In 1976, 16-year-old model Babi Christina Engelhardt embarked on a concealed eight-year event using the 41–year-old filmmaker that mirrors one of his true most well-known films. Now, amid the #MeToo reckoning and Allen’s personal scandals, she appears back with mixed thoughts on the relationship as well as its unequal powerful.
Sixteen, emerald-eyed, blond, an aspiring model with a confident streak and an agonizing past: Babi Christina Engelhardt had simply caught Woody Allen’s look at popular new york energy restaurant Elaine’s. It absolutely was October 1976, when Engelhardt came back through the women’ space, she dropped an email on her phone number to his table. It brazenly read: “Since you’ve finalized sufficient autographs, listed here is mine!”
Quickly, Allen rang, welcoming her to his Fifth Avenue penthouse. The already-famous 41-year-old manager, nevertheless hot off Sleeper and whom’d launch Annie Hall the next springtime, never asked her age. But she told him she ended up being still in senior school, managing her household in rural nj-new jersey as she pursued her modeling aspirations in Manhattan. Within days, they would be actually intimate at their destination. She would not turn 17, appropriate in ny, until that December.
The pair embarked in, by her account, a romance that is clandestine of years, the claustrophobic, managing yet dreamy proportions of which she actually is nevertheless processing significantly more than four years later. On her behalf, the present re-examination of sex power characteristics initiated by the #MeToo motion (and Allen’s individual scandals, including a claim of intimate abuse by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow) has turned just what have been a melancholic if nevertheless memory that is sweet one thing alot more uncomfortable. Like other people among her generation she led then be judged by what she considers today’s newly established norms— she just turned 59 on Dec. 4 — Engelhardt is resistant to attempts to have the life. “It is nearly as though i am now anticipated to trash him,” she states.
Time, however, has transfigured what she’s very long seen as a key, unspoken monument for their then-still-ongoing relationship: 1979’s Manhattan, for which 17-year-old Tracy (Oscar-nominated Mariel Hemingway) enthusiastically beds Allen’s 42-year-old character Isaac “Ike” Davis. The movie has constantly “reminded me personally why I was thinking he had been therefore interesting — their wit is magnetic,” Engelhardt states. “It had been why we liked him and exactly why i am nevertheless impressed with him being a musician. He played with me. just how he used figures in the films, and just how”
Two of Engelhardt’s good friends through the period affirm these people were alert to Engelhardt’s relationship with Allen during the righ time — one could also drop her off at his penthouse. Photographer Andrew Unangst, who was simply dining together with her at Elaineis the evening she made her move on Allen, additionally states he knew in regards to the long-running tryst she initiated that night. “She had been a knockout, and outbound too,” he states regarding the gambit. Engelhardt’s younger bro Mike recalls Allen calling their moms and dads’ house: “I’d holler down, ‘Babi, it is Woody!’ My mind don’t think one thing intimate; I became 11 or 12 and a fan that is huge. After all, Bananas?!”
Engelhardt along with her journey, provided right here publicly for the very first time, are complicated. She actually is happy with her teenage self as 
an up-by-her-bootstraps heroine whom effectively beguiled a “celebrated genius.” Nonetheless, she holds by by herself mostly in charge of staying into the relationship so long she never held any agency as she did and for the frustration and sorrow that ultimately came with the liaison — one in which, by her description. (Many professionals would contend that this kind of uneven energy dynamic is inherently exploitative.)
Despite having hindsight, however, she actually is reluctant to indict Allen, whom declined to comment for this story. ” What made me speak is we thought I could give a perspective,” she provides. “I’m perhaps perhaps not Woody that is attacking, she states. “It is not ‘bring down this man.’ I am dealing with my love tale. This made me whom i will be. We have no regrets.”
Today, Engelhardt (whom dropped Babi from her title and goes on Christina), is really a divorcee and mom of two college-aged daughters surviving in a crystal-filled apartment in the flats of Beverly Hills. Since youth, she says she is been a reader that is psychic interpreting the movie stars for boldface names (just like she when did for Allen, who had been maybe maybe not impressed). One paid client that is psychic the belated Pop Minimalist musician Patrick Nagel, gifted her the initial piece above her family room couch. It is right right here, with a profile of her yellowed and brittle modeling photos in hand, that Engelhardt travels into her past.
Open and thoughtful, Engelhardt unspools a life tale that took root in a strict German immigrant home and blossomed right into a Zelig-esque variety of activities as she attemptedto break right into modeling: partying with Iman, jet-setting with Adnan Khashoggi, dining with Stephen King, being employed as a individual assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier later convicted for soliciting a girl that is underage. After her time with Allen, she continued in order to become a muse that is platonic Federico Fellini through the auteur’s late-life journeys in Rome and Tulum, Mexico, then invested years maintaining egos as being a hostess within the professional dining area at Paramount before landing her present gig, being employed as an associate for producer Bob Evans. Just just exactly What’s made her attractive to these effective males, both actually and skillfully, she posits, is in component exactly just what Allen appreciated when you look at the place that is first “I became pretty sufficient, I happened to be smart sufficient, I happened to be nonconfrontational, I became non-judgmental, we had been discreet, and nothing shocks me personally.”
She actually is currently written, and kept personal, two volumes of unpublished memoirs, one concentrating on her Fellini years, an added on her behalf time with Allen. Within the latter, Engelhardt portrays a relationship of unequals. From their very first rendezvous (quizzing her from the meaning of life, challenging her to a chess match, welcoming her to view a baseball game inside the television space, making down along with her), terms had been decreed by Allen. She considered him then, but still considers him now, a man that is great. She pressed right back little if at all.
“I became a pleaser, acceptable,” states Engelhardt, a fan of Allen well before they came across. “Knowing he was a manager, i did not argue. I became originating from an accepted host to devotion.” They operated under two key rules that are unspoken There’d be zero conversation about their work, and — owing to your celebrity’s assumed requisite for privacy — they are able to just fulfill at their destination. By her count, on a lot more than 100 subsequent occasions, she’d go to him at their apartment at 930 Fifth Ave., where she’d invariably make her option to an upstairs room dealing with Central Park.
“The curtains had been constantly drawn,” Engelhardt claims. ” The view should have been dazzling.” She shrugs. “I becamen’t here for the view.”
Another element which could have factored into her powerful with Allen, Engelhardt muses, ended up being her German history. “I experienced been taunted, tormented as a ‘Nazi youngster’ within the Jewish neighbor hood we was raised in: Matawan, nj-new jersey. The household relocated to a rural part of the state whenever she had been an adolescent. My dad went around in lederhosen. I’d doorways slammed during my face.” Her moms and dads had been both postwar emigres, her father — by their account — a 14-year-old ditch-digging conscript into Hitler’s military helping near the French border ahead of the end associated with the war. “Woodyis the uber-Jew, and I also’m the uber-German,” she claims. Whilst the set never ever talked about their distinction, she contends it hovered, at the least on the end: “there is a chip back at my neck about planning to please people who cast me personally aside. We was not confrontational because We thought, ‘Nobody likes Germans.’ “
By Engelhardt’s recollection, about per year to the relationship, Allen sometimes started bringing in 2 other “beautiful young women” for threesomes. Engelhardt states she had tried bisexuality and also at times discovered the experiences with Allen “interesting — a ’70s research,” she states.
