The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (24 page)

With the arrival of one baby after another, a marriage that was never Ozzie and Harriet in the first place grew progressively unhappier. In Hollywood, where sex was a matter of supply and demand, there was nothing but supply for studio executives and directors, especially men as good-looking as the tall, blond Farrow, a legendary fornicator. A snake tattooed on the upper inside of his left thigh appeared to be emerging from his genitals. Exercising droit du seigneur, with a sense of entitlement about sex from the actresses he directed, Johnny Farrow and his snake would prove memorable for some of Hollywood's biggest stars. By the early fifties, Mia's mother and father were sleeping in separate bedrooms. So that her rest would not be disturbed when her husband came home in the middle of the night after tomcatting around Beverly Hills, Maureen insisted on a separate entrance to his room.

At the age of nine, Mia contracted a mild case of infantile paralysis, a mysterious ailment that, before the Salk vaccine, was crippling and killing thousands of children. After six days in the polio ward at Los Angeles General Hospital, surrounded by children unable to breathe without a respirator and confined in iron lungs, she returned home to find everything changed, in order to safeguard the other children. "The dog had been given away," she recalled. "Our swimming pool had been drained. The lawn had been reseeded. The whole house had been repainted, the couch reupholstered, the carpets cleaned." She was terrified about contaminating her brothers and sisters. The following year there was another crisis when Mia's oldest brother, fifteen-year-old Michael, was hit by a car, and four years later he would die in a plane collision while, unbeknownst to his parents, he was taking flying lessons.

Throughout her life, Mia would be possessed by an overriding need for her father's approval. His reputation as an adulterer masked a serious, scholarly man, a fervent Roman Catholic who wrote a massive popular history of the papacy and a biography of Sir Thomas More. For his services to the Church, the Vatican awarded him a Knighthood of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. More significant, however, was his obsession with Father Damien, a Belgian priest who founded a leper colony in Hawaii, where he eventually contracted the disease and died in 1889 at the age of forty-nine. Culminating years of research, Farrow published a biography,
Damien the Leper,
an inspirational work that would go through thirty-three printings. His preoccupation with the leper saints selfless work among the Hawaiians would have a pronounced impact on Mia, who, in her adult life, would endeavor to re-create Father Damien's colony in her own home, by adopting nonwhite children who were blind, crippled, or otherwise medically disabled.

In the fall of 1962, beyond humiliation, tired of the papal knights indefatigable philandering and heavy drinking, the long-suffering Maureen O'Sullivan turned her back on the wreckage. In New York, she acted in a Broadway comedy,
Never Too Late,
and had a romance with its seventy-five-year-old director, George Abbott. With the family fragmented, Mia joined her mother at Christmas. One night when Maureen was spending the evening with Abbott, her husband telephoned, and Mia made excuses. Throughout the night, Farrow called repeatedly, but Mia let the phone ring. Eventually, the calls stopped because John Farrow, clutching the receiver, had died of a heart attack.

No event shaped her future more than the death of her father, who had expressed withering disdain for actresses, whom he treated like pieces of meat, and opposed Mia's acting ambitions on the grounds that it would certainly make her miserable. Almost immediately after his death, she joined the cast of
Peyton Place,
the first daytime soap opera to be aired in the evening. The TV version of Grace Metalious s novel, about a small New England town and its citizens, would become one of 1964 s biggest hits and make Mia, as its brooding heroine, Allison MacKenzie, famous overnight. What she lacked in acting ability—sometimes requiring ten takes to film a single line—she made up for in other respects. With her father’s looks, she was a beauty whose best feature would be her extraordinary skin, as diaphanous as if her flesh were a package done up in Saranwrap.

March of Time:

"There were four sisters and three brothers and we all used to fight to kill. I'm serious. I have scars all over my body. We used knives, bottles."

—Tisa Farrow, 1970

The year after her father died, Mia met Frank Sinatra on the 20th Century-Fox lot while filming
Peyton Place.
During lunch breaks, she had taken to planting herself on the doorstep of the soundstage where he was filming a train scene for
Von Ryan's Express.
With her fair hair styled in waist-length braids, attired in a long white nightgown, she quickly captured Sinatra’s notice. He dispatched one of his underlings to find out how old she was. "Nineteen," she said. Sinatra was fifty.

