Love, Death and La - De - Dah

Call Diane Keaton, the shy, gangly, lost-and-found soul who is Annie in Annie Hall, the funniest woman now working in films. Small praise. Give or take Lily Tomlin, it is hard to think of another woman now being funny in films.

Remember Keaton in the Godfather movies? Not likely. She was invisible in The Godfather and pallid in The Godfather, Part II. She played Al Pacino's wife, and her role amounted to telling Pacino every now and then to stop killing people so often and spend some time with the kids. Says Keaton: "Pacino was great. Robert De Niro was great. I was background music."

That expresses well enough an oddity of the past two decades of moviemaking. Women, with a few notable exceptions, have been background music. The reason is not simply that Paul Newman and Robert Redford make a lovely pair, cuddly though they are. It is a matter of social realities and society's perceptions. A male actor can fly a plane, fight a war, shoot a badman, pull off a sting, impersonate a big cheese in business or politics. Men are presumed to be interesting. A female can play a wife, play a whore, get pregnant, lose her baby, and, um, let's see ... Women are presumed to be dull.

Yes, and yes. Is it possible, however, that films are beginning to see women through a sharper lens? Or at any rate with a more interesting astigmatism? New women novelists have begun writing about women as creatures who can make noises in the forest, even if no man is there to hear, and whose sexuality, in particular, functions without any by-your-leave from old social presumptions. Now a determined trend spotter can point to a handful of new films whose makers think that women can bear the dramatic weight of a production alone, or virtually so.

Among such films scheduled for release in the next weeks: The Turning Point, a study of two dancers, with Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft; a version of Lillian Hellman's short story Julia, with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave; and One Sings, The Other Doesn't, a French work that will open the New York Film Festival this week.

Then there is Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. As Theresa Dunn, Keaton dominates this raunchy, risky, violent dramatization of Judith Ressner's 1975 novel about a schoolteacher who cruises singles bars. Watching her is a shock for viewers who associate her shy and awkward manner with Annie Hall. She is on-screen for well over two hours while her character disintegrates in the direction of alienation and death.

Till now Diane Keaton has been able to wander down a Manhattan street with out drawing more than an occasional half-suspicious stare. She lets herself be kept waiting for two hours in a Southern California beach restaurant because the maitre d' cannot imagine that this tall, apologetic young woman in sunglasses and floppy clothes is someone who might merit his attention.

At 31, Keaton is about to see her life changed by Goodbar, mostly in ways she does not like to think about. Her habit is to clutch privacy about her like a shawl. She is insecure about her looks (as she is insecure about her acting ability, her intelligence, her income, her singing and possibly her two cats). Now anyone in the country who has $3 will be able to see her naked in lengthy sex scenes.

Keaton rolls her eyes as she talks about this. Little groans issue forth: "Oh, right, oooh, wow!" She shakes her head. Modesty. What a problem. In 1968 she played the lead in Hair, on Broadway, and made a footnote in theatrical history by refusing to take off her clothes. From Tokyo to Munich, entire companies of Hair peeled exuberantly. Not Keaton.

What she did do was peek at the other actors. "I was quite curious," she confesses. Her tone is solemn. Then, in her mind, she hears a playback of what she has just said. It sounds goofy. "Urn, yeah," she says, thinking this over. "Yeah." She has caught herself again. She grins enormously, a dizzying grin that spreads and resonates like the sound of trumpets blown at dawn by celestial heralds. "I mean, I wouldn't say I was not curious, you know. I took a look or two, sure."

A listener can endure only a certain amount of this nonsense without contracting an enormous crush on Keaton. She marches sturdily into her sentences, pinafore starched and party shoes shining, then imagines that she hears a growl, stops uncertainly, scolds herself for being silly, collects herself and moves forward, uttering exhortations, and finally collapses, out of breath, on the far side of a not especially fearsome thought. She does not seem dithery or dimwitted, merely enormously vulnerable and utterly uncalculating.

This endearing and undefended confusion is part of her own character, and her character is no distance at all from the one she played in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. It was her fourth film with Allen; she had been the lovely and trusting best friend's wife in Play It Again, Sam; the goose-witted girl of the 22nd century --cheeks like two Parker House rolls, mind like a third--in Sleeper; and the sweet cheat Sonja in Love and Death, Allen's send-up of War and Peace.

