The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (23 page)

This particular night, the publicist made a point of bringing over a blond actress, Mia Farrow, who had just walked in with Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira. The Caines had come from the Barrymore Theatre, where they had seen Mia and Anthony Perkins in a new play, Bernard Slade's
Romantic Comedy,
and were about to join Mick Jagger for dinner. Mia, having done matinee and evening performances, said she was exhausted and should have gone straight home to bed because she knew it would take forever to get served. She did not appear tired. Pale blue veins showed through skin so silkily translucent that it made her look like an anorexic Botticelli. She had a whispery baby-doll voice, the same silken little-girl manner of Jackie Kennedy. When she was twenty-two, she had been on the cover of
Life,
which depicted her as "a small forsaken animal that snuggles its way into your lap," the kind of creature that men wanted to cuddle "not in an embrace, but fatherlike, because she seems so hopelessly fragile." In truth, Mia was not the sort to snuggle, nor was she "hopelessly fragile," being more accurately a Lolita of vaulting ambition, who pulled off the considerable coup of marrying Frank Sinatra. Yet, at thirty-four, she still retained some of her superficial childlike qualities.

Woody knew Mia's sister Tisa, a minor actress whom he had cast in
Manhattan
as Polly, the girl who had the wrong kind of orgasm. (To whom Isaac replied that even his worst orgasms were smack on the money.) Suddenly remembering that after
Manhattan
Mia had written him a fan letter, he told her how the compliments had made his day.

Afterward, whenever Woody or Mia talked about how they met, they invariably mentioned Michael Caine. Never was there a reference to Bobby Zarem, who in the world of the mega-famous was a kind of shoeshine boy, providing an essential but anonymous service. In fact, nothing could have been more perfect than a superflack playing Cupid to a superstar director and the godchild of the poisonous Louella Parsons.

Several months earlier, a photograph of Woody had appeared on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
one Sunday morning. Posing on his roof deck, he was clutching a large black umbrella and gazing into the middle distance with the lugubrious expression of a funeral home director. The flattering article, "The Maturing of Woody Allen," predicted that Woody would become "one of Americas major serious film makers." Better yet, it offered him a perfect platform to separate himself from his West Coast contemporaries, the Coppolas and Scorseses with their sex-drugs-and-violence pictures, and to position himself as the American Ingmar Bergman for the eighties. Throughout the interview, in his airy living room filled with plants, against a backdrop of movie-star opulence, Woody sat, barely moving on the edge of his favorite chair. The only time he stood up was to change a Mozart recording to a Beethoven. Of particular interest to him now, he insisted, were feelings, not laughs. In
Manhattan,
for example, he cut a number of funny scenes because they were "superfluous. They stopped the flow. And sometimes they were too funny." It was an audacious idea, a comedian tossing out material because it was too funny.

A half mile away, in her apartment on the other side of the park, Mia Farrow tore out the article and slipped it into her dictionary. It was not that she sought out powerful men, but they were the only people who thrilled her.

Memorabilia: Woody Allen requests the pleasure of your company for New Year s Eve on December 31
^st
, at ten o'clock 4 East 75
^th
Street New York R.S.V.P.

Helen Gurley and David Brown, after a preparty dinner at Elaine's, whisked over to the Harkness mansion, home of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, where Woody was hosting a party to ring out the seventies and welcome the eighties. The event was, Helen Gurley Brown said, "a hard ticket. If you were invited you went." Among those who were invited and went were Gloria Vanderbilt and her two boys, and Robert De Niro, looking shockingly fat for a new boxing movie. And Mick Jagger, George Plimpton, Lauren Bacall, and Lillian Hellman. And Norman Mailer, Vincent Canby, Pauline Kael, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bette Midler. And Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Robin Williams, plus hundreds more. Afterward, people talked about it as the last great party of the seventies, perhaps one of the great parties of several decades, as thrilling as Truman Capote's legendary black-and-white ball back in 1966. The evening was masterminded by Jean Doumanian, who had drawn up the guest list—the pop stars of politics, music, literature, fashion, and Hollywood—with the same assiduous attention she applied to booking guests for
Saturday Night Live.
Woody, dressed in tux and tennis shoes, assumed his post at the foot of the grand staircase, looking like a wobbly Ashley Wilkes on the day of the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. While many of the party guests he barely knew, or had never met, probably never wished to meet, there were a few whose presence genuinely thrilled him. "Earl The Pearl* will be here any minute," he whispered in Roger Angells ear. Besides Earl Monroe, he also invited another of his favorite Knicks stars, Walt Frazier.

