The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (30 page)

March of Time:

Playboy:
Would you like to have children?

Allen: Eight or twelve little blonde girls. I love blonde girls.

—Interview, 1967

In His Own Words:

"Mia has a talent for mothering the way some people have a green thumb for gardening, or an ear for music, or a talent for medicine. Its no chore for her."

—Woody Allen, 1989

Along with Donald and Ivana Trump and Lonnie and Burt Reynolds, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow became one of the most famous couples of the eighties, to all appearances the picture of compatibility, a pair so much in love they could spend twenty-four hours a day together as partners on screen and off. But behind the glamorous public image raged a silent struggle dating back to their first months of courtship five years earlier. Mia wanted to marry. Woody resisted. Almost fifty now, he was not receptive to an arrangement that, he told her, boiled down to nothing but an irrelevant piece of paper. Theirs was a more honest form of matrimony, a relationship based entirely on love and trust. Besides, he insisted, didn't he behave as a husband? Angry, but poor at confrontation, Mia pretended to acquiesce. In reality, she possessed iron determination and to get what she wanted, a friend said, she "simply used passive-aggressive tactics." If she could not become Mrs. Woody Allen, she wanted to have a child, even one out of wedlock. Woody's response was guarded. She would have to assume complete responsibility, meaning the child would live with her and require none of his involvement. With that understanding, Mia tried for months to conceive. Finally, worried because she was almost forty, she suggested adoption. Once again, he agreed, although not enthusiastically. Whenever she talked about the adoption, which was constantly, he impatiently changed the subject. He cared nothing about babies, he said, only his work. Undaunted, she forewent her usual international adoption and instead applied for a blond, blue-eyed American female infant, exactly the kind of child, she admitted later, who might be most likely to appeal to him.

In July 1985, Mia and her twelve-year old, Soon-Yi, flew to Texas to fetch the newborn. Mia named her Dylan O'Sullivan Farrow, after Dylan Thomas, and asked her friend Casey Pascal to be godmother. At first Woody ignored the baby, whom Mia carried in a sling over her chest. "I had no pronounced feeling one way or the other," he was to recall. In just a few weeks, however, the bald, apple-cheeked infant was working her way into his heart. "Gosh," he thought, "she's pretty cute."

After years in which he seldom spent any time in Mia's home, he was there every day. He even asked for a key. One evening on his way to Mia's, he found himself stuck in a cab in traffic. Like a man possessed, he jumped out and ran several blocks to get there before Dylan’s bedtime. The change in his behavior was extraordinary. "I got a great thrill out of pushing the baby cart and taking walks with her," he said. "I'd set the alarm for 5 in the morning, and get out of bed and be at Mia's house by 6:15.1 wanted Dylan to feel that her father was there, even though Mia and I didn't live together." A short time later, he decided that he wanted to co adopt her. But there was a problem: New York State did not allow unmarried couples to adopt children. Woody had one of his attorneys begin working to find a loophole in the adoption law. He also proposed adopting seven-year-old Moses, who felt deprived because his older brothers and sisters had Andre, but he had no father. Knowing that he would be included in the adoption of Dylan meant a great deal to him, and the idea understandably delighted Mia.

Until then, Woody had been adamant about a separate residence. Overnight, he began talking about the possibility of living together as a family. There is reason to doubt that he wanted to cohabit with Mia's entire brood—and the dog, cat, parrot, hamsters, canary, and tropical fish—but in order to be with Dylan, he had to accept the rest of them. He and Mia began looking at houses and duplex penthouse apartments, places that could accommodate eight children and two adults, but still large enough to give Woody private space. One of the properties under consideration was Harkness House, the luxurious four-story mansion around the corner on East Seventy-fifth Street, the setting of his famous New Year’s Eve party. The 1886 town house, lavishly renovated in the sixties by the late philanthropist Rebekah Harkness for her ballet school, was for sale. The asking price, $9.75 million, was a record for residential real estate in the city (the market price of Woody’s penthouse, for example, was now about $7 million). After three inspections, Woody did not buy Harkness House, nor did he take the mansion on Beekman Place or the five-million-dollar twin town houses in the West Village.

