by Marion Meade
According to his friends, Woody was surprised by the public outcry. "He couldn't imagine that other people would react as they did," said Walter Bernstein. His goodness was "self-evident." Above all, Woody was amazed that people actually were taking Mia seriously. He quickly learned that the public was fascinated by his incipient disgrace and that others profited by it.
Hearing the news, Dominick Conde, the photographer who had caught Woody and Soon-Yi holding hands at Madison Square Garden in 1990, checked his agency's files. "Whoa," he whistled, "look what I have." What he had was the only photograph of them together, looking like lovers. According to Conde, it "sold like crazy" all over the world. Soon he bought himself a new apartment.
Over the next several weeks, Woody's problems became the number-one interest of the country, even threatening to overshadow the Republican National Convention. In Houston, evangelical delegates harping on the popular topic of "family values" could not resist casting him as a personification of everything that ailed the country. But the networks slyly sandwiched Woody bulletins between the speeches of Barbara Bush and Marilyn Quayle, as if they were covering an unfolding sensational news story.
Magazines that had been praising Woody's genius for years were suddenly putting his life under a microscope. During the week of August 31, Time, Newsweek, and People trumpeted the Woody and Mia story across their covers. In endless hours of interviews, Woody tried to explain that he was not Soon-Yi's biological father or a father figure, had never lived in her home, had never been married to her adoptive mother. And yet in a sidebar, Time assembled a group of psychiatrists to discuss "What Is Incest?" (Their consensus: Incest might be too strong a word, but Woody and Soon-Yi's relationship is "surely an abuse of power.") No wonder confused readers thought he was sleeping with one of his daughters and had sexually molested a younger one.
Predictably, the Konigsbergs were in shock. Privately mortified, Woody's mother chose not to speak to the press, but Marty Konigsberg had plenty to say, little of it sympathetic toward his son. Mia was "a nice girl" with a conniving mother who "put her up to all this." Still, Woody should not have traded her for Soon-Yi without expecting to "take the heat." Only Letty came forward to defend her brother and accused Mia of adopting children "not for their needs but for hers." What's more, Letty sniped, "she favors her biological children while treating the older adopted kids as servants." Thereafter, Mia would find herself constantly depicted as an unstable woman for wanting a family of eleven, as if the state of mind required to accumulate that number of children was inherently suspicious.
Moving Pictures:
Standards and Practices Man: Child molestation's a touchy subject.
Mickey Sachs: Read the papers. Half the country's doing it.
—Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986
On an impulse, Woody invited Moses to lunch. Woody's motion for temporary support and visitation had resulted in a court ruling: He could see Satch twice a week, with a third person in the room, but not Dylan. However, no restrictions were placed on his meeting with Moses.
To his surprise, the normally sweet-tempered boy had turned against him. In a letter to his father, he lashed out that he never wanted to see Woody again because "I don't consider you my father anymore." Having sex with "his son's sister" was "a horrible, unforgivable, needy, ugly, stupid thing." He hoped that "you get so humiliated that you commit suicide." As for a lunch date, he added, "forget about it."
At the mention of Woody's name, said a family observer, "Moses would get very angry. For months before the scandal ever broke in the papers, he was depressed. He was such a dutiful, good-hearted boy, with total integrity, and now he got hurt big time."
Bridgewater residents were careful to avoid the media. "Mia was going through a bad time," said one local, "and we didn't want to make it worse." However, the Farrow children were constantly running up to the television vans on the road outside Frog Hollow and holding impromptu news conferences to defend the family. Peering solemnly through his glasses, Moses told a newsperson that Woody "has no morals. Everything seems right to him. He says he's in love with Soon-Yi but he's not. He's just using her." Lark and Daisy suddenly showed up in the newsroom of the New York Post one morning and asked for news of their sister. "They were nervous," recalled columnist Andrea Peyser. "It was clear their mother had sent them to trade an interview for information. I thought it was mean of Mia to send children to do her dirty work." Sitting down with Post reporters, the girls were not shy about putting Soon-Yi on the psychiatric couch. According to Lark's analysis, her sister was "emotionally immature for her age"; Daisy thought the romance was "disgusting."
