The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (38 page)

PMK is a major player in New York's publicity machine. A blue-ribbon public relations giant representing A-list clients such as Robert Redford, Tom Hanks, Michelle PfeifTer, and Courtney Love, the firm specializes in personal publicity for entertainment celebrities, which includes troubleshooting at a cost of about $3500 a month. Leslee Dart, a co-owner of PMK, had represented Woody since the mid-eighties, replacing his longtime publicist Richard O'Brien. A tall brunette in her late thirties, Dart is a careful, disciplined woman who pays strict attention to her weight, and that meant no sweets, no bread, no pasta, "and no weekend relaxation of the rules."

Among the stable of movie clients handled by PMK are probably a number of stars who have been arrested, divorced, or spent time in psychiatric hospitals. But Leslee Dart had never been required to perform crisis management for Woody Allen. In her eyes, he was a responsible, thoughtful man.

The New York celebrity world inhabited by Woody and Mia is about the size of a Trobriand island. For months there had been whispers of their breakup, including reports of his affair with Australian actress Judy Davis throughout the filming of
Husbands and Wives.
Annoyed, he sent word to columnist Liz Smith, denying that he had ever seen Davis off the set. To squelch rumors, Woody suggested a joint press release to announce there was nothing wrong, but Mia resisted. Privately, Woody didn't believe the public would care about their separation, or his involvement with Soon-Yi. With luck, people would forget in a week.

Unbeknownst to Woody, the media already had the lowdown on the breakup. What's more, it had nailed down the identity of the other woman as well.

On June 10, Richard Johnson, a
New York Daily News
columnist, was the first to break the story. "I reported that Woody and Mia had broken up," recalled Johnson, "but I didn't say why." He was still trying to squeeze further details out of Woody's publicist about the family romance. "But Leslee Dart, the incredible, unbelievable Leslee Dart, denied to me up the yin-yang that Woody was boning Soon-Yi."

Dart pretended to be shocked at Johnson's suggestion. "How can you say such a thing?" she snapped. "That's horrible."

"What's the problem?" Johnson replied. "It isn't his daughter." Nevertheless, for the moment he held back on the story of Woody and Soon-Yi.

Med-O-Lark is a coed camp for children ages eleven to sixteen that is located on a scenic four-mile lake in Washington, Maine, an hour's drive north of Portland. To occupy Soon-Yi over the summer—and to keep her away from Woody—Mia and her former husband, Andre Previn, decided to ship her to camp, where she could earn nine hundred dollars as a counselor and make new friends with youngsters her own age. Mia was familiar with Med-O-Lark because, five years earlier, Matthew Previn had worked there and enjoyed a pleasant summer. While Med-O-Lark offered a variety of outdoor activities such as rock climbing, and rafting on the Penobscot River, it was basically an arts-and-theater camp. Assigned to teach drawing and sketching, Soon-Yi bunked in a cabin with a dozen campers and two other counselors.

A product of Central Park West, and, most recently, Fifth Avenue penthouses and chauffeured limousines, Soon-Yi had not bargained for the camp's rustic ambience. A counselor remembered that she was in a tizzy about mosquitoes and the lack of city amenities. "The first thing she said after getting off the bus was, 'Oh my God, look at all the trees,' " said Hans Weise.

The first time the toilet in her cabin backed up, she said, "We'll have to call a plumber."

"There's a plunger in the bathroom," another counselor replied.

The biggest problem, however, turned out to be the telephone. Half a dozen times a day, a "George Simon" would call the director's office and ask for Soon-Yi. "It was extremely disruptive," said Hans Weise. "This person was phoning when the staff and children were out doing activities. At all hours Soon-Yi would have to be pulled out of her work."

For two weeks, Soon-Yi's art students received increasingly less attention. The camp administrators, tired of operating an answering service, told her to leave.

The party on the spacious lawn at Frog Hollow was for Dylan, who turned seven on July 11. Working in the city, her older brothers and sisters were planning to make a special trip to Connecticut on the bus. Mia warned Woody, whom she had invited reluctantly, about monopolizing Dylan. Lark and Daisy and the twins would be there only a short time because they had to return on the five o'clock bus and everyone wanted to spend time with Dylan. Woody agreed.

