by Marion Meade
Another bleak New York winter went by. The unhappiness in Woody's personal life, still a shambles, spilled over into his Fall Project, the most risky picture he had attempted because it portrayed his fans as freaks, a sideshow carnival of distorted faces resembling Weegee grotesques. Any person who truly admired him, he seemed to be saying, was a moron. Principal photography began on September 11, but by December, Woody had slipped five weeks behind in the twenty-two-week shooting schedule. The buzz around New York suggested the picture was in trouble. A Village Voice columnist tried pumping Charlotte Rampling, one of the leads, who refused to divulge anything because, she told Arthur Bell, Woody "would kill me if he thought I was talking to you." Seeking out less cautious sources (an extra who played a Martian in a UFO sequence), the Voice cobbled together a report of the filmmaker holding up a mirror to his dark side, in a parody of Fellini's 8 1/2 that could easily turn out to be a masterpiece or a disaster. Of one thing the paper was certain—it sounded "depressing." Nervous about public reaction, Woody was determined to keep the plot secret.
In the spring, eager for relaxation, he decided to sandwich in a few days in Paris with Jean Doumanian and her new boyfriend, Jaqui Safra. At Saturday Night Live, Jean's diligence paid off when the show's creator and executive producer Lome Michaels resigned and NBC named Jean as his replacement. To assure a brilliant debut for his friend when the new season began in November, Woody was full of ideas on how Jean could reinvent television's foremost comedy show.
In the meantime, there was no further contact with Mia Farrow, whose large family must have sounded like some kind of weird baby factory. Usually he shied away from mothers because he and they had nothing in common. He had as much interest in family life as any sixteen-year-old, which is why he once blurted out that "it's no accomplishment to have or raise kids. Any fool can do it." Most of the time, with a straight face, he claimed that the only reason he had no children was because "I've never had a marriage that has worked." But that was precisely his problem—maintaining a relationship was impossible. Navigating the decade of the seventies, a golden age of one-night stands, he symbolized the single, kiddie-phobic, narcissistic male, over forty but still pulling girls' pigtails, the connoisseur of casual sex, not yet ready for commitment. The last thing this type of bachelor wanted was the aggravation of squalling kids. On-screen, he didn't know how to behave around children. In Manhattan, the scenes between Alvy and his son were clumsy, and in Stardust Memories, the Sandy Bates character, quintessentially self-involved, loves a French woman but is painfully ill at ease with her two small children. Offscreen, Woody did not particularly enjoy spending time with youngsters, either, not even his sister's two children, Chris and Erika.
Nevertheless, a few days before leaving for France, he impulsively decided to get in touch with Mia. Rather than calling himself, he asked Norma Lee Clark to set up a 1 P.M. lunch at Lutece on East Fiftieth Street. He arrived early and ordered a bottle of 1949 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. In a tweed jacket and tasteful tie, he had dressed appropriately for a first date with a Hollywood princess, at one of the city's great restaurants. Mia blew in, breathless and disheveled, sporting an outfit entirely suitable to a day on the moors: Irish sweater, skirt, sensible walking shoes with leggings and socks, because she had just tramped down from the Upper West Side. Her hair, washed but not set, looked as though it had been styled by a lawn mower. Later, trying to recall the lunch, she could not remember the food, only the conversation about W. B. Yeats (Woody's favorite poet), Plato and Christianity, James Agee, and classical music—Mahler's slow movements and the Heifetz recording of the Korngold concert. After a decade with Andre Previn, a prominent musician and a first-rate jazz pianist, it was a subject she knew something about. Although the New York Times profile of Woody that she had tucked into her dictionary included an eyewitness account of him at Michael's Pub. Mia pretended to know nothing of his clarinet-playing, but he was happy to tell her about Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton. When they left the restaurant, it was already getting dark. Woody gave her a lift in his Rolls and promised to call when he returned from Paris.
Afterward, he could never recall the date of that first lunch, except that it was a few days after the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. Mia, however, remembered exactly. She commemorated the occasion by embroidering April 17, 1980, on a needlepoint sampler.
