Mia Farrow’s Story: On Frank Sinatra, Battling Scandal, and Raising Her Family (original) (raw)

“I never thought I would have so many children. That was never a plan,” says Mia. “I did want a child or two—they came as twins. I didn’t think about more children for a couple of years.” She was living in England with André Previn. The Vietnam War was ending, and in 1973 the Previns decided to adopt a Vietnamese baby, Lark Song. “I remember standing in the airport in Paris with Mia for 10 hours waiting for the baby,” says Previn. “We were told nothing, just to be there. At one point Mia said, ‘How will we know who she is?’ I said, ‘Mia, how many nuns carrying an Asian baby are on the flight?’ Finally we saw a nun carrying a basket coming towards us. She said, ‘_Voici votre bébé,_’ and then she disappeared.”

“Lark was a very ill baby,” Mia told me. “She was only five pounds. But I was absolutely entranced, even though it was a lot of work and stress.”

After adopting Soon-Yi, who had serious emotional issues, Previn thought that six was it. “Mia didn’t agree and kept it going.” A former friend adds, “Mia cannot have a man play a role in raising the children. It’s her way or no way.” In later years, as the number mounted, Mia always considered her children’s views on whether or not to adopt again. “I can’t remember votes,” says Matthew, “but I remember certain robust discussions.” Mia’s close friend Carly Simon, who lived for years in the same West Side apartment building in New York, told me, “The way she sees herself is unlike the way anyone else does. She has a huge hoopskirt under which she has all these beloved children. She was always the model mother. Whenever my family found ourselves in a difficult position, we’d say, ‘What would Mia do?’ ”

“People have this impression of Mia as a flighty airhead flower child. She’s not,” says Maria Roach, daughter of the producer Hal Roach, who grew up next door in Beverly Hills. “She gives that delicate impression, but she’s a powerhouse. She can get done what needs to get done.” (Dory Previn, André’s second wife, who got dumped—reportedly when Mia became pregnant with the twins—warned of that seeming fragility in her song “Beware of Young Girls.”) Roach adds, “Tam, who was blind, could sort her own laundry. Mia somehow managed to organize all those kids in a very functional, united way.”

Because her husbands were not happy about her making movies away from them, the radiant young actress never capitalized on the enormous potential for fame and fortune she accrued from Rosemary’s Baby. “I had thought I would probably never work again after that,” she says. “I had very little ambition.” Sinatra demanded that she stop working on the film, which ran way over its shooting schedule, and make The Detective with him. “In terms of what Frank would say, I shouldn’t have done any movies. He’s on the record saying, ‘I’m a pretty good provider. I can’t see why a woman would want to do anything else.’ That’s the way men thought, and you felt pretty guilty wanting something for yourself.”

“Do you think if you’d flown around with him and just sat by his side the whole time, you’d still be together?,” I asked.

“Yes, because then he came back, over and over and over and over. I mean, we never really split up.”

Mia had no lawyer for either of her divorces, and she took no alimony from Sinatra or Previn. “Some wineglasses was all she got from Frank,” says Roach. Most women would consider that plain dumb on her part. “I think she had an amazing amount of integrity and faith in herself,” says another childhood friend, Casey Pascal, who lives nearby in Connecticut. “She didn’t want to be obligated to anyone who treated her badly.” Previn is said to have given her a small amount monthly for child support and paid half the school tuitions for his group of six. Allen would chauffeur the kids around and take them on European vacations every year, but he reportedly paid Mia only $200,000 for each of the 13 films she made with him. Her mother’s second husband, James Cushing, a businessman and producer, helped out with the children’s schooling. Nevertheless, financial worries were frequent. During her breakup with Previn, Mia moved to Martha’s Vineyard for a year but then ran out of money, so her mother took her and the children into her Manhattan apartment on Central Park West, and Mia worked on Broadway opposite Anthony Perkins in Romantic Comedy. “I think I was hoping I could patch things up with André,” she says.

