The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (25 page)

Previn's looks were unconventional. He was short, with thinning black hair, a prominent nose, heavy circles under his eyes that made him look owlish, and he walked with a stoop that gave him an old-man quality. "There was nothing appealing about him at first," said an acquaintance from his Hollywood days. "But the minute he opened his mouth he had women eating out of his hand." After a first marriage to jazz singer Betty Bennett, and two daughters, he then married Dory Langdon, a talented lyricist four years his senior whom he met at MGM. An abusive family history resulted in a troubled adulthood for Dory: affairs with married men, two abortions, an annulled marriage, and a mental collapse that landed her in an institution, where she apparently was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Her marriage to Andre would be clouded by crippling breakdowns that necessitated hospitalization, interspersed with periods in which she functioned normally.

They first encountered Mia at the home of their next-door neighbor, the director Alan Pakula, when she bounced over to them and exclaimed sweetly that everyone she loved also loved them, and so she just had to say hello. She was holding in her hands a square of tapestry on which she was needlepointing a rose pattern. Dory, sizing up the twenty-four-year-old actress, studied the texture of her skin, as translucent as if "she were still wrapped in the gauze of her placenta." Listening to the whispery voice that had been "gently buffed" by good schools and money, Dory, at forty-three, felt quite over the hill. "No pig in the parlor, she," Dory wrote in an autobiography. "This was lace-curtain Hollywood." Mia persisted in trying to befriend the Previns, and once when Andre was away with the Houston Symphony, she invited Dory to her home in Bel Air. Confidences were exchanged. Why didn't she accompany Andre on tour? Mia wondered. Dory said that she rarely ventured out of Los Angeles because flying terrified her, a problem because Andre got lonely on the road and she feared he might fall under the spell of some sex kitten. Taking a youthful approach to Dory's dilemma, Mia advised worrying less about death by air crash and living her life more fully.

In months to come, Andre kept his distance from Mia. Sixteen years her senior, he seemed to be irritated by her flower-child flakiness. One evening, he and Dory were driving to a restaurant with Mia and Mike Nichols, when Mia suddenly declared she'd be perfect to play Peter Pan because she'd visited never-never land many times. That annoyed Andre, who told her that "if you ever say anything so stupid again, I'll personally throw you out of the car." Another night Mia and Liza Minnelli paid a call on the Previns, and Andre accompanied Liza on the piano, while Mia sat quietly in a corner listening. As the evening progressed, Dory began to seethe at the way Liza kept touching her husband and vowed that she would never be invited back. It never occurred to her to worry about Mia, because she always drove Andre nuts.

Not long afterward, in London, Andre and Mia accidentally ran into each other at a party. Andre, feeling claustrophobic, came out to the sidewalk for a breath of air and spotted Mia leaving. She couldn't stand it any longer, she said.

"Well, that's interesting because I can't stand it either," he replied. "How about going out to dinner?" According to Mia, Previn was unattached that evening. According to Dory Previn, he was still attached to her. And so when Mia became pregnant in May of 1969, Andre had difficulty informing his wife, who learned about it when a gossip columnist telephoned to ask for her reaction. Despite her fear of the air, in an attempt to join her husband and save her ten-year marriage, she hastily booked a flight to London. As the plane was sitting on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport, she tore off some of her clothes and ran bare-chested up and down the aisle. Screaming threats at other passengers, including a priest, she was removed from the aircraft and hospitalized.

Andre hesitated to press for a divorce until Dory came to her senses. But, said a friend from that time, "Dory was not OK before she found out. She would never be OK." Meanwhile, Dory, now released from the sanatorium, continued to hope that Andre would eventually come back to her, but after Mia delivered nonidentical twins, Matthew and Sascha in February 1970, she had no choice but to agree to a divorce. However, her hatred for the third Mrs. Previn was unabated. Convinced that Mia set out to marry her husband by deliberately becoming pregnant, she wrote and recorded an album of personal songs, including the pointed "Beware of Young Girls," which told of a wife's bitterness when a career homewrecker burrows into her marriage and steals her husband. (Mia thought the song was tasteless.) Two years later, Dory and Mia accidentally passed each other in the ladies' room at the Hill-crest Country Club in Los Angeles. They did not acknowledge each other. "I started to say something and got choked on my own words," Mia recalled. "Maybe it was better not to."

