The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (42 page)

Justice Wilk's sympathy for the downtrodden did not end with draft protestors. It was well known in legal circles that he favored women. And mothers.

On January 12, 1993, Wilk held a preliminary hearing to rule on Woody's motion requesting regular visits with all three of his children. In the courtroom that morning. Woody was seated with his lawyers and publicists in a single row on the right side of the room, (just behind Woody, breathing heavily down his neck, sat eavesdropping
New York Post
reporters. Mia was not present, but Eleanor Alter riffled her folders and informed Justice Wilk that Woody did not deserve additional visitation. For example, she claimed that in a fit of anger he overreacted by grabbing Satch's legs and yelling, "I'm going to break both your fucking legs, you little bastard." Woody listened to her accusation, his face flushed with indignation. Worse than that, Eleanor Alter went on, a grumpy Woody once shoved Dylan's face into a plate of hot spaghetti.

Then Alter dropped a hammer on Woody. Mr. Allen, she announced, had had intercourse with the sister of his children while the little ones were present. Her words sent the
Post
reporters sitting behind Woody scrambling for their notepads. Quoting from an affidavit submitted by Mia, Alter repeated Dylan's account to the Connecticut police: On a visit to their father's apartment, Dylan and Satchel noticed him sitting with Soon-Yi on the terrace and ran out to join them, but they were chased off and told to play. After a while, when Woody and Soon-Yi disappeared into a bedroom, the children tiptoed up to the door and observed them "lying together on top of the coven." Once again, they were shooed away. A short time later, Dylan returned alone and secretly watched her father and sister "complimenting each other and making sounds like snoring," and this time her presence went unnoticed. She saw "Daddy put his penis in Soon-Yi."

In light of Woody's carelessness in exposing himself before the child. Alter told Judge Wilk. that "visitation with Dylan is unthinkable." Wilk agreed.

Woody, taken by surprise, looked like a man under pressure. As soon as the hearing ended, he stormed down the marble hall to the elevator trailed by a flock of reporters who caught up to him on the steps of the courthouse. With clenched jaw, he cried out, "Great, the wilder the charges the better!" Dylan's story was pure fantasy, "too insane to even think about." He and Soon-Yi never gamboled on his balcony. Likewise, it was "absolutely untrue" that he ever thought of twisting Satch's leg or pushing Dylan into a plate of spaghetti. He was sick of Mia using the children as her mouthpieces to vent her fury against him, he angrily informed the media.

His legal problems had become increasingly time-consuming. Not only was he suing Mia for custody and petitioning to broaden his visitation rights but also fighting her suit, in Surrogate's Court, to invalidate his adoption of Dylan and Moses. In addition, he was threatening a civil suit against Mia,

her mother, and her sister for libeling him in a November 1992 article in
Vanity Fair,
"Mia's Story," which painted him as a pervert.

Meanwhile, hanging over his head were the worrisome criminal investigations in Connecticut and New York. He was aware that if charges of sexual misconduct were brought against him, his career as a filmmaker would be finished. He continued to cooperate with the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale—New Haven Hospital, which had been evaluating Dylan for six months, and he also made sure that Frank Maco's office received affidavits and letters from Dylan's and Satch’s therapists, Soon-Yi's psychiatrist, as well as his own doctor, Kathryn Prescott. In contrast to Mia, he even agreed to a take a lie detector test. What more did Maco want?

For several months, Paul Williams at the Child Welfare Administration in New York had worked feverishly to compile a two-hundred-page dossier that documented what he believed to be a cover-up by the city's Human Resources Commission in the Allen-Farrow case, charges that his superiors would vehemently deny. Despite his diligence, Williams was surprised to learn in December that he was being transferred off the Dylan Farrow case. Later on, his superiors would try to portray him as an obsessive malcontent who overstepped his authority and behaved unprofessionally with people he interviewed. Stung by these charges, Williams contended that that was not the reason he had been removed. Rather, it was because he continued to pursue his investigation. In desperation, Williams told, or leaked to, the
New York Observer
that his bosses were acting under pressure from Woody's attorneys and Mayor David Dinkins office, a claim that was denied. This proved to be a mistake because, before he knew it, he was accused of unethical conduct and fired, although he would be reinstated a few months later. "They played it dirty and ugly," Williams told the media. According to Elkan Abramowitz, the pesky Paul Williams was a clumsy investigator: "He acted in a rude fashion and appeared to be biased against Mr. Allen." But as Williams admitted, "I concluded that abuse did occur and that there was a prima facie cause to commence family-court proceedings against Woody Allen."