Annie Hall was something quite different. The film turned out to be by far the best thing either Allen or Keaton had done. Making it meant taking a flying leap into what might easily have been a mawkish mess, because Alvy Singer, the skinny, insecure, red-haired comedian, was Allen's rueful sketch of Allen, and Annie, the beautiful gawk of the film, was a quick line drawing of Diane. (Hall is her family name; Keaton is her mother's maiden name. She is no relation to Buster Keaton, though one of her cats is so named.) The action was a fictional treatment of a year in the early '70s when Woody and Diane lived together.

Audiences begin cheering Annie Hall with the first scene, when Annie and Alvy meet after a tennis game (she wearing men's brown pants, an unpressed white shirt, a black vest, and a ridiculously long polka-dot tie, an outfit Diane might have found on the floor of her own closet). She starts to compliment him on his tennis, gets lost in one of her enchanted word-forests, then subsides into pretty embarrassment: "Oh, God, Annie ... Well, oh, well ..." And then the murmur of defeat: "La-de-dah, la-de-dah." Heartbreaking. Does anyone doubt that young women across the country are looking into their mirrors and trying to find just the right intonation with which to murmur "La-de-dah"?

The plot of Annie Hall has the two underweight egos twine together, rose and briar. For a while they twitch as one, forming a touching sort of pill pool and neurosis bank in Alvy's Manhattan apartment. Then it is over. Annie drifts off to Los Angeles; Alvy writes a play about the affair, wistfully giving it a happy ending in which the lovers unite. The film's details are not meant to match reality exactly. Keaton, then 22, and Allen, then 33, met when he was casting his Broadway comedy Play It Again, Sam, not after a tennis match; her career was farther advanced than Annie's; she did move out of Allen's apartment, but she stayed in New York, and lived for a while with another man. Through the five years since they split, she and Allen have maintained an unshakable friendship; they confer at dinner, catch a Knicks' game, work together, each one busily putting bubble-gum patches on the insecurities of the other.

Whether or not their actual affair now seems in some ways funny to them, Allen's humor has never fitted its subject better. Annie Hall addicts have been returning to theaters three and four times. Allen fans recite bits such as the one that shows Alvy and Annie, on a split screen, talking to their shrinks about the frequency with which they have sex. "Hardly ever," says Alvy, aggrieved; "maybe three times a week." "All the time," says Annie, fed up; "at least three times a week."

Woody Allen came from a Jewish family in Brooklyn; Diane Keaton's parents are Methodists who live in Southern California. She lacks the spooky older brother of Annie Hall (she has a younger brother, unspooky, and two younger sisters). But there is general agreement that the dinner scene, in which Alvy imagines that "Grammy Hall" sees him with yarmulke, full beard, earlocks and frock coat, bears some resemblance to truth.

There is a Grammy Hall, in her 80s, who is still trying to fix Diane up with nice young men from her neighborhood in Los Angeles. She thinks the film was very funny and says, "That Woody Allen, he's something! I can't make head or tail out of half of what he says." She, not Diane, appears to be the ranking family cutup; when Diane's sister Dorrie, 24, had to write a genealogical essay in the manner of Roots for college, Grammy Hall obligingly gave phony details about ancestors unto the fifth generation.

Diane's father Jack is a handsome, prosperous engineer with his own consulting firm, and her mother Dorothy is a pretty woman who once won a "Mrs. Los Angeles" contest. She is a semipro photographer, and Diane herself works seriously at photography (Photoworld magazine plans to publish a six-page spread of Keaton's photographs). The family seems close, loving and untroubled, a warm tribe whose members liked to sing together. From all accounts, Diane's childhood in Santa Ana was the sort that would leave a person quite unmarked. And unmarked is what Diane sometimes seems. Only one comment among her recollections raises a faint doubt. She enjoyed going to the Methodist church, she says, because she liked singing in the choir. The memory raises the thought of childhood guilts: "I used to pray a lot. You know, apologize." She has been apologizing ever since, though for what is not clear. Apology is her public and private manner, and it is the core of her comedy.

She matured from a skinny, late-developing kid to a somewhat overweight teenager, which may explain a measure of her insecurity. She was forever falling in love from afar with bronzed basketballers, "because they were unattainable. I wasn't up for the real stuff." Her dates were amiable shorties, the proles of a high school social order. She overdid clothes and makeup: "White lipstick and black net stockings. Oh, wow."