In the seventies, the Previns lived on a twenty-acre country estate in Surrey. Surrounded by woods and streams at "The Haven," their family kept growing. During a concert tour in South Korea in 1970, Andre accompanied another musician to an orphanage for Vietnam war victims. The sight of hundreds of babies lying in cardboard boxes, covered with newspapers, upset him so greatly that he wanted to scoop up "as many as I could carry out." He and Mia adopted two-month-old Kym Lark in 1973, another Vietnamese baby, Summer, the following year, and a Korean orphan, Soon-Yi, in 1977. A third biological son, Fletcher, was born to them in 1974.

In the beginning, the marriage was sometimes happy, sometimes not. Married not yet two years, Mia was complaining to
Photoplay
about trying to work out "a lot of problems," adding that "maybe being every man's third wife is a jinx." Previn, a man of immense charm and charisma on the podium, radiated sweetness and witty humor but in private could be frosty, guarded, and withholding. Mia also discovered that Andre, though not traditionally handsome, was attractive to women. As time went on, there was increasing gossip about him and other women, including the music critic of the
Financial Times
of London. But in the end it was not his black moods or his alleged dalliances that broke up their marriage but the fact that he was hardly ever home. As one of the most prominent musicians in Britain, he was either on the road or performing on television. During the second year of their marriage, Mia was shocked to realize that he had spent only a total of fifteen days with her. Andre despised Hollywood and didn't want his wife to work there, and besides, her children needed her at home. But with a husband who was always absent, life could become humdrum, and so she acted in several British films that contributed nothing to her reputation.

Among the Previns' close friends was an English couple, Heather and Michael Jayston, and their three children. Michael, an actor who played Czar Nicholas in
Nicholas and Alexandra,
had appeared with Mia in Carol Reed's
The Public Eye
(1972). His wife, a tall woman with high cheekbones and shoulder-length auburn hair, was a glass-and-jewelry etcher. She was a good friend of Mia's, whose example resulted in the Jaystons' adoption of a Vietnamese war orphan as well. By the time that the Jaystons divorced in 1977, Andre had developed more than friendly feelings for the thirty-year-old Mrs. Jayston, who would become his fourth wife in 1982. Mia, too, began having relationships, with Roman Polanski and then Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's director of photography.

An enterprising teenager who grew up too fast, Mia once revealed her aspirations to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Being anonymous, she confided, "just 'one of the Farrows,' third from the top and fifth from the bottom," couldn't possibly satisfy her. Instead, she planned to think big, because that was how she could achieve her heart s desire—"a big career, a big man, and a big life." Mia may have been immature and greedy, but she was also a show-business brat, tremendously savvy in the ways of Hollywood. That men would be her entree to the big life was obvious—it was the expected role of women, even in the swinging sixties—but Mia also grasped a crucial fact: What counted was connecting with rich, handsome older men. Already prospecting for a suitable candidate, casting flirtatious glances toward Yul Brynner and Kirk Douglas, she sensed that nice girls finish last.

By her mid-thirties, Mia had been married to and divorced from two big men. Like any woman who presents herself as a fragile gamine in need of care—another traditional female role—Mia tried to avoid competition with men, indeed was careful not to suggest she could ever be an equal. Personally, her assets were meager. She learned to act at the Liz Taylor Academy of Dramatic Arts, although she steadily improved with age and eventually developed into a capable comedienne. Average intelligence and a sketchy finishing-school education, but few skills of concentration, made unlikely any fulfillment of her childhood fantasy of becoming a pediatrician. Primarily, she was a pretty woman with a breathtaking complexion.

While Mia had no problem winning the affection of prominent men, keeping them proved more difficult. Big men plus big money plus big egos equaled big trouble. Without fail, they fell victim to forces beyond their control, usually the allure of other women, and meandered away.
^U
I believed in my husband’s/partners," Mia said. "I trusted them absolutely, automatically, and I failed to see the full picture."

