Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Allen: Eight or twelve little blonde girls. I love blonde girls.

  —Interview, 1967

  In His Own Words:

  "Mia has a talent for mothering the way some people have a green thumb for gardening, or an ear for music, or a talent for medicine. It's no chore for her."

  —Woody Allen, 1989

  Along with Donald and Ivana Trump and Lonnie and Burt Reynolds, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow became one of the most famous couples of the eighties, to all appearances the picture of compatibility, a pair so much in love they could spend twenty-four hours a day together as partners on screen and off. But behind the glamorous public image raged a silent struggle dating back to their first months of courtship five years earlier. Mia wanted to marry. Woody resisted. Almost fifty now, he was not receptive to an arrangement that, he told her, boiled down to nothing but an irrelevant piece of paper. Theirs was a more honest form of matrimony, a relationship based entirely on love and trust. Besides, he insisted, didn't he behave as a husband? Angry, but poor at confrontation, Mia pretended to acquiesce. In reality, she possessed iron determination and to get what she wanted, a friend said, she "simply used passive-aggressive tactics." If she could not become Mrs. Woody Allen, she wanted to have a child, even one out of wedlock. Woody's response was guarded. She would have to assume complete responsibility, meaning the child would live with her and require none of his involvement. With that understanding, Mia tried for months to conceive. Finally, worried because she was almost forty, she suggested adoption. Once again, he agreed, although not enthusiastically. Whenever she talked about the adoption, which was constantly, he impatiently changed the subject. He cared nothing about babies, he said, only his work. Undaunted, she forewent her usual international adoption and instead applied for a blond, blue-eyed American female infant, exactly the kind of child, she admitted later, who might be most likely to appeal to him.

  In July 1985, Mia and her twelve-year old, Soon-Yi, flew to Texas to fetch the newborn. Mia named her Dylan O'Sullivan Farrow, after Dylan Thomas, and asked her friend Casey Pascal to be godmother. At first Woody ignored the baby, whom Mia carried in a sling over her chest. "I had no pronounced feeling one way or the other," he was to recall. In just a few weeks, however, the bald, apple-cheeked infant was working her way into his heart. "Gosh," he thought, "she's pretty cute."

  After years in which he seldom spent any time in Mia's home, he was there every day. He even asked for a key. One evening on his way to Mia's, he found himself stuck in a cab in traffic. Like a man possessed, he jumped out and ran several blocks to get there before Dylan's bedtime. The change in his behavior was extraordinary. "I got a great thrill out of pushing the baby cart and taking walks with her," he said. "I'd set the alarm for 5 in the morning, and get out of bed and be at Mia's house by 6:15. I wanted Dylan to feel that her father was there, even though Mia and I didn't live together." A short time later, he decided that he wanted to coadopt her. But there was a problem: New York State did not allow unmarried couples to adopt children. Woody had one of his attorneys begin working to find a loophole in the adoption law. He also proposed adopting seven-year-old Moses, who felt deprived because his older brothers and sisters had Andre, but he had no father. Knowing that he would be included in the adoption of Dylan meant a great deal to him, and the idea understandably delighted Mia.

  Until then, Woody had been adamant about a separate residence. Overnight, he began talking about the possibility of living together as a family. There is reason to doubt that he wanted to cohabit with Mia's entire brood—and the dog, cat, parrot, hamsters, canary, and tropical fish—but in order to be with Dylan, he had to accept the rest of them. He and Mia began looking at houses and duplex penthouse apartments, places that could accommodate eight children and two adults, but still large enough to give Woody private space. One of the properties under consideration was Harkness House, the luxurious four-story mansion around the corner on East Seventy-fifth Street, the setting of his famous New Year's Eve party. The 1886 town house, lavishly renovated in the sixties by the late philanthropist Rebekah Harkness for her ballet school, was for sale. The asking price, $9.75 million, was a record for residential real estate in the city (the market price of Woody's penthouse, for example, was now about $7 million). After three inspections, Woody did not buy Harkness House, nor did he take the mansion on Beekman Place or the five-million-dollar twin town houses in the West Village.

