The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (28 page)

"Oh, of course," asserted Woody, wise in the exotic ways of seventies dating, as practiced on the Upper East Side. "This means you can be in a constant courtship." During the day Mia had her kids to look after, "but in the evenings we'll meet and its like a date." Then, after sex, she went back to her place. "It's ever so much easier to get along with somebody if you aren't always having to go to bed with them, when you're tuckered out, and get up with them, when you're still sleepy." As he unburdened intimate details to a virtual stranger, he could not help revealing the deep-seated fears of a man with two failed marriages, who was wary of intimacy with a woman—any woman—lest he fail once again. After two years, he still had a problem sleeping the entire night with Mia. Permitting her to simply leave a robe in his bathroom represented a major breakthrough, as was allowing her hairbrush and shampoo to sit in the cabinet alongside toiletries belonging to Diane Keaton, preserved there like so many fossilized relics in King Tut s tomb for more than a decade.

But even as Woody was speaking to Ebert, his life was changing dramatically. Settling into a relationship with Mia made him feel loved and aroused special feelings of belonging that he had never before experienced. As he would write about the Mia character in
Hannah and Her Sisters,
she made him feel connected to the human race. Making efforts to please her, efforts that already involved major practical concessions, he began to move forward and leave his adolescence behind.

Still, patterns of a lifetime were hard to break. In the habit of sleeping in his own bed, he refused to spend the night at Mia's apartment because the place made him uncomfortable. In contrast to the opulence of his co-op, her sprawling rental at the Langham was well-worn, homey, the kind most New York families with children could only dream of. Overlooking Central Park were three sunny front rooms decorated with woven baskets and needlepoint pillows, floors carpeted with Oriental rugs, and walls lined with books and photographs of the children and Walt Disney characters. In the sitting room stood an old spinet piano heaped with sheet music, because five of her children took lessons. A playroom was filled with a rocking horse, toys, and arts-and-crafts materials. The family ate in the kitchen at a Parsons table, and the housekeeper, Mavis Smith, always left a special baked treat (peanut-butter brownies were a favorite) before going home. "I expected to walk into a noisy, cluttered place," recalled Lorrie Pierce, the children's piano teacher for many years. "But Mia ran an exceptionally organized, orderly household. The apartment was so quiet you could hear a pin drop."

Maybe so, but it could not have compared to the monastic silence of Woody's empty penthouse. Conditions at Mia’s, where the bedrooms were stuffed from floor to ceiling with bunk beds, may have brought back unpleasant childhood memories of overcrowded houses and rooms shared with relatives. Equally distasteful were the animals that roamed Mia's apartment as if they owned it. Along with the dog, Mary, and several cats, there were three chinchillas, two hamsters, six mice, four frogs and a turtle, a tank of tropical fish, and several birds—a canary, a parakeet that warbled, and the parrot, Edna. The place always smelled a little stinky to him. "The pets, the cat and the dog, would jump on the kitchen table and eat off the plates," he remembered. Disgusted, he refused to use any utensil in Mia's kitchen and made her keep a supply of paper plates and cardboard cups especially for him.

Disliking her house, he instead invited her for sleepover visits at 930 Fifth Avenue. With all seven children (and sometimes their friends), she would arrive on Friday nights toting sleeping bags, toothbrushes, and toys. The next morning, she dismantled the bivouac and hustled them home for breakfast because Woody needed to write or see his analyst. However, during basketball season, they often met again in the afternoon at the Garden. Woody's explanation of the game was frequently interrupted because he and Mia wound up kissing, "cooing, cuddling, and hugging" at a Philadelphia 76ers game, according to the
New York Daily News.
For the sake of her sons, Mia endured the Knicks but never appreciated sports and quickly tired of pretending she did.

Of all Mia’s brood, Woody got along best with the two youngest boys, eight-year-old Fletcher, who begged for play dates with him, and the four-year-old Korean boy who wore big glasses just like Woody. The boy's adoptive name was Misha Amadeus Farrow (Misha was Russian for Michael, Mia's dead brother, and Amadeus because he was born on Mozart's birthday), but Woody found it effeminate and suggested a more manly name, in honor of the Philadelphia 76ers star Moses Malone. The only one of Mia's children who was not the child of Andre Previn, little Moses was always begging hugs and kisses from Woody, whom he worshiped as a father from the first. Whenever he accompanied his mother to work, he wanted Woody to play games and draw pictures, and as he grew older, Woody taught him chess.

