What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  That time shines now like a beautiflil, far-off, golden dream: gentle sunshine, dappled shade, butterflies in February, and barefoot summers, the nurseries of Beverly Hills, where children were tended by British nannies in crisp, white uniforms, and feted with clowns, ponies, magicians, castles for cakes, and personal soda fountains.

  There were seven children in my family. Our father had fought in World War II, which might explain the gaps of several years between and after the births of my older brothers. Michael was the oldest, then Patrick, and I followed as the senior of the ensuing cluster of five.

  Mike was so smart that even when they skipped him a grade, he got straight A's. And he was handsome too, an Adonis, people use to say. The girls were nuts about him. I could tell from the way they got all mushy around him and they called so often that my parents had to get him his own phone number. There was always a bunch of his friends around, tinkering with cars on the driveway, in and out of

  the swimming pool, with music going, chasing here and there, cutting up—Mike had it all. He was the bright and shining hope of my family. He's gonna be the President, I used to thmk, and the topper was that he loved me. I never doubted it.

  "How's it going, Mouse?" he'd say, because I was a runt, and I'd feel my face go all hot and I could scarcely look at him for happiness. The presence of my brother's friends around the house almost chased away lingering tendrils of the dark nights and made the world seem well and happy and safe.

  During the summer after polio, Mike got his first steady girlfriend, Joan Bailey. She was Mike's age, fifteen, and I tried unsuccessfully not to like her. I discovered that Joan and Mike had a magical gift: they could transform any mundane, done-it-a-thousand-times-before dumb thing into a mysterious, thrilling, never-done-it-before adventure, and their delight in it and in each other was a revelation. I was mesmerized and trailed around after them, hoping they would take me mto their enchanted circle.

  "When I first met you," Joan Bailey remembers, "you were going around pmching your cheeks, and I asked Mike why. He told me you'd had polio, and said, 'She thinks if she looks healthy. Mom will let her ride her bike to the store with the others.' You wanted to go with everyone else but you were so pale and thin, your parents were always worried about you, and kept you quiet. You were reading all the time. I remember that summer you read David CopperfieU to your brothers and sisters."

  Johnny, a year younger, was closest to me in age and interests. For years, we could credibly pass for twins. If wishing was all it took, I would have been a boy too, entranced as I was by explorers, knights, pirates, soldiers, cowboys, jockeys, deep-sea divers, Robin Hood, and Superman. What exactly it meant to be a woman wasn't at all clear to me. I teetered on my mother's pointy high-heeled shoes,

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  and studied her strange undergarments—the girdles, stockings, garter belts, corsets, brassieres—and I worried.

  My sister Prudence, next in line to Johnny, was tall, willowy, and a fast swimmer. (All my brothers are tall. I'm the shortest one in the family, perhaps because of polio.) Prudy's dimples were much admired, and her glasses with pale blue plastic frames were forever sliding off her small, freckled nose. She was wildly emotional, totally honest, adventurous, and quick to laugh.

  Like our father, Mike, and me, Stephanie, the next to the youngest child, was blond and, in those days, on the chubby side. Her eyes, huge and round, gave her a startled look, as if she had just v/itnessed a train crash. The rest of her face was pinkish and tranquil; it made no statements. When she grew up, she was so pretty that for as long as she wanted she earned a living as a model. Steffi never said much, but she observed the goings-on within the family, and occasionally revealed a position of sorts with her amused, surreal comments. In our brawling family, her neutrality and detached, off-center humor earned respect.

  If the Farrow kids pooled freckles, we'd have sunk a dinghy. It was a toss-up whether Patrick or Tisa, the youngest, had more. The nanny liked her best—she was a good kid, smart and funny. When she was six or seven she'd memorize the whole TV Guide and go around announcing what was going to be on—stuff nobody'd even heard of, because we were only allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club and The Lone Ranger.

