Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Not only The New Yorker and Newsday but a number of other publications refrained from asking Woody embarrassing questions and promoted his Capraesque fantasies. This was not always the case. Throughout the eighties, he had been regularly interviewed—at least once a year—by Roger Ebert. While there was no bigger fan of Woody's, Ebert possessed the courage to contradict him. "Many times," Woody once told him, as a prelude to a morose harangue on the futility of life, "I've gone to sleep at night, and thought it wouldn't bother me for a second if I didn't wake up in the morning."

  "This is all so depressing," Ebert interrupted.

  With calculated timing, Doubleday slipped Mia Farrow's memoir, What Falls Away, into the bookstores on February 5, 1997, despite the fact that Barnes & Noble had told customers inquiring about the book that it was not due to be published for months. To avoid news leaks and any possibility of legal action, there were none of the usual advance reading copies. At the Doubleday warehouse, shipping cartons bore no author identification, only an 800 number to report cases of tampering. On the eve of publication, Nan Talese and her husband, Gay, hosted a gala book party for Mia at their East Side town house. Among the 140 A-list celebrities in attendance were Margaret Atwood, Lauren Bacall, Walter Cronkite, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dominick Dunne. Mia, arriving on the arm of Stephen Sondheim, was also accompanied by five of her children—Sascha, Fletcher, Daisy, Lark, and Moses. Posing months earlier for the jacket photo, she had twisted her long blond hair into a braid and looped it over one shoulder. Now evidently hoping to be taken seriously as a member of the literary community, she replaced her Shirley Temple ringlets with a short nineties bob. Her youthful bloom— she looked in her thirties—raised suspicions among some of her female contemporaries, who were in their fifties. "There was so much collagen in her face that she had a beatific look," said one skeptical observer.

  What Falls Away, which borrowed its title from a verse in Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking," was dedicated to "my mother and my children who have stood by me, and to those grandchildren and great-grandchildren whom I may never meet." The book's central metaphor, on which Mia strung all the sorrows of a lifetime, was that as a child stricken with polio, she had become an unwitting carrier of a contagious disease. Infantile paralysis had made her fear that she had endangered those she loved most. Years later, her liaison with Woody had exposed her family to another deadly infection. Roughly half of the narrative concerned her years with the film director, who was depicted as both a killer disease and a tyrant, only a little to the left of Stalin. The rest of the narrative concerned her Hollywood childhood, her father, and her early career as a film and television star. Despite her efforts to sanitize her marriage to Frank Sinatra, it was clear that Mia's men had much in common. Like Woody, Sinatra had been unable to break up with her directly, and had dispatched his lawyer to do his dirty work. For Mia, however, the passage of time had blurred his betrayal. (Upon hearing of Sinatra's death the following year, Mia would tell the press that he was "the first love of my life.") Barely mentioned in passing was the publicity-hating Andre Previn, who presumably instructed her not to write about their marriage or his personal life. In an appendix, Mia reprinted in its entirety Justice Elliott Wilk's excoriating decision in the child-custody hearing.

  What Falls Away earned respectable sales and mixed reviews. The New York Times Book Review, for instance, assigned it to Kathryn Harrison, a novelist who could be expected to sympathize with Mia's problems. Harrison's controversial new book, The Kiss, about her consensual four-year affair with her father, had made her the new incest expert on the literary scene, but she lacked any pity for Mia, a martyr whom she characterized as a compulsive adopter of children, who was waging a holy war to "solicit sympathy in the court of public opinion." In Britain, reviewers unanimously rejected "a pathologically indiscreet book" from a celebrity "most famous for her impressive collection of men and children." The London Sunday Times ran Mia's jacket photo with a snide caption: "Should a 50-year-old really have a pigtail?" Nevertheless her book succeeded in further damaging Woody's reputation because it provided considerable ammunition to his enemies. Once again it became open season on Woody Allen. On his late-night show, Jay Leno never seemed to tire of Woody jokes, including the one about a new cocktail called The Woody Allen: "Mix Old Grandad with a Shirley Temple your wife ordered." But not everyone was laughing. Bill Maher, the prosecutorial host of Politically Incorrect, devoted an entire show to What Falls Away, in which he pilloried Woody as a "white O. J. Simpson."

