What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  I didn't know what to do. I went out, following them a little. Then, standing in the hallway, I said to Woody, "You can't just come in here and sit down at the table as if nothing happened. People have feelings, and very strong feelings." He told me to come into the living room, and there followed another hour of him talking and talking and me crying. I don't even remember what he said, and the whole time I was begging him to leave. Finally he went.

  Nights were the worst.

  "Please come over and talk to Soon-Yi," I asked Casey the following day. "Make sure she knows I still love her, she needs to know that. But I'm too angry to do it."

  For the first time in my life I sought professional help. I saw to it that those of my children who needed it, including Soon-Yi, also received counseling to deal with the trauma. Woody encouraged this and paid for it. All the while I tried to see to It that life contmued as normally as possible for all of us. I got the children up at seven and fed them, teeth were brushed, they were dressed and taken to school at eight, when the baby-sitter arrived. The two youngest children saw and heard Soon-Yi crying, and although I tried, it was not possible to entirely conceal my own distress.

  It took two weeks for me to reach a point when I could send the baby-sitter to Woody's screening room to take away his key. Until then he kept on coming to our apartment and he went on talking; each time he came over, and every time he called me on the phone, I came undone all over again.

  We went to Frog Hollow that weekend: all the children, including Soon-Yi. In the lobby of our building I hugged her and told her I loved her.

  "You're incredible, Mom," she said.

  As a family we were in the habit of discussing everything, but the trauma of these last days and my own implosion

  had prevented me from forming a coherent picture of what had happened. Still, I felt it was important that we find a way to talk, so I scribbled a note and used it to open a dialogue in our kitchen.

  January 18 My children.

  An atrocity has been committed against our family and it is impossible to make sense of it. You know that I share your pain and bewilderment and anger. But I feel the need to talk and think further with you. It is essential that none of us permit ourselves to be in any way diminished by these events—we must struggle to find a way to learn and perhaps even grow stronger through them. We have seen firsthand that there are terrible consequences to terrible acts, and therefore how crucial it is that we proceed through our lives with respect for others, and be guided by a sense of responsibility. You have seen the full measure of mv love for Soon-Yi, and therefore for each of you—my love for you is unshakable, and that is no small thing. Here, in this moment, in the bright light of pain, we have been able to define ourselves, to ourselves and to each other. We have been granted a perspective that only a trauma such as this could lend. Let us hold it close, never allow it to fade, and let us use it to enrich and enlighten our present, and to build our future.

  Finally, know how grateful I am to each of you. You have brought depth and joy and meaning to my life. I love you beyond all words. Because of you, even my darkest days have not been without light.

  Soon-Yi left the room. In the talk that followed, Daisy, who was seventeen, told us that over the last three years Woody had tried to initiate four intimate conversations with her. He had asked her how old her friends were when they began doing things with boys, and how old she was when she started fooling around, and what sorts of things she'd done. Daisy told us he'd said, "Tell me everything you've done that you wouldn't tell your mother. I promise I won't tell her." Woody had never talked to Daisy privately before, and she was uncomfortable with his line of questioning. She didn't have anything to tell him anyway, and she didn't stick around.

  Lark said, "He probably didn't try with me because Jesse"—her football-star boyfriend, who was also present— "would have thrown him through the window." Then Jesse recalled a trip back to New York the previous summer in the limousine with Lark, Soon-Yi, and Woody. He'd been dozing in the back; opening his eyes, he saw Woody place his hand on Soon-Yi's thigh and caress it. He had told Lark, and she had refused to believe it. Fletcher remembered a moment the year before when he had walked into the laundry room and Woody had spun away from Soon-Yi. Sascha, Lark, and Daisy remembered that durmg the previous summer Soon-Yi had questioned them about birth control. Moses recalled coming into our study when Woody and Soon-Yi were sitting on the sofa watching a ball game. They both moved over so that Moses could sit down. Soon-Yi was wearing a miniskirt. As Woody moved, he dipped his head for a very long second and looked between Soon-Yi's bare legs.

