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At 31, Keaton is about to see her life changed by Goodbar, mostly in ways she does not like to think about. Her habit is to clutch privacy about her like a shawl. She is insecure about her looks (as she is insecure about her acting ability, her intelligence, her income, her singing and possibly her two cats). Now anyone in the country who has $3 will be able to see her naked in lengthy sex scenes.
Keaton rolls her eyes as she talks about this. Little groans issue forth: "Oh, right, oooh, wow!" She shakes her head. Modesty. What a problem. In 1968 she played the lead in Hair, on Broadway, and made a footnote in theatrical history by refusing to take off her clothes. From Tokyo to Munich, entire companies of Hair peeled exuberantly. Not Keaton.
What she did do was peek at the other actors. "I was quite curious," she confesses. Her tone is solemn. Then, in her mind, she hears a playback of what she has just said. It sounds goofy. "Urn, yeah," she says, thinking this over. "Yeah." She has caught herself again. She grins enormously, a dizzying grin that spreads and resonates like the sound of trumpets blown at dawn by celestial heralds. "I mean, I wouldn't say I was not curious, you know. I took a look or two, sure."
A listener can endure only a certain amount of this nonsense without contracting an enormous crush on Keaton. She marches sturdily into her sentences, pinafore starched and party shoes shining, then imagines that she hears a growl, stops uncertainly, scolds herself for being silly, collects herself and moves forward, uttering exhortations, and finally collapses, out of breath, on the far side of a not especially fearsome thought. She does not seem dithery or dimwitted, merely enormously vulnerable and utterly uncalculating.
This endearing and undefended confusion is part of her own character, and her character is no distance at all from the one she played in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. It was her fourth film with Allen; she had been the lovely and trusting best friend's wife in Play It Again, Sam; the goose-witted girl of the 22nd century —cheeks like two Parker House rolls, mind like a third—in Sleeper; and the sweet cheat Sonja in Love and Death, Allen's send-up of War and Peace.
Annie Hall was something quite different. The film turned out to be by far the best thing either Allen or Keaton had done. Making it meant taking a flying leap into what might easily have been a mawkish mess, because Alvy Singer, the skinny, insecure, red-haired comedian, was Allen's rueful sketch of Allen, and Annie, the beautiful gawk of the film, was a quick line drawing of Diane. (Hall is her family name; Keaton is her mother's maiden name. She is no relation to Buster Keaton, though one of her cats is so named.) The action was a fictional treatment of a year in the early '70s when Woody and Diane lived together.