What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  The success or failure of our movies had little impact on our, or at least my, consciousness, except of course for the New York Times review, which Woody usually had some inside word on, and which he read the minute it hit the stands. The relationships he cultivated on the Times were important too. We had dinner with the major critics of Time and Newsweek. But Woody reserved special contempt for film critics on television. "The Chicago morons" was his label for one high-profile pair. We were always at work on the next project when a film came out, and everyone around us knew not to mention reviews in our presence. Woody advised me not to read them. "J^st keep your head down and do good work," he said.

  Other films were offered to me during those years, even some good ones. But with our schedule, and reshoots all through the year, it would have been difficult to take on a separate project. My availability enabled Woody to rewrite and reshoot our scenes whenever he wanted. And truthfully I didn't have much ambition beyond what we were doing. I just wanted to be with him and my kids, not interrupt our routine, and to do good work. I must have been the envy of every actor in the land. If there was a drawback, I didn't see it.

  Most of the films we made together were artistic and

  critical successes. A couple were even commercial successes. One of these was Hannah and Her Sisters^ which Woody described as "middlebrow." Although the reshoots on Hannah were extensive, he never came up with an ending that satisfied him. Its success confirmed his feelings about its essential mediocrity. "If one of my films is widely accepted," he said, "I am immediately suspicious of it."

  His Oscar and other prizes were kept at his parents' house. "The whole concept of awards and being honored is silly," he said. "It's a popularity contest." The fact that Gordon Willis was not even nominated for his superb work on The Godfather and Manhattan was the example Woody always fumed about. So awards had no significance in our lives. I only found out on the day of the broadcast that I had been nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress (for one of the Roses, I forget which), and then only because Woody asked me which photograph they should use on television when they read my name. We didn't watch the show: by dinnertime that night we'd forgotten all about it.

  "What would you think about us havmg a baby?" I asked when we had completed Zelig.

  After the little cough he gave when he was uncomfortable, he said without looking at me, "Well, I don't know. I would have to think about it." Which meant he would discuss it with his therapist. There were three of us in the relationship: Woody, his shrink, and me. No decisions were ever made without her. He didn't even buy sheets without talking to her. I know that part of several sessions went into his switch from polyester-satin to cotton.

  Eventually, with the understanding that I would be responsible for the baby in every way, he (they) agreed.

  That Woody had been in psychoanalysis two or three times a week for about thirty years was astonishing to me. I myself had never been to any kind of psychiatrist, and I was

  highly skeptical. Woody had no problem admitting that for him therapy was "a crutch," and he credited it with enabling him to work as productively as he had. I couldn't argue with that.

  The subject of marriage came up a few times over the years. "It's just a piece of paper," he would say. And intellectually I could see that. His was the more evolved position. Our relationship had to be truer, purer, more responsible, more committed, hetteVj because it stood solely on the quality of its own trust and love. Ours, surely, was the highest form of marriage. He was never kinder or more reassuring than in those moments of my insecurity. "Do I not behave as if we are married?" he would ask, and I would answer that he did. The "piece of paper" was irrelevant. Of course. And the dark thoughts would scamper away.

  In 1985 Eileen got sick. She sent me a picture of herself taken in the hospital: there was a tube coming out of her nose, a shower cap on her head, and she had sores all over her mouth with yellowish cream on them. She didn't have her teeth in and she was laughing into the mirror. That same week someone called to tell me that she had died.

  I went to the funeral parlor to say good-bye. I worried that they might have fixed her face funny, put makeup on her, or given her a strange smile or something. She looked all right; dead, but all right. She was wearing her good, shiny blue dress, the one she'd worn the night she came to see me on Broadway, and I wondered how they got it on her. Someone once told me that undertakers cut clothes right up the back so they can put them on you after you're stiff. Eileen wouldn't have liked her best blue dress being cut. And she wouldn't have liked the idea of lying around with her eyes closed in front of her friends either. I put my hand on her hand, which was room temperature, and I

  thought, Good-bye Eileen, I have loved you all my life, and I will love you until my last thought.