  Finally, they saw the house of their dreams on East Seventy-third Street, a property even more splendid than the Harkness mansion. Built on two lots, the house boasted sunny rooms and a small garden, where Mia pictured herself puttering about and planting strawberries and jasmine. She immediately invoked the MGM movie Meet Me in St. Louis and a picture of cozy serenity just like that of the turn-of-the-century Smith family. In the garden, Dylan would have her own sandbox and swings, while Woody would happily play Ping-Pong and Mia would lie reading in the hammock, her mother, Maureen, picking out old favorites on the grand piano. There would be no more trips to the park, because the children would be able to run outside whenever they felt like it, and Mia would never have to worry about their safety. It would be living in New York but not living in New York. In their big house on the Upper East Side, surrounded by high walls and apple trees, they would surely be as happy as the Smith clan, laughing and crying in their Victorian house, in their Technicolor MGM musical, directed by Vincente Minnelli. It was a fairy tale. But Mia believed in fairy tales.

  By the time Woody bid on the Meet Me in St. Louis house, the owner had changed his mind about selling. Several months passed. Woody still loved "pushing the baby cart," but there was less talking of living together and the celluloid fantasy was quietly shelved. Given their incompatibility, he decided, their relationship as it now stood was "a workable compromise for both of us." In any case, there were other considerations. "I like to sleep with the air-conditioning on, while she doesn't like air-conditioning."

  Moving Pictures:

  Elliott (after sleeping with his wife's sister): She's a wonderful woman and I've betrayed her. She came into my empty life and changed it and I repaid her by banging her sister in a hotel room. God, how despicable....

  —Hannah and Her Sisters, 1987

  In the mid-eighties, Woody wrote two inviting stories about family life: Hannah and Her Sisters, a return to the Interiors theme of sisters in conflict, and Radio Days, in which he re-created the topsy-turvy domestic chaos of his own family during World War II. Making these pair of back-to-back films at this particular juncture in his life reflected his intense exploration into the idea of parenthood during the period when Mia was trying to get pregnant. They also suited the tenor of the decade that saw Ronald Reagan in the middle of his second term and a country that had turned sharply conservative.

  According to Woody, he took his inspiration for Hannah and Her Sisters, a title he conceived before writing the script, from Leo Tolstoy’s 1870s novel Anna Karenina, which begins with the familiar observation that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But as Mia knew, Hannah was basically a home movie of her Farrow family. The script contained the kind of inside knowledge a wife tells her husband in confidence: the rivalries and petty complaints; infidelities and quarrels; the substance abuse; all the unforgotten traumas that her family pretended did not happen. Reading the sisters script, she felt betrayed. What's more, it rearoused her old suspicions of Woody and her sister Steffi. It was no secret that Woody found sisters fascinating, even sexually arousing; he had often spoken of Janet Margolin and her two sisters, and Diane Keaton and her sisters, Dorrie and Robin. Mia told herself that she was being too sensitive—Woody was an artist and artists always transformed this kind of personal material. However, the thinly veiled portrait of the Farrows embarrassed and outraged others in the family, particularly her mother, whom the script described as "a boozy old flirt with a filthy mouth." In the end, everyone told one another it was only a movie, and preten
ded to be flattered. The seventy-five-year-old Maureen accepted the part of Mia's mother, her first featured role in twenty years.

  Covering two years in the life of an artistic New York clan, the story unfolds around Hannah, one of three sisters, a successful actress who is the bulwark as well as primary enabler of her dysfunctional WASP family Like Mia, the dependable Hannah has a brood of children, including twin sons and several adopted children. Hannah's younger sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey), is a recovering alcoholic trapped in an abusive affair with a surly SoHo painter (Max von Sydow); another sister is the scatterbrained Holly (Dianne Wiest), a neurotic cocaine addict who skitters from catering to acting to writing. Hannah's quarrelsome parents are played by Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O'Sullivan. For this picture, Woody split himself into two characters: Hannah's former husband, Mickey Sachs (Woody), a hypochondriacal television producer, who represents Woody's good-boy side; and her current spouse, Elliott (Michael Caine), Woody's bad-boy side, who has an affair with his wife's sister Lee.

