The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (37 page)

That winter, Soon-Yi stopped coming home on the weekends and eventually ceased calling her family as well. When her brothers and sisters phoned to see how she was doing, she seemed sullen. Her mother got on the line and began interrogating her about Woody. Had she kept her promise to stay away from him? Soon-Yis response was to shout, "Stop asking me for things!" and slam down the phone.

Even with their relationship damaged, possibly beyond repair, neither Woody nor Mia seemed sure of whether to separate from each other. For a dozen years, she had been his leading lady, and he was apprehensive about finding a new actress who would possess her charm and ability. Mia, with all her professional eggs in one basket, was caught in an even worse position. Although traumatized by his betrayal, she could not afford to walk away from her employment. She had a family to support. The last thing either wanted was public exposure of their problems.

In February, as he edited
Husbands and Wives,
Woody walled off his emotions and adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but at the same time he pleaded with Mia to give him the photographs. "Let's bum them together," he proposed. But Mia, guarding the Polaroids as closely as the Zapruder film of the

Kennedy assassination, replied that they would remain in her bank vault "for the rest of my life," to serve as a reminder of his betrayal. Lacking Woody's ability to compartmentalize, she redrafted her will to make sure he got custody of none of her children in the event of her death. She also contacted Paul Martin Weltz, the attorney who had overseen Woody's adoptions of Dylan and Moses, to inform him that Woody had deceived her. All the time that he had been clamoring for adoption, he was "screwing one of my kids," she said. Weltz doubted it would be possible to overturn the adoptions and instead suggested a coparenting agreement that would regulate Woody's visitation. Over the next six months, Weltz's negotiations with both parties resulted in an elaborate thirty-page legal settlement outlining their rights and responsibilities toward Dylan, Satch, and Moses. Under the terms of the agreement, Woody was to pay Mia $6,000 a month in child support. He also agreed to one of Mia's primary conditions, that he could not be alone with Dylan and Satch until they were twelve years of age. Curiously, Weltz never got the impression the couple was separating. "I always thought they were trying to put the pieces back together," he remarked later.

During the winter, Woody decided that Mia was having a nervous breakdown. At his insistence, and for the first time in her life, she began seeing a therapist and taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. Nothing helped alleviate her depression, and she felt as if she were walking around in a chemical fog. Her slurred speech made some people assume she was either intoxicated on liquor or high on drugs. One evening when Woody arrived at Elaine's for dinner with Mia at his side, Jean Doumanian noticed that she was groggy and disoriented, "like someone who was out on a doctor's pass for the evening." While visiting his penthouse one afternoon, Mia left a suicide note. Petrified, he dashed to his terrace and leaned over the railing to see if she had jumped to her death. Dutifully relating the incident to her therapist, he suggested hospitalization. "Many times she threatened to kill me, or have me killed," he told friends. "I started getting phone calls all night long, death threats calling me the devil and evil incarnate."

The previous September, Mia had adopted two Vietnamese orphans, both older children. One was a six-year-old boy who became crippled after contracting polio, and the other was an eleven-year-old girl, who, after becoming blind at age eight, was abandoned by her parents. Traveling to Hanoi and meeting the crippled boy, Sanjay, in person, Mia began to doubt the diagnosis. She asked for a further evaluation, which proved inconclusive. When she brought him to New York for tests, she learned he was severely retarded and functioning at an eighteen-month level. Not prepared to care for such a child, whose special needs would draw her attention away from Satch and Dylan, she reluctantly decided to arrange for his transfer to another family.

In the meantime, there remained the blind girl, Nguyen Thi Tarn, who had not been able to leave Hanoi with Mia because her papers were still being processed. Although Mia was having second thoughts about taking Tarn, she decided that canceling the adoption would be unfair to the girl.