  WAFP 1984-85 began like all the other WAFPs: weighing one idea against another. After endless talk over many months, he finally settled on a subject that had long intrigued him—sisters. He had been close to Janet Margolin, his leading lady in Take the Money and Run, and her two sisters; then with Diane Keaton and her two sisters; and now there was me and my three sisters. My youngest sister Tisa had even played a role in his film Manhattan. While we walked, worked, ate, slept, and lived our lives, the story of Hannah was fleshed out, detail by familiar detail.

  Fmally he placed a fresh script in my hands with instructions that I could play whichever sister I wanted, but he felt I should be Hannah, the more complex and enigmatic of the sisters, he said, whose stillness and internal strength he likened to the quality Al Pacino projected in The Godfather.

  It was the first time I criticized one of his scripts. To me, the characters seemed self-indulgent and dissolute in predictable ways. The script was wordy but it said nothing. Woody didn't disagree, and tried to switch over to the alternative idea (which might have been a murder mystery, I forget), but preproduction was already in progress and we had to proceed. It was my mother's stunned, chill reaction to the script that enabled me to see how he had taken many of the personal circumstances and themes of our lives, and, it seemed, had distorted them into cartoonish characterizations.

  At the same time he was my partner. I loved him. I could trust him with my life. And he was a writer: this is what writers do. All is grist for the mill. Relatives have always grumbled. He had taken the ordinary stuff of our lives and lifiied It into art. We were honored and outraged.

  And a small sick feeling stirred deep inside me. What I

  shared with nobody was my fear that Hannah and Her Sisters had openly and clearly spelled out his feelings for my sister. But this was fiction, I told myself, or at most a fantasy m-spired by passing thoughts. Even President Carter had fantasies. And Woody was a morally superior person. Besides, my sister was now happily married with a newborn baby, mv godson. So I put those thoughts out of my mind. My mother and I played our mother-daughter roles, and she was fabulous. My old friend Michael Came, who five years earlier had introduced Woody and me, played my husband.

  Much o^ Hannah was filmed in my own apartment, which we were also living in—the children and I, Mary the dog, a cat, three chinchillas, two hamsters, six mice, assorted fish, a canary, and Edna the parrot. The place was pandemonium. The rooms were clogged with equipment, forty people arrived at dawn crowding into any available space, our personal treasures were spirited away to who-knew-where. The kitchen was an active set for weeks (we ordered out). Some nights I literally couldn't find my bed. In its own way it was a little Zen lesson—a shove toward acceptance and letting go, finding serenity in the center of chaos.

  It was strange to be shooting scenes in my own rooms— my kitchen, my pots, my own kids saying lines, Michael Came in my bathroom, wearing a robe, rummaging through my medicine cabinet. Or me lying in my own bed kissing Michael, with Woody watching.

  Years later, I was in bed late at night flicking through the channels, and just at that moment I happened to catch my bedroom on television, and the same bed I was actually lying on, a
nd me. Even my television was on television. I think I screamed.

  The commotion, and not being able to find anything, sometimes got me a little crazy. But the kids loved it. All of them appear in the movie. Moses, Fletcher, and Daisy played my screen children, so they got to stay home from

  school (they were tutored). The cat has never been the same.

  Two years had passed and still we had not conceived a child. I was nearly forty. The notion of adoption was not appealing to Woody, but finally, after I assured him once again that the child would be entirely my responsibility, and he told me it would not end our relationship, I applied to adopt a child.

  But it was not a topic we could discuss. During the waiting period, as we walked in Central Park, in a swell of excitement and against my better judgment, I began babbling about the baby, and he cut me off. "Look, I don't care about the baby. What I care about is my work."

