by Marion Meade
Throughout his long and productive career, Woody insisted that he never ran short of ideas and had no trouble writing, but for the second year in a row he found himself unable to complete a screenplay for a new film. By Christmas of 1992, distracted by staggering legal woes, he was still scrounging around for an idea for a fall project for 1993. Hoping that a collaborator might help rekindle his creative spark, Woody invited the self-effacing Doug to work with him on a screenplay. The neophyte recalled considering the proposition for five seconds before he said yes. It would give him, he remembered thinking, a window that would be "open for about one second" in which people might say, "Hey, who's this guy working with Woody, and what else does he have and what else does he want to do?"
After New Year's, Doug began showing up at Woody's apartment for three or four hours each day to brainstorm ideas for a comedy set in the 1920s. "Whatever we do," Woody told him, "I have to write a part for Dianne Wiest." He had promised the actress a part in his next film. The atmosphere was full of turmoil, McGrath later recalled. Woody, still preoccupied, was frequently on the phone with lawyers. ("Okay, get a detective," McGrath overheard him say.) Mia was as difficult to ignore as a brushfire raging out of control, and practically everything she did upset him. Hearing that Dylan might have to be sedated for a vaginal examination (in an attempt to prove penetration) made him feel ill. And he was livid when he learned that Mia had permitted the British magazine Hello! to photograph the children. He called the photos a sickening kind of exploitation.
In the bone-chilling rain, a tide of soggy green hats and wailing bagpipers spilled along Fifth Avenue as thousands of marchers, 160 brass-and-pipe marching bands, and countless beer drinkers clomped along toward Eighty-sixth Street. It was the St. Patrick's Day Parade, one of two annual events (the other was the Puerto Rican Day Parade) that Woody wished he could "sleep through and awaken when they're over." Twenty floors above the parade, Woody received a long-awaited call. After six months, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital was ready to issue its report, and the next morning Woody and Mia were summoned to appear in New Haven for the briefing.
The panel attempted to answer two main questions. Was Dylan sexually abused? Was she telling the truth? In the opinion of the experts, the answers to both questions was no. There was no available physical evidence of child abuse and therefore no chance that Woody had molested his daughter. Dylan's account appeared to be the fantasies of an emotionally vulnerable child living in a disturbed family, a response to stress she was unable to handle. The fondling in the attic was "concocted or imagined." The doctor heading the investigation, John Levanthal, who had interviewed Dylan numerous times, called her accounts inconsistent, and he also noted that "those were not minor inconsistencies." Dylan's descriptions had "a rehearsed quality," he said. The story heard on the videotapes, the hospital team believed, was imagined or the result of Mia's coaching, very likely a combination of both. Indeed, as Levanthal later theorized, it was possible that the videotaping had the effect of encouraging fabrication because Dylan enjoyed performing.
According to the sex-abuse experts, "Ms. Farrow has had a very disturbed relationship with Dylan and Satchel." The report also suggested that it was "absolutely critical for the children's emotional health that she be in intensive psychotherapy to address these relationships."
As he listened to the findings, Woody looked immensely relieved. He kept glancing over at the woman he once loved and now could not remember loving, and he was struck by her furious expression. At that moment, he was suddenly aware of how intensely she hated him. All the same, she perplexed him. Any normal mother would be relieved that three experts, two of them women, found her daughter had not been molested. "But so deep is her venom that she actually sees this as a loss," he thought. In any case, "she knows I never molested Dylan."
During the two-hour briefing, Mia verged on collapse. She felt sure that Woody's fame had somehow influenced the panel. Afterward, she made no comment to reporters except to promise numbly that she would "always stand by my children." Late in the afternoon, at home, she nestled on a sofa in her living room and sobbed. Although the panel agreed that Woody too had "disturbed relationships"—mentioning his "boundary problems"—with the children, she was shocked and offended at the suggestion that it was she who needed psychiatric treatment.
