Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  In the fall of 1992, barely three months after Woody sued for custody, Mia announced she was going to write her autobiography. Unlike many celebrities who use professional writers as collaborators, Mia promised that she would write the book herself. For all of her hysteria about the custody action and the bombardments of the media, she managed to pull herself together and write a book proposal, consisting of a dozen or so pages about her childhood in Hollywood, which her literary agent submitted to editors at Putnam, Warner Books, and Simon & Schuster. It was eventually sold to Doubleday for an advance reported to be $3 million. The acquiring editor was Nan Talese, a sympathetic partisan of Mia's during the custody hearing. (Another Doubleday editor who had deluged Mia with phone calls and letters urging her to write a memoir was Jacqueline Onassis.) In terms of celebrity advances, Mia's was respectable but not extraordinary, especially when it was compared to the spectacular sums commanded by Whoopi Goldberg ($6 million), Paul Reiser ($5.6 million), and Marlon Brando ($5 million). Mia's high-powered literary agent was Lynn Nesbit, with whom Mia had a close, personal relationship. Lynn happened to be the mother of Matthew Previn's girlfriend, Priscilla Gilman, whom he had met as an undergraduate at Yale and whom Mia regarded as one of her own daughters. In her literary endeavors, Mia was fortunate to enjoy both the emotional support and literary guidance of two powerhouses in publishing.

  At the time of the book deal in 1992, Mia promised that her memoirs would cover her entire life: her movie-star family, her childhood ambition to be a pediatrician in Africa, the marriages to Sinatra and Previn, her acquaintance with such icons as Salvador Dali and the Beatles. Three years later, however, she was declaring that a portion of the book, perhaps no more than a single chapter, would speak about her dispute with Woody. Instead, she said during an interview, she would focus her thoughts on religion and philosophy: "What is the meaning of things? And who are people anyway? And what to make of what you're given." The idea that she planned to hold forth in her book on weighty philosophical issues sounded unrealistic when the obvious reason for the book—and its large advance—was to dot the is and cross the ts on her broken relationship with Woody. Did readers really want to hear about the existential Mia, even if she was married to Frank Sinatra? Their main interest was the Woody Wars. As it transpired, once she had obtained a book contract, Mia found little time for writing. After the custody trial, she needed to earn money as an actress. Following Widow’s Peak, she did Miami Rhapsody, in which she played a middle-aged wife whose secret liaisons shocked her children when they discovered them. Her next picture, Reckless, was about a happily married housewife who, discovering her husband has hired a hit man to murder her, escapes a violent death by crawling out a window clad in a flannel nightgown. It was a story that no doubt appealed to Mia because of its parallels with her own life. Then, to her dismay, Mia, like most middle-aged screen actresses, found that scripts were scarce.

  The vast amount of her time was spent in raising her children. By now, she had adopted three more children, who were physically disabled in one way or another and demanding far greater amounts of attention than other children. As a companion for Isaiah, she took in another African-American baby, whose mother was addicted to crack, and named her Kaeli-Shea, and a few months later she adopted a six-year-old paraplegic from India, who had been abandoned in a Calcutta train station. She gave him the name Thaddeus and bought him a small red wheelchair. Finally, in 1995, she adopted another blind Vietnamese orphan, a three-year-old whom she named Frankie-Minh for Frank Sinatra. Frankie-Minh, Mia decided, would be her last child. She was fifty, the mother of fourteen children, and soon to become a grandmother.

  Her older children no longer lived at home. Although Mia always wore a smiling, serene Hallmark face for the media, the truth was different, and the emotional bloodbath of the custody hearing, along with her two-year depression, had scarred the family. For some of her kids, survival meant flight. The first to leave home was Fletcher, who spent two years at a prep school in Hamburg, Germany. Returning to the United States at the age of twenty-two, he enrolled as a freshmen at Connecticut College, where roommates in his triple dormitory room remembered him as a friendly young man who dreamed of becoming a film director and one summer wangled an internship with Tom Hanks. After graduating from Yale University, Matthew Previn obtained his law degree at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., graduated cum laude, and began working as a law clerk for a federal court judge. His twin brother, Sascha, graduated from Fordham University, then left for Colorado with his girlfriend, Carrie Englander, shortly after the custody hearing. Returning to New York in 1995, Sascha married Carrie and worked as an accountant with a media buying company.