Like it or not, Mia’s children became part of Woody’s existence. His efforts to make friends with them were not easy because he was no more comfortable around children than around adults. But his weekend parenting, such as it was, liberated him from routines that had grown rigid, and this made him feel pleased. He was always telling people about how well he got along with the Previn children. From Mia’s point of view, however, he had little regard for her family. Whatever he did—trading his Rolls for a capacious stretch limousine to transport the kids—was never enough. What bothered her most were the distinctions he made between her biological offspring and her adopted Asian youngsters, who, to him, didn't seem like real brothers and sisters to Mia's own kids, no matter what they called one another. It was hard for him to imagine them as one family. To his way of thinking, according to Mia, she seemed to be baby-sitting for UNICEF, without getting paid for it.

In the summer of 1981, shortly before the filming of
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,
Mia fell in love with a sixty-acre farm, Frog Hollow, on the outskirts of Bridgewater, Connecticut, a slumbering country town of 1,600, boasting a post office, a general store, and a gas station, as well as a bank and library. "But if you blink while driving through the town center you would miss the whole thing," said a resident. A rural community with working farms, Bridgewater was situated in wealthy Litchfield County, where celebrities such as Ivan Lendl owned homes. Nearby lived close friends of Mia's, Casey and John Pascal and Bill and Rose Styron. Frog Hollows two-story, white-frame Colonial house faced a lake that had a small beach, a rocky island in the middle, and two log cabins on the far shore. Hemmed by acres of rolling fields and deep woodlands, it was set back from the main road, but just in case, Mia nailed a white sign to a tree: CAREFUL—CHILDREN PLAYING. That the house was slightly creaky made no difference. Everything about the place enchanted her.

Woody came up to tour the new house. After tramping all over, he found fault with the bathroom, which contained a big antique tub but no shower. Mia installed a new bath and shower just for him.

On his next visit, carrying a white rubber mat, he entered the bathroom only to burst out seconds later.

"The drain is in the middle," he said, taking her to task. Germs would not wash down efficiently without a side drain. Since he was unable to shower, he said, he would be forced to leave first thing in the morning.

Mia sought to please. A new bathroom was built with a shower whose drain was placed in the corner. The children called it "Woody’s bathroom" because they were not permitted to use it. But even special plumbing never made him feel at home in Mia’s country house. During the day, to protect himself from insects, he would wander around wearing a beekeepers hat and netting. At night, wishing he had "a gun under the bed," he was too terrified to get a good night's sleep.

At the time Mia was settling down in Bridgewater, Woody suddenly decided that he, too, needed a little hideaway of his own, about an hour from Manhattan, just to get out of the city and perhaps use for location filming as well. With Jean Doumanian as his guide, he paid $3.5 million for a six-bedroom oceanfront estate in Southampton called the Ark, complete with sauna, Jacuzzi, and Nautilus weight room. Throughout the winter of 1982, landscapers carted away a Victorian greenhouse and cut down the beach grass. The manse was renovated, painted, and furnished in pine antiques and Laura Ashley prints to Jean's impeccable standards. But the paint had scarcely dried on the place when Woody changed his mind. "I hated it," he said later. After spending one night at the Ark, he decided to sell, although it took several years to find a buyer for his seaside white elephant.

It was Sunday, the Fourth of July, and Woody sat alone in the air-conditioned darkness of the 86 Street East, watching Steven Spielberg's new thriller
Poltergeist.
After the movie, "I walked around the empty streets," he said. The city was the way he liked it, hushed and practically deserted. All traces of summer heat and humidity suddenly cleared away and the cool, cleansing air hit him in the face. For a change, there were no curious New Yorkers staring at him; nobody stopped him for an autograph. That weekend, Mia and the children were at Frog Hollow, and despite her efforts to make her house comfortable for him, he remained pathological about the place. Sitting hours in traffic just to arrive at a glorified summer camp full of bugs and screeching kids was not his idea of relaxation. He was just as happy spending the holiday in his solitary bedroom with the air conditioner on full blast and the curtains drawn.

