Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  "Oh, I know," Woody's secretary told her. "She's an old friend."

  Adams laughed. "Yeah? Well, she ain't that old."

  Adams ran the item without identifying Soon-Yi. According to Conde, he had no doubt the teenager was Mia's daughter "because I'd been shooting her since she was a little girl." The other person who didn't have to wonder about the identity of Woody's new girlfriend was Mia. Getting wind of the Cindy Adams story, she confronted Woody, who acted as if she were crazy. At first dismissing her suspicions as believing the lies of a gossip columnist, he finally conceded that it was possible he grabbed Soon-Yi's hand for a second as they were elbowing their way into the Garden, as he did when Elaine's was crowded and the restaurateur led him by the hand to his table. When Mia protested Woody's touching Soon-Yi, warning him that "she has a crush on you and she might misinterpret that," he snapped. "Don't be silly." The subject was dropped.

  Moving Pictures:

  Isaac Davis: I'm dating a girl who does homework.

  —Manhattan, 1979

  Soon-Yi was beginning her senior year at Marymount, a small all-girl parochial prep school on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-third Street, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Woody's apartment was only a five-minute walk from the school, and it was easy for her to visit him, wearing her school uniform, on her lunch break. She also figured out a way to see him on weekends. On Saturday mornings, and sometimes Sundays, usually around nine-thirty, she donned miniskirts and slathered on makeup, telling her mother that she was meeting a girlfriend at Bloomingdale's.

  What friend? asked Mia, suspiciously glancing at her bare legs.

  Nobody special, Soon-Yi said. It was just someone she'd met last summer, who now worked as a salesclerk at Bloomies.

  "Well, what do you do when your friend is working?" Mia persisted. "Just stand there all dressed up?"

  Mia was determined that her children attend college. Accordingly, Matthew went to Yale, Sascha to Fordham, and Lark attended New York University, where she planned to enter the nursing program. Soon-Yi, however, seemed to have other ideas about her future. She wanted to be an actress, an ambition that seemed possible, if not easily achieved, given her show-business connections. Her fantasies were further fueled in the summer of 1990 when Woody got her extra work in Scenes from a Mall, a Disney comedy in which he himself was starring, his first venture outside of Orion since The Front. Woody played a wealthy ponytailed lawyer from California who breaks up and gets back together with his wife of sixteen years (Bette Midler) in the Beverly Center, a mall on the west side of Los Angeles. The picture started production there and then moved to Stamford Town Center in Connecticut, and finally to a replica of the Beverly Center mall that had been created at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens.

  Each morning Woody took Soon-Yi to work with him. It was at this time that she began talking about a professional career in modeling and urged him to launch her. Over the opposition of her mother, he had his casting director send her to the Flick modeling agency, which coincidentally represented her cousin, the daughter of Prudence Farrow. But it was doubtful that Soon-Yi could ever have become a model. Not only did she lack the dainty features of a Chinese or Vietnamese woman, but she was also chunky and large-boned, with a head that was not in proportion to her torso. The owner of the modeling agency, Frances Grill, asked Soon-Yi if she had any photographs of herself. "I told her she needed something to be a model, and suggested she get some simple Polaroids." Soon-Yi said she did not have any professional photographs but promised to come back with some pictures. She never returned to the modeling agency. "Of course in person, she wasn't model material at all," Grill said. "She was pretty but not tall enough. But sometimes Polaroids will show that a girl photographs well."

  "Soon-Yi had always been rather plain," recalled the family music teacher, Lorrie Pierce. "But suddenly she looked beautiful, like young girls do when they're in love." That spring she graduated from Marymount. "At home on graduation day, she looked as radiant as a bride," Pierce said. In the school yearbook, alongside a recent photo of Soon-Yi, there was a photo of the four-year-old in traditional Korean dress, which had been taken in Seoul at the time of her adoption. Her mother composed a message of congratulations: "A mom couldn't dream of a better daughter. You are a miracle and my pride and joy. I am profoundly grateful for every minute along the way. Congratulations, Bravo and three cheers for our Soon-Yi."