The sight of Mia's kids denouncing him on CNN and elsewhere embarrassed Woody. The children he had treated royally for the last ten years, whom he had even airlifted to Europe on the Concorde, were suddenly buzzing around the media jackals like a surly Greek chorus. Meanwhile, the person most mortified by the press attention enveloping the children was Andre Previn.
The village of Bedford, New York, a wealthy, exclusive Westchester County community an hour north of the city, is horse country with hundreds of miles of trails winding through the woods. You can still buy a hundred-acre farm and an eighteenth-century house set in a bucolic landscape straight out of National Velvet, but Bedford and Bedford Hills and Katonah are also home to so many movie stars that they might be considered Beverly Hills East. Here lived Andre Previn with his wife, Heather, and their eight-year-old son, Lukas, when Previn was not commuting to London for various musical engagements.
Ever since Mia's frantic phone call after finding the Polaroids, he had maintained a calculated distance from Soon-Yi, whom he had scarcely raised. In all likelihood he was counting on Mia, "a remarkable mother," to cope with her customary competence and make sure Woody repaired his "unspeakable breach of trust" by leaving Soon-Yi alone. Beyond that, he was not particularly anxious to talk to the girl and surely did not want the responsibility of her living with his family in Bedford. By now it had been several months since he had spoken to his daughter about Woody Allen or anything else. Therefore, learning that she and Woody were continuing to have sex, he was rendered speechless. As a father, he couldn't find "a colorful enough vocabulary" to express his utter disgust for Woody.
The shameless invasion of privacy that passed for normal in Hollywood continued to repel Previn, who refused to stand for intrusions into his personal life and detested people who flaunted their grievances to the press. In 1970 his affair with Mia generated intense interest from the English paparazzi, who climbed trees outside Previn's Belgravia flat to peek at the couple. He would never forget the "degrading" and "unbelievable" spectacle of the "gutter press corps" nesting in the trees. In a curious way, history was repeating itself. Now it was not only the gutter press but the world's news media roosting in his trees.
Sixty-three and suffering from painful angina, he wanted the whole tawdry investigation to disappear. Instead, the name of Previn, a distinguished conductor and composer, was guaranteeing an automatic laugh on The Tonight Show.
As for his youngest daughter, she had become a celebrity in her own right. Television news showed Soon-Yi strutting in and out of Woody's building, looking relaxed and perky, long hair flying, a book bag casually swinging from her shoulder. She appeared resentful that anyone should believe she had been preyed upon. Hinting at her true disposition, she insisted that she made her own choices. "Let's not get hysterical," she declared to Newsweek. "I'm not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested, and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot." Evidently, she clung to the typically juvenile belief that one's parents were incapable of having sex. Except for work and family occasions, she told Time, Woody and Mia had "little to do with one another." She also insisted that Mia would have been equally jealous had Woody slept with "another actress or his secretary."
The morning after Woody's press conference at the Plaza, news helicopters began circling the campus at Drew. Later the same day
Soon-Yi was located miles away at Rider. Woody instructed her to attend class and say nothing to the media. Nevertheless, Andrea Peyser, the New York Post columnist, reached her by phone at her dormitory. Years later Peyser recalled being "stunned by her complete lack of regard for Mia. She hated her like poison. Obviously, she had never bonded with her mother but she seemed to have no feeling for anyone else either. I wondered if she was capable of strong emotions, even for Woody." When Peyser asked about her beau, she broke into a giggling fit and said, "I don't want to talk about it." She told her roommate, however, that she had "a boyfriend," without mentioning his name, therefore making Woody sound like the boy next door.
