New York Stories 1: Woody Allen on Jimmy Cannon

An extract from In the editing room with Woody Allen: from defense to offense. By Ira Berkow. International Herald Tribune, November 2, 1995.

"Jimmy Cannon's New York is my New York," Woody Allen said recently, sitting in his home-away-from-home, the suite at the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue where he edits his movies. "My whole feeling of New York City as a black-and-white Gershwin town comes from reading the late Jimmy Cannon," Mr. Allen said. "I never missed him."

Mr. Allen … can still recite passages from Cannon's sports columns in The New York Post during the 1950's: the time he described "the serene dependability of Stan Musial," or "the bookmaker who took a guy's money all year and then gave him a ball-point pen for Christmas." And he still remembers Cannon describing how he had been in a New York apartment late at night where Frank Sinatra was singing at a piano, and then how he walked home alone through the melancholy New York streets as the sun was coming up.



An afterthought: I have been working on a posting about Jimmy Cannon, which should appear before too long. When I was growing up, and even later, like Woody Allen, I never missed a Cannon column.