  All the Previn and Farrow children had been brought up as ladies and gentlemen. Occasionally, however, they got into mischief. Once Lark and Daisy shoplifted $342 worth of bras, panties, and garter belts from a store in the Danbury Fair Mall. Apprehended by security guards, who observed them mashing lingerie into a shopping bag, they were arrested and charged with fifth-degree larceny, a misdemeanor. In court with their mother, the girls agreed to attend a six-month rehabilitation program in order to erase their arrest records. Another time, Daisy failed to receive her monthly allowance check from Andre Previn and cashed Soon-Yi's check with a forged signature. There were other incidents involving skipping school, jumping subway turnstiles, and sneaking out to late-night parties with boys. Soon-Yi never participated in these adolescent high jinks.

  In the fall of 1991, Soon-Yi departed for Drew University, a school in Madison, New Jersey, that Sascha had attended briefly. In academic distinction, Drew had the reputation for being a haven for debutantes and for placing few intellectual demands on its students. Soon-Yi, unable to make friends easily, was homesick and frequently phoned Woody for his advice on how to make college life bearable. "We were both quite unhappy," he later recalled.

  The March of Time:

  A young playwright, Harold Cohen, is dallying with Connie Chasen, a long-legged blonde actress. But Harold is secretly fascinated by Connie's mother, Emily, for whom he develops lustful yearnings. Secretly plotting Emily's seduction, he lures her to Trader Vic's for Mai Tais when he suddenly realizes he is in love with two women, "a not terribly uncommon problem. That they happen to be mother and child? All the more challenging!" In due time, Connie's ardor cools (Harold now seems like a brother), and he is free to woo and wed the enticing Emily. His family is incredulous.

  "His girlfriend's mother he's marrying?" shrieks his aunt Tillie as she falls into a faint.

  Harold's mother reaches for a cyanide capsule. "Fifty-five and shiksa!"

  —Woody Allen, "Retribution," 1980

  Woody and Soon-Yi became intimate in 1990, if one is to believe the story she told Mia in the first hours after her mother discovered the Polaroids. Woody's version was different. He said the sexual relationship began more or less accidentally when Soon-Yi came home from college for Christmas break in 1991. "We started talking about following her [graduation] from college, what would happen, and that was when I put my hand on her," he testified under oath. It was obvious that if his sexual relations with Soon-Yi could be established prior to December 17, 1991, his co-adoption of Dylan and Moses might be reversed. By now there were many people, in addition to Dominick Conde and untold numbers of Knicks fans at Madison Square Garden, who had witnessed them together in compromising positions: Lark's boyfriend noticed Woody caressing Soon-Yi's thigh while riding in Woody's car; Fletcher caught them in some sort of intimacy in the laundry room; Moses was shocked to see Woody ducking his head and gazing upward between his sister's bare legs at her crotch. At 930 Fifth Avenue, Woody's neighbors gossiped about the frequency of Soon-Yi's visits, and exchanged tart comments on her appearance. "She was sallow and badly dressed, not at all pretty," one woman said. "I thought he could surely do better." Other neighbors had little sympathy for Mia, whom they mocked for acting snooty, and behaving, as some people said, like a "fruitcake."

  Jean Doumanian, Woody’s friend and confidante, informed People magazine in 1992 that the romance began soon after Satchel's birth, when Mia was preoccupied with the new baby. In her opinion, Woody's attraction to Mia's daughter seemed perfectly natural precisely because the filmmaker had known her since childhood
. "She took off her braces and took out her hairpin," Doumanian waxed poetic, "and lo and behold here was this lovely woman. A breath of fresh air, a companion," who was also "charming and intelligent."

  While Woody and Mia slept together infrequently in 1990 and 1991, not all sexual contact ceased, Mia later reported. During those two years, Woody Allen had had two mistresses, mother and daughter; one in a public love affair, the other in a secretive one.