Soon Rider was transformed into a sideshow. College officials posted a security guard outside Soon-Yi's dorm, corralled reporters behind barricades, and assigned another guard to accompany her to class. Fueling up on Whoppers, delivered by Burger King directly to her dorm room, she spent her time reading Tennessee Williams and making telephone calls to Woody on a pay phone in the hallway. Before her picture appeared in the papers, the school had known nothing about her famous connections. To the surprise of the residence director, Soon-Yi paid no attention to the jumble of cameras, mikes, and reflectors. When the director inquired how she was doing, Soon-Yi smiled and said "she was used to publicity because of her famous parents."
Far from feeling beleaguered, she seemed to be basking in the attention. Her only complaint was that the air-conditioning in her room had broken down.
Caught on Tape:
Mia: Now you want little girls to turn you on because you can't get a hard-on with me anymore. That's all it is. You couldn't fuck me anymore so you wanted a little girl.
Woody: [no response]
Mia: But I know that as people get toward their 60s, it gets harder and harder to get [aroused]. So that's why guys in their late 50s turn to little girls.
Woody: Why?
Mia: To get sexual stimulation. Something new. Something forbidden. More erotic.
—Excerpt from transcript of a phone conversation,
ca. August 4-December 31, 1992,
taped by Woody Allen
and subsequently subpoenaed for
Woody Allen v. Maria Villiers Farrow
At long last the summer ended. At the Loews on East Nineteenth Street, the weekend crowd for Honeymoon in Vegas slouched in their seats with popcorn and sodas, yawning through a raft of boring previews. When the trailer for Husbands and Wives appeared, however, the entire theater snapped to attention. Stern-faced, costumed in frumpy sweater and jeans, Mia asks Woody if he is ever attracted to other women? "Like who?" he replies. The audience shrieked with laughter.
TriStar, stuck with Husbands and Wives, was understandably nervous. The film was to open on September 23 in eight theaters, a limited run that could qualify as an art-house opening. But now that art was clearly following life, the studio decided to "go wide" and open five days early in 865 theaters. Despite the free advertising, Husbands and Wives did poorly at the box office.
Shortly before the opening of Husbands and Wives, Woody began principal photography on Manhattan Murder Mystery, the movie he had coauthored with Marshall Brickman. Over the summer, it was obvious that Mia would have to be replaced, and at the last minute Diane Keaton stepped in to play her role. The reunion of Woody and Diane seemed to be an inspired move, resulting in a kind of Annie Hall Two that would conjure up the magnificent chemistry of their best work. Unfortunately, nostalgia aside, the idea backfired because audiences found it hard to believe that Annie and Alvy were now middle-aged. Woody looked run-down ("like Rumpelstiltskin" to a discomfited John Simon) and Diane was still pretty but overweight and unquestionably matronly. Together they could pass for a retired couple on Social Security. At the box office, domestic grosses barely topped Husbands and Wives' earnings of $10.5 million.
Despite Woody's ability to compartmentalize his life, Manhattan Murder Mystery had been made under trying conditions. Shooting on location in Bryant Park, he was booed by bystanders. Off the set, he had only to step out of his building to face a three-ring circus. To the dismay of the co-op board, some of whom remembering from years past his promise to be a model tenant, television trucks and hordes of paparazzi kept vigil.
When summer school ended, Soon-Yi returned to the city and moved in with Woody before it was time to return to Drew for her sophomore year. Adopting a foxhole mentality, the couple tried to stay out of the public eye as much as possible. Because Woody insisted they not be seen together for legal reasons, there were no sightings by the press or fans at Elaine's or his other usual haunts. Like Hansel and Gretel, they passed most of their time playing house in Woody's fortress, the faraway whisper of street traffic swirling below.
In Manhattan, a small group of expensive matrimonial lawyers handle nearly all the high-profile divorce cases of superrich couples. Among this exclusive group is Raoul Lionel Felder, the top family lawyer in the country, and close behind is Eleanor Alter, who was representing Mia. A short, stocky woman of fifty-three, Alter was a partner at Rosenman & Colin, a firm of two hundred lawyers, which charges clients four hundred dollars an hour. In legal circles, the battle-hardened Alter is known as a cold and arrogant person. She has never denied it. "Lots of people will tell you I'm a bitch," she once boasted to the New York Times. Even though Woody certainly had the means to hire the most prestigious matrimonial lawyer in the United States, he may have chosen his new lawyer in the same hit-and-miss way that many people pick an attorney, by calling his business lawyer and getting a referral.
