by Marion Meade
Working for Woody showed Mia an entirely different side of her lover, who could be severe and sarcastic with his actors. In a scene that required Jose Ferrer to say, "These are not my teeth," Woody was unhappy with his reading of the line and put Ferrer through the ringer by shooting it over and over. Tension began to build. The seventy-two-year-old Ferrer, a widely respected actor and director of stage and screen, grew increasingly upset. After take number thirty, he finally refused to do the scene one more time and yelled angrily that Woody had melted him into a mass of fears. Woody, observed Andrew Sarris, "is almost a ventriloquist and all his actors are marionettes. It's his nature. He has to be on top."
If Woody could intimidate Jose Ferrer so easily, he had no trouble making Mia feel like "a rank amateur," she would write. Worried about her acting, she began frantically fishing for reassurance, but no comfort was forthcoming. As a world-class whiner himself, he lacked patience with women who complained. Suffering second thoughts about her Woody film debut, she told him that on future pictures she did not want to act but would like to be his assistant, to which he retorted, "It's hard work." Understandably, this blistering rebuke magnified her jitters. Before long, Mia found plenty of other reasons to worry. The weather was miserably hot and humid, and she had to be encased in a sweaty iron corset for the frilly period costumes; her hair was set in torturous curlers to produce Mary Pickford ringlets. She developed fierce headaches, and by the middle of shooting, she also had an ulcer and dosed herself every four hours on Tagamet. To make matters worse, there were unexpected problems with her sister Stephanie, who had been hired as her stand-in. Mia was close to Steffi, who was divorced and lived with her son only a few blocks away, but Mia soon regretted her presence on the film because she straggled around after Woody in a flirtatious way. During breaks the two of them would go off together, laughing and relaxing under a tree, while Mia, confined to her camper with corset and curls, boiled with jealousy. Their flirtatious camaraderie made her so suspicious that she wondered if they were sleeping together.
Woody retitled his erotic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. In fact, it owes more to Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night than to Shakespeare, although Woody scoffed at the notion that he had deconstructed the Swede’s turn-of-the-century boudoir farce with its sexual chases and carnal round dances. Photographed so beautifully by Gordon Willis that it seems to be a painting in motion, an animated Renoir's Luncheon after the Boating Party, Sex Comedy is the most visually gorgeous of all Woody's films. Stanley Kauffmann thought the picture was "easily his best-directed film, much better than his last, Stardust Memories, which finished last in the Fellini Sweepstakes"—but still found Woody to be an inept writer. Unlike his previous films, Kauffmann was later to say, which had been "cobbled together," A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy had "a sense of control and fluency. He now knew how to use a camera gracefully and was becoming a very good director." Nearly everyone else found fault. "Watching Woody in the woods wasn't much fun," grumbled Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune. "Little sex and less comedy," John Simon huffed in National Review. Pauline Kael took Woody to task for presenting "tableaux that suggest the Nelson Rockefeller collection of imitation works of art." At the box office, the bon-bon proved an expensive financial disaster, and Mia's performance resulted in a Razzie Award as Worst Actress of 1982.
For the first time in his show-business career, Woody received back-to-back pans. He badly needed a hit.
To give authenticity to his pseudodocumentary about the chameleon man, Woody wanted to use guest-star interviews with real people, interspersed with archival newsreel footage and antique photos. It was intended to be a takeoff of Reds, a picture that costarred Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton (his current girlfriend) as American journalist John Reed and his lover, Louise Bryant. Embellishing Beatty's film were interviews with Rebecca West and other witnesses to the history of the Bolshevik revolution. Unlike Beatty's real-life witnesses, Woody's intellectuals were asked to utter serious opinions on a fictional figure from the twenties, a man supposed to be more famous than Charles Lindbergh. Trolling for celebrities, Woody wrote to Greta Garbo and asked if she would like to be in one of his movies. She did not reply, nor did a letter to Jack Dempsey produce results because the Manassas Mauler, now in his late eighties, was suffering from poor health. Woody was more successful with Lillian Gish, whose career had spanned the entire century. The First Lady of the Silent Screen, now an energetic eighty-five and still working, was happy to comply. The interview was disappointing, however, and he decided not to use it in the film.