CHAPTER TEN

Woody in Love

During Saturday matinees, Woody liked to slip into the Barrymore Theatre, where
Romantic Comedy
was now in its eighth month. Once the curtain fell, he would make a beeline for the stage door and whisk Mia away for a quick bite before the evening show. By now the whole company knew she had a mad crush on him and he was crazy about her.

Even a blind person, he thought, could appreciate Mia's beauty, but that was only part of the reason he found her thrilling. Her exotic pedigree, sublimely trailing the mythology of Hollywood's gilded era, conjured up for him the ecstasy of Midwood's old movie palaces and long dark afternoons with giant boxes of Milk Duds. She seemed a fantasy in the flesh, whose connections to the glamour personalities pasted on Cousin Ritas wall of pinups overwhelmed him. It was hard to believe that her mother was the same sexy starlet from the Tarzan movies. For that matter, the last person he ever expected to love was the ex-wife of Frank Sinatra, who had been a god to his cousin.

In the months after their lunch at Lutece, on Sundays when there was no performance of
Romantic Comedy,
they explored the city's offbeat neighborhoods on foot, holding hands and carrying a bottle of Chateau Margaux and two wineglasses in a brown paper bag. And when they got tired, the Rolls materialized a la
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and took them home. In cozy East Side art houses playing Bergman and Goddard films, they hugged and kissed. Apart, Woody yearned for Mia and dispatched his chauffeur to Central Park West with lover's gifts to be dropped off with her doorman, his favorite recordings and romantic e. e. cummings poetry, and once an antique postcard showing a man in a bowler hat with five children that had been inscribed by some unknown lover, "Your future husband—Your future children."

The one thing he could not manage to do, however, was pick up the phone and call her. From May to August, Norma Lee Clark continued to schedule their meetings by dialing Mia with dates and times when her employer would be available. As they were lovers by then, this arrangement seemed ridiculous, but Mia made no objection. His reluctance to phone her ended when she checked into New York Hospital for emergency abdominal surgery resulting from complications following peritonitis, and from there convalesced in Marthas Vineyard. While she was away, he began calling two or three times a day.

Aside from his telephone phobia, Woody's biggest problem was her children. In this matter, they totally ignored each other’s messages. Woody, at the beginning of their relationship, warned that he’ll never dated a mother (apparently forgetting Teri Shields) and had "zero interest" in kids, giving her to understand she must not expect anything of him. And Mia, only a few weeks after they began dating, while sitting in a theater watching a new Australian film,
My Brilliant Career,
suddenly turned to him and whispered, "I would like to have a child with you." Woody, taking the remark as a joke, looked at her and laughed. After all, she had seven children. What he failed to understand was that, above all else, Mia adored babies. "She never met a baby she didn't like," said an intimate.

Not only had Woody not yet met her children, he expressed no interest in meeting them. Since the divorce, Mia had been living at the Langham on Central Park West, in a spacious eight-room apartment that combined her mother's six-room apartment with the unit next door. Woody had never been there. Whenever he picked her up, he waited downstairs in the Rolls. It was not until late September that the first encounter took place, accidentally, when he arrived to pick up Mia just as she was entering the building with her family, like a mother duck trailed by ducklings: the ten-year-old twins, Matthew and Sascha; seven-year-old Lark; and Soon-Yi, who was also around seven or eight; and the two six-year-olds, Daisy and Fletcher. To these half dozen was recently added a seventh, Misha, who suffered from cerebral palsy on his right side and had to wear a leg brace. Abandoned in a phone booth in Seoul, South Korea, Misha was two when Mia took him in earlier that year, after specially requesting a handicapped child. The children were returning from the playground, all of them holding dripping ice-cream cones. They were shy. Woody fidgeted. Later, ill at ease, he told Mia they were cute.

In September, shortly after Mia's return to the city, Woody prepared for the release of
Stardust Memories.
Unlike previous years when he alleviated his anxiety over the openings of
Interiors
and
Manhattan
by fleeing to Paris, this year Jean Doumanian was not available, and so he invited Mia to accompany him. Paris happened to be the one European city she couldn't stand. What's more, being separated from her children always upset her, and she had barely recovered from surgery. Nevertheless, she could not bring herself to refuse the pleasures of a romantic week with her new lover.