Elkan Abramowitz was a respected trial lawyer who specialized in white-collar crime. As he admitted, Woody's case was "a total exception" to his usual activities, which included an antitrust proceeding against the Mafia. In the past, he had also served as special prosecutor in the investigation of a stock transfer involving Mayor David Dinkins. A graduate of New York University School of Law and a partner in Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Jason & Silberberg, Abramowitz was fifty-two, a tall, bearish, silver-haired man with a slight potbelly and an odd gait that suggested his shoes might be pinching. For twenty-five years he had been happily married to a best-selling novelist, Susan Isaacs (Compromising Positions, Shining Through), with whom he had two grown children. They owned a redbrick house in the leafy Long Island suburb of Sands Point, as well as a city apartment on Central Park South.
The first time Abramowitz met Woody, he remarked, "Look, I've only spent three hours with you, but I figure I've known you my whole life." It was not that Woody had suddenly turned into a cuddly person. The astute Abramowitz was merely observing that Woody Allen fans automatically assumed they knew the man, and so it was like representing "somebody who lives next door to everybody."
In legal circles, Woody's choice of a counselor who had never practiced matrimonial law raised a few eyebrows. While Abramowitz was an accomplished lawyer, he was hardly a flamethrower. "Choosing him was a mistake," said Raoul Felder. "He had never played in this playground." An attorney who knew his way around the matrimonial courtrooms, Felder thought that Woody's affair with Soon-Yi would doom his suit for custody of Dylan, Satch, and Moses Farrow. "For all intent and purposes, he has been her father. If this is the case, he'll never be able to visit them much less have custody." For that reason alone, Felder later said that he would have turned down the case. Even at the outset, he considered Woody's case a lost cause.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dirty Laundry
Since August, Woody Allen had been pursued by the television networks for an exclusive interview. "It was a huge story," according to Victoria Gordon, producer of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes. "Leslee Dart told me Woody wanted to respond in some way and was thinking of writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times. Of course I believed he could make the same points more effectively in a television interview." Although Dart preferred Nightline, in the end, Woody chose 60 Minutes. In meetings with Letty Aronson, Gordon and correspondent Steve Kroft nailed down the ground rules: W
oody was free to make whatever points he wished, but there would be no deals, no questions off-limits.
As Kroft promised at the start of the program, aired on the Sunday before Thanksgiving of 1992, it would be a "no holds barred" session. Woody claimed that he had no idea how the Polaroids came to be on the mantel. "What about the way Mia discovered the affair?" Kroft asked him. "By finding certain embarrassing pictures."
Woody looked at him in surprise, as if he had not expected Kroft to mention the photographs.
"Yes." In his living room, he sat up straighter in his chair. "What is the question?" he murmured.
After two decades in broadcast journalism, the 60 Minutes correspondent had perfected his technique. Kroft gazed into Woody's face and said very quietly, "I presume that is not the way you wanted her to find out." Woody squinted.
"Or did you want her to find out?"
He seemed to be considering the question. "I never really thought about it," he answered. He guessed that he would have told her "eventually."
"He was very organized and had obviously given it a great deal of thought," Kroft recalled. "But there was a total blind spot about the impropriety of his relationship with Soon-Yi. He seemed not to care about what people thought." Instead, he joked about his harrowing problems. "Some of the best material in the interview," Kroft said later, "was cut so as not to offend viewers."
Kroft was completely sympathetic to Woody, who, he said, "had always been a hero of mine. At the time of Annie Hall, I thought he was the smartest person in the world." He added that he was not normally "starstruck. But the reading material in his living room, actually everywhere, was heavy stuff. In his bathroom I saw works on Freud, the kind of books you would expect to find in the office of a professor of psychiatry."