In the case of both these children, Woody had been supportive and had even offered to help pay for Mia's trip to Hanoi. The situation changed after the Polaroids incident, however, and he became intensely suspicious of Mia's motives. Now it seemed clear to him that she was using the children like pacifiers, to bolster her spirits through times of trouble, as she had adopted Soon-Yi and Moses during her painful breakup with Andre Previn. His suspicion was confirmed at the beginning of February—barely three weeks after Mia learned of Woody's affair with Soon-Yi—when Mia agreed to take a sickly month-old African-American infant, whose mother had been addicted to crack. The adoption agency had not found a home for the infant, and he was to be placed shortly in permanent foster care. If Mia wanted him, the staff at the agency said, she had to act immediately. Within days, a bassinet was sitting next to her bed. She named the boy Isaiah Justus Farrow, after Sir Isaiah Berlin, Woody's favorite philosopher. Woody's first reaction was bewilderment. In his opinion, given Mia's depressed mental state, she could not take care of her own children, let alone an ailing infant.

Then, not two weeks after Isaiah appeared, the blind Vietnamese child finally came to join her new family. Malnourished and covered with lice, Tarn reacted to her new home with fear, depression, and rage. "She was hard to deal with because she was violent," recalled a member of Mia's household. "She'd scratch and bite and kick and spit. Sometimes we had to physically restrain her." To make matters worse, an openly resentful Satch expressed his feelings toward the newcomer by "throwing things at her across the room and she couldn't see them coming."

In March, Mia arranged for the baptism of the younger children—Soon-Yi, Moses, Dylan, Satchel, Isaiah, and Tarn—into the Roman Catholic Church. Over the years religion had played small part in her child-rearing. With such a large family, regular church attendance had proved awkward. She also felt self-conscious attending church. Because she was a movie star, people stared at her. In this time of emotional upheaval, not only did she seek religious comfort for herself, but she also realized that she had neglected to provide her family with a spiritual core.

On March 11, the family gathered at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, a few blocks from their apartment. It was a joint ceremony with the three children of her close friends Casey and John Pascal. Present were all of Mia's children, with the exception of Matthew, who could not get away from his job. The children wore white shawls over their best dresses and suits, except Soon-Yi, who, unaware of the solemnity of the occasion, had come straight from Drew in her (cans The children carried lit candles to the altar, where a priest sprinkled their heads with holy water. Afterward, there were refreshments at Mia's apartment for the various godparents, relatives, and neighbors.

Hearing of the baptism after the fact, Woody was given no opportunity to protest. "She was never religious for sixty seconds in all the years 1 knew her. And then she suddenly ran out and baptized the kids and told me she had found God," he said. "Then," he went on to claim, "twenty-four hours later, she was threatening to stick my eyes out." He was planning to raise Dylan and Satch as humanists and let them choose their religion when they grew up.

As their relations continued to deteriorate, they began to physically attack each other in public. In Central Park Woody yelled at Mia, and, allegedly, she punched him in the face. On another occasion, after leaving an Irish pub on West Seventy-ninth Street, they began quarreling on the sidewalk. As Woody turned to walk away, it was claimed that Mia, oblivious to passersby, thwacked him hard across the back. A few days after Tarn's arrival, they took her for a stroll in Central Park but exchanged sharp words when they returned to the building. As the blind girl clutched helplessly at the sleeve of her new mothers jacket, Mia started to cry. Woody, patting her back, attempted to console her, but Mia, still in tears, dragged Tarn into the lobby. A photographer who had shadowed them up Central Park West caught the quarrel on film. The next day five photos were plastered across the
New York Daily News
with the soapy headline: reel-life stars ... have real-life scars.

One of Woody's confidants at this time was jane Martin, who had worked for him as an assistant nearly as long as Mia had been his leading lady. Hearing about the slapping incidents. Martin was quick to sympathize with her boss. The relationship between the two "wives'—consort/mistress and office majordomo—had always been prickly. Mia. no prima donna, rarely yelled, but she could turn on a dime when somebody made her deeply angry. According to Martin, she would go "berserk screaming crazy," a sight

sufficiently chilling that Martin never forgot it. "I've never been chewed out like I was twice by Mia." she recalled. "She can go from zero to 100 miles an hour in one second." Being around her was like "having a huge cobra coiled up in the corner of the room and having to watch it every day so it wouldn't come .nit."

Voice of America:

Oprah Winfrey: We are certainly empathizing with you but when you saw those pictures of your daughter, legs pornographically spread, how could you have let him back into your life? How could you? What did you tell yourself?" Mia: I know. He said he was sorry. I loved him.

