Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Then, not two weeks after Isaiah appeared, the blind Vietnamese child finally came to join her new family. Malnourished and covered with lice, Tam reacted to her new home with fear, depression, and rage. "She was hard to deal with because she was violent," recalled a member of Mia's household. "She'd scratch and bite and kick and spit. Sometimes we had to physically restrain her." To make matters worse, an openly resentful Satch expressed his feelings toward the newcomer by "throwing things at her across the room and she couldn't see them coming."

  In March, Mia arranged for the baptism of the younger children—Soon-Yi, Moses, Dylan, Satchel, Isaiah, and Tam—into the Roman Catholic Church. Over the years religion had played small part in her child-rearing. With such a large family, regular church attendance had proved awkward. She also felt self-conscious attending church. Because she was a movie star, people stared at her. In this time of emotional upheaval, not only did she seek religious comfort for herself, but she also realized that she had neglected to provide her family with a spiritual core.

  On March 11, the family gathered at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, a few blocks from their apartment. It was a joint ceremony with the three children of her close friends Casey and John Pascal. Present were all of Mia's children, with the exception of Matthew, who could not get away from his job. The children wore white shawls over their best dresses and suits, except Soon-Yi, who, unaware of the solemnity of the occasion, had come straight from Drew in her jeans. The children carried lit candles to the altar, where a priest sprinkled their heads with holy water. Afterward, there were refreshments at Mia's apartment for the various godparents, relatives, and neighbors.

  Hearing of the baptism after the fact, Woody was given no opportunity to protest. "She was never religious for sixty seconds in all the years I knew her," he said. "And then she suddenly ran out and baptized the kids and told me she had found God. Then twenty-four hours later, she was threatening to stick my eyes out." He was planning to raise Dylan and Satch as humanists and let them choose their own religion when they grew up.

  As their relations continued to deteriorate, they began to physically attack each other in public. In Central Park Woody yelled at Mia, and she punched him in the face. On another occasion, after leaving an Irish pub on West Seventy-ninth Street, they began quarreling on the sidewalk. As Woody turned to walk away, Mia, oblivious to passersby, thwacked him hard across the back. A few days after Tam's arrival, they took her for a stroll in Central Park but exchanged sharp words when they returned to the building. As the blind girl clutched helplessly at the sleeve of her new mother's jacket, Mia started to cry. Woody, patting her back, attempted to console her, but Mia, still in tears, dragged Tam into the lobby. A newspaper photographer who had shadowed them up Central Park West caught the quarrel on film. The next day five large photos were plastered across the New York Daily News with the soapy headline: REEL-LIFE STARS . . . HAVE REAL-LIFE SCARS.

  One of Woody's confidants at this time was Jane Martin, who had worked for him as an assistant nearly as long as Mia had been his leading lady. Hearing about the slapping incidents, Martin was quick to sympathize with her boss. The relationship between the two "wives"—consort/mistress and office majordomo—had always been prickly. Mia, no prima donna, rarely yelled, but she could turn on a dime when somebody made her deeply angry. According to Martin, she would go "berserk screaming crazy," a sight sufficiently chilling that Martin never forgot it. "I've never been chewed out like I was twice by Mia," she recalled. "She can go from zero to 100 miles an hour in one second." Being around her was like "having a huge cobra coiled up in the corner of the room and having to watch it every day so it wouldn't come out.

  Voice of America:

  Oprah Winfrey: We are certainly empathizing with you but when you saw those pictures of your daughter, legs pornographically spread, how could you have let him back into your life? How could you? What did you tell yourself?"

  Mia: I know. He said he was sorry. I loved him.