By summer, Mia and Woody were behaving like an acrimonious divorced couple. Woody had never enjoyed sleeping at Frog Hollow. Ordinarily he returned to the city on the same day, but this time he decided to stay overnight. Unhappy about having him in such close proximity, Mia told him to check into a motel, or bunk in the guest house on the other side of the pond. He did not listen to her.

On the afternoon of the party, he was unnerved by the sight of Mia, who was clad in her usual summer uniform of white T-shirt and rumpled khaki shorts and appeared poised to erupt like a volcano. Remembering her jokes about poisoning his red wine, he now took the precaution of bringing his own food from New York, usually a large barbecued chicken and a tin of Beluga caviar, which he ate right out of the container. Perhaps because the other guests ignored him, he sarcastically commented on the firecrackers and sparklers brought to the party by Casey and John Pascal, whom he disliked. Soon bored, he disregarded Mia's admonitions about monopolizing Dylan and plopped himself down at his daughter's side. At one point, he put a damper on the activities by dragging Dylan to the pond to play.

After the party was over, Mia angrily pounced on him. He had promised to leave Dylan alone but had done exactly the opposite. Woody did not respond. When it was time to retire, he slept, as usual, in the guest room near the garage. The next morning he was greeted by a note pinned to the door of a nearby bathroom:

CHILD MOLESTER at BIRTHDAY PARTY! Molded then abused one sister Now Focused on Youngest sister Family disgusted.

Horrified, he quickly ripped down the note and jammed U in his bag. In his opinion, Mia was insane. At that point, said a friend of the actress's, "things had gotten really crazy. There was lots of crying. She didn't hide a whole heck of a lot from the kids."

Med-O-Lark informed Mia that her daughter had been Bred because a Mr. Simon "seemed to be her primary focus and definitely detracted from her concentration on being a counselor." Soon-Yi, the camp director wrote Mia, had returned to New York. Confronting "Mr. Simon," Mia demanded that he tell her the whereabouts of her daughter. Woody pleaded ignorance.

Some sixty miles away, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Soon-Yi was living in a college dormitory room at Rider, a private liberal arts college that, like Drew, made minimal demands on its students, especially in the summer. Woody had made all the arrangements for her to enroll in the summer session. It was Soon-Yi, however, who had chosen to register for The New South in Literature, Music, and Film, a three-credit course that examined southern culture since World War II, beginning with the spread of New Orleans jazz and ending with the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Stashed away in rural New Jersey, she waited for the weekends when Woody's chauffeur arrived to drive her back to town.

That July, Soon-Yi abandoned her family. To her sisters and brothers, there remained fleeting memories of her mad giggling on the phone and a few of her personal belongings gathering dust in the girls' bedroom. At the dining table, the space where she had once sat was occupied by Isaiah's high chair. Mia stopped trying to locate her child and turned her attention to still another adoptee in dire need of a family. Some time earlier she had applied for a foster child, Tunisia, a nine-month-old crack-addicted infant, who needed temporary care until her mother recovered from her drug problems. Dylan and Satch were enthusiastic about a new sister until they heard she was only staying with them temporarily. Reluctantly. Mia withdrew the application.

On Tuesday afternoon, August
4.
Woody arrived at Frog Hollow to spend the day with Dylan and Satch. Mia and two of the children. Tarn and Isaiah, had gone shopping with Casey Pascal. Otherwise, the household was like it was on any other day, swarming with children and baby-sitters: the three

Pascal children being minded by the Pascal sitter, Alison Stickland, and Dylan and Satch in the care of two other sitters, Kristi Groteke and Sophie Bcrge. For Woody, these visits to Frog Hollow felt rather like a nuclear winter. Satch and Dylan were always excited to see him, but nobody else made him feel welcome. Moses, who would never forgive Woody for sleeping with his sister, deliberately snubbed him by disappearing into the woods for the day. Woody's feeling of entering "a household of enemies" was accentuated by the presence of Krisrj Groteke, whom he felt was spying on him. This was the case. She had instructions from Mia to never let Dylan out of her sight. The afternoon passed uneventfully until Mia, who had returned home from shopping, became upset when she discovered that Dylan was not wearing underwear under her white sundress.

