12/18/2018
From the Hollywood Reporter:
Woody Allen’s Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired ‘Manhattan’
by Gary Baum December 17, 2018, 6:00am PST
Not that secret, since Allen made one of his most famous movies, 1979′s Manhattan, about their affair, with Mariel Hemingway playing his high school student girlfriend. It was considered uncool at the time to have moral objections to the film, but I always found the movie distasteful. Still, it’s kind of Peak Woody Allen, along with 1977′s Annie Hall, the way Lolita is extremely distasteful but it’s also Peak Nabokov. (By the way, Lolita isn’t really that good — it’s overly long and show-offy — while Pale Fire and Speak, Memory are wonderful and don’t make you read about child abuse.)
Open and thoughtful, Engelhardt unspools a life story that took root in a strict German immigrant household and blossomed into a Zelig-esque series of adventures as she attempted to break into modeling: partying with Iman, jet-setting with Adnan Khashoggi
This is the international arms dealer who was in the news all the time a generation ago. He was the cousin of the Khashoggi who was murdered by the Saudis.
, dining with Stephen King, working as a personal assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier later convicted for soliciting an underage girl. Following her time with Allen, she went on to become a platonic muse to Federico Fellini during the auteur’s late-life journeys in Rome and Tulum, Mexico, then spent years tending to egos as a hostess in the executive dining room at Paramount before landing her current gig, working as an assistant for producer Bob Evans.
Hoo boy, she can pick ‘em. I’m surprised she didn’t also sleep with Armand Hammer.
… Another element that may have factored into her dynamic with Allen, Engelhardt muses, was her German background. “I had been taunted, tormented as a ‘Nazi child’ in the Jewish neighborhood I grew up in: Matawan, New Jersey. [The family moved to a rural area of the state when she was a teenager.] My father ran around in lederhosen. I had doors slammed in my face.” Her parents were both postwar emigres, her father — by his account — a 14-year-old ditch-digging conscript into Hitler’s army serving near the French border before the end of the war. “Woody’s the uber-Jew, and I’m the uber-German,” she says. While the pair never discussed their difference, she contends it hovered, at least on her end: “There was a chip on my shoulder about wanting to please those who cast me aside. I wasn’t confrontational because I thought, ‘Nobody likes Germans.’ “
As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine last March after the Oscars:
[Comment at Unz.com]While film critics have been wondering recently how they could have been so…toxic as to have long admired Woody Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan about a 42-year-old man sleeping with a 17-year-old girl played by Mariel Hemingway, the Academy voted the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar to 89-year-old James Ivory for Call Me by Your Name, a movie about deflowering a 17-year-old boy.
But that’s different because Ivory, unlike Allen, is gay.
So that’s okay.
Also, please keep in mind that Allen is in bad odor these days because of his inveterate white maleness. Nobody is apologizing for why Woody, a hardworking, Pete Rose-like talent but not exactly a transcendent genius, was so lavishly praised by critics for all those decades, which has something to do with his casting in Manhattan the granddaughter of the most prestigious arch-gentile of his youth, Ernest Hemingway, as the high school shiksa he’s shtupping.
That predilection would be…not appropriate to discuss in print, you understand.
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