  —Oprah Winfrey Show, February 11, 1997

  Shadows and Fog, Woody's twenty-first film and his final picture for Arthur Krim, opened in February 1992. Shot in black and white, with a melancholy score by Kurt Weill, it was a hybrid movie that recycled his 1975 one-act play, Death, and paid homage to German Expressionist directors such as Fritz Lang. In a central-European town in the 1920s, Max Kleinman (Woody) is hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to help a posse hunt for a maniacal killer, only to find himself pursued as a suspect. The Kafkaesque clerk meets and falls in love with a circus performer (Mia), a sword swallower who is fleeing from her faithless lover (John Malkovich). To help viewers sit through the cinematic murk, Woody salted his cast with amusing cameos by Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Lily Tomlin, John Malkovich, even Madonna as a lusty trapeze artist, although the picture was so dimly lighted that it was difficult for moviegoers to recognize the celebrities. From now on, the director who disdained Hollywood would raid Tinseltown yearly for glamorous stars to pump up his box office. Famous artists appeared on-screen for a moment or two, and in most instances, worked for little salary. Juliet Taylor, with her usual zeal, told Madonna, for instance, that she would enjoy her role that would last two minutes and take only a day to shoot. Although a Woody Allen set was not most actors' idea of fun, the ploy worked. Not only Madonna, but respected actors and actresses were flattered when they were offered a part in a Woody Allen film. A mystified Jay Leno quizzed Kathy Bates on The Tonight Show as to why she had made a film about which she knew nothing—it could have been a porno film—and she replied, "Well, you kind of go on blind faith because it's Woody."

  Budgeted at $14 million, Shadows and Fog received horrible notices. Stanley Kauffmann called the picture "the flip side of creative freedom," an example of "the worst that can happen when a good filmmaker (which Allen has become) gets his unsupervised way." Notwithstanding the presence of Madonna, the film earned an embarrassing $2.7 million, the weakest financially of Allen's films except September. The picture was derivative, causing even the usually complimentary French critics to wonder if Woody was not overdoing his imitation of the films of his favorite directors; one reviewer twitted him for lifting wholesale a mother and child scene from Chaplin, to which Woody replied that Chaplin's scene took place in the daytime, his own at night.

  A few days before the release of Shadows and Fog, no doubt expecting to be panned by critics, Woody discoursed starchily to the Los Angeles Times that the reason for being a filmmaker was not to impress audiences or receive glowing reviews—or earn money—but to be innovative. Hopefully, his audiences would paddle along behind as he cruised out of the mainstream. (As usual, hype took precedence over truthfulness because what could be more mainstream than casting Madonna?) For all his confidence, Woody's ambition to navigate the lesser streams had run aground. Depressed and frightened by his problems with Mia, he had developed a full-blown case of writer's block. He was forced to seek the help of a figure out of his past, his old friend Marshall Brickman, who had cowritten three of Woody's biggest hits. Since 1979, when Woody had dropped him, Brickman had written or directed several films, including a big-budget Bette Midler picture, For the Boys. If he bore resentment about their past relationship, he kept it to himself.

  From his drawer of odds and ends, Woody ransacked material he had dropped from Annie Hall. Manhattan Murder Mystery is the story of an East Side couple, Larry and Carol Lipton, who strike up a conversation with their next-door neighbors, a husband and wife. When the wife dies suddenly under suspicious circumstances, the Liptons become amateur sleuths and attempt to solve the mystery with the help of friends (Alan Alda and Angelica Huston).

  Despite the turbulence of his life, Woody and Brickman managed to write a comedy-thriller with a few good jokes and a slapdash mystery plot that readers of Nancy Drew could figure out in a minute. Later Woody would guiltily regard Manhattan Murder Mystery as a waste of his time and call it a vacation from filmmaking, a pleasurable but "not significant" m
ovie, which was another slap in the face to the faithful Brickman. Manhattan Murder Mystery served its purpose, however. Incapable of producing anything creative at this time, Woody relied on work for his emotional salvation.

  PMK is a major player in New York's publicity machine. A blue-ribbon public relations giant representing A-list clients such as Robert Redford, Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Courtney Love, the firm specializes in personal publicity for entertainment celebrities, which includes troubleshooting at a cost of about $3500 a month. Leslee Dart, a co-owner of PMK, had represented Woody since the mid-eighties, replacing his longtime publicist Richard O'Brien. A tall brunette in her late thirties, Dart is a careful, disciplined woman who pays strict attention to her weight, and that meant no sweets, no bread, no pasta, "and no weekend relaxation of the rules."

  Among the stable of movie clients handled by PMK are probably a number of stars who have been arrested, divorced, or spent time in psychiatric hospitals. But Leslee Dart had never been required to perform crisis management for Woody Allen. In her eyes, he was a responsible, thoughtful man.

