Take all the pictures you want (flash). Be my guest, no problem. Pardon me? Oh yes, I was married to Frank Sina-
Mv mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, and her father, Charles.
My mother and grandmother, Mary Frazer O'Sullivan, m Ireland, 1958.
-^«
The oval portrait of my father's mother, Lucy Farrow, m the year of her death at the age of nineteen.
Me at four with Raggedy Ann and Mickey.
The Farrows in 1949: my father, my mother with baby Prudence m her arms, Mike, Patrick, me, and Johnny.
A shared fifth birthday with my father.
Mike, me, and Patrick in a boat in our Beyerly Hills swimming pool.
J
Johnny and me in Malibu, 1955.
The day of my First Holy Communion, with Billy the dog.
OPPOSITE: My father brmgs me home.
INSET: A polio ward in the 1950s.
(Courtesy of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University)
•^ARIA GOES HOMI—Mar.
'^^^■^^'^» ^ J^'livafi Chile ''■^*^-- l-eaves Hospital Polio Ward
Maria Roach and mv brother Johnnv at the Candv Cane Ball.
Queen of the Fiestas in Dema, Spain, 1958.
K.(
ne'^
Mike with Dad.
Mike
MKliatl Daiiutn Villitrs Farrow Born May 30th, 1939 DitJ October 29. 1958
Our Father who art in heasen.
Hallow(.d he thy name. Thy kinjjdom come.
ITiy will be done ....
Mv favorite picture of Mike.
Eternal rest grant unto hirn. O I-«rd, and let (xrpetual li^ht shine upon him.
My father in his bedroom.
5Anaele0 3
JANUARY 29, 19d?
! Farrow, winner of t-heMo-|* Uon Picture Academy's 1956,s best screenplay award fori' "Around the World in SOJ Days," was born in Sydney,F Australia, in 1904. '^
Short story writing ledj* Farrow to Holly^vood, where'' ne was employed as a seen- f list by Cecil B. DeMille in « l'^27. His greatest success be-1 -an 10 years later, howe^'er. I Al'en he wrote and directed " "My Bill" for Warner Bros.''
In Canadian Navy ,
, In 19;J9 he joined the Ca-i. nadian Xavy. iieeing action! wiUi the anli-subraarine pa-l
"X)! in convoys in the North d South Atlantic. i
Farrow's long list of film ci-edits includes such pic-: tares as "Wake Island." "Bill of Divorcement," "Five Came Back," "Two Years Before the Mast," "Hondo." "California," "Botany Ba}'," and
Back From Eternity." Tragedy visited the Far-
•ows in 1958 when the eldest ii their seven children, Mlichael D. V. Farrow, 19, A-as killed in an air collision near Whiteman Alrpaik, Pa-i coima. i
Others of the surviving! SIX children are John, 16,j Prudence, V5, Stephanie, 13,1 and Tiv-a (Theresa) Farrow,)-
John Forrow
Film Writer John Farrow Dies at 58
A; ires.s Maureen O'.-^ulli-
,.Ltilct,i ■■i :.,■, :;ususna,
jjohn Villiers Farrow, 58.
The colorful film writer-director was found dead late Sunday in their Beverlyi Hills home by his son, Pat-' rick, 20, eldest of the couple's six children.
Farrow lay fully clothed on a bed in his study in the home at 809 N Roxbury Dr., His hand rested on a telephone as if he were about; to rn?if a ^-nll. j
Mas.«ive Heart Attack . Dr. William Weber Sn- Ji,i the family physician, .saic. he! died of a massive heart at-l tack. He had some hearty trouble long ago and a cir-f-vilalorj' disorder more rc-jcently. Dr. Sniith said ! Funeral arrangement.? are pending at the Cunninghaiii 4: O'Connor Hollywood Mot ituarv
With Ryan O'Neal m Peyton Place.
(Courtesy of 20th Century—Fox)
Dali and me.
