Does emotional detachment equal guilt? Apropos Woody Allen

Now that HBO has finally closed out its in-depth airing of the grievances of the Farrow clan against Mia’s ex/Soon-Yi’s husband/Dylan’s alleged rapist, it might do some good to let said villain speak at length. Since the only discussion Woody Allen has engaged in about the charges made against him (besides a “60 Minutes” segment) was included in Robert Weide’s Woody Allen: a Documentary (2011), we must look instead to Woody’s 2020 autobiography Apropos of Nothing, in which he devotes about a fourth of the 392-page book (easily) to the issues surrounding the accusations made by his ex and their adopted daughter.

Portions of the audio book version of Apropos are present in the HBO doc, apparently used without clearing the rights. Although the book is most definitely comprised of Allen’s own opinions (no ghostwriting here), it also does reflect oddly on him, since it includes jokes and statements that underscore his blasé indifference to what the public thinks of him.

I have already written about the Farrow-Allen case at some length here, outlining both of their positions. I eventually reached the verdict that, after one considers all the evidence (and the very deeply disturbed state of their daughter Dylan/Eliza/Malone), that whoever you are (however complicated you are), that you would never want to date either Woody or Mia. As for the accusations of rape, they seem to be (after reading scores of articles, documents, and interviews) a very pernicious “gotcha” by Ms. Farrow that irreparably injured her own daughter’s mind.

For those who are interested in Mia’s own words, I refer you to the link I provided in a previous blog entry to a 2006 interview with Farrow where she says she could forgive Allen “in an instant” and wanted to  “move on” from the Soon-Yi affair, with no mention at all of Dylan or the rape — can one move on when one’s daughter has been raped by an ex?

Back to Woody in print: Apropos is a compulsively readable book, although it has no chapters (just line spaces to indicate the end of a segment) and no index, never mind a photo insert section. Woody’s published work to date has consisted entirely of Perelman-esque humorous short pieces, so one isn’t surprised he’s a breezy memoir-writer, although one could’ve wished he gave a tiny bit more weight to his standup career, which is recounted here, but mostly as a step between his gag writing and filmmaking, and mostly as something he was repeatedly forced into by his manager Charles Joffe.

He does offer much info about his films, but more about that below. What he first wants to do is to disabuse the reader of the notion that he’s anything they’ve thought he was. He goes on for several pages (and returns to the topic several times) to convince us that he’s not an intellectual, his horn-rim specs to the contrary. He wants us to know that he hasn’t read many of the great works of fiction, hasn’t seen many classic films, and it goes without saying that he would probably rather die than listen to popular music from the rock ’n’ roll era onward.

In the first of many contradictions — if we learn anything from Apropos, it is that he thrives on being a contrarian and isn’t afraid of making emotionally distant remarks about people and events — he demonstrates a bizarrely arcane grasp of English vocabulary, which he shows off at several points. Including this lovely puzzler: describing the joys of Fall when he was young, he mentions that “although the nightmare of books and classes loomed, at least there would be some sigmoid anatomy to hasten the blood.” [Allen, Apropos of Nothing, 2020, New York: Arcade Publishing, p. 285]

It turns out that, despite the many famous authors he hasn’t read, he did have a period of auto-didactic reading of classics, so he could chat with the brainier girls at school. At this point he must’ve begun gathering arcane terms to sling around for comic effect.

So once he’s gotten past the laundry list of “things I don’t like/don’t care about,” he is firmly in autobiographical mode – but he still does want to challenge the reader’s assumptions about him, at times exhibiting a side of himself that is both self-confident (to the point of being brazenly ballsy) and self-loathing. That is the most remarkable thing about the book — that it is both his single most detailed denial of guilt and his ultimate statement about what went on before, during, and after the accusation that he raped Dylan, and it is also a personal memoir that includes his reflections on his life, none of which are “polished” in any regard. Some are downright brutal.

There’s an odd balance throughout the book of him both acknowledging his luck and his privileged position in society, and him still whining about things that bother him. This will be no surprise to his fans (open admission: I’ve been a fan I was a child when I discovered the “earlier, funny films” while he was still crankin’ them out), but it might seem an odd tack to take in a book in which one wants to proclaim one’s innocence of a heinous crime.

This side of Woody has already appeared in two of his grimmer films, Stardust Memories (1980) and Deconstructing Harry (1997). As noted above, his work in print has always been light-hearted. Thus, encountering the “real” Woody writing a book is already a shock, but then finding out that he’s *such* a contrarian in real life (and willing to put it right out there, even when mounting a defense against the accusations) is the real surprise of Apropos.

So, while he states that his mother was a no-nonsense disciplinarian, he also depicts her as very supportive. (His dad, whom he reveals to be a bit of a wannabe-crook-who-never-was, was also fully supportive of his efforts.) And so, we know he was spoiled in many ways — this is underscored by the fact that he acknowledges openly that he’s achieved all that one could want in his chosen field (except making “the perfect movie,” but more of that later), but he then will whine about a beach house he bought, did massive construction on, and then stayed one night in. Or the fact that his glamorous Fifth Avenue “penthouse” (he never refers to it as anything but that) had constant leaks in the ceiling.

Woody walks with
Tamara Dobson in NYC.

Or that he has had incredibly lovely experiences all over Europe, but then will whine about having to leave NYC and miss a Knicks game. I mean, the longtime Woody fan *knows* this is his shtick, but you figure he might just go with the flow and say, “I’ve been very lucky” and leave it at that. He’ll also slide back into his standup mode and be self-loathing about his appearance (or, over and over, how badly he plays clarinet), then let us know how many gorgeous women he’s dated — when Mia showed up in his life, he was busy dating the wonderful Jessica Harper and he notes he didn’t just live with Diane Keaton, he also at different times regularly dated her two sisters.

Thus he’s an artist who’s perpetually down on himself but also always very certain that all he does is totally right. He notes he got this attitude about his comedy from Danny Simon (Neil’s elder brother, who wrote for Sid Caesar and "Bilko"), who told him the most important thing for a comedy writer is to believe what they wrote is funny and sell it as such (and never alter it). The first attitude is one that endears the public – and most certainly “sold” Woody back in the Sixties and Seventies — but the second attitude can be off-putting. (And also explains his moviemaking — but, again, below!)