  In the fall of 1984, principal photography began inside Mia's own apartment at the Langham. For several months the production completely disrupted the lives of Mia's children, who found themselves living on a movie set. All of them agreed to appear in the film, but only Fletcher, Daisy, and Moses had lines. Since the Screen Actors Guild required tutoring on the set for principals, On Location Education provided a licensed teacher for the three younger children. The classroom was the girls' bedroom, the only room in the apartment not ripped apart. Tutor Jean Reynolds recalled that "the apartment was chaotic because of the technical people with their equipment and lights, but the classroom was off-limits to them. With all this going on in the house, it was incredible to see how Mia always had time for the children. Woody also stopped by to play with Moses—it was obvious they had a very nice relationship."

  More than 80 percent of the film was rewritten and reshot. The original version ended pessimistically with Elliott still in love with Lee but staying married to Hannah. In the revised script, although Hannah and Elliott's marriage is still a farce, the final scene focuses on Mickey and Holly as she sweetly tells her husband she is pregnant—a kind of miracle baby because Mickey believed himself to be infertile. Years later, Woody regretted tacking on the pregnancy, saying he had tied up the threads too neatly.

  Hannah and Her Sisters shows a Woody liberated from many of his problems as a writer and director. The main subject remains himself, but he has dispensed with the existential hand-wringing, the ambitious homages to Bergman and Fellini. Instead, the beautifully crafted screenplay shows a heartfelt celebration of family life on the Upper West Side, as close to Norman Rockwell as Woody would ever get. A whirlwind tour of the city's architectural wonders—the Beaux-Arts facade of the Ansonia, the splendor of the Chrysler Building, charming town houses tucked away on Pomander Walk—were photographed by Woody's new cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma, who was known for his work on Antonioni films. (After eight pictures, Gordon Willis left to work for other directors.) Hannah shows another side of Woody, not the hard-edged, repressed neurotic but a mature man in love with his partner and taking pleasure in the idea of parenthood. Because the film opens and closes with homey Thanksgiving dinners, it would become an immensely popular television movie during the holidays.

  His biggest hit since Annie Hall and the one film most in tune with the values of mainstream America, Hannah would be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture (it lost to Oliver Stones Platoon). It won Oscars for Woody (Best Original Screenplay) and for Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest (Best Supporting Actor and Actress). Although her performance as a sloppy drunk received no awards, Maureen O'Sullivan received the best notices of her entire career. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that she "never had five minutes on the screen to equal her work here." Ecstatic, Maureen praised Woody as "a very wonderful person—kind, good, and straight," and equated him with George Cukor, who was famous for his skill in directing women. Her career suddenly rejuvenated, she was offered a role in Francis Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married.

  Hannah and Her Sisters opened to rave reviews. Leading the critics singing Woody's praises were Andrew Sarris, who, after singling out Manhattan as the best film of the seventies, now called Hannah "the great American film of the '80s," and Woody's friend Vincent Canby, who labeled him the country's "only authentic auteur" and "the urban poet of our anxious age."

  For his next picture, Woody paid a nostalgic visit to his old Brooklyn neighborhood during World War II. Narrated by Woody, who does not appear in the movie, Radio Days is more an oral history of a family than a real story. With more than two hundred characters and a dozen separate vignettes, it has several plots loosely strung together into a collage: Woody's alter ego, Little Joe (Seth Green), whose favorite show is the Masked Avenger, is the son of "two people who could find an argument in any subject"; Joe's spinster aunt, Bea (Dianne Wiest), only wants to get married; and Sally White (Mia) is an ambitious nightclub cigarette girl who becomes a radio star. Using dozens of locations throughout the city, Woody cut back and forth between the glamorous big city, where the radio shows originate, and the everyday lives of listeners, leagues away in the outer boroughs. At its most effective, Radio Days is a happy, likable film that perfectly evokes the textures of those years when every living room had a majestic floor model or a tabletop mahogany box, and people sat glued to their radios, listening to The Major Bowes Amateur Hour, the adventure tales of The Lone Ranger, and contestants trying to guess song titles on Name That Tune. But without a story or strong central characters, it tends to be thin and aimless.

  Some critics saw Radio Days as a retread of Neil Simon's play Brighton Beach Memoirs or Federico Fellini's 1974 anecdotal memoir of growing up, Amarcord. The nostalgia did not appeal to Pauline Kael, who cruelly anatomized Woody as an old-timey movie pasha from the lump-in-the-throat school of moviemaking. "Woody Allen has found in himself the heartfelt coyness of Louis B. Mayer—without the redeeming vulgar joyfulness." But Radio Days had passionate admirers, among them Vincent Canby, who was reminded of Proust, and Richard Schickel, of Chekhov. These grandiose literary allusions on the part of his reviewing colleagues made John Simon roll his eyes in wonderment. "What's left for Woody to look forward to?" he mused. "Shakespeare, I guess."

