What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  The next WAFP, in 1987, was Another Woman, a film for which I had inadvertently provided the pivotal device. A year or so earlier. Woody and I had been sitting in my living room. I was staring at the fireplace, thinking about how fascinating apartment buildings are, with people living their separate lives inches apart from one another. In fact, just on the other side of my own living-room wall, a renowned therapist conducted her sessions; some of her patients were acquaintances of ours, including Woody's agent. We used to see them in the hallway coming and going.

  "Wouldn't it be so cool to get one of those spy listening devices?" I said to Woody. "We could hear what they're saying through the wall."

  ''Would you want to define yourself as a person who would do that?" he asked disapprovingly.

  "God no, absolutely not, just joking." I felt like a worm. My unworthy thought was somewhat redeemed when the script of Another Woman was built around just such a situation.

  I was seven months pregnant when we began shooting Another Woman, and I worked right up until a week before the baby arrived. Gena Rowlands played the lead. Sadly, her husband, John Cassavetes, could not join her in New York for the filming; he was in California seriously ill with a liver disease. Woodv persuaded my old friend Sven Nykvist to shoot the film; he had been Ingmar Bergman's cinematogra-pher on so many of Woody's favorite films.

  As my body expanded I felt fat, undesirable, and exhausted. Woody seemed put off by my condition; he never touched my stomach, or felt the baby kick, or tried to hear his heartbeat. In fact he scarcely mentioned the baby. So I wasn't surprised when he declined to be my Lamaze coach. Casey took the classes with me.

  On December 19, 1987, the baby was delivered by cesarean section. To my great surprise. Woody agreed to be in the operating room with the provision that if it got too disgusting, he wouldn't stay. I wouldn't have blamed him, but I think I hung on to his hand so tight he probably couldn't leave. He was by my side even when the epidural wore off while they were cutting me open.

  We called our not-so-tiny (nine pounds, four ounces) baby Satchel, after Satchel Paige the ballplayer. The name was Woody's suggestion. I wasn't sure about it, but it was better than Ingmar, which was his first choice.

  On the second day of my stay in the hospital I was given a form, the umpteenth, which I filled out and gave back. The next morning my doctor came into the room looking slightly embarrassed to say that unfortunately I couldn't legally fill out the box marked 'Tather" because I wasn't

  married. If I wanted a father listed on the certificate, I would have to give the form to that person, and he could have his name put on it. If he wished. The doctor, a nice m^an, gave me back the original form along with a new, blank one, and he apologized again. I said. Oh I see, I'm sorry, no problem.

  I didn't know whether Woody would want his name on the form or not. I decided I would pick a moment to give him the form and just tell him it was an option. No big deal. Whatever. I hated the form.

  Later that week I gave it to him. He said he'd have his lawyer deal with it.

  I had never spent even one night away from Dylan and I was eager to get back home. Christmas is a Very Big Deal in our family and there were only a few days left. Because of the fall work schedule, I always began shopping and organizing in August. So the lists were already checked off, the tree was trimmed, the stockings were hung, and presents were in giant labeled bags hidden in my closet. Mavis would make her stuffing, and there was nothing left to do until Christmas Eve.

  During the operation I had lost more blood than was usual; I felt as if I'd spent a week with vampires. The doctor told me I could go home on the morning of the third day, provided I had a hospital nurse around-the-clock for a week.

  "What's that for?" Woody asked the nurse with the wheelchair when the day arrived for me to go home.

  "It's to take her downstairs," she replied.

  "We don't need it," he said. I was all stooped over, and I couldn't straighten up, my stomach hurt so much. Step by tiny step we made it to the car, settled ourselves into the back, and started home.

  "Please," I begged the driver, "go slow." And I cried all the way up First Avenue.

  One of my eight children was entering Yale and another was about to begin nursery school. I had been picking up pieces of Lego for almost two decades.