That evening Woody and Mia went to a local restaurant for dinner. Mostly their conversation consisted of shop talk about the new picture that was scheduled to begin principal photography in a few weeks. Returning to the house, he went upstairs to tell Dylan and Satchel a "Little Woody" bedtime story, only to be interrupted by Tarn, who began to scream at the sound of his voice. After six months in this country, and despite her enrollment in special-education classes at an excellent public school, she was still having difficulty adjusting to her new life. Her hellish tantrums were so earsplitting that Mia had to turn on the air conditioner to drown out her voice. In a few short months, she had developed a powerful hostility toward Woody, possibly because he seldom acknowledged her or included a toy for her in the shopping bags of gifts he brought for his own kids. "Woody no goody. Woody no goody," she would chant. Woody tried to continue the bedtime story, bur Tarn wouldn't stop screaming. Later, his nerves frayed from Tarn's shrieking, he began upbraiding Mia for compulsively adopting children who were often emotionally or physically damaged. It was having a terrible effect on
hit
children, by which he meant Dylan and Satch. Mia told him he could "rot in hell."

As Woody prepared to leave Frog Hollow the next morning, Dylan showed him a well-thumbed toy catalog, in which she had checked off certain items for him to bring when he returned on Saturday. "Daddy, don't forget." she cried as she ran off, her tousled blond curls flying.

"Okay," he replied. "See you Saturday."

Minutes later, after Woody had departed in his black Mercedes sedan, the phone rang. Mia answered it. The caller was Casey Pascal, who sounded apprehensive. Her baby-sitter, returning from Frog Hollow the previous day, had reported that "something very disturbing" had happened. Casey thought that Mia should know about it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

What the Heart Wants

While Mia was out shopping, Casey Pascal said, Alison Stickland had walked into the television room looking for one of the Pascal children and noticed Dylan on the sofa. Woody was kneeling beside his daughter with his face buried in her crotch. There was an intimate, unfatherly feeling about the tableau that disturbed Alison, as if she was witnessing something she shouldn't have. The baby-sitter's account deeply disturbed Mia. Hadn't Dr. Coates cautioned Woody about being overly intimate with the child? Her delicate face turned ashen as she suddenly remembered that on that afternoon her daughter was not wearing underpants.

"Did Woody have his face in your lap yesterday?" she asked Dylan, who was sitting on her bed.

Her father was holding her around the waist, Dylan replied. He would not release her, and when she tried to pull away he touched her "privates." Then, he had taken her upstairs to Mia's bedroom, to a crawl space in the closet, and touched her again with his finger. After listening to the child's chilling story, Mia became alarmed. She reached for a videocamera, which she had been using earlier to record Isaiah, and began taping Dylan. For months she had been on red-alert, looking for trouble, "like a pig hunting for truffles," said a person close to the family. She told everyone that Woody was "a sick bastard" who could not be trusted. If he could violate one of her daughters and make disgusting Polaroids, "then anything might happen. I know for a fact Mia didn't make up Dylan's story. She didn't have to. But when something did happen, her reaction was, 'See—I was right.' "

After talking to Dylan, Mia telephoned Eleanor Alter, a New York divorce lawyer she had recently retained as counsel. Alter advised her to take Dylan to the family pediatrician immediately. But Dylan became tongue-tied when she was questioned by Dr.Vadakkekara Kavirajan of New Milford, Connecticut. Prodded, she repeated part of the story but clammed up when the doctor asked where her father touched her. Alone with her mother afterward, as she ate an ice-cream cone, she admitted that speaking to a stranger about those things embarrassed her. The next day, returning to Dr. Kavirajans, a physical examination revealed no sign of penetration but this time the physician was able 10 elicit the story Dylan had told to her mother.

That afternoon the pediatrician phoned Mia to say he would be notifying the authorities. Surprised, she tried to dissuade him. but Dr. Kavirajan had already checked with his lawyer. There was no physical evidence that Woody had sexually abused the child, bur the law required him to report Dylan’s story lo the police. Immediately Mia called Dr. Susan Coares, who was (rearing Satch. If the local pediatrician was going to report the incident, Coares, too, was obligated to contact the New York City Child Welfare Administration and Woody as well. There would be an investigation. Mia burst into tears. Fearing Woody's anger, she begged Coares not to tell him.