  "I think this may be my last New Year's Eve," Woody said. "I think I've outgrown it."

  He was sitting with Gene Siskel, in the Fortune Gardens Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue, at 2 P.M. on December 31, 1985. Foregoing his usual deli tuna sandwich, he was having a sit-down luncheon interview with the personable Chicago Tribune critic. Privately, Woody enjoyed poking fun at both Siskel and Roger Ebert, wickedly dubbing them "the Chicago morons," a perverse salute to their enormous influence as leading newspaper critics as well as national tastemakers on their popular "thumbs up—thumbs down" television show Sneak Previews. Thrown over a nearby chair lay Woody's green army jacket. In his everyday uniform of faded gray slacks and a lumpy pullover sweater, and a day-old beard, he had an air of stylish scruffiness. When the waiter appeared, he asked for a double order of shrimp dumplings, wonton soup, spring rolls, and a bottle of Heineken beer.

  That evening Woody planned to toast the new year with Mia, and Diane Keaton, visiting from the Coast. After dinner they were going to a party. "If I had my way we wouldn't go out," he said. Parties still terrified him, as did elevators. (Sometimes he walked up twenty flights of stairs.) Fortunately the elevator would be no problem that night because the party was at a town house.

  Tucking in his shrimp dumplings with a pair of chopsticks, he embarked on a paean to adoptions. "It's a wonderful, wonderful thing," he told Siskel. For the first time he could "see the joy of it" himself because he was "in on it from the very beginning. I was there when she got off the plane from Texas with the baby." Most days Mia brought six-month-old Dylan to the set, usually accompanied by a pretty baby-sitter, Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur Miller). No sooner did Woody
glimpse Dylan than he dropped everything and ran over to take her in his arms, then continued to direct while holding her. Whenever another person wanted to take her, he became noticeably jealous. To capture her attention again, he would make faces, put his cap on her head, and kiss her belly, until she screamed with laughter.

  After lunch, Woody remained in a good mood. With Gene Siskel in tow, he headed back to Julia Richman High School on East Sixty-seventh Street, where he was shooting classroom scenes on the top floor with a group of children. As baby Dylan was not there, Woody read the New York Times entertainment section between takes. At 4:30 everyone but Woody gathered for cake and champagne. Already he was on his way to Central Park West. That December afternoon, Gene Siskel felt certain that he was witnessing a turning point in Woody's career. Despite his neuroses, he was "a happy man," and his new picture was "the life-affirming work" of a director at the height of his game.

  Nineteen eighty-five, the year Woody turned fifty, was a vintage year. In a few weeks his fourteenth film was scheduled to "open wide" on four hundred screens. Well ahead of time, the media was calling Hannah and Her Sisters his best film ever, another breakthrough. Once again he would ascend to the top of the hill, to bask in the glory of a big film and a domestic box-office gross of $40.1 million, his first commercial hit in five years. But for Woody, the year about to close had brought him an experience far richer than mere commercial triumph. Into his life had unexpectedly entered fantastic happiness, someone upon whom he could shower all the love he had to give. If she happened to be a baby, what was wrong with that?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dead Sharks

  Woody told his mother that Mia was pregnant. "By you?" she said. "I guess so," he replied. Nettie was not the only one to react with hostility. Letty, too, was horrified to learn that her fifty-one-year-old brother had fathered a child with "a second-rate actress, a bad mother, a completely dishonest person." There was bad blood between Mia and the suspicious Letty, who always believed, she said later, that Mia had "a grand plan to meet Woody, have a relationship with him, be in his films, and eventually have his child." The person least pleased by the news, however, seemed to be Woody himself, which seems odd given the fervor with which he embraced parenthood with Dylan, who was not quite two years old. Presumably, more children simply did not interest him very much at that point, and he made no effort to hide his annoyance. Just about the only one celebrating the unexpected pregnancy was Mia, who had given up trying to conceive after the adoption of Dylan. Dispirited over Woody's indifference, which she knew was not her imagination, she withdrew emotionally and even considered breaking off with him.