  A fixture on the talk-show circuit that spring, Mia rambled endlessly about herself and Soon-Yi, whose face, in photos and video clips, flashed on the television screen as Mia reiterated the details of her betrayal. Not surprisingly, whenever she talked about her daughter she omitted details that did not fit her script. Repeatedly describing the incriminating Polaroids, she failed to mention that the same young woman was now an industrious graduate student at Columbia University. In those months, Soon-Yi was doing her student-teaching semester at Spence, an elite private school for girls, where she taught reading to third-graders. Her students did not realize her fame until one of them happened to spot her on television.

  "Ms. Previn," a girl teased, "do you have a boyfriend?"

  "Yeah," Soon-Yi retorted. "Tom Cruise. Let's get back to reading." After class, the girls fluttered around her desk. Wasn't Tom Cruise married?

  "Period's over," she scolded.

  Soon-Yi was popular with both her students and the staff. "She's going to be a fine teacher," said a school official. Some parents and alumnae, however, thought that because of her notoriety she was a poor role model for young girls.

  When she was interviewed by both Barbara Walters and Katie Couric, Mia made it clear that she was not extending any olive branches to Soon-Yi. She also told Oprah Winfrey that nobody in the family had heard from her in five years. There was no doubt in Mia's mind that Soon-Yi was a victim at the beginning but "now she's responsible for continuing the affair." She no longer had any desire to see Soon-Yi, she said.

  As best he could, Woody tried to ignore What Falls Away. "Not interested in that whole thing," he insisted. "I know what happened, and I know what she thinks. It's history." His only sadness was that "I don't get to see my kids— whom I love." Dylan, whom he had not seen for five years, was a twelve-year-old, no longer the dimpled little girl who had so enchanted him. Mia was strict about sheltering her daughter from the public eye, and when camera crews from the Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters television shows descended on Frog Hollow for interviews, Eliza O'Sullivan Farrow, as she was now called, always was away visiting a friend. However, when Mia appeared on The Tonight Show, during a commercial break, Dylan was seen backstage in the green room munching potato chips with her mother and Satchel. This rare glimpse of Woody's kids revealed Dylan to be a gawky preadolescent girl, while Satch was still blond and adorable, a nine-year-old boy who resembled his mother. Then, Dylan smiled self-consciously and Satchel stared wearily as both children stopped eating their chips and reluctantly faced the camera. Being the children of Woody Allen would never be easy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  "Help"

  On December 19, 1997, Seamus (aka Satchel) O'Sullivan Farrow turned ten years old. Even though Woody continued to have visitation rights, he had not seen him in two years. The meetings were suspended by mutual agreement, he said. Sometimes he told people that he had stopped the visits for Satch's sake, or that Mia had so thoroughly poisoned the child's mind against him that he became anxious whenever he saw his father. Whatever the reason for the estrangement, there was no doubt that he had lost his son's love. For five years, his all-consuming obsession—to obtain parental visiting rights with Dylan and Satchel—had been stymied until it seemed he had journeyed far beyond the boundaries of common sense. Although he had successfully defended himself against the charges of child molestation, all the lawsuits and appeals and petitions to Elliott Wilk came to nothing. Gradually, as months passed with
out seeing Satch, he must have decided that his son was also a lost cause. Several days after Satch's birthday he took a step that effectively ensured he would be shut out of the boy's life, at least as long as Justice Wilk had anything to say about it. Two days before Christmas, he married Soon-Yi.

  The March of Time:

  "As far as I'm concerned, there is no age difference between Frank and me. There is nothing wrong with an older man marrying a younger woman if they are in love."

  —Mia Farrow

  (after marrying Frank Sinatra)

  "Love is pretty strong. So you don't fight what feels good."