A Chaotic Start

In a way, she was mirroring the hardships she had suffered growing up. From contracting polio at age 9 to the tragic death of her eldest brother, Michael, in a small-plane crash when he was 19, Mia Farrow had a life full of shocks and heartbreaks. Her father was a womanizer, and he and his equally hard-drinking wife never got over their son’s death. “After Michael died, for a lot of years, everyone went to hell,” says Roach. In a sprawling Beverly Hills household where the parents rarely ate with their children, the seven Farrow kids never had any extended family around. “You don’t feel rooted the way one might if you grew up in a town where your relatives were there and your base was there. No one I knew felt that in Beverly Hills,” says Mia. “Their parents came here and left their fate to luck, and they either lucked out or they didn’t. If they lucked out, their children didn’t know how to replicate that. A few did, like Michael Douglas or Jane Fonda, but there were many more who didn’t.”

Mia’s life became even more chaotic in 1963, when John Farrow died at 58 of a heart attack. Maureen O’Sullivan was starring in a play on Broadway, so she moved the children to New York. At 17, Mia started looking for acting and modeling work, because there wasn’t enough money for college. She posed for Diane Arbus and became the baby muse of Salvador Dalí in a totally platonic relationship. Her godfather, the director George Cukor, paid her $50 a week to go to every play on Broadway and write him a synopsis in order for him to decide if it would make a good movie. The younger siblings in the family were left to fend for themselves, with often sad results. Patrick, who had drug problems in youth and “terrifying emotional instability,” according to Mia, became a sculptor and committed suicide four years ago. Her estranged brother, John, recently pleaded guilty to sexually abusing young boys in Maryland. Susan Farrow, who was married to Patrick for 43 years, told me she once asked him if he had ever heard the word “normal” in his family, because “it was not normal.”

As the eldest daughter, however, Mia, even before she went to a convent boarding school in England, was always “very determined and bossy—the leader of the pack,” according to Roach. “It was something I was born with, a kind of determination,” Mia says. “Mia was almost too smart for school. She didn’t like rules,” says Roach, adding, “We absolutely had no supervision—we could escape and make our own fun.” Roach became a Playboy Bunny and later married the astronaut Scott Carpenter. Success for girls, she says, was defined by catching the right man, “and if that meant taking off your clothes or marrying an astronaut, you did it.” Mia hung with “the flighty, pretty girls,” Roach recalls. “It was not cool to be smart.” According to Mia, “If you come from where I came from, it was assumed that girls would just marry.”

Life with Mother

I was able to speak to eight of Mia’s children, who uniformly said they were not especially aware of how unique their situation was growing up. “I knew the status of my mom, but to me we were normal. My brothers were my brothers, and my sisters were my sisters. There was nothing special,” Daisy Previn, 39, told me. “We each had our own life, went to school, did our homework. My mom was there to sit down for dinner with us.” There was help in the house, but not a lot, and sometimes the teenage girls would complain about how much they had to babysit. I asked Daisy about their emotional issues and physical handicaps. “It wasn’t considered that you can’t see or you have this disability or that,” she said. “It was more that it was time to clean your rooms, so one person would help another one do it.” One of the accusations Woody Allen’s side made during the uproar with Soon-Yi was that Mia favored her biological children. Daisy disagrees: “If we got into trouble, it was no different than if a biological kid got into trouble. As far as love was concerned, there was no distinction. I gave my mom some very hard times growing up, but in the end she always said, ‘Remember, Daisy, I love you.’ ”

Most of the children used the same adjective for their situation: cool. “Not many people have that much variety, diversity. I liked that,” says Sascha Previn. “We all pitched in and helped each other out; we had to.” Isaiah, 21, who at six feet three and 275 pounds defines himself as “the large black male of the family,” adds, “In terms of size, composition, and disabilities, we weren’t normal, but we were great—we were so cool.” He credits Mia’s “unflinching honesty. She was very open about what each one of us is and where we came from. That became more normal to me than the regular 2.2 nuclear family. We got used to that as soon as we were old enough to understand some of us have physical or mental disabilities—so what? We are defined by more than just blood; we are brought together by love.”

“I am so proud of my family,” Ronan told me. “I grew up across the table from Moses, who has cerebral palsy, and next to my sister Quincy, born of a drug-addicted inner-city mother, and Minh, who is blind. I could never have understood what it means to grow up blind or with cerebral palsy. I saw problems and needs, so the next thing you think is: O.K., what are you going to do about it?”

