It is not easy to live down an iconic early performance...‏

• 
  

Diane Keaton's memoir

A life in the shadow of Annie Hall

The Economist, Nov 24th 2011, 13:31 by V.B. | LONDON  http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/11/diane-keatons-memoir

"A LOVE Song for Annie Hall" is a track by Hartley Goldstein, an American folk-singer. The first verse is a tender elegy for the character of Annie as depicted in the 1977 Woody Allen film, with her awkward charm and her "liberal-arts educated neurotic philanderings". However Mr Goldstein's lovesick nostalgia soon turns into a grim indictment. "I've got a bone to pick with your agent," he sings of Diane Keaton's later career. His conclusion is brilliantly blunt: "Cos Diane you were so cool when you were young/What in God's name happened?/Are we all just destined to become/Mediocre and lame?" 

Mr Goldstein is not afraid of hyperbole, but his plaintive ode has some truth to it. In "Then Again", Ms Keaton's new memoir, we see her struggling with just these questions. It is not easy to live down an iconic early performance.     
    
Woody Allen is ever present in "Then Again". This is understandable; for nearly a decade he was the centre of either Ms Keaton's professional life or her private one. Over an eight-year period he cast her in ''Play It Again Sam'', ''Sleeper'', ''Love and Death'', ''Annie Hall'', ''Interiors'' and ''Manhattan''. Ms Keaton accompanied Mr Allen during his progression from inspired slapstick to angsty Manhattan sociology. She muses at length over their relationship; their uncomfortable first steak-house date, their cutesy, insulting nicknames and, of course, the experience of starring in his greatest films. Ms Keaton had already starred in ''The Godfather'', but the roles Mr Allen crafted for her assured her place in cinematic history in a way that none of her subsequent work has.   
    
"Then Again" flicks back and forth in time. The present-day passages ring slightly hollow, padded out with mundane detail (''I worry about Dorrie's antiques business... I think about the complications of selling Mom and Dad's two oceanfront homes''). Recollections of the past seem tinged with envy for Ms Keaton's younger self. It is slightly uncomfortable how effusive she is about her former collaborator (''I miss Woody...I still love him"), couching her affection in self-deprecation (''Woody and I did share a significant romance, according to me anyway''; ''He would cringe if he knew how much I care about him''). 

Ms Keaton's anecdotes in "Then Again" about her life now, doing speaking tours and raising adopted children, are sweetly drawn domestic vignettes. She is a contented and, by almost any measure, successful woman. But overall "Then Again" does nothing to dispel the impression of Ms Keaton as an abandoned muse. Although Mr Allen's move to another lead actress is given only a sentence in the book—"Woody had met Mia Farrow and began a new alliance"—the number of pages devoted to him convey the sting of his rejection.

The inescapable sadness of the book comes from the way Ms Keaton's life is forever hindered by the young invention that audiences prefer to remember her as: ''am I recognisable as the same person I was when 'Annie Hall' opened almost thirty-five years ago? I remember people coming up to me on the street, saying, 'Don't ever change. Just don't ever change.'' 

"Then Again" by Diane Keaton is published by Random House in America; Fourth Estate in Britain, and is out now