Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  At forty-three, Lee Guthrie, a writer from Louisville, Kentucky, was a newspaper reporter, the author of a biography of Cary Grant, and a mother of three—one of whom would grow up to be film actress Sean Young. In 1977, Guthrie had contracted with Drake Publishers to write about the comedian. In her biography, she quoted titanic chunks of his stand-up material, along with dialogue from film scripts and television specials, and snippets from his New Yorker pieces, all of which she stirred into the manuscript without obtaining or paying for the usual permissions. Woody sued Guthrie and her publisher for copyright infringement, claiming that her unauthorized work unfairly competed with his own plans to write an autobiography. He demanded the defendants recall and destroy all printed copies, as well as search for customers who had purchased the book, and, of course, to cease further publication.

  Having crushed the ill-fated Guthrie book, but now feeling more threatened than ever, Woody continued to view biographers as the enemy and himself as a defenseless subject. Approached by Gerald McKnight, a British writer, he rebuffed the would-be biographer with the claim that there was nothing new to report. "You won't get anywhere," one of Woody's employees warned McKnight. "He talks to nobody outside his own tight little circle." On the whole, that proved to be correct, but McKnight managed to uncover several valuable primary sources, including Woody's unsuspecting mother in Florida. Woody, however, took no legal action against McKnight's Woody Allen: Joking Aside, possibly because it was only published in England.

  Lee Israel, on the other hand, was an experienced American biographer who had written lives of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen. She had grown up in Woody's old neighborhood and graduated from Midwood High School in the Class of '57, but having age and birthplace in common with her subject proved of no advantage. By now, Woody's strategy was first to dodge a biographer's letter seeking an interview, then to obstruct the research. His employees, knowing to whom they owed their livelihood but loath to acknowledge his iron control, said the usual things employees say in such situations. They were worried about upsetting him, they claimed, when what worried them was losing their jobs. Even former employees became adept at making excuses ("He feels enough books about him have already been written"). Encountering a stream of nervous people who refused to talk without Woody's consent, Lee Israel had no choice but to return her advance to her publishers.

  Another would-be writer was Louise Lasser. Ten years following her divorce, after she made a big splash in the television series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, her memoirs were sought by Toni Morrison, the novelist who was an editor at Random House. Louise pumped out 2,000 pages of transcribed recollections. Alarmed that his former wife was writing her memoirs, Woody must have discouraged her from writing the book. Still dominated by him, realizing she could never write a truthful account of her own life without including their marriage, Louise reluctantly gave up the project.

  The only writers Woody found acceptable were foreigners, especially those who convinced him their sole interest was an academic interpretation of his films. In 1985 the French-born writer Thierry de Navacelle received permission to observe the filming of Radio Days and write an insider's diary of the day-to-day shooting. "I was with him for five months," reported de Navacelle, "and he said about five sentences to me, most of them about weather." He was also surprised to notice Woody's "very manipulative" treatment of his employees, for whom he seemed to lack feeling. For example, "he has used the same electrician, the same grips for 10 years, but he never says a word to these people." (Likewise, Woody valued Dennis Kear, his nonintrusive stand-in for a decade, because, Kear believed, "I could fade into the woodwork when not needed.") Before publication of Woody Allen on Location, Thierry de Navacelle had to clear the manuscript with Woody. As his account could only be published with Woody's approval, de Navacelle did not feel free to say what he really observed or thought about his subject, and so readers learned nothing significant about the man called Woody Allen.

  In the late 1980s, Woody gave his blessing to a handpicked biographer, no doubt hoping to ensure an account of his life that would portray him as a simple, lovable guy—and also to make unnecessary any future books about himself. He felt comfortable with Eric Lax, whom he had known for some fifteen years and with whom he had cooperated on a previous book, On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, published in 1975. Lax had never tilled the messy fields of biography. A native of Canada who grew up in southern California, he had been a Peace Corps volunteer before turning to freelance writing. In his forties, he shared a bachelor apartment with his college roommate Peter Tauber, the same writer who had been Jean Doumanian's nemesis when she worked for Saturday Night Live. Sometime later, Lax married the daughter of New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger.

