Promotional photo for Hair by Kenn Duncan
I believe that Diane Keaton made her biggest impression on me in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. When I looked at her filmography today, I recognized that I would have seen her in the first installment of The Godfather (I didn't bother with the other two), and in three earlier Allen films, but it wasn't until Annie Hall that her name and face really took hold.
At that time, I was a Woody Allen fan, and as he had been in a relationship with Keaton for a number of years, she appeared in eight of his films, as best as I can tell: Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In fact, post-Annie Hall, she was as much a reason to see Allen's films as his involvement with them. Maybe it was her girl-next-door beauty and charm. Maybe it was because there often seemed to be little space between herself and the character she portrayed that lent authenticity to her performances.
While Annie Hall might have been pivotal as regards how Keaton came to be notable in my mind's memory (as I think about this now, her role in Play It Again, Sam, which I watched again last night, likely contributed as well), it was her role in Looking For Mr. Goodbar—or perhaps more accurately, the film itself—which had a significant impact on me. I don't recall now that I knew much about the film prior to going to see it. I might have seen a Siskel-Ebert review... I honestly can't say. That it starred Keaton was probably the biggest factor in my wanting to see it.
At the time, I was seeing a woman I had met at school, Robin, and during the Christmas-New Year break that year, after being "a couple" for a few months, I drove from Toledo to her family's home near Pittsburgh to meet her parents. Robin was cute and sweet and kind and smart. Bubbly. Also... religious. Her grandfather had been a minister, as would her father, I think, later in life. That said, I don't recall now that our time together was the constant push and pull you might expect between a Bible thumper and an atheist. We enjoyed each other's company and spent a great deal of our time out of class together.
The film was released in October of 1977, so only a couple of months before my trip to Beaver Falls (home town of Joe Namath and Papa John Creach, by the way). I stayed with Robin's family for probably a couple of nights, and one evening, we drove into Pittsburgh to the Showcase Cinemas to see the film. As I try to recall the evening, I can only imagine that she cringed through the whole thing, as Keaton's character was a school teacher by day and a barhopper by night who came home with a variety of men to fulfill either her sexual desires or to paint over her loneliness. Ultimately, she is murdered by a young man who had issues of his own, particularly as regards his sexuality. The scene is quite shocking, and the swift viciousness of the attack was almost as unexpected for me as it might have been for the victim.
Robin and I left the theatre stunned. Considering her rather Pollyanna life until then, it had to have been a brutal assault on her senses. I doubt she had ever seen such an emotionally charged, graphic film, much less one that depicted a world so different than the one she'd known up until then. I recall that she cried, but I don't recall that we talked much—if at all—about it on the way back to the house. As I think about it these many years later, I wonder if she thought I was depraved to have exposed her to such a shocking film, or that I had intended on dragging her into that kind of world.
We've been in touch sporadically over the years, and I think she managed to find some sort of forgiveness for my transgression, but she and Diane Keaton remain inexorably tied in my mind because of the film.
The random memory I had regarding Diane Keaton actually doesn't involve her, but seeing the above promotional photograph for the Broadway production of Hair in the 1970s spurred the memory I have of being in New York at the time the musical was running. My mom's father lived in Manhattan, and we stayed in Staten Island with Mom's best friend, Gladys, and her family. Making the trip to Manhattan meant riding the Staten Island Ferry. Since Hair was currently running, there were posters advertising it at the ferry terminal. I seem to recall that the posters were of a larger—mostly nude—group, which added a little more controversy to an already controversial play, but it might very well have been the above photo or one of several from that same session taken by Kenn Duncan. That's it. That's my memory.
Since beginning this post, I've re-watched Play It Again, Sam, Love and Death, and Annie Hall, and have watched a few clips of her appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman, and it's just so hard to grasp that her vibrance is gone from this world.
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