CHAPTER NINE
Beware of Young Girls
Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow seemed to be a character out of the pages of Photoplay. She was born in Beverly Hills on February 9, 1945, the third of seven children belonging to a glamorous couple: John Farrow, a director at Paramount, and Maureen O'Sullivan, an Irish starlet under contract to MGM. Mia's godparents were Hollywood royalty: George Cukor, the so-called woman's director, and the feared and famed Hearst gossip queen Louella Parsons. Mia's dog Billy was the grandson of Lassie. On exclusive Beverly Drive, on the half-acre grounds of the Farrow home, the seven beautiful children lived in a separate wing of the house, where they were bathed, dressed, and pampered by a staff of nannies and governesses. Meals were prepared in their own kitchen. Weekends were spent at the beach house in Malibu. While the Farrows took pains to create for their children the idyllic type of childhood that existed only in the cinema, there was a certain emptiness at the heart of all this grandeur. The children lived apart because John Farrow could not tolerate noisy kids underfoot. He was a strict disciplinarian with "an almighty temper," recalled Mia, who as a toddler could not pronounce Maria and would be known by her childhood nickname. Her father believed in corporal punishment and thought nothing of whacking her across the room or beating her with his walking stick. "I didn't know my parents very well," she admitted.
John Villiers Farrow was an interesting minor director of forty-two pictures, notably the 1943 war film Wake Island, and a thriller, The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland. Skilled at getting good performances, he was also widely disliked for his tyrannical treatment of actors.
An Australian by birth, whose mother died in childbirth and whose father seems to have abandoned him, he was raised by relatives and ran away, first chance he got, to join the merchant marines. In his early twenties, Farrow impregnated a seventeen-year-old San Francisco girl, Felice Lewin, but was brought to heel by her father, a mining tycoon who insisted that he marry Felice before she gave birth to a daughter. Undoing this union in order to marry Maureen O'Sullivan in 1936 required a special dispensation from the Vatican.
During her career in Hollywood, Mia's mother made seventy pictures, including The Barretts of Wimpole Street and David Copperfield, even a Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races. But she is remembered best for her association with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s apeman in six Tarzan movies, playing opposite Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan's scantily clad mate, Jane, in the jungle series. In the 1940s, semiretired, she was almost constantly pregnant, and gave birth to three sons and four daughters within the space of a dozen years. Although Maureen Farrow liked the idea of having babies, she had absolutely no idea what to do with them afterward. A next-door neighbor, Maria Roach, daughter of comedy producer Hal Roach and Mia's best friend, remembered Mrs. Farrow as a distant exotic figure who was not involved in her children's daily lives and spent most of her time out of sight, like the Wizard of Oz, in her bedroom, which was painted dark green and resembled a religious shrine.
With the arrival of one baby after another, a marriage that was never Ozzie and Harriet in the first place grew progressively unhappier. In Hollywood, where sex was a matter of supply and demand, there was nothing but supply for studio executives and directors, especially men as good-looking as the tall, blond Farrow, a legendary fornicator. A snake tattooed on the upper inside of his left thigh appeared to be emerging from his genitals. Exercising droit du seigneur, with a sense of entitlement about sex from the actresses he directed, Johnny Farrow and his snake would prove memorable for some of Hollywood's biggest stars. By the early fifties, Mia's mother and father were sleeping in separate bedrooms.
So that her rest would not be disturbed when her husband came home in the middle of the night after tomcatting around Beverly Hills, Maureen insisted on a separate entrance to his room.
At the age of nine, Mia contracted a mild case of infantile paralysis, a mysterious ailment that, before the Salk vaccine, was crippling and killing thousands of children. After six days in the polio ward at Los Angeles General Hospital, surrounded by children unable to breathe without a respirator and confined in iron lungs, she returned home to find everything changed, in order to safeguard the other children. "The dog had been given away," she recalled. "Our swimming pool had been drained. The lawn had been reseeded. The whole house had been repainted, the couch reupholstered, the carpets cleaned." She was terrified about contaminating her brothers and sisters. The following year there was another crisis when Mia's oldest brother, fifteen-year-old Michael, was hit by a car, and four years later he would die in a plane collision while, unbeknownst to his parents, he was taking flying lessons.
