Then Again - Diane Keaton [53]
Audrey Hepburn was sixty-three when she died of cancer. She was forty-eight when I met her, not exactly what you’d call old. Backstage, I pretended to listen to her words, but in truth I couldn’t get my mind off age and what it does to a person. Maybe it was said best by Cher: “There is only value to having the look you have when you are young and no value to the look you have when you are older.” Instead of taking the time to have a conversation with Audrey Hepburn, I chose to hightail my way out of her company as fast as I could. It is another regret in a growing list of regrets.
Woody woke up the morning after and opened The New York Times. On the front page he read that Annie Hall won best picture and went back to work on his next script, Interiors, a drama. Woody stood by his principles. To him there was no “best” in an art form—that included no best director, no best picture, and definitely no best actress. Art was not a Knicks basketball game.
Even Grammy Hall was interviewed by the local Highland Park newspaper. She had her picture taken with a photograph of Woody in her right hand and one of me in the left. “People say I’m in the clouds, I ain’t in no clouds. I’ll tell you one thing about the Academy Awards. It’s something big for a small family. That Woody Allen must be awfully broad-minded to think of all that crap he thinks of.”
2009
Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It’s the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it’s closed. We’re watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun begins to set. It’s a perfect afternoon. There were many perfect afternoons with Woody.
Woody never chose to join me in the sad-sack nostalgia of temporal concerns. He didn’t regret the past or try to bring back perfect afternoons that most likely weren’t perfect except in memory. He’s never spoken of his Academy Awards with an ounce of pride. He doesn’t speak of them at all. Even funny is preferred without sentiment. He loves to dish it out. And the deal is, nobody does it better than Woody. He’s mastered the put-down. I just wish he would do it more often, like he did at my Lincoln Center honor a few years back.
Lincoln Center Tribute
“I got a call asking if I would say some nice things about Diane. I said, Yes, I can think of some nice things. Keaton for one thing is punctual. She, she, she’ll always show up on time, and she’s thrifty; she knows the value of a dollar. She, um … what else can I say about her … She has wonderful handwriting. She’s … I’m reaching. Uh … She’s, uh, beautiful. She was always beautiful. She’s remained beautiful over the years. She’s not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word beauty. By the conventional sense I mean ‘pleasing to the eye.’ She has great conviction in her own taste. She always dresses with the black clothes and the hat and the sensible shoes. She looks to me like the woman who comes to take Blanche DuBois to the institution. It’s grammatically incorrect to say someone is ‘the most unique’ or ‘so unique,’ but, you know, Diane is the most unique person that I’ve ever known. That could be interpreted as weirdness but she’s, you know, she’s truly one of a kind … I think.