I witnessed a real example of redemption one day at Frog Hollow when Thaddeus came to visit. As a paraplegic in Calcutta, he was discarded in a railway station and forced to crawl on his hands and stubs of legs to beg for food. Later, at an orphanage, he was chained to a post, and kids would throw rocks at him to prompt the mannish growls he made. When Mia saw him, she says, she had a powerful reaction: “That’s my son.” Mia thought he was 5, but when doctors examined his teeth, they determined he was 12. He was so filled with rage that he would bite Mia and try to pull her hair out. But she taught him that even if he could not choose how he was born he could choose how to behave. He shared a room with Isaiah, who describes him as “the hidden gem of the family. He is such a hard worker.” Thaddeus walks with crutches or uses a wheelchair. “It was scary to be brought to a world of people whose language I did not understand, with different skin colors,” he told me. “The fact that everyone loved me was a new experience, overwhelming at first.” He eventually found he had a talent for mechanics. Lying on his skateboard, he could push himself under cars to fix them. Mia tried to get him into a technical school, but they wouldn’t take him. Last Christmas he came home after spending a year living in upstate New York, losing weight, doing odd jobs. A girlfriend had started taking him to church, he said, and he had a spiritual awakening. He became a Good Samaritan, stopping to help people stranded along the roadside change their tires. He decided he wanted to work in law enforcement and talked his way into a criminal-justice program at a junior college. “You’re an inspiration,” the officer in charge told him. “I came back at Christmastime to tell Mia, ‘I know I never really said thank you, Mom.’ I just let out emotions I would never let myself express. Finally I was able to.”

Fletcher Previn, 39, is his mother’s protector. He built his first computer at age 13, and he painstakingly Photoshopped Woody Allen out of every single family photo and edited him out of family videos so that none of them would ever have to see him again. “We can look at them and be reminded of the good and not be reminded of the bad,” he told me.

Similarly, Carly Simon took Allen’s name out of the lyrics of her song “Love of My Life.” It originally read:

I love lilacs and avocados

Ukuleles and fireworks

And Woody Allen and walking in the snow

The new lyrics read, “ … And Mia Farrow and walking in the snow.” Simon sums up: “What a shock that all was. I will never see another Woody Allen movie.”

Many people feel protective of Mia, but Fletcher, who worked as Allen’s personal assistant on three films, has actually chosen to have his family live next door to her. His two daughters, seven and three, love to tromp through the nearby woods with their mother to visit Grandma, who reads to them and lets them color her toenails green and purple and play with her parakeet. “She’s an influence I want on my kids,” he says.

Shock Resistance

Not long after the crisis with Soon-Yi, compounded by the allegations of what had happened with Dylan, Fletcher took off to study in Germany, where he stayed several years. Sascha moved to Colorado, giving up a job he had in New York. “Devastating” is the word the children use for what happened to them. Daisy says, “It turned our world upside down. It was nothing you would wish on anyone.” Fletcher adds, “To my siblings and me, you thought of [Allen] as another dad. It can disrupt your foundation in the world. It resets the parameters of what is possible.”

The author Priscilla Gilman, Matthew Previn’s girlfriend in high school and college, was constantly in and out of Mia’s apartment. One day, she recalls, Matthew called her at Yale and said, “ ‘I have to come over. It’s just so horrible.’ He was green, and he fell on my sofa. ‘Woody’s having an affair with Soon-Yi.’ Soon-Yi was the last person I would have thought of,” she says. Matthew showed her the naked photos of Soon-Yi that Mia had found. “They were extremely pornographic—really disturbing.” Gilman says she had always thought Soon-Yi, whom she characterized as the nerd of the family, had a crush on Matthew. “He definitely picked on the most sheltered person,” she continues, referring to Allen. “It took her hours to do her homework; she had a tutor.” Soon-Yi also had trouble bonding. “I remember Matthew saying she’d scratch and spit at him,” says Gilman.

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the shocking photographs, in January 1992, Mia did not bar Allen from her house. She allowed him to visit his adopted children, and she finished the film they were working on, Husbands and Wives. “The kids have a right to be somewhat angry—she didn’t protect them,” says a legal observer. “She let it go on; she didn’t want to rock the boat. He was in therapy for inappropriate behavior with Dylan when he adopted her! Tell me that makes sense.” Gilman explains, “Mia didn’t want the media to know. She didn’t want Woody’s name tarnished.”

Allen, in turn, according to Gilman and others, did everything he could to woo Mia back and to continue seeing Dylan. “I did witness him begging her to get back together—many times,” Gilman asserts, “saying Soon-Yi meant nothing to him, and it was a ‘cry for help,’ because it was hard after the baby [Ronan] was born. I remember him coming over with presents.”