  The New York celebrity world inhabited by Woody and Mia is about the size of a Trobriand island. For months there had been whispers of their breakup, including reports of his affair with Australian actress Judy Davis throughout the filming of Husbands and Wives. Annoyed, he sent word to columnist Liz Smith, denying that he had ever seen Davis off the set. To squelch rumors, Woody suggested a joint press release to announce there was nothing wrong, but Mia resisted. Privately, Woody didn't believe the public would care about their separation, or his involvement with Soon-Yi. With luck, people would forget in a week.

  Unbeknownst to Woody, the media already had the lowdown on the breakup. What's more, it had nailed down the identity of the other woman as well.

  On June 10, Richard Johnson, a New York Daily News columnist, was the first to break the story. "I reported that Woody and Mia had broken up," recalled Johnson, "but I didn't say why." He was still trying to squeeze further details out of Woody's publicist about the family romance. "But Leslee Dart, the incredible, unbelievable Leslee Dart, denied to me up the yin-yang that Woody was boning Soon-Yi."

  Dart pretended to be shocked at Johnson's suggestion. "How can you say such a thing?" she snapped. "That's horrible."

  "What's the problem?" Johnson replied. "It isn't his daughter." Nevertheless, for the moment he held back on the story of Woody and Soon-Yi.

  Med-O-Lark is a coed camp for children ages eleven to sixteen that is located on a scenic four-mile lake in Washington, Maine, an hour's drive north of Portland. To occupy Soon-Yi over the summer—and to keep her away from Woody—Mia and her former husband, Andre Previn, decided to ship her to camp, where she could earn nine hundred dollars as a counselor and make new friends with youngsters her own age. Mia was familiar with Med-O-Lark because, five years earlier, Matthew Previn had worked there and enjoyed a pleasant summer. While Med-O-Lark offered a variety of outdoor activities such as rock climbing, and rafting on the Penobscot River, it was basically an arts-and-theater camp. Assigned to teach drawing and sketching, Soon-Yi bunked in a cabin with a dozen campers and two other counselors.

  A product of Central Park West, and, most recently, Fifth Avenue penthouses and chauffeured limousines, Soon-Yi had not bargained for the camp's rustic ambience. A counselor remembered that she was in a tizzy about mosquitoes and the lack of city amenities. "The first thing she said after getting off the bus was, 'Oh my God, look at all the trees,' " said Hans Weise.

  The first time the toilet in her cabin backed up, she said, "We'll have to call a plumber."

  "There's a plunger in the bathroom," another counselor replied.

  The biggest problem, however, turned out to be the telephone. Half a dozen times a day, a "George Simon" would call the director's office and ask for Soon-Yi. "It was extremely disruptive," said Hans Weise. "This person was phoning when the staff and children were out doing activities. At all hours Soon-Yi would have to be pulled out of her work."

  For two weeks, Soon-Yi's art students received increasingly less attention. The camp administrators, tired of operating an answering service, told her to leave.

  The party on the spacious lawn at Frog Hollow was for Dylan, who turned seven on July 11. Working in the city, her older brothers and sisters were planning to make a special trip to Connecticut on the bus. Mia warned Woody, whom she had invited reluctantly, about monopolizing Dylan. Lark and Daisy and the twins would be there only a short time because they had to return on the five o'clock bus and everyone wanted to spend time with Dylan. Woody agreed.

  By summer, Mia and Woody were behaving like an acrimonious divorced couple. Woody had never enjoyed sleeping at Frog Hollow. Ordinarily he returned to the city on the same day, but this time he decided to stay overnight. Unhappy about having him in such close proximity, Mia told him to check into a motel, or bunk in the guest house on the other side of the pond. He did not listen to her.

  On the afternoon of the party, he was unnerved by the sight of Mia, who was clad in her usual summer uniform of white T-shirt and rumpled khaki shorts and appeared poised to erupt like a volcano. Remembering her jokes about poisoning his red wine, he now took the precaution of bringing his own food from New York, usually a large barbecued chicken and a tin of Beluga caviar, which he ate right out of the container. Perhaps because the other guests ignored him, he sarcastically commented on the firecrackers and sparklers brought to the party by Casey and John Pascal, whom he disliked. Soon bored, he disregarded Mia's admonitions about monopolizing Dylan and plopped himself down at his daughter's side. At one point, he put a damper on the activities by dragging Dylan to the pond to play.