Both Paul Williams and Frank Maco were tilling similar ground. Their conclusions about the truth or falsity of Dylan's story would have important consequences for Woody because it raised the specter of his being arrested, prosecuted, and, in a worst-case scenario, convicted and sent to prison. Outwardly, there was no indication that these matters worried Woody, who alternated between periods of going about his business, and continual crises that involved long, paralyzing meetings with attorneys and publicists. By provoking a frenzy of media attention, he had managed to leave himself wide open to the most awful sort of public voyeurism. News of his life had become a business commodity, like pork bellies or soybeans. The most intimate derails—his snuffling and snoring during sex, for example—were considered legitimate news to be pawed over by strangers. Granted, he had been dribbling out plenty of details about his private circumstances for thirty years— in fact, ever since he did his first stand-up routines. No comedian was more confessional, or more selective about what he chose to make known. Now he seemed to have little control over what was written about him. In self-defense, he began leaking favorable news about himself to John Miller of Channel 4. Mia's favorite partisan television reporter was Rosanna Scotto of Fox Five, whose children attended school with Dylan. "Let him have
60 Minutes"
Mia said airily. "I have Channel 5 News." Nothing he did seemed to staunch the flow of invective.

The remarkable productivity of his daily life Woody owed to both his own exceptional discipline and the dedication of his personal assistant, Jane Read Martin. At his beck and call for eight years, Martin put up with his moods and whims and performed endless personal chores. No task was too menial. For a measly salary, she worked inhuman hours—seven days a week, often until 10 p.m.—and took only two weeks a year for vacation. In 1990, in her mid-thirties and unmarried, the aide-de-camp had resigned, and although Woody arranged for another assistant, the rapport was never the same because, said a member of his staff, "Jane was very special."

Even though Jane was gone, she and Woody remained fast friends. Not surprisingly, she continued to regard Mia as a reptile slithering in the grass, intent on smearing "an indelible black question mark at the end of Woody's name forever." Out of friendship for her former boss, she provided sympathetic company and also offered to testify in the custody hearing. Grateful for her years of service and touched by her eagerness to stand by him, Woody frequently went out to dinner with Jane, who sometimes brought along her boyfriend, a writer and sometime stand-up comic named Douglas McGrath.

By now, Woody felt comfortable around Doug, a balding, puppyish man of thirty-three. A native of Texas, Doug had graduated from Princeton University, where he performed in Triangle Club musicals, and then obtained a writing job on
Saturday Night Live.
During the eighties, he wrote several unproduced screenplays, articles for
The New Republic,
as well as a single episode of
LA. Law,
then supported himself as a tutor at a private school for boys. Not only did Woody and Doug establish rapport because he was Jane's steady date, but Woody began to regard him as a trusted insider and part of his extended family. Evenings together were spent talking about jazz and old movies, and trading horror stories about Hollywood. Doug's first produced screenplay, a remake of
Born Yesterday
with Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, had recently been fried by the critics.

Throughout his long and productive career, Woody insisted that he never ran short of ideas and had no trouble writing, but for the second year in a row he found himself unable to complete a screenplay for a new film. By Christmas of 1992, distracted by staggering legal woes, he was still scrounging around for an idea for a fall project for 1993. Hoping that a collaborator might help rekindle his creative spark, Woody invited the self-effacing Doug to work with him on a screenplay. The neophyte recalled considering the proposition for five seconds before he said yes. It would give him, he remembered thinking, a window that would be "open for about one second" in which people might say, "Hey, who's this guy working with Woody, and what else does he have and what else does he want to do?"

