Unruly Life of Woody Allen
Page 36
Now a junior at Drew, she lived in a campus dorm room, but on Friday afternoons Woody's chauffeur ferried her back to 930 Fifth Avenue, where as mistress of the house she felt free to run it as she pleased. The decor was stodgy. The place felt like a mausoleum. To make the apartment more cheerful, as she insisted, Woody agreed to knock down walls and redecorate with country furniture, colorful needlepoint pillows, and antiques. Matching checked sofas were ordered for the living room, and a long oak refectory table for Soon-Yi's computer and textbooks was installed in the blue room, which was the room where Mia had discovered the Polaroids. A small bedroom was redone for Satch and named the "Monster Room." According to Elliott Wilk's rulings, the six-year-old could not sleep at Woody's apartment, take home toys, or see Soon-Yi. Nevertheless, his room contained two eight-foot-tall replicas of space aliens, shelves of Predator videos, and toy bins brimming with a jumble of grotesque intergalactic plastic creatures that had been assembled by father and son. An immense rubber spider sprawled across the bed. After the redecoration, discarded furniture was hauled to the basement. Several tenants in the building took the opportunity to recover Woody's castoffs from the trash, dragging tables and chairs to their summer homes or giving the loot to relatives.
Soon-Yi's refurbishing was not confined to the interior of the apartment. The terrace also needed repair. In fact, she could hardly set foot on the decks without sloshing into puddles or stumbling over stained, broken tiles. With his attention focused elsewhere the previous two summers, Woody scarcely noticed a minor problem such as poor drainage on the terrace. He blamed the roofer who five years earlier had replaced and waterproofed both of his roof terraces but, in his opinion, had botched the job. While instigating a lawsuit against Mia Farrow, he had also filed a half-million-dollar action against the roofing firm.
At the same time, he further instructed his lawyers to threaten legal action against a postcard company for poking fun at him with a photomontage card, "Mona Allen," that depicted him as the Mona Lisa.
Soon-Yi never hesitated to speak her mind. Anyone who spent time in the couple's company could not help noting that Soon-Yi was constantly correcting Woody. He, though, seemed willing to make allowances for the "kid who was eating out of garbage pails in Korea," as he liked to call her.
In the privacy of their home, she treated him as a typical teenager might behave with her father—in an affectionate, protective, but often patronizing manner. She thought nothing of mocking what she felt were stuffy friends, his old-fashioned ideas, his outdated taste in hairstyle, clothes, and restaurants. She teased him about the collegiate outfits that he had assembled in the fifties, especially his shapeless hats. Eager to improve his appearance, she plied him with suggestions for making himself over by wearing stylish Armani suits, designer glasses, and adopting a voguish haircut. In general, she was impressed by his enormous fame, but the work that it rested upon seemed not to interest her, and she cheerfully admitted having "never read anything he's written." Nor had she seen many of his films. Woody recommended watching Annie Hall with "one of your twitty teenage friends," but she thought it sounded boring. Once she sat through Interiors and found it "long and tedious." Her favorite movie, perhaps for obvious reasons, was Manhattan. Although she was an opinionated, and often impertinent, young woman, Soon-Yi, according to Jean Doumanian, was good for Woody.
"She's very clear and has a different way of viewing things," Jean noted. "She's very quick to say how she feels."
To some people, Soon-Yi's position as the mistress of a famous man seemed enviable, but it came with a price. She was obliged to live life with a partner who was old enough to be her grandfather, and whose lifelong routines revolved around work and his creative imagination. Entertaining friends at home never interested him. Going away on a weekend was "a punishment." He didn't like parties or rock music. And he didn't even dance. Soon-Yi, however, always liked to be on the go. She loved parties, swimming, dancing, shopping, rock music, and slinky miniskirts. She wore her hair in pigtails, a Pocahontas hairstyle that succeeded in making Woody look like the Ancient Mariner. Dutifully she accompanied him to Knicks games, but soon she was dragging him to Fashion Week collections of her favorite designer, Donatella Versace. It was to please Soon-Yi that Woody could be found in first-class seating next to the runway alongside Whitney Houston and k.d. lang. Sometimes he looked sullen, as he clamped both hands over his ears to block out the throbbing of high-decibel rock.
While they continued to be seen at Elaine's, Woody's favorite luncheonette often took second place to Soon-Yi's choice of restaurants, the new glamorous in-spots patronized by cafe society. Not long after it opened, Balthazar, the trendy SoHo brasserie, received more than a thousand calls a day. But Soon-Yi and Woody had no trouble getting a reservation—even changing their table because some loud, tequila-drinking stockbrokers at a nearby table made conversation impossible. Other favorite dining spots were the newly reopened Le Cirque 2000 (where Soon-Yi was observed eating with her fingers), Nobu in Tribeca, and a collection of less-elite Upper East Side restaurants, closely guarded secrets such as Asia, Ennio's, and Primola. Without Woody, Soon-Yi was seldom recognized in public. Together, their entrance usually electrified other diners, who stopped eating or talking to gaze spellbound at the famous film director and his young lover.