  Mia seems to have been the only person who wasn't puzzled by Woody and Soon-Yi's increasingly symbiotic relationship. Woody plainly wanted her to know of the infatuation though, even writing a script about middle-aged husbands jettisoning their wives for young women and casting her in the film as one of the rejected women. In retrospect, she seemed to be asleep at the wheel. But then few women can easily conceive of their trusted husbands or partners having sexual relationships with the children they have spent years loving and nurturing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Coiled Cobra

  On St. Valentine’s Day of 1992, he delivered gifts for the children. As he was leaving Mia's apartment, he went into the kitchen and gave her a red satin box of chocolates and an embroidered heart cushion. She handed him a slender, neatly wrapped box.

  Downstairs in the car, he tore off the paper and found a blue Tiffany & Co. box. When he opened the box, however, it was evident the contents had not been purchased at Tiffany's. It was "a very, very chilling Valentine, meticulously worked on, one hesitates to say psychotically worked on," he later said. The ornate Victorian card was a white heart decorated with entwined pink buds and green vines that framed a Brady Bunch family portrait of Mia surrounded by her nine smiling children. Through the hearts of the children she had jabbed steel turkey-roasting skewers. Her own heart was gashed by the tip of a steak knife, whose handle was wrapped in a xerox copy of one of the Polaroids of the nude Soon-Yi. Mia had written next to the photograph: "Once my heart was one and it was yours to keep. My child you used and pierced my heart a hundred times and deep."

  A month had passed since that fateful Sunday evening when Woody had photographed Soon-Yi in the nude. The most reasonable explanation is that they were using the Polaroid camera as a sexual accessory, a method similar to ceiling mirrors or erotic videos. In Woody's case, this particular device certainly does not seem remarkable for a man whose livelihood depends on the camera. Of course, rushing off and leaving the photographs on the mantelpiece was exactly akin to scattering a trail of bread crumbs because Mia found them the very next day.

  As his limousine swept through Central Park, Woody squirmed in the backseat. It was the knife that terrified him. Not a week earlier, he and Mia had celebrated her forty-seventh birthday with dinner at Rao's, one of her favorite restaurants. As a present, he had given her three expensive leather-bound volumes of Emily Dickinson's poems. Now she was suggesting that she wanted to kill him by driving a stake through his chest. More than bewildering, her queer little gift was "quite frightening," he said later.

  Mia's intention, she explained later, was not only to put the fear of God into him, but to make sure he fully understood "the degree of pain he had inflicted on me and my entire family." A month after the discovery of the affair, he failed to appear the least bit repentant and seemed to be treating the incident as an ordinary story about the difficulties of monogamy. He had cheated; he had gotten caught. That Woody could be selfish and self-absorbed should have come as no surprise to Mia, who had known him for twelve years. Still, if she couldn't get him to feel remorse, she at least wanted him to acknowledge—and apologize for—his treachery.

  Soon-Yi returned to Drew University. The day that Mia found the pictures, she had collapsed in shame. Like a naughty child caught poaching in her mother's purse, she sobbed, "I'm a bad girl." She threatened to kill herself. In no time, however, her defiance—her sense of specialness—reasserted itself. "The person sleeping with the person is the one with the relationship," she gloated. Those words enraged Mia, who began kicking her. "I just pounced on her," Mia admitted. "She kicked me and I hit her on the side of the face and shoulder." Still clinging to the belief that her daughter's sex with Woody had been nonconsensual, Mia made Soon-Yi promise never to see him again, and to hang up if he ever attempted to phone her. Woody, too, promised Mia that the affair was over. It was not the case. They were "in constant contact," sometimes speaking on the phone five or six times a day.

  That winter, Soon-Yi stopped coming home on the weekends and eventually ceased calling her family as well. When her brothers and sisters phoned to see how she was doing, she seemed sullen. Her mother got on the line and began interrogating her about Woody. Had she kept her promise to stay away from him? Soon-Yi's response was to shout, "Stop asking me for things!" and slam down the phone.

  Even with their relationship damaged, possibly beyond repair, neither Woody nor Mia seemed sure of whether to separate from each other. For a dozen years, she had been his leading lady, and he was apprehensive about finding a new actress who would possess her charm and ability. Mia, with all her professional eggs in one basket, was caught in an even worse position. Although traumatized by his betrayal, she could not afford to walk away from her employment. She had a family to support. The last thing either wanted was public exposure of their problems.

