The Story of His Life

The Cafe Carlyle is squishing room only. An elegantly coiffed woman toils demurely over a lamb chop, oblivious to the seven-piece band that is giving “Basin Street Blues” a sultry workout behind her.

The clarinetist doesn’t seem to mind. Wedged between the trumpet player and the banjo man, he’s off in his own trance, tilting his head back as he slices little notes into the air with a mystical vibrato that suggests a flickering candle.

This is Woody Allen in nirvana. Far from the madding camera crews and paparazzi, he sits here as he has sat on Monday nights for 20-odd years, a humble sideman in Eddie Davis’ New Orleans jazz band. For most of those years, they lodged at Michael’s Pub, where Allen tooted a $12 Ramponi horn. Now he plays a plush Duffet, one he had designed for him in Paris to incorporate all the best elements of the 25 clarinets he has played since switching over from a soprano sax as a teenager.

“I’m always searching for the perfect horn,” Allen confesses the next day from his Park Avenue screening room. “If you take a guy who really has a gift, no matter what horn you give him, he’ll make it sound beautiful. I don’t have a gift. I’m just an ardent fan. People come because they see me in movies. When we did our jazz tour in Europe, we sold out everywhere. An interviewer asked me, ‘Don’t you feel a little guilty that Ornette Coleman was here two weeks ago and they only filled three rows?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. It’s a terrible thing.’ ”

In his new film “Sweet and Lowdown,” Allen couples his passion for jazz with his own sense of inadequacy by chronicling the life of a little-known jazz guitarist from the ‘30s named Emmet Ray. Played with garrulous brio by Sean Penn, Emmet is a swaggering variation on the classic Allen schnook: He attracts women with his art, then repels them by force of ego, neuroses, lack of social grace.

What may be most essential to Allen is that Ray is completely made up, an elaborate tease from Allen’s ever-gurgling imagination. In this respect, Allen connects Emmet to all of the seemingly self-referential characters that Allen has impersonated over the years. Those who welcome “Sweet and Lowdown” as a departure from such recent Allen films as “Husbands and Wives” and “Deconstructing Harry”--whose sour marital angst strayed discomfortingly close to Allen’s own travails with his ex-partner Mia Farrow and Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn (now his wife)--have got another thing coming.

“If you can name one thing that has been the bane of my existence since I started to make films, practically,” Allen, 65, says with a weary smile, “it’s that it’s hard for people who can’t make up stories to fathom that other people make them up. That’s what I do. There is almost nothing else I can do very well.

“ ‘Annie Hall’ was the first one that people thought was an autobiographical film. It was not a remote picture of my life or how I met Diane Keaton or how we work together or how we broke up. The same with ‘Deconstructing Harry.’ I took a writer and thought, This guy has come to a writer’s block. Something that has never happened to me. His home is drinking, not a problem for me. And he has hookers coming over to his house and kidnaps his child. None of these things would I ever do. I’ve never puffed a marijuana cigarette in my life even.”

But what are we to think when Allen asserts that his latest character is so thinly disguised that he might as well say it is himself?

“By the time I got to ‘Deconstructing Harry,’ I was laughing with friends and said, ‘Instead of telling everybody this is not me, I’m making this up, and then they don’t want to hear it and go and write ‘It’s him’ anyway, why don’t I just say, ‘It’s me, that’s exactly me’? Years ago, people were disappointed to find that Clark Gable was not Clark Gable off screen, or John Wayne. They’d pick fights with them at bars, saying, ‘I don’t think you’re really so tough.’ It’s what people want to think. They blur the line. I don’t think I help. But they blur the line.”

If Allen’s audiences are so willing to blur the line between his fiction and his reality, they would feel amply encouraged by the way in which Allen persists in spotlighting his private romantic interests as his celluloid lovers. The work that Allen did with Keaton represented the summit of his commercial popularity, although he now dismisses the slapstick conceits of his earliest films as “funny, silly little things” that he would only resurrect if the inspiration struck him. “At the time I knew nothing about directing. I only knew that I could rely upon making jokes. That’s all I cared about: I didn’t want the audience to wait too long for the next joke.”

