“So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh”: Deceased Artiste Pete Seeger

The phrase “great American” is used to distraction (or more accurately, misused) by a current-day conservative talk host (the one that John Cleese reminded us is “plump as a manatee”). In his usage, the phrase means nothing – it just means you agree with him. My idea of a great American is that old folkie who died a few days back after sharing his music with the world for over three quarters of a century (he died at 94 but had begun performing in the Thirties).

Pete Seeger was blacklisted in show business for quite a while, but never bailed from this country (who would have blamed him if he had?). He had a great enthusiasm for musical history and, in going through the list of his hit songs, one finds that not only was he one of the first great advocates of what is now called “world music,” but that he also continued to shine a spotlight on American history (usually the underside of our history) by keeping old folk songs alive.

He kept it simple, simple to a fault. He breezed past the winds of fashion and went in and out of style. There were moments when songs he had written were in the Top 40, and he surely was making a good deal of money from the publishing rights – he also was a member of the quartet that qualified as the first “crossover” folk act to hit the pop charts, the model for the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, and every other folk duo or trio that hit in the “folk boom” of the early Sixties. Seeger's group was, of course, the Weavers.

Here is a beautiful collection of what they called “Snader Telescriptions,”short films made in 1951 showing the Weavers at the height of their powers and celebrity. These were little “soundies” made for TV that show them singing, among others the catchy-as-hell Israeli song “Tzena Tzena,” “So Long (it’s been good to know yuh),” and their big hit,”Goodnight Irene”:

It was Seeger's love of this country, though, that always came to the fore. He involved himself with many causes, from union struggles in the Forties right through to the “Occupy” movement. 

His belief that a better America could be obtained through protest – and, of course, through music – was most likely the thing that kept his heart beating until the age of 94. (And most likely the recent passing of his wife Toshi – the two were married for just under 70 years – was one of the things that let Father Time catch up with him.)

Like most people of a “certain age,” I grew up seeing Pete on TV, performing both simple numbers for kids and incredibly serious and moving old folk tunes. What remained impressive about him was the fact that he truly didn't care about fashion – in a literal sense (except for his conductor caps or the occasional nice pullover, Pete was never a “natty” guy) and in the metaphorical one as well.

At a certain point his music was deemed too “corny” and his singalongs were the stuff of stupid jokes – yes, Pete could certainly croon several verses of “Kumbaya” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” both of which became punchlines for jokes about folk music and “brotherhood.” He didn't care, though – he loved classic folk songs and clearly *believed* in them as well. He could be an incredibly laidback performer (and certainly became more so as he got older), but he was always incredibly sincere.

The other thing that kept knocking me out as I delved into the trove of Seeger video material that is available online is that every third or fourth song I came across was one that I knew but didn't know the title of. Pete was the master at rediscovering older tunes that had incredible, fucking unforgettable hooks (thus the pop success of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” taken from “Wimoweh,” Seeger's version of an African folk song).

Pete had a heritage of music and social activism in his family. His dad was a musicologist who specialized in ethnomusicology and his mother was a concert violinist and teacher at Julliard. Pete was not from a poor family – he was sent to a boarding school and did indeed make it into Harvard, which he quit after realizing he really loved folk music (and radical politics, having joined the Young Communist League).

Here's a short clip from a filmed interview he did, where he talks about his interest in folk music:

The people he worked with in the Thirties and Forties are now the stuff of legend: Lead Belly, Burl Ives, Will Geer, Funhouse favorite Nicholas Ray, and the man he traveled the country with, the immortal Woody Guthrie. Seeger was already a “grand old man” of folk by the Sixties because he had known all of these legends who were long gone by the time of the folk boom (or, in the case of Woody, unable to perform any longer).

He first courted controversy as a member of the Almanac Singers, a loose-knit group of folkies whose first line-up included Pete, his pal Woody Guthrie, screenwriter Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays (later of the Weavers). Their first album (consisting of three 78s) was called “Songs for John Doe” and was released in 1941 well before Pearl Harbor.

This last fact is important because the album stressed an anti-interventionist message about the ongoing war in Europe. The sentiment behind this position was that U.S. corporations were beating the drums for intervention. Here's the lead track, “The Strange Death of John Doe”:

This isolationist message of course fell out of favor quickly as 1941 came to a close. The Almanac Singers toured all over America and even recorded an album of songs called “Dear Mr. President” that praised America's role in the war. In the meantime the group sang other types of tunes (including sea shanties) and on other topics (including the Spanish Civil War and, most importantly, the union movement).

