The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (36 page)

One evening in January 1990, the New York Knicks were playing the LA. Lakers at the Garden. On assignment for the
National
a sports publication, a freelance photographer named Dominick Conde was strolling around fishing for celebrities. Right before halftime, he spotted Woody and Soon-Yi glued together in the seats behind the scorer's table. They were holding hands. Using a long lens, Conde took three shots. "When I came back after half-time," he said, "they were still holding hands, so I shot three more frames." As it turned out, the
National
did not run the photos, which were archived at Star File, Conde s agency, where they remained for the next two years.

Coincidentally, a week or two after Conde photographed Woody and Soon-Yi, another observant Knicks fan happened to notice the couple at a Sacramento game. Seeing Woody stroke Soon-Yis hair and kiss her cheek, the fan tipped off Cindy Adams, gossip columnist at the
New York Post.
Adams, a product of Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, former Miss New Jersey State Fair, and wife of Catskills comic Joseph Abramowitz aka Joey Adams, was a woman of a certain age who had spent ten years as a professional gossipmonger. By this time she knew a thing or two about the follies of celebrity husbands who got moony over babes half their age. She put in a call to Woody's production office.

"Oh, I know," Woody's secretary told her. "She's an old friend."

Adams laughed. "Yeah? Well, she ain't that old."

Adams ran the item without identifying Soon-Yi. According to Conde, he had no doubt the teenager was Mia's daughter "because I'd been shooting her since she was a little girl." The other person who didn't have to wonder about

the identity of Woody's new girlfriend was Mia. Getting wind of the Cindy Adams story, she confronted Woody, who acted as if she were crazy. At first dismissing her suspicions as believing the lies of a gossip columnist, he finally conceded that it was possible he grabbed Soon-Yi s hand for a second as they were elbowing their way into the Garden, as he did when Elaine's was crowded and the restaurateur led him by the hand to his table. When Mia protested Woody's touching Soon-Yi, warning him that "she has a crush on you and she might misinterpret that," he snapped. "Don't be silly." The subject was dropped.

Moving Pictures:

Isaac Davis: I'm dating a girl who does homework.

—Manhattan,
1979

Soon-Yi was beginning her senior year at Marymount, a small all-girl parochial prep school on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-third Street, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Woody's apartment was only a five-minute walk from the school, and it was easy for her to visit him, wearing her school uniform, on her lunch break. She also figured out a way to see him on weekends. On Saturday mornings, and sometimes Sundays, usually around nine-thirty, she donned miniskirts and slathered on makeup, telling her mother that she was meeting a girlfriend at Bloomingdale's.

What friend? asked Mia, suspiciously glancing at her bare legs.

Nobody special, Soon-Yi said. It was just someone she'd met last summer, who now worked as a salesclerk at Bloomies.

"Well, what do you do when your friend is working?" Mia persisted. "Just stand there all dressed up?"

Mia was determined that her children attend college. Accordingly, Matthew went to Yale, Sascha to Fordham, and Lark attended New York University, where she planned to enter the nursing program. Soon-Yi, however, seemed to have other ideas about her future. She wanted to be an actress, an ambition that seemed possible, if not easily achieved, given her show-business connections. Her fantasies were further fueled in the summer of 1990 when Woody got her extra work in
Scenes from a Mall,
a Disney comedy in which he himself was starring, his first venture outside of Orion since
The Front
Woody played a wealthy ponytailed lawyer from California who breaks up and gets back together with his wife of sixteen years (Bette Midler) in the Beverly Center, a mall on the west side of Los Angeles. The picture started production there and then moved to Stamford Town Center in Connecticut, and finally to a replica of the Beverly Center mall that had been created at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens.

Each morning Woody took Soon-Yi to work with him. It was at this time that she began talking about a professional career in modeling and urged him to launch her. Over the opposition of her mother, he had his casting director send her to the Flick modeling agency, which coincidentally represented her cousin, the daughter of Prudence Farrow. But it was doubtful that Soon-Yi could ever have become a model. Not only did she lack the dainty features of a Chinese or Vietnamese woman, but she was also chunky and large-boned, with a head that was not in proportion to her torso. The owner of the modeling agency, Frances Grill, asked Soon-Yi if she had any photographs of herself. "I told her she needed something to be a model, and suggested she get some simple Polaroids." Soon-Yi said she did not have any professional photographs but promised to come back with some pictures. She never returned to the modeling agency. "Of course in person, she wasn't model material at all," Grill said. "She was pretty but not tall enough. But sometimes Polaroids will show that a girl photographs well."

