by Marion Meade
As background, Woody supplied 60 Minutes with visual materials: the dagger-pierced Valentine, the child-molester note, custody affidavits in which Mia swore he was a wonderful father. However, the main point he wanted to get across regarded Mia's parenting. Her adoption of so many children was abnormal behavior, he argued. In addition, she was a poor mother. (Actually, these allegations were shared, to some degree, by a few people who knew Mia and Woody and believed Mia had problems handling so many children. "Her style of mothering was pathological," said one observer, who was not surprised by her "hysterical" reaction to Woody's infidelity, "only its intensity.")
Then Kroft raised the allegations that Woody took Dylan into the attic and touched her. "Is there any truth to that at all?"
Woody deflected the question. "Look, be logical about this. I'm fifty-seven. Isn't it illogical that at the height of a very bitter, acrimonious custody fight, I'm going to drive up to Connecticut, where nobody likes me and I'm in a house full of enemies, and suddenly, on visitation, pick this moment in my life to become a child molester?" He then answered his own question: "It's just incredible. It's so insane!"
Even though 60 Minutes had earned its stripes as fearless investigators, in this instance the newsmagazine seemed curiously timid. No effort was made to ask tough questions of the subject or shed new light on the story. In fact, Kroft concluded with an exoneration: "Reports we were shown seem to support his contention that he's not a child molester."
The Film Critics:
"There was something awful about the Soon-Yi business, but on the other hand something very human, the type of ambivalence that surrounds him and his work."
—John Simon
"The press depicted him as a dirty old man but nobody considered he might be more of a mentor to Soon-Yi. With Woody Allen, sex is not the point so much as communication."
—Roger Ebert
“I don't care what people say about the age difference. It's just pure jealousy," said Soon-Yi when she returned to Drew after the Thanksgiving break. Rumors that Woody was losing interest in her were instigated by her mother, she informed a reporter, who was furious that Woody had never married her.
Soon-Yi did not appear on 60 Minutes, to the relief of the producers. "We knew enough about her to think she was not going to be a great interview," said a staff member. On 60 Minutes Woody had seemed bored when talking about Soon-Yi. When asked if he saw her on weekends, he said, nonchalantly, "Yeah, I see her when she gets off school, when she's off for the holiday or something." "Or something" did not suggest a passionate love affair. In private moments with friends, he displayed more emotion. Of course he was in love with Soon-Yi, a sweet girl who appreciated the things he did for her. But sometimes he thought he had made an error in judgment ("I screwed up"). Some insiders predicted the romance would not endure, especially if Woody was forced to choose between Soon-Yi and getting custody of his children.
Andre and Heather Previn worried that Woody would discard Soon-Yi after he had become bored with her sexually. But for all his sympathy, Andre had no wish to testify in the custody proceeding. His feelings mirrored those of his son Sascha, who one morning confided to Kristi Groteke, with tears in his eyes, "I'm so sick of this whole thing. I wish it would just end." The last thing Andre wanted was to be a spear-carrier in Woody and Mia's drama.
In the summer, Soon-Yi had conducted herself with dignity and composure. But as the spotlight faded, and the loss of her family dawned on her, she seemed less self-assured. Her fame of a few months earlier had taken an unexpected and unpleasant turn. The media wickedly lampooned her in a spate of nasty, disparaging gags that were both sexist and racist. On Saturday Night Live she was raunchily impersonated by comedian Rob Schneider; Mad TV based an insulting character on her, and she (along with Woody and O. J. Simpson) was the butt of a crude Howard Stern radio skit, "Mandingos Over Broadway."
She was lonely at Drew, where the other students made fun of her behind her back. She had few friends. No one wanted to room with her—or date her—and so she spent every weekend with Woody in New York.
If Soon-Yi felt depressed, her little sister was in far worse shape emotionally. The previous summer, Dylan suddenly began to complain of headaches. In a daze, she lazed in the hammock at Frog Hollow. "If you asked her what was wrong," recalled a visitor, "she'd say she didn't feel well." She also began to wet her bed, something that had not happened since she was three years old. Her father's abrupt and painful removal from her life was wrenching to the child, and yet, under the circumstances, it was impossible for her to directly express any feelings of grief.