  So when I had entered the hospital, it was with confidence that I'd bounce back from the cesarean in no time. I would pouch my baby and take him everywhere. This baby I would nurse as long as he wanted, like mothers do all over the world. The other kids would accept and adore him just as they had Dylan, who for months now had been laughing at the thumps from my stomach. "Mjy baby," said Dylan as she folded the tmy clothes and put them into freshly lined drawers. She could hardly wait to help me dress and bathe the new baby. We taked about how she would curl up beside me while I read to her like always, and "her" baby would sleep peacefully in her arms along with her teddy, Flo-Bear.

  But the baby screamed day and night. When sleep overtook him for scant minutes at a stretch, he jumped himself awake in full cry. It was colic, said Dr. Stone, he was a "high-needs baby," he had an "immature nervous system." He was exhausting.

  "Take him outside for a walk," the doctor finally suggested.

  "Throw him away," wailed Dylan, fed up with so much howling. I would put on his woolly hat, pop him into the pouch, strap him onto any willing brother or sister, zip a goose-down jacket over the two, and send them out the door. As the elevator descended and the screams faded, I fell back in bed. Never had I been so tired.

  At night I put Dylan's favorite part of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the stereo, and I lay on her bed with my arms around her, and told her how I loved her, and that I was eating my spinach, so soon I'd be as strong as Popeye, and we would ride on the merry-go-round, and ice-skate in

  Central Park, and visit the elephants at the museum. Then just when the flowers are opening, we will go to Frog Hollow, and a beautiful giant butterfly will be waitmg in the field. We'll climb on its back and fly up into the sky where we can bounce on pmk clouds with baby angels and slide on the pieces of rainbow they keep up there. And our own baby will stop his crying: he'll look around, and when his tears are dry, he will smile, he'll be so happy to see us all, especially Dylan.

  Dylan and I had planned for this to be our special shared time, but now I could barely stand up, and Woody kept taking her off to other rooms. He rarely came in to see me and he hardly glanced at the new baby. He never held or touched him, and he didn't seem to like me nursing him. He seemed stern—or was it angry? It made me cry.

  The doctor told me to eat meat for anemia, so Woody brought me steaks. "Thank you," I said, "and thank you for offering to pay for five days of a private nurse. You've done these nice things for me, but you're so cold."

  This was a mistake, because he shouted, ^'That's a lie, that's an out-and-out lie!"

  Scared in my bed, I said, "I'm sorry, I just meant I need you to be kinder. I feel you don't love me anymore."

  But he was on his way out of the room. "Please leave Dylan with me," I called after him. "Every time you come over, you take her away from my room. No, don't go. I'm sorry. It's the hormones, or the operation, or it's that I haven't slept in weeks, the baby cries all the time. I don't know what it is, but I'm sorry."

  Less than a month after the birth I was back in the camper with Dylan and Satchel, for reshoots—now with a pillow to replicate my pregnant stomach. My costumes were adjusted to accommodate nursing the baby. At that moment I would have given almost anything not to have had to work, but at least my part wasn't huge. I never saw the

  movie, or Nnv York Stories, which followed immediately. All I remember about makmg them is wanting to go home.

  The baby finally stopped crying, and eventually I was almost as strong as Popeye.

  In the summer of 1988 the whole family went on another trip. We visited Grieg's birthplace m Norway, and the Munch museum, and we wandered aimlessly around Helsinki. The center
piece of the trip, our visit to the Soviet Union, lasted less than twenty-four hours. Woody was so unnerved by the way of things there—the lines for tour buses and terrible food, the fact that he was just another tourist in Leningrad. So he told his assistant to get us out on the next Jtight, he didn't care where to.

  Two weeks later we were in London, heading home. The breast pocket of his rumpled, black linen jacket was bulgmg with stationery from hotels in Norway, Helsinki, Stockholm, Salzsburg, Copenhagen, Rome, Venice, Lake Como, and London on which Woody had written the first draft of Crimes and Misdemeanors.