Finally he persuaded Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, and Dr. Bruno Bettelheim to discuss Leonard Zelig's place in history. Bellow, for instance, was given lines like: "Therefore his sickness was also at the root of his salvation. It was his very disorder that made a hero of him." As usual, Woody failed to reveal what the film was about, and by the time Bellow found out it was too late. Had he known, he would have backed out of it because the picture made him look "foolish," he thought. The $5,000 payment did not compensate for being taken advantage of. If the Nobel prize winner couldn't figure out what Woody was up to, neither could Susan Sontag. Years later, she was appearing at an Oregon arts program when a member of the audience asked about the Zelig cameo. Sontag got snippy. "Next question," she said impatiently.
A moderate commercial hit, Zelig turned out to be a critical winner; its sophisticated special effects received glowing reviews, the best since Manhattan, and some writers compared it to Citizen Kane. Looking back, Andrew Sarris thought that critics probably oversold the picture to their readers. To begin with, he said, "we New York critics tend to identify with Woody. We have roughly the same kind of politics and we laugh at the same things. He has us in his pocket." In 1983 Woody singled out several critics, Sarris among them, and arranged private screenings for them, a shrewd move that paid off nicely. Afterward, Sarris felt he "had been had by Woody" and should have been more cautious in his estimation of Zelig. In any case, its sophisticated special effects succeeded in dazzling viewers. Newsweek’s Jack Kroll spoke for the majority when he called Zelig "a brilliant cinematic collage that is pure magic," and to Vincent Canby, it was nothing less than the perfection of ideas Woody had been systematically exploring in every film since Take the Money and Run. Few critics or viewers realized how intensely personal the picture was for Woody, nor did they associate its themes with Stardust Memories. Like Leonard Zelig, Woody was a famous figure who, forced to battle the beast of celebrity, continued to feel like a poor lost sheep once known as Allan Konigsberg. Only Pauline Kael was impolite enough to bring this up, writing that despite Woody's claims to the contrary, his films could not be more autobiographical; he is constantly showing audiences how bad he feels about himself. All the adulation in the world could not keep Woody—and Charlie Chaplin—from feeling "utterly alone and lost, like wormy nothings," she concluded in her best Ma Barker style.
The most peculiar admirer of Zelig was Oona O'Neill Chaplin, the widow of Charlie Chaplin, now an elderly, bedridden alcoholic living in Switzerland. One evening, in a boozy stupor, she excitedly watched a Zelig videotape four times, under the illusion that each viewing was the first. Delighted with footage that showed her husband clowning with Marion Davies on a tennis court at William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon, she instructed her daughter to send Woody a telegram. "Say he's incredible," she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pushing the Baby Cart
In the gloom of the Russian Tea Room on a bright July afternoon in 1982, Woody was sitting in his usual booth up front by the bar with Roger Ebert, expounding on the perfect love affair. "You've got to realize," he said in a serious tone, "that a relationship is always better if you don't actually have to live with the other person."
The Chicago Sun-Times critic was listening politely. "Really?" he said, as if studying the mating rituals of a Yanomami Indian.
"Oh, of course," asserted Woody, wise in the exotic ways of seventies dating,
as practiced on the Upper East Side. "This means you can be in a constant courtship." During the day Mia had her kids to look after, "but in the evenings we'll meet and it's like a date." Then, after sex, she went back to her place. "It's ever so much easier to get along with somebody if you aren't always having to go to bed with them, when you're tuckered out, and get up with them, when you're still sleepy." As he unburdened intimate details to a virtual stranger, he could not help revealing the deep-seated fears of a man with two failed marriages, who was wary of intimacy with a woman—any woman—lest he fail once again. After two years, he still had a problem sleeping the entire night with Mia. Permitting her to simply leave a robe in his bathroom represented a major breakthrough, as was allowing her hairbrush and shampoo to sit in the cabinet alongside toiletries belonging to Diane Keaton, preserved there like so many fossilized relics in King Tut’s tomb for more than a decade.