Minutes later, while being introduced to the singer, she spilled the contents of her straw bag, including her retainer and a box of tampons, on the floor in front of his chair. Sinatra, charmed, saw an adorable little girl who needed to be cared for, like an exotic plant in danger of wilting, the helpless image she would convey to practically every man she ever met. Walking her to the stage door, he asked for a date.

In a darkened screening room, they held hands and as she said later, she began to love him the moment she first smelled him. He was wearing the same brand of aftershave lotion as her father had used. The next day, Sinatra sent his Learjet to bring Mia and her deaf cat, Malcolm, to his compound in Rancho Mirage, California, where he induced her to part with her virginity a few hours after the aircraft touched down at Palm Springs Airport. A pretty redhead wept by the pool. She had been expecting to share Sinatra’s bed but had been passed along to Yul Brynner at the last minute. Sinatra, like Mia, was addicted to high drama.

Hollywood was as picaresque as a feudal barony where a lord could share a woman sexually with a rival, then turn around and vengefully deflower the enemy's daughter after his death. Years earlier, Sinatra first entered Mia’s life one evening when she was eleven and having dinner with her father at Romanoff's. Walking by their table, Sinatra glanced at Mia and remarked to her father "pretty girl," whereupon Farrow looked at him as if he were a worm. "You stay away from her," he warned. There was more to this exchange than its face value. After the breakup of Sinatra’s tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner, John Farrow directed her in
Ride, Vaquerol,
a Western filmed in southern Utah. At first, the sex goddess disliked Farrow. On the weekends, carousing with hookers imported from Los Angeles, he would spend all day Sunday in bed and then report to the set on Monday mornings with a hangover. However much she was put off by his whoring, as well as his sadistic treatment of horses in the film, she subsequently changed her mind, and it was this relationship that prompted Maureen O'Sullivan to install the separate entrance on Beverly Drive. Although the Farrow children had no full knowledge of their fathers indiscretions, Mia happened to know about Gardner because one day she accidentally caught them together in his office.

Mia's upbringing had imprinted a layer of rich fantasy over the pathology of a damaged family playing out various themes of religion, infidelity, alcoholism, and physical and emotional abuse. Giving up her virginity to the ex-husband of her father s mistress was simply the sort of extravagant theatricality that had become second nature.

One of Mia's friends, Liza Minnelli, was shocked to hear about her unlikely new boyfriend. "You're not dating Uncle Frank!" she exclaimed. But Mia's mother considered Uncle Frank "a nice man" likely to take good care of her daughter, a clue to the extent of her maternal guidance. Self-absorbed, unable to assume responsibility for her children's upbringing, Maureen allowed all of them to do more or less as they pleased, frequently with disastrous results. As a widow, her own desperate quest for affection led her to contemplate marriage to a twenty-three-year-old French rabbinical student. The boy's horrified parents, faced with a Mrs. Robinson situation, hastily put an end to the relationship.

In the summer of 1966, Mia married Sinatra in Las Vegas. No family members or friends attended. Their wedding photograph was described in detail by the
New York Post:
"The groom, his retreating hairline camouflaged by one of his sixty toupees, his face tanned almost to the bronze of Max Factor's theatrical makeup Number 11-N but a trifle jowly, his chin just visible in duplicate, was beaming." For better or for worse, Mia had re-created her parents' marriage. This became obvious a few months later, during an opening at the Sands Hotel, when Frank asked her to stand and take a bow and informed the audience that he had married again. "Well, you see I had to," he said. "I finally found a broad 1 can cheat on," which caused gasps even from the blasé* Las Vegas crowd. Mia, head lowered, smiled. She would soon retreat into needle pointing and marijuana. In her fifties, still full of unresolved feelings about Sinatra, she remembered loving him "with all the powers of my infantile, hungry, myopic self," and at Sinatra's funeral she sat sobbing next to his first wife, Nancy.

While her husband's voice—his timing, phrasing, and matchless interpretation of a song—had made him a colossus among popular entertainers, he was also a flawed human being whose nastier side was suggested by his friendships with hoodlums, his treatment of women, whom he referred to as cufflinks or broads, the ring-a-ding misogyny of his partying Rat Pack sidekicks, his high-priced hookers and gutter brawling. Angry, restless, he always had a chip on his shoulder, never bigger than when comedian Jackie Mason repeatedly made jokes about him and Mia ("Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces"). Ignoring a number of warnings, Mason found three bullets fired into his hotel room, followed several months later by an unknown assailant breaking his nose and crushing his cheekbones. Sinatra's temper reminded Maria Roach of John Farrow, who "could be so charming and wonderful, and turn around and be somebody else," the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome typical of the alcoholic personality.