For Woody it was Christmas in July because the panel approved of visits with Dylan, even overnight visits at his apartment, and saw no problem with his continuing to see Soon-Yi as well. Outside the hospital, the usually dour Woody wore a triumphant grin on his face. "I think Dylan will be thrilled to see me," he declared to a huddle of reporters.
While the Yale-New Haven Hospital experts concluded that Woody was innocent, the office of the Connecticut State's Attorney was far from convinced. Unbeknownst to Woody, the skeptical Frank Maco was giving scarcely any weight at all to the hospital findings, which constituted only a portion of his investigation. He continued to believe that Woody's behavior with his daughter on August 4 was "grossly inappropriate." In his opinion, there was enough evidence for him to order the actor's arrest.
Back in New York that evening, certain that he had been fully exonerated, Woody kept busy on the phone as he received calls of congratulations from Diane Keaton and other friends. To share his triumph and record it for posterity, he summoned his favorite reporter, Denis Hamill. Hamill was a columnist at the New York Daily News; his prominent brother, Pete, was a New York Post columnist and novelist, who had dated Shirley MacLaine and Jacqueline Kennedy; and another brother, Brian, was employed by Woody as official still photographer on his movie sets. The previous summer, sympathetic to Woody's plight, Pete Hamill treated Woody's affair with Soon-Yi as a star-crossed passion out of a Puccini opera. "A pall has fallen on the city and on Woody Allen and upon many people who love him," he wrote in the Post. "Love is at the heart of this terrible story, of course; it usually is." In the Daily News, using personal details spoon-fed to him by Woody, Denis Hamill reported on the bottles of Xanax and Tofranil in Mia's medicine cabinet, the return of the retarded youngster Sanjay, whom she had found "too burdensome," and the particulars of how she had breast-fed Satchel "until he was 3 1/2 and even had a special harness constructed to do so over Woody's objections."
The night of his return from New Haven, Woody invited Hamill to his apartment. When the reporter asked him how the investigation had affected his career, Woody, sounding giddy, brushed off the question and said that it was only his children, not his career, that interested him. Over the past eight months, he had seen Satch for a total of thirty-six hours. He had not seen Dylan once. The Yale-New Haven team recommended that father and child should be reunited as quickly as possible. Dylan loved and missed him. Child custody laws were so highly prejudiced against men, Woody noted to Hamill, that "the burden of guilt is on you, not on the accusers. This is on me like a tattoo for life. There will always be some people who believe what I was accused of just because I was accused." It was Mia's fault that "my manhood and my fatherhood were being torn apart in front of my eyes."
"Did you pray?" Hamill asked.
In the past, such a question probably would have provoked an arched eyebrow and a sharp one-liner from Woody, an avowed atheist. At the moment, however, he chose not to alienate anybody. "I believe in a superior being but not organized religion," he replied primly.
Two days later, the custody hearing began.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Allen v. Farrow
The New York County Courthouse looms over Foley Square in downtown Manhattan like a picturesque ruin from imperial Rome. Chiseled in large letters above the portico is the inscription: THE TRUE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IS THE FIRMEST PILLAR OF GOOD GOVERNMENT, an inspirational message from George Washington to the citizens of Gotham. Everything about the massive hexagonal structure promises a square deal for those unlucky enough to wind up there: the steep flight of steps; the fourteen Corinthian columns soaring to a pediment crowne
d by heroic statues; the magnificent interior rotunda, whose polychrome marble floor is inset with brassy copper medallions representing the signs of the zodiac. On the third floor, Courtroom 341 is a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room that had looked very impressive in 1927, when the courthouse was built. In 1993, however, the brown walls were peeling, the wooden chairs creaking, and the three large windows covered with yellow paper window shades pulled down to the sills. For three decades, in a multitude of films, Woody had successfully laid claim to Manhattan, particularly to the glamorous Upper East Side. But 60 Centre Street was the private domain of Elliott Wilk.