  After making life difficult for previous writers, Woody now proceeded to make life simple for his anointed biographer. "I let him hang around and watch whatever he wanted to watch," Woody said later. "I gave him access to anyone he wanted to talk to." Anyone included Mia, who made herself available for an interview in which she spoke glowingly of Woody as a parent. "I can't imagine a more committed father," she assured Lax.

  Instead of chipping at the legends that encrusted his subject's life like so many dripping stalagmites, Lax smoothly repackaged as fact the myths of Woody as an eccentric but lovable and decent little man. Observing Woody and Mia together at social gatherings, he was charmed and reassured by the sight of their holding hands, which he misinterpreted as "a sweetness" that made them more married than most married couples.

  Woody Allen: A Biography, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991, was basically a Woody Allen production. Molly Haskell, writing on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, seemed to sense the subject had succeeded in controlling the biographer ("more smoke screen than revelation"), but the film critic (and wife of critic Andrew Sarris) also thought it would be "churlish to nit-pick" in the case of a filmmaker who had given the world so much pleasure. Representing the nitpickers was a reviewer for Film Quarterly, who decided that Lax's book offered "a wealth of biographical detail and virtually no critical perspective."

  True to form, Woody was unhappy with a biography that could hardly have been more complimentary. He failed to see where Lax had been too soft on him, as some reviewers noted. "I, of course," he said jokingly, "felt that he wasn't complimentary enough."

  On page 180 of Eric Lax's biography can be found the briefest of references to the Andre Previn-and-Mia Farrow children, who included the twins, Matthew and Sascha, Fletcher, Lark and Daisy, "both Vietnamese orphan girls, and Soon-Yi, an orphaned Korean girl."

  Mia's sixth child, the third whom she adopted while married to Previn, Soon-Yi was born in Seoul, the capital of South Korea and a city that lay in ruins after the devastation of the Korean War. Economic recovery had proceeded slowly. After the war, hardly a tall building was still standing, and millions were left homeless. Even in the late sixties, life remained raw in an agrarian society struggling toward industrialization. There is no way of determining with certainty the year of Soon-Yi's birth, either 1970, 1972, or 1973, depending on whom you listen to. After her affair with Woody became public, she claimed to be twenty-one, born in 1970. But throughout her childhood, Mia always gave her birthdate as 1972 or else cited the results of a bone test indicating she was seven in 1980, so 1973 was also possible. If Mia's figures are correct, she was about four years old at the time of her adoption and as young as seventeen when she became involved with Woody.

  If her age was guesswork, so was her history. Mia was told that Soon-Yi's mother had been a prostitute, and, in a society fractured by war, this was a reasonable assumption. Physically abusive, Soon-Yi's mother punished her by forcing her to kneel in a doorway and slamming the door against her head. Eventually, she abandoned the child, and Soon-Yi joined the gangs of lost children who spent their lives in the streets and survived by begging and foraging through garbage cans. By the time she was placed in a Catholi
c orphanage, dirty and dressed in rags with sores on her lips and a head full of lice, she knew neither her name nor age, nor did she comprehend enough language to answer questions. The people at the orphanage named her Soon-Yee. Had she not found refuge in an institution, she would have undoubtedly become a child prostitute, as did many of Seoul's street children.

  A few months later, the foundling was assigned to the Previns for adoption. Complications arose, however, when they discovered U.S. laws limited the number of adoptions of foreign-born children to two by a single family.

  Andre and Mia already had their quota. With the help of William Styron and his wife, Rose (who would become Soon-Yi's godmother following the death of Mia's friend Natalie Wood), they personally fought to have Congress pass a bill amending the law, and soon after it was changed, Mia flew to Seoul to bring home her new child.