For Mia, the dark side of Woody could be frightening. One day while they were strolling down East Seventy-third Street, he pointed out the residence of William Buckley, a maisonette in a Park Avenue building. People like Bill and Pat Buckley represented to him the essence of the 10021 ZIP-code elite. Stopping in front of the Buckley home, he proceeded to give Mia an impromptu tutorial on the local blue bloods.

Several months later, on another walk through the same neighborhood, Mia looked at a building and foggily tried to remember if it was Buckleys address. It wasn't. But what seemed like a perfectly innocuous question—or maybe it was something else entirely—made Woody furious. He lashed out at her for acting stupid, until she broke down in tears on the sidewalk. After that Jekyll and Hyde outburst, she would always be wary of him. Woody understood how much he owed Mia. But however rewarding the relationship, it was accompanied by bonds that chafed, sometimes unbearably. Then, out of the blue would swim blackest rage. In these moments, to get his own way, he thought nothing of throwing tantrums, or more often, withdrawing into his chronic anhedonia, which made normal existence impossible. Because of all this, Mia discovered, his world was more circumscribed than anyone imagined.

Together they might have been the reigning couple of the city's show-business social circuit. On a first-name basis with the cream of New York artists, they were invited everywhere and could have entertained on a grand scale had they wished. As a couple, however, they had a limited circle of joint friends. In a dozen years, about the only couple with whom they ever managed to establish a friendship was the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and his wife, Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, but even that relationship was impersonal and unequal. Woody enjoyed Vladimir's eccentricities and Wanda's offbeat sense of humor. (In 1988 he gave her a small speaking part in
Crimes and Misdemeanors.)
During a typical evening together, they picked up the elderly couple at their brownstone on East Ninety-fourth Street and took them to dinner at Le Bernardin, a midtown seafood restaurant. Since Vladimir ate nothing but fillet of sole and asparagus, Woody's assistant always phoned ahead to make certain that sole was on the menu. After dinner, Horowitz insisted on picking up a copy of the next day's
New York Times
before Woody's chauffeur could drive them uptown. Although Mia always misspelled the eighty-two-year-old pianists first name, she bore sole responsibility for maintaining the friendship with birthday greetings, bread-and-butter notes, and words of condolence to Wanda when Horowitz died in 1989.

For female companionship, Mia had a coterie of girlfriends dating back to her childhood, but Woody's boyhood gang from Midwood had long since ceased to occupy any place in his life. He had lost contact with Elliott Mills, a research scientist at Duke University Medical School, who lived in North Carolina. However, Jack Victor, a research psychologist, and Jerry Epstein, a psychiatrist, were living in New York. When one Monday Jack showed up at Michael's Pub with his teenage son, Woody handed him his private phone number, but Jack hesitated to use it. Over the years, Jack and Jerry occasionally saw Woody from afar at Madison Square Garden but never approached him.

One of Woody’s regular dining spots was Rao's, a tiny Italian restaurant at 114th Street in East Harlem with home-style food and only eight tables (and no credit cards accepted), which was always filled weeks in advance by celebrity customers. Both he and Mia enjoyed the owner's daughter-in-law, Anna Rao, a woman with a towering bouffant hairstyle, stiletto heels, dark glasses, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, and a wry sense of humor. When one evening Mia remarked that she had always wanted to play that type of woman, Woody was happily amazed. Never would he have imagined such unusual casting. Soon, however, he was busy working on a screenplay with an Anna Rao—type character for Mia.

In his third picture for Orion, he returned to the years before he had made it, when as a struggling comedy writer in the fifties, he hung around joints such as Lindy's and observed the usual cast of characters: the small-time agents, the third-rate singers, the women who looked just like Anna Rao. Danny Rose, an unsuccessful theatrical manager, is known for making virtually any sacrifice to nurture his acts. Trying to make a comeback is Danny's biggest client, Lou Canova, an overweight, over-the-hill Italian pop singer with a big ego and a drinking problem, who, though married, is having an affair with the widow of a mafioso. Danny Rose is grooming Lou for the big-time, but Lou can't perform unless his mistress, Tina Vitale, is present. Against his better judgment, Danny agrees to play his decoy.