After New Year's, Doug began showing up at Woody's apartment for rhree or four hours each day to brainstorm ideas for a comedy set in the 1920s. "Whatever we do," Woody told him, "I have to write a part for Dianne Wiest." He had promised the actress a part in his next film. The atmosphere was full of turmoil, McGrath later recalled. Woody, still preoccupied, was frequently on the phone with lawyers. ("Okay, get a detective," McGrath overheard him say.) Mia was as difficult to ignore as a brushfire raging out of control, and practically everything she did upset him. Hearing that Dylan might have to be sedated for a vaginal examination (in an attempt to prove penetration) made him feel ill. And he was livid when he learned that Mia had permitted the British magazine
Hello!
to photograph the children. He called the photos a sickening kind of exploitation.

In the bone-chilling rain, a tide of soggy green hats and wailing bagpipers spilled along Fifth Avenue as thousands of marchers, 160 brass-and-pipe marching bands, and countless beer drinkers clomped along toward Eighty-sixth Street. It was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, one of two annual events (the other was the Puerto Rican Day Parade) that Woody wished he could "sleep through and awaken when they're over." Twenty floors above the parade, Woody received a long-awaited call. After six months, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital was ready to issue its report, and the next morning Woody and Mia were summoned to appear in New Haven for the briefing.

The panel attempted to answer two main questions. Was Dylan sexually abused? Was she telling the truth? In the opinion of the experts, the answers to both questions was no. There was no available physical evidence of child abuse and therefore no chance that Woody had molested his daughter. Dylan's account appeared to be the fantasies of an emotionally vulnerable child living in a disturbed family, a response to stress she was unable to handle. The fondling in the attic was "concocted or imagined." The doctor heading the investigation, John Levanthal, who had interviewed Dylan numerous times, called her accounts inconsistent, and he also noted that "those were not minor inconsistencies." Dylan’s descriptions had "a rehearsed quality," he said. The story heard on the videotapes, the hospital team believed, was imagined or the result of Mia’s coaching, very likely a combination of both. Indeed, as Levanthal later theorized, it was possible that the videotaping had the effect of encouraging fabrication because Dylan enjoyed performing.

According to the sex-abuse experts, "Ms. Farrow has had a very disturbed relationship with Dylan and Satchel." The report also suggested that it was "absolutely critical for the children's emotional health that she be in intensive psychotherapy to address these relationships."

As he listened to the findings, Woody looked immensely relieved. He kept glancing over at the woman he once loved and now could not remember loving, and he was struck by her furious expression. At that moment, he was suddenly aware of how intensely she hated him. All the same, she perplexed him. Any normal mother would be relieved that three experts, two of them women, found her daughter had not been molested. "But so deep is her venom that she actually sees this as a loss," he thought. In any case, "she knows I never molested Dylan."

During the two-hour briefing, Mia verged on collapse. She felt sure that Woody's fame had somehow influenced the panel. Afterward, she made no comment to reporters except to promise numbly that she would "always stand by my children." Late in the afternoon, at home, she nestled on a sofa in her living room and sobbed. Although the panel agreed that Woody too had "disturbed relationships"—mentioning his "boundary problems"—with the children, she was shocked and offended at the suggestion that it was she who needed psychiatric treatment.

For Woody it was Christmas in July because the panel approved of visits with Dylan, even overnight visits at his apartment, and saw no problem with his continuing to see Soon-Yi as well. Outside the hospital, the usually dour Woody wore a triumphant grin on his face. "I think Dylan will be thrilled to see me," he declared to a huddle of reporters.

While the Yale—New Haven Hospital experts concluded that Woody was innocent, the office of the Connecticut State's Attorney was far from convinced. Unbeknownst to Woody, the skeptical Frank Maco was giving scarcely any weight at all to the hospital findings, which constituted only a portion of his investigation. He continued to believe that Woody's behavior with his daughter on August 4 was "grossly inappropriate." In his opinion, there was enough evidence for him to order the actor's arrest.

Back in New York that evening, certain that he had been fully exonerated, Woody kept busy on the phone as he received calls of congratulations from