What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  The three younger Tinocco girls and I spent our days horseback riding and soon I picked up a little Spanish. We also spent considerable time scheming to prompt the highly strung English governess to resign. (Release a bat in her bedroom, put toads and spiders between her sheets, spread peanut butter on the toilet seat, and speak only in a language she cannot understand.) We had no sense then that El Salvador was smoldering and would soon be torn apart by terrorists representing both the left and the right, that a bloody revolution was imminent, and that the wealthy elite like the Tinocco family would flee for their lives. During that summer of 1956, everything seemed peaceful throughout the countryside, where we galloped thoroughbred horses through the immense coffee plantations and I stared back at the unsmiling workers waiting in line for a spoonful of black beans slopped onto a tortilla.

  Two years later, in 1958, my mother retired from the screen. For reasons we did not understand, movie offers had thinned out for my father—he'd only made four films in four years instead of four in one year, as in 1951. Now money was a concern. I caught the strained tones and overheard snatches of conversations, and I worried.

  But finally a project, John Paul Jones, did come together and our family moved to Spain for its filming. Mike, three months shy of his nineteenth birthday, didn't want to leave California, so we left him there in the home we loved on Beverly Drive and flew all the way to Madrid, where we loaded into the Castellana Hilton Hotel. What we didn't know, what we had no inkling of when we left that morn-

  ing, was that this trip would bring about an end to the life we had known.

  In Madrid we lived under life-sized portraits of Conrad Hilton and explored every inch of the huge drab hotel; we spied on fellow guests, ordered room service, attended Spanish schools, and within a month I was dreaming in Spanish. Dad gave Johnny and Patrick parts m the movie and he said I could be in it too—he even gave me a line, which was "From our petticoats, sir." "My" scene wasn't due to be shot for five months but already I was nervous. My father neglected to tell me in what context my line would appear, so I imagined every conceivable scenario and gave "From our petticoats, sir" every interpretation my twelve-year-old mind could come up with.

  When Bette Davis arrived to play Catherine the Great, she brought her daughter BD, who was my age, and I was taken along on many of their sightseeing expeditions. BD was quiet, well-behaved, and pretty. Bette was energetic, blunt, bossy, vivid, and of course completely intimidating, but she was kind to me and I liked her. She, in turn, has described me as "quite mousy-looking, a lonely little girl . . . born with an old soul. She lived all alone in her own world."

  Benidorm, on the southern coast of Spain, was a sleepy little village then, with burros wandering through the colorful marketplace, long pristine beaches, and a few midrange houses for the tourists, who were scarce. When Dad moved there for the final three months of the shoot, our family rented one of these houses. Our father did not live with us, but in one of the two big hotels that loomed incongruously out of the dusty town, sleek harbingers of what was to come.

  But It was quiet then, nothing happening. We swam, drank lemonade, and tried to sell some to the handful of German tourists. We nursed our sunburns, argued, swatted at flies, drew in the dust with sticks, read, and I practiced

  H MIAFARROW

  my line. After dark, by candlelight we played cards, checkers, chess, argued some more, swatted the mosquitos, and sometimes we played a version of the Ouija board, using an overturned wineglass and pieces of paper with the letters of the alphabet written on them. One hot night, my mother and some of the kids and I were doing this, and asking questions, when swiftly and purposefully a seemingly self-propelled glass whirled from letter to letter, right out from under our fingertips, and spelled out MIKE DEAD. We didn't play after that.

  When the day finally arrived for my film debut, I was nervous after the months of anticipation and preparation. "From our petticoats, sir" had to be the most practiced line in cinema history. Wearing a costume made specially for me, I was taken onto the set, a huge sailing ship, and placed among a cluster of women surrounding the star, handsome Robert Stack. I was shaking. There was some talk, and then suddenly Robert Stack was saying, "And where did you get the material to make this flag?" My cue, surely this was my cue. I opened my mouth to speak when, from behind me, a velvety, seductive voice was saying, "From our petticoats, sir." Stunned, I whipped around: the ravishing woman speaking my line was Mrs. Robert Stack. So it goes.

