The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (41 page)

Elkan Abramowitz was a respected trial lawyer who specialized in white-collar crime. As he admitted. Woody s case was "a total exception" to his usual activities, which included an antitrust proceeding against the Mafia. In the past, he had also served as special prosecutor in the investigation of a stock transfer involving Mayor David Dinkins. A graduate of New York University School of Law and a partner in Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Jason & Silberberg, Abramowitz was fifty-two, a tall, bearish, silver-haired man with a slight potbelly and an odd gait that suggested his shoes might be pinching. For twenty-five years he had been happily married to a best-selling novelist, Susan Isaacs
(Compromising Positions, Shining Through),
with whom he had two grown children. They owned a redbrick house in the leafy Long Island suburb of Sands Point, as well as a city apartment on Central Park South.

The first time Abramowitz met Woody, he remarked, "Look, I've only spent three hours with you, but I figure I've known you my whole life." It was not that Woody had suddenly turned into a cuddly person. The astute Abramowitz was merely observing that Woody Allen fans automatically assumed they knew the man, and so it was like representing "somebody who lives next door to everybody."

In legal circles, Woody's choice of a counselor who had never practiced matrimonial law raised a few eyebrows. While Abramowitz was an accomplished lawyer, he was hardly a flamethrower. "Choosing him was a mistake," said Raoul Felder. "He had never played in this playground." An attorney who knew his way around the matrimonial courtrooms, Felder thought that Woody's affair with Soon-Yi would doom his suit for custody of Dylan, Satch, and Moses Farrow. "For all intent and purposes, he has been her father. If this is the case, he'll never be able to visit them much less have custody." For that reason alone, Felder later said that he would have turned down the case. Even at the outset, he considered Woody's case a lost cause.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dirty Laundry

Since August, Woody Allen had been pursued by the television networks for an exclusive interview. "It was a huge story," according to Victoria Gordon, producer of the CBS newsmagazine
60 Minutes.
"Leslee Dart told me Woody wanted to respond in some way and was thinking of writing an op-ed piece for the
New York Times.
Of course I believed he could make the same points more effectively in a television interview." Although Dart preferred
Nightline,
in the end, Woody chose
60 Minutes.
In meetings with Letty Aronson, Gordon and correspondent Steve Kroft nailed down the ground rules: Woody was free to make whatever points he wished, but there would be no deals, no questions off-limits.

As Kroft promised at the start of the program, aired on the Sunday before Thanksgiving of 1992, it would be a "no holds barred" session. Woody claimed that he had no idea how the Polaroids came to be on the mantel. "What about the way Mia discovered the affair?" Kroft asked him. "By finding certain embarrassing pictures."

Woody looked at him in surprise, as if he had not expected Kroft to mention the photographs.

"Yes." In his living room, he sat up straighter in his chair. "What is the question?" he murmured.

After two decades in broadcast journalism, the
60 Minutes
correspondent had perfected his technique. Kroft gazed into Woody's face and said very quietly, "I presume that is not the way you wanted her to find out." Woody squinted.

"Or did you want her to find out?"

He seemed to be considering the question. "I never really thought about it," he answered. He guessed that he would have told her "eventually."

"He was very organized and had obviously given it a great deal of thought," Kroft recalled. "But there was a total blind spot about the impropriety of his relationship with Soon-Yi. He seemed not to care about what people thought." Instead, he joked about his harrowing problems. "Some of the best material in the interview," Kroft said later, "was cut so as not to offend viewers."

Kroft was completely sympathetic to Woody, who, he said, "had always been a hero of mine. At the time
of Annie Hall,
I thought he was the smartest person in the world." He added that he was not normally "starstruck. But the reading material in his living room, actually everywhere, was heavy stuff. In his bathroom I saw works on Freud, the kind of books you would expect to find in the office of a professor of psychiatry."

As background, Woody supplied
60 Minutes
with visual materials: the dagger-pierced Valentine, the child-molester note, custody affidavits in which Mia swore he was a wonderful father. However, the main point he wanted to get across regarded Mia's parenting. Her adoption of so many children was abnormal behavior, he argued. In addition, she was a poor mother. (Actually, these allegations were shared, to some degree, by a few people who knew Mia and Woody and believed Mia had problems handling so many children. "Her style of mothering was pathological," said one observer, who was not surprised by her "hysterical" reaction to Woody's infidelity, "only its intensity.")