  In the fall of 1988 we began Crimes and Misdemeanors (or, as Moses would pronounce it, "Crimes and Mister Mean-ers"), a chillmg but brilliant movie about getting away with murder, conscience-free. There were the usual problems with the script, especially the section involving Woody and me. He rewrote and reshot all of our scenes and at least a third of the rest of the movie.

  Salvador Dali died early in 1989. I hadn't seen him since I visited him and Gala at the St. Regis Hotel in 1980, when he lowered himself to his knees and kissed my hand, and then had trouble rising to his feet. But on Palm Sunday, every year smce 1966, I had received a telegram from him: each one said "Pakn Sunday," and some said it many times.

  I had not slept through the night m more than a year.

  But Satchel, though nocturnal, was a blessing: an affectionate, thoroughly rewarding little boy, and a silver-haired, blue-eyed replica of my brother Mike. He began to speak at seven months and was astoundingly articulate well before his first birthday. Even so. Woody remained indifferent, at best. Not entirely in jest, he referred to him as "the little bastard," or "the completely superfluous little bastard." to which the child responded with equal measures of indifference and hostility.

  In the summer of 1989 we all went to Europe again— Venice, Vienna, Rome, Switzerland, Belgium, and Paris, I think. To avoid the unpleasantness of airports, this year Woody chartered a private jet for the entire trip. Fresh gua-camole and chips were out on the table when we boarded the plane at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. The seats were huge and cushiony, the enchiladas (our food of choice for the flight) were tops; there were dozens of movies to choose from. You couldn't help feeling guilty at the luxury of it, but It sure was an easy way to travel. You come and go whenever you want (the crew stays in a hotel). Customs people come right on board to stamp passports.

  One major benefit of our summer travels en famille was that they seemed to have brought Woody closer to the older kids. Indeed, in 1990 he would suggest that I amend my will so that in the event of my death, the care and custody of all my minor children would be left to him. I thought it was a beautiful and brave and generous gesture for which I was immeasurably grateful. Immediately I redrafted my will, and delighted in the new relationships that were forming. I noticed Woody in conversations with Daisy, and even Soon-Yi seemed to be warming toward him. When he finally became more considerate with her, it was wonderful. There was no doubt in my mind that it would be good for her.

  Without complaint he attended Soon-Yi's sweet-sixteen party. And that year he began stopping by her desk as she

  did her homework in the evenings, before we went out to dinner. Now, whenever he came over, Soon-Yi would appear in the room. When he sat in the library watching baseball, basketball, and football on television, Soon-Yi sat quietly beside him as he explained the games to her. Her brothers and sisters began to tease her, saying she had a crush on him.

  For her next birthday Woody and I took her and a few of her friends to dinner at the Russian Tea Room, then we dropped them at Phantom of the Opera. Woody and I didn't go to the play, but he sent his limo to pick up the girls afterward. Soon-Yi's braces were off, and she was a lovely seventeen-year-old beginning her junior year at Marymount, an all-girls Catholic school on Fifth Avenue. An autographed picture of Fred Astaire hung by her bed. Her friends were already dating, but Soon-Yi showed little interest in that. She had never had a single date or even a phone call from a boy. She was a diligent worker in school and I was proud of her accomplishments, but privately I was beginning to wonder whether a coeducational school might not have been better for her.

  For years Woody had had four season tickets to the Knicks basketball games. Since I didn't much enjoy attending them, he usually went with other fHends, or, if the season was unexciting, he gave his seats to guys on the crew. Lark, Matthew, Daisy, and Moses were passionate basketball buffs, and over the years I had tactfully and unsuccessfully tried to get Woody to bring them to a game. So I was delighted when that year he asked if he could bring Soon-Yi to a Knicks game. After the third game, though, I suggested he invite Moses or Lark. They were dying to go, and it was only fair. So the next time, he took Lark and Moses to their very first game, along with Soon-Yi.

