What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  I was blinking into Andre's face, trying to hold it in place as he was telling me, It's two boys, we have two sons, with no mention of a dead one.

  By the time they wheeled me in to see the babies it was the middle of the night, and the nursery lights were dimmed. It would have been quiet except for one infant over in the corner under the bright light, screaming bloody murder. Andre pointed to a nice-looking baby and said it was mine. I stared. My sleeping son. He didn't look familiar. They were already pushing me toward the corner— toward the noisy baby with the reddish purple blotches on-his face. They didn't need to tell me he was mine.

  **Why does he look like that?" I asked. "What happened to him?"

  "Nothmg, dear," said the nurse with the chipper voice. "He wasn't breathmg on his own at first, so he just needed a bit of help. The doctor had to breathe into him and his face got a bit bruised, that's all. He's fine."

  "How long?" I asked. "For how long didn't he breathe?"

  "It was . . . let's see . . ." She found it on the chart. "Nine minutes."

  We had to stay in the clinic for ten days. The babies weighed five pounds, fifteen ounces each, that's about the size of a shoe box. All of it, the whole thmg, was immense, overwhelming. Two small strangers, and a large one, had suddenly claimed one hundred percent of my life.

  When the twins were a few weeks old we moved out to the country, to the house we called The Haven. I banished from my mind the first feelings of disappointment that it was right on the road and without so much as a fish pond. After all, it was lovely, a seventeenth-century tavern with half-moons carved out of the door frames where the barrels had been carried through, and there were beamed ceilings and beautiful, creaky floors and fireplaces you could sit in, and the woods were magnificent, giant oaks by the

  thousands, and the bluebells were already coming into bloom.

  Apnl 7, 1970 The Haven I've just fed the babies. As I write, Andre is practicing the piano—Mozart—for next month's concert. It's great to have him home. Sprmg has arnved—is it always so glorious? The daffodils are out and a million new living thmgs. Deer come right up to the house. The horse m our neighbor's field is very pregnant and looks happy, I remember the feelmg. Our own babies are a daily wonder, each fiercely intense, each quite differenL

  June 1970 I miss Andre. But I can't take the babies on tour with him the way we planned. And I won't leave them. They're tmy and they cry easily and they're up most o{^ the night. I'm exhausted all the time. It doesn't help that I'm anemic. Having twins is no joke when your starting weight is ninety-two pounds. Barbara is living in London, but she comes here almost every day. There are still a miUion details to finish up on the house, she deals with the carpenters, plumber, electrician—^she keeps everything going.

  June 1970 Andre savs Barbara has to go. It's awful. She's been with me since I was nmeteen. Through everything! He savs it's unhealthy for me to be so dependent on her—he says I don't know how to do anything. Which I guess is true, but I don't want her to leave.

  June 1970 Every week I dress up the babies and take lots of pictures that I send, along with a detailed account of the many good things in my life, to my family, and to my friends Yul, Liza, and the Kanins, Lenny, Maria, Thornton, and Nancy [Sinatra]. / send no pictures to Dali. He thinks the proportions of babies are grotesque, and he still insists on referring to the twins as "embryos."

  The nanny and a chirpy New Zealand couple live in a separate wing of the house. All of them have false teeth. I keep to myself.

  September 1970 We were married in a Unitarian church. I didn't want our wedding to be in an office. Mom was there, and Steffi and her husband Jim and Andre's mother, no one else. Andre has a beard.

  September 1970 All year we had been planning and looking forward to Andre's two weeks off. We rented a VW bus and drove through Scotland, just stopping wherever and whenever we wanted, sleeping in the bus. It was cold, especially in the early mornings, but Scotland is beautiful in its bleak way, and a place we both wanted to see. It was a swell time. It's the first time I've been apart from baby Sascha, but he gets upset easily, he doesn't like strangers, or having his routine disrupted, so we brought only Matthew—what a serious, dignified little citizen he is. He has an unblinking, most unbaby-like intensity. I

  think one dav he'll be a judge. Or a customs inspector.

