What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  The night Michael Caine, an old friend from Fox Studios, came to see the play, he asked me to come along to Elaine's restaurant afterward, where he would be joining Mick ]ag-ger. It was Wednesday and I was already tired from doing a matinee and an evening performance, and Elaine's was way uptown on the East Side; it would be jammed, too noisy to talk, and it takes forever to get served. I was looking forward to getting home, raiding the refrigerator, having a bath, and getting into bed with Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoy. On the other hand it had been a year since I'd seen Michael, and it would be fun seeing Mick Jagger, and really

  I ought to go out every now and then. It was a flip-of-the-com decision that landed me in Elaine's that night.

  As we threaded our way toward our table, where Mick was waiting, Michael stopped to say hello to Woody Allen, who thanked me for the fan note I had written him about his movie Manhattan. I was stunned that he remembered. "It made my day," he said, without smiling.

  Less than a year earlier I had saved the picture of him from the cover of the New York Times Magazine. He was standing under an umbrella on a gray day. I tore it from the magazine and put it in my giant dictionary for safekeeping, because there was something so interesting and appealing in his face or expression I thought I might want to look at it again. When, over a glass of wine, I confessed this to Michael, he dashed back to Woody's table and returned with a compliment for me.

  Within weeks a printed invitation to Woody AUen's New Year's Eve party arrived at my apartment.

  My sister Steffi, now divorced, was living with her young son, only a block away from me in New York. That New Year's Eve, following the performance of Romantic Comedy, we made our way over to the Harkness House, a great old mansion off Fifth Avenue. I presented my invitation to one oi the women seated behmd a table in the marble foyer and then Steffi and I were directed toward a staircase where Woody Allen stood, greeting his guests. New York's most starry figures, as they moved past him up the stairs. A lovely, dark-eyed young actress smiled by his side. Upstairs, hundreds of people—movie stars, icons of Broadway, socialites, politicians, and basketball players—milled together through the huge rooms. There was unlimited caviar, shellfish, and every other kind of food. Two bands played on different floors. My sister found some friends of hers and stayed on. I left before midnight. The following day I sent him a book. The Medusa and the Snail, with a note of thanks.

  My son Moses Amadeus Farrow, whom we called Misha at first, after mv brother Mike, arrived in 1980, the week before his second birthday, January 27, which he shares with Mozart. When he was just a few days old, he had been left, wrapped m a pink blanket, in a phone booth in Seoul. His right side was afflicted with cerebral palsy. He had no speech yet. He was a beautiful angel.

  I spent the remainder of the winter getting to know my new son, tending to the rest of the brood, and doing eight shows a week. During intermissions I knitted many small, red mittens and hats and a seventh Christmas stocking. I also embroidered a "tooth pillow," as my children were suddenly losing teeth at a wondrous rate.

  Ours was one of the £tw buildings on the Upper West Side that was not co-op, which meant we didn't own our apartment, we rented. When my family moved there in 1963, you could buy or rent on the West Side for peanuts by today's standards. Under the law, they could only raise the rent by some three percent every few years. Hardly a week passed without Mom or I noting how lucky we were to have the place.

  It was a gorgeous building, built near the turn of the century, when ceilings were ten or eleven feet high. The nine spacious rooms of our apartment retained all their original moldings, paneling, and floors. Our kitchen was big enough for ten people to sit comfortably at the long butcher-block table. The dumbwaiter in our larder wall was only a spooky, spidery hole now, but a half century earlier it brought hot food up to the apartments from basement kitchens. Just off the lobby, where Lee Strasberg's library is now, was the old dining room. I imagined the carriages and coaches drawing up at the rear doors, and people, beauti-

  fully dressed in formal wear, laughing softly under crystal chandeliers. I'm told that on Friday and Saturday evenings there was chamber music in the dining room, all those years ago. Some nights as I lay in bed, beautiful music drifted up the stairwell and almost reached my ears before the noise of traffic drowned it out.

