Love, Death and La - De - Dah

What's a nice girl like Annie Hall doingin a film like Mr. Goodbar?

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Keaton and Woody Allen met cute, as their trade phrases it. Her job in Hair was as understudy to the star, Lynn Kellogg, and when Kellogg left the production, Keaton took over. Naturally, she was feeling insecure. "I was living alone on the West Side, in a one-room apartment with the bathroom out in the hallway and the bathtub in the kitchen, right? I didn't feel like I had arrived with Hair. That play wasn't much for individual performances." When she heard about tryouts for Play It Again, Sam, she invited herself in.

Naturally, Allen was feeling insecure. "She was a Broadway star, and who was I? A cabaret comedian who had never even been on a stage before." She worried that she was too tall. He worried that he was too short. They took off their shoes and measured, back to back. She, at 5 ft. 7 in., was three-quarters of an inch taller. Close enough.

They played lovers onstage, and afterward, as the most casual of friends, passed the time with Tony Roberts, who played Diane's husband in the production and later in the movie. "We'd hang around together, nothing big, have dinner," recalls Woody. "Tony and I couldn't stop laughing at Diane. It was nothing you could quote later; she couldn't tell a joke if her life depended on it. Tony tried to figure it out one time, what it is she does. He says she has this uncanny ability to project you back into an infantile atmosphere, and you are suddenly a little kid again. There is something utterly guileless about her. She's a natural."

What brought this fountain of rarefied nonsense to Mr. Goodbar? Keaton's name still brings an "Oh. yeah, Woody Allen's girl" reaction from filmgoers, and she and Allen have known for some time that she must establish herself separately. Her first venture, during a dry period between the stage and film versions of Play It Again, Sam, was a series of three memorably tacky TV commercials, in which she played a housewife who jogged around her kitchen in a track suit, holding up a can of Hour After Hour deodorant and yelling, "This stuff is great!" It was a survival maneuver, and she survived—at $25,000 a shot.

The film Lovers and Other Strangers led to her dim Godfather experience, and later she was funny in a bad Elliott Gould movie, Harry and Walter Go to New York, and then funny in a good Elliott Gould movie, I Will, I Will ... For Now. Last year she was delightful in a misbegotten Broadway comedy, The Primary English Class.

But the problem of establishing herself as something more than a luminous satellite remained. Goodbar was especially satisfying as an answer because it is the heaviest kind of melodrama. As is true of so many gifted comedians. Keaton yearns to evoke horror, jerk tears, turn the faces of onlookers pale with fear. "I didn't know if Diane had the range," Goodbar Director Richard Brooks remembers. "And I was thinking, sitting there in my office with her, that she is not exactly what you call a great beauty. Then it struck me that this is who this story is about: a nice-looking girl, a sexy girl, but not the best-looking girl in the class. Someone you would almost overlook."

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