The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (52 page)

The vast amount of her time was spent in raising her children. By now, she had adopted three more children, who were physically disabled in one way or another and demanding far greater amounts of attention than other children. As a companion for Isaiah, she took in another African-American baby, whose mother was addicted to crack, and named her Kaeli-Shea, and a few months later she adopted a six-year-old paraplegic from India, who had been abandoned in a Calcutta train station. She gave him the name Thaddeus and bought him a small red wheelchair. Finally, in 1995, she adopted another blind Vietnamese orphan, a three-year-old whom she named Frankie-Minh for Frank Sinatra. Frankie-Minh, Mia decided, would be her last child. She was fifty, the mother of fourteen children, and soon to become a grandmother.

Her older children no longer lived at home. Although Mia always wore a smiling, serene Hallmark face for the media, the truth was different, and the emotional bloodbath of the custody hearing, along with her two-year depression, had scarred the family. For some of her kids, survival meant flight. The first to leave home was Fletcher, who spent two years at a prep school in Hamburg, Germany. Returning to the United States at the age of rwenry-rwo, he enrolled as a freshmen at Connecticut College, where roommates in his triple dormitory room remembered him as a friendly young man who dreamed of becoming a him director and one summer wangled an internship with Tom Hanks. After graduating from Yale University, Matthew Previn obtained his law degree at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., graduated cum laude, and began working as a law clerk for a federal court judge. His twin brother, Sascha. graduated from Fordham University, then left for Colorado with his girlfriend, Carrie Englander, shortly after the custody hearing. Returning to New York in 1995, Sascha married Carrie and worked as an accountant with a media buying company.

In the case of Mia's girls, Soon-Yi was the only one to complete college.

After Drew, she enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University's Teachers College, studying lor a degree in childhood education. Lark, after two years at New York University, abandoned her plans to become a pediatric nurse and married Christopher McKinzie, a Brooklyn construction worker and furniture mover. Her sister Daisy spent one semester at Wheaton College in Massachusetts before dropping out of school and then she moved to Brooklyn and married the brother of Lark's husband. Both girls soon became pregnant. In contrast to their ambitious sister Soon-Yi, who was reportedly well maintained with a million-dollar trust fund from Woody, Lark and Daisy had obviously taken altogether different directions. In 1997, after giving birth to a second daughter. Lark developed serious medical problems.

In the years following the acrimonious end of her relationship with Woody, Mia insisted she had no plans to remarry, but soon she was seen with a number of well-known actors, writers, and directors. Aware that her judgment about men had been "very limited, very flawed indeed," she admitted that it was a fault that "has had catastrophic consequences. I think I'm much shrewder now. I hope I am."

In 1995 she began dating Philip Roth, one of America's premier novelists whose prolific output—some twenty works of fiction and nnnfiction— rivaled Woody's output in film. Roth was Mia's neighbor in Connecticut and had recently gone through a divorce. His wife of eighteen years was the celebrated English actress Claire Bloom. In his 1990 novel,
Deception,
one of the characters was a whining, middle-aged English actress named Claire, until the real Claire Bloom insisted he create another name for the character, but it was hardly the first instance of his cannibalizing the lives of people he knew for his fiction. In 1987, after a painful knee operation. Roth had encountered problems with the hypnotic drugs Halcion and Xanax and had experienced severe depression. Six years later, he suffered a complete breakdown and entered Silver Hill, a psychiatric hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. When he was released from the hospital. Roth served his wife with divorce papers in which he accused her of inhumane treatment. What Claire Bloom shared in common with Mia Farrow, besides a talent for acting, was a maddening passivity in her relationships with men.

Philip Roth was exactly the type of man whom Mia usually found appealing: Like Andre Previn, he was a cerebral Jew, a man some years her senior who exuded superior intelligence, charm, and wit. Like Woody, Roth's life centered around his work. Both Woody and Previn were small men, physically the opposite of Roth, who was six feet one with piercing black eyes and sultry dark looks. But Mia Farrow and Philip Roth had something in common: They both despised Woody Allen.

