Diane Keaton: Her Own Best Disputant (2024)

“I hate these chairs,” said Diane Keaton of two of her own chairs in her spotless, natural-wood-and-white living room. “They’re so uncomfortable. I got them by mail order and I like what they look like, but they’re no fun to sit in. I’ll do something about it. They’re too angular. We could sit in the kitchen and have tea—yes?—where the chairs are more ordinary. These are definitely a mistake. I have a tendency to get a little severe about taste in chairs until I’ve sat in them. Oh, well.”

We were in her apartment, on the East Side of Manhattan. She describes it as being like a railroad car. About the kitchen, one sees what she means, but only about the kitchen. Everything else has a sense of space and liberty. Diane Keaton herself is very open. She is not at all like the many actresses who have skimmed some mannerisms off her and done insultingly mild imitations by relying on “Well”s and dither. Miss Keaton, the Oscar-winning costar of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” is not a whit like the flustered ingénue she was cast to play. “I’ve noticed people saying ‘La-di-da’ like Annie Hall, and I don’t like it, you know?” she told me. “It’s not a good idea to be identifiable, though it’s reassuring. It feels safe in most ways, and that’s bad, because it means that you’re accepted, and once that happens that’s where you stay. You have to watch yourself. I’d like a life like Katharine Hepburn’s in terms of work. She matured. She made the changes. Like Martha Graham.”

We went to her gym class. She goes every second day, and also goes to singing classes and acting classes. She got ready for the gym class fast: she had on a black leotard and black tights under her other clothes. It was a long class, and the woman leading it was merciless. Some people dropped out. Miss Keaton kept at it till the end. She is very supple, with an apparently boneless back, like a cat’s.

“You seemed to anticipate what the woman was going to get you to do next,” I said when it was over.

“Well, after all this time I’d be an idiot if I couldn’t.”

“Do you do ballet?”

“When I was nineteen, at Martha Graham’s school. Her floor work was fantastic.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m not working. I like that. I like to have time to myself. What are you doing?”

“Talking to you.”

“Yes, I guess you are. Well, I bought some books this morning. Max Ernst and Rothko.”

“Do you draw?”

“Do you?” She saw the rhythm of question-allaying she had slipped into, and said, “I draw very small.”

She took me into a big room—big enough to be a bedroom—that she uses as her darkroom, for photographs she likes taking and then keeping from public sight, for herself alone. Everything very neat. “You see, it doesn’t have to be more furnished than a kitchen. I like it better than my actual kitchen.”

In her bedroom, there is a basketful of rubber stamps that she has had made. She printed a page for me: an entry in old-fashioned medical typeface from some old encyclopedia, and a dental drawing—oddly, not at all macabre—of an X-ray of teeth and their roots. “You wonder whose teeth,” she said. “It’s like home movies or blue movies. You wonder what those people are like now who were young then.”

Diane Keaton, famous as Woody Allen’s co-star and in her own right, is one of the most comedically pure and brainy actresses in our midst. Her prodigious comic gifts are sometimes hidden. She tends to hoard these gifts, as if she were an impostor guest at a banquet tucking away food for friends under the challenging eyes of a portly butler, or as if her talent might run out in some world energy crisis. Like many of us, she dreads departures and endings, though she undertakes them with the debonair gaiety of a silent comedian setting off into nowhere. Equally, she sees herself as someone who puts off encounters and beginnings.

“I could just take classes indefinitely,” she said to me at my place in New York. “Don’t you ever get surprised when you’re paid to do something you like doing?” she asked another day, when we were at her apartment. She seemed amazed that a paying cinema audience should ever choose to watch and listen to her. “My mother, now, who taught me a lot about print work, has occupied her life by doing chores. Now that I’m not working, I’m still very interested in print work. And I like to spend a lot of time making collages. It’s nice to be by myself, thinking, looking into store windows.” She was wearing the clothes that she has made her own. One or two of the things she wears with especial fondness were given to her by Woody Allen, her ally in anxiety: he shares with her, as with Annie Hall, a terror of live lobsters that have been bought for an intimate dinner and that roam around distressingly behind the fridge, like distraught women in stiletto heels. She has a romantic love of the big hats that one associates with boating and picnics on the grass. Allen found her one in a thrift shop. They perfectly suit her thriving and reposeful face. This costume look of hers, which has become identified as the “Annie Hall” look, often consists of men’s pants and waistcoats, a floppy tie vaguely tucked into the belt of the pants, and little-girl sandals; or a skirt and shirt and pullover, and heels daringly high for someone already tall. She has a stride hard to define until one realizes that it has to do with not being crippled by carrying a bag in the hand, which inhibits so many women’s gait.