  Next door the Roach girls, Maria, Jeannie, and Kathy, fitted perfectly into the gaps between our ages. Other kids came and went, but this was our essential gang. Being so much older, Michael and Patrick had no interest in our activities, which for the most part were pretty standard stuff. We climbed trees, built forts and clubhouses, argued, raced, explored, spied, played on rooftops, rode bikes, roller-skated, and swam. After our toddler years, the nan-

  nies didn't even try to keep up with us: we ran wild and unchecked between the two properties and in the alleyways of Beverly Hills.

  In front of our house, the ivy lay thick and tangled in the soft shade of eight gnarled olive trees that, though beau-tiftil, were not much good for climbing. But at the tip of the narrow strip of woods that divided the Farrow-Roach terrain there grew a giant pine of rare perfection to which we gave a no-frills name, the Big Tree. Its branches reached far out over the sidewalk to meet the tall palms that lined Beverly Drive, and they were so powerfully seductive that even my parents were discovered, one magical evening none of us will ever forget, trying to climb up into them.

  At the highest attainable level of the tree, the massive trunk parted and branched up toward the sky, forming a nest. It was to this place, above the rooftops of Beverly Hills, that I brought the small pets that had passed through my life—the dead hamsters, lizards, guinea pigs, birds, and turtles of my affection, each in an open box covered tightly with Saran Wrap. I placed them there, among the branches, and over time, with deepest respect, I watched them rot.

  So often in my dreams I am there still, where the ivy tangles. I see my parents standing in front of my house. They are young, and the sun is in their hair. They are calling me to dinner. I run toward them with all my child feelings, hot from play, out of breath, muddy hands, a wig-gly tooth—but I do not cross the threshold of my home. I never enter, although I have dreamed this dream thousands of times. For I know that if I go inside, i{ I take my place at the table, I will have to live my life from that moment all over again, and invariably the weight of this thought awakens me.

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  As children of show business, we came naturally to the business of shows. Rarely was the Roach/Farrow clan with-

  out a play in production. They were meandering, melodramatic scenarios constructed around any characters that caught our fancy. Consistently and shamelessly, I took all the best roles, female and male.

  Our audience was likely to include an occasional valiantly patient and tactful parent (usually Mrs. Roach or my mother), and any member of the household staff or stray friend we could beg or bully into attendance. When my grandmother was over from Ireland she would be there, cigarette between her lips, oblivious to the long ash that I found so absorbing and that dropped just anywhere at all. Granny was a "character," the grown-ups used to say, and for that I loved her all the more. We had a club, the two of us, down in the cellar, with the suitcases pushed around to make a little, secret place. There she talked about Ireland and the strangeness of growing old, and she would show me her hands, and pinch the veins to make them stand up all by themselves. It was hard to believe that my mother was really Granny's daughter, and it was troubling to hear them speak to each other m distant, chill voices.

  Tour buses crept up and down the streets of Beverly Hills, pausing in front of each celebrity's house while a guide chirped starry anecdotes into a microphone—you could hear them coming a half block away. We accepted their presence as inevitable and unremarkable as the sunshine, or the grand houses, crystalline swimming pools, nannies, cooks, gardeners, and the gaze of strangers. It was obvious that for the quizzical faces peering out of the bus windows, movie stars* houses, their kids, and even their dogs were of interest—along the lines, we speculated, of a visit to the zoo, or even a Disneyland r
ide. That was a lot to live up to. So for the folks on the buses, our shows were frantic, in the broadest, operatic style. We spattered ourselves with ketchup-blood that was stored, along with the rubber dag-

  ger, under the rhododendron bush. We strangled, stabbed, staggered, crawled, rolled, and writhed. And we howled and screamed at the top of our lungs.

  Drawn by dreams, and some mysterious brew of talent, de-termmation, looks, and luck, our parents came from towns and cities across the United States and Europe too, to their positions in the Hollywood constellation. Once there, in that rarefied setting, it was easy to lose touch with origins, roots, people, perspective.