  In the case of Mia's girls, Soon-Yi was the only one to complete college. After Drew, she enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University's Teachers College, studying for a degree in childhood education. Lark, after two years at New York University, abandoned her plans to become a pediatric nurse and married Christopher McKinzie, a Brooklyn construction worker and furniture mover. Her sister Daisy spent one semester at Wheaton College in Massachusetts before dropping out of school and then she moved to Brooklyn and married the brother of Lark's husband. Both girls soon became pregnant. In contrast to their ambitious sister Soon-Yi, who was reportedly well maintained with a million-dollar trust fund from Woody, Lark and Daisy had obviously taken altogether different directions. In 1997, after giving birth to a second daughter, Lark developed serious medical problems.

  In the years following the acrimonious end of her relationship with Woody, Mia insisted she had no plans to remarry, but soon she was seen with a number of well-known actors, writers, and directors. Aware that her judgment about men had been "very limited, very flawed indeed," she admitted that it was a fault that "has had catastrophic consequences. I think I'm much shrewder now. I hope I am."

  In 1995 she began dating Philip Roth, one of America's premier novelists whose prolific output—some twenty works of fiction and nonfiction— rivaled Woody's output in film. Roth was Mia's neighbor in Connecticut and had recently gone through a divorce. His wife of eighteen years was the celebrated English actress Claire Bloom. In his 1990 novel, Deception, one of the characters was a whining, middle-aged English actress named Claire, until the real Claire Bloom insisted he create another name for the character, but it was hardly the first instance of his cannibalizing the lives of people he knew for his fiction. In 1987, after a painful knee operation, Roth had encountered problems with the hypnotic drugs Halcion and Xanax and had experienced severe depression. Six years later, he suffered a complete breakdown and entered Silver Hill, a psychiatric hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. When he was released from the hospital, Roth served his wife with divorce papers in which he accused her of inhumane treatment. What Claire Bloom shared in common with Mia Farrow, besides a talent for acting, was a maddening passivity in her relationships with men.

  Philip Roth was exactly the type of man whom Mia usually found appealing: Like Andre Previn, he was a cerebral Jew, a man some years her senior who exuded superior intelligence, charm, and wit. Like Woody, Roth's life centered around his work. Both Woody and Previn were small men, physically the opposite of Roth, who was six feet one with piercing black eyes and sultry dark looks. But Mia Farrow and Philip Roth had something in common: They both despised Woody Allen.

  Born within two years of each other, Woody Allen and Philip Roth came from the same postwar generation of middle-class Jewish males with high IQs and perpetually tormented libidos, who were eager to escape their parents' orbits and revel in the new sexual revolution that was taking place in the 1960s. As it happened, their writing embraced some of the same subject material. One of Roth's targets in his novel Portnoy’s Complaint was the leading character's overpossessive mother, Sophie. Like Roth's uninhibited heroes, Woody's Alvy Singer and his other fictional characters doted on blond gentiles—his Harold Cohen in "Retribution" achieving an ultimate fantasy by indulging his sexual appetites with
a mother and daughter. Apart from their creative similarities, neither Roth nor Woody were personally able to sustain mature relationships with women. Finally, their names would become synonymous with the term "self-hating Jew," not only because they are uncomfortable with their Jewishness but also because they find humor in Jewish paranoia and neuroses.