Born within two years of each other, Woody Allen and Philip Roth came from the same postwar generation of middle-class Jewish males with high IQs and perpetually tormented libidos, who were eager to escape their parents' orbits and revel in the new sexual revolution that was taking place in the 1960s. As it happened, their writing embraced some of the same subject material. One of Roths targets in his novel
Portnoy's Complaint was
the leading characters overpossessive mother, Sophie. Like Roths uninhibited heroes, Woody's Alvy Singer and his other fictional characters doted on blond gentiles—his Harold Cohen in "Retribution" achieving an ultimate fantasy by indulging his sexual appetites with a mother and daughter. Apart from their creative similarities, neither Roth nor Woody were personally able to sustain mature relationships with women. Finally, their names would become synonymous with the term "self-hating Jew," not only because they are uncomfortable with their Jewishness but also because they find humor in Jewish paranoia and neuroses.

For all these ironic parallels, however, there was no professional or personal sympathy between them. In the seventies, Woody said, deadpan, that he couldn't relate to Roth's characters because "I have never had that obsession with Gentile women." Roth "always detested Woody," reported a friend of Claire Bloom's, "because of the sentimentality and the vulgarity. The thing about Philip is that he has exquisite taste because he knows when he is being vulgar." Over the years, the novelist's increasing animosity toward Woody was further fueled by his suspicion that the filmmaker had pickpocketed some of his ideas. In 1972, for instance, the year Roth published his novel
The Breast,
Woody made
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,
which contained a memorable scene showing a giant breast that escapes from a sex researcher's laboratory and terrorizes the countryside until it is lured into an X-cup bra. When Woody's affair with Soon-Yi became public, Roth was said to be disgusted by the revelation. His scorn amused friends of Claire Bloom's because evidently Roth, like Woody, had also developed a taste for teenage girls. Although Bloom had no idea that he behaved as he had at the time, she later discovered that Roth had propositioned her daughters best friend, a girl who had been practically a daughter to her.

When Woody learned about Mia and Roths relationship, he must have seen it as an opportunity to exact a double revenge. In 1988 he chose to cast Claire Bloom as the deceived wife in
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
and then, aware that she was separated from Roth and in need of money, he hired her for a second time as the hero's mother-in-law in
Mighty Aphrodite.
Then he wrote a screenplay about a renowned novelist and academic who freely plunders for his fiction the lives of people close to him, before suffering writer's block and teetering on the edge of a crack-up. "A nasty, shallow, superficial, sexually obsessed" man was how Woody happily described his protagonist, Harry Block. Undoubtedly, he must have hoped that moviegoers would never think to connect Harry Block with Philip Roth. Everyone would assume that in the film Woody was slyly mocking himself, donning a reverse hair shirt and justifying his mistreatment of Mia. In a final embellishment to his private joke, he cast Richard Benjamin as one of the performers playing Harry Block. The hero in the film versions of both
Portnoys Complaint
and
Goodbye, Columbus,
Benjamin had seldom worked in recent years.

On a muggy summer night in 1996, Woody brought his touring band to the 92nd Street Y in New York. The concert was sold out and for the first time in memory the Y attracted scalpers. The crowds streaming into the hall that July evening were predominantly middle-aged suburbanites, the hard-core fans who had not missed one of his movies since
What's New, Pussycat?
and had even liked
Stardust Memories.
Nostalgic, they were hungry for the old Woody magic. They were disappointed, however, by the sight of the real man who had brought them so many funny, unforgettable moments. Collapsed on a chair with his pale white arms dangling from the short sleeves of a blue shirt, his eyes staring limply into his lap, he ignored the audience, who enthusiastically applauded him. As they filed out of the auditorium, some of them expressed concern about his health.

"Doesn't he look like a cadaver?" a fiftyish man said to his wife.

"No, he doesn't look like a cadaver," she replied. "He looks like he ought to be on life support."

At sixty, Woody's skin had the waxy, white pallor of a solitary-confinement inmate. Although he would not admit it to anyone, his daily strolls on the treadmill hardly counted as exercise, since he seldom got beyond 2.6 miles per hour, which was barely enough to work up a sweat.

Always worried about his health, Woody had a separate doctor for practically every part of his anatomy. Arriving for a consultation with a new specialist that year, he looked fearful and morose, so uncomfortable among the other patients in the reception area that the nurse quickly ushered him into an examining room. In an attempt to cheer him, she chuckled, "We even use clean needles here," a joke that he failed to appreciate. His movie characters reputation as an intractable hypochondriac was based on reality. For many years, he had kept a thermometer at Mia's apartment and also carried with him, in his pants pocket, a silver pillbox that contained Compazine, Librium, Excedrin, Zantac, and a couple of Donnazyme tablets. Not that he had often needed to use the pills—he disliked even taking an aspirin—but knowing he was prepared for any mental or physical emergency made him feel safer.