He both believes life to ultimately meaningless (that is a common refrain in the book), yet there are things to love and live for. One of these things, he emphasizes quite often in Apropos, is that he finally met Soon-Yi, whom he depicts as his ultimate soulmate. (Although the repeated references to Louise Lasser as a sexpot define her as his best bedmate; by comparison, the woman he refers to repeatedly as “Keaton” is just a very close friend.)

The constant paeans to Soon-Yi seem to be legitimate — after the truly bizarre way their relationship began (and yes, awkward and bizarre, and to be avoided in most every case, unless you’re a successful artist working on his own dime in this own time), he hails her every few pages as the single most important person in his adult life. He loves her so much he mocks her in print — this does seem to be the spoiled-kid, colder side of Woody — noting that her raising of their two daughters is akin to the discipline of certain Third Reich officials, and that she would no doubt prosper if she ever found herself in a Nazi-run society.

Woody likes to speak honestly (to a fault) about his favorite people — he tells us an incredible amount about the severe psychological problems suffered by his object of sexual obsession, Louise Lasser. To the point where you want to go, “Woody, she’s an 81-year-old in very bad shape medically – you can let her give away her own secrets in her own book!”

Woody Allen and Louise Lasser.

Soon-Yi, of course, is the linchpin of L’affaire Farrow for Woody. Here his troubles began (to paraphrase Spiegelman), since public opinion changed when he began his relationship with her and it clearly became the pivot for the accusations later made against him. One of the colder-blooded moments of Farrow’s was her phone call to Allen’s sister Letty Aronson, to whom she said, “He took my daughter, now I’ll take his.” [p. 252]

What Woody does in the book is what more than likely spawned the HBO documentary. He offers an “everything and the kitchen sink too” approach to the case, outlining all of the negative aspects of Mia’s child-rearing life, the darker secrets about her family history, the many odd things he witnessed and that were witnessed by two nannies, and the disciplinary “rituals” that Soon-Yi and her brother Moses have told Woody about (and which Moses wrote about on his blog).

Before this point, Woody was holding back, while Mia was the more vocal about the atrocities he allegedly committed. Clearly, Allen saw Apropos as the chance to clear the decks, so he hauls out all the dirty laundry. Some of it is stuff we’ve heard before — Mia beating her children, rehearsing them to apologize to the whole family when they did something wrong, treating her Asian children as lesser than the white ones.

But some of the material he includes is exclusive to his legal encounters with her — for instance, the fact that her initial charge against him was that he had molested *both* Satchel/Ronan and Dylan/Eliza/Malone (he also notes how she changed the kids’ names more than once, often on a whim, when there well past pre-school age). And the odd moment where she said in front of three Yale investigators that, after Dylan was molested, that she ran into the arms of her sister Lark. Woody thought he had trumped her by saying that Lark wasn’t at the Connecticut summer house where this occurred but was back in NYC. Mia’s response? “I know that Lark was in New York but Dylan embraced her spiritually.” [p. 275]

There are moments in Apropos where Woody asks us what we think of what went on — surely, the reader is either in his camp already or is leaning toward him. (Perhaps a few people on “Team Mia” would sift through the book to find out his side of the situation, but probably not very many.) He outlines his relationship with Farrow, stating as he has in the past that it was for all intents and purposes over by the time she was pregnant with Satchel/Ronan.

He does acknowledge that there were countless “red flags” he saw in Mia’s behavior — her being capricious, petty, and making sudden statements that stunned him. But she was a beautiful actress who found him interesting, so he says he ignored any and all signals that she was someone to be wary of. As I noted in the earlier pieces I wrote on their thoroughly bizarre romance, Woody clearly seemed to have continued the relationship with Mia because it was so oddly laissez-faire: How often do you become involved with someone who lives across a park from you, yet never really move in with them? (A: When they’re addicted to accumulating children and anywhere they live will be an emotional powder keg.)

Thus, he admits he should’ve known better but was besotted with Mia, until such time as their relationship seemingly became a habit and little more. Then they shared two children — Dylan, who was adopted to be the child of both of them (with Moses, one of the earlier adoptees whom Woody himself wanted to adopt) and Satchel/Ronan. At that point Woody notes he felt pangs of fatherhood — but of course, given the crazy living situation, he still never wanted to live with Mia and the brood. (As Woody is prone to say in Apropos, “I’ll ask you — what would you think if this happened to you?”)

He recounts the burgeoning romance between himself and Soon-Yi as a sort of experiment that took hold and blossomed into the romance of his lifetime. One could easily speculate and say that he felt he needed a woman who could be a girlfriend, a daughter, and a mother figure to him — he does talk about how lovely it is to spend time with her (gf), to spoil her and give her things she never got as a child (daughter), and how she keeps his life running smoothly, anticipating his problems and getting rid of them (mother).

Once Mia had unleashed her anger and Soon-Yi was basically disowned, her lot was cast — she was either with Woody or conducting her life entirely on her own from that point. Woody had her live with him and their relationship became what it remains today — a successful marriage that began in a very odd way and consists of (from Woody’s description of her in Apropos) a very capable, business-like woman and her much-older husband, an internationally known and respected comedian/filmmaker/actor/writer, whose direction in filmmaking has found him making somewhat whimsical character studies with techniques borrowed from European masters, but whose personal sense of humor ranges from Perelman verbal sophistication to far grimmer dark humor that makes Brother Theodore seem like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

That is one of the hands-down strangest aspects of this memoir. Woody offers a very eloquent defense of himself, running dozens of pages at a time. He skillfully rebuts Mia’s accusations and statements made by Dylan (and her very protective and very livid-at-his-original-father younger brother, Ronan). He wanted to clear the air and put all the evidence exonerating him in one place, and did so very well (despite, yes, the lack of chapters and any tight organization of the book besides a general chronological flow, which is often scuttled when necessary).