  I was miserable in Spain and wrote my friend Maria, "The people here don't seem to like their dogs or their children." I missed Mike, and our dog Tuffy, and my friends, and home, and I seemed to be sick all the time. Whatever the reason, I grew listless and pale, and dark circles settled permanently under my eyes. My mother was worried: this was how I'd been in the months before my ninth birthday. The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with me, but I was so weak I could barely sit up.

  Then a strange thing happened. The town of Denia, where the film was being made, put on a huge week-long festival each year, and because I was the movie director's daughter, I was chosen Queen of the Fiestas, and there was

  no way around it. Four long gowns had been made for me and I wore a crown and elbow-length gloves and rode in floats through the crowded streets, waving. I danced with the mayor and made a long flawless speech in Spanish to thousands of people. I visited schools and churches and handed out baskets to the poor and my mother was absolutely astonished that I could do these thmgs, and I myself was beyond amazement. The minute it was over I again grew pale, and the circles under my eyes reappeared, and I went back to bed. For years my mother would say, "Remember in Spain how you rose to the occasion?"

  Money troubles were hangmg over us all the time. From the start, financing for John Paul Jones had come in irregularly. So we were relieved when the film was finally finished and we headed for the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, where I rode horses all day and visited with my cousins.

  In the fall we joined our father in London, where he was editing the movie, and the family took up residence in the Park Lane Hotel. Johnny and Patrick were sent to school in Bournemouth, and Prudence and I were enrolled in a convent boarding school in Surrey, while Tisa and Steffi attended a day school in London. We all survived an intermmable shopping expedition at Harrods, where we bought uniforms, nightgowns, sheets, towels, hot-water bottles, and quilts, and we spent quiet, nervous hours with Barbara, our nanny, sewing name tags into every single item. Finally, on a gray September morning, a chubby, bespectacled chauffeur named Freddie drove Prudy and me out to the school. The austere brick building was set at the edge of Richmond Park. It looked a grim, forbidding place.

  My sister and I were taken to separate quarters, where we cried for hours every night. I telephoned our parents begging them to let us come back even for a weekend, but they took a firm stand. It took a toothache to bring me "home" to the Park Lane Hotel.

  "Get up Mia, get dressed." Our nanny's voice, with the firm, cheery Scottish accent, now seemed strange, muffled, cracked, as she pushed the trolleyful of English breakfasts into our hotel bedroom.

  "What's the matter, Barbara?" I asked, but her lips stayed pressed together, her eyes lined pink, searching the floor. A heavmess leaned into me. I put on my uniform to return to school after breakfast. I'd been to the dentist the day before, but I wasn't thmkmg about cavities now.

  Barbara turned to dress my little sister Tisa. I pushed around my cereal and fixed on a single tear as it slid crookedly through the lines near Barbara's right eye to hang trembling on the soft jowl below her plump cheek.

  "I can't eat any more." I waited.

  "Go to your mam and dad now," she said, still not looking at me.

  My parents' suite was at the end of the hallway and I kept my eyes on their door, stomach turning over empty. I wanted to run—run the other way before it was too late, up the long corridor, down the six flights of stairs out into the watery English morning, where it would be s
even-thirty and an ordinary day. But I put my stout black shoes one in front of the other, even when I heard the terrible sounds from deep inside my mother.

  I pushed the door open and took a couple of steps into the suite. In the living room, toward the right, my father sat crookedly on the couch, bent over, silent. My mother was standing, facing him, her back to me. She threw a pillow at him hard. I shouldn't be seeing this, I thought, nor hearing these sounds.

  "Mom, what happened? Mom?" She moved past me heavily, out of the living room, and I followed toward the bedroom, where she twisted slowly toward me, my serene and beautiful mother, her face torn wild, ripped apart. The

  scream never left my throat; I could not move nor make a sound.