Then Kroft raised the allegations that Woody took Dylan into the attic and touched her. "Is there any truth to that at all?"

Woody deflected the question. "Look, be logical about this. I'm fifty-seven. Isn't it illogical that at the height of a very bitter, acrimonious custody fight, I'm going to drive up to Connecticut, where nobody likes me and I'm in a house full of enemies, and suddenly, on visitation, pick this moment in my life to become a child molester?" He then answered his own question: "Its just incredible. It's so insane!"

Even though
60 Minutes
had earned its stripes as fearless investigators, in this instance the newsmagazine seemed curiously timid. No effort was made to ask tough questions of the subject or shed new light on the story. In fact, Kroft concluded with an exoneration: "Reports we were shown seem to support his contention that he's not a child molester."

The Film Critics:

"There was something awful about the Soon-Yi business, but on the other hand something very human, the type of ambivalence that surrounds him and his work."

—John Simon

"The press depicted him as a dirty old man but nobody considered he might be more of a mentor to Soon-Yi. With Woody Allen, sex is not the point so much as communication."

—Roger Ebert

"I don't care what people say about the age difference. It’s just pure jealousy,” said Soon-Yi when she returned to Drew after the Thanksgiving break. Rumors that Woody was losing interest in her were instigated by her mother, she informed a reporter, who was furious that Woody had never married her.

Soon-Yi did not appear on
60 Minutes,
to the relief of the producers. "We knew enough about her to think she was not going to be a great interview," said a staff member. On
60 Minutes
Woody had seemed bored when talking about Soon-Yi. When asked if he saw her on weekends, he said, nonchalantly, "Yeah, I see her when she gets off school, when she's off for the holiday or something." "Or something" did not suggest a passionate love affair. In private moments with friends, he displayed more emotion. Of course he was in love with Soon-Yi, a sweet girl who appreciated the things he did for her. But sometimes he thought he had made an error in judgment ("I screwed up"). Some insiders predicted the romance would not endure, especially if Woody was forced to choose between Soon-Yi and getting custody of his children.

Andre and Heather Previn worried that Woody would discard Soon-Yi after he had become bored with her sexually. But for all his sympathy, Andre had no wish to testify in the custody proceeding. His feelings mirrored those of his son Sascha, who one morning confided to Kristi Groteke, with tears in his eyes, "I'm so sick of this whole thing. I wish it would just end." The last thing Andre wanted was to be a spear-carrier in Woody and Mia's drama.

In the summer, Soon-Yi had conducted herself with dignity and composure. But as the spotlight faded, and the loss of her family dawned on her, she seemed less self-assured. Her fame of a few months earlier had taken an unexpected and unpleasant turn. The media wickedly lampooned her in a spate of nasty, disparaging gags that were both sexist and racist. On
Saturday Night Live
she was raunchily impersonated by comedian Rob Schneider;
Mad
TV based an insulting character on her, and she (along with Woody and O. J. Simpson) was the butt of a crude Howard Stern radio skit, "Mandingos Over Broadway."

She was lonely at Drew, where the other students made fun of her behind her back. She had few friends. No one wanted to room with her—or date her—and so she spent every weekend with Woody in New York.

If Soon-Yi felt depressed, her little sister was in far worse shape emotionally. The previous summer, Dylan suddenly began to complain of headaches. In a daze, she lazed in the hammock at Frog Hollow. "If you asked her what was wrong," recalled a visitor, "she'd say she didn't feel well." She also began to wet her bed, something that had not happened since she was three years old. Her father's abrupt and painful removal from her life was wrenching to the child, and yet, under the circumstances, it was impossible for her to directly express any feelings of grief.