  For all these ironic parallels, however, there was no professional or personal sympathy between them. In the seventies, Woody said, deadpan, that he couldn't relate to Roth's characters because "I have never had that obsession with Gentile women." Roth "always detested Woody," reported a friend of Claire Bloom's, "because of the sentimentality and the vulgarity. The thing about Philip is that he has exquisite taste because he knows when he is being vulgar." Over the years, the novelist's increasing animosity toward Woody was further fueled by his suspicion that the filmmaker had pickpocketed some of his ideas. In 1972, for instance, the year Roth published his novel The Breast, Woody made Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, which contained a memorable scene showing a giant breast that escapes from a sex researcher's laboratory and terrorizes the countryside until it is lured into an X-cup bra. When Woody's affair with Soon-Yi became public, Roth was said to be disgusted by the revelation. His scorn amused friends of Claire Bloom's because evidently Roth, like Woody, had also developed a taste for teenage girls. Although Bloom had no idea that he behaved as he had at the time, she later discovered that Roth had propositioned her daughter's best friend, a girl who had been practically a daughter to her.

  When Woody learned about Mia and Roth's relationship, he must have seen it as an opportunity to exact a double revenge. In 1988 he chose to cast Claire Bloom as the deceived wife in Crimes and Misdemeanors, and then, aware that she was separated from Roth and in need of money, he hired her for a second time as the hero's mother-in-law in Mighty Aphrodite. Then he wrote a screenplay about a renowned novelist and academic who freely plunders for his fiction the lives of people close to him, before suffering writer's block and teetering on the edge of a crack-up. "A nasty, shallow, superficial, sexually obsessed" man was how Woody happily described his protagonist, Harry Block. Undoubtedly, he must have hoped that moviegoers would never think to connect Harry Block with Philip Roth. Everyone would assume that in the film Woody was slyly mocking himself, donning a reverse hair shirt and justifying his mistreatment of Mia. In a final embellishment to his private joke, he cast Richard Benjamin as one of the performers playing Harry Block. The hero in the film versions of both Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, Benjamin had seldom worked in recent years.

  On a muggy summer night in 1996, Woody brought his touring band to the 92nd Street Y in New York. The concert was sold out and for the first time in memory the Y attracted scalpers. The crowds streaming into the hall that July evening were predominantly middle-aged suburbanites, the hard-core fans who had not missed one of his movies since What's New, Pussycat? and had even liked Stardust Memories. Nostalgic, they were hungry for the old Woody magic. They were disappointed, however, by the sight of the real man who had brought them so many funny, unforgettable moments. Collapsed on a chair with his pale white arms dangling from the short sleeves of a blue shirt, his eyes staring limply into his lap, he ignored the audience, who enthusiastically applauded him. As they filed out of the auditorium, some of them expressed concern about his health.

  "Doesn't he look like a cadaver?" a fiftyish man said to his wife.

  "No, he doesn't look like a cadaver," she replied. "He looks like he ought to be on life support."

  At sixty, Woody's skin had the waxy, white pallor of a solitary-confinement inmate. Although he would not admit it to anyone, his daily strolls on the treadmill hardly counted as exercise, since he seldom got beyond 2.6 miles per hour, which was barely enough to work up a sweat.

  Always worried about his health, Woody had a separate doctor for practically every part of his anatomy. Arriving for a consultation with a new specialist that year, he looked fearful and morose, so uncomfortable among the other patients in the reception area that the nurse quickly ushered him into an examining room. In an attempt to cheer him, she chuckled, "We even use clean needles here," a joke that he failed to appreciate. His movie character's reputation as an intractable hypochondriac was based on reality. For many years, he had kept a thermometer at Mia's apartment and also carried with him, in his pants pocket, a silver pillbox that contained Compazine, Librium, Excedrin, Zantac, and a couple of Donnazyme tablets. Not that he had often needed to use the pills—he disliked even taking an aspirin—but knowing he was prepared for any mental or physical emergency made him feel safer.

  Caught on Tape:

  "I don't spend two seconds thinking about him if I can help it, and most of the time I can."

  —Mia Farrow, 20/20, 1997

  “Very quickly I learned that this man had no respect for everything I hold sacred—not for my family, not for my soul, not for my God or my goals."

  In June of 1996, Mia was a featured speaker at the annual American Booksellers Association convention in Chicago, along with John Grisham and other blockbuster authors. Her speech was a message to booksellers that Doubleday intended to hustle the tide with a major promotional campaign. In spite of her schoolgirl uniform that consisted of a flouncy skirt, Peter Pan blouse, and black tights—the same kind of costume she had worn during the court hearing—there was no doubt that Mia was going straight for the jugular. She told the booksellers that she had been forced to write about herself after suffering "shouting distortions and loud lies and real-life pain, terrible pain."