But the isolationist material they recorded on the “John Doe” album brought them to the attention of the FBI and the right-wing press, which branded them “commies” (they were, of course) whose music was “dangerous.” This, mind you, while the war was raging overseas – thus, Pete and his friends were tarred and feathered in the press by right-wingers even before the HUAC existed.

Here's an interesting ditty the Almanac Singers performed called “The Dodger Song”. The group also performed classic folk material like the song “Liza Jane,” but the one song from that period that Pete kept in his repertoire for years to come was this item (recently redone by the Dropkick Murphys and Ani DeFranco – separately).

Pete served in the Army during WWII in a performing unit. After the war he began his solo performing career, which didn't last very long (in this era), because by 1949 he was part of the Weavers. The group's repertoire was indeed sublime – they chose to sing American folk classics, great new tunes by folks like Lead Belly and Guthrie, their own new tunes (including Pete's “If I Had a Hammer”), and songs from around in the world in English translation.

Their records were selling, they were a popular touring act, but the appearance of Pete's name in the infamous publication “Red Channels” meant the group was now under surveillance by the FBI and Seeger was blacklisted from appearances on TV and radio.

Pete did go up before the HUAC in 1955 and made news by not “taking the Fifth.” Instead he evoked the First Amendment and indicated that his decisions and beliefs were private. He was held in “contempt of Congress,” was indicted in '57, and wasn't cleared of the charge until '62.

What was most interesting, given the “underground” and then crossover appeal of folk music in the late Fifties, was that the Weavers did reunite in 1955 to play Carnegie Hall, and sold the place out. As a result they stayed together for the next few years, until Seeger quit the group because he objected to their doing a commercial for cigarettes.

He continued to reunite with them over the years, the most poignant occasion being when Lee Hays was ailing and the group once again played Carnegie Hall, certain this was the last performance of the original quartet. The performance is chronicled in the documentary The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time! (1982). Here is the final song from the show, the group's biggest-ever hit, “Goodnight Irene”:

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The maker of the terrific PBS documentary about Pete, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song has uploaded some of Pete's home movies, made with a sound camera in the mid-Fifties. Here is a great clip of him in 1955 giving a little crash course in how to play the banjo:

And an equally interesting lesson in “How to Make a Steel Drum”:

These home movies tie in to what Pete did to make a living during the time he was blacklisted: he toured the college circuit doing concerts and also taught music in schools and summer camps.*****

In researching this piece I was reminded of how important a “curator” of this music Seeger was. At the time in the Sixties when his songs were hits for other artists, he undertook one of his most interesting experiments in the media, a weekly show called “Rainbow Quest,” that was shot at and aired on an NYC/NJ UHF station, WNJU (Ch. 47, whose programming was primarily Spanish-language).

He only did the show from 1965-66 (he funded it himself with coproducer Sholom Rubinstein), and there were only 39 episodes, but the result is a timeless piece of musical history. 12 of the shows were released on either DVD or VHS (some on both media), and currently a number of complete episodes and wonderful clips are available online. 

The uploader named “d3singh” has put up complete episodes, and every one of the shows is a gem. Pete made sure to represent different types of folk music on the program, and so the viewer gets a musical education, as well as being entertained by some truly kick-ass musicians. The first episode finds Pete musing on being a TV host (this is, remember, when he was still banned from mainstream TV).

He talks about it here at 5:00, before inviting on his guests the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and Tom Paxton:

The Rainbow Quest clips available online include some terrific performances. Among them are Malvina Reynolds (who cowrote the classic “Little Boxes” with Pete) performing her song “Turn Around,” which is a number that I haven't heard in many years, but which used to appear on TV quite a lot (as noted, these songs are burnt into all of our minds and hearts from many years ago).

The guests run through a range of material, from old gems – Hedy West singing the “murder ballad” called “Little Sadie” and Pete's brother Mike and the New Lost City Ramblers singing “Man of Constant Sorrow” – to younger artists doing their own work – the act that Pete seems most enraptured by is Richard and Mimi Farina, doing Richard's “House Un-American Activity Dream.” 

