What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  The stockings were hung, all but one. The children were merry and eager, playing beside the tree. Hope leaped and flickered with the flames.

  The Connecticut state police continued their investigation, interviewing baby-sitters, all the children, our neighbors, doctors, and schoolteachers. To determine whether a criminal prosecution should be pursued, state's attorney Frank Maco referred Dylan to a team of two social workers and a pediatrician at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He asked them to "assess whether there were any impediments affecting the

  child's ability to accurately recall events related to the abuse claims, and whether a trial would put her at risk of further traumatization." While the Yale-New Haven report concluded that there had been no sexual abuse, the pediatrician who wrote the report never even met Dylan. The report was widely criticized, and state's attorney Maco publicly announced that he gave it "little weight" and that the criminal investigation of Woody Allen would continue.

  On March 19, 1993, with only two hours' notice, Woodys custody trial began before Justice Elliott Wilk in New York State Supreme Court. He was represented by six different law firms, led by a criminal attorney.

  In attempting to make the case that the children should be taken away from me. Woody took the stand as his own first witness. Early on, he and his attorneys tried to dismiss the issue of his affair with Soon-Yi. "I didn't envision that I would maintain necessarily a long relationship" with her, he testified, and "I felt nobody in the world would have any idea about it except Soon-Yi and myself." At which point the judge asked dryly, "Wasn't that enough? . . . That you would know that you were sleeping with your children's sister?"

  "No, I didn't see it that way," Woody replied. "She was an adopted child and Dylan was an adopted child." He testified that my family was more like a "foster home" with kids from different parts of the world; that he "did not conceive of this as a sister relationship between the kids" because "a lot of kids were adopted and Soon-Yi was older."

  Woody talked about Satchel's negative attitude toward him and claimed that I was responsible for it. To demonstrate his point he submitted a drawing that he swore under oath was made by Satchel. It was a drawing of a heart with

  five faces inside and names beneath them: Satchel, Dylan, Moses, Mommy, and Daddy, drawn with glasses.

  But under intense and wily cross-examination, Woody grew increasingly flustered; then, in one of the most peculiar moments of the trial, he confessed that in fact he had drawn the entire picture himself.

  "You drew the heart?" asked my attorney, Eleanor Alter.

  "Yes," said Woody, "and put the faces of the family in it." Justice Wilk rose out of his chair to peer at the drawing Woody held.

  "You drew the faces of the family?" she asked again.

  "That's correct. And Satchel blackened my face out and he drew a heart and drew a line through it and wrote the word no, and crossed out my name."

  "So it wasn't accurate yesterday when you said it was a drawing by Satchel?"

  "Well, some of it is," Woody insisted stubbornly. "I just drew It and he crossed my face out."

  "But it was actually your drawing?"

  "This? Yes."

  In his redirect testimony the next morning he returned to the subject of the drawing. "Satchel blackened out the face," he said. "I drew the heart and inside the heart I put Satchel, Dylan, Moses, Mommy, and Daddy, because my practice was always to promulgate for Satchel some kind of warmth and respect for his mother and for his, for you know, Dylan and for Moses. And Satchel looked at the heart and then blackened my face out, eliminated it, blackened out the word Daddy, eliminated it, drew his own heart with a line through it, a 'forbidden' line, and wrote the word no."

  He acknowledged that he had called the children "little bastards," but never "in the pejorative sense." I listened to him deny pushing Dylan's face into a plate of hot spaghetti —^an incident witnessed by most of our family. He denied twisting Satchel's leg. He denied that he'd had sex with

  Soon-Yi while Dylan was in the apartment, or at any time before the adoptions of Dylan and Moses.