  In February, as he edited Husbands and Wives, Woody walled off his emotions and adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but at the same time he pleaded with Mia to give him the photographs. "Let's burn them together," he proposed. But Mia, guarding the Polaroids as closely as the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, replied that they would remain in her bank vault "for the rest of my life," to serve as a reminder of his betrayal. Lacking Woody's ability to compartmentalize, she redrafted her will to make sure he got custody of none of her children in the event of her death. She also contacted Paul Martin Weltz, the attorney who had overseen Woody's adoptions of Dylan and Moses, to inform him that Woody had deceived her. All the time that he had been clamoring for adoption, he was "screwing one of my kids," she said. Weltz doubted it would be possible to overturn the adoptions and instead suggested a coparenting agreement that would regulate Woody's visitation. Over the next six months, Weltz's negotiations with both parties resulted in an elaborate thirty-page legal settlement outlining their rights and responsibilities toward Dylan, Satch, and Moses. Under the terms of the agreement, Woody was to pay Mia $6,000 a month in child support. He also agreed to one of Mia's primary conditions, that he could not be alone with Dylan and Satch until they were twelve years of age. Curiously, Weltz never got the impression the couple was separating. "I always thought they were trying to put the pieces back together," he remarked later.

  During the winter, Woody decided that Mia was having a nervous breakdown. At his insistence, and for the first time in her life, she began seeing a therapist and taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. Nothing helped alleviate her depression, and she felt as if she were walking around in a chemical fog. Her slurred speech made some people assume she was either intoxicated on liquor or high on drugs. One evening when Woody arrived at Elaine's for dinner with Mia at his side, Jean Doumanian noticed that she was groggy and disoriented, "like someone who was out on a doctor's pass for the evening." While visiting his penthouse one afternoon, Mia left a suicide note. Petrified, he dashed to his terrace and leaned over the railing to see if she had jumped to her death. Dutifully relating the incident to her therapist, he suggested hospitalization. "Many times she threatened to kill me, or have me killed," he told friends. "I started getting phone calls all night long, death threats calling me the devil and evil incarnate."

  The previous September, Mia had adopted two Vietnamese orphans, both older children. One was a six-year-old boy who became crippled after contracting polio, and the other was an eleven-year-old girl, who, after becoming blind at age eight, was abandoned by her parents. Traveling to Hanoi and meeting the crippled boy, Sanjay, in person, Mia began to doubt the diagnosis. She asked for a further evaluation, wh
ich proved inconclusive. When she brought him to New York for tests, she learned he was severely retarded and functioning at an eighteen-month level. Not prepared to care for such a child, whose special needs would draw her attention away from Satch and Dylan, she reluctantly decided to arrange for his transfer to another family.

  In the meantime, there remained the blind girl, Nguyen Thi Tam, who had not been able to leave Hanoi with Mia because her papers were still being processed. Although Mia was having second thoughts about taking Tam, she decided that canceling the adoption would be unfair to the girl.

  In the case of both these children, Woody had been supportive and had even offered to help pay for Mia's trip to Hanoi. The situation changed after the Polaroids incident, however, and he became intensely suspicious of Mia's motives. Now it seemed clear to him that she was using the children like pacifiers, to bolster her spirits through times of trouble, as she had adopted Soon-Yi and Moses during her painful breakup with Andre Previn. His suspicion was confirmed at the beginning of February—barely three weeks after Mia learned of Woody's affair with Soon-Yi—when Mia agreed to take a sickly month-old African-American infant, whose mother had been addicted to crack. The adoption agency had not found a home for the infant, and he was to be placed shortly in permanent foster care. If Mia wanted him, the staff at the agency said, she had to act immediately. Within days, a bassinet was sitting next to her bed. She named the boy Isaiah Justus Farrow, after Sir Isaiah Berlin, Woody’s favorite philosopher. Woody's first reaction was bewilderment. In his opinion, given Mia's depressed mental state, she could not take care of her own children, let alone an ailing infant.