Caught on Tape:

"I don't spend two seconds thinking about him if I can help it, and most of the time I can."

—Mia Farrow,
20120,
1997

"Very quickly I learned that this man had no respect for everything I hold sacred—not for my family, not for my soul, not for my God or my goals."

In June of 1996, Mia was a featured speaker at the annual American Booksellers Association convention in Chicago, along with John Grisham and other blockbuster authors. Her speech was a message to booksellers that Doubleday intended to hustle the tide with a major promotional campaign. In spite of her schoolgirl uniform that consisted of a flouncy skirt, Peter Pan blouse, and black tights—the same kind of costume she had worn during the court hearing—there was no doubt that Mia was going straight for the jugular. She told the booksellers that she had been forced to write about herself after suffering "shouting distortions and loud lies and real-life pain, terrible pain."

Despite the hyperbole, it is doubtful she was the sole author of her memoir; in fact, it most likely benefited from the extensive editorial assistance of several people, including writer and family friend Rock Brynner, the son of Yul Brynner; Nan Talese, known to be an exceptionally hands-on editor; and Philip Roth, whose brilliant literary talent had no doubt helped to shape the final product.

Moving Pictures:

Sandy Bates: You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only—only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

—Stardust Memories,
1980

Ordinarily, Woody's publicity machine treated the media as an interference with the filmmaker's artistic schedule. As a result, some journalists referred to the imperious Leslee Dart as "that woman" if they were feeling kind and other unprintable names if they weren't so inclined. Once a photographer for a major newspaper called Dart with a request to take Woody's picture to accompany an interview scheduled to appear in the publication. He could have five minutes, Dart told the photographer, adding that someone would tell him where to set up his equipment. When he suggested a more creative camera angle, she became peevish. "We don't care about creative," she said.

In recent years, PMK had rewritten the rules of celebrity journalism to the dismay of magazine and newspaper editors, who were being forced to bow to public relations firms' demands or do without the star profiles that sold their publications. More and more, it was common practice for publicists to make their clients available for interviews in exchange for control over the finished profile. Not only did they expect lo select the writer and photographer, they also dictated what questions could be asked or what sources could be interviewed, and in addition insisted on quotation and layout approval and the right to read the story in advance of publication. By negotiating the terms of an interview, a celebrity could completely control his public image. As Mia's book was expected to stir up the dust, PMK began a vigorous campaign to trivialize her revelations.

Damage control got under way in the fall of 1996 when Woody and PMK negotiated a profile by
The New Yorker
that was to be written by John Lahr. the magazine's senior drama critic. During a weeklong series of interviews, he trailed after the director from his "book-lined and flower-filled Fifth Avenue penthouse" to his handsome Park Avenue screening room "wallpapered in olive-green brushed velvet" to "the high-ceilingcd elegance" of Michael's Pub, which was now relocated in the Parker Meridien hotel.

Woody speaking of himself, however, sounded like a homespun journey into the land of "let's pretend." Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself once again, he even tried to do the impossible and remake his physical appearance. All his adult life he had stood five feet five and a half, five feet six if he stood up very straight, but in his new incarnation, as other men his age were losing height, he had gained inches and now claimed to be five feet seven. Working hard to present himself as white-bread, coupled with eagerness to spin an
hi a Wonderful Life
talc, he sounded as if he were a happy-go-lucky New York George Bailey, who was fortunate to be surrounded by a circle of loyal employees, business colleagues, and ex-mistresses. Woody's preapproved sources—his agent Sam Cohn, Diane Keaton, and Dianne Wiest—delivered testimonials to his talent and generous friendship. Evidently Lahr was not permitted to ask Woody embarrassing questions, because his stormy relationship with Mia and his children were glossed over. Displaying no emotional attachment to her children, he discounted any parental role in Mia's household, even dismissing their own twelve-year relationship as one of no particular importance. "It was comfortable and very distant, I mean, very distant, uh, you know, in every way." Talking about his romance with Soon-Yi, a union that was repugnant to many people, he described it as "genuine." The profile was titled