Finally, they saw the house of their dreams on East Seventy-third Street, a property even more splendid than the Harkness mansion. Built on two lots, the house boasted sunny rooms and a small garden, where Mia pictured herself puttering about and planting strawberries and jasmine. She immediately invoked the MGM movie
Meet Me in St. Louis
and a picture of cozy serenity just like that of the turn-of-the-century Smith family. In the garden, Dylan would have her own sandbox and swings, while Woody would happily play Ping-Pong and Mia would lie reading in the hammock, her mother, Maureen, picking out old favorites on the grand piano. There would be no more trips to the park, because the children would be able to run outside whenever they felt like it, and Mia would never have to worry about their safety. It would be living in New York but not living in New York. In their big house on the Upper East Side, surrounded by high walls and apple trees, they would surely be as happy as the Smith clan, laughing and crying in their Victorian house, in their Technicolor MGM musical, directed by Vincente Minnelli. It was a fairy tale. But Mia believed in fairy tales.

By the time Woody bid on the
Meet Me in St. Louis
house, the owner had changed his mind about selling. Several months passed. Woody still loved "pushing the baby cart," but there was less talking of living together and the celluloid fantasy was quietly shelved. Given their incompatibility, he decided, their relationship as it now stood was "a workable compromise for both of us." In any case, there were other considerations. "I like to sleep with the air-conditioning on, while she doesn't like air-conditioning."

Moving Pictures:

Elliott (after sleeping with his wife's sister): She's a wonderful woman and I've betrayed her. She came into my empty life and changed it and I repaid her by banging her sister in a hotel room. God, how despicable....

—Hannah and Her Sisters,
1987

In the mid-eighties, Woody wrote two inviting stories about family life:
Hannah and Her Sisters,
a return to the
Interiors
theme of sisters in conflict, and
Radio Days,
in which he re-created the topsy-turvy domestic chaos of his own family during World War II. Making these pair of back-to-back films at this particular juncture in his life reflected his intense exploration into the idea of parenthood during the period when Mia was trying to get pregnant. They also suited the tenor of the decade that saw Ronald Reagan in the middle of his second term and a country that had turned sharply conservative.

According to Woody, he took his inspiration for
Hannah and Her Sisters,
a title he conceived before writing the script, from Leo Tolstoys 1870s novel
Anna Karenina,
which begins with the familiar observation that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But as Mia knew,
Hannah
was basically a home movie of her Farrow family. The script contained the kind of inside knowledge a wife tells her husband in confidence: the rivalries and petty complaints; infidelities and quarrels; the substance abuse; all the unforgotten traumas that her family pretended did not happen. Reading the sisters script, she felt betrayed. What's more, it rearoused her old suspicions of Woody and her sister Steffi. It was no secret that Woody found sisters fascinating, even sexually arousing; he had often spoken of Janet Margolin and her two sisters, and Diane Keaton and her sisters, Dorrie and Robin. Mia told herself that she was being too sensitive— Woody was an artist and artists always transformed this kind of personal material. However, the thinly veiled portrait of the Farrow’s embarrassed and outraged others in the family, particularly her mother, whom the script described as "a boozy old flirt with a filthy mouth." In the end, everyone told one another it was only a movie, and pretended to be flattered. The seventy-five-year-old Maureen accepted the part of Mia's mother, her first featured role in twenty years.

Covering two years in the life of an artistic New York clan, the story unfolds around Hannah, one of three sisters, a successful actress who is the bulwark as well as primary enabler of her dysfunctional WASP family. Like Mia, the dependable Hannah has a brood of children, including twin sons and several adopted children. Hannah's younger sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey), is a recovering alcoholic trapped in an abusive affair with a surly So Ho painter (Max von Sydow); another sister is the scatterbrained Holly (Dianne Wiest), a neurotic cocaine addict who skitters from catering to acting to writing. Hannah’s quarrelsome parents are played by Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O'Sullivan. For this picture, Woody split himself into two characters: Hannah’s former husband, Mickey Sachs (Woody), a hypochondriacal television producer, who represents Woody’s good-boy side; and her current spouse, Elliott (Michael Caine), Woody’s bad-boy side, who has an affair with his wife's sister Lee.