  "Mike's dead," she said. Then, from a great distance I heard words: plane crash, flymg lessons, leavmg today, Mom and Dad, California, Mike's body, a funeral, do you understand? No, no I don't understand anything are you sure it's him mayhe it's a mistake maybe it's someone else.

  "Go back to school now," she told me. Would I be all right? Would I tell Prudy? She stood apart, she didn't touch me.

  "Yes, Mom, I will. I'll tell Prudy. We'll be all right ..." I could not bridge the terrible gap between us.

  "We'll be okay," I said. But I toppled hard. Never again would death catch me so unprepared. At the age of thirteen I vowed to stand ready.

  Back at school the nuns had been notified and on my arrival I was taken to the Reverend Mother Elizabeth's office, where she rambled on about "God's will." I interrupted to ask if she would find Prudy, please. "I need to tell her. My mother said to tell her." It would be the most terrible and important thing I had ever done, and I would do It better than anybody because I cared more than anybody.

  But when the nun returned with Prudy some minutes later it was clear that from the lips of this stranger who neither cared nor knew anything about Mike or Prudy or me or our exact and fierce love, and therefore this our own and nobody else's loss and fury and pain—my sister had been told her brother was dead. I held her, hating the Reverend Mother, who would not leave the room, and my helplessness and God himself, yes, Goddamnyou Jesuschristgod. If You exist, damn You to hell.

  Did he feel pam? Was there time for fear, or just surprise? Was there a final thought? Did he love me last? Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing. Mv brother's death plunged me into the struggle

  of my life, drenching every bitter, brutal hour of each day and each long, foreign night. Everything was overturned, broken into senselessness.

  But gradually over the next months I became aware that deep within me hope had survived. And after hope came strength, and with it a fragile clarity—just enough to reach for what was essential. So in the end I found myself at the beginning. And once again, all the world was brand-new.

  And I learned a useful thing about anger—^you can feel it, all of it, and then let it pass through you. It can be done —I know because I've done it countless times; the rage can just pass right through you. And eventually grief gathers tight into Itself and in the most intimate, lacerating concentration of pain it takes its final, permanent place. And there is nothing to be done about it.

  Ghapter Three

  After Mike's death, my parents moved from the Park Lane Hotel to a tall, quamt house on Swan Walk, m Chelsea. I was given the attic room, flooded with light, from which you could climb out onto the rooftop for a splendid view of the Thames. I painted the room myself, a palest shade of peach, yet I rarely stayed there; by then I preferred being at school in Surrey. Tensions between my parents had escalated. Their demons were driving them apart, and in their grief they found no solace in each other.

  My father was drinking heavily. One evening, in an awful rage, he began shouting, and he chased my mother with a long knife through the ground-floor rooms of the house. I froze at the foot of the stairs until at last, knife in hand, he careened out into the night. My mother and I watched the door and after a time we made hot chocolate. But still I was shaking, so she put me into her own big bed saying that when Dad returned he'd find me there and surely then he'd soften because he loved me so. Then she

  climbed the stairs to the safety of my little attic room, while I propped myself up in bed, with my face right under the light, and waited.

  Oh dear God, please take care of my mother, I understand something of her grief but I cannot comfort her however much I long to. Stay close to my father tonight, make him put dov^m his knife, or throve it into the dark river hut please don't let him come hack here to plunge it into his sleeping child; and Lord God, be merciful, don't let him put it into himself, out there in the dark, for he is a good man and You have given him an awful lot to bear. Please, Jesus please, take care of this family, and if it be Thy will, let Dad get a movie job, I don't know what will happen to us if he doesn't, and God, one last thing, I won't ask more — if I should fall asleep, please don't let my face turn away from this light.

  Winter held the Surrey countryside in gray, glassy light and the cold penetrated everything. There was no central heating in the sleeping quarters for the fifty or so girls at my convent school. I didn't much like jockeying for a place in front of the single fireplace downstairs, but after someone mentioned that wet hair would freeze in the night and break to bits, I elbowed my way to the fireside when I washed my hair to get it bone dry.