The next shock came when Mia was told it was mandatory for Dylan’s pediatrician to report her allegations to the authorities. A week after the report was filed, Allen, under investigation by the Connecticut State Police, filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to win custody of Moses, Dylan, and Ronan. He called a press conference to declare his love for Soon-Yi and to claim that Mia was making up accusations of child-molestation because she was basically a scorned woman. He called her actions “an unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children for vindictive and self-serving motives.” In an interview in Time magazine, he baldly declared, “The heart wants what it wants.”

Lark and Daisy, who had graduated from the elite Nightingale-Bamford School for girls, in New York, shared a room with Soon-Yi in Mia’s house. Lark was then in her last year of nursing school at New York University, and Daisy was a student at Wheaton College. They both dropped out. Lark broke up with her boyfriend, a football player at Columbia, and got pregnant by a man who had been in jail. Daisy got pregnant with his brother and later married him. Today, Daisy does not ascribe their actions to what happened at home. “It’s also a part of growing up,” she told me. “Everybody at one point makes their own stupid decisions.”

Mia is haunted by what-ifs: “How would everyone have turned out—how would everyone be—if this had not happened?” she asks. “Mia was going to be Woody’s inspiration, his muse,” says Carly Simon. “In some way her fantasy worked for him too. Then he rebelled against it, so fantastically, so cruelly.” Gilman adds, “She took children nobody wanted. Woody Allen gave a rebuke to the meaning of her life: ‘See, it doesn’t work out, Mia. You can’t make it better.’ ”

Fletcher is more direct: “There were casualties, who were totally derailed. It had a different impact on everyone, but everyone had a reaction.” Moses, he says, was crushed. He also singles out Lark, who died at 35. “I really do think he’s got some blood on his hands.”

Moving On

‘To this day it’s hard for me to listen to jazz,” Dylan told me. “He [Allen] would take me with him [when he practiced the clarinet with his band]. I’d be in between his legs, facing out. I felt like a dog or something. I was just told to sit there. I did what I was told. He used to sing to me the famous song ‘Heaven’ [“Cheek to Cheek,” by Irving Berlin]. It really sends shivers up and down my spine and makes me want to throw up, because it’s a throwback.”

Dylan (who now has another name) has never before spoken publicly of what she remembers about Allen and how his behavior back then has tormented her. She refuses ever to say his name. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, but what happened in the attic I remember. I remember what I was wearing and what I wasn’t wearing.” I asked her if what she had said happened in the attic happened more than once. “That was isolated. The rest was just everyday weirdness—the weird routine I thought was normal.”

Dylan is 28, a college graduate, married to an information-technology specialist who serves as her buffer. “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I would not be functioning without him.” Before our conversation, which lasted more than four hours, I promised her that I would not reveal where she lives or other identifying details. Quick-witted and extremely intelligent, she is writing and illustrating a 500-page novel in the Game of Thrones genre.

She recalls vividly how paparazzi swarmed outside Mia’s apartment building in the wake of the scandal. “If I had to use the main entrance to go to school, I had to be wrapped in blankets and carried to the car.” From the time she was able to register Allen’s obsessiveness toward her, Dylan said, she could never shake the feeling that she was disappointing one parent or the other. “After I told my mom what happened to me in the attic, I felt it was my fault,” she said. Individuals outside the family who were there at the time remarked to me how Dylan would shut down when Allen came around. She would complain of stomachaches and lock herself in the bathroom to avoid him. A babysitter testified that on the day of the alleged attic incident, while Mia was out shopping, she had come upon Allen in the TV room, kneeling, face forward, with his head in Dylan’s lap.

“I didn’t know anything formally wrong was going on,” Dylan said. “The things making me uncomfortable were making me think I was a bad kid, because I didn’t want to do what my elder told me to do.” The attic, she said, pushed her over the edge. “I was cracking. I had to say something. I was seven. I was doing it because I was scared. I wanted it to stop.” For all she knew, Dylan said, “this was how fathers treated their daughters. This was normal interaction, and I was not normal for feeling uncomfortable about it.” (Allen initially denied having gone into the attic. When hairs of his were found there, he said he might have popped his head in once or twice. Because of where the hair was found, his presence could not be proved conclusively.)