In the summer of 1994, Woody was furious to learn that Mia Farrow was moving out of the city. New rent laws contained a luxury decontrol provision allowing landlords to deregulate an apartment and charge what the market would bear if a tenant's income exceeded $250,000 a year. The monthly rent of $2,300 on Mia's apartment was in danger of soaring to the full market price of $8,000. When she debated dodging the new rule by putting the lease in her children's name, the building's owners promised to take her to court and "sue her for the rest of her life." Mia felt bad about giving up the apartment that was first rented by her mother in 1963. Maureen O'Sullivan, however, proved far less sentimental. "This used to be a joyous place," she told Mia. "But I think it's depressing now. It's a shrine to the past."
Although some of Mia's neighbors in the same predicament succeeded in negotiating compromises with the owners of the Langham, Mia decided to leave Central Park West for her country home in Connecticut. Whether or not she could afford the new rent, luxury deregulation gave her a faultless excuse for removing Dylan and Satch from proximity to Woody. Her older children were away in college—only Moses had two remaining years of high school—and living at Frog Hollow would be healthier for her younger children. Determined not to be outfoxed, Woody took her to court to prevent the move, but he was unsuccessful and had to drive several hours to Connecticut to see Satch for a mere three-hour visit. Unwelcome at Frog Hollow, he usually wound up taking his son, along with a chaperon, to a movie or to a mall, where they passed the time shopping for toys and eating ice cream.
Moving Pictures:
Kleinman: I've never paid for sex in my life.
Prostitute: You just think you haven't.
—Shadows and Fog, 1992
One year after Judge Wilk's decision, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed his ruling. Its harshest criticism was reserved for Woody's involvement with Soon-Yi because, as Justice David Ross wrote, "continuation of the relationship, viewed in the best possible light, shows a distinct absence of judgment. It demonstrates to this court Mr. Allen's tendency to place inappropriate emphasis on his own wants and needs and to minimize and even ignore those of his children." The Appellate Division also upheld Wilk's restrictions on the amount of time Woody could spend with Satch, although two of the five justices dissented because they felt unsupervised visitation for twelve hours a week, plus alternate weekends and holidays, would be more reasonable. As for the famous Polaroid photos, which Woody always argued were nothing but ordinary erotic pictures between two consenting adults, the all-male panel delivered its opinion: "We have viewed the photographs and do not share Mr. Allen's characterization of them." Case closed.
The emotional cost of the proceeding proved to be exorbitant, but Woody also paid dearly in dollars. Before the roller-coaster ride even began, he had spent "a couple of million already on seven lawyers, and we're not done yet." Subsequently, his expenses for attorneys and private detectives continued to climb astronomically. Over and above the cost of the hearing and his fight against Mia in Surrogate's Court, there were also the costs of appealing Wilk's ruling, along with his complaints against Frank Maco. And finally, Wilk ordered him to foot the bill for Eleanor Alter, Mia's gilt-edge matrimonial lawyer, an expense that Woody aggressively resisted because, as he initially estimated, her lawyer's fee could run him as much as $300,000. As it turned out, he had gravely underestimated the fee. In 1995 he would be forced to enrich Rosenman & Colin with a cool $1.2 million.
All told, Woody's romance with Soon-Yi set him back upward of $7 million, a king's ransom that would have meant nothing to him had it accomplished his two main goals: clearing his name of the child-molestation charge and winning back his daughter. But for all the energy and time he poured into the struggle, in the end it proved to be money down the drain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Cost of Running Amok
At the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue, where Woody had filmed scenes from Broadway Danny Rose, hungry diners could care less about sex scandals involving young women and continued to order the overstuffed, overpriced "Woody Allen" sandwich—"Lotsa corned beef plus lotsa pastrami, $13.45." But on Park Avenue in the peach-colored brick St. Bartholomew's Church, the question of character was bound to count. The rector of St. Bart's had once brightened up his sermons with quotes from Woody's writings, generally a surefire means of drawing delighted chuckles from his Anglican parishioners. One of Reverend William Tully's favorite quips was: "There is no question there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?" But after Woody's transgressions, Reverend Tully discovered that any reference to Woody Allen was "radioactive because the jokes just didn't play well."
The story that had transfixed the country continued to glow like Chernobyl. On television, The Simpsons tagged him a child molester, and the cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head called their penises "my Woody Allen." More devastating was the continuing contempt of columnist Murray Kempton, the Joe DiMaggio of American journalism, who had attended the custody hearings and in six columns over a period of ten months could find no redeeming qualities in such "a hateful creature." Another harsh critic was the New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who compared one of his recent movies to "an infomercial with bad info." In her opinion, it was obviously "a propaganda film, a sentimental exercise in self-promotion," that he had made to rehabilitate his image. Woody bridled at the image of himself as a person in need of rehab. "It's the public that needs rehabilitation, the press," he retorted. Dowd had it backward; he was the real victim. "I'm the one who was suddenly smeared."