At the same time, he keeps intact the darker side of his humor. Again, I’ve been watching, reading, and generally following Woody since my kidhood when he was in his “earlier, funny films” mode, and even I was a bit surprised that he chooses in Apropos to bemoan the fact that, concerning his supervised visits with Satchel, the poor kid was “packed off to ride an hour and a half to New York from Connecticut to be with the predatory old man.” [p. 278] He notes the supervisor was present “to be sure I don’t rape the poor kid.” [p. 281]

And perhaps the most stunning joke in the book, when he mockingly refers to the public perception of Soon-Yi (which he spends several paragraphs disproving) by mentioning that people ask them what they talk about. “Everything. For instance, I may ask, as someone underage who’s been raped and is retarded, what are your views on the economy?” [p. 321]

If one is a fan of Woody’s humor, they “get” that the preceding lines are intended only as jokes. (He made a quick, pitch-black, joke in public many years ago about his first wife that resulted in a lawsuit from her.) Although, again, it’s kinda weird to include them in a book intended to mount an articulate defense against what one maintains are made-up charges. But this ties in with a general laissez-faire attitude that Woody has about how he is perceived by the public. Toward the end of the book, he openly admits he doesn’t care what his legacy ends up being, taking a truly downbeat line and (he’s still a gag writer, after all) adding a humorous coda: “Not believing in a hereafter, I really can’t see any practical difference if people remember me as a film director or a pedophile or at all. All that I ask is my ashes be scattered close to a pharmacy.” [p. 382]

This sense of the push and pull between interest and disinterest seems manifested most clearly in his statements about filmmaking. Clearly, he loves to make movies (or at least write them and work with actors) and that compulsion has sustained him for the last half-century. He makes it clear, though, that he is a director who shoots “carelessly and irresponsibly” [p. 328] and leaves the technical side of his films to his collaborators.

Gordon Willis' memorable signature
image from Manhattan

This has always been apparent – Woody is a writerly filmmaker and never has had a visual style of his own. His top-notch cinematographers (Gordon Willis, Sven Nykvist, Carlo Di Palma, and many others) have crafted the visuals in his films, and their imprint is strongly felt. It’s as if various painters had essayed their versions of Woody’s chatty, neurotic, uncertain characters.

This lack of interest in “polishing” a film isn’t exactly a new discovery — the 2011 PBS documentary by Robert Weide about Woody let us know that he writes one draft, one draft only, of each script. (True to Danny Simon’s rule and his upbringing, he clearly believes whatever he commits to paper is the best it can be, and that’s it.) This, of course, makes his great films even more impressive — Hannah and Her Sisters is a first draft?  Incredible achievement, truly.

But one can always sense when something is wrong with the lesser or uneven films. Thus, when one hears him proudly tout in that documentary that he never does rewrites, and in Apropos that he considers himself “careless” and never takes time to rehearse, block, or go through other basic steps before shooting, one realizes why a number of his films since the mid-Eighties are mildly charming but forgettable. (A number of them from different periods run together in one’s memory as one Big Woody Allen Movie that finds famous faces in very similar situations.)

The one piece of philosophy he offers about filmmaking in the book is “hire good actors, and get out of the way.” He does take the time in the book to acknowledge nearly every one of his features with at least a sentence or two. As is usually true of artists, he has incredibly skewed taste and looks back fondly on truly minor efforts but will take some space to put down the ones that are major achievements. (Every time one of the features has received great reviews or awards, true to form, he begins to think that something was drastically wrong with it.)

Thus, for cinephiles who have followed Allen’s films for a few decades, the most eye-opening passages of Apropos are not the large swaths of the book related to the Soon-Yi and Dylan incidents, but instead to the fact that Allen’s filmmaking philosophy has been to take care (once) in writing a script, hire some really fine actors, and then just instigate a film shoot with them, letting the crew handle all the technical details while he works almost exclusively with the actors.

“...I find technical details [about filmmaking] a bore and don’t know any more about lighting and photography now than when I started, as I was never curious enough to learn…. My filming habits are lazy, undisciplined, the technique of a failed, ejected film major.” [pp. 389-390] “When I direct, I know what I want, or more important, I know what I don’t want.” [p. 390]

He does note that he works personally with his editor on each film, but also adds that his loathing of filming “coverage” (he states resolutely that he wants film shoots to end at a normal hour, usually 5:00 or 6:00 p.m., so he can go home) has made it difficult to assemble certain scenes and can cause great difficulty when he reaches the editing phase.

He also has one big exception to his rule about changing his scripts — he asks the cast that, if they feel certain lines sound phony, to restate them in their own words. Thus, there is some part of him that knows a script can and does require polishing, but he is not going to be the one who does it. Of course, Robert Altman (among a scant few others) used to encourage ad-libs during shooting (while Cassavetes wanted the actors to come up with new dialogue during a lengthy rehearsal period). Altman, though, also had a very identifiable visual style he developed over his five decades of working in movies and TV.

The oddly self-loathing passages in the book do indeed back up this weird pattern of contrarian behavior — be compulsive about something (keep putting together film projects year after year, continue to perform in a band playing clarinet) but don’t go too crazy about it. He notes that Bergman (naturally) is his favorite filmmaker, but when the Master of Melancholy asked Woody if would like to visit him on Faro Island, Allen turned it down because, while he might worship Bergman’s films, “I’m not that dedicated.” [p. 303]

So when he begins to wonder what went wrong with a particular film — his usual reason being “there must have been something wrong with the writing” — one wants to simply respond to the book (as he does encourage us to actually think about and engage with this tome), “You know what it was? You didn’t actually sit down and do a second draft of the script! That’s why it was so lopsided or inconsistent, or just so damned ill-conceived.”

In any case, despite the dispiriting information that he most definitely spends more time practicing his clarinet playing (which he says he does pretty much daily) than he has ever done refining his directorial technique, Apropos does lay out his personal defense rather eloquently, although he does perhaps undercut his case a bit by not holding back on his utterly blasé (some would say unemotional, or more simply, “cold”) attitude toward what people end up thinking about him.