  Asked whether he considered Moses, Dylan, and Satchel to be brothers and sister, he replied, "I think in a certain way they are brothers and sisters. It's not an easy question, not in the traditional sense, not in the way I am with my sister, no. They are not brothers and sisters. There is a difference between a biological brother and sister and adopted brothers and sisters." Then he conceded that Moses did consider Matthew his brother, and Satchel his brother, and Daisy, Lark, and Soon-Yi his sisters. He reluctantly admitted that Dylan's favorite person in the world, next to her mom, was her sister Lark. Further questioning revealed that he knew next to nothing about the lives of the children he sought custody of: he did not know their friends, their teachers, their doctors, or even the names of their pets. He had testified that there was a "special arrangement" for Moses's tuition; under cross-examination he admitted that "the arrangement was that Miss Farrow pay for It."

  Over his days on the stand, Woody became increasingly inarticulate. The New York Times observed that "on his first day of testimony, he seemed relaxed, one arm draped over the back of his chair giving answers that were lengthy, conversational, even funny. But yesterday he spoke quietly, sometimes mumbling, often asked that questions be repeated, and at times searched in vain for a way to phrase his answers." On the last day of his three days of testimony, the Times noted that "Mr. Allen sat on the stand with the hunched-over posture of someone who half-hoped to disappear by scrunchmg up into a small ball. He found it difficult to remember details and had to refer to printed transcripts, taking off his glasses and bringing his nose in contact with the paper, looking remarkably like a befuddled old man."

  Without respect for truth, he took the intimate mo-

  ments of my pain and shock and horror and spun them into grotesque anecdotes for strangers. While I watched him talking, talking on the witness stand, I thought I saw a strange thing: like Clark Kent pulling apart his shirt, Woody opened his chest with his two hands and inside, where a heart and soul and conscience ought to be, were entrails, and dark things burrowing, unaccustomed to the light.

  Then his attorneys called me to the stand. According to the Mw York Times, "Elkin Abramowitz, representing Mr. Allen in his custody suit against Mia Farrow, tried to portray her as a woman so wounded by Mr. Allen's affair with her adopted daughter that she would stop at nothing to strike back: a devious, manipulative woman whose thirst for vengeance had turned her into a howling fury. But someone slipped a different Ms. Farrow into the witness box. The woman who calmly answered Mr. Abramowitz's questions throughout a long, often tedious day looked like a Roman Catholic schoolgirl . . . The stricken look with which she recounted the demise of her relationship imposed a kind of respectful silence on the courtroom . . . Even the din of the construction work outside the building seemed to halt when Ms. Farrow described the cooling of Mr. Allen's affection."

  Woody brought forth his witnesses: a handful of employees, followed by shrink upon shrink upon shrink. Secure in their Freudian castles in a gray Jungian jungle, they streamed their jargon like television cult leaders who know their scriptures too well. While the press dozed, I wandered my own bleak terrain, and all the shrinks blurred into one fuzzy Babylonian ball.

  During the six weeks of testimony, not one of his witnesses testified that Woody Allen should be granted custody. None of the mental-health professionals had ever dealt with a situation in which the children were forced to confront an ongoing sexual relationship between their father

  and their sister. One volunteered that m these circumstances, "We're flying by the seat of our pants."

  The judge informed us that the decision would be handed down in several weeks—one morning before eleven o'clock —so we shouldn't sit by the phone all day. Throughout the trial my lawyer reassured me continually that Woody had no chance of obtaining custody, that he had not remotely succeeded m proving me an unfit mother, and that no judge would take
three children away from their siblings to live with a father who was living with their sister. Editorials and countless letters of support from all over the country reinforced her assurances. Still, I never stopped worrying. If he were awarded custody, what would I do? I knew that if Moses, Dylan, and Satchel were forced to live with Woody Allen, it would destroy them. And what would happen to Tam and Isaiah? And what would then become of the other kids? Beyond that I couldn't think. My lawyer said that Woody's suit was so outrageous that he would surely be ordered to pay my legal fees, estimated at well over a million dollars that I didn't have. But what if she was wrong? The younger kids had only the vaguest notion of why I had been going to court. I didn't want to worry them. As they went about their days, I got myself an agent, and luck came through with a movie to be filmed in Ireland that coming summer; I even started learning my lines. When I couldn't sleep, I went into the nursery to watch the children safe in slumber.