Harkness House was filled with hyacinths, "everywhere in beautiful jars," remembered Andrea Marcovicci, "tons and tons of hyacinths in the middle of winter on every floor. For the cool and hip, there were discos on two of the upper floors. There were buffet tables with filet mignon and shrimp and lobster. At four o'clock in the morning, a breakfast of eggs and bacon was served. I've never seen a party handled more beautifully." In his diary, Andy Warhol admitted that he was impressed. Woody's party was "the best." It was "wall-to-wall famous people," and he added, "we should have gone earlier."

The March of Time: "Mia gets what she wants." —Maureen O'Sullivan (Mia’s mother), 1967

Following the introduction at Elaine's, Woody added Mia Farrow's name to the guest list for his New Year’s party. She showed up with her sister Stephanie Farrow and Tony Perkins and his wife, Berry Berenson, but dashed out scarcely a half hour later, before ringing in the new year. Woody, wrapped up in his guests, barely said hello.

A few days after the party, she sent him a bread-and-butter present,
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
by Dr. Lewis Thomas, who had previously written the best-selling
The Lives of a Cell.
No intellectual herself, Mia was nonetheless skilled at selecting a gift for one, and the Thomas work, a collection of science essays, had been chosen with particular care. Aside from its serious subject, the book itself was a message: She was available. Woody, however, failed to pick up on it.
The Medusa and the Snail,
along with the bouquets and bottles of champagne sent by other guests, was politely acknowledged by Norma Lee Clark, who phoned to say that Mr. Allen sent a thank you and hoped they could have lunch one day.

Another bleak New York winter went by. The unhappiness in Woody’s personal life, still a shambles, spilled over into his Fall Project, the most risky picture he had attempted because it portrayed his fans as freaks, a sideshow carnival of distorted faces resembling Weegee grotesques. Any person who truly admired him, he seemed to be saying, was a moron. Principal photography began on September 11, but by December, Woody had slipped five weeks behind in the twenty-two-week shooting schedule. The buzz around New York suggested the picture was in trouble. A
Village Voice
columnist tried pumping Charlotte Rampling, one of the leads, who refused to divulge anything because, she told Arthur Bell, Woody "would kill me if he thought I was talking to you." Seeking out less cautious sources (an extra who played a Martian in a UFO sequence), the
Voice
cobbled together a report of the filmmaker holding up a mirror to his dark side, in a parody of Fellinis
816
that could easily turn out to be a masterpiece or a disaster. Of one thing the paper was certain—it sounded "depressing." Nervous about public reaction, Woody was determined to keep the plot secret.

In the spring, eager for relaxation, he decided to sandwich in a few days in Paris with Jean Doumanian and her new boyfriend, Jaqui Safra. At
Saturday Night Live,
Jeans diligence paid off when the show's creator and executive producer Lome Michaels resigned and NBC named Jean as his replacement. To assure a brilliant debut for his friend when the new season began in November, Woody was full of ideas on how Jean could reinvent television's foremost comedy show.

In the meantime, there was no further contact with Mia Farrow, whose large family must have sounded like some kind of weird baby factory. Usually he shied away from mothers because he and they had nothing in common. He had as much interest in family life as any sixteen-year-old, which is why he once blurted out that "it's no accomplishment to have or raise kids. Any fool can do it." Most of the time, with a straight face, he claimed that the only reason he had no children was because I've never had a marriage that has worked." But that was precisely his problem—maintaining a relationship was impossible. Navigating the decade of the seventies, a golden age of one-night stands, he symbolized the single, kiddie-phobic, narcissistic male, over forty but still pulling girls' pigtails, the connoisseur of casual sex, not yet ready for commitment. The last thing this type of bachelor wanted was the aggravation of squalling kids. On-screen, he didn't know how to behave around children. In
Manhattan,
the scenes between Alvy and his son were clumsy, and in
Stardust Memories,
the Sandy Bates character, quintessential^ self-involved, loves a French woman but is painfully ill at ease with her two small children. Offscreen, Woody did not particularly enjoy spending time with youngsters, either, not even his sisters two children, Chris and Erika.