Woody saw Satch twice a week, in the presence of a social worker. On the trip to Fifth Avenue, the boy would get nervous, but by the time Woody's driver returned him home to Central Park West two hours later, his mood would have swung 360 degrees. He was extremely fond of toys. Under his arm he would be carrying his latest loot, along with a shoe box full of drawings or a cake he and his father had baked together. Dylan did not like that at all. "Satch and Dylan were very close and so he knew better than to tell her he had a good time," said a member of the household. "If he showed her the cake, she would say right away, ‘Put that cake away, I'm not eating it,' just as if she were the divorced woman."
During Christmas week, the Connecticut State Police paid a final visit to Frog Hollow to wrap up loose ends of their investigation. On an earlier visit, Dylan, using anatomically correct male and female dolls that a psychologist employed by the police had shown her, joined the two figures in a simulation of sexual intercourse. This time the investigators decided to quiz her further about it. To Mia's shock, Dylan described a visit to her father's apartment, which Mia calculated to be in the fall of 1991 when she was in Vietnam to adopt Sanjay and Tam. According to Dylan, her father and Soon-Yi were making love on the terrace. The child's description of their intimate behavior was so detailed and so clinical that Mia immediately reported it to Eleanor Alter, who, meanwhile, had successfully subpoenaed Woody's psychiatric records.
In His Own Words:
Q: What are sex perverts?
A: Sex perverts are the most wonderful people in the world ... a much maligned majority group.
Q: Have you known many?
A: Just family. Immediate family.
—Woody Allen interview, 1972
Acting Justice Phyllis Gangel-Jacob is an expert at dealing with messy legal cases involving the rich and famous. Nevertheless, her assignment in August 1992 to the Allen-Farrow case seemed like a piece of rotten luck for Woody because in legal circles the judge was known as "a man-eater." Donald Trump, after his divorce from his wife, Ivana, declared Gangel-Jacob s court to be "stacked in favor of women." Other disgruntled males—attorneys as well as husbands—complained she was unworthy of sitting on the bench. In New York Supreme Court, the normal method of processing cases is random assignment by computer. In the Allen-Farrow case, however, a clerk had initially given the case directly to Gangel-Jacob, which aroused the ire of her colleagues, who grumbled that as usual she grabbed all the celebrities. As a result, the case was reassigned to Acting Justice Elliott Wilk. While Wilk was on vacation, Gangel-Jacob continued to handle the preliminary hearing.
For a man of fifty-one, Elliott Wilk was exceptionally fit. He had run in five New York City Marathons and was training for his sixth. Growing up in Queens, the son of an attorney, the justice attended public schools and graduated from New York University Law School in 1966. In private practice, he represented draft protestors during the Vietnam War, and, in the seventies, championed inmates prosecuted for crimes during the Attica prison riot. Now he lived on Central Park West with his wife, Betty Levinson, a specialist in matrimonial and family law who had represented Hedda Nussbaum, the battered wife of convicted child killer Joel Steinberg.
Visitors to Wilk's robing room at 60 Centre Street usually noticed the photograph of the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara on the wall. What they did not see was any judicial regalia because the
trim, bearded Wilk entered his courtroom in a business suit, even though wearing black robes "would save on cleaning bills," he joked. The backbone of his judicial career had been highly contentious social issues, including child welfare, the homeless, and housing, and not the marital brawls of unmarried movie stars. His admirers spoke of him as a thoughtful jurist with superior intelligence (an I.Q. of 180) and an iconoclastic approach to the bench, a man who "asked sharp questions to cut through the nonsense."