  Except for Andre's concerts in London, I didn't go anywhere. I didn't even drive in England. Andre had a driver. I missed Barbara.

  We'd made a couple of friends; the Kanins introduced us by letter to ]oan Plowright and Laurence Olivier, who lived in Brighton, about forty minutes away. They were excellent company, and they had young children, so we were encouraged to bring our babies along in their baskets when we went to dinner. When the Oliviers came to our house we had chicken because it was what I could cook. Invariably Larry told his chicken-carving story: how his father, the parson, "could carve a chicken to feed twenty people." Larry always did the carving.

  With the Oliviers we went to dinner at 10 Downing Street. It was a stiff crowd—except for us and Leonard Bernstein, with whom I had a depressing conversation about the death of symphonic music and civilization in general. Larry, sitting next to me, was Lord Olivier from the moment he arrived. At the dinner table the Queen Mother was on his other side. She asked me about the babies and I said they were fine, thank you, and then, because of the silence, I asked. What, in your view, is the most important thing I can teach them?

  "Let me think for a moment." Her Highness looked thoughtful.

  "Ma'am, I think Mia means—" Larry interjected, flashing a look that jogged a vague recollection that you're not supposed to ask queens questions.

  "I know what she means. I'm just thinking—" She cut him dead. Then, with her eyes shining, she said beautifully, "I think it's . . . manners."

  "Really?" I squeaked. "You thinkY'

  "Yes," she said decisively. "I believe that manners can get you through anything."

  November 27, 1970 The doctors have said that one of the babies has "autistic tendencies." He is nine months old and has never looked at me, not even once. He sometimes screams for fifteen hours at a stretch, as if electric shocks are going through him. Nothing seems to reach him. I can't comfort him. I can't get through to him. By the time he was two months old I knew there was a problem, but the doctors wouldn't listen. I was just a young, inexperienced mother, so they tried to convince me I was imagining it, or even that I might be causing the problem by being worried. But now that he is nine months old, it is obvious even to them. At Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital they did frightening tests, injecting dye into his brain. At least now, with a diagnosis, maybe someone will help.

  December 1970 It turns out nobody knows a thing about autism. There is no treatment. No advice. They just prescribe tranquilizers for me and for the baby (for whom they had the reverse effect), and they have given me the name of a residential school I can contact when he is five. If I wait that long I will surely never reach him.

  February 1971 I found a doctor, finally —Dr. E. at the Anna Freud Clinic in London—who says he will try to help. He is American. I am hopeful.

  Mav 1971 For thirteen Saturdays I have picked up Dr. E. at the Reigate train station and have taken him to our house, vy^here he watches the baby for two hours, takes copious notes, eats the cheese sandwiches I make, and says next to nothing. He IS polite, but in my hardly expert opinion, he seems not entirely human. Certainly he is not any help. I'm wondering if we are part of some sort of research that he or the Freud Clinic is involved in.

  May I97I Today when my mother came to visit, the baby looked at her! For not quite three seconds. We jumped up and down.

  I barely slept that night from excitement, and trying to devise a plan. But had it been a fluke? Would it ever happen again? It was so fleeting, we could have imagined it, from wishing so hard. But if it did happen—why, when he has avoided eye contact with all of us for fifteen months? What was different about my mother? The o
nly thing I could come up with was her bright pink lipstick.

  The next day I took the baby to a damp, monk-bare room upstairs in our chilly thatched guest cottage. My mother's lipstick was smeared on my lips, as bold as pink could ever be, but his faraway eyes floated over to the sunlit window.

  So I bought big sheets of white poster board that I tacked over the windows. Then I, pink-mouthed, babbled into my son's wandering face . . . and he looked! For the first time in his life, he looked at me—at my bright pink lips.

  In the white room, over weeks and months, buoyed by minuscule but ongoing successes, I tried whatever entered

  my mind to catch his eye and hold it; I bought Upstick and eye shadow in every color, I painted dots, stripes, patterns, all over my face, I covered it with tin foil, then with Saran Wrap, I blew smoke out of my mouth, blew bubble-gum bubbles, crinkled cellophane between my teeth, ate carrots, potato chips, I wore gloves, I lugged in pots of water to splash in, I sang, whistled, tickled, and clucked. I had seen my baby son smile at crinkling cellophane, and at the crunch of autumn leaves underfoot. Finally, now, he smiled at me.