The turning point was “Interiors,” a somnolent, Bergmanesque foray into visual formality and familial introspection. Democratically blending his “Annie Hall” star into an ensemble, it initiated a period of bittersweet, if not bitter, seriocomedies in which Farrow carried the baton as resident muse. While they included some of his finest (“Radio Days,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Alice”) and underappreciated (“Another Woman”), they signaled a turning away on the part of many of Allen’s fans, a trend comically echoed by a woman in “Stardust Memories” who ambushes Allen with “I love your movies, especially the early, funny ones.”

“There were quite a number of people who felt resentful and betrayed,” admits Allen. “One writer wrote--I never forgot this, it seemed such a harsh judgment--that doing that movie was an act of bad faith. I would say that the worst you could say about a movie I did was that it was no good. But there was no bad faith involved. I was trying to make a movie as best, and honestly, as I could.

“I think it was Nabokov who said--and I’m not equating myself with this, but it does represent a phenomenon that’s prevalent--that the artist is always ahead of his audience. And the audience always wants you to do the same thing. The artist wants to try and do something different. I felt like I have made what I wanted to make and suffered the consequences.”

Won’t the audience come around eventually?

“No, never. [Film critic] Richard Schickel wrote that my audience left me. . . . I was making this kind of film. But he had it backward. What happened is I left them. And they didn’t like that and have never really gone with me. I have in America a loyal audience. But it’s small, and it remains small. I have to say were it not for Europe, I wouldn’t be able to survive. And that is a mystery to me because I’m so American. I’m from Brooklyn. I like sports. I like baseball, I like basketball, I like jazz. I like the Marx Brothers. Very American things.”

Is He Being Unfair to the Audience?

The hostile critical and public reaction to “Stardust Memories,” an “8 1/2”-like reverie about the tribulations of a famous movie director’s life, underscored the tentative relationship between Allen and his audience. “They seemed to come away from that film with a sense of, ‘Hey, is this what this guy thinks of us, that we are a stupid, grasping, phlegmatic group of philistines? Oh Woody, what are you complaining about--you’re rich?’ And I want to say to them, ‘I’m not complaining about that for me. I’m complaining for you. I’ve made lots of money and had a good time. But I think life is unfair for you. To all of us.’ ”

When asked how it is that a filmmaker who traffics so generously in Manhattan is so meager in his use of African American and Latino characters, he replies, “I write about what it is that I know. I don’t set out to be an equal-opportunity writer. My goal in film is not to represent all strains of New York City. You could say the same of other directors, Scorsese or Francis Coppola. I write more about the Upper East Side. My concerns have been the romantic interests of certain people. But [the inattention to minorities] has no other significance. It’s something I never give a moment’s thought to.”

Allen has given a lot of thought to his representation of women. His prolific gallery of women’s roles has garnered their players nine Oscar nominations and four awards, a fact he seems proud of. More significantly, perhaps, he has given his women full rein to expose his own frailties for all to see.

“It was a happy accident. When I started out as a writer for television and theater, I only wrote from a man’s point of view. I could never write for women. Then I started to go out and live with Diane Keaton on ‘Play It Again, Sam.’ I had so much affection for her, so much admiration for her. I found I could write things for her. And she always made them sing.”

The hullabaloo of an artist’s life that continues to preoccupy Allen in recent films seems to have drowned out his obsessions about mortality. But Allen has merely put them on the back burner. “Ingmar Bergman said many years ago after doing ‘The Seventh Seal’ that he had sort of worked through that problem. I don’t feel that way. I feel the same terror over mortality. I haven’t made much progress in terms of that.”

How does Allen want to be remembered?

“Only that I always tried my best. There are times I struck out and continue to strike out. But I never took the audience cheaply. I always tried to give them an original idea, an idea that was about something.

“You get lucky enough times so that they keep bankrolling you. All those people who tell you, well, I made my own luck, are too frightened to say what the real terrifying truth is. And that is we are all so incredibly dependent on luck. When we get up in the morning and there isn’t a shadow on our X-ray, or you meet the right person. No matter how much you try and influence your life, you can only do it to a tiny degree. And I’ve had a very, very lucky life.”