Diane Keaton dishes some dirt
By Sheila Weller |
December 2, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
DIANE Keaton is admired for her ease in performing the difficult and for making the sensible glamorous. She minted a wildly original style of dressing while moviegoers were just learning her name. For three and a half decades, she's starred in films spanning from younger woman's nightmare ("Looking for Mr. Goodbar") to older woman's fantasy ("Something's Gotta Give"), while somehow not being punished for the fact that no role ever quite equaled the luster of her Best Actress-winning turn in "Annie Hall." She sashayed into arty endeavor without waxing aloof. She rode out the "age thing" (she's 65) that all female stars face. And she's been self-sufficient. She forthrightly says, "I never found a home in the arms of a man."
Fifteen years ago, Keaton adopted her first of two children, just as her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, with whom she'd been exceptionally close, was struggling to put together sentences, fading from Alzheimer's. "After a lifetime of avoiding intimacy," she writes, "suddenly I got intimate in a big way." Dorothy Hall had been a prolific diary keeper.
When Dorothy died in 2008, Diane started using her mother's diaries as a springboard to her own autobiographical journey. And so we have this book, rich and ruminative, provocatively honest, jumbled and jittery and textured. It speaks in two voices: Keaton is bitingly wry, ironic and tough about herself, but pleadingly earnest and passionate when writing of her mother. It's as if she's bargaining with her readers: She'll open her life to view and dish the dirt she knows we want, as long as we love her mother as she did. It's worth taking her up on it.
Both of Keaton's parents made the mythic trudge to California from the Midwest in the 1920s. Dorothy talked the local big-deal musical-theater coach into giving Diane better parts, which led to a breakout role for Diane in high school. And soon she found herself, at 19, at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
Keaton met Woody Allen via her role in his "Play It Again, Sam," which opened on Broadway in 1969. They argued about women's status in the arts (her idea) on their first date; he wrote her a letter, calling her "Beet Head" (she called him her "White Thing"), and soon - "He couldn't help himself; he loved neurotic girls" - they were spending time in his penthouse happily "torturing each other with our failures."
After Allen came the tenacious if impermanent grip of Warren Beatty. Keaton learned, in 1978, that "once Warren chose to shine his light on you, there was no going back."
No wonder Dorothy Hall once mused to her diary: "Diane ... is a mystery. ... At times she's so basic, at others so wise it frightens me."
Fifteen years ago, Keaton adopted her first of two children, just as her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, with whom she'd been exceptionally close, was struggling to put together sentences, fading from Alzheimer's. "After a lifetime of avoiding intimacy," she writes, "suddenly I got intimate in a big way." Dorothy Hall had been a prolific diary keeper.
When Dorothy died in 2008, Diane started using her mother's diaries as a springboard to her own autobiographical journey. And so we have this book, rich and ruminative, provocatively honest, jumbled and jittery and textured. It speaks in two voices: Keaton is bitingly wry, ironic and tough about herself, but pleadingly earnest and passionate when writing of her mother. It's as if she's bargaining with her readers: She'll open her life to view and dish the dirt she knows we want, as long as we love her mother as she did. It's worth taking her up on it.
Both of Keaton's parents made the mythic trudge to California from the Midwest in the 1920s. Dorothy talked the local big-deal musical-theater coach into giving Diane better parts, which led to a breakout role for Diane in high school. And soon she found herself, at 19, at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
Keaton met Woody Allen via her role in his "Play It Again, Sam," which opened on Broadway in 1969. They argued about women's status in the arts (her idea) on their first date; he wrote her a letter, calling her "Beet Head" (she called him her "White Thing"), and soon - "He couldn't help himself; he loved neurotic girls" - they were spending time in his penthouse happily "torturing each other with our failures."
After Allen came the tenacious if impermanent grip of Warren Beatty. Keaton learned, in 1978, that "once Warren chose to shine his light on you, there was no going back."
No wonder Dorothy Hall once mused to her diary: "Diane ... is a mystery. ... At times she's so basic, at others so wise it frightens me."
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