  Oaober 1971 WE PLAYED PEEKABOO!

  During the second year of my marriage to Andre, i£ you connected all the days he wasn't somewhere else, we spent a total of fifteen days together. It was not an atypical year. Whatever strength or confidence the early bloom of our relationship had lent me began to evaporate in the isolation of the drafty Surrey house. The pregnancy and the birth of the twins had left me with a fatigue I couldn't shake. Worry over the baby, and day-to-day life without a soul to talk to, in the expanding space of Andre's absences, amassed into wordless, familiar loneliness.

  But I was absorbed with my children and they brought pure delight to each day. I don't know whether I missed acting or not, for there was another unexpected factor: piece by piece, comment by comment, over the first year of our relationship, I had assembled the dimensions of Andre's contempt for the movie industry and anyone connected with it. Given the fact that I had had a father who had **never seen a happy actress," and a first husband whom I'd lost partly because of my determination to work, I feared anything that might jeopardize my marriage to Andre. We agreed then that I would accept a movie if it permitted me

  to come home every night—home to The Haven m Surrey, England.

  Sometimes, H'hen I felt homesick for the Vineyard, I would call the Wooden House, and listen to the phone ringing through the rooms; I imagmed the mice scurrying and the sound touching the furniture, books, the lamp with the painted-glass shade, all my things, just as I had left them, in the stillness, with the ringing phone. It was the next best thing to being there.

  Through it all, Nancy Sinatra remained close, and Frank and I stayed in touch too, although our contact was less frequent now. Sometimes I missed him more than was appropriate, which Andre knew, because I told him everything.

  But the good times were still good. I loved going to Andre's concerts, and the music became important to me. I took pride in my postconcert tasks of packing my husband's drenched white tie, the cummerbund, his ruffled nylon shirt and black tails in the navy garment bag, and laying the still-warm patent-leather pumps in their separate, soft brown sacks with the tube of batons at the bottom. Andre and I didn't ever fight, and our small sons were the light of our lives. We even hoped to expand our family.

  In 1971 and 1972, in London's parks, I marched, pushing a twin stroller alongside Vanessa Redgrave, to protest U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. The senselessness of Andre and I having another baby when already there were so many children in the world needing homes was dramatically underlined by the war, as it stretched on interminably. Every morning's newspaper brought fresh documentation of human suffering. It was in this climate that we decided to adopt a Vietnamese war orphan.

  Two years of delays, disappointments, and frustration followed, but led us finally, in May 1973, to an airport

  hotel in Paris, where Andre and I toasted our three children in a champagne supper, and through a sleepless night we held hands and watched the skies, waiting for our baby daughter, due at dawn.

  By the time the plane from Saigon landed it was nearly noon. Andre and I stood by the entrance to the terminal dizzily searching the weary passengers as they trudged past, some holding babies. Countless, countless times I had studied the tiny black-and-white photo we had been sent from the orphanage, but which baby was ours? An airport official advised us to sit down, the orphans from Vietnam were not among the other passengers, they would be brought from the plane in a special minibus. We then sat, staring through the window, down the runway at the airplane in the distance. After what seemed an eternity, we saw the minibus slowly approaching.

  More than a dozen men and women wearing medical coats came through the terminal doors, each carrying a child. Last to enter was a small gray-haired woman. Smiling, she walked toward us and placed in my waiting arms a little plastic baby seat; way down at the bottom, not a third of the way up, enormous, shining black eyes peered with interest into my flowing ones. The woman handed me a nearly empty bottle and a Vietnamese passport and then disappeared into the crowd.

  We brought our daughter home—home to The Haven, where her brothers, now three and a half years old, were waiting excitedly. At three months. Lark Song weighed only five pounds. She was asthmatic, and already the fragile survivor of two bouts of pneumonia. She was the most exquisite little girl we had ever seen.