As noted above, some of the jokes in the book are so dark as to appear gruesome. But the man began as a joke writer and always has had a very honed sense of how to craft a comedy line. Perhaps that’s why one of the better bits in the book is this short summation of his awareness that he has become a very unloved character among certain segments of the populace.

He lists all his achievements in one paragraph, elaborating them one by one. Then: “If I died right now I couldn’t complain – and neither would a lot of other people.” [p. 339]

And, 52 pages later, the line that should perhaps be put on his gravestone: “… being a misanthropist has its saving grace — people can never disappoint you.” [p. 381]

King Neurotic vs. the Ex From Hell (epilogue -- hopefully!)

After I wrote the two-part piece below, there was an explosion of media activity, not just from those who wanted to impart their personal opinion on the sexual abuse charge, but from parties who were friends with Woody and Mia, and finally Dylan and Woody themselves.

In the interests of posterity, I will list the most salient links below, as I already went through my opinions on the case in the two parts of this blog entry. Although my research was duplicated (or borrowed?) for the first link below, I'm very proud that mine has seemingly been the only piece to explore both Woody and Mia's on-screen personas and how they related to public perception of the case.

Firstly, on Jan. 27, 2014, the Curb Your Enthusiasm and documentary director (he did the two-part American Masters profile on Woody) Robert Weide decided to step forward to defend his friend and colleague.

Weide does use several of the same URLs I did to make his point, but he also supplies information he gleaned in the making of his documentary about Allen. He also made two interesting decisions that I had veered away from in writing the piece below. He chose to use Dylan's new name (Malone), which is a fact that's instantly retrievable from Google, but which Maureen Orth indicated as a kind of “family secret” (a not very well hidden one).

He also included a fact I left out of my piece, since I thought it swerved the reader's attention well away from the Woody/Mia relationship – namely, the fact that Mia's brother was a convicted sex offender.

The victim herself, Dylan, then decided to come forward and write an open letter to the public about her sex abuse. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof printed her letter, along with a prologue noting that he is indeed a friend of the Farrow family. This piece was interesting in that it was the only lengthy adult reflection on the case by Dylan (should we just call her Malone now?) that wasn't penned by Maureen Orth and includes a picture of her along with the article. (The picture at right is from her Twitter account, easily found on Google.)

In the wake of these two statements from people “inside” the case, the press bloggers came out with their knives for the other side. I will only link to two of these, because they seemed to be most eloquent about their beliefs. Firstly, Michael Wolff on The Guardian site wrote a piece about the case that was pro-Allen, “Media Spin for the Farrow Family?” 

And then Jessica Winter wrote a two-part piece on the case, taking Dylan and Mia's side, trying to focus attention on what she saw as the dubiousness of Weide's statements about the early Nineties custody case. Winter actually provides a more reasoned argument than anything penned by Maureen Orth in VF.

Then another “insider” stepped into the public spotlight on February 5th to talk about the case from his own personal knowledge of the family. Moses, the third and oldest of Woody and Mia's children (he was adopted, but was indeed adopted by both of them as a couple), decided to talk to People magazine; he sided with his father and accused his mother of completely manipulating and fabricating the sex abuse charge. 

Dylan then decided to do an interview with People, which appeared on Feb. 6, to rebut Moses' claims. The two most interesting things here were, again, a picture of the grown-up Dylan/Malone (Picture credit: “Courtesy Mia Farrow”) and that she uses the phrase “my cross to bear.”

It's been noted that Mia returned to Catholicism after Woody took up with Soon-Yi. As an ex-(ex-ex-ex-)Catholic myself I will simply note that suffering is redemptive in the Catholic faith – it is in fact (in one of the faith's more horrifying teachings) a good thing. The more you suffer, the more secure is your place in Heaven and the more you are loved by the supposed deity.

Dylan clearly feels that she is a martyr, but then oddly adds that she needed to speak up about her abuse not because of herself but because of her family. “But I will not see my family dragged down like this. I can't stay silent when my family needs me.” Thus, she felt she needed to speak out again, because of the attack on her family by her estranged brother Moses (who works as a family counselor and stated that Mia used to hit her kids when she was angry at them).

Clearly Dylan is a very damaged young woman. I find it fascinating, though, that she places her family (which would clearly be Mia, since she was the focus of Moses' statements) above herself.

The ping-pong game kept going back and forth this week. On the same morning that Dylan's new interview appeared in People, Dick Cavett (a longtime friend of Woody's) spoke about the case in very measured terms on the Don Imus radio show. He exhibited a clear sympathy for Dylan/Malone, but also did defend his friend against the charges.

And finally, Woody decided to write a response to Dylan's “open letter” for publication in The New York Times on Feb. 9. In it he states his case plainly and defends himself against the charges.

In doing this he harkens back to a bunch of the issues I mentioned in my piece, in addition to adding two things I didn't have time or space to include: that he took a lie detector test and Farrow refused to; and that he is a claustrophobe, who couldn't have remained in the attic where he was accused of sexually abusing Dylan. He also talks about the fact that adoption agencies allowed him and Soon-Yi to adopt two children, conducting thorough investigations into his background in the process.

Most interestingly, he notes that the actress Stacey Nelkin has come forward to say that Mia wanted her to testify against him in the custody case saying she was underaged when Woody dated her, which Woody says is untrue. But wasn't that Nelkin's declaration from the beginning, in saying that she was the source for the Mariel Hemingway character in Manhattan?

He addresses the side-issues, including Mia's statement that she was “involved” with Sinatra while dating Woody, and that he is indeed the father of Satchel/Ronan. Woody's take on the matter is “Again I want to call attention to the integrity and honesty of a person who conducts herself like that.”

Allen states his sympathy for Dylan and declares that he hopes there will be a rapprochement in the future with his daughter. Most laudably, considering that this affair has now been debated ENDLESSLY in the “court of public opinion” that is the Internet, he concludes in a parenthetical note: “This piece will be my final word on this entire matter and no one will be responding on my behalf to any further comments on it by any party. Enough people have been hurt.” 