But even as Woody was speaking to Ebert, his life was changing dramatically. Settling into a relationship with Mia made him feel loved and aroused special feelings of belonging that he had never before experienced. As he would write about the Mia character in Hannah and Her Sisters, she made him feel connected to the human race. Making efforts to please her, efforts that already involved major practical concessions, he began to move forward and leave his adolescence behind.
Still, patterns of a lifetime were hard to break. In the habit of sleeping in his own bed, he refused to spend the night at Mia's apartment because the place made him uncomfortable. In contrast to the opulence of his co-op, her sprawling rental at the Langham was well-worn, homey, the kind most New York families with children could only dream of. Overlooking Central Park were three sunny front rooms decorated with woven baskets and needlepoint pillows, floors carpeted with Oriental rugs, and walls lined with books and photographs of the children and Walt Disney characters. In the sitting room stood an old spinet piano heaped with sheet music, because five of her children took lessons. A playroom was filled with a rocking horse, toys, and arts-and-crafts materials. The family ate in the kitchen at a Parson's table, and the housekeeper, Mavis Smith, always left a special baked treat (peanut-butter brownies were a favorite) before going home. "I expected to walk into a noisy, cluttered place," recalled Lorrie Pierce, the children's piano teacher for many years. "But Mia ran an exceptionally organized, orderly household. The apartment was so quiet you could hear a pin drop."
Maybe so, but it could not have compared to the monastic silence of Woody's empty penthouse. Conditions at Mia's, where the bedrooms were stuffed from floor to ceiling with bunk beds, may have brought back unpleasant childhood memories of overcrowded houses and rooms shared with relatives. Equally distasteful were the animals that roamed Mia's apartment as if they owned it. Along with the dog, Mary, and several cats, there were three chinchillas, two hamsters, six mice, four frogs and a turtle, a tank of tropical fish, and several birds—a canary, a parakeet that warbled, and the parrot, Edna. The place always smelled a little stinky to him. "The pets, the cat and the dog, would jump on the kitchen table and eat off the plates," he remembered. Disgusted, he refused to use any utensil in Mia's kitchen and made her keep a supply of paper plates and cardboard cups especially for him.
Disliking her house, he instead invited her for sleepover visits at 930 Fifth Avenue. With all seven children (and sometimes their friends), she would arrive on Friday nights toting sleeping bags, toothbrushes, and toys. The next morning, she dismantled the bivouac and hustled them home for breakfast because Woody needed to write or see his analyst. However, during basketball season, they often met again in the afternoon at the Garden. Woody's explanation of the game was frequently interrupted because he and Mia wound up kissing, "cooing, cuddling, and hugging" at a Philadelphia 76ers game, according to the New York Daily News. For the sake of her sons, Mia endured the Knicks but never appreciated sports and quickly tired of pretending she did.
Of all Mia's brood, Woody got along best with the two youngest boys, eight-year-old Fletcher, who begged for play dates with him, and the four-year-old Korean boy who wore big glasses just like Woody. The boy's adoptive name was Misha Amadeus Farrow (Misha was Russian for Michael, Mia's dead brother, and Amadeus because he was born on Mozart's birthday), but Woody found it effeminate and suggested a more manly name, in honor of the Philadelphia 76ers star Moses Malone. The only one of Mia's children who was not the child of Andre Previn, little Moses was always begging hugs and kisses from Woody, whom he worshiped as a father from the first. Whenever he accompanied his mother to work, he wanted Woody to play games and draw pictures, and as he grew older, Woody taught him chess.