  I can't remember ever being so cold. A glass of water beside the bed had a crust of ct by morning. Chilblains swelled our finger joints sore and stiff, with angry, itchy crimson lumps that didn't subside until June. Hot-water bottles were lifesavers, and although it was against the rules, beneath my navy blue woolen uniform I kept my pajama bottoms on all day. The cold, and the modesty of the convent, motivated me to perfect a technique for changing clothes with lightning speed without revealing an inch of skin.

  Most of the nuns were even more severe than the sisters in California. I thought of them as not exactly human but as some sort of hybrid, short on compassion, humor, pa-

  tience, and any capacity to give or receive affection. We were children without parents in an isolated and harsh environment, where the most basic kindness was unusual.

  There were exceptions. Mother Lillian taught piano and art. In chapel she played the organ stirringly, and from our meager, shivering ranks she pulled together a choir that transported us beyond our capabilities and circumstances. When word of our choir spread through Surrey, we were asked to sing in local churches and hospitals and homes for the elderly. With her fine, chiseled features and long, graceful hands. Mother Lillian was as beautiful as her gentle world of music and art.

  Mother Frederick had white-blond eyelashes and a round face that became flushed when she was upset. She was tall and very young. Sometimes she looked as if she had been crying. Not long out of childhood herself, it was Mother Frederick who extended a much-needed touch of humanity. When she and Mother Lillian both left the Order of the Sacred Heart of Mary, it took me twenty years to find them.

  The Dickensian atmosphere of our school proved fertile ground for friendships and spiritual values. My roommates and best friends were Nancy Newton, with Spanish eyes, runaway thoughts, and a probing, promising mind; and Leslie Mullin, who had a pale, haunted, angel's face set in a short fuzz of yellow hair; at night, while everyone slept, Leslie knelt on the bare floor in her long flannel nightgown and prayed with outstretched arms. Ann Casey was a grade older than me, and I was drawn to her because she was fun and one of the most generous people I have ever met. I could always count on Casey.

  Daily attendance at Mass was not compulsory, but I liked the half-mile walk through frigid winter mornings silent with nuns along dark, country roads, past the overgrown graveyard to the main school building near the chapel. At the lonely predawn Mass I took Communion

  and said the book prayers and made up the rest, and after school I slipped again into the quiet chapel to kneel with my arms outstretched like Leslie.

  It was during the first of my two y
ears in Surrey that I decided to become a Carmelite. The nuns at my school laughed and said I'd have to do a load of improving before the Carmelites would take me. But I yearned for the contemplative existence, to become one with the mind of God. It seemed the most pure, powerful, and significant way I could possibly spend my life.

  I tried to make myself nun material. But the cards seemed to be unfairly stacked against me: I was driven by the itchy kind of curiosity that eclipsed good sense and continually got me into hot water, I tended to be forgetftil or preoccupied, I found things fionny when other people didn't, and in the face of wall-to-wall rules that were trivial and pointless, my instinct was to rebel.

  In March 1959, my roommate Nancy made this entry in her diary: "Mia in trouble again"; and in May, "Mia—the drainpipe." I did dimb out the third-floor window down the rotting drainpipe into the dewy, deery grass behind the dorm and I did, on a dare, set my alarm clock off during the Rosary, and it's true that I cut myself opening sardine tins by flashlight. It has always taken me a while to get to sleep, so when they turned out the lights, I'd wait until the coast was clear and the halls were nun-free, and then I'd get up and roam around the building, just visiting friends, having some laughs, catching up on news, and checking whether anyone had anything good to eat.

  "Mia Farrow!" (Scary voice.) "What are you doing here! You have one colossal nerve!" She was crazy-eyed, but she'd said this so many times it had no meaning.

  So I just said, "Yes, Mother Finbar." My thoughts were with the bag of Oreo cookies behind my back.

  "Unless it is to go to the bathroom, you do not leave

  your bed for any reason after lights-out- Can you get that into your head?"