  —Mia Farrow (after marrying her friend Dory Previn's husband, Andre)

  Bride and groom left the Hotel Gritti Palace in their street clothes to avoid attracting the attention of passing Venetians. Woody, who was bundled in overcoat, tweed cap, and muffler, looked as casual as though he were cruising down Madison Avenue to his office, and Soon-Yi, under her long camel-colored coat, was wearing a sweater and skirt. Had she desired to wear a bridal gown to her wedding, she would have been overruled by her husband, and if she wanted an elegant occasion, he would not wish that, either. Officiating at the twilight ceremony at the Palazzo Cavalli, near the Rialto Bridge, was the city's mayor, who helped to orchestrate a secret wedding that required careful planning and a certain amount of subterfuge. The short, businesslike ceremony was witnessed by only three invited guests, Woody's sister, Letty, her husband, Sidney, and one of their children. Afterward, a blustery wind was blowing off the Grand Canal as the wedding party celebrated the occasion at Harry's Bar, famous since Ernest Hemingway and the twenties and by far the city's grandest restaurant, where they dined on pasta with truffles, scampi, and crepes a la creme.

  On Christmas Day, the couple flew by private jet to Paris. An icy drizzle was falling as they checked into the Ritz for a combination honeymoon and publicity junket for the French release of Deconstructing Harry. In his favorite city, Woody's mood brightened and he appeared relaxed. Ambushed by a mob of photographers outside the hotel, he donned a cheerful smile and obligingly planted affectionate kisses on his new wife's cheek. In his atrociously accented French, he said that he was "very, very happy to be in Paris," and other platitudes parroting the script of a television commercial ("Jaime la France") he made recently to promote French tourism. After praising the city, he impatiently mumbled to Soon-Yi, "Can we go to lunch now?" and ducked into a waiting limousine.

  Five days later, he and Soon-Yi returned to New York. Their first public appearance took place at the Café Carlyle on Madison Avenue a few blocks from his apartment and the supper club where his band now played. In the past, Soon-Yi had absented herself from the weekly Monday shows, but that evening she was obviously eager to take her place in the celebrity spotlight as Mrs. Woody Allen. In a pink cashmere sweater, she conspicuously held court at one of the tiny ringside tables as she sipped Evian water and showed off her wedding ring. Her husband's solo of "Sweet Georgia Brown" stirred her to vigorous applause, but it was another number, Frank Sinatra's sentimental ballad "September," about age and youth, that made her misty-eyed. "This really is quite lovely," she said.

  Earlier that day, Soon-Yi's mother, who had been Sinatra's third wife, had attended the introduction on Ellis Island of a commemorative postage stamp on immigration. Seated with their mother and holding American flags were Seamus and Eliza, Isaiah, Kaeli-Shea, and Mia's three foreign-born children—Tam, Thaddeus, and Frankie-Minh, the five-year-old blind Vietnamese orphan whom Mia had named after Sinatra. Following the ceremony, a television reporter buttonholing Mia for a reaction to the marriage received a frosty look. Then she looked away without a reply. But in London, the news had prompted an angry response from Soon-Yi's father. As angry as he could possibly be, Andre Previn (who received an honorary knighthood in 1996) told the Daily Telegraph: "I'll tell you what I think of Woody Allen. I think he is the worst human being on the planet. I think he is the worst human being I have ever heard of, read of, or been able to imagine."

  In the weeks that followed, Woody and Soon-Yi continued to celebrate their marriage. After a Knicks game they joined Jean Doumanian and her ex-husband, John, at Elaine's. Elaine Kaufman plunked herself down at their table and then organized impromptu toasts by George Plimpton, Michelle Phillips, and other celebrities who happened to be dining at the restaurant. The porcine restaurateur said that she had known all along that the couple would marry because "happiness is just a girl called Soon-Yi."

  Beyond Elaine's, the marriage failed to fly with the public. On the contrary, it stimulated fifty-seven varieties of incest and pedophilia jokes. In comparison to the sick, racist jokes that were posted on the Internet ("What do Woody Allen and Kodak Film have in common?"), the gags of late-night television monologists sounded tame. Jay Leno cracked that Soon-Yi married her father, which made Woody his own son-in-law: "He's 62 and she's 27—sounds like halftime at a Clippers game," he joked. David Letterman kidded that he knew of "few pleasures in life greater than having your ex-girlfriend as your mother-in-law."