The custody proceeding of WOODY ALLEN, Petitioner, v. MARIA VILLIERS FARROW, also known as MIA FARROW, Respondent opened unexpectedly on Friday, March 19, 1993. Nothing was supposed to happen for several months, but Judge Wilk did not believe in shilly-shallying. That morning, without warning, he abruptly sent the wheels of justice spinning and announced the hearing would commence after lunch. This suited Woody, who wanted an end to the proceedings. For Mia, it was a devastating blow because she was departing for California to play the wife of Jack Nicholson in Wolf her first acting job since leaving Woody's employ. She was forced to withdraw.
The issues at the heart of Allen v. Farrow were the following: What are the best interests of the child? What is the competence of the mother? In order for a parent to win sole custody, the burden is on the plaintiff to prove that the change would benefit the child. In addition, terminating Mia's parental rights in regard to Dylan, Moses, and Satchel would mean proving incompetence, abandonment, or behavior damaging to the children's emotional and physical well-being.
On Friday afternoon, Elkan Abramowitz called Woody to the stand. With the good news from New Haven still ringing in his ears, he had every reason to feel confident. Dressed in his usual chinos and casual jacket with unbuttoned shirt, he gazed around with the supreme self-assurance that three decades of movie stardom—and first-class analysis—could provide. On the podium, he seemed to be in a director's chair, as if pondering how to use a drove of extras waiting below for their instructions. As if following one of his scripts, he allowed Abramowitz to lead him through a summary of how the affair with Soon-Yi Previn began a few days after Christmas of 1991, when she was home from college. However, he sounded surprisingly vague about his sexual attraction for the girl. To hear him tell it, the affair was an out-of-body experience. He had felt no particular yearning for Soon-Yi, nor did he have any prior plans to seduce her. Evidently he assumed the sex would be a passing fancy, "a short thing," he said.
Justice Wilk interrupted to ask if he had considered the effect on the other children in the family.
"I felt nobody in the world would have any idea," Woody answered. After all, it was a private matter.
"Wasn't that enough, that you would know you were sleeping with your children's sister?" Wilk wanted to know.
"I didn't see it that way," Woody replied. "I'm sorry." He and Mia, he continued, had not had sex for five years, and their relationship was over. Besides, he reminded the court, he had never lived with her or slept at her apartment, obviously forgetting all his nights at Frog Hollow and the years when she and the kids had slept at his penthouse.
Listening in disbelief, Mia sat only twenty feet from Woody. With her mane of fluffy hair curling in girlish corkscrews and the granny glasses, she had a studious look, as if she had dressed for a day at school: pleated skirt, immaculate starched white blouse, navy blue blazer, sensible flat shoes with black tights. In this courthouse ensemble, which she would wear every single day of the hearing, she gave the illusion of youth and appeared almost as young as any of her teenage daughters, although she was forty-eight and could not quite pull it off. Throughout Woody's testimony, as she heard his references to their "joyless, sexless" years together, his statements about their never having sex since the time of Satch's birth, she sat quivering. During a recess she lit a Marlboro Red and broke into tears. Not only was she a bundle of nerves, but her physical health had been poor for months. Seldom hungry, she subsisted on lunches of sardines or one of her favorite Lindt chocolate bars. (Like Woody, she had a passion for chocolate.) Sometimes she would poke around the refrigerator to find leftovers stored by the housekeeper, Mavis Smith. Spooning rice on a paper plate, she would plop a piece of chicken on top, and eat it cold. As a result of her meager diet, as well as stress, she had become rail-thin.
Taking the stand again, Woody recalled Mia's discovery of the Polaroids and the volcanic rages that followed. She was so crazed with hatred, he said, that she called him "a dozen times a night, raging and screaming into the phone, threatening to kill me." Given her most rabid threat—"You took my daughter and I'm going to take your daughter"—it was hardly surprising that only a few months later she would accuse him of sexually molesting Dylan. Gaining energy, he raised his voice. "It's unfathomable," he said in a rush of words. "It's unconscionable. It's disgusting. It's unappealing. It's not in my history or something I would ever do." After three hours, he was excused, and the hearing adjourned for the weekend. As well-wishers rushed to offer him congratulations, he walked out of the courthouse certain that he would win the custody hearing.
Monday morning, on cross-examination, Eleanor Alter stepped up and asked him an innocuous question: Had he ever dressed Dylan?