  After the party was over, Mia angrily pounced on him. He had promised to leave Dylan alone but had done exactly the opposite. Woody did not respond. When it was time to retire, he slept, as usual, in the guest room near the garage. The next morning he was greeted by a note pinned to the door of a nearby bathroom:

  CHILD MOLESTER at

  BIRTHDAY PARTY!

  Molded then abused one sister

  Now Focused on Youngest sister

  Family disgusted.

  Horrified, he quickly ripped down the note and jammed it in his bag. In his opinion, Mia was insane. At that point, said a friend of the actress's, "things had gotten really crazy. There was lots of crying. She didn't hide a whole heck of a lot from the kids."

  Med-O-Lark informed Mia that her daughter had been fired because a Mr. Simon "seemed to be her primary focus and definitely detracted from her concentration on being a counselor." Soon-Yi, the camp director wrote Mia, had returned to New York. Confronting "Mr. Simon," Mia demanded that he tell her the whereabouts of her daughter. Woody pleaded ignorance.

  Some sixty miles away, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Soon-Yi was living in a college dormitory room at Rider, a private liberal arts college that, like Drew, made minimal demands on its students, especially in the summer. Woody had made all the arrangements for her to enroll in the summer session. It was Soon-Yi, however, who had chosen to register for The New South in Literature, Music, and Film, a three-credit course that examined southern culture since World War II, beginning with the spread of New Orleans jazz and ending with the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Stashed away in rural New Jersey, she waited for the weekends when Woody's chauffeur arrived to drive her back to town.

  That July, Soon-Yi abandoned her family. To her sisters and brothers, there remained fleeting memories of her mad giggling on the phone and a few of her personal belongings gathering dust in the girls' bedroom. At the dining table, the space where she had once sat was occupied by Isaiah's high chair. Mia stopped trying to locate her child and turned her attention to still another adoptee in dire need of a family. Some time earlier she had applied for a foster child, Tunisia, a nine-month-old crack-addicted infant, who needed temporary care until her mother recovered from her drug problems. Dylan and Satch were enthusiastic about a new sister until they heard sh
e was only staying with them temporarily. Reluctantly, Mia withdrew the application.

  On Tuesday afternoon, August 4, Woody arrived at Frog Hollow to spend the day with Dylan and Satch. Mia and two of the children, Tam and Isaiah, had gone shopping with Casey Pascal. Otherwise, the household was like it was on any other day, swarming with children and baby-sitters: the three Pascal children being minded by the Pascal sitter, Alison Stickland, and Dylan and Satch in the care of two other sitters, Kristi Groteke and Sophie Berge. For Woody, these visits to Frog Hollow felt rather like a nuclear winter. Satch and Dylan were always excited to see him, but nobody else made him feel welcome. Moses, who would never forgive Woody for sleeping with his sister, deliberately snubbed him by disappearing into the woods for the day. Woody's feeling of entering "a household of enemies" was accentuated by the presence of Kristi Groteke, whom he felt was spying on him. This was the case. She had instructions from Mia to never let Dylan out of her sight. The afternoon passed uneventfully until Mia, who had returned home from shopping, became upset when she discovered that Dylan was not wearing underwear under her white sundress.

  That evening Woody and Mia went to a local restaurant for dinner. Mostly their conversation consisted of shop talk about the new picture that was scheduled to begin principal photography in a few weeks. Returning to the house, he went upstairs to tell Dylan and Satchel a "Little Woody" bedtime story, only to be interrupted by Tam, who began to scream at the sound of his voice. After six months in this country, and despite her enrollment in special-education classes at an excellent public school, she was still having difficulty adjusting to her new life. Her hellish tantrums were so earsplitting that Mia had to turn on the air conditioner to drown out her voice. In a few short months, she had developed a powerful hostility toward Woody, possibly because he seldom acknowledged her or included a toy for her in the shopping bags of gifts he brought for his own kids. "Woody no goody, Woody no goody," she would chant. Woody tried to continue the bedtime story, but Tam wouldn't stop screaming. Later, his nerves frayed from Tam's shrieking, he began upbraiding Mia for compulsively adopting children who were often emotionally or physically damaged. It was having a terrible effect on his children, by which he meant Dylan and Satch. Mia told him he could "rot in hell."