  Now I viewed his behavior with Dylan m a completely different light. I no longer believed he could control himself. I no longer believed he was dealing with his problems responsibly, I was no longer sure that his "inappropriate" and "intense" behavior with Dylan was not sexual. At ex-actly what pomt does it become child abuse? What kmd of

  WHAT FALLS AWAY 257

  person puts his thumb in a little girl's mouth for her to suck on? And when he was told by the therapist that it was not appropriate and no good for Dylan, what made him persist? The last time I caught him doing that had been when I came back from Vietnam. Dylan was six. Satchel was asleep when I u'alked into the kids' bedroom. Woody was standing next to Dylan's bed. He had his thumb in her mouth, and the nursery night-light was reflected m his glasses. "Please," I said, and he quickly pulled his thumb out of her mouth.

  I redrafted my will. In the event of my death the children were to remain together m the care and custody of their adult brothers, Matthew and Sascha. I then remembered that only three weeks earlier I had signed papers that made Woody the adoptive father of Moses and Dylan. In horror, I called the lawyer, Mr. Weltz, who had set up the adoptions for Woody. I told him there had been a terrible mistake—I had not known the facts. Woody Allen had deceived me, deceived him, deceived the judge, and deceived the children. For months, maybe years for all I knew, he had been screwing one of my kids. He had taken pornographic pictures of her. He was completely untrustworthy. He was without morals or self-control. He was not at all the man I supposed I knew. He was not an appropriate father for my children. He was dangerous. We needed to go back to the judge and tell her. She would have to undo the adoptions, because we were tricked.

  Mr. Weltz was outraged and said he would do everything he could to ensure the protection of my children, but he did not see how we could overturn the adoptions. A second legal opinion was far more promising; there was precedent m the state of New York for undoing adoptions on the basis of "fraud against the court."

  I insisted that since I had been deceived into consenting to the adoption. Woody should agree to waive his custodial rights if I predeceased him. On February 3 we both signed a document to that effect. I attached a statement, which I

  showed only to Woody, articulating my concerns about his behavior and my reasons for believing he would be an inappropriate custodial parent; and as proof I included photocopies of the Polaroids he'd taken of Soon-Yi. We sealed the documents and gave them to Woody's business manager to be kept in a vault, and opened only in the event of my death.

  On the same day, unbeknownst to me at the time, Woody signed a second document in which he stated that he had no intention of abiding by the agreement we had just signed.

  The few scenes I had yet to shoot for Husbands and Wives were put off for ten days. I don't know how I went back and filmed them. Woody's behavior to me on the set was gentle, apologetic, and caring.

  But as the days went on and I reran the events in my mind over and over, I could not believe that the Polaroids were left out accidentally, as Woody claimed. He was not an incautious man. He was meticulous, he had a cleaning woman and a housekeeper; in twelve years, nothing in his apartment was ever moved or out of place. And he knew I would be in that room. It was his phone call that brought me within inches of the pictures. Why?

  Perhaps, as my son Moses believes, deep inside Woody there was an unf
athomable and uncontrollable need to destroy everything good and positive in his life, and so he tried to destroy our family. For him to have sex with one of my children, a child he had known as my daughter since she was eight years old, was not enough: he had to make me see, graphically, what he was doing. What rage did he teel against me, against women, against mothers, against sisters, against daughters, against an entire family? The pictures were a grenade he threw into our home, and no one was unharmed.

  After January 13, I didn't leave him alone with any of my kids.

  At one point, toward the end of that first week, I went to talk to Soon-Yi. She was sitting on the floor with the phone in her lap. I asked her when this had begun. "Senior year in high school," she said. Unbearable details emerged. 1 pounced on her. I hit her on the side of her face and shoulders. I went into the kitchen, crying. In her room I heard Soon-Yi sobbing, "I'm a bad girl. I'm a bad girl."

  What were we supposed to do?