In the fall of 1984, principal photography began inside Mia’s own apartment at the Langham. For several months the production completely disrupted the lives of Mia's children, who found themselves living on a movie set. All of them agreed to appear in the film, but only Fletcher, Daisy, and Moses had lines. Since the Screen Actors Guild required tutoring on the set for principals, On Location Education provided a licensed teacher for the three younger children. The classroom was the girls bedroom, the only room in the apartment not ripped apart. Tutor Jean Reynolds recalled that "the apartment was chaotic because of the technical people with their equipment and lights, but the classroom was off-limits to them. With all this going on in the house, it was incredible to see how Mia always had time for the children. Woody also stopped by to play with Moses—it was obvious they had a very nice relationship."

More than 80 percent of the film was rewritten and reshot. The original version ended pessimistically with Elliott still in love with Lee but staying married to Hannah. In the revised script, although Hannah and Elliott's marriage is still a farce, the final scene focuses on Mickey and Holly as she sweetly tells her husband she is pregnant—a kind of miracle baby because Mickey believed himself to be infertile. Years later, Woody regretted tacking on the pregnancy, saying he had tied up the threads too neatly.

Hannah and Her Sisters
shows a Woody liberated from many of his problems as a writer and director. The main subject remains himself, but he has dispensed with the existential hand-wringing, the ambitious homages to Bergman and Fellini. Instead, the beautifully crafted screenplay shows a heartfelt celebration of family life on the Upper West Side, as close to Norman Rockwell as Woody would ever get. A whirlwind tour of the city's architectural wonders—the Beaux-Arts facade of the Ansonia, the splendor of the Chrysler Building, charming town houses tucked away on Pomander Walk—were photographed by Woody's new cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma, who was known for his work on Antonioni films. (After eight pictures, Gordon Willis left to work for other directors.)
Hannah
shows another side of Woody, not the hard-edged, repressed neurotic but a mature man in love with his partner and taking pleasure in the idea of parenthood. Because the film opens and closes with homey Thanksgiving dinners, it would become an immensely popular television movie during the holidays.

His biggest hit since
Annie Hall
and the one film most in tune with the values of mainstream America,
Hannah
would be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture (it lost to Oliver Stone’s
Platoon).
It won Oscars for Woody (Best Original Screenplay) and for Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest (Best Supporting Actor and Actress). Although her performance as a sloppy drunk received no awards, Maureen O'Sullivan received the best notices of her entire career. In the
New York Times,
Vincent Canby wrote that she "never had five minutes on the screen to equal her work here." Ecstatic, Maureen praised Woody as "a very wonderful person—kind, good, and straight," and equated him with George Cukor, who was famous for his skill in directing women. Her career suddenly rejuvenated, she was offered a role in Francis Coppola's
Peggy Sue Got Married.

Hannah and Her Sisters
opened to rave reviews. Leading the critics singing Woody's praises were Andrew Sarris, who, after singling out
Manhattan
as the best film of the seventies, now called
Hannah
"the great American film of the '80s," and Woody's friend Vincent Canby, who labeled him the country's "only authentic auteur" and "the urban poet of our anxious age."

For his next picture, Woody paid a nostalgic visit to his old Brooklyn neighborhood during World War II. Narrated by Woody, who does not appear in the movie,
Radio Days
is more an oral history of a family than a real story. With more than two hundred characters and a dozen separate vignettes, it has several plots loosely strung together into a collage: Woody’s alter ego, Little Joe (Seth Green), whose favorite show is the
Masked Avenger,
is the son of "two people who could find an argument in any subject"; Joe's spinster aunt, Bea (Dianne Wiest), only wants to get married; and Sally White (Mia) is an ambitious nightclub cigarette girl who becomes a radio star. Using dozens of locations throughout the city, Woody cut back and forth between the glamorous big city, where the radio shows originate, and the everyday lives of listeners, leagues away in the outer boroughs. At its most effective,
Radio Days
is a happy, likable film that perfectly evokes the textures of those years when every living room had a majestic floor model or a tabletop mahogany box, and people sat glued to their radios, listening to
The Major Bowes Amateur Hour,
the adventure tales of
The Lone Ranger,
and contestants trying to guess song titles on
Name That Tune.
But without a story or strong central characters, it tends to be thin and aimless.