But I want to give the final word to Mia in this instance. As I researched this piece, I found an amazing interview with Farrow that has surprisingly not been quoted yet in the see-saw, ping-pong media coverage. In a June 2, 2006 interview for The Independent, Mia claimed she could FORGIVE Woody: Asked whether she has since forgiven Allen, she says: "In an instant. I can't carry any of that. That's too heavy for me. It really isn't up to me to forgive or not forgive, is it?" Remarkably, in such a small city as Manhattan, Farrow says that she hasn't once run into Allen - or his bride - since their rancorous split. "It's incredible, I know. But I've had the good fortune and that has never happened to me. No, thank God."

Asked about whether she'd like to reconcile with Soon-Yi, as she had stated in the years between '92 and '06, she says, "Well, I've got over it, you know. You can get over almost anything. You just can't go on mourning forever, and so I've moved on. It's been a long time now. And I really don't think of her as my daughter any more. I can't. She isn't. She's estranged - and strange."

Considering her recent outcries, that quote about forgiveness from 2006 ("In an instant") is rather startling.

Hopefully there won't be more about this matter in the press (although I know the Internet will continue to debate it for DECADES to come, as with the matter of the girl in the Polanski case, who has virtually pleaded with the press and public to move on, but whose wishes were countermanded by those who believe they know better than the victim). It would be best for everyone (critics and “avengers” of both sides) to let this be worked out in private, by those actually involved in the case.

King Neurotic vs. the Ex From Hell: the never-ending saga of Woody and Mia (part 2 of two)

As I noted in the first part of this piece, there are a number of people who have a major antipathy for Woody Allen concerning the way he has lived his life. Some of these people still see his movies, others have sworn off his work for good. What I find interesting is that even the loudest of them rarely seem to take the side of Mia Farrow and add to their “what a degenerate pedophile!” tirades any mention of “that poor woman whose heart he broke.”

I believe this is because there are two Mia Farrows in the public view (besides the many characters she played over the years, the best of which were in Rosemary's Baby and films directed by Allen). The first Mia is an incredible humanitarian, a woman who has traveled throughout Africa and has focused her attention on starving children.

Her work in this regard is invaluable and admirable. She is a liberal of the old school, who literally has put her money and time where her mouth is, and has supported the victims of hunger in Darfur, Chad, Haiti, and many other countries.

In this regard in her personal life, she became “Momma Mia,” a woman who has adopted children from difficult situations, some with disabling conditions, other from impoverished circumstances. She is to be lauded for all these accomplishments, as she is an actress who has done something truly important with her life.

Here is a sympathetic and positive documentary about her accomplishments from the Intimate Portrait series:

And then there's the other Mia. A woman who has let her angry feelings about a relationship that went horribly wrong become her distinguishing characteristic. She trumpets the injustices doled out to her and her children by her ex, alleging absolutely heinous things, while undercutting her own position as an example of moral rectitude with new “revelations.”

Farrow first came to public attention as one of the stars of the nighttime soap Peyton Place in 1964. Her next major show business “coup” (in the eyes of the media) was becoming the third wife of Frank Sinatra. He was 50, she was 21, and they were the very definition of a May-December romance (Ava Gardner's purported crack about the marriage was “I always knew that Frank would marry a boy”).

Farrow achieved major fame starring in Rosemary's Baby (and no, I'm not going to discuss Polanski in this piece, because that is a very different case with a very different artist). Two years after the film, she began an affair with Andre Previn, who divorced his wife, singer-songwriter Dory Previn (aged 45), to be with her.

Dory's response was the lacerating tune “Beware of Young Girls.” Here is a performance of the song by the singer Kate Dimbleby, who does a monologue as Dory (seen right, with Andre Previn) about Mia. The lyrics of the song are rather amazing:

“She was my friend, my friend/My friend/I thought her motives were sincere/Oh yes, I did/Ah, but this lass/It came to pass/Had a dark and different plan/She admired my own sweet man/She admired my own sweet man/We were friends, oh yes, we were/And she just took him from my life/Oh yes, she did, so young and vain/She brought me pain/But I'm wise enough to say/She will leave him, one thoughtless day/She'll just leave him and go away.”

Here is the original version by Dory:

During the period of the custody trial, Allen decided to discuss a campaign of harassment Farrow had begun against him (probably the oddest note was the “valentine with skewers” shown in the 60 Minutes interview, above). Of course, the most damning aspect of the story was the charge that Woody had sexually abused his daughter Dylan. One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence was a videotape that Mia shot of her daughter talking about the abuse.

While being the single most damning evidence against Allen, the tape was in and of itself a problem – it had been shot by the little girl's mother, and as such was “muddied” evidence. A New York Times piece from May 4, 1993 noted that “The doctor who headed the Connecticut investigation into whether Woody Allen molested his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan, theorized that the child either invented the story under the stress of living in a volatile and unhealthy home or that it was planted in her mind by her mother, Mia Farrow, a sworn statement released yesterday says.

“Dr. John M. Leventhal, who interviewed Dylan nine times, said that one reason he doubted her story was that she changed important points from one interview to another, like whether Mr. Allen touched her vagina. Another reason, he said, was that the child's accounts had "a rehearsed quality." At one point, he said she told him, "I like to cheat on my stories."

“Dr. Leventhal said: "We had two hypotheses: one, that these were statements that were made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind. And the other hypothesis was that she was coached or influenced by her mother. We did not come to a firm conclusion. We think that it was probably a combination"....

Dr. Leventhal said it was "very striking" that each time Dylan spoke of the abuse, she coupled it with "one, her father's relationship with Soon-Yi, and two, the fact that it was her poor mother, her poor mother," who had lost a career in Mr. Allen's films.”

The interesting thing here again is the public perception of the performer. While Woody Allen has made his overriding neuroses and his “perversions” part of his act since he began as a standup in the Sixties, Farrow is generally in the public mind for this scene from the end of Rosemary's Baby. She is, in effect, the perennial victim – the people whom she thought were friends and loved ones ultimately betray her.