  I went back into her room and told her I loved her. "He shouldn't have done this to us," I said. "We shouldn't he in this position."

  She was my child, but I could not help her. I could scarcely look at her. We had become something else to each other. We had to go through this separately. In anger she threatened to kill herself. In anger I told her I hated her. It was a relief when she went back to college. I loved her, I missed her, and I worried for her, but it was hard for me to be near her. She gave me her word that she would not have any contact with Woody and promised that if he tried to call her, she would hang up the phone.

  Panic attacks are visitations of undiluted terror. I have had four in my life, all between January and March 1992. Those were weeks of sleepless nights fiUed with rage and tears when I phoned Woody and expressed my fury at what he had done to us. Some nights he called me ten or twenty times or more and I'd hang up. Other nights I called him to say. Please don't leave me now, I'm so afraid. I couldn't let him go from my life, yet I could not even look at him. In my worst anguish, he was the one I needed most. But there had been so much damage. Now when I looked back over the years, I saw that they had been paved with lies and deceptions.

  For my birthday Woody gave me three lovely leather-bound volumes of Emily Dickinson's poems, and he took me to dinner at Rao's.

  At that time I wrote a note to Maria Roach, my childhood friend in California.

  Dear Maria,

  I have come perilously close to a genuine meltdown of my very core. I know now that my vision has been unclear and I have spent more than a dozen years with a man who would destroy me and lead my daughter into a betrayal of her mother, her family, and her principles, leaving her morally bankrupt, with the bond between us demolished. I can think of no crueler way to lose a child, or a lover, and with them, a treasured part of my life. I have spent long years with a man who had no respect for everything I hold sacred—not for my family, not for my soul, not for my God or my purest goals. But in the end I must pity him. He has spoiled and mutilated that part of himself which is improved by right conduct and destroyed by wrong: is there any part of us that is more precious? Today I stand, with washed eyes, gazing clearly into an unknown future. I will travel lightly there, carrying only the essentials, trusting that a new life will create itself.

  6 hapt er Clev en

  This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons recollect the Snow: First Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

  — Emily Dickinson

  The fact that Woody had slept with my daughter had to be kept secret from the outside world. He was terrified that the public would find out, and desperate to get the Polaroids back. But I kept them hidden in my room until February, when I took them to a lawyer, who put them in a vault. I asked the older children not to tell anybody. In our isolation, we grappled with shock, grief, and anger. At this point, I had three objectives: to protect the children from further harm, to get through this trauma intact, and to separate from Woody Allen.

  Concerning Woody's forty years of psychoanalysis, my friend Lenny Gershe said, "You can't say his therapy was a failure. Who knows, without it he might have been a serial killer." But I had never been more skeptical about psychiatrists and the benefits of long-term analysis. Looking at the place psychoanalysis had occupied in Woody Allen's life, it seemed that it had helped to isolate him from people and the systems we live by, and placed him at the center of

  a different reality—one that exists only after he has bounced his views off his therapist. Woody lived and made his decisions while suspended in a zone constructed and controlled almost entirely by himself—a world that he used his therapists to validate. He did not acknowledge other beings except as features in his own landscape, valued according to their contribution to his own existence. He was therefore unable to empathize and felt no moral responsibility to anyone or anything. When I turned to his psychiatrist to ask for his help in protecting my family, he told me that "it's not a therapist's job to moralize." I had to wonder what decades of such thinking had contributed to Woody's perspective.

  In February I received a call from an adoption agency that had for some time been trying, unsuccessfully, to find a home for a baby boy. He was about to be placed in permanent foster care, and they wondered i^ I would take him. He was African-American, from an inner city, with the possibility of medical problems. A decision was needed immediately. I discussed it with the children, and in the midst of all the pain, we said yes. Again I placed the bassinet with the patchwork lining beside my bed.

  I named my sixth beautiful son Isaiah Justus Farrow, after Isaiah Berlin, and that first Isaiah, the most interesting of the prophets.

