Woody Allen . . . one of our finest filmmakers and a man of droll wit, who came of age as an artist in the 1970s, just in time for his unique combination of cynicism and romanticism, as old gods died and new ones failed to appear."-Jim Delmont, Omaha Dispatch

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