At the same time, the jogging jurist managed to be a controversial figure, a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Abby Hoffman. His critics castigated him for pursuing his own liberal social agenda instead of trying cases. "His reputation for being ultra-liberal is deceptive," according to a divorce attorney who practiced before him. "There's also a defiance of authority, and clearly Woody Allen was a threatening figure to him." Another of New York's premier lawyers called him "a starfucker. In the Allen case, because these were celebrities, there was talk of a video camera in the courtroom. There was no justification. My God, when you have abuse cases you close the courtroom. If there had been cameras, those children would have been identified all over the world and their lives ruined, but Wilk and the lawyers would be famous." Both Woody and Mia had in fact tried to close the courtroom to not only TV cameras but also the press and public because the case involved children. Phyllis Gangel-Jacob ruled against the cameras but she did permit press coverage.
Justice Wilk's sympathy for the downtrodden did not end with draft protestors. It was well known in legal circles that he favored women. And mothers.
On January 12, 1993, Wilk held a preliminary hearing to rule on Woody's motion requesting regular visits with all three of his children. In the courtroom that morning, Woody was seated with his lawyers and publicists in a single row on the right side of the room. Camped behind Woody, breathing heavily down his neck, sat eavesdropping New York Post reporters. Mia was not present, but Eleanor Alter riffled her folders and informed Justice Wilk that Woody did not deserve additional visitation. For example, she claimed that in a fit of anger he overreacted by grabbing Satch's legs and yelling, "I'm going to break both your fucking legs, you little bastard." Woody listened to her accusation, his face flushed with indignation. Worse than that, Eleanor Alter went on, a grumpy Woody once shoved Dylan's face into a plate of hot spaghetti.
Then Alter dropped a hammer on Woody. Mr. Allen, she announced, had had intercourse with the sister of his children while the little ones were present. Her words sent the Post reporters sitting behind Woody scrambling for their notepads. Quoting from an affidavit submitted by Mia, Alter repeated Dylan's account to the Connecticut police: On a visit to their father's apartment, Dylan and Satchel noticed him sitting with Soon-Yi on the terrace and ran out to join them, but they were chased off and told to play. After a while, when Woody and Soon-Yi disappeared into a bedroom, the children tiptoed up to the door and observed them "lying together on top of the covers." Once again, they were shooed away. A short time later, Dylan returned alone and secretly watched her father and sister "complimenting each other and making sounds like snoring," and this time her presence went unnoticed. She saw "Daddy put his penis in Soon-Yi."
In light of Woody's carelessness in disporting himself before the child, Alter told Judge Wilk, "visitation with Dylan is unthinkable." Wilk agreed.
Woody, taken by surprise, looked like a bottle under pressure. As soon as the hearing ended, he stormed down the marble hall to the elevators trailed by a flock of reporters who caught up to him on the steps of the courthouse. With clenched jaw, he cried out, "Great, the wilder the charges the better!" Dylan's story was pure fantasy, "too insane to even think about." He and Soon-Yi never gamboled on his balcony. Likewise, it was "absolutely untrue" that he ever thought of twisting Satch's leg or pushing Dylan into a plate of spaghetti. He was sick of Mia using the children as her mouthpieces to vent her fury against him. "She takes her daughter and makes her say it," he angrily informed the media.
His legal problems had become increasingly time-consuming. Not only was he suing Mia for custody and petitioning to broaden his visitation rights but also fighting her suit, in Surrogate's Court, to invalidate his adoption of Dylan and Moses. In addition, he was threatening a civil suit against Mia, her mother, and her sister for libeling him in a November 1992 article in Vanity Fair, "Mia's Story," which painted him as a pervert.
Meanwhile, hanging over his head were the worrisome criminal investigations in Connecticut and New York. He was aware that if charges of sexual misconduct were brought against him, his career as a filmmaker would be finished. He continued to cooperate with the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which had been evaluating Dylan for six months, and he also made sure that Frank Maco’s office received affidavits and letters from Dylan's and Satch's therapists, Soon-Yi's psychiatrist, as well as his own doctor, Kathryn Prescott. In contrast to Mia, he even agreed to a take a lie detector test. What more did Maco want?