In November 1992 a very long Vanity Fair article appeared that summed up all of Mia's allegations against Woody. It's a fascinating piece, in that the writer, Maureen Orth, titled it “Mia's Story,” but every so often includes the opinions of Allen's colleagues and friends tangentially, effectively dismissing them. She identifies the skewers in the valenine as “toothpicks” and lays out Farrow's case against Allen in nearly excruciating detail.

Anytime there is a possible objection to something being said, Orth quotes it and passes over it, while supplying ample space to Farrow's friends to praise Mia and curse Woody– as in one interestingly damning parenthetical note (“You can’t say his own therapy failed,” quips Mia’s lawyer Eleanor Alter. “He might have become a serial killer without it.”).

If the items cited in Orth's long, long article are indeed true, their relationship was a nightmare and Woody is a monster; if it isn't true, the article was a stunningly horrifying piece of character assassination. I link to it here so that you can read it if you like.

I noticed that Farrow's most important interview after the custody trial is somehow curiously missing from the YouTube deep trove of Howard Stern clips. Yes, Mia appeared on the Stern show (the radio show and its E! Channel video airing of its contents) in May 1997 to discuss her life and memoir with Howard.

Stern, he of the fart/burp/big-tit/dick joke, took the high moral ground when the Woody/Mia split occurred and publicly condemned Allen. Thus he was a sympathetic ear for Mia's complaints about her ex and also was able to ask his usual questions about dick size and “things you hate about your ex” (hoping the ex will call in and fight with the in-studio guest – nothing more fun on the Stern show than having family members battle for the listeners' entertainment).

Perhaps “liberated” by Stern's juvenilia, Farrow turned back into her teeny bopper persona – read, the “girl who snagged Sinatra” – and began to discuss various things. Among them were:

– the fact that Allen has a small penis

– Sinatra had a bigger penis

– Sinatra offered to break Woody's legs (“Frank is so sweet,” one listener remembers her saying)

– of the four Beatles, she most wanted to have sex with John, but it never happened, sadly

When I saw this interview on E! (which I have somewhere preserved on VHS), I remember thinking that she'd completely devolved into the Sixties mod-chick who called Frank her “Charlie Brown” (because of his big round head – no joke here, look it up) and had later became the subject of that Dory Previn song. Her condemnation of Allen for stealing her older daughter and molesting her younger one was tied up in a package that also contained gleeful revelations about his genitals and a reflection on which Beatle was the most shaggable.

In the decade and a half after that, Mia became deeply involved in her humanitarian efforts and was indeed wiping away the memories of her relationship with Woody and any of the related public appearances and statements.

And then Allen's films became surprisingly popular at the box-office in the last few years. Midnight in Paris was his highest-grossing film ever, taking in $56 million in North America. To Rome With Love made $73 million dollars worldwide; Sony Pictures Classics said it was the seventh highest-grossing picture in the two-decade history of that distribution arm of Sony. Blue Jasmine has earned $94 million worldwide to date and is still playing in many parts of the country. 

Thus, the return to the national stage of Farrow – in a new Vanity Fair profile in the November 2013 issue, again by Maureen Orth. The writer decided to begin the piece with the charge of sexual abuse against Allen and to include his side of the story as a one-line parenthetical denial in what is otherwise a characteristically long VF profile.

The only “new” information about the sexual abuse charge comes in the middle of the article (pages 5 and 6 online), where Orth interviews Dylan, who claims that the interactions with Allen in her childhood have haunted her adult life, that she gets sick when she hears the jazz Allen liked or sees his picture on a t-shirt in the street. It's heartbreaking stuff, truly.

One wonders why Orth was disinclined to include any of the information that was reported in the New York Times, The L.A. Times, and People magazine that I have included in this piece. In Orth's account of events, there is no mention of the possibility that Farrow's video recording of her daughter was problematic, that the girl's story changed often from telling to telling, and that at least one psychologist believed Farrow might've prompted the recovered memories.

Instead, Orth begins her very long piece with the abuse charge and a bizarre story about Mia begin counseled by Sinatra's mob connections. Then, and only then, do we learn about her very important work with UNICEF. Priorities, priorities!

More than once, one does feel while reading this new Orth piece that the relationship between Mia and the temper-prone Woody (as he is depicted here) was an absolute nightmare and Allen was indeed a monster. Here there is no question of even considering the possibility (slight or major, however you choose to view it) that the claims were manipulated by an angry ex. I don't have the answers myself, but perhaps in the interests of journalism, it is necessary to air them and cite the articles that mentioned them two decades ago.

What was rather dazzling about the media coverage of Orth's new piece was that the gossip columns and supermarket rags went on at length NOT about the sexual abuse charges concerning Mia and Woody's daughter Dylan. Instead most mentions of it concerned the fact that Mia is now declaring that Ronan (formerly Satchel) may be the son of Frank Sinatra, since Mia now wants us all to know that she was still regularly seeing – and having sex with? – Old Blue Eyes in the late Eighties while involved with Allen.

It's a rather unique and admittedly odd situation: a person who wants her claims of her ex's moral depravity to be taken seriously, meanwhile augmenting those claims with a counter-argument that the ex isn't the father of the child he thought he was – because she was cheating on him.

The media seized on this questionable “revelation” and continually noted how much Ronan looks like Sinatra because he has blue eyes. Forgetting that Mia has blue eyes and Ronan's fairer-than-fair complexion does make him look a lot like his mother when she was young.

The one-two punch of that Vanity Fair piece and the recent Tweet from Ronan mentioning the story of his sister's sexual abuse at the moment when the Golden Globes was presenting his father with a Lifetime Achievement Award has resurrected the molestation charge against Allen and has led the producers of his new Broadway show (a musical version of Bullets Over Broadway) to speculate on whether the Farrow clan will attempt to protest the show in some fashion.

It's not clear what would “end” this storyline: it appears that Farrow wants it known by every viewer of Allen's film work that he sexually abused his young daughter. Allen proclaimed his innocence in a handful of interviews during the custody trial two decades ago and has remained silent about the matter since then.