  It was around then that Soon-Yi developed another new interest; she began talking about modeling and auditioning for acting parts. But she had wanted to be a psychologist,

  and had never shown the slightest interest in acting, or even been in a school play. Acting is a tough business with lots of rejection built-in; I would have tried to dissuade any of mv children from entering it. I hoped they would find professions that were relatively solid. Soon-Yi was still in high school, with college ahead. I didn't want her trying to model—the values in that world are all screwed-up. I asked Woody to please not encourage her. But his casting director was already sending her on auditions.

  That fall, and through the winter of 1990, we shot Mkc^ my first major role since Satchel's birth. He still awoke during the night, and there were days when I came to work exhausted, but I was eager to be back on the job, excited about the movie and thrilled with my part, and I was going to be working with Joe Mantegna, Alec Baldwin, and Ber-nadette Peters. Again we reshot at least half of the movie as we went along, and, predictably, after the rough cut there were more reshoots. The ending was a problem.

  In the meantime Woody's lawyers weren't getting anywhere m their efforts to arrange for Woody to co-adopt Dylan. From time to time over the years he would bring a lawyer to the set or my apartment with papers for my signature. Before I signed anythmg, I always asked the same question: "I wouldn't be giving up any of my rights, would I?" And in chorus Woody and his lawyers would say, "No, of course not."

  But the fact that we weren't married seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle for the court—quietly I was relieved and hoped the issue would disappear. My concern about his behavior with Dylan, now five years old, his insistence that there was nothing unusual about it, and the unpleasantness my objections caused had created specific tensions between us. But I supposed that no relationship of ten years' duration was without its problems, and those

  tensions aside, our life was moving forward in all the same ways. The commitment of a decade together, I felt, had provided us with a permanent, solid base. If the pattern of our lives was in some respects less than ideal, it worked in other respects.

  "It's sort of like just enough," Woody told his biographer. "Perhaps if we were to live together or if we met at different times in our lives, it wouldn't work. But it seems to be just right. I have all the free time I want and it's quiet over here, and yet I get plenty of action over there. I think it's because we don't live together and that she has her own life completely and that I have mine, that we're able to maintain this relationship with a certain proper tension. If we got married years ago and lived together maybe now we'd be screaming, 'What have we gotten into?' These things are so exquisitely tuned. It's just luck . . . Mia's been a completely different kind of experience for me, because the predominant thing has been family . . . She's brought a completely different, meaningful dimension to my life. Yet the two of us have so little m common that it always amazes us.

  "I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early—five-thirty, six—and I love to eat out, la
te. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants, I like fancy places. She can't sleep with an air conditioner on, I can only sleep with an air conditioner on. She loves pets and animals, I hate pets and animals. She likes to spend tons of time with kids, I like to spend my time with work and only a limited time with kids. She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up Mount Kilimanjaro, I never want to go near those places. She has an optimistic, yea-saymg feeling toward life itself, and I have a totally pessimistic, negative feeling. She likes the West Side of New York, I like the East Side of New York. She has raised nine

  children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day . . .

  "I can only think that what made us throw in our lot together is that the two of us met slightly later in life and that we both have our own developed lives—her with a major family and me with a career—and we don't share the same house. I'm able to live with it when she goes to the country for the summer. She's able to live with it that I don't. We both have our own lives and just enough intersection so that it's fun but not smothering."

  His biographer, Eric Lax, who hung around through five films over nearly four years, observed that "few married couples seem more married, however. They are in almost constant communication and there is what can only be called a sweetness about them; at the few parties they attend they usually shyly stand off in a corner, holding hands."

  During the summer of 1990 we all went to California and stayed at the Bel-Air Hotel while Woody shot Scenes from a Mall with Bette Midler. Maria Roach, my childhood neighbor and friend, and I took Woody on a tour of Beverly Hills. He was completely entranced, exploring our old haunts, and said over and over what a great movie the story of my life would make.