Throughout her life, Mia would be possessed by an overriding need for her father's approval. His reputation as an adulterer masked a serious, scholarly man, a fervent Roman Catholic who wrote a massive popular history of the papacy and a biography of Sir Thomas More. For his services to the Church, the Vatican awarded him a Knighthood of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. More significant, however, was his obsession with Father Damien, a Belgian priest who founded a leper colony in Hawaii, where he eventually contracted the disease and died in 1889 at the age of forty-nine. Culminating years of research, Farrow published a biography, Damien the Leper, an inspirational work that would go through thirty-three printings. His preoccupation with the leper saint’s selfless work among the Hawaiians would have a pronounced impact on Mia, who, in her adult life, would endeavor to re-create Father Damien's colony in her own home, by adopting nonwhite children who were blind, crippled, or otherwise medically disabled.
In the fall of 1962, beyond humiliation, tired of the papal knight’s indefatigable philandering and heavy drinking, the long-suffering Maureen O'Sullivan turned her back on the wreckage. In New York, she acted in a Broadway comedy, Never Too Late, and had a romance with its seventy-five-year-old director, George Abbott. With the family fragmented, Mia joined her mother at Christmas. One night when Maureen was spending the evening with Abbott, her husband telephoned, and Mia made excuses. Throughout the night, Farrow called repeatedly, but Mia let the phone ring. Eventually, the calls stopped because John Farrow, clutching the receiver, had died of a heart attack.
No event shaped her future more than the death of her father, who had expressed withering disdain for actresses, whom he treated like pieces of meat, and opposed Mia's acting ambitions on the grounds that it would certainly make her miserable. Almost immediately after his death, she joined the cast of Peyton Place, the first daytime soap opera to be aired in the evening. The TV version of Grace Metalious's novel, about a small New England town and its citizens, would become one of 1964's biggest hits and make Mia, as its brooding heroine, Allison MacKenzie, famous overnight. What she lacked in acting ability—sometimes requiring ten takes to film a single line—she made up for in other respects. With her father's looks, she was a beauty whose best feature would be her extraordinary skin, as diaphanous as if her flesh were a package done up in Saranwrap.
March of Time:
"There were four sisters and three brothers and we all used to fight to kill, I'm serious. I have scars all over my body. We used knives, bottles."
—Tisa Farrow, 1970
The year after her father died, Mia met Frank Sinatra on the 20th Century-Fox lot while filming Peyton Place. During lunch breaks, she had taken to planting herself on the doorstep of the soundstage where he was filming a train scene for Von Ryan's Express. With her fair hair styled in waist-length braids, attired in a long white nightgown, she quickly captured Sinatra's notice. He dispatched one of his underlings to find out how old she was. "Nineteen," she said. Sinatra was fifty.
Minutes later, while being introduced to the singer, she spilled the contents of her straw bag, including her retainer and a box of tampons, on the floor in front of his chair. Sinatra, charmed, saw an adorable little girl who needed to be cared for, like an exotic plant in danger of wilting, the helpless image she would convey to practically every man she ever met. Walking her to the stage door, he asked for a date.
In a darkened screening room, they held hands and as she said later, she began to love him the moment she first smelled him. He was wearing the same brand of aftershave lotion as her father had used. The next day, Sinatra sent his Learjet to bring Mia and her deaf cat, Malcolm, to his compound in Rancho Mirage, California, where he induced her to part with her virginity a few hours after the aircraft touched down at Palm Springs Airport. A pretty redhead wept by the pool. She had been expecting to share Sinatra's bed but had been passed along to Yul Brynner at the last minute. Sinatra, like Mia, was addicted to high drama.
Hollywood was as picaresque as a feudal barony where a lord could share a woman sexually with a rival, then turn around and vengefully deflower the enemy's daughter after his death. Years earlier, Sinatra first entered Mia's life one evening when she was eleven and having dinner with her father at Romanoff's. Walking by their table, Sinatra glanced at Mia and remarked to her father "pretty girl," whereupon Farrow looked at him as if he were a worm. "You stay away from her," he warned. There was more to this exchange than its face value. After the breakup of Sinatra's tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner, John Farrow directed her in Ride, Vaquero!, a Western filmed in southern Utah. At first, the sex goddess disliked Farrow. On the weekends, carousing with hookers imported from Los Angeles, he would spend all day Sunday in bed and then report to the set on Monday mornings with a hangover. However much she was put off by his whoring, as well as his sadistic treatment of horses in the film, she subsequently changed her mind, and it was this relationship that prompted Maureen O'Sullivan to install the separate entrance on Beverly Drive. Although the Farrow children had no full knowledge of their father's indiscretions, Mia happened to know about Gardner because one day she accidentally caught them together in his office.