Diane Keaton grew up in southern California, in Santa Ana. Her family are Methodists. The family name is Hall, but her mother’s maiden name was Keaton. “I was encouraged by my teacher in junior college to think I was wasting my time in ‘Bye Bye Birdie.’ ” She raised her eyebrows at herself and said, “I suppose it all started with singing. It was always one of the predominant things in our family. I used to go out onto the back porch and sing. There was one less successful thing than ‘Bye Bye Birdie’: a church recitation when I was six. I started to cry, and my mother had to come up and get me. The audience applauded me, which was terrible. I was in ‘Little Mary Sunshine’ when I was eighteen, and that was also terrible, because I wasn’t being what I was supposed to be, which was the comedy lead. I always auditioned in junior high, and everyone knew I’d been around for years trying, but I didn’t seem to have much drive. I still don’t really have it.”

Miss Keaton studied for a time at the Neighborhood Playhouse, in New York, but now she finds herself more and more drawn to cinema. “I want to be close to things,” she told me. “You get disappointed if you see everything in medium shot in a theatre.” We spoke of how well her namesake Buster Keaton understood that. Her family were encouraging but were remote from the arts. “My father is a civil engineer. I have two sisters and a brother, and I was born in 1946, which I guess would give me time to have had around ten children if I’d really worked at it, but I’m not like my mother. She spent a lot of time on us. She has a lined face. American Gothic. Gray hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly into a bun at the back of her head, and this rectitude. She’s straight—very straight.” Miss Keaton made a characterizing gesture of uprightness with her hands.

She came from California ten or twelve years ago. Quite a bit later, she lived with Woody Allen for a year; now her apartment is about ten blocks down from his. She found it hard to leave her family in California. “But sometimes one knows how strong the impulse to do is. I didn’t know how really strong until a lot afterward. I have a deep feeling for America. I’m definitely a product of this continent. I hadn’t worked east of New York until we shot ‘Love and Death’ in Paris and Hungary. The workers in Hungary are poor, really poor. Outsiders would say, Well, at least they’ve got a regular income, whereas artists don’t know where the next job’s coming from. But I guess we’re the privileged ones. I often dream about California. There’s an opulent copy of grass, called dichondra—soft and velvety and green—that confers great prestige. I can’t stand it at those Los Angeles parties when people cover up the real grass with plastic because they think it’s going to wear out by being trodden on. Well, a lot of things get worn out by being trodden on, or even just stepped on—especially people—so why choose grass to protect? I can’t stand people who keep things from being used.”

I was reminded of the convention of antimacassars: “Things like doilies made of lace and hung over the back of armchairs to keep men’s Macassar oil off.”

“Aië, aië, aië,” she said. “Those people don’t want to let time be shown by living, do they?”

“What’s the difference for you between the West Coast and here?”

“California is where my roots are. I like the weather. The desert. Being much more in touch with nature. Camping. I don’t like being out in California for what I do professionally; I just love the southern part, where I come from. As far as New York goes, it’s fine, but I can’t live in a fancy world too much. Though I love the buildings here. I love walking. I love the feeling that I have to do things. Everything goes so fast. You go to a supermarket, and no one says ‘Thank you’ or ‘May I?’—which is honest. It would be all right if they meant the courtesies, but they wouldn’t. You can fool yourself in California, but you can’t do that here—not like L.A., not just by making it seem nicer and prettier than it really is. I suppose the truth is I’m in love with Arizona and New Mexico as well as with puttering around New York. When I’m here, I love to go to those old medical bookstores and places that have drawings of machinery.”

“Annie Hall” was Diane Keaton’s fourth film with Allen as her co-star. The first, directed with a matching neurotic laconicism by Herbert Ross, was “Play It Again, Sam;” after that, she played the goose-brained girl of the twenty-second century in Allen’s own “Sleeper,” then Sonja in Allen’s “Love and Death”—a Russian lyric beauty, with her hair drawn back in an early feminist coil, as fascinated as the Allen character is by words like “epistemological,” which they discuss in what seem to be very chilly places indoors, wearing heavy fur coats and fur hats at meals. The edginess she displays as Sonja during their sophom*oric discussions in “Love and Death” is an edginess that both enthralls Allen’s own recurring film character and seems to infect him with an intellectual’s equivalent of hives. This edginess is a quality she can adopt or drop at will. There is no trace of it in the serenity of her apartment or in the serenity of her cats. The apartment has polished wood floors, no carpets, a white-on-white painting by a Californian named Bruce Nauman, with the word “VISION” picked out in the whiter white. There are big wicker baskets, and a cactus inside a galvanized-iron trash basket. The colors, apart from the cactus and its cage, are rusty brown and white. These are also the colors of her cats. One, called Buster, is a red Abyssinian of talkativeness and poise; the other, Whitey, a long-haired beauty of a mongrel.