"Soon-Yi had always been rather plain," recalled the family music teacher, Lorrie Pierce. "But suddenly she looked beautiful, like young girls do when they're in love." That spring she graduated from Marymount. "At home on graduation day, she looked as radiant as a bride," Pierce said. In the school yearbook, alongside a recent photo of Soon-Yi, there was a photo of the four-year-old in traditional Korean dress, which had been taken in Seoul at the time of her adoption. Her mother composed a message of congratulations: "A mom couldn't dream of a better daughter. You are a miracle and my pride and joy. I am profoundly grateful for every minute along the way. Congratulations, Bravo and three cheers for our Soon-Yi."

All the Previn and Farrow children had been brought up as ladies and gentlemen. Occasionally, however, they got into mischief. Once Lark and Daisy shoplifted $342 worth of bras, panties, and garter belts from a store in the Danbury Fair Mall. Apprehended by security guards, who observed them mashing lingerie into a shopping bag, they were arrested and charged with fifth-degree larceny, a misdemeanor. In court with their mother, the girls agreed to attend a six-month rehabilitation program in order to erase their arrest records. Another time, Daisy failed to receive her monthly allowance check from Andre Previn and cashed Soon-Yis check with a forged signature. There were other incidents involving skipping school, jumping subway turnstiles, and sneaking out to late-night parties with boys. Soon-Yi never participated in these adolescent high jinks.

In the fall of 1991, Soon-Yi departed for Drew University, a school in Madison, New Jersey, that Sascha had attended briefly. In academic distinction, Drew had the reputation for being a haven for debutantes and for placing few intellectual demands on its students. Soon-Yi, unable to make friends easily, was homesick and frequently phoned Woody for his advice on how to make college life bearable. "We were both quite unhappy," he later recalled.

The March of Time:

A young playwright, Harold Cohen, is dallying with Connie Chasen, a long-legged blonde actress. But Harold is secretly fascinated by Connies mother, Emily, for whom he develops lustful yearnings. Secretly plotting Emilys seduction, he lures her to Trader Vies for Mai Tais when he suddenly realizes he is in love with two women, "a not terribly uncommon problem. That they happen to be mother and child? All the more challenging!" In due time, Connies ardor cools (Harold now seems like a brother), and he is free to woo and wed the enticing Emily. His family is incredulous.

"His girlfriends mother he's marrying?" shrieks his Aaunt as she falls into a faint.

Harold's mother reaches for a cyanide capsule. "Fifty-five and shiksa!"

—Woody Allen, "Retribution," 1980

Woody and Soon-Yi became intimate in 1990, if one is to believe the story she told Mia in the first hours after her mother discovered the Polaroids. Woody's version was different. He said the sexual relationship began more or less accidentally when Soon-Yi came home from college for Christmas break in 1991. "We started talking about following her [graduation] from college, what would happen, and that was when 1 put my hand on her," he testified under oath. It was obvious that if his sexual relations with Soon-Yi could be established prior to December 17, 1991, his co-adoption of Dylan and Moses might be reversed. By now there were many people, in addition to Dominick Conde and untold numbers of Knicks fans at Madison Square Garden, who had witnessed them together in compromising positions: Larks boyfriend noticed Woody caressing Soon-Yis thigh while riding in Woody's car; Fletcher caught them in some sort of intimacy in the laundry room; Moses was shocked to see Woody ducking his head and gazing upward between his sisters bare legs at her crotch. At 930 Fifth Avenue, Woody s neighbors gossiped about the frequency of Soon-Yi's visits, and exchanged tart comments on her appearance. "She was sallow and badly dressed, not at all pretty," one woman said. "I thought he could surely do better." Other neighbors had little sympathy for Mia, whom they mocked for acting snooty, and behaving, as some people said, like a "fruitcake."