('photo by Philippe Halsman © Halsman Estate)
Graduation in Peyton Place.
(Courtesy of lOth Century—Fox)
M- first film, Guns at Batasi. John Leyton is on the left and Richard Attenborough to the right,
(Courtesy of 10th Century—Fox
Frank with our dog Samantha. Malcolm and me.
The Share Party, 1965: my first time out in public with Frank.
rhe boat trip.
Roz Russell, Claudette Colbert, and me with the boat behind us.
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£ Ml
W^irh Bill Goetz.
Edie Goetz and Yul Br'nner.
jusr married, 1966.
tra, and while I'm smiling let me say that I'm happy to write my name on your menu or your arm or wherever, and I don't mmd at all being dragged over to meet your family —it's mother's milk to me. Except it was a mistake, becoming famous—so I'd be grateful if you wouldn't get excited or think I'm anything special when I'm not.
Supposing you make a mistake at a very early age, and the mistake sets in motion certain mysterious forces that should never have been fiddled with in the first place. As a result, the fragile and complex connections between you and everybody else get screwed up, as people respond to illusions, artificial images. It's scary to think that nobody can see you. How is it possible to know anybody if they're busy reacting to a thing that isn't you? Frank says if you just keep movmg . . . But by becoming famous, I have bombed the very bridges I needed most, to cross the gulf, to connect with other people. Isn't that, in the end, what redeems us?
I could change my name. Dye my hair brown. Get fat. Move to another state. I'll pick a spot on the map, pack the music box and encyclopedias, or actually Barbara could do that and she'll take me and the encyclopedias and the music box to the airport, and then I guess I'd say good-bye to Barbara because I wouldn't need an assistant anymore. So I arrive there, somewhere, I rent a Hertz car, load up the encyclopedias, check into a motel, people do it all the time, and look for a sweet little dream house to buy (remember to call my business manager, find out how much money I have). Actually a whole different country might be best. Spin the globe. A bicycle repair shop in Peru! Dogs asleep on the dirt floor. I can even speak Spanish, sort of. There are countless options. What were they again? Change names. Dye hair. Get fat. Move to Peru. Fix bikes. Have I thought of everything? I wonder how long you can live on Sara Lee chocolate cake?
A phone call in the night. My sister Prudence, in Bos-
ton, unmoored in some nightmare of her own, was talking about transcendental meditation. Without understanding any of it, I filled a duffel bag with books and walked out the front door; I waved to the gardener, who was standing near the pink roses. I got into the car and Barbara drove me away from the house in Bel Air and all its contents, away from the gleaming grand piano, and the deaf cat watching from the window, my music box, and even my encyclopedias. Without understanding a thing I boarded a plane to Boston.
Prudence and I made our way through Boston's snowy streets to a crowded auditorium where Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was speaking. "The mind can transcend all limits of experience and thought," he said, "and is left in a field of pure Being—the source of all wisdom, creativity, peace, and happiness . . ."
Inside the numbness came a newborn nuzzling of hope. After the lecture we shouldered through the photographers and reporters.
"Where's Frankie?" someone yelled.
"Hey Mia, look this way.'"
"Is your marriage really over?"
My sister and I were haunted, shuddering specters in the flashing light. But Maharishi said, Come to India, Come to a teacher's training course there, and Prudy and I accepted. I said. Yes, I will learn to meditate, and seek enlightenment and peace at the foot of the Himalayas!
A world away from the leafy stillness of Bel Air, I groped numbly through New Delhi's anarchic streets. A swirling cacophony of Indian pop songs blared tinny out of countless unseen radios, as cars driving crazily played on horns; smells of spices, sewers, and piles of rotting garbage. There were cows with red spots painted on their foreheads and bells on their feet tra
ipsing right through the middle of
everything, and everybody swarmed in all directions, shoving and spilling out of buses and rickshaws. Vivid saris fluttering, purple, sapphire, turquoise, and gold, unreadable watchful dusky faces, vendors of all kinds, fortune-tellers, snake charmers, magicians, flies, and flocks of ragged children, begging. From the gutter, a dead dog's eye stared back at me. It was a collision of magnificence and wretchedness. We journeyed north. Winds howled raw at the foot of the Himalayas, where saffron-swathed monks were wading serenely m the icy Ganges. By the bridge at Rishikesh, lepers begged with fingerless hands.