  Later that same February, Tam, the little girl I'd spent ten minutes with in Vietnam, finally arrived. We guessed that she was about ten or eleven years old. She was malnourished, frightened, angry, depressed, and covered with lice. I was as busy as I'd ever been, looking after the children, seeing social workers, and setting up elaborate braille and special-educational programs for Tam, who had never been to school.

  Now I only saw Woody when he came to visit Dylan

  and Satchel, for one supervised hour most weekdays. Occasionally he persuaded me to go out to dinner with him, but mvanably I left the table m tears. Sascha's wife, Carrie, recalled that "when Woody came to the apartment he was all over you. He brought flowers and kept saying, 'I love you.' We didn't know whether to hit him, or how to protect you. Sascha and I asked you what you wanted, and you looked so confused, you said you didn't know."

  "What would have happened if I hadn't found the pictures of Soon-Yi?" I asked Woody one day.

  "Nothing," he replied. "I thought this would be just a pleasant little footnote in Soon-Yi's history."

  But her analyst told me, "Unfortunately Mr. Allen has crushed the fragile relationship you had built with Soon-Yi." Now I understood the reason for the dramatic change in her attitude the previous year, the new little laugh of superiority, the smugness, and the coldness to the other kids. I didn't know how we would ever repair things, and this thought broke my heart.

  A counselor for one of the teenage kids advised me that even Woody's brief appearances in our apartment were having a disturbing effect; that both Woody and Soon-Yi had been "sexualized" in the minds of, probably, all the children. "The home has to be viewed as a safe place," she said, and the child she was counseling felt "unsafe" when Woody was present. I was advised that if I wanted to see him, I should do It outside the apartment, without telling the kids.

  By early spring Woody was no longer saying how sorry he was, or that he couldn't live without me, or that he was the most trustworthy person on earth. Now he was saying, "If we don't get back together, then I'm free to date Soon-Yi, or anybody I want."

  "How are the kids supposed to live with that?" I asked

  him. I pointed out that, psychologically, this was incest. "What are they going to do at PTA meetings, introduce Soon-Yi as their sister and stepmother? How do you think, practically speaking, everybod
y would handle it? This is crazy! I can't be your mother-in-law!"

  Despite everything that had happened, all the agony, and all his years of therapy, the moral dimensions of the situation still utterly eluded him. We had been over it and over it, and still he didn't get it, even though he was now seemg two therapists and sometimes had appointments twice a day, including Sunday.

  When Woody's psychiatrist was unhelpful, I went to Dr. Willard Gayland, a noted ethicist, who was sympathetic, but didn't have time to take Woody on as a full-time patient. Then I went to a brilliant Jesuit priest who agreed to talk to him, but Woody refused.

  By late spring, when Woody called or came to see the children, he was tough and entirely unrepentant; if I got angry or cried, he threatened to put me in a mental hospital and have the children taken away.

  In the foyer of our apartment one day, I was trying to push him out, saying, "Get out. Please, please go," as some of the kids gathered around—Fletcher, Moses, Dylan, Tam, and Satchel.

  "I'm going to take these kids out of here," Woody was saying loudly, over and over.

  Suddenly Fletcher was coming at him, saying, ^'Get out now. Get out and leave Mom alone." Woody fled.

  About that time Moses handed a letter to Woody.

  . . . You can't force me to live with you . . . All you want is the trust and relationships you had in the beginning of the time. You can't have those worthy things because you have done a

  horrible, unforgivable, needy, ugly, stupid thing, which I hope you will not forgive yourself for doing ... I hope you get so humiliated that you commit suicide . . . You brought these things to yourself, we didn't do anything wrong. Everyone knows you're not supposed to have an affair with your son's sister including that sister, but you have a special way to get that sister to think that it's OK. Unfortunately, Soon-Yi hadn't had a serious relationship before and probably thought "OK, this is a great chance to see what a serious relationship is like." That's probably why she did it ... I just want you to know that I don't consider you my father anymore. It was a great feeling havmg a father, but you smashed that feeling and dream with a single act.