Woody and His Favorite Clown

Never mind whether Scarlett and Rhett ever got together again. What the world wants to know is whether Annie Hall and Alvy Singer will manage to get their inadequacies synchronized and live together anxiously ever after. The answer, neurosis fans, is yes! Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, who gave the '70s a love story to believe in, green and warty and sour as a good dill pickle, live together on Manhattan's East Side, in apartments ten blocks apart.

Visit her flat, a half-furnished encampment that looks as if someone got a great bargain in white paint, and Allen is on the phone. Interview Allen in his penthouse, a comfortable layout that might belong to a literate lawyer, and Keaton has just called. Anxieties have gnawed dangerously at confidence during the night, and repairs must be made. "I'm a guilt-ridden, anhedonic type," says Allen, whose conversation can sound like a Woody Allen movie without the jokes. He lives with despair, gloomily believing that his films "are all strikeouts. None of them achieved what I'd hoped to do." Keaton argues that the films are lovely, funny, an imperishable national asset.

Her turn. Says Allen, "She is always afraid that she is never going to work again. She worries that she hasn't earned her success." Keaton is going to cut her first record in a few months, and, Allen predicts, "she will have no problem whatsoever performing. But she worries that she is not an interesting singer. Now she is worried about her role in my new film and worried that when she is older she will be one of those actresses who haven't aged well." He tells her she is great.

"Diane was just born funny," Allen says. "She can take a perfectly straight paragraph and read it and you'll be rolling on the floor. She has unfailing good taste. Her mind is never clouded by popular opinion, the need to score points. I can show her something and say the two greatest writers in the world love it, and she can pick it up and say 'I don't know what's so great about this.' And she'll be right."

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