Not a huge surprise, but: Woody Allen tried to seduce Mariel Hemingway when she was 18 years old.
The revelation appears in Hemingway's upcoming memoir “Out Came the Sun,” in which the actress and star of Allen's 1979 film “Manhattan” describes how the Oscar-winning filmmaker invited her on a trip to Paris after her 18th birthday, and even went so far as to fly out to her parents' Idaho home to ask for their permission. She relates telling her parents “that I didn”t know what the arrangement was going to be, that I wasn”t sure if I was even going to have my own room. Woody hadn”t said that. He hadn”t even hinted it. But I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn”t. They kept lightly encouraging me.”
It says a lot about Allen's power and influence — not to mention the less-enlightened era in which the episode took place — that Hemingway was forced to fend for herself in the matter; in a later excerpt she relates waking up in the middle of the night “with the certain knowledge that I was an idiot. No one was going to get their own room. His plan, such as it was, involved being with me.” She then describes shaking Allen awake and demanding: “I”m not going to get my own room, am I?” before turning down the offer of the trip. He flew off on his private jet the next day, without her.
Artistic merits aside, I've always been baffled that “Manhattan” is so beloved by so many when the crux of the story revolves around an April-December relationship between a 42-year-old comedy writer and an underage girl (Hemingway was only 16 at the time of filming). Want to be creeped out even more? Here's a quote by Hemingway from 2010 in which she describes having to kiss Allen during filming:
“I had never kissed anybody. So the kiss in the cab around Central Park terrified me. I was worried about it for weeks. Fortunately it was a long shot and I didn”t have to do much . . . he attacked me like I was a linebacker.”