  They couldn't know how their gifts had come to them, or how long they would endure. They worked and played, and fashioned their lives in dazzling light, while insecurity and apprehension curled into tight little balls, and burrowed deep into unacknowleged silence. But over the years, a creeping awareness of the precariousness of their place fed the dark, hidden things that grew, malignant, demanding light, pushing through the cracks in the smooth, polished surface . . .

  R I loved my parents with a fierceness and an incomprehension that was terrifying.

  My mother was born in 1911, above a draper's shop in the little town of Boyle, Roscommon, in the west of Ireland. Whatever magic is in her soul, she tells me, comes from there. Her own mother, Mary Frazer, was a beautiful and amusing woman, but not a happy one. She found marriage difficult, and never learned to cook or keep house. When her husband said he liked lamb, she bought a whole sheep and hung it over the bathtub, where it dripped blood for days.

  My grandfather went off to fight in World War I, but returned in a few months, his right arm shattered. Doctors recommended amputation, but he refused, and fought all

  his life to keep it. My grandmother couldn't face suffering, and nervous breakdown followed nervous breakdown.

  My mother, her father's favorite, went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. She hated it. They had to wear vests in the bath, and were told that "whistling on the stairs makes Our Lady cry." Vivien Leigh was in the same class, the only girl m the school, according to my mother, who had any sense of direction: from the age of eleven she knew she would be an actress. The others just wanted to be socially successful and travel the world. Vivien Leigh was voted "prettiest girl in the school," and when my mother came in second, she cried all day, unable to believe that anyone thought she was pretty.

  Mom was indeed pretty and was "discovered," Hollywood-style, by the director Frank Borzage, who was in Ireland looking for an Irish colleen and a little boy to play in the movie Song o^ My Heart, starring the famous tenor John McCormack.

  My mother describes it this way: "It was the last night of Horse Show week and I wanted to celebrate. I was invited out by a very attractive young bachelor from Trinity College. My mother thought I looked tired and told me not to go out, but I went anyway. There was a dance band. Frank Borzage was sitting at the next table with a group of people and they were watching me. I knew exactly who they were. Everybody knew. They were looking for a young girl for a part in the film. The most beautiful girl in Dublin, Grace McLaughlin, went for an interview. A lot of my friends had tried out, and been turned down or were working as extras. But I didn't. I didn't think I was good-looking enough. Actually, they had given up looking for an Irish girl and were going back the next week, havmg decided to use a Hollywood actress. Eventually my escort wanted to go home, but I had a feeling something was going to happen, and I said, 'No, let's stay and have one more dance.' That dance sealed my fate. When I came back to my table and

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  WHAT FALLS AWAY 17

  sat down, the hcadwaiter brought over Frank Borzage's card, on the back of which was written, 'If you are interested in films, will you come to my office tomorrow at eleven?' Frank signed me for three pounds a week." In October 1929, eighteen-year-old Maureen O'SuUivan, with a six-month contract, set sail for Hollywood, accompanied by her mother.

  Three years later, my mother was signed by MGM and began work on Tarzan, the Ape Man, the first of six Tarzan movies she made with Johnny Weissmuller. She says she got bored of being rescued from mad elephants, alligators, and hippopotamuses. She found the monkeys particularly loathsome, and said they were "all homosexuals" who adored Johnny and were jealous of her, biting her at every opportunity. To this dav she refers to Cheetah the Chimp as "that bastard."

  She says she was "extremely fond of Johnny, but he would drive me crazy with his practical jokes. I remember once on my birthday he brought me a huge cake, and when I put the knife in, the whole thing exploded in my face. While all America thought we were having an affair, there was never a glimmer of a romance between us."

  To date, my mother has played leading roles in sixty-two movies, including The Thin Man (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), and The Big Clock (1948), one of several films she starred in that was directed by my father.