There is almost no way for the matter to be settled, nigh short of the case being opened up again in court, which would be detrimental to Dylan's state of mind (as surely everything that's happened up to now has been – whether she was molested by her father or “programmed” by her mother). She has been the definite victim in this whole affair, and the question is whether Farrow's new quest for justice, conducted through Orth and VF, is ultimately helping or hurting her daughter.

In considering this long-stemmed narrative and how much the media has been gobbling it up and spitting it out yet again over the past week since the Golden Globes Tweet business, I came to one conclusion. I figured out the one thing that both exes, both Allen and Farrow, would agree on – namely, the fact that they never should've started dating in the first place.

The above fantasy-option would have denied movie lovers a few really terrific movies they collaborated on (and would've also spared us misfires like Shadows and Fog), so it could easily be amended to their relationship ending after Hannah and Her Sisters (or, for some, Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I think is a more uneven film than Hannah).

In any case, the early '90s were a nightmare era for the Allen-Farrow relationship, and what's odd is that we are still living with the aftermath of their blighted, odd love story a full two decades later.

Note: the epilogue to this piece can be found here.

King Neurotic vs. the Ex From Hell: the never-ending saga of Woody and Mia (part 1 of two)

If celebrities are indeed “imaginary friends for adults,” then Woody Allen and Mia Farrow are the divorced couple we all know who can't stand each other — the partner who cheated wishes that the other one would just shut up, and the one who was cheated on won't stop complaining about how they were wronged.

Granted, this couple are very famous, and the issue that has now become paramount above all else is a very, very serious charge of sexual abuse of a child (raised again publicly by Ronan Farrow in a wildly over-publicized Tweet last Sunday night), but as an “ex-couple” Woody and Mia serve a specific same purpose for we who can't avoid their never-ending story in the media: they make us extremely glad we never had a relationship with either of 'em.

I don't need to run through the twists and turns of their long-stemmed saga; if you need a brief summation that takes care not to leave out a few of the sleazier details, then check out this Gawker piece. In the meantime, I thought it would be interesting to see how the public perceives both individuals, and how they both have “behaved” in public. Their godawful break-up and its aftermath serve as sort of a litmus test for those who respond to it — people make judgments for or against either party based on their personal beliefs and relationship history.

The fans and foes for each party somewhat runs along gender lines, but I’ve talked to some men who find Woody’s private-life interactions distasteful and as a result signed off seeing his films. There are also women who wish Mia would just shut up about the relationship (my mother hasn’t liked her since the days when Mia stole Andre Previn away from Dory, but that’s another story — see below).

The story begins in earnest at the moment where Mia discovers the nude photos that Woody took of Soon-Yi. Sadly enough, this is the decisive moment in that young woman's life. She lost a mother and siblings and gained a husband at that very moment.

She was 19 when the incident took place, thus very much of legal age, but Woody was thought of in the Farrow family as “stepfather” to all of the children (Soon-Yi was adopted by Mia and Andre Previn). Thus, there was, depending on how you look at it, an unusual “redefinition” of family/romantic roles in Soon-Yi’s life, or a massive violation of trust.

I have always been a big fan of Woody Allen (full disclosure here), and a major component of his nebbish image was the fact that he would occasionally proclaim himself a “pervert”:

It also became clear back in the Seventies that Mr. Allen was a hebephile (someone attracted to adolescents). There is the line delivered by Tony Roberts in Annie Hall about “two teens,” and of course, there is the entirety of the Mariel Hemingway plotline in Manhattan (1979) (which actress Stacey Nelkin has maintained was about her – radio silence from Woody, which is par for the course).

So we have an artist who has made hay for years about the fact that he has “pervy” leanings.

[In watching this clip again, I realized that the final line... well, I won't say anything.] 

By the time he is deeply enmeshed in his relationship with Mia he makes the sublime Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which the Michael Caine character carries on an affair with his wife's sister behind his wife's back; Caine’s wife is played by Mia Farrow. Take that plot line, cross it with the Hemingway thread from Manhattan, and have you have l'affaire Soon-Yi.

The affair was something of a surprise to his fans, since very few people had kept track of the names of Farrow’s children, but it wasn’t a very big surprise, since he had already laid out his fascinations in the scripts of his films.

I am not arguing from the above that Mia should've seen it coming, but one of Woody's strong suits as a writer is that not much remains hidden – like his hero Ingmar Bergman (who spent the final years of his life writing screenplays in which he tried to confront his feelings of guilt about how he screwed over the women in his life — see Ullmann’s Faithless), Allen seems to be working out his emotions through his protagonists.

So Woody makes this improper decision and justifies it with the famous quote “the heart wants what it wants.” At the point that the Soon-Yi relationship becomes public, Allen loses many fans, who feel he is a “pedophile” who has committed “incest” with his stepdaughter (this People article indicates that Woody knew her from the time she was 10, but he wasn’t involved with the children actively until the three that were “his” came along).

He didn't discuss the matter publicly until the court case with Farrow over custody of the three children they had together (one biological, two adopted). During the trial loads and loads of dirty laundry was aired. Farrow publicly accused him of destroying her family, and then added on top of the Soon-Yi situation an entirely different, and far, far more serious, accusation – that he had sexually abused their adopted daughter Dylan.

This accusation has become the principal one, since it became apparent that Woody is planning to live for the rest of his life with Soon-Yi as his wife (deep, deep love or lifelong guilt? It’s not really our business). He volunteered that “In the end, the one thing I have been guilty of is falling in love with Mia Farrow's adult daughter at the end of our years together."

The charge of sex abuse changed the whole situation, since the focus was now on Woody as a parent. What was revealed in the trial indicated that he had been brusque and even violent with Satchel (now Ronan), whereas he doted on Dylan to an alarming degree. His lawyers contended this was merely a father being overly attentive to his daughter; Mia’s lawyers contended the child was undressed at various times, and later spoke to her mother about Woody in an alarming manner, as if he had been intimate with her.

Whatever the truth is, one thing’s certain: the public doesn’t know what is true and what is the creation of the tabloid press and interested parties. But that hasn’t stopped the speculation. My personal *favorite* slice of weird storytelling about the Woody-Mia relationship was the gonzo telefilm Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story 1995, directed by Karen Arthur.