For several months, Paul Williams at the Child Welfare Administration in New York had worked feverishly to compile a two-hundred-page dossier that documented what he believed to be a cover-up by the city's Human Resources Commission in the Allen-Farrow case, charges that his superiors would vehemently deny. Despite his diligence, Williams was surprised to learn in December that he was being transferred off the Dylan Farrow case. Later on, his superiors would try to portray him as an obsessive malcontent who overstepped his authority and behaved unprofessionally with people he interviewed. Stung by these charges, Williams contended that that was not the reason he had been removed. Rather, it was because he continued to pursue his investigation. In desperation, Williams told, or leaked to, the New York Observer that his bosses were acting under pressure from Woody's attorneys and Mayor David Dinkins's office, a claim that was denied. This proved to be a mistake because, before he knew it, he was accused of unethical conduct and fired, although he would be reinstated a few months later. "They played it dirty and ugly," Williams told the media. According to Elkan Abramowitz, the pesky Paul Williams was a clumsy investigator: "He acted in a rude fashion and appeared to be biased against Mr. Allen." But as Williams admitted, "I concluded that abuse did occur and that there was a prima facie cause to commence family-court proceedings against Woody Allen."
Both Paul Williams and Frank Maco were tilling similar ground. Their conclusions about the truth or falsity of Dylan's story would have important consequences for Woody because it raised the specter of his being arrested, prosecuted, and, in a worst-case scenario, convicted and sent to prison. Outwardly, there was no indication that these matters worried Woody, who alternated between periods of going about his business, and continual crises that involved long, paralyzing meetings with attorneys and publicists. By provoking a frenzy of media attention, he had managed to leave himself wide open to the most awful sort of public voyeurism. News of his life had become a business commodity, like pork bellies or soybeans. The most intimate details—his snuffling and snoring during sex, for example—were considered legitimate news to be pawed over by strangers. Granted, he had been dribbling out plenty of details about his private circumstances for thirty years—in fact, ever since he did his first stand-up routines. No comedian was more confessional, or more selective about what he chose to make known. Now he seemed to have little control over what was written about him. In self-defense, he began leaking favorable news about himself to John Miller of Channel 4. Mia's favorite partisan television reporter was Rosanna Scotto of Fox Five, whose children attended school with Dylan. "Let him have 60 Minutes," Mia said airily. "I have Channel 5 News." Nothing he did seemed to staunch the flow of invective.
The remarkable productivity of his daily life Woody owed to both his own exceptional discipline and the dedication of his personal assistant, Jane Read Martin. At his beck and call for eight years, Martin put up with his moods and whims and performed endless personal chores. No task was too menial. For a measly salary, she worked inhuman hours—s
even days a week, often until 10 P.M.—and took only two weeks a year for vacation. In 1990, in her mid-thirties and unmarried, the aide-de-camp had resigned, and although Woody arranged for another assistant, the rapport was never the same because, said a member of his staff, "Jane was very special."
Even though Jane was gone, she and Woody remained fast friends. Not surprisingly, she continued to regard Mia as a reptile slithering in the grass, intent on smearing "an indelible black question mark at the end of Woody's name forever." Out of friendship for her former boss, she provided sympathetic company and also offered to testify in the custody hearing. Grateful for her years of service and touched by her eagerness to stand by him, Woody frequently went out to dinner with Jane, who sometimes brought along her boyfriend, a writer and sometime stand-up comic named Douglas McGrath.
By now, Woody felt comfortable around Doug, a balding, puppyish man of thirty-three. A native of Texas, Doug had graduated from Princeton University, where he performed in Triangle Club musicals, and then obtained a writing job on Saturday Night Live. During the eighties, he wrote several unproduced screenplays, articles for The New Republic, as well as a single episode of LA. Law, then supported himself as a tutor at a private school for boys. Not only did Woody and Doug establish rapport because he was Jane's steady date, but Woody began to regard him as a trusted insider and part of his extended family. Evenings together were spent talking about jazz and old movies, and trading horror stories about Hollywood. Doug's first produced screenplay, a remake of Born Yesterday with Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, had recently been fried by the critics.