  Given everything he had said, and the awful, undeniable fact that he had "zero interest" in my seven children, who were as dear as any on earth and who one by one had given up trying to win his heart; given all this, I don't know how I still hoped that he would love this child, that she would be the one to open his heart, and that through her, he would learn to love without suspicion; that through her, he would see that a person other than himself, with needs and interests distinct from his, can exist not as a threat, but as one worthy of respect and love. And discovering this, he would surely acknowledge all my children, he would see who they are as human souls, and in knowing them, how could he not love them? And then he would know all they mean to me, and finally he would understand who I am; and knowing my heart, he would feel safe and love me back with certainty. In loving this child, he would place her needs before his own—he would begin to hope on her behalf, and in doing that he would have access to a purer, deeper connection to life; and we would all be there together, a family. That is what I hoped.

  G hapter VI in e

  In the summer of 1985, newborn baby Dylan came home. It was no accident that she was a little blond girl—the kind of child, he said, he would be most inclined to view positively; although, he was careful to add, it was certainly no guarantee. Soon-Yi and I traveled to a state in the Midwest, and together we brought baby Dylan home to Frog Hollow.

  Since Moses was already two years old when he arrived, there had not been an infant in our family tor eleven years. Eight wondrous faces crowded around the wicker basket, we watched her in her dreams, and we watched her study the birch leaves moving against the summer sky. Moses and Fletcher, proud and careful, pulled her about the garden m their red wagon, padded now with the patchwork quilt I'd made for the twins, sixteen years earlier. I named her after Dylan Thomas, and Casey became her godmother.

  In the fall, when Woody and I went on our walks and discussed the upcoming WAFP, Radio

  Dcr)iSj baby Dylan nestled snugly in the pouch on my chest, so quiet and small he barely noticed her. In preparation for my role of Sally the cigarette girl, I took daily singing lessons with my new daughter in my arms. My teacher even remarked on her perfect pitch.

  By the time we began Radio Days that winter at Astoria Studios, Dylan was a serene and purposeful little girl with the beginnings of blond curls and a surprisingly raucous laugh. Even Woody was beginning to find her irresistible. It seemed to be the miracle I had hoped for. We shared our delight in the baby, and even discussed adopting a sister for her the following year.

  "It might make sense to find a place big enough for all of us," he said to me one day. "I could have my own floor or wing away from everybody, so I can work. The kids would love living in a house. It could be like in Meet Me in St. Louis."

  I proposed sharing my apartment, which was larger than his. But it wasn't nearly big enough, he said, and it wasn't on the East Side. I pointed out that if we got a place on the West Side, it would cost much less, and over the years I'd be able to pay him back for my half. I told him I'd feel better if I could do that, because if for some reason our living together didn't work out, I didn't want to have to pack up my eight children and move out. I didn't want to do that again, and I didn't want the kids to have to go through it either, because wherever we lived should be their home. So, if we ever decided to go back to living separately, I would do my best to pay him for the whole house. But places on the East Side, in the neighborhood he was talking about, cost many millions of dollars.

  "Keep your apartment as a backup," he said. I could see he was losing interest.

  "But that's just it: I wouldn't be able to keep it, it's 'rent stabilized,' " I heard myself yammering, a little too brightly. "If we're not living in it, if it's not our primary residence.

  the landlords can up the rent as high as they want. Our apartment's been in the family for twenty-somethmg years, it's a big deal to lose it. I'd never find another place big enough for all of us that's this affordable."

  "Well, you'll have to work that out," said Woody. Which I never managed to do.

  We had another talk about marriage, our second; eight or nine sentences was all, repeating what had been said before. Then I brought up the thing that worried me most: the thing that happened in front of the house that wasn't William Buckley's; and another time, when I didn't know the name of a certain kind of pasta; and again, when I was off in my estimate of the weather by only four degrees; and when I asked about a dream he'd had the previous night, when he had mumbled the words "Dolly Parton." Each of these times he had become so enraged, and his attacks were devastating. He always apologized afterward, but still, I was afraid it might happen again. If we were living together, it might happen more frequently, and maybe even worse. What if it got worse? And how can you avoid making someone angry when you don't have any idea what happened or why? And most important, what if he ever turned that anger on one of the kids?

