Keaton's Confessions

My wife and I saw Diane Keaton speak about her new book, Then Again, which is her memoir about her mother, her upbringing and her career and her private times. Many of us now in our sixties carry the indelible image of Keaton from her movies roles reminding us of our romantic younger times. Keaton, who herself is now in her sixties, still radiates youth and dresses like her younger self -- and, in truth, talks exactly like the girl in Annie Hall. She spoke at the New York Public Library earlier this week for about half an hour about herself and her family and her films and her love life. It was an extraordinary occasion. She used her audience as her psychiatrist. She spoke openly and sometimes in that "la di da" manner about her fear of intimacy, her decision to seek a theater/movie career that guaranteed her multitudes of adoring fans rather than one adoring man, her admission that she made a "mistake" in not getting married, her wonderment in having adopted two lovely children at age 50, and her extraordinary dependence on her powerful mother. Her rawness of confession was almost painful, but at the same time exhilarating. She made clear that she was really only a "California girl" and was still bewildered that her career had carried her as far as it did. She admitted to feelings of insecurity around her peers in the film world like Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino -- all of them one-time paramours. And she said she never really followed up on her fame, to the point that today she worries about her money situation. She ended the evening with a line that might otherwise sound like a cliche, but, coming from her, sounded profoundly moving, namely that "you can't have it all in your life". We always thought that she did.