CLOUDS IN MY COFFEE #3: THE LOST DIANE KEATON TAPES

Another installment in the ongoing true life adventures of Periphery Man, who has had myriad peculiar encounters with celebrities, while not being a celebrity himself. I liked pretty much everything about Daphne Merkin's nicely done profile on Diane Keaton in this Sunday's NY Times, including the photo of Keaton lying on her back in her driveway with one of her trademark hats over her face (which seemed marvelously evocative of her "I'm here but you can't see me" persona), but that isn't surprising, talk about preaching to the choir: I've been in love with this woman since 1973.

To me she will always be a kind of paradigm of the romantic comedy heroine (just as Annie Hall has inarguably been the rosetta stone, the Citizen Kane of modern rom-coms). One of the great pleasures of my checkerboarded life in the worlds of entertainment was the four or five months I worked with her, back when she was beginning Manhattan.  I'd love to say you can find my name on the credits of Diane Keaton's record album from '78... except, true to the spirit of the chronicles of Periphery Man -- the album doesn't exist.

In the ‘70s one of the ways I made a living, among my hodgepodge of musical sideman and songwriter jobs, was as a vocal coach.  Pretty funny, considering I had such a dicey singing voice (Who was it who once said, upon hearing my infamous solo album, “it sounds like you’ve got your nuts in a vice”?).  But hey, I had taken vocal lessons myself, I did know how to put a song over, and I did a decent job with a number of young actresses who’d added “singer” to their new resume and head-shot and suddenly had to back up the claim.

One afternoon in 1978 I got a phonecall from friend Carly Simon’s then-manager, Arlyne Rothberg, who wanted to know if I could work with another client of hers.  I believe “Do you think you might be able to spend a little time coaching Diane Keaton?” was the way she put it.  Might I?  Hmm, let’s see: considering that I’d seen Annie Hall twice, reaffirming the major crush I’d had on this actress for years, it was conceivable that I could find the space in my busy schedule…

Keaton was charming self-deprecation incarnate on the phone.  She had these songs, y’know, that she liked to sing, sort of, and well, people had been telling her she ought to, y’know, do something, like a record or something, which was a really dumb idea if you asked her, but anyway…  We arranged to have her come down to my place the following week with a pile of sheet music. 

Thus, to my own disbelief, one day Diane Keaton walked the three flights up to my humble village pad, where I awaited with nice lilies in the vase on the piano, a pot of coffee on the stove, and the songs she'd sung in Annie Hall already committed to my anxious memory. 

It’s hard to imagine anyone not getting along well with Keaton, on account of she’s adorable, period: smart, funny, sexy and above all, refreshingly accessible.  With her there's no pretense, not a whiff of “I’m Important.” And in that period, coming off of Annie (and Goodbar and The Godfather), she was luminous with the glow of someone good-becoming-great, of coming into her own and being able to do things she’d always wanted to do.  Like, sing some of her favorite songs, if she felt like it.  You could feel it was a happy time for her -- there was that Warren guy in the picture, too -- and her giddiness was infectious.  Then again, I was shamelessly ga-ga to begin with (though I like to think I masked it well), and Keaton is simply one of those people who radiates positive energy.  Anyway, we had a good time.

Good enough to keep it going; on and off for nearly half a year, her schedule permitting, we got together for an hour a week.  We worked on a dozen songs or so, our goal the making of a demo tape that could be shopped to some labels.  Keaton’s voice had a sweet, simple, untrained quality.  It could be an unsteady wisp of a thing when she lost focus, but her instincts were good and she was game to push her instrument into new territory.  I think what I did, if anything, was to help build her confidence.  Our songbook became eclectic: there was a Leiber and Stoller tune (Some Cats Know), one Billie Holiday (Don’t Explain), one Nina Simone (Don’t Smoke in Bed) and, my idea, a couple of years before Linda Ronstadt got onto it, Smoky Robinson’s Oooh Baby Baby.

It got time to go to the studio.  At Diane's request, I kept the recording almost absurdly minimal, with only bass player Tony Conniff joining us on a few tunes.  This sat well with Diane, who looked like a rabbit facing a rifle when she first stepped up to the studio microphone.  She might have bolted altogether if she’d had to deal with a band.  But for me, it may have been a missed opportunity.  Maybe a tape more cleverly arranged and well-produced might have actually pushed the project (and my participation in it) forward;  the Mernit-Keaton tape was a kind of Diane Sings, Naked.   It only led to producer Richard Perry taking her into the studio and over-producing, fully orchestrated, his own preferred material… and ultimately, Diane abandoned the idea of putting an album out, altogether.

But  I’m left with a handful of fond memories: seeing Keaton leave my living room before flying out to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards, both anxious and wryly dismissive of the whole big deal, and a few nights later, with a group of friends sitting in that same room, cheering as I watched her win the Oscar...  I remember discovering our mutual love of Joseph Cornell, and going to a gallery with her to look at his collages… and one afternoon when neither one of us wanted to work, lolling around my living room playing with the kitten I’d recently inherited, instead. 

I still have a Frank Sinatra LP of hers, and she’s got one of my Willie Nelsons.  We drifted apart, naturally, but traded postcards for awhile.  Years later, I did run into her once, in a typically peculiar way – but that’s for another Coffee.  Meanwhile, somewhere in the depths of the Mernit archives lie the lost Diane Keaton tapes, yet another golden nugget souvenir of my unerringly peripheral career.

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