Woody saw Satch twice a week, in the presence of a social worker. On the trip to Fifth Avenue, the boy would get nervous, but by the time Woody's driver returned him home to Central Park West two hours later, his mood would have swung 360 degrees. He was extremely fond of toys. Under his arm he would be carrying his latest loot, along with a shoe box full of drawings or a cake he and his father had baked together. Dylan did not like that at all. "Satch and Dylan were very close and so he knew better than to tell her he had a good time," said a member of the household. "If he showed her the cake, she would say right away, 'Put that cake away, I'm not eating it,' just as if she were the divorced woman."

During Christmas week, the Connecticut State Police paid a final visit to Frog Hollow to wrap up loose ends of their investigation. On an earlier visit, Dylan, using anatomically correct male and female dolls that a psychologist employed by the police had shown her, joined the two figures in a simulation of sexual intercourse. This rime the investigators decided to quiz her further about it. To Mia’s shock, Dylan described a visit to her father's apartment, which Mia calculated to be in the fall of 1991 when she was in Vietnam to adopt Sanjay and Tarn. According to Dylan, her father and Soon-Yi were making love on the terrace. The child's description of their intimate behavior was so detailed and so clinical that Mia immediately reported it to Eleanor Alter, who, meanwhile, had successfully subpoenaed Woody's psychiatric records.

In His Own Words:

Q: What are sex perverts?

A Sex perverts are the most wonderful people in the world ... a much maligned majority group. Q: Have you known many? A: Just family. Immediate family.

—Woody Allen interview, 1972

Acting Justice Phyllis Gangel-Jacob is an ex pen at dealing with messy legal cases involving the rich and famous. Nevertheless, her assignment in August 1992 to the Allen-Farrow case seemed like a piece of rotten luck for Woody because in legal circles the judge was known as "a man-eater." Donald Trump, after his divorce from his wife, Ivana, declared Gangel-Jacobs court to be "stacked in favor of women." Other disgruntled males—attorneys as well as husbands—complained she was unworthy of sitting on the bench. In New York Supreme Court, the normal method of processing cases is random assignment by computer. In the Allen-Farrow case, however, a clerk had initially given the case directly to Gangel-Jacob, which aroused the ire of her colleagues, who grumbled that as usual she grabbed all the celebrities. As a result, the case was reassigned to Acting Justice Elliott Wilk. While Wilk was on vacation, Gangel-Jacob continued to handle the preliminary hearing.

For a man of fifty-one, Elliott Wilk was exceptionally fit. He had run in five New York City Marathons and was training for his sixth. Growing up in Queens, the son of an attorney, the justice attended public schools and graduated from New York University Law School in 1966. In private practice, he represented draft protestors during the Vietnam War, and, in the seventies, championed inmates prosecuted for crimes during the Attica prison riot. Now he lived on Central Park West with his wife, Betty Levinson, a specialist in matrimonial and family law who had represented Hedda Nuss-baum, the battered wife of convicted child killer Joel Steinberg.

Visitors to Wilks robing room at 60 Centre Street usually noticed the photograph of the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara on the wall. What they did not see was any judicial regalia because the trim, bearded Wilk entered his courtroom in a business suit, even though wearing black robes "would save on cleaning bills," he joked. The backbone of his judicial career had been highly contentious social issues, including child welfare, the homeless, and housing, and not the marital brawls of unmarried movie stars. His admirers spoke of him as a thoughtful jurist with superior intelligence (an I.Q. of 180) and an iconoclastic approach to the bench, a man who "asked sharp questions to cut through the nonsense."

At the same time, the jogging jurist managed to be a controversial figure, a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Abby Hoffman. His critics castigated him for pursuing his own liberal social agenda instead of trying cases. "His reputation for being ultra-liberal is deceptive," according to a divorce attorney who practiced before him. "There's also a defiance of authority, and clearly Woody Allen was a threatening figure to him." Another of New York's premier lawyers called him "a starfucker. In the Allen case, because these were celebrities, there was talk of a video camera in the courtroom. There was no justification. My God, when you have abuse cases you
close
the courtroom. If there had been cameras, those children would have been identified all over the world and their lives ruined, but Wilk and the lawyers would be famous." Both Woody and Mia had in fact tried to close the courtroom to not only TV cameras but also the press and public because the case involved children. Phyllis Gangel-Jacob ruled against the cameras but she did permit press coverage.