  Malignant specters of the dark nights move into familiar positions. Hounds tug on taut leather lines, howling horrible. While the children sleep I dream of Ireland awakening in gentle light; gray stone walls hemming the damp fields, sheep across the stretch of the Wicklow Mountains and the

  glowering hills of Connemara; apples in the branches near Inistioge; oars dip the sea at Ballyhack; the blue-eyed daughters of Ballyknocken trudge to school.

  A shy new moon slips into a starless sky. A cough stirs the dozy parrot—his beaky profile gives a one-eyed stare. My silver-haired son comes wordlessly in small steps to lie beside me; blue veins beneath marble.

  I rise to rock the baby Isaiah, his eyes are drowsy, opal seas. I cup the metal curls and rock him till his breath evens and the small fist falls from my shoulder. Then I lay him back in his crib and return to my big bed to gather the white child in my arms. Him too I place in the cot, beside his brother, and both are asleep in the nursery light.

  These several things I do and then I lie down to push back the scorched imprints of the long day.

  On the weekends we drove to Frog Hollow, and before two weeks had passed, I found myself watching the telephone in the mornings from ten until eleven. The older kids called me from their schools to see if there had been any word. Every day I reassured them that all would be well, that nothing would tear us apart. Our last shred of trust hung in the space between Justice Elliott Wilk and my family.

  On the morning of June 7 the phone rang. I picked it up. My lawyer, Eleanor Alter, was in a phone booth at the courthouse. "We won,'* she said. "We won!"

  I rushed over to her office and there I sat down to read the lengthy judgment, which addressed the many complicated issues that the custody trial had unearthed. In his state supreme court decision,* Justice Wilk determined that:

  • See Appendix for the entire decision.

  WOODY ALLEN

  • Mr. Allen has demonstrated no parenting skills that would qualify him as an adequate custodian for Moses, Dylan, and Satchel.

  • He showed no understanding that the bonds developed between adoptive brothers and sisters are no less worthy of respect and protection than those between biological siblings.

  • Mr. Allen's deficiencies as a custodial parent are magnified by his affair with Soon-Yi . . . Having isolated Soon-Yi from her family, he left her with no visible support system. He had no consideration for the consequences to her, to Ms. Farrow, to the Previn children for whom he cared little, or to his own children for whom he professes love.

  • Mr. Allen's response to Dylan's claim of sexual abuse was an attack upon Ms. Farrow, whose parenting ability and emotional stability he impugned without the support of any credible evidence. His trial strategy has been to separate his children from their brothers and sisters; to turn the children against their mother; to divide adopted children from biological children.

  • His self-absorption, his lack of judgment and his commitment to his divisive assault, thereby impeding the healing of the mjuries he has already caused, warrant a careful monitoring of his future contact with the children.

  MIA FARROW

  • Few relationships and fewer families can easily bear the microscopic exammation to which Ms. Farrow and her children have been subjected. It is evident that she loves children and has devoted a significant portion of her emotional and

  material wealth to their upbringing . . . She is sensitive to the needs of her children, respectful of their opinions, honest with them and quick to address their problems.

  • There is no credible evidence to support Mr. Allen's contention that Ms. Farrow coached Dylan or that Ms. Farrow acted upon a desire for revenge against him for seducing Soon-Yi. Mr. Allen's resort to the stereotypical "woman scorned" defense is an injudicious attempt to divert attention from his failure to act as a responsible parent and adult.

  • Ms. Farrow's refusal to permit Mr. Allen to visit with Dylan after August 4, 1992 was prudent. Pier willingness to allow Satchel to have regular supervised visitation with Mr. Allen reflects her understanding of the propriety of balancing Satchel's need for contact with his father against the danger of Mr. Allen's lack of parental judgment.

  • In a society where children are too often betrayed by adults who ignore or disbelieve their complaints of abuse, Ms. Farrow's determination to protect Dylan is commendable.

  • Ironically, Ms. Farrow's prmcipal shortcoming with respect to responsible parenting appears to have been her continued relationship with Mr. AUen.