  The room where I now slept had been my mother s, when I was a teenager. It was she who trained the ivy to weave through the black curls of the heavy wrought-iron screen that divided the room. The space that had been her office was now a cheerful nook for my youngest son. I tied wooden toys, stuffed animals, and colorful origami shapes to his side o£ the screen, and I covered the walls with quilts and children's paintings. When he awakened during the night, I lulled him back to sleep in the same chair that I had rocked his brothers and sisters in, back at The Haven. I don't know many lullabies, so I sang Christmas carols.

  In April 1980, a phone call from Woody Allen's secretary made my stomach jump. She asked if I would have lunch with Mr. AUen. We set the date for the following week, April 17, at one o'clock.

  **You never heard of Lutece!" Tonv Perkins was incredulous. Every night we waited in our positions onstage for five or so minutes before the curtain rose and the play began. That was the time when we exchanged our news. "It's only the 7nost chic restaurant in New York City! What are you going to wear?"

  "He doesn't care about clothes, does he?" I asked, thinking of Diane Keaton's thrift-shop ensemble in Annie Hall, and his own casual rumpled look.

  "Are you kiddingY' snorted Tony, who knew Woody Allen.

  I was a little fidgety on the morning of the 17th, so I set out on foot, with my hair still wet, at 10:30 A.M. For a

  second the clothes thing threw me, but in the end I dressed warmly in a skirt and an Irish sweater, with sensible shoes, leggings, and socks. It was a brisk, windy day.

  At one on the dot the maitre d' led me to the table where Woody Allen waited, wide-eyed behind black-rimmed glasses. He was handsomely dressed in an unrum-pled tweed jacket and tie.

  The wine was 1949 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. As it sank in its bottle, we traded fragments of our respective histories. He asked many questions, and before I knew it we were talking about Mozart, and Mahler's slow movements, Schubert, the Heifetz recording of the Korngold, Plato, Christianity and Jefferson, Walter Kaufmann as a guide through existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, the poems of Yeats, my children, and my lifelong passionate albeit imaginary relationship with James Agee, who died before I could meet him but whose wife had actually been named Mia. Floodgates opened; it had been so long since I had shared these sorts of thoughts. He too loved Yeats and Mahler's slow movements, and I hadn't known he played the clarinet, and I had never heard of Sidney Bechet or Jelly Roll Morton or Johnny Dodds, but I couldn't wait. And so It went.

  When we left the restaurant it was dark outside. A chubby uniformed chauffeur named Don was opening the door of a white Rolls Royce. Woody offered to take me home. During the ten-minute drive, he said he would be in touch when he returned from Paris the following week, if I liked. I told him yes.

  Less than a week later, his secretary called to propose a dinner date for Sunday, when there was no performance of the play. This set the pattern for the next months; each week his secretary would call to confirm the date and time. The fact that he never phoned me himself made things a little strange. But instead of talking on the phone, we left notes and small gifts with each other's doormen. Two

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  records arrived with a note explaining that the Bach, second selection, and the second movement of Stravinsky's Concerto in D for Strings, contained his favorite slow movements. Another time it was the Apollo Suite, with the notation "great." There were antique postcards, a slide of a frog's foot, and a poem by E. E. Cummings:

  somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

  any experience,your eyes have their silence:

  in your most frail gesture are things
which enclose me,

  or which i cannot touch because they are too near . . .

  In the beginning his name felt awkward to me: "Woody." It seemed extreme, and it didn't feel quite real, perhaps because it wasn't. His actual name was Allan Konigsberg. So I asked him, "What do I call you?" hoping maybe he would want me to call him Allan or something. But he said, "I would be pleased if you would call me 'Woody.' "

  He thought my name was awkward too. Sometimes I heard him refer to me by my name when he couldn't make the point with "she" or "her"—but he never ever directly called me Mia.

  It was hard work keeping Romantic Comedy fresh for so many months, but all in all I was enjoying the run. Woody had a soft spot for thirties-style comedies, so he came to see the play and liked it very much. The whole company knew I was nuts about him.

  Sunday nights flew by too quickly. When the waiters began loudly turning chairs up onto the tabletops, we took our cue to leave the restaurant.

