"Well, now, there’s Buster Keaton. I thought he was visually thrilling, and very sophisticated: more about women than about men. He lets you read a lot into things."

"You’re left with so much to decide. And then there was a woman in Santa Ana, an incredible woman, an artist. She was mysterious. She loved a lot of things that weren’t yet open to me. And then, gosh, a woman I met once when I was looking for an apartment who claimed that her husband had invented the tea bag. . . Well. And then my family. We’re very close to each other. My sister Dorrie looks like an Eskimo. And then Woody, of course."

So said Diane Keaton, in 1978, when The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt asked her to name 3 people who have influenced her the most in life.

Why am I reading that this morning? I was having a conversation about an old episode of "Friends" ("The One Where Monica and Richard Are Friends") and — because there's a scene in a video store — I got to thinking about a scene in a bookstore in "Annie Hall":



A scene in a bookstore (or a video store, if the show is set in the fleeting video-store era) can take advantage of the books (or movies) at hand to develop the characters. Looking for that bookstore scene, I was googling for "Annie Hall" and "cats" (because I remembered that Allen's character disapproves of her interest in a book about cats and insists on buying her the first of many books he would buy her with the word "death" in the title).

The old New Yorker article happened to contain the word "cats" (because Gilliatt describes Keaton's NYC apartment, replete with cats). Not what I was looking for, but I got interested in reading Gilliatt, whose articles I loved reading in the 70s. Imagine encountering a paragraph like this today:

She seems like some New World Romantic who actually promises us habitation in quite another world from the dishwasher-spirited world of modern acquisitive fact. Her imaginative world, though it is totally modern, seems grounded in the farsightedness of centuries of European thought, which she has gathered partly through reading and partly by temperament. She said she was going to a department store, and would I come? For once, shopping took on the mood of a spree. Exchanging a coffee strainer: though she apparently lives in a realm of undefended confusion, she actually deals with it very efficiently. Diane Keaton, for all the “You know?”s and “Well”s, is no foolish bird. Born thirty-two years ago, she seems to be a distillation of the troubles and the acquaintance with pre-natal world history which are the inheritance of her generation. She has lived, in her thought, just as much through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War as through the time of Vietnam. This girl from California, geographically so far removed from Europe, has a sense of non-isolationism which is alert. It seems to reinforce her deep friendship with the Jewish, Brooklyn-born Woody Allen. She speaks very sensibly about “success” and about the job of acting, which in general attracts a great deal of Western Seaboard nonsense from sophisticates warning of the dangers of fame-chasing in the midst of chasing it themselves. “If you’re an actor,” she said, “you have to make your effort in front of other people. Then you have to say to yourself, because there’s such pressure, ‘Jesus, I’m never going to be allowed to do anything else wrong, ever. I’m just supposed to do it right again and again.’ And then you have to say, Nuts. ‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ like the man in Beckett.”