  DYLAN FARROW

  • The credible testimony of Ms. Farrow, Dr. Coates, Dr. Leventhal and Mr. Allen does prove that Mr. Allen's behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.

  CUSTODY

  • None of the witnesses who testified on Mr. Allen's behalf provided credible evidence that he is an appropriate custodial parent. Indeed, none would venture an opinion that he should be granted custody. When asked, even Mr. Allen could not provide an acceptable reason for a change in custody.

  • After considering Ms. Farrow's position as the sole caretaker of the children, the satisfactory fashion in which she has fulfilled that function, the parties' pre-litigation acceptance that she continue in that capacity, and Mr. Allen's serious parental inadequacies, it is clear that the best interests of the children will be served by their continued custody with Ms. Farrow.

  VISITATION

  • The common theme of the testimony by the mental health witnesses is that Mr. AUen has inflicted serious damage on the children and that healing is necessary. Because, as Dr. Brodzinsky and Dr. Herman observed, this family is in an uncharted therapeutic area, where the course is uncertain and the benefits unknown, the visitation structure that will best promote the healing process and safeguard the children is elusive. What is clear is that Mr. Allen's lack of judgment, insight, and impulse control make normal noncustodial visitation with Dylan and Satchel too risky to the children's well-being to be permitted at this time.

  • It is unclear whether Mr. Allen will ever develop the insight and judgment necessary for him to relate to Dylan appropriately. My cau-

  tion is the product of Mr. Allen's demonstrated inability to understand the impact that his words and deeds have upon the emotional well being of his children.

  • I believe that Mr. Allen will use Satchel in an attempt to gain information about Dylan and to insinuate himself into her good graces. I believe that Mr. Allen will, if unsupervised, attempt to turn Satchel against the other members of his family. I believe Mr. Allen to be desirous of introducing Soon-Yi mto the visitation arrangement without concern for the effect on Satchel, Soon-Yi, or the other members of the Farrow family. In short, I believe Mr. Allen to be so self-absorbed, untrustworthy, and insensitive, that he should not be permitted to see Satchel without appropriate professional supervision until Mr. Allen demonstrates that supervision is no longer necessary.

  • Because Mr. Allen's position has no merit, he will bear the entire financial burden of this litigation.

  Afte
r so many months of fear and horror it would take time before I could believe we were really safe. I telephoned the older kids at their schools and returned to the apartment where the younger ones were just coming home. I held them tightly. They didn't know what this day meant or how much had been at stake. I never told them that they could have been taken away from me, and from their brothers and sisters. All those mornings when I had left them to go to court, I said only that there were "problems" that had to be dealt with; that Woody Allen was not happy about certain things, but that all would be well.

  That night Sascha and his wife Carrie, Matthew,

  Fletcher, Daisy, Lark, Moses, and I gathered around the table after the little kids went to sleep. The atmosphere was subdued as we shared our emotional exhaustion and immense relief. It had been so long since we had awakened to an ordinary day.

  G hapt er Twelve

  A month after the court's decision, Moses, Tarn, Dylan, Satchel, Isaiah, and I left for Ireland, where I would make Hugh Leonard's Widow's Peak in the Wicklow Mountarns. I joined an old ftiend ftom England, Joan Plowright, and two new ones, Natasha Richardson and her fiance, Liam Neeson, with whom I'd worked only a year and a half earlier, a lifetime ago it seemed, in Husbands and Wives. To focus on something other than the trial came as a relief and a pleasure, and after thirteen years with the same director and crew, it was exhilarating to be at work m an atmosphere so entirely different.

  I was returned that summer to long-ago memories of Ireland, of mystical tales told to me by Eileen, my mother, and my grandmother; and of my grandfather's house that moaned in the wind, the black bogs pelted with rain, and the heavy smell of turf fires. Now, in the welcoming of aunts and cousins, after decades of wandering, I was wrapped in a deep sense of belonging. It was as if I had come home.