  I cant wait to see you! I wrote to him.

  One summer night, as I stood in the wings o^ the Barry-more Theater waiting to make a second-act entrance, my dresser, Madeleine, rushed up. "It's from Woody Allen.'" she whispered excitedly, putting an envelope into my hands. "His chauffeur is here." On a plain white card Woody wrote

  WHATFALLSAWAY Z77

  that Sunday was too long to wait, and he asked if I would join him after the following evening's show. It promised to be a clear night and we could go up on his terrace and look at the stars. Yes, I scribbled back.

  With that we began seeing each other more frequently. We went to museums and movies and the opera. We walked all over the city with the white Rolls Royce to meet us at our destinations. He showed me the New York he loved: high on a clock tower with a heart-stopping view, he took two wineglasses and a bottle of Chateau Margaux out of a paper bag. It was as if I had stepped into a Woody Allen movie. He was more serious, less humorous, far more confident than in his films; but, I thought, more attractive, more interesting.

  My new son Moses was an eager, affectionate, cheerful little fellow with an irresistible smile and a passion for bugs. Before he could be fitted for a brace or begin physical therapy, he needed to have an operation on his leg—the first of two—that he endured without complaint, along with months in a cast, and six years of physical therapy and speech therapy. Woody had not yet met any of my children.

  In August 1980, I was the one in the hospital—for major abdominal surgery, my fourth, for complications resulting from the peritonitis in 1974. My stomach pains forced Woody and me to leave Rao's restaurant before we had finished our dinner. Later that night I checked in to the emergency room at New York Hospital.

  During my second week in the hospital Woody came to see me and, for the first time, he telephoned me. After that, while I was convalescing on Martha's Vineyard with the children, he called two or three times every day. While on the phone to Woody, I suddenly became aware of the din around me, something I was normally oblivious to. I was, of course, acutely aware that he had lived his forty-five years

  entirely without children. He had never dated a woman with even one child. As he put it, "I have zero interest m kids." And if that wasn't clear enough, he talked about his sister, who also lived in Manhattan, with whom he had shared an unusually close childhood. He spoke to her on the phone; he loved her, and he helped her financially, but he avoided her company. He described her as "pushy," and as an example he told me about her unwelcome and futile efforts to involve him with her children when they were younger.

  The previous year on Martha's Vineyard had given me time to reflect, in every season and in every conceivable frame of mind. As each attempt to rehabilitate my marriage had failed, I was left with few illusions. I was a smgle mother with seven young children; wonderful as they indeed were, I understood it was unlikely that I would ever again meet a man who would want to become seriously involved with me. That is not to say I was without hope—but hopes are not expectations.

  The children and I returned to my mother's apartment in the fall of 1980. I'd played out my run in Romantic Comedy^ and even though it was difficult to leave my home on the Vineyard, I went back to New York because of my feelings for Woody.

  He lived in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue directly opposite my apartment, less than a mile across Central Park. We blinked our lights at each other, waved through binoculars, and shook towels out the windows. This relationship, I remember thinking, will be the best of my life. We will be together forever.

  My children met Woody on an Indian-summer afternoon in late September 1980. The kids and I were returning from the playground, just entenng the lobby of our building, when he arrived early to take me for a walk; they

  were holding dripping chocolate ict cream cones, and they all had on hats. Somehow it seemed as if there were more of them when they were wearing hats and eating ice cream. Seven small faces stared up at him: Matthew and Sascha were ten, Soon-Yi was seven going on eight (her age was finally determined through the standard method of X-raying her wrists). Lark was seven, Daisy and Fletcher were six, and Moses, covered with ice cream in his stroller, was two and a half. By then even the littlest kids knew Woody meant a lot to me, so they were curious and sweet and shy with him.