Keaton remembers that "when I was really small I used to go out in the yard and sing to the moon. It was like plugging into a great big battery." In ninth grade, "through sheer want," she made it into the school talent show, singing All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth with another girl, "with our front teeth blacked out. La-de-dah, hey?" And in her senior year, playing the second lead in the school production of Little Mary Sunshine ("The star was beautiful; I was the funny one"), she plugged into the great big battery again. "I sang my solo and then I was backstage, and I heard this sound. And then I couldn't believe it. It was applause, and they were clapping for me, and it was SO LOUD!"

She went to college (a semester at Santa Ana College, a few months at Orange Coast College) "for the musicals." Allen agrees that she didn't learn anything else. He now has great respect for her native intelligence, but believes "when I first met her, her mind was completely blank."

Her high school acting teacher suggested she enroll in Manhattan's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. Jack and Dorothy Hall stowed their four children into a Ford van, and drove to New York to investigate. Diane entered the school on a scholarship. It was in early 1968--finished with school, finished with summer stock and four months into a depressing period of trying out for parts and not getting them--that she attended an audition for Hair. She was rejected. "I went out to the elevator, and man, did I feel bad. I mean, I felt bad. I was thinking, 'This is ridiculous.' Then along came one of the producers, this French guy, and he said, 'No, you stay.' I have no idea why he decided to keep me."

Keaton and Woody Allen met cute, as their trade phrases it. Her job in Hair was as understudy to the star, Lynn Kellogg, and when Kellogg left the production, Keaton took over. Naturally, she was feeling insecure. "I was living alone on the West Side, in a one-room apartment with the bathroom out in the hallway and the bathtub in the kitchen, right? I didn't feel like I had arrived with Hair. That play wasn't much for individual performances." When she heard about tryouts for Play It Again, Sam, she invited herself in.

Naturally, Allen was feeling insecure. "She was a Broadway star, and who was I? A cabaret comedian who had never even been on a stage before." She worried that she was too tall. He worried that he was too short. They took off their shoes and measured, back to back. She, at 5 ft. 7 in., was three-quarters of an inch taller. Close enough.

They played lovers onstage, and afterward, as the most casual of friends, passed the time with Tony Roberts, who played Diane's husband in the production and later in the movie. "We'd hang around together, nothing big, have dinner," recalls Woody. "Tony and I couldn't stop laughing at Diane. It was nothing you could quote later; she couldn't tell a joke if her life depended on it. Tony tried to figure it out one time, what it is she does. He says she has this uncanny ability to project you back into an infantile atmosphere, and you are suddenly a little kid again. There is something utterly guileless about her. She's a natural."

What brought this fountain of rarefied nonsense to Mr. Goodbar? Keaton's name still brings an "Oh. yeah, Woody Allen's girl" reaction from filmgoers, and she and Allen have known for some time that she must establish herself separately. Her first venture, during a dry period between the stage and film versions of Play It Again, Sam, was a series of three memorably tacky TV commercials, in which she played a housewife who jogged around her kitchen in a track suit, holding up a can of Hour After Hour deodorant and yelling, "This stuff is great!" It was a survival maneuver, and she survived--at $25,000 a shot.

The film Lovers and Other Strangers led to her dim Godfather experience, and later she was funny in a bad Elliott Gould movie, Harry and Walter Go to New York, and then funny in a good Elliott Gould movie, I Will, I Will ... For Now. Last year she was delightful in a misbegotten Broadway comedy, The Primary English Class.

But the problem of establishing herself as something more than a luminous satellite remained. Goodbar was especially satisfying as an answer because it is the heaviest kind of melodrama. As is true of so many gifted comedians. Keaton yearns to evoke horror, jerk tears, turn the faces of onlookers pale with fear. "I didn't know if Diane had the range," Goodbar Director Richard Brooks remembers. "And I was thinking, sitting there in my office with her, that she is not exactly what you call a great beauty. Then it struck me that this is who this story is about: a nice-looking girl, a sexy girl, but not the best-looking girl in the class. Someone you would almost overlook."

Brooks is a tough, bony man of 65, with a tough, bony reputation. He is an old baseball player, newspaper reporter, rider of freights. He played chess with Bogart. He directed and wrote the screenplays for Key Largo, Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood. His regular practice is to give actors segments of the script just before scenes are to be shot, then collect them afterward and destroy them in a paper shredder. "I don't trust anybody," he yells. "I've seen it happen too many times. The best goddamned thing in your movie shows up in a goddamned TV show six months before the movie is out. I don't want anything stolen." He yells a lot.