  In adopting infants such as Lark and Daisy, the Previns encountered none of the major difficulties that were associated with children adopted abroad, especially older institutionalized children, who generally had suffered varying degrees of trauma and had trouble adjusting to a new home. Sometimes the children immediately revealed serious problems, which included, in addition to difficulties with speech and language, an inability to laugh or cry, refusal to make eye contact, temper tantrums, and an inability to form emotional bonds. In other cases, however, social and emotional maladjustment did not manifest itself until many years later. When she was first adopted, Soon-Yi stuffed eggshells into her mouth and fled from mirrors. She could only fall asleep on the floor next to her mother's bed. In contrast to her real mother, whom she remembered as "Naughty Mama," Mia became her "Good Mama."

  In the blink of an eye, as if going from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz, little Soon-Yi found herself transplanted from the squalor of Seoul to a life of privilege in which she wanted for nothing. But along with her colossal good fortune, there was also unhappiness and misery because her new parents' marriage was faltering. Lonely and rejected as a woman, Mia found consolation in her children. "Kids are probably the most secure kind of love," she said, "because you know you won't lose them, barring some kind of personality conflict between parent and child." For the first time, but not the last, she reacted to abandonment by adopting an orphan, in this case, Soon-Yi, as a sort of surrogate spouse. "I was in a lot of pain and had no idea what would happen next," she said. Amid the bereavement of a marital breakup, she was also attempting to revive her languishing film career.

  Soon-Yi's early life with the Previns was fragmented. Shortly after her arrival in Surrey, England, where the Previns were living, Mia ignored a doctor's warning about the harsh conditions in Egypt, and traveled with Soon-Yi to Cairo, where she was acting in Death on the Nile. The following year, Soon-Yi was hauled to the South Pacific island of Bora Bora for Hurricane, a twenty-million-dollar disaster epic in which Mia costarred with Jason Robards and Max von Sydow. Shortly thereafter, the Previns separated, with the eldest boys remaining with their father in Surrey and Mia and the four younger children returning to the United States. For several months, they lived on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, before settling permanently in Maureen O'Sullivan's apartment on Central Park West. Within the space of two short years, the peripatetic orphan lived in five countries.

  It was not surprising that Soon Yi's impoverished early environment led to what psychologists call "developmental delays." When she was in third grade, tests revealed that she had minor learning disabilities, including trouble in processing information as well as an IQ slightly below average. From grades six to twelve she required tutoring. Her aunt, Tisa Farrow, would refer to her as having "a double-digit IQ. It's not like she's a drooling idiot, but she's very naive and very immature." This picture was neither true nor fair. While not the dim bulb described by her aunt, she did not seem particularly bright compared to the others in the family. "She was a little slow," said a family friend, who points out that Soon-Yi received permission to take her S.A.T.s (Scholastic Aptitude Tests for college entrance) untimed, in a special test situation for learning-disabled students. It took Soon-Yi twice as long—sometimes even longer—as other children to complete her homework, but "she worked damned hard," recalled her sister Daisy.

  Soon-Yi never managed to bond with Mia; indeed, she seemed to have trouble empathizing with "Good Mama" in any way, something that her mother preferred to ignore. On the other hand, she was inclined to distrust all people. In her adopted family, sibling rivalry could be intense, and she was reluctant to involve herself with the other children, especially Fletcher, whom she disliked. When he was six, she pushed his head into a toilet, which the family construed as a wish to drown him. Until the age of eight, she seemed closest to Lark, but then her integration into the family seemed to halt. For example, all the children loved music, and despite a lack of talent, dutifully took piano lessons—except Soon-Yi, who told the piano teacher, "I'm the one who's not musical." She always would remain an outsider. Among the brothers and sisters, the least physically attractive, the one with the shyest personality, she was the plain vanilla sister. On an application for camp, in the marital-status blank, she wrote "nun," which elicited teasing from her brothers and sisters. Even at seventeen, she was still pigeonholed as prissy and puritanical, an indication of how seriously they underestimated her ambition. Like the understudy Eve Harrington in All About Eve, she was an Anne Baxter to her mother's Bette Davis as she shrewdly studied Mia's life for guidelines on how to navigate the ways of the world. Confident that a woman could win her heart's desire by aggressively pursuing older, successful men, Soon-Yi would soon emulate her mother's behavior.