  He said my kids were "very cute," and before spring arrived we were all staying at his place on Friday and Saturday nights. At first we carried our stuff back and forth across the park with us: sleeping bags, stuffed animals, pajamas, dolls, toy cars, stamp collections, videotapes, Lego, board ^ames, puzzles, art supplies, books, and snacks. In time, shelves appeared in the back bedroom, then a bunk bed, and we began to leave things there. The kids brought their friends along for sleep-overs. My robe hung in his bathroom. He gave me my own drawer. My hairbrush, soap, and shampoo took their place alongside Diane Keaton's (his girlfriend from more than a decade earlier), which I never presumed to touch, in the cabinet above the sink.

  On Saturday and Sunday mornings, at around seven-thirty, Woody and I would go for a walk. When we returned, I would get the kids ready, put the room where they slept back in order, and then we would go back to our own apartment, where I would make pancakes for breakfast. Woody wanted to be alone to exercise, see his analyst, write, and practice his clarinet. The kids had their play dates, piano lessons, cheeseburger lunches on Columbus Avenue, and excursions to the playground or the Museum of Natural History.

  Woody was never comfortable with the children, but in his way, he tried. He traded his white Rolls for a black

  stretch limo big enough to transport us all. On weekend afternoons throughout the fall and winter, he had movies screened for them at his Park Avenue editing rooms. While they polished off deep bowls full of candy left for them by Woody's assistant, they watched the movies of Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Chaplin, Gary Grant, Frank Gapra, John Ford, and every science-fiction and kids' classic right up to the latest Disney and Spielberg. I once left: Daisy and Fletcher with him at his apartment while I went to the doctor. When I returned less than an hour later, he was throwing his hats and gloves into the fire. The kids were ecstatic. "I ran out of things to do," he shrugged.

  A postcard, circa 1935, arrived from across the park. It pictured a man in a bowler hat with five small children. Over the top was printed, YOUR FUTURE HUSBAND—YOUR FUTURE CHILDREN.

  A French cook named Golette worked for Woody full-time, but he preferred to eat out, except for Mondays, when he played clarinet at an East Side pub, and Sundays, when we had Ghinese take-out together with the children in my kitchen. He never ate our food or used our plates or utensils because of the cats, who had been known to jump onto the table. He couldn't stand the cats.

  I missed our first, long dinner dates in quiet restaurants, when we talked until the waiters dislodged us. Now, as had been his custom for years before we met, we joined Jean Doumanian and her boyfriend for dinner. Woody had met Jean in Ghicago when he was a stand-up comedian playing nightclubs; she and her then-husband were fans
who kept returning to catch his show. I had been aware of her importance in Woody's life, and I was curious to meet her, but that didn't happen for the first six or more months that we

  were dating. In those early days we kept to ourselves, steering clear of high-profile restaurants like Elaine's. So nothing appeared in the gossip columns until the night a photographer came blazing into La Grenouille restaurant. That was when I swallowed my ring.

  Although we had dinner with Jean several times a week for almost a dozen years, I never became comfortable with her. Not that she wasn't nice to me, but she had been close to Woody for so long, they talked on the phone several times a day, and she was older than Woody, who was himself a decade my senior. The whole package was intimidating: her breezy, seamless confidence, well-timed remarks, chic all-black wardrobe, perfectly styled black hair, dark eyes, and thin lips on a chalk-white face. Her show-busmess anecdotes were the latest, her other interests were exercise, health food, massages, and acupuncture. I didn't know what to talk to her about.

  When Woody suffered from a kind of chronic sty that none of his doctors could cure, Jean brought her herbalist up from Chinatown to the Fifth Avenue penthouse. The old fellow produced a cat's whisker and stuck it into Woody's tear ducts: it had no effect at all on the sties. This departure from traditional medicine aside, Woody Allen was connected to his doctors like no one I ever heard of: he had a doctor for every single part of his body. He carried around his doctors' home numbers, he rushed to the doctor before a twinge could reach symptom status. If he felt the least bit unwell, he would take his temperature at ten-minute intervals. He kept his own thermometer at my apartment. In his pocket he carried a silver box full of pills for any conceivable ailment. Whenever one of his movies came out, he'd have a screening for his doctors and their wives. It was called "the doctors' screening," and the room was always full.