Like it or not, Mia's children became part of Woody s existence. His efforts to make friends with them were not easy because he was no more comfortable around children than around adults. But his weekend parenting, such as it was, liberated him from routines that had grown rigid, and this made him feel pleased. He was always telling people about how well he got along with the Previn children. From Mia's point of view, however, he had little regard for her family. Whatever he did—trading his Rolls for a capacious stretch limousine to transport the kids—was never enough. What bothered her most were the distinctions he made between her biological offspring and her adopted Asian youngsters, who, to him, didn't seem like real brothers and sisters to Mia's own kids, no matter what they called one another. It was hard for him to imagine them as one family. To his way of thinking, according to Mia, she seemed to be baby-sitting for UNICEF, without getting paid for it.
In the summer of 1981, shortly before the filming of A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Mia fell in love with a sixty-acre farm, Frog Hollow, on the outskirts of Bridgewater, Connecticut, a slumbery country town of 1,600, boasting a post office, a general store, and a gas station, as well as a bank and library. "But if you blink while driving through the town center you would miss the whole thing," said a resident. A rural community with working farms, Bridgewater was situated in wealthy Litchfield County, where celebrities such as Ivan Lendl owned homes. Nearby lived close friends of Mia's, Casey and John Pascal and Bill and Rose Styron. Frog Hollow's two-story, white-frame Colonial house faced a lake that had a small beach, a rocky island in the middle, and two log cabins on the far shore. Hemmed by acres of rolling fields and deep woodlands, it was set back from the main road, but just in case, Mia nailed a white sign to a tree: CAREFUL—CHILDREN PLAYING. That the house was slightly creaky made no difference. Everything about the place enchanted her.
Woody came up to tour the new house. After tramping all over, he found fault with the bathroom, which contained a big antique tub but no shower. Mia installed a new bath and shower just for him.
On his next visit, carrying a white rubber mat, he entered the bathroom only to burst out seconds later.
"The drain is in the middle," he said, taking her to task. Germs would not wash down efficiently without a side drain. Since he was unable to shower, he said, he would be forced to leave first thing in the morning.
Mia sought to please. A new bathroom was built with a shower whose drain was placed in the corner. The children called it "Woody's bathroom" because they were not permitted to use it. But even special plumbing never made him feel at home in Mia's country house. During the day, to protect himself from insects, he would wander around wearing a beekeeper's hat and netting. At night, wishing he had "a gun under the bed," he was too terrified to get a good night's sleep.
At the time Mia was settling down in Bridgewater, Woody suddenly decided that he, too, needed a little hideaway of his own, about an hour from Manhattan, just to get out of the city and perhaps use for location filming as well. With Jean Doumanian as his guide, he paid $3.5 million for a six-bedroom oceanfront estate in Southampton called the Ark, complete with sauna, Jacuzzi, and Nautilus weight room. Throughout the winter of 1982, landscapers carted away a Victorian greenhouse and cut down the beach grass. The manse was renovated, painted, and furnished in pine antiques and Laura Ashley prints to Jean's impeccable stan
dards. But the paint had scarcely dried on the place when Woody changed his mind. "I hated it," he said later. After spending one night at the Ark, he decided to sell, although it took several years to find a buyer for his seaside white elephant.
It was Sunday, the Fourth of July, and Woody sat alone in the air-conditioned darkness of the 86 Street East, watching Steven Spielberg's new thriller Poltergeist. After the movie, "I walked around the empty streets," he said. The city was the way he liked it, hushed and practically deserted. All traces of summer heat and humidity suddenly cleared away and the cool, cleansing air hit him in the face. For a change, there were no curious New Yorkers staring at him; nobody stopped him for an autograph. That weekend, Mia and the children were at Frog Hollow, and despite her efforts to make her house comfortable for him, he remained pathological about the place. Sitting hours in traffic just to arrive at a glorified summer camp full of bugs and screeching kids was not his idea of relaxation. He was just as happy spending the holiday in his solitary bedroom with the air conditioner on full blast and the curtains drawn.