Jean Doumanian, Woody's friend and confidante, informed
People
magazine in 1992 that the romance began soon after Satchel's birth, when Mia was preoccupied with the new baby. In her opinion, Woody's attraction to Mia's daughter seemed perfectly natural precisely because the filmmaker
had
known her since childhood. "She took off her braces and took out her hairpin," Doumanian waxed poetic, "and lo and behold here was this lovely woman. A breath of fresh air, a companion," who was also "charming and intelligent."

While Woody and Mia slept together infrequently in 1990 and 1991, not all sexual contact ceased, Mia later reported. During those two years, Woody Allen had had two mistresses, mother and daughter; one in a public love affair, the other in a secretive one.

Mia seems to have been the only person who wasn't puzzled by Woody and Soon-Yi's increasingly symbiotic relationship. Woody plainly wanted her to know of the infatuation though, even writing a script about middle-aged husbands jettisoning their wives for young women and casting her in the film as one of the rejected women. In retrospect, she seemed to be asleep at the wheel. But then few women can easily conceive of their trusted husbands or partners having sexual relationships with the children they have spent years loving and nurturing.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Coiled Cobra

On St. Valentines Day of 1992, he delivered gifts for the children. As he was leaving Mia's apartment, he went into the kitchen and gave her a red satin box of chocolates and an embroidered heart cushion. She handed him a slender, neatly wrapped box.

Downstairs in the car, he tore off the paper and found a blue Tiffany & Co. box. When he opened the box, however, it was evident the contents had not been purchased at Tiffany's. It was "a very, very chilling Valentine, meticulously worked on, one hesitates to say psychotically worked on," he later said. The ornate Victorian card was a white heart decorated with entwined pink buds and green vines that framed a Brady Bunch family portrait of Mia surrounded by her nine smiling children. Through the hearts of the children she had jabbed steel turkey-roasting skewers. Her own heart was gashed by the tip of a steak knife, whose handle was wrapped in a xerox copy of one of the Polaroids of the nude Soon-Yi. Mia had written next to the photograph: "Once my heart was one and it was yours to keep. My child you used and pierced my heart a hundred times and deep."

A month had passed since that fateful Sunday evening when Woody had photographed Soon-Yi in the nude. The most reasonable explanation is that they were using the Polaroid camera as a sexual accessory, a method similar to ceiling mirrors or erotic videos. In Woody's case, this particular device certainly does not seem remarkable for a man whose livelihood depends on the camera. Of course, rushing off and leaving the photographs on the mantelpiece was exactly akin to scattering a trail of bread crumbs because Mia found them the very next day.

As his limousine swept through Central Park, Woody squirmed in the backseat. It was the knife that terrified him. Not a week earlier, he and Mia had celebrated her forty-seventh birthday with dinner at Rao's, one of her favorite restaurants. As a present, he had given her three expensive leather-bound volumes of Emily Dickinsons poems. Now she was suggesting that she wanted to kill him by driving a stake through his chest. More than bewildering, her queer little gift was "quite frightening," he said later.

Mia’s intention, she explained later, was not only to put the fear of God into him, but to make sure he fully understood "the degree of pain he had inflicted on me and my entire family." A month after the discovery of the affair, he failed to appear the least bit repentant and seemed to be treating the incident as an ordinary story about the difficulties of monogamy. He had cheated; he had gotten caught. That Woody could be selfish and self absorbed should have come as no surprise to Mia, who had known him for twelve yean. Still, if she couldn't get him to feel remorse, she at least wanted him to acknowledge—and apologize for—his treachery.

Soon-Yi returned to Drew University. The day that Mia found the pictures, she had collapsed in shame. Like a naughty child caught poaching in her mother's purse, she sobbed, "I'm a bad girl." She threatened to kill herself. In no time, however, her defiance—her sense of specialises*—reasserted itself. "The person sleeping with the person is the one with the relationship," she gloated. Those words enraged Mia, who began kicking her. "I just pounced on her," Mia admitted. "She kicked me and I hit her on the side of the face and shoulder." Still clinging to the belief that her daughter's sex with Woody had been nonconsensual, Mia made Soon-Yi promise never to see him again, and to hang up if he ever attempted to phone her. Woody, too, promised Mia that the affair was over. It was not the case. They were "in constant con tan." sometimes speaking on the phone five or six times a day.