What Sinatra wanted most was a dependent wife, whose only interest would be satisfying his every desire. According to comedian Tom Dreesen, a close friend of Sinatra’s, his stooges and yes-men flattered him as if he were the Sun King. "You have to understand that when you are with Frank Sinatra, its his world and you are living in it. If you can revolve around his energy, you benefit." But Mia, who expected to be dominated by men, nevertheless showed surprisingly little aptitude for being a yes-woman. To spite him for excluding her from his fiftieth birthday party, given by his ex-wife Nancy and their children, she pitched a tantrum and chopped off her hair to the length of a boys. In 1967 she was offered her first starring role in
Rosemary's Baby,
a horror film directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levins widely popular novel about an innocent young housewife who lives in a spooky New York apartment and gives birth to the son of Satan. When shooting was delayed, and Sinatra ordered her to walk off the set, she refused, no doubt counting on a short-lived conflict. Instead, he instructed his lawyer to draw up divorce papers. On the Paramount lot, Mickey Rudin appeared with a brown envelope, and took Mia into her trailer, leaving a few minutes later without a word. "Sending Rudin was just like firing a servant," thought Roman Polanski. If Mia’s marriage to Sinatra ended badly, it also lasted sixteen months, which was about a year longer than some people expected.

Eyewitness:

"When you look at her, you are convinced that she has only just stepped out of a convent, all scrubbed and holy and chaste. It is sometimes a shock to remember who she really is, and what."

—Peter Yates, 1970

After her divorce from Sinatra, Mia made numerous sexual conquests. Wild living and immaturity combined with a slew of men, lots of sex, and a miscarriage brought loneliness. "She was a real sad little girl," recalled an actress friend, "the walking wounded." Mia would describe her malady as "a touch of Zelda Fitzgerald in me."

In Palm Springs, she visited John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, who had just become parents of a baby girl, Chynna. Suffering from exhaustion and postpartum depression, Michelle was having a hard time. Leaving her to fend for herself, Mia and John slipped away to Joshua Tree and checked into a hotel. John Phillips, completely infatuated, saw Mia as "gentle and flighty," a "real Flower Child." Decked out in beads, granny glasses, and funky muumuus, as if dressed for a masquerade ball, she liked to go around barefoot and sit on the floor. According to his memoirs, their relationship seemed to be fueled by taking mescaline together and engaging in boisterous pillow fights. One day as they were tripping, Peter Sellers pulled up to Phillips's house and found them stoned. Sellers, another man who had fallen hard for Mia, after breaking up with his wife, Britt Ekland, was gripped by such a raging obsession that Roman Polanski, who introduced them, figured they must be soul mates. Finding his soul mate whacked-out with John Phillips, Sellers let out a maniacal squeal, "I’ll get you down from that drug if I have to pull you down by the pubic hairs." Barely two years later, Mia married again.

Andre Previn was born in 1929 and accepted into Berlins most prestigious conservatory after showing signs of genius as a piano prodigy at age six. His father, an attorney, was not unduly disturbed when Hitler came into power because, even though he was Jewish, he thought of himself first of all as a German. One evening in 1938, however, on his way home from work, he noticed a sign: NO DOGS OR JEWS PERMITTED IN THIS PARK. Arriving home, he told his wife to pack for a weekend trip to Paris. They never returned. Andre Previn remembered that "we took one bag and left everything behind." From Paris, the Previns emigrated to Los Angeles, where they had a cousin who was a musical director at Universal Studios. While still a student at Beverly Hills High School, Andre began working for MGM and graduated to contract composer, arranger, and orchestrator of film musicals during the studios golden age. In his sixteen years in Hollywood, a period he would call his "Esther Williams days," he scored a total of sixty films, won four Academy Awards for Best Music Score
(Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Irma La Douce,
and
My Fair Lady),
and bought "a pretty house." Despite his hugely successful career as a film composer, he refused, he said, "to spend the rest of my life manufacturing music that would be played while Debbie Reynolds spoke," and lived for the day when he could become a symphonic conductor. Within a few short years, he was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, the first American to lead a major British orchestra. The English press dubbed him "the British Leonard Bernstein."