Banal Over Broadway

{Cough, clears throat}. Chapter one. It’s 1991 in Manhattan. Cue a Gershwin piano trill, followed by sirens; open on an old lady getting her purse snatched. An ambulance whizzes by. Gray skies and rain; a little group of shivering hookers. Oh yeah, the roaring ’90s. But this isn’t Midtown. No, no, we’re in the crosshairs of 88th Street and Second Avenue. One building has a line outside. We zoom in on the awning — it’s Elaine’s, the glamorous literary canteen. The camera takes us inside, tracking. Tucked into a little table — not in the back, never in the back; only loser tourists and hack writers sit in the Siberia of that crowded restaurant — but along the right row, visible from the entrance, below the sconces and crooked picture frames, is Woody Allen’s table. Table six. Imagine it! A wintry night, and the tourists outside gripping their Frommers, and the candlelit table that sits empty until Woody Allen arrives. Mia Farrow is there, too, picking at cold tortellini, but she doesn’t stay long. Not because she’s angry — no, none of that stuff has happened yet; Farrow just doesn’t like to stay out late, and leaves hours before her famous boyfriend, who lives alone on the opposite side of the park. Woody spends the rest of the night chewing burnt steak, drilling red wine, and shuffling cards for Gay Talese and George Plimpton at a late-night poker game that wraps at dawn.

Allen was a fixture at Elaine’s every night for 10 years, and would trade barbs with Kaufman, the thick-wristed owner who talked like a yenta but punched rather more like a Belfast prizefighter. Kaufman and Woody were like relatives, which made Allen a prince in the kingdom of New York’s top haunt for mayors and movie stars, where Jackie Kennedy made her first public appearance at 2 a.m., several months after the assassination of her husband, and where Woody Allen was introduced to Mia Farrow.

Cast your mind back to the time before The Allegations, and you realize that, right up until that point, Allen was in the midst of an unstoppable 15-year run: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Interiors, Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Husbands and Wives — not a flop