She said, over the head of Buster, that she didn’t know why she had been chosen to be in “Hair” on Broadway, which came before her close friendship with Woody Allen.

“Because you were the best who was being auditioned?” I said.

“That’s probably right. There might have been plenty of others out on the street who were better but didn’t know there was a producer’s call.”

She sang in Pasadena night clubs a while back. “I got bad reviews. It was terrible: every time someone applauded, I said ‘Thank you’ and apologized. I apologized a thousand times. When I was on the Johnny Carson show, it was always geared to laughs, and he played off me, because he thought he could make me frantic. I hate that.” Sometimes she will leap into a sudden attempt to explain her own habit of apologizing, at the same time sheltering behind a Scotch terrier’s growth of fringe over her forehead; she uses it, perhaps, as some women use dark glasses.

She would like to leave the chic part of the East Side where she lives. “All the boutiques and dogs in clothes. . .” Again she chipped away at this question of the railroad-car aspect of her present apartment.

“I like train journeys,” I said.

“But not to live in,” she said. “It’s ridiculous to be in an unmoving vehicle. The apartment may be mostly white, like yours, but this is an empty train. I can see that your place is somewhere you have people to. My place isn’t really finger-marked enough to be convincing, you know? It’s my own fault that I haven’t anyone to cook for. Of course, I’m a lousy cook. But it is a fault. I’d have to order those things you’re always supposed to have by you.”

“Kitchen staples.”

“Yes. Well. Do you have staples? I can’t seem to need them. Flour, milk, tea, tomatoes, bacon, bread, coffee, onions. I buy them all the time, but they’re always going bad.”

“Not tea or coffee or flour, surely?”

“Flour? Roaches!” Roaches seemed to be in the lobsters-behind-the-fridge category. There are fifth columnists of cuisine everywhere. For a moment, I thought she was going to say “La-di-da, la-di-da”—Annie Hall’s way of bidding goodbye with a blithe wave of the hand to an impossible subject, the Annie Hall who was probably based on idiosyncrasies of her own behavior which she has now left behind—but, naturally, she didn’t. She says it most famously in “Annie Hall” itself after she has first met Woody Allen, as Alvy Singer, on a tennis court. Hero worship on sight. She greets him with a “Hi, hi,” covering the most love-struck embarrassment, meets an embarrassment equal to her own, then ends the impossible silence between them with her “La-di-da.”

“Why did you use to say ‘La-di-da’?” I asked.

“People had fixed it on me. It originally meant hoity-toity, didn’t it?”

She has a way of lobbing people’s questions back at them which is rare in an actress. She seems to do it not because she wants to elude the hard questions but because she wants to know other people’s answers.

“You like America, don’t you?” she asked. “Yes?” She pursued it.

“It’s interesting. Not consoling, not like Europe, but very interesting.”

“Would I like England?”

“It treats you in the way you said you like. It lets one get on with one’s life. There’s time for meandering.”

“I suppose some of the most interesting ideas have come up through people meandering. Did Leonardo meander his way into the idea of the flying machine?”

I tried to restore question-and-answer to their proper alternation, and asked, “Who are the, say, three people who’ve influenced you most in your life?”

“Who are yours?”

“I suppose one real person and two characters in fiction. Someone in Jane Austen and someone in Dostoevski. But you?”

“Well, now, there’s Buster Keaton. I thought he was visually thrilling, and very sophisticated: more about women than about men. He lets you read a lot into things. You’re left with so much to decide. And then there was a woman in Santa Ana, an incredible woman, an artist. She was mysterious. She loved a lot of things that weren’t yet open to me. And then, gosh, a woman I met once when I was looking for an apartment who claimed that her husband had invented the tea bag. . . Well. And then my family. We’re very close to each other. My sister Dorrie looks like an Eskimo. And then Woody, of course.”