  He promised me it would never happen again. Ever. And I could tell he meant it this time. So we began, cautiously, to look at big houses and double penthouse apartments on the East Side. We found the house of our dreams on Seventy-third Street: every room was fiUed with sunlight, and it had been built on two lots, so the garden was extra large—the kids would be able to go outside whenever they felt like it. They could make snowmen, we could plant flowers and vegetables, strawberries, and jasmine. What a different New York life it would be! Moses would collect bugs after school; he and Matthew would play chess under the apple tree; we would build a tree house; Lark would do her cartwheels on the grass; baby Dylan would have her

  very own swings and sandbox right here in Manhattan. I pictured the kids and their friends playing badminton, reading in the hammock, shooting basketball. Soon-Yi would find more four-leaf clovers, and my mom would come to visit. We'd all have lunch outside and then she'd play old songs on the grand piano while I made tea. Woody would have his private space for work, and his special bathroom, and a poolroom and a Ping-Pong table. We will be the Meet Me in St. Louis family. We will watch the children grow. From our places by the fire we'll talk and laugh and wonder and love until we are worn-out.

  Woody put in a bid to buy the house. Then, while we were dreaming, the owner changed his mind. We went on looking and working and living our lives in all the same ways with one small but growing difference, baby Dylan.

  Winter had set in when we began Radio Days in late 1985. Mv feet were blocks of ice, while in snappy, forties high heels I pamfully clomped the streets near Shubert Alley. Winds below zero froze my nylon stockings and silk dresses. With bright red lips and chattering teeth, I kissed a soldier in Grand Central Station. But mostly we were in Queens, at Astoria Studios. Fletcher, then eleven, was given a role that required him to be at work more than me, but on different days. Woody offered to bring him to and from the studio and assured me he would look after him there.

  I loved playing Sally, the airheaded cigarette girl, and it suited me fine that it wasn't a long part. I brought Dylan with me to work, but I preferred being at home with her. Times were good. When occasionally a small
cloud covered the sun, the powerful winds of our good fortune blew it quickly past; but it was strange, for that moment, how dark the clouds seemed in a perfect, clear sky.

  Fletcher was pale and quiet when Woody brought him home one evening. His ear ached, he said. He couldn't get

  warm and he was beyond hunger. They had been shooting outside all day on a rooftop. The forties-period costume Fletcher had to wear was scarcely effective against the wind and cold, and the scene had taken almost all day to shoot. Instead of breaking for lunch, cups of hot soup had been handed out to the crew, but nobody gave anythmg to Fletcher.

  It was the first time in our five and a half years together that I confronted Woody in real anger. It was unthinkable to me that he could have been there m his Eddie Bauer arctic gear, drinkmg hot soup, without any thought or feeling or sense of responsibility for Fletcher.

  Not two weeks later we had a similar conversation when he brought Fletcher home deeply upset after shooting. Woody had taken him to see dailies, a scene in which, as SaUy the cigarette girl, I came on to this guy, and he was all over me. There were two or three complicated shots, so a number of takes were printed, and it took a long time to view them all—an eternity, apparently, to my eleven-year-old son. And I knew just how he felt, having, as a child, watched my own mother in the arms of Joseph Gotten.

  Some days after that, with a face full of worry, Fletcher told me about an actress at work who was being affectionate in the extreme with Woody, which, come to think of it, had not escaped my attention when we were making Hannah. There was just a moment—a greeting she might have done differently if she'd seen me in the doorway. Except, of course, it was out of the question: she was so nice and he loved me more than ever, and he was top-drawer in every significant way, so I certainly didn't need to worry about her hanging around the editing room. It was understandable: she was trymg to learn the trade, he said, so she could direct a movie herself someday. Besides, I do not rush to judgment. I block it out.