Nevertheless, a few days before leaving for France, he impulsively decided to get in touch with Mia. Rather than calling himself, he asked Norma Lee Clark to set up a 1 P.M. lunch at Lutece on East Fiftieth Street. He arrived early and ordered a bottle of 1949 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. In a tweed jacket and tasteful tie, he had dressed appropriately for a first date with a Hollywood princess, at one of the city's great restaurants. Mia blew in, breathless and disheveled, sporting an outfit entirely suitable to a day on the moors: Irish sweater, skirt, sensible walking shoes with leggings and socks, because she had just tramped down from the Upper West Side. Her hair, washed but not set, looked as though it had been styled by a lawn mower. Later, trying to recall the lunch, she could not remember the food, only the conversation about W. B. Yeats (Woody's favorite poet), Plato and Christianity, James Agee, and classical music—Mahler's slow movements and the Heifetz recording of the Korngold Symphony. After a decade with Andre Previn, a prominent musician and a first-rate jazz pianist, it was a subject she knew something about. Although the
New York Times
profile of Woody that she had tucked into her dictionary included an eyewitness account of him at Michaels Pub, Mia pretended to know nothing of his clarinet-playing, but he was happy to tell her about Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton. When they left the restaurant, it was already getting dark. Woody gave her a lift in his Rolls and promised to call when he returned from Paris.

Afterward, he could never recall the date of that first lunch, except that it was a few days after the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. Mia, however, remembered exactly. She commemorated the occasion by embroidering April 17, 1980, on a needlepoint sampler.

CHAPTER NINE

Beware of Young Girls

Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow seemed to be a character out of the pages
of Photoplay.
She was born in Beverly Hills on February 9, 1945, the third of seven children belonging to a glamorous couple: John Farrow, a director at Paramount, and Maureen O'Sullivan, an Irish starlet under contract to MGM. Mia's godparents were Hollywood royalty: George Cukor, the so-called woman's director, and the feared and famed Hearst gossip queen Louella Parsons. Mia’s dog Billy was the grandson of Lassie. On exclusive Beverly Drive, on the half-acre grounds of the Farrow home, the seven beautiful children lived in a separate wing of the house, where they were bathed, dressed, and pampered by a staff of nannies and governesses. Meals were prepared in their own kitchen. Weekends were spent at the beach house in Malibu. While the Farrow’s took pains to create for their children the idyllic type of childhood that existed only in the cinema, there was a certain emptiness at the heart of all this grandeur. The children lived apart because John Farrow could not tolerate noisy kids underfoot. He was a strict disciplinarian with "an almighty temper," recalled Mia, who as a toddler could not pronounce Maria and would be known by her childhood nickname. Her father believed in corporal punishment and thought nothing of whacking her across the room or beating her with his walking stick. "I didn't know my parents very well," she admitted.

John Villiers Farrow was an interesting minor director of forty-two pictures, notably the 1943 war film
Wake Island,
and a thriller,
The Big Clock,
starring Ray Milland. Skilled at getting good performances, he was also widely disliked for his tyrannical treatment of actors.

An Australian by birth, whose mother died in childbirth and whose father seems to have abandoned him, he was raised by relatives and ran away, first chance he got, to join the merchant marines. In his early twenties, Farrow impregnated a seventeen-year-old San Francisco girl, Felice Lewin, but was brought to heel by her father, a mining tycoon who insisted that he marry Felice before she gave birth to a daughter. Undoing this union in order to marry Maureen O'Sullivan in 1936 required a special dispensation from the Vatican.

During her career in Hollywood, Mia’s mother made seventy pictures, including
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
and
David Copperfield,
even a Marx Brothers film,
A Day at the Races.
But she is remembered best for her association with Edgar Rice Burroughs's apeman in six Tarzan movies, playing opposite Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan's scantily clad mate, Jane, in the jungle series. In the 1940s, semiretired, she was almost constantly pregnant, and gave birth to three sons and four daughters within the space of a dozen years. Although Maureen Farrow liked the idea of having babies, she had absolutely no idea what to do with them afterward. A next-door neighbor, Maria Roach, daughter of comedy producer Hal Roach and Mia’s best friend, remembered Mrs. Farrow as a distant exotic figure who was not involved in her children's daily lives and spent most of her time out of sight, like the Wizard of Oz, in her bedroom, which was painted dark green and resembled a religious shrine.