Woody Allen Tonight: "A Twenties Memory" (from "Getting Even")

Hemingway in the '20s: His 1923 passport photo

"I kidded Hemingway about his forthcoming novel and we laughed a lot and had fun and then we put on some boxing gloves and he broke my nose."

-- from "A Twenties Memory"

by Ken



What's so inspiring about this "memory" isn't just the famous names littered through it but the deep insights into them. The author hobnobs with famous writers including not just Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (who turn out to have something surprising in common but Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald ("most of our friends believed that [Scott] based the protagonist of his latest novel on me and that I had based my life on his previous novel and I finally wound up getting sued by a fictional character"). Thanks to Hemingway the author even meets "that great, great artist" the bullfigher Manolete ("had he not become a bullfighter, his grace was such that he could have been a world-famous accountant").



And he pals around with artists like Picasso (who, because of having coffee with the author and Gertrude Stein, was delayed by ten minutes in starting "what was later to be known as his 'blue period' -- though "it lasted four years, so the ten minutes did not really mean much") [that's a Picasso "blue period" self-portrait at right], Dali (he recalls the one-man show of Dali's that "was a huge success, as one man showed up"), and Gris ("Gertrude Stein used to say that only a true Spaniard could behave as he did; that is, he would speak Spanish and sometimes return to his family in Spain").



All somehow crammed into a single decade!





FOR THIS RIVETING "TWENTIES MEMORY," CLICK HERE

SO FAR IN "WOODY ALLEN TONIGHT"



from Getting Even (1971)

"A Look at Organized Crime"

"Death Knocks," Part 1 and Part 2



coming Sunday and Monday: "Hassidic Tales, and a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar," Parts 1 and 2

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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