Brooks is a studio baiter, a closer of sets against both pooh-bahs and publicity rodents. To get what is called "final cut" of Goodbar--which means complete control of the film and no changes to be made without his approval--he agreed to work for a minimal salary and a percentage of whatever profit there may be. To meet expenses, he is selling his house. Today this furious man speaks of Keaton with a kind of awe: "She has more artistic courage than anyone I know."

Brooks and Keaton mulled over the character of Theresa Dunn, who teaches devotedly in a school for the deaf by day, and then, as "Terry," prowls for rough sex in the singles bars at night. Terry is frighteningly disconnected from any feeling that lasts longer than the time required for nerve ends to stop tingling. She goads men and feels invulnerable.

Both Brooks and Keaton were concerned about the sex scenes. The basic question was simple: Could she do them? They had to be done nude. Keaton is a woman who hides imagined flaws behind high collars and long sleeves.

Brooks recalls telling Keaton, " 'Look, there's going to be some tricky lighting in this movie, and I've got to start thinking about how to photograph your body. And, well, Diane, I'm going to have to see what you look like.' She just stared at me. She was shocked. And then, after a few moments, she said, 'O.K., Brooks.' "

The sets would be closed, he explained, but there would be cameramen, technicians. "You're going to lie there like a piece of meat while they adjust the lighting. We can't use a double; the skin colors would be wrong. And some camera guy is going to run a tape measure down from his lens to your ass--zip!--to get his focus right. Can you work with that?"

Keaton worried, talked with her parents, talked with her analyst. (She has seen a psychiatrist several days a week, most weeks, for five years. She began on the advice of Allen, who has been in analysis, he says, for 20 years.) She decided to go ahead.

Keaton was on the set for 76 days, playing in every scene of the film except one. Halfway through she cracked a rib when Actor Richard Gere, who plays a stud named Tony, threw her to the floor. "It was my fault," she said. "I knew how to take the fall, but I blew it. Besides, it's fun to do that wild, physical stuff. And it's nice to get really angry and scream, and then walk away from the responsibility for all that when the shooting is over."

Keaton regularly does acting exercises, one of which involves finding a way to key her concentration so that she feels completely alone. If she has kept herself fit with the exercises, she finds she can program and hold an emotion through the endless technical annoyances of film making. Most of the time this worked in Goodbar, but not always. Once, Brooks remembers, he wanted a look of pleasurable anticipation to cross her face as she came out of a bathroom and approached a man who lay in bed. Keaton tried it a couple of times, but came up empty. She could not find the emotion by herself, and since the bed was off-camera, there was no actor there for her to respond to.

Brooks told her to go back and try it again. Then he pulled off his shirt, and as Keaton opened the bathroom door, was busy removing his pants. She came apart in shrieks of laughter. Pulling herself together, she did the scene again, says Brooks, and "it was perfect. When she opened that door, she really didn't know what she was going to see."

The effort that went into Goodbar was exhausting. "We all got so sick of me, day after day," Keaton remembers. A residue of Theresa stayed with Keaton after each day's shooting. "The parts where I had to be bitchy were hard to dismiss. I would go home feeling really rotten."

There was a sour moment one day when a crew member made the inevitable crack to Keaton: "Hey, I didn't recognize you with your clothes on." Brooks reduced the cur to slag, and Keaton survived. "The lady is tough," he says. "I think she must have a lot of anger in there somewhere."

Brooks and Keaton changed the character of Theresa perceptibly. Author Rossner described a chilly, rather unpleasant woman, and Keaton's Theresa is likable and warm, especially in her relationship with her sister, played by Tuesday Weld. So questions arise. Is Theresa too solid to be believable later as the victim of her own alienation? Does the humor she shows reflect too much sanity? Worse, does it reflect too much Annie Hall?

After a movie is shot, it takes a long ime for the dice to stop rolling. A lot rests on the gamble of Goodbar. Keaton's career, Brooks' bank account and, to a certain degree, the immediate future of serious films about women. Meanwhile, Keaton is back in Manhattan, renewing acquaintances with her cats and her analyst, thinking lazily about changing apartments, studying a new Woody Allen script. The film has no title yet, but rehearsals begin next week. Allen himself will direct the picture, but not act in it. He reports with much satisfaction that the film is very gloomy, in no sense a comedy, and that Keaton's role is "far more heavy and tortured and difficult than the girl in Goodbar." He's worried about the film, she's insecure, they're happy. A dark night of the soul lies ahead, and what's more, room service is closed.

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