The ashram was a fenced compound consisting of six puri —single-story, concrete, barracks-style structures, each with ten simple rooms facing a single wan sapling in a sandy courtyard. A gravel path connected the buildings, then wound beneath tall eucalyptus trees toward the kitchen and dining area and beyond to the lecture hall where Maharishi addressed the meditators and responded to questions every evenmg. All these buildings stood on a hillside that descended steeply to the Ganges.
Patches of snow lay on the ground and the rooms had no heat. Each morning a bucket of steaming water was placed inside my door by a young Indian man with large, mistrustful eyes. I liked the austere little room—its hard bed, chest of drawers, and dim lamp met my needs perfectly.
We were a reverent, drab group of fifty or so men and women of various nationalities, ages, and professions. All spoke English and the course was conducted in this language. Maharishi suggested that we meditate for twelve hours of the day, taking short breaks as we needed. During these hours, when meditators, often wrapped in the heavy brown blankets from our beds, encountered one another along the gravel paths or beneath the trees, we exchanged
other-worldly smiles and the Sanscrit salutation "Jai Guru dev"
On the much-anticipated day of my initiation into meditation, I presented Maharishi with a bunch of cut flowers, as is customary, and sat cross-legged facing him, a little nervously. Then at last he gave me my mantra—my own secret, magical sound—and just as he said it, soft: like he did, I sneezed. So, I'm not positive, but mayhe I didn't quite catch it—his voice was so low, and the word or sound was strange and brief, and he had a beard, and he said it right in the middle of my sneeze, so after a moment I said, Excuse me, I don't think I quite heard you. But he would not say it again—ever. So I couldn't be one hundred percent sure I was doing it right. And when I brought it up, which I did from time to time, he would just wave it off. But when I was meditating, the thought would edge back into my mind that maybe I was doing it wrong, and that's what was keeping me out of the "field of pure Being."
I tried to meditate for the recommended twelve hours a day, but I rarely came close. At least I wasn't throwing up anymore, and my concentration had improved to the point where I could read again. With a book in hand, I would clamber down the hill to read or just to watch the Ganges rushing past. Sometimes I wandered across the bridge into the town of Rishikesh. When I brought back an emaciated, flea-ridden stray puppy, Maharishi named him Arjuna, after the warrior, and said he could stay with me at the compound.
All that I read, and most of my thoughts, were parts oi a. single process. My religion, as it had been presented to me and as I had interpreted it, was no longer helpftil, satisfying, or even acceptable to me—nonetheless, since childhood my orientation had been to a higher order. I could not be a nihilist. Separation from my faith had left me with a sense
of incompleteness that went far beyond missing Frank. I felt that I had lost what was at the heart of my existence: my bond with everything that is. With the help of the books I had brought with me, along with a few I found at the ashram, I began to redefine my relationship with Christianity, Catholicism, and Being.
In the Bhagavad Gita I read that the Divine Being is the very substance of the universe, but that everything we experience with our senses is merely illusion: "Water cannot wet It, nor can fire burn It, wind cannot dry It, and weapons cannot slay It. It is the all-pervading, omnipresent, divine Being . . . Hard it is to pierce that veil divine of various shows which hideth me; yet they who worship me pierce it and pass beyond."
The teachings of Buddha tell us that the Self is the greatest obstacle to true understanding: "The worldling will not understand, for to him there is happiness in selfhood only, and the bliss that lies in a complete surrender to Truth is unintelligible to him."
