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Yet Allen persistently regards himself as "just a man who can write good comedy lines." This certainty about his limitations descends, like a black hole, to the bottom of his brain. It allows the very basis of his thinking a cold, immediate access to the facts of living. Certainly few entertainers are so comfortlessly close to reality as Allen; still fewer are crowded so hard by sanity. Often his wit appears to be a cushion against hard fact. More often it seems an act of reprisal. He hurls it, rich with cyanic rancors, in the face of sham wherever he sees it. Of a male celebrity who strode into church one midwinter morning wearing sun glasses, Allen grated: "He's afraid God might recognize him and ask him for an autograph." Of a snob-noxious Hollywood character traveling with his "secretary," he murmured acidly: "He's traveling à la tart."
With people who "take up his time," Fred is ruthlessly rude. When TIME asked for an interview, he snorted: "Why? You just have to find someone for your cover every week. . . . Well, it's the same trouble we have with guest stars. I'll cooperate—if it suits my convenience." Recently, when the U.S. Treasury asked him to appear at a bond rally, he declined: "Why should I? I pay my taxes."
Reluctantly Amiable. Only in the fastnesses of his pleasant, unpretentious Manhattan apartment, where he lives with his wife Portland (the Portland Hoffa of his radio show), does Allen lower his always-loaded guns. Even then, he does not often relax. Five days a week, 14 hours a day, he squints through nine newspapers and bends over his typewriter like a jeweler, chipping and polishing at the hard little brilliants for his program. Most nights he sleeps only six hours (with ear plugs).
Allen employs four assistant writers, but he does three-quarters of the show himself. He takes their drafts and rewrites them completely—between the lines. Groused one writer: "The only reason he hired us was because he likes to work on dirty paper." Gripes Allen: "Most writers just jump from cliché to cliché." He himself is so afraid of clichés that he even shies from saying "hello" to friends.
The Allens rarely gad about. One night a week they take in a movie. The other evenings, while Fred works, Portland reads or knits in bed—an old vaudeville custom. They rarely entertain. Allen's best friends are "just plain people"—barbers, shoeshine boys, paper boys, waiters, delicatessen storekeepers. With them, says Comic Henry Morgan, he is "a reluctantly amiable guy." From them, he collects an authentic U.S. idiom.