  Despite the hyperbole, it is doubtful she was the sole author of her memoir; in fact, it most likely benefited from the extensive editorial assistance of several people, including writer and family friend Rock Brynner, the son of Yul Brynner; Nan Talese, known to be an exceptionally hands-on editor; and Philip Roth, whose brilliant literary talent had no doubt helped to shape the final product.

  Moving Pictures:

  Sandy Bates: You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only—only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

  —Stardust Memories, 1980

  Ordinarily, Woody's publicity machine treated the media as an interference with the filmmaker's artistic schedule. As a result, some journalists referred to the imperious Leslee Dart as "that woman" if they were feeling kind and other unprintable names if they weren't so inclined. Once a photographer for a major newspaper called Dart with a request to take Woody's picture to accompany an interview scheduled to appear in the publication. He could have five minutes, Dart told the photographer, adding that someone would tell him where to set up his equipment. When he suggested a more creative camera angle, she became peevish. "We don't care about creative," she said.

  In recent years, PMK had rewritten the rules of celebrity journalism to the dismay of magazine and newspaper editors, who were being forced to bow to public relations firms' demands or do without the star profiles that sold their publications. More and more, it was common practice for publicists to make their clients available for interviews in exchange for control over the finished profile. Not only did they expect to select the writer and photographer, they also dictated what questions could be asked or what sources could be interviewed, and in addition insisted on quotation and layout approval and the right to read the story in advance of publication. By negotiating the terms of an interview, a celebrity could completely control his public image. As Mia's book was expected to stir up the dust, PMK began a vigorous campaign to trivialize her revelations.

  Damage control got under way in the fall of 1996 when Woody and PMK negotiated a profile by The New Yorker that was to be written by John Lahr, the magazine's senior drama critic. During a weeklong series of interviews, he trailed after the director from his "book-lined and flower-filled Fifth Avenue penthouse" to his handsome Park Avenue screening room "wallpapered in olive-green brushed velvet" to "the high-ceilinged elegance" of Michael's P
ub, which was now relocated in the Parker Meridien hotel.

  Woody speaking of himself, however, sounded like a homespun journey into the land of "let's pretend." Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself once again, he even tried to do the impossible and remake his physical appearance. All his adult life he had stood five feet five and a half, five feet six if he stood up very straight, but in his new incarnation, as other men his age were losing height, he had gained inches and now claimed to be five feet seven. Working hard to present himself as white-bread, coupled with eagerness to spin an It's a Wonderful Life tale, he sounded as if he were a happy-go-lucky New York George Bailey, who was fortunate to be surrounded by a circle of loyal employees, business colleagues, and ex-mistresses. Woody's preapproved sources—his agent Sam Cohn, Diane Keaton, and Dianne Wiest—delivered testimonials to his talent and generous friendship. Evidently Lahr was not permitted to ask Woody embarrassing questions, because his stormy relationship with Mia and his children were glossed over. Displaying no emotional attachment to her children, he discounted any parental role in Mia's household, even dismissing their own twelve-year relationship as one of no particular importance. "It was comfortable and very distant, I mean, very distant, uh, you know, in every way." Talking about his romance with Soon-Yi, a union that was repugnant to many people, he described it as "genuine." The profile was titled "The Imperfectionist," even though John Lahr, as had Eric Lax, described few imperfections in his subject.

  Besides John Lahr, Woody granted interviews to other journalists during those months. For Newsday, he made an effort to debunk some of the so-called myths about himself. It was not true that he hated Hollywood, he declared. His twenty-year absence from the Oscars was no more than a coincidence because the Academy insisted on holding its awards on Mondays, when he had a prior commitment to Michael's Pub. On the subject of his discarded women, he claimed to be "close friends with Louise Lasser, my second wife, and even friends with my first wife who doesn't live anywhere near me." This was undoubtedly news to Harlene, who had had no contact of any kind with Woody after taking him to court in 1967.