Thomas Jefferson wrote extensively about Jesus Christ, and guided by his work I began to discriminate between the core of His teachings and the dogma that has been attached to it. "We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists," he wrote. "Select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus . . . There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man . . . Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagmation, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross . . . When, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught since His day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines He
inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily His disciples: and my opinion is that if nothing had ever been added to what flowed purely from His lips, the whole world would at this day have been Christian."
Tolstoy said much the same: "Nothing needful can be poured into a vessel full of what is useless. We must first empty out what is useless . . . True Christian teaching . . . tells us nothing about the beginning, or about the end, of the world, or about God and His purpose, or in general about things which we cannot, and need not, know; but it speaks only of what man must do to save himself, that is, how best to live the life he has come into, in this world, from birth to death. For this purpose it is only necessary to treat others as we wish them to treat us . . . Belief that the Gospels are the inspired word of God is not only a profound error, but a very harmful deception . . . Jesus himself did not write a book . . . The reader must remember all this in order to disengage himself from the idea, so common among us, that the Gospels in their present form have come to us directly from the Holy Spirit."
In his essay entitled How to Read the Gospels and What Is Essential in Thern^ Tolstoy wrote that "to understand any book one must select the parts that are quite clear, dividing them from what is obscure or confused. And from what is clear we must form our idea of the drift and spirit of the whole work . . ."
These insights illuminate, far more eloquently than I could, the shape and distillations of my befuddled thoughts. And so I lifted the words of Jesus out of the New Testament and wrote them out in mv clean, lined notebook; and in takmg them to heart, the confusion that had previously besieged all my efforts to define my position fell away, and was replaced by plain understanding.
From the chaos of the recent years, and the personal failure and forgetting, emerged a powerful remembrance from the polio wards of my childhood. As a member of the
human family, I rediscovered my sense of responsibility. Now I would begin to search for a mission that could breathe meaning into my existence.
Nearly every afternoon Maharishi sent for me to come to his bungalow for a private talk. From the start he had been especially solicitous and attentive to me, and I had responded with wary resentment. "Not only does he send for me every single day, and not the others," I complained to my sister, "but also, he is giving me mangoes. And to the best of my knowledge, he has not given a single mango to anybody else . . ." Prudence said the problem was me.
The ashram, up to this point, was a strange, cold, colorless place where meditation was the sole focus: we moved as if in a dream and spoke only when necessary, in the respectful, hushed tones of visitors to a graveyard. So it went, quietly and evenly, until one afternoon when, out of the blue, the Beatles
arrived.
Right on the heels of their groundbreaking, earthshaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, all four Beatles and their wives descended upon the ashram. Maharishi managed to keep the press outside the compound, but even there, at the edge of the earth, there were photographers in the trees. Nonetheless, with their cheerful chatter and guitars and singing, the new arrivals brought an element of "normalcy" to the ashram—a sort of contemporary reality, which at first seemed jarringly out of place. After a short time Maureen and Ringo Starr left: because of the flies; and they missed their kids. Ringo and George were the most accessible of the four, but I liked them all. Now the Beatles too came to Maharishi's bungalow in the afternoons.
"Whenever I meditate," John said, in his irresistible Liverpool accent, "there's a big brass band in me head."
"Write it down, write it down," recommended Maharishi.
I think of John, so off-center and quick, peering out from behind his glasses; he made me laugh, which I hadn't done in a while. And at evening assembly he used to turn his chair completely around, and look at everyone. John seemed to see everything on a mystical plane, and he thought of Maharishi as a kind of wizard.
George was gentle and kmd, with a radiant spiritual quality—he would go to the elderly women meditators to play his guitar and sing for them. It was his serious commitment to meditation that had motivated the other Beatles to come to India. He was interested in playing the sitar, he said, not just to entertain, but so that he could play the ragas—rhythms passed through holy men from the Vedas —because it is believed that they alter the consciousness and can influence people for the good.
What falls away : a memoir Page 12
