Diane Keaton's autobiography is an endearing ramble that reveals more about her close relationship with her mother than it does about her films
You would not expect a memoir by Diane Keaton to be a conventional "as told to" or ghosted showbusiness autobiography, and indeed she recognises her own eccentricity in a 1969 letter to her mother written after failing an audition for a Broadway comedy. "Too tall and too 'kooky' ? a nice way of saying strange," she reports, using a newly fashionable term to describe the ditzy likes of Goldie Hawn, Liza Minnelli and herself. Her rambling, endearing book is not short of glamorous names, nor does it scorn ambition and fame. But she shares the stage with her family and most particularly with her mother, Dorothy Hall, as co-star. On the final page she calls the book "our memoir ? your words with my words". In 1968 when she got her Equity card and discovered there was already an actor called Diane Hall in good standing, it was her mother's maiden name of Keaton that she adopted.
Diane was born in Los Angeles in 1946, the oldest of the three daughters and one son of Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dorothy's parents had migrated from the midwest in search of the American dream, and her father abandoned the family at the height of the Depression, leaving his wife to raise the children by working as a janitor. Diane's father was a handsome junior officer in the US navy in the second world war, who subsequently became chief engineer for a county water and power board before establishing his own successful business.
After endless attempts at winning talent contests, Dorothy devoted herself to photography, collages and 85 scrapbooks that documented her life and thoughts and the activities of the family and from which Diane quotes copiously. This obsession with collage is seen as a way of reordering and re-creating the family circle and as part of a lifelong battle against depression. Father Jack's own obsession was with organisation and self-improvement. He was devoted to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, and an organisation called Pace (Personal and Company Effectiveness), and he imposed their systems on his children. "Dad," Diane coolly observes, "was attracted to imposters, swindlers, and frauds."
Diane felt part of a secure, highly individual, not to say eccentric family. But the need to perform and achieve public acclaim emerged early on, and the urge to dress up and dress down that became part of her public persona through Annie Hall was established by her early teens. "I didn't want to be a wife, I wanted to be a hot date," she tells us, adding: "I was looking for an audience, any audience." At 19 she broke away from the world of domesticity and crossed the continent to study acting in New York under the great Sanford Meisner. "Some day you're going to be a good actress," he told her on her graduation from the Neighbourhood Playhouse, and her first break came early with a major role in Hair. This was followed by Play It Again, Sam, which ran on Broadway for more than a year and began her long association with Woody Allen, one of the three co-stars and lovers she came nearest to marrying, the others being Warren Beatty (her teenage idol) and Al Pacino, whose wife she played in the three Godfather pictures. However, she spent a year without work after Play It Again, Sam, during which time she developed bulimia, and her frank discussion of this topic begins with a list of 20 fellow celebrity bulimics. She attributes the condition to worries about her body image, and believes she shared a low self-esteem with her mother. She went into analysis but never discussed her problem with Allen.
In the 1970s and 80s Keaton made more than 20 films and received the first two of her four Oscar nominations. She's fairly scathing about some, considering herself miscast in Allen's deadly serious Interiors and finding the character of Louise Bryant, the radical heroine she played in Beatty's unduly protracted production of Reds, a dislikable character. Her happiest experiences were on Allen's Annie Hall (for which she won an Oscar) and Manhattan. She writes amusingly and with insight on her relations with Allen, who "loved neurotic girls". He gently mocked her family through the alarmed Jewish eyes of his alter ego, Alvy Singer, in Annie Hall, and they thought him odd. Diane's grumpy, outspoken paternal grandmother remarked: "That Woody Allen is too funny-looking to pull some of that crap he pulls off, but you can't hurt a Jew can you?"
The book contains few startling revelations or anecdotes about her films, and there's more in its latter part on her parents than on her work. Her father died in 1990 after a brief struggle with brain cancer, which necessitated her breaking off shooting Godfather III. Her mother died in 2008, 15 years after the onset of Alzheimer's disease, an experience that prompted Diane's brother, a published poet, to say: "Her memory is walking out the back door." Between these two events, Diane, then in her early 50s, adopted two children, Dexter and Duke, on whom she dotes, and who have become the recipients of slightly whimsical letters from her.
There are, however, a couple of interesting references to Unstrung Heroes, a curious independent movie Diane directed in the 1990s, and to Something's Gotta Give (2003), probably the only movie of interest she's made since Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), her eighth and last collaboration with Allen. She refers to the characters of Unstrung Heroes "finding redemption through documentation", a good description of what her mother achieved in her journals and Diane does in this book. After initially thinking Something's Gotta Give a doomed project, she ends up calling it "my favourite film". She recalls particularly the happy memory of a love scene played with Jack Nicholson at the age of 57, and the surprise two years after the movie opened "when a cheque with a lot of zeros arrived in the mail for my back-end percentage". As she didn't have such a deal, she phoned her agent and discovered that Nicholson had given her a piece of his own percentage of the movie's gross.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/20/then-again-diane-keaton-review
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