—Oprah Winfrey Show,
February 11, 1997

Shadows and Fog,
Woody's twenty-first film and his final picture for Arthur Krim, opened in February 1992. Shot in black and white, with a melancholy score by Kurt Weill, it was a hybrid movie that recycled his 1975 one-act play,
Death,
and paid homage to German Expressionist directors such as Fritz Lang. In a central-European town in the 1920s, Max Kleinman (Woody) is hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to help a posse hunt for a maniacal killer, only to find himself pursued as a suspect. The Kafkaesque clerk meets and falls in love with a circus performer (Mia), a sword swallower who is fleeing from her faithless lover (John Malkovich). To help viewers sit through the cinematic murk, Woody salted his cast with amusing cameos by Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Lily Tomlin, John Malkovich, even Madonna as a lusty trapeze artist, although the picture was so dimly lighted that it was difficult for moviegoers to recognize the celebrities. From now on, the director who disdained Hollywood would raid Tinseltown yearly for glamorous stars to pump up his box office. Famous artists appeared on-screen for a moment or two, and in most instances, worked for little salary. Juliet Taylor, with her usual zeal, told Madonna, for instance, that she would enjoy her role that would last two minutes and take only a day to shoot. Although a Woody Allen set was not most actors' idea of fun, the ploy worked. Not only Madonna, but respected actors and actresses were flattered when they were offered a part in a Woody Allen film. A mystified Jay Leno quizzed Kathy Bates on
The Tonight Show
as to why she had made a film about which she knew nothing—it could have been a porno film—and she replied, "Well, you kind of go on blind faith because it's Woody."

Budgeted at $14 million,
Shadows and Fog received
horrible notices. Stanley Kauffmann called the picture "the flip side of creative freedom," an example of "the worst that can happen when a good filmmaker (which Allen has become) gets his unsupervised way." Notwithstanding the presence of Madonna, the film earned an embarrassing $2.7 million, the weakest financially of Allen's films except
September,
The picture was derivative, causing even the usually complimentary French critics to wonder if Woody was not overdoing his imitation of the films of his favorite directors; one reviewer twitted him for lifting wholesale a mother and child scene from Chaplin, to which Woody replied that Chaplin's scene took place in the daytime, his own at night.

A few days before the release of
Shadows and Fog
no doubt expecting to be panned by critics, Woody discoursed starchily to the
Los Angeles Times
that the reason for being a filmmaker was not to impress audiences or receive glowing reviews—or earn money—but to be innovative. Hopefully, his audiences would paddle along behind as he cruised out of the mainstream. (As usual, hype took precedence over truthfulness because what could be more mainstream than casting Madonna?) For all his confidence, Woody's ambition to navigate the lesser streams had run aground. Depressed and frightened by his problems with Mia, he had developed a full-blown case of writers block. He was forced to seek the help of a figure out of his past, his old friend Marshall Brickman, who had cowritten three of Woody*s biggest hits. Since 1979, when Woody had dropped him, Brickman had written or directed several films, including a big-budget Bette Midler picture,
For the Boys.
If he bore resentment about their past relationship, he kept it to himself.

From his drawer of odds and ends, Woody ransacked material he had dropped from
Annie Hall. Manhattan Murder Mystery
is the story of an East Side couple, Larry and Carol Lipton, who strike up a conversation with their next-door neighbors, a husband and wife. When the wife dies suddenly under suspicious circumstances, the Liptons become amateur sleuths and attempt to solve the mystery with the help of friends (Alan Alda and Angelica Huston).

Despite the turbulence of his life, Woody and Brickman managed to write a comedy-thriller with a few good jokes and a slapdash mystery plot that readers of Nancy Drew could figure out in a minute. Later Woody would guiltily regard
Manhattan Murder Mystery
as a waste of his time and call it a vacation from filmmaking, a pleasurable but "not significant" movie, which was another slap in the face to the faithful Brickman.
Manhattan Murder Mystery
served its purpose, however. Incapable of producing anything creative at this time, Woody relied on work for his emotional salvation.