  John Villiers Farrow was a conflicted, incongruous figure in Hollywood. He was a movie director, but failed to see film as art, and so could not respect his own endeavors. He read serious books and he wrote serious books, which he did respect, and he fraternized with Jesuits. He was a devout Catholic, and a womanizer of legendary proportions. He was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1904. According to

  Farrow family lore, he was the product of a relationship between Lucy Savage and King Edward VII. Whatever the truth, it went to the grave when beautiful, nineteen-year-old Lucy died during my father's birth. All he ever possessed or knew of his mother was the oval portrait he kept with him throughout his life. He never knew his father, Joseph Farrow, so "Jack," as my father was then known, was raised by an aunt, and at fifteen sent to Winchester College in England to complete his education. But a restless spirit and some measure of unhappiness led him to lie about his age and run away to sea. He spent his youth in the merchant marine and the Royal Canadian Navy.

  Of all the distant ports, my father loved Tahiti best. During one of his numerous extended visits, he assembled the first French-English-Tahitian dictionary, and wrote a novel, laughter Ends. He kept a scrapbook with black pages and careful white handwriting. The tiny photographs show a very fit, handsome young man, flaxen-haired, with a dazzling smile and a flowered cloth sarong around his waist, in various poses with native women of Bora Bora, Tahiti, and Moorea, and a beautiful, bobbed brunette named Lila.

  It was in Tahiti that he learned of the life of Father Damien, and came to admire him deeply. Among my mother's notes I found the following account of how that came about, in my father's words:

  "After a wretched passage on a small trading cutter we reached one of the more remote islands. The sudden peace of the lagoon so enchanted me that I determined to stay there a few days. A consultation with the amiable half-Chinese, half-Tahitian captain soon settled the matter. He would proceed to the next island, pick up a cargo of copra, then after three days' time, return for me. But given the ways of manners in those pleasant waters, it was not surprising when he did not return for nearly three months.

  "Excepting for a gendarme who lived in a different village, I was the only white man on the island and as such

  was treated as a personage. One hospitable family came forward, insisting I should stay with them smce they actually had a bed, an unusual and prestigious article of furniture m those regions, which defined the owner as being a person of wealth, culture, and initiative. My hosts were rightly proud of their bed. It was a huge and grand affair, made of glittering brass and shining mother-of-pearl, ornamented with colored shells and swathed in clouds of mosquito netting. Each evening when it was time to retire, my solemn-eyed friends would gather to wave farewell as I disappeared through the tall curtains. For about two weeks I had been sleeping there in great comfort when, one morning as I was going to the lagoon to fish, I met the gendarme. 'If you are interested to know,' he told me in the most casual of tones, 'the bed you are sleeping in is the bed of a leper.'

  "A f
rantic check revealed this to be true. The son of my hosts was a leper, who had been relegated to a hut of his own behind the main house. I further learned that we had been sharing the same dishes. I got hold of the stongest disinfectants available and scrubbed till the blood ran. After a week had passed, drawn by boredom and the pessimistic certainty of my own fate, I began to visit the leper and we became friends. He was only twenty-five and resigned to his affliction. He strummed the guitar and in a patois of French, Tahitian, and English, he told me stories about the leper colony and the exploits of a character so heroic as to seem highly fictitious—called Kamiano. Tale after tale, punctuated by bobbings of reverent salutes, filled me with curiosity. When at last I sailed back to Papeete I learned that Kamiano was the native name for the priest who had worked and lived among the lepers until he too contracted the disease, and died a leper's death. His name was Father Damien."

  My father's biography of Father Damien, Damien the Leper, was published in 1937. In the foreword, Hugh Walpole wrote: "I scarcely know how Mr. Farrow has been able to

  leave so vivid a picture of Father Damien in the reader's mind with so few words ... I feel that I have Damien as a companion for the rest of my days. This is an addition to one's spiritual experience." Pope Pius XI responded to the book by naming my father a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

  In one port, San Francisco, my father lingered to pursue a seventeen-year-old beauty from a prominent local family. Always a voracious reader, he took the opportunity to formalize his education and earned a degree in literature from Loyola Marymount University, staying afloat by painting portraits of socialites. A brief, stormy marriage to that same young woman produced his mirror-image daughter, my half sister Felice.