Mia's upbringing had imprinted a layer of rich fantasy over the pathology of a damaged family playing out various themes of religion, infidelity, alcoholism, and physical and emotional abuse. Giving up her virginity to the ex-husband of her father's mistress was simply the sort of extravagant theatricality that had become second nature.
One of Mia's friends, Liza Minnelli, was shocked to hear about her unlikely new boyfriend. "You're not dating Uncle Frank!" she exclaimed. But Mia's mother considered Uncle Frank "a nice man" likely to take good care of her daughter, a clue to the extent of her maternal guidance. Self-absorbed, unable to assume responsibility for her children's upbringing, Maureen allowed all of them to do more or less as they pleased, frequently with disastrous results. As a widow, her own desperate quest for affection led her to contemplate marriage to a twenty-three-year-old French rabbinical student. The boy's horrified parents, faced with a Mrs. Robinson situation, hastily put an end to the relationship.
In the summer of 1966, Mia married Sinatra in Las Vegas. No family members or friends attended. Their wedding photograph was described in detail by the New York Post: "The groom, his retreating hairline camouflaged by one of his sixty toupees, his face tanned almost to the bronze of Max Factor's theatrical makeup Number 11-N but a trifle jowly, his chin just visible in duplicate, was beaming." For better or for worse, Mia had re-created her parents' marriage. This became obvious a few months later, during an opening at the Sands Hotel, when Frank asked her to stand and take a bow and informed the audience that he had married again. "Well, you see I had to," he said. "I finally found a broad I can cheat on," which caused gasps even from the blase Las Vegas crowd. Mia, head lowered, smiled. She would soon retreat into needlepointing and marijuana. In her fifties, still full of unresolved feelings about Sinatra, she remembered loving him "wit
h all the powers of my infantile, hungry, myopic self," and at Sinatra's funeral she sat sobbing next to his first wife, Nancy.
While her husband's voice—his timing, phrasing, and matchless interpretation of a song—had made him a colossus among popular entertainers, he was also a flawed human being whose nastier side was suggested by his friendships with hoodlums, his treatment of women, whom he referred to as cufflinks or broads, the ring-a-ding misogyny of his partying Rat Pack sidekicks, his high-priced hookers and gutter brawling. Angry, restless, he always had a chip on his shoulder, never bigger than when comedian Jackie Mason repeatedly made jokes about him and Mia ("Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces"). Ignoring a number of warnings, Mason found three bullets fired into his hotel room, followed several months later by an unknown assailant breaking his nose and crushing his cheekbones. Sinatra's temper reminded Maria Roach of John Farrow, who "could be so charming and wonderful, and turn around and be somebody else," the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome typical of the alcoholic personality.
What Sinatra wanted most was a dependent wife, whose only interest would be satisfying his every desire. According to comedian Tom Dreesen, a close friend of Sinatra's, his stooges and yes-men flattered him as if he were the Sun King. "You have to understand that when you are with Frank Sinatra, it's his world and you are living in it. If you can revolve around his energy, you benefit." But Mia, who expected to be dominated by men, nevertheless showed surprisingly little aptitude for being a yes-woman. To spite him for excluding her from his fiftieth birthday party, given by his ex-wife Nancy and their children, she pitched a tantrum and chopped off her hair to the length of a boy's. In 1967 she was offered her first starring role in Rosemary’s Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin's widely popular novel about an innocent young housewife who lives in a spooky New York apartment and gives birth to the son of Satan. When shooting was delayed, and Sinatra ordered her to walk off the set, she refused, no doubt counting on a short-lived conflict. Instead, he instructed his lawyer to draw up divorce papers. On the Paramount lot, Mickey Rudin appeared with a brown envelope, and took Mia into her trailer, leaving a few minutes later without a word. "Sending Rudin was just like firing a servant," thought Roman Polanski. If Mia's marriage to Sinatra ended badly, it also lasted sixteen months, which was about a year longer than some people expected.