In that film, we see the most lurid parts of the trial acted out, with the emphasis on Mia’s heartache. Patsy Kensit (who, curiously, played Mia’s daughter in The Great Gatsby) essays the role of Mia as a glamorous sort of nut, while Dennis Boutsikaris underplays Woody, to try to evoke the “man within.”

The film is an absolute crap-TV delight, because (as with many TV movies) it pretends to tell the real story while only reveling in the sleaziest details — and also making sure that Woody’s life is acted out as scenes from his films. Visuals and events from Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and other Woody movies are acted out, but with Kensit and Boutsikaris inserted as the real Allen and Farrow.

I will have more to say about this TV movie in the future, because there are many kitsch reasons to love it. But back to the actual case: The verdict on the sex-abuse charge was that the Connecticut State Attorney decided not to prosecute to spare Dylan having to testify in court (although it raised enough questions to decisively prevent Allen from being allowed to visit Dylan). 

A Los Angeles Times piece offered this summation: “Lawyers for Woody Allen said Monday that a former nanny who worked for Mia Farrow has testified she was pressured by the actress to support charges that the filmmaker molested their 7-year-old adopted daughter.

“The nanny, Monica Thompson, resigned from the Farrow household on Jan. 25 after being subpoenaed in the bitter custody battle between the actress and Allen. She told Allen’s lawyers in depositions that another baby-sitter and one of the couple’s other adopted children told her they had serious doubts about the molestation accusation.” 

A New York Times article published around the same time noted that “While a team of experts concluded that Dylan was not abused, the judge said he found the evidence inconclusive… ‘I am less certain, however, than is the Yale-New Haven team that the evidence proves conclusively that there was no sexual abuse,’ Justice Wilk wrote.”

The entire allegation resolves down to a “he said, she said” situation, in which the he is Woody — augmented by the two psychotherapists who treated Dylan — and the she is Dylan — augmented seminally by Mia, who chose to record a discussion about the alleged incident, and Farrow family members, most notably Ronan, who did not witness the alleged incident but brought it up as a factual event in his Golden Globes Tweet.

There is no one who wouldn’t feel sorry for Dylan, who seemingly was Woody’s “favorite” of his three children with Farrow (for good or ill) and whose alleged abuse was used as a “wedge” in a custody battle between her adoptive parents. She is the definite victim in this whole matter, but the questions remain: to what degree was her overly-attentive father a villain, or her mother an outraged and vengeful ex?

As noted above, Woody has included his neuroses, fears, and fetishes into his films — although he does shy away from sex scenes (as the coy massage scene in Match Point so grandly illustrated; he cuts away at the moment when other filmmakers would’ve “gone straight in” for the lovely-people-having-stylized-sex sequence).

There is no way to gauge his feelings for children from his films, because they rarely exist in Woody’s cinematic universe (except, notably, the youthful versions of himself). The interesting tone that he took in the late ’90s was regret over romantic decisions (the heart wants what it wants, but it apparently makes very bad choices sometimes…).

To supply just two examples, the heroes of Celebrity (1998) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) suffer because they pick the wrong woman — in the case of the former, the Woody surrogate (Kenneth Branagh, doing a ridiculous Allen impression) suffers because he breaks with Judy Davis and becomes involved with Winona Ryder.

One of the more obscure items from that period confronts the old-man-chooses-younger-woman-over-steadfast-wife-his-own-age theme head on: Allen’s one-act play “Central Park West” (the avenue on which Farrow has lived for many, many decades, btw). That play was produced in 1995 as part of the show “Death-Defying Acts,” along with two shorter pieces by David Mamet and Elaine May.

The plot finds a middle-aged therapist (Debra Monk played the role to a fine turn off-B’way) fearing that her best friend (Linda Lavin, in the same production) is the reason her husband has left her. She eventually finds out that her husband is madly in love with a 21-year-old Barnard student.

I don’t have a copy of the play on-hand, but remember it containing a number of really nasty jokes made at the middle-aged husband’s expense — he is raked over the coals by his friends for his May-December passion. A review of the play in the Christian Science Monitor noted that the dialogue is Allen’s contribution was indeed very funny, but that the play “leaves a bad taste in the mouth.”

For the most blatant funhouse-mirror reflection of the real events, one need only look at Husbands and Wives (1992), the last Allen-Farrow collaboration. The film is definitely modeled after Scenes from a Marriage, but adds on a very irritating approximation of Cassavetes’ handheld camera style.

Three things in that film are noteworthy, if not downright revelatory, if one is trying to find “reflections” of real events in Allen’s life (and no, not a single one of them relates to a child — children really haven’t ever been on his radar):

— The rather transparent plotline in which Woody’s character befriends a college student (Juliette Lewis), with whom he is clearly smitten.

— The constant verbal jabs taken at Mia’s character for being overbearing. They don’t seem as much passive-aggressive on Woody’s part as openly aggressive. What did Mia think when she read the script?

— The conclusion to the Sydney Pollack/Judy Davis plotline, in which both characters realize they’d rather remain in a sexless but “comfortable” middle-aged marriage than be with others. This twist is one of Woody’s most touching and yet bleakest views of marriage. Could it be his dream of what it would’ve been like to stay with Mia?

The film certainly invites speculation on many levels because, of course, he was writing the damned thing while he was beginning his affair with Soon-Yi. What does this all amount to? Woody has proven throughout the years that if he’s obsessed with something — be it angst over death, guilt over romantic choices, repressed anger over “dominant” figures in his life, or an attraction to teenage girls — he can’t really hide it.

I will let him have the last word, in the only visual interview I know of where he openly addresses the sexual abuse allegations. This aired on 60 Minutes and in it he gives us the timeline of events.

He denies the allegation, noting that he has no inkling to be (no bones about it, he says the term) a child molester. He also allowed the camera people to get a shot of a crazed note written by Mia to him, and the famous “valentine with skewers” that she sent him:

In the second part of this piece I will discuss Farrow's past and her public image. The epilogue to this piece (with updates and links to later articles concerning the case written by people involved including Woody, Dylan, and Moses Farrow) is here.