  Rashomon:

  "[The children] are very close to Woody, and I'm glad about that. They have a good [father] substitute—he's there for them in important ways. He shares leisure time with them—he takes them to the park and plays ball with them and takes them around the city. Whenever they want to see him, he's available."

  —Mia Farrow

  "I had no relationship with him whatsoever. I didn't care either way. I felt that he could be mean to Mom really quietly. He was like that. He could be very nasty."

  —Lark Previn

  "He was never any kind of a father figure to me. I never had any dealings with him."

  —Soon-Yi Previn

  "He was a 12-year boyfriend to my mom and then he started going out with my sister. How could he do that?"

  —Moses Previn

  "He is a stable influence. They [the Farrow children] live in chaotic circumstances."

  —Letty Aronson

  Even though Woody got on well with Moses (and Fletcher, too, for a brief time), he had never been interested in Mia's other children. Once or twice, she begged him as a favor to take Soon-Yi for a walk and buy her ice cream, but he had no time. Besides, Soon-Yi made no secret of her dislike for him. "She was someone who didn't like me," he remembered. "I didn't speak to her." To him, she was the shy little creature, the one with the braces whom he paid seventy dollars to baby-sit Satch and Dylan on weekends. She was colorless, bland, and not particularly pretty.

  After Satch was born, however, whenever he came up to the apartment to visit Dylan and Satch, she suddenly began asking him questions about basketball, or advice on homework. "She went gaga over him," said Daisy. A friend of the family thought that "growing up in a movie star's family definitely appealed to Soon-Yi. She wanted to be part of the glamour. When she saw a chance, she jumped at it." Of all Mia's children, only Soon-Yi possessed the imagination to see her life as a romantic Hollywood story, with lights, camera, action, which is probably the reason she was more conscious than her siblings of the friction between Woody and their mother. She must have sensed that he was drifting away—out of Mia's life—and that meant out of her own as well. Slowly, Soon-Yi began to register on Woody. Unlike the other children, she listened to him and even laughed at his jokes. He loved the flattery and treated her like a grown-up. She made a point of inviting him to her Sweet Sixteen part
y and on her next birthday, he invited her and several school chums to a lavish dinner at the Russian Tea Room.

  Mia asked him to take Moses and some of her other children to see the Knicks games. Instead of inviting Moses, he asked Soon-Yi because she seemed to be so enthusiastic about basketball. Hungry for attention, she spent one, then two evenings with him at the Garden. A different girl away from her family, she promptly unleashed a stream of complaints about depression and a miserable home life, mostly a long laundry list of grievances against her mother, whom she described bitingly as "no Mother Teresa." The tales she rattled off about Mia, Woody thought, were enough to "curl your teeth." Pouring out her heart, Soon-Yi found a sympathetic audience in Woody, who was willing to listen to her problems with her mother. Apparently he hadn't figured out that a classic pastime of adolescent girls is depicting their mothers as riding on broomsticks.

  One evening in January 1990, the New York Knicks were playing the L.A. Lakers at the Garden. On assignment for the National, a sports publication, a freelance photographer named Dominick Conde was strolling around fishing for celebrities. Right before half-time, he spotted Woody and Soon-Yi glued together in the seats behind the scorer's table. They were holding hands. Using a long lens, Conde took three shots. "When I came back after half-time," he said, "they were still holding hands, so I shot three more frames." As it turned out, the National did not run the photos, which were archived at Star File, Conde's agency, where they remained for the next two years.

  Coincidentally, a week or two after Conde photographed Woody and Soon-Yi, another observant Knicks fan happened to notice the couple at a Sacramento game. Seeing Woody stroke Soon-Yi's hair and kiss her cheek, the fan tipped off Cindy Adams, gossip columnist at the New York Post. Adams, a product of Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, former Miss New Jersey State Fair, and wife of Catskills comic Joseph Abramowitz aka Joey Adams, was a woman of a certain age who had spent ten years as a professional gossipmonger. By this time she knew a thing or two about the follies of celebrity husbands who got moony over babes half their age. She put in a call to Woody's production office.