  With a straight face, Leslee Dart swore to the press that Woody did not ask Soon-Yi to sign a prenuptial agreement, which elicited shrieks of laughter in some quarters and a professional snicker from lawyer Raoul Felder. If that was truly the case, he smiled, "he needs a psychiatrist more than an attorney." Those persons least surprised by the nuptials were Mia's friends, some of whom had been expecting the couple to wed. "She's his ball and chain. If he betrays her—or if she leaves him, which is unlikely because she has no family—she has a good three- or four-million-dollar book in her. He can't cut her loose," said one of Mia's confidants. That viewpoint pretty much echoed Felder's prediction of their future life together. He compared them to "the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They're basically trapped with each other, and they'll forever be drifting through time."

  Voice of America:

  Q: What did Michael Jackson say to Woody Allen?

  A: Swap you a ten for two fives.

  —Internet One-Liners, January 23, 1998

  In his sixties, Woody seemed determined to overhaul his life. Apart from a third marriage, he took other surprising measures. After thirty-six years in psychotherapy, the world's oldest living analysand kicked the habit of a lifetime and terminated treatment. Like brushing his teeth twice a day, analysis was part of his personal regimen and had helped an unfocused, floundering twenty-four-year-old to thrive and exploit his extraordinary gifts to their fullest. The habit of withholding praise remained strong, however, because he seemed reluctant to offer any endorsements of the analytic profession. To be sure, psychotherapy could be helpful "to get past a little crisis" but long-term treatment was not "user-friendly," he said. "People expect a really dramatic result, but legitimate growth is not that dramatic." In an interview in London with Radio Times, he confided to Andrew Duncan that his marriage to Soon-Yi had made therapy unnecessary. "Did you need it in the first place?" Duncan asked. "Probably not," Woody replied. Friends heard a different story, however. In a burst of candor, he admitted quitting analysis after his most recent therapist complained about his tendency to hold back feelings.

  Still, nobody in America had done more to popularize psychotherapy than Woody Allen. He cheerfully had spent a fortune on analysts, even though he loved to complain about their exorbitant fees—unlike the old days of therapy, when, he once wrote, you could be treated by Freud himself and he would also press your pants. In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer swore that after fifteen years he was giving his doctor "one more year and then I'm goin' to Lourdes." And in Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs's analyst supposedly became frustrated over his patient's lack of progress. "The guy finally put in a salad bar," said Mickey. In reality, Woody's shrinks earned so much from him they had no need of salad bars; most likely they were able to take early retirement.

  Meanwhile, perhaps the most dramatic changes were taking place in his career. In 1992, when the sex scandal and custody battle had adversely affected his box
office, falling profits seemed a temporary response to a barrage of unusually negative publicity. According to Woody, the scandal was "a neutral factor," which sold newspapers but had nothing to do with him. "It's come and it's gone. It was nothing either way. It didn't help me. It didn't hurt me." The truth was the opposite. By the end of the nineties, the scandal continued to hurt him, and professionally he was basically treading water.

  Desperate for a hit, he began to robotically recycle and cannibalize his old movies while competing in an increasingly sex-oriented film marketplace. Being regarded by a new generation of filmmakers as a dusty old museum piece petrified him. ("He didn't need a scandal to bring him down," believes Andrew Sarris. "Comedy is definitely a young man's racket, and when you get older, you lose the capacity to make people laugh. Some of his recent films have been unfunny.") Beginning with Mighty Aphrodite in 1995 and continuing through Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity, he made a series of films that are best described as his Hooker-Fellatio Trilogy. These three pictures present a parade of female characters who are whores (professional or amateur), nymphomaniacs, or psychotics. The roles (played by Mira Sorvino, Hazelle Goodman, Bebe Neuwirth, Judy Davis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) appeared to have been the creation of an embittered, misogynistic writer consumed by primitive hatred of the female sex and fixated on the kind of passive sex that permits no conversation. As Harry Block remarks, hookers are wonderful because you needn't discuss Proust.