"I could have put her socks on." He smiled. "That's always hard work."
"Anything besides socks?"
Woody admitted that he had never changed a diaper or done any of the hard stuff. "Not appreciably, no. I help her on with her jacket, a little bit." Alter was not done yet. "Satchel?" she asked. "The same kind of thing, a little bit I help out." "Moses?"
Woody shook his head. "No, I don't dress Moses."
Still, Alter would not let up. Did he ever bathe Satchel or Dylan? (No.) Ever take the children for a haircut? (No.) Did he know who cuts their hair?
At this point, Woody caught on. "I think Mia cuts their hair," he replied.
In a rising voice, Alter moved on to other topics. She peppered him with questions about report cards and PTA meetings. Did he know the names of friends, teachers, doctors, or pets? Woody, tight-lipped, appeared to be clueless.
Did he know Moses loved baseball? (Perhaps.) And had he taken him to a game? (Probably not.)
Later the media would hail Alter’s courtroom cunning, but Raoul Felder, one of her fellow divorce attorneys, dismissed the strategy as "silliness. I don't see how it would impress any judge," insisted Felder. "Men can't remember information like that. I myself couldn't recall answers to those questions. Haircuts have nothing to do with being a good parent."
After Alter had concluded her questioning, Judge Wilk turned to Woody. "The other thing that occurs to me involves your relationship with Soon-Yi," he said quietly. "In the letter that was read from Moses [the "I hope you commit suicide" letter], you refer to her not having had any friends besides you.
"To the best of my knowledge that is correct."
Not for nothing was Wilk known as a judge who "gets into people's heads." Sounding mild-mannered, he continued amicably to ask what would happen to Soon-Yi if Woody broke off the relationship. "I guess the question that I have is, where is her support system?"
Woody shrugged. "Her support system at that time would have been me."
"Well," said Wilk, "it wouldn't have been if she wanted to stay, and you wanted out."
"No." Woody's confidence seemed to wane, and his answers began to sound a bit incoherent. "She would have had the normal support system that she had. Friends. She could have had what she could have gotten from the family. It would not have been an issue."
Wilk cut him off. "I gather it would have been a large issue, because it's not something she could have discussed with her family."
By this time, Woody began to look dazed. He was stuttering and coughing nervously, and sometimes his speech slid into the Brooklyn inflections of Allan Konigsberg. He finally said to Wilk, "My thought was that I would be the one aban
doned. I don't see it the other way around."
"Thank you," Wilk said. "You may step down."
Back at the oblong wooden table that Woody and his team of lawyers shared with Mia and her attorneys, Woody seemed subdued. He locked his fingers together and raised them to his lips.
Woody was no match for Eleanor Alter, but questioning by his own attorney, Elkan Abramowitz, proceeded routinely.
Twice the previous year, he told the court, he took Mia to the Carlyle Hotel for sex "because she begged me." On one occasion, when they were in the hotel room, she became abusive and hysterical. "I thought she was going to jump out the window," he said. "Then I realized, mercifully, that the Carlyle's windows are glass walls."
At such moments, Woody was "totally in character," said Post reporter Hal Davis. "You remembered that he was after all an actor." Joan Ullman, covering the hearing for Psychology Today, thought that he was "very funny. It felt exactly like watching a Woody Allen movie and so naturally everybody laughed."
"Do you have an opinion regarding custody in this case?" Justice Wilk asked Susan Coates, the clinical psychologist who treated Satchel Farrow for two years. Wilk sounded weary. What he wanted was a straight answer about the heart of the matter, the question that was sinking under a pile of fan-magazine details: Who should have custody of the three children?
Coates, in her third day on the stand, was testifying as Woody's witness. She hemmed and hawed and mumbled vague mumbo jumbo to even the simplest question. Apparently she had neglected to take careful notes of her sessions with Satchel. "My feeling," she answered, "is that further evaluation is necessary. I really feel from where I sit now, I wouldn't know what to do."
Rashomon:
"It's a classic case of a woman scorned."