She has had great loves, like Warren Beatty; she has felt passionate passions, like Al Pacino, whom she asked to marry; and eternal friends, like Woody Allen, whom she supports unconditionally.
Diane Keaton is candid and quirky. She's hard to believe but has always felt like an ugly duckling.
Woody Allen invited her to dinner. "I think I had a date with him. We went to the famous Frankie and Johnnie's steakhouse », Diane writes to her mother in 1969, when she was 23 years old. Everything was going well until... «I scratched the plate with my fork and made a normal cutting noise; It must have bothered him a lot because she squealed, "says Diane Keaton in her memoir Now and Forever (Lumen).
He got nervous. She became self-conscious and since she couldn't think of a way to continue eating without making the noise that so upset Woody Allen, she didn't eat anything else on that first date and began to talk about the condition of women in the arts. "As if I knew anything about women and art," she says. "I don't think we'll be going out to dinner again for a long time," she told her mother.
Diane and Woody had met a year earlier when she auditioned for Dreams of a Seducer. At the beginning of their relationship, they saw each other sporadically. Two reasons prevented more frequent contact: he was very busy with her neural; he had his daily rituals and had little time left for cuddling. "Every day I played the clarinet and acted in his work read Tolstoy, wrote new jokes for his appearances at Caesars in Las Vegas (...) He was always busy, so he didn't ask much of me," Diane says.
Diane was bulimic. «I put my fingers in my mouth three times a day to vomit; I've been doing it for years », she confessed to her therapist
The other impediment to more consistent dating was Diane's big secret: she was bulimic. "Sadly, the demands of bulimia were stronger than my desire for Woody, but it was," Diane confesses. There are no filters when she talks about her eating problems: "I gave five years of my life to an insatiable voracity," she admits. “I put my fingers in my mouth thrice daily to vomit. I've been doing it for years », this is how she explained her problem to her therapist. Bluntly.
In her memoirs, she gives a surprising list of bulimic women like her: Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan, Audrey Hepburn, Portia de Rossi (Ellen Degeneres' wife), Felicity Huffman (actress of Desperate Housewives), Mary Kate Olson, Victoria Beckham, Catherine Oxenberg (Dynasty actress), Mariel Hemingway, Anna Freud, and Princess Diana.
In six months of psychoanalysis, Diane defeated bulimia. Woody Allen convinced her to confess to her divan. That strange, manic, and depressive guy for Diane is "a funny, humble, and intelligent man." She adores him. Still, many years after being a couple. Diane has supported him when the film director was banned from Hollywood over allegations of abuse by his daughter Dylan Farrow.
Diane Hall Keaton, with that look of confidence, of rock, with her helplessness to wear the outlandish outfits designed by her (she does it even now, about to turn 77) is very honest with her insecurities. She has felt ugly since she was a child, for example. "She hated my nose," she says. "The attractive genes had gone to my sisters (she has three)," she explains.
She spent her adolescence with a complex. And at the same time, she had enough personality to design her clothes and tease her hair at the age of 16. And she doesn't go anymore: she showed up to her graduation wearing a shirt dress with a flared skirt that her mother made; She donned white pointed-toe heels with black pom poms, and she finished the outfit off with a bowler hat bought secondhand from a Salvation Army store. She got her purpose. "I managed to get attention. It didn't matter that she looked ridiculous, I managed to overcome the difficulties of being a simple and vulgar Diane. And my mother was right about her hat: better to keep it », she adds.
Diane has been lucky with her family. The Halls her first surname (the second is Keaton) was an average Californian family, the father a civil engineer, her mother, a charming woman, and Diane's accomplice in her artistic vocation. There were shouts between them and distance between the parents, but Diane's words for her family are one of gratitude and to her mother, especially, of emotional devotion.
Because she was afraid of flying, Warren Beatty held her hand throughout the flight. "Once safely on land, she kissed me, turned around, and went back to Los Angeles," she says, melting.
At the age of 19, she left Los Angeles (her hometown of hers) and went to New York to study theater. One of her first professional experiences was singing three verses of a song from the musical Hair. She emotionally writes to her family, “Big stars like Warren Beatty have come to see the play. Do you remember how I fell in love with him watching Splendor in the Grass? She did not imagine that Warren Beatty would later be one of her great loves.
But before that, there was Al Pacino. She was crazy about him. They worked together on The Godfather. She didn't have a good time in the film: "I was just a wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in a blonde wig in the world of The Godfather," she says. And Marlon Brando was rude: "Nice tits," she told him upon meeting her.
She loved Pacino: "It was all worth it just to feel her face next to mine," she says. She fell madly in love. "I recently attended a screening of the film and fell in love with Al again," she said in 2011, 21 years after the premiere of the third part of The Godfather.
Diane Keaton has never been married, but she has lived great passions. She has revealed many details about her relationship with Woody Allen. They wrote a lot. "I was the dear little fool of hers. He was my 'little white thing,'” she says. They also fought: "We were crazy to humiliate each other." Of course, they laughed: “His analyzes of my personality were spot on and hilarious. That bond remains the core of our friendship, and for my part, of our love," Diane believes.
The complicity between them gave rise to several films. For Annie Hall, Woody took Diane's last name and was inspired by her family. And that they had broken two years before. With that film, Diane won the Oscar.
Marlon Brando, her partner in the movie 'The Godfather', seemed rude to her. "Nice tits," he told her when he met her.
She ended the affair with Woody and then Warren Beatty came along. A first-class Don Juan. A genius of seduction. He did not resist a woman. Diane explains how she did it and that her weapons were foolproof. An example: she told him that she was afraid of flying and that days later she had to travel to Los Angeles. He showed up at the boarding gate, shook her hand, and didn't let go of her throughout the flight. "Once safely on land, he kissed me, turned around, and headed back to Los Angeles," she says. melted. He made each girlfriend of hers feel unique. "When she looked at me I was the most captivating person in the world." And also, witty with gifts. "I loved her crazy generosity," says Diane. And as if that were not enough, he was gorgeous.
Warren Beatty lived in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in a 4,500-square-foot penthouse filled to the ceiling with books and scripts. A bachelor pad. "Warren and the concept of home didn't mix well," explains the actress. He was irredeemably tardy, he made everyone wait and she suspected that sooner or later he would go off with someone else. Her problem was committing; to whatever he was.
Warren Beatty was a worldly man who introduced her to very interesting people like Katharine Graham, Jackie Kennedy, Diane Von Furstenberg, Diana Vreeland, and Gay Talese, people Diane was fascinated by, but with whom she didn't quite feel comfortable.
Besides, Beatty wasn't an easy guy. The filming of Rojos, directed by him, was tormenting. "It was impossible to work with a perfectionist shooting forty takes of a scene," explains Diane. She really liked Louise Bryant, her character. "And Geraldine Page was an acting genius, but with geniuses, there are no rules." He did not enjoy Reds although he was about to win an Oscar: it could not be, that year Katharine Hepburn took it for her role in In the Golden Pond.
The romance ended Beatty and his passion for Al Pacino resurfaced on the set of The Godfather III. Marry me, or at least consider that possibility, Diane asked Al. He declined. "Poor Al, he never wanted it," she says.