The show did run the gamut, from the memorably ridiculous

to the incredibly sublime:

Seeger took care to bring on living legends, but he also brought on the new talents of the Sixties, including Donovan (who guested with an Irish friend who played sitar and blues icon Rev. Gary Davis):

Buffy Sainte-Marie and Pete did a cover of “Cindy,” which I've spoken about on this blog in relation to Dolores Fuller and Howard Hawks:

The most memorable episode from the series is the one that feature Johnny Cash and June Carter. Johnny is clearly on some drug, but he's very eloquent and sings very well. Again, it's fascinating to see these iconic figures interacting with each other:

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Rainbow Quest was a local production that was meant to be syndicated around the country, but independently – I'm most curious what kind of commercials aired in the ad-breaks on WNJU, seeing that the station was predominantly a Spanish-language station. Seeger made his first network TV appearance in a decade and a half when he guested on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

His song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” just cut too close to the bone for America at the time, so CBS edited out the song from the September '67 show on which he sang it (he was still included in the final edit otherwise). Tom Smothers brought the case to the “court of public opinion” by getting the press to cover the act of censorship, and so CBS allowed the song to air on a January 1968 show on which Seeger returned as a guest.

Pete also sang his classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on the Smothers show. Another controversial TV appearance he made a few years after this was his guest spot on The Johnny Cash Show after he had visited North Vietnam when the war was still at its height. Cash defended him and had him on for a full segment:

After Vietnam and the civil rights movement, Seeger chose to “think globally, act locally” by campaigning for the clean up of the Hudson River. After the bigger struggles he had faced from the Forties through the Sixties, his turn to environmentalism might be seen as a “simpler” task, but it was totally in keeping with his interest in the world around him. He sang plenty of songs about the river and the environment, but the one that burned itself into my brain was this modest children's tune:

Pete did weigh in on the other battles of the Seventies. Here he does a number by his sister Peggy that reflected the women's liberation movement of that period. Doing these numbers Pete could indeed be looked upon as corny, but the guy was so charming and earnest, he brought the numbers to life beautifully:

Seeger was incredibly generous to younger performers whose work he admired. I doubt Joni Mitchell would've wanted anyone else adding to her work, but when it came to Pete, she was clearly flattered that he decided to write an extra verse to “Both Sides Now.” (Pete's verse is clearly from the point of view of a parent, so it briefly turns the song into “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens.)

The whole concert featuring Joni and Pete was available as of a few days ago, but has been now been taken off of YT. Here is their duet on “Both Sides Now”:

The one artist Pete was most closely allied with in the last few decades was his friend Woody's son Arlo (you can read about Springsteen's tribute to Seeger everywhere online, so I'm going to skip over that collaboration). Pete and Arlo worked perfectly together, with Arlo supplying the lighter side and Pete getting the crowd alive and singing. Here they are in 1993 (Pete is a mere stripling of 74), doing Seeger's big hit “If I Had a Hammer”:

One younger performer who admired Pete and wrote a wonderful tribute song about him was Harry Chapin. Harry acknowledges the fact that Seeger was derided in some quarters, but beautifully conveys the importance of the man as a conscience for our country:

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The only way to really close out this piece is with Pete's own wry take on aging – at points it seemed like he had left his sense of humor behind, but this tune proves it was always lurking somewhere in the background.

There is a clip from his very last performance (in Nov. 2013) online, and most of his obits pointed out that one of the most significant performances he gave in recent years was when he played at Pres. Obama's inauguration – an event that seemingly served as an apology from the U.S. government for having attempted to ruin his life for over a decade and a half.

One of the most moving clips related to Pete on YouTube is a record of an event that took place in April 2012 in a town square in Oslo, where 40,000 people gathered to sing the Seeger song “My Rainbow Race.”

A right-wing terrorist who was on trial at the time for terrorist acts (which he confessed to having committed, stating they were “atrocious but necessary”) had cited the song as an example of “cultural Marxism” and multiculturalism that was used to “brainwash” Norwegian children. The man leading the crowd in song is Norwegian singer Lillebjorn Nilsen, who had a big hit with the Norwegian version of the song.

I know that Pete played in front of thousands of people at many of the historic concerts and folk festivals he performed at, but there's something especially moving about one of his latter-day anthems being sung by tens of thousands of people in a foreign language in a country he was never identified with. (Pete's original version of the song can be found here.)

Seeger always said that for him the happiest moments at his concerts were hearing the voices of audience members singing along. Now that he's gone we'll just have to keep singing for the “old folkie.” He certainly spent enough time teaching us how.

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.