Persecuted in his own country, Woody turned to Europe for appreciation. For years he had been one of France's most popular entertainers, a hero in their cultural pantheon. In 1989 he was named a Chevalier de 1'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, even though the French government neglected to inform him of the honor and he only learned of the medal by accident in 1998. Interviewed on French television about Bullets Over Broadway, whose subject he summarized as one dealing with compromise and aesthetics, Chevalier Allen said with exasperation, "How do you expect Americans who spend their time watching television, going to church and to shopping malls, to understand this?" The French couldn't figure out why Woody had become a pariah in his own country. "For the French, a man who does not have several loves, several mistresses, is not an interesting man," said a French film producer. "What Woody Allen did is very European and we appreciate his attitude: not being ashamed, and especially not apologizing."
But what Woody did is also very American. Certainly he did not invent the older man—younger woman romance, especially in Hollywood Babylon, possibly the most decadent city in the world, where sexual license has been traditionally enjoyed by male stars ever since its inception. As Woody himself tried to point out, Soon-Yi was as old as Mia Farrow was when she married Frank Sinatra. But the national press, unwilling to make allowances, continued to treat him just as if he had driven up to Soon-Yi's playground in his Mercedes and waved a Snickers bar at her.
March of Time:
"Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends."
—Woody Allen, 1969
On the evening of Tuesday, February 28, 1995, Woody's attorney, Elkan Abramowitz, was invited to dine at the Park Avenue home of Eleanor Alter, who was newly remarried to a psychiatrist. The recent adversaries who had jousted against each other in Elliott Wilk's courtroom were now friends. Promptly at 8:00, they made themselves comfortable in front of the television set and prepared to watch Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story, the first part of a four-hour miniseries. Produced on a low budget and filmed mostly in Toronto, the television movie was cast with look-alike actors and actresses who skillfully impersonated the famous real-life people. Dennis Boutsikaris, a well-regarded but little-known New York stage performer, played Woody, and Mia was portrayed by Patsy Kensit, a British actress who had debuted at age three as Mia's towheaded daughter in The Great Gatsby. When he learned of the miniseries, Woody pretended to be surprised that anyone would be interested in filming Mia's life. And the idea of someone playing himself struck him as ludicrous. "I must call Tom Cruise and tell him that there's a job opening," he deadpanned. Despite the joke, his amusement was hollow because the Fox Network production was based largely on a book he had never wanted to be published. The author was a former nanny to Mia's children, who had transformed herself from country hired help into a published author with her own book tour.
In the summer of 1991, Mia had hired the daughter of a Bridgewater neighbor to look after Dylan and Satchel in the country. Kristi Groteke, who lived two miles away, was a pretty, athletic, easygoing young woman of twenty-one, who seemed to fit right in with the family as more of a big sister than an employee. She was attending Manhattan College in Riverdale on a track scholarship and needed one semester to graduate with a B.S. in education. Over the next two years, however, Kristi began spending more and more time helping out in the city, especially when Tam needed extra attention and then during the frantic months when Mia was preoccupied with the custody hearing. As genuine ease and affection grew between employer and employee, Mia came to depend on the loyal Kristi.
During the hearing, Kristi had approached Mia with the idea of using her inside knowledge of the family to write a sympathetic book that would picture Mia as a devoted mother coping with the disintegration of her family. Aware of how much she owed Kristi, Mia gave the project her blessing and cooperated by allowing her to inspect copies of court transcripts and conduct interviews not only with herself but also with Daisy, Lark, and other friends of the family. If Mia had qualms about the project, she did not express them to Kristi. Perhaps she had doubts that a college student with no previous experience as a writer would be capable of completing a book, let alone finding a publisher. There was the possibility that nothing would come of it.
With the help of Marjorie Rosen, a senior writer from People magazine, Kristi produced a three-hundred-page book that, despite a tight deadline, was professionally researched, expertly written, and published by Carroll & Graf. In the sp
ring of 1994, the proud author delivered to Mia an advance copy of Mia and Woody: Love and Betrayal and expected her approval. But two days before publication, Mia called Kristi in a fury. "Just stop the book!" she yelled. "Stop it!" Kristi, however, was in no position to stop the presses. Besides, she was booked on Larry King Live.
As Mia informed Kristi, she objected to the depiction of her marriage to Frank Sinatra as an abusive relationship. But what truly upset her was the speculation that she and her close friends had shared information with Kristi and that now Kristi was making public: Mia's suspicions of a secret affair between Woody and her sister Steffi, after she had discovered photos of Steffi in his apartment; his romance with Diane Keaton's younger sister Robin; and his obsession with one of Mariel Hemingway's sisters. Of course Woody had never made a secret of his fascination with the relationships between sisters, which, as he told the New York Times, probably resulted from growing up among a multitude of aunts and female cousins.