  Lark's adoption also brought home an awareness of the desperate conditions of the orphanages in Vietnam. I learned the facts and got hold of photographs. I contacted anyone I ever knew even remotely and sent them the information along with lists of items the orphanages needed so

  desperately. Everyone, I assumed, could send something. And thev did. To my surprise companies responded too—with disposable diapers, baby formula, and vaccines; Air France even transported everything to Saigon for free. The president of Fisher-Price Toys, Mr. Henry Coords, agreed to sell us their almost indestructible toys at cost, and every toy we bought, he matched with another, and arranged for their shipment to Vietnam.

  The Great Gatsby, filmed in England at Pinewood Studios, about two hours from The Haven, was one of the few acceptable projects. It was during this film that I became pregnant with our third son, Fletcher. Consequently, what I remember best about Gatshy are my earnest and mostly successful efforts not to throw up on Theoni Aldredge's gossamer costumes. I also remember the Watergate hearings, which riveted Bob Redford and me to the television set in his dressing room, and provided us all with an endlessly fascmating topic for discussion. Nor will I forget Bob's good heart, and the pleasure of his company.

  Because my hair was short when we began shooting, I wore a wig in the film. The hairdresser had bleached it snow white the night before our first day's shootmg, so it permanently felt and looked like cotton candy. Nobody else cared or even particularly agreed with me, so the bad wig stayed throughout the filming and, I felt, undermined "Daisv" as I had wanted her to appear.

  Nor was producer David Merrick's presence on the set helpful, especially to Jack Clayton, who was best known for his sensitive small films. Ultimately, The Great Gatshy was a victim of overhype; the market was flooded with tie-in promotions, from Ballantine's scotch to "Gatsby cookware." This delicately balanced script was blown up into something It never was meant to be, and released as if it had been Gone with the Wind.

  In the years between 1971 and 1977 I made several films, but my focus during those years in England was my family, and my primary work took place on the stage. Through ]. M. Same's odd and intense Mary Rose, which I played m Manchester and London, I met the composer John Tav-erner, and found a lasting soul mate. Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Aiha was an opportunity to explore as an actor, and its favorable reception gave me a fleeting boost in confidence professionally, but its most enduring benefit was my friendship with the play's translator, Tom Stoppard.

  In September 1974, I was admitted into a Lon
don hospital with severe pain in my lower-right abdomen. The examining physician had diagnosed it as acute appendicitis and immediately scheduled an operation. I was nursing Fletcher, my six-month-old son, so I brought him with me to the hospital, expecting a stay of three or four days at most.

  But things went another way. The surgeon came into the room looking important and distracted. He gave my stomach a little token push or two and concluded the problem was not my appendix but some other thing, "possibly a tubular infection." Whatever that mav be, it was not the problem: my biggest problem turned out to be his misdiagnosis. A ruptured appendix had been the cause of the pain and fever, but they didn't discover that until the operation nine days later, by which time peritonitis had turned my guts to gum.

  My baby was taken home around the time of the first surgery—I, who took the quickest baths in the Western Hemisphere so as not to leave him for long; I, who had never missed a night tucking my children into their beds or telling them a bedtime story; I, who planned to breast-feed the baby for as many years as he wanted; I, who, with my secret ration of personal magic and with all the powers of

  my will, could not turn this unthinkable progression of events around. The medications had "poisoned" my milk, they said, and anyway, by then I was too weak and in too much pain to even lift the baby. There was nothing I could do—I was losing ground, moving inexorably into a sphere where all thoughts, even that one, would be crushed from my mind, where there was only pain—pain to the farthest reaches of consciousness. No other self exists there. I was pain.

  The morphine-heroin concoction they injected into the tops of my thighs at three-hour intervals didn't cover it— but more would kill me, they said, and gave no options. My mother flew in from New York and moved into the hospital. There were three major abdominal surgeries. Days and nights fused molten red. I was fed through a tube threaded up the vein in my arm, around my shoulder, and into the large artery near my heart. A half dozen other tubes streamed in and out of me.