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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 54

WOODY ALLEN

Scenes from a Breakup


A storied love affair crashes in shards as Mia Farrow accuses
Woody Allen of incest and child molestation. For the prurient,
it was a delight; for Allen and for Farrow's motley family,
a piteous descent into hell.

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Georgia Harbison/ New
York, with other bureaus


    Woody and Mia. No last names, please, for the king and
queen of Manhattan's glitterati. For a decade they were the
wax-doll couple atop a cake at the wedding of popular art and
social responsibility. He made, and she starred in, movies that
played like fantasies of their partnership. Offscreen, their
liaison produced the portrait of an ideal postmodern family.
Unmarried, they lived apart yet loved together. While nurturing
a rainbow coalition of privileged American kids and children
salvaged from the Third World, Mom and Dad lived the city's most
public private lives. Tout New York was their movie set, Madison
Square Garden their all-star playground, the chic eatery
Elaine's their kitchen. Central Park was their shared backyard.
From their respective apartment windows on opposite sides of the
park, they would wave love at each other.

    That patch of green is now their DMZ. Woody Allen,
America's most revered and introspective filmmaker, and Mia
Farrow, the waif who matured into a madonna in reel and real
life, are at war. What began as a skirmish over custody rights
of three children escalated early last week when Allen declared
that he was in love with one of Farrow's adopted daughters,
Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. Then the tabloid artillery went
ballistic. The Connecticut police were investigating a complaint
of child molestation against Allen. It was revealed that Farrow
discovered the infidelity when she found nude photos of Soon-Yi
that Allen had taken. Farrow was mobilizing her loyal kids,
sending them to newspapers and TV shows, to defend her
motherhood. Those close to Allen charged Farrow with beating
Soon-Yi upon learning of the affair, and of mistreating her
adopted brood. Each day's accusations were grotesque -- and, as
they say, growing tesquer.

    This was not mere celebrity dish; this was rancid food for
thought. The clash raised troubling questions for every nouveau
Brady Bunch family, every jerry-built alliance of siblings who
are more like classmates and parents who may be only lovers.
What is incest? How affectionate can a man be to those in his
care? What is a father? How much distance must he put between
himself and his unofficial children before he is free to date
one of them?

    The battle of Woody and Mia has already claimed
casualties, real and figurative. Allen's life and eminence seem
permanently branded; the only major filmmaker since Charlie
Chaplin to be commonly referred to by his first name is now
likely to be remembered in part, as Chaplin is, as a despoiler
of young women. Manhattan divorce attorney Raoul Felder,
alluding to another disgraced director, says of Allen, "He can
put his career in an envelope and mail it to Roman Polanski."

    Farrow's reputation as an All-World Mother, selflessly
adopting children to show them a good life and maternal love,
is shrouded in suspicion. Soon-Yi, who says she is 21, has
tumbled at least in her siblings' eyes from child-woman to Other
Woman. Dylan, the seven-year-old girl adopted by Farrow and
Allen, is scarred by the accusations of child abuse. And the
other children must be suffering psychic retinal damage from the
blinding heat of the infotainment dragon. Another casualty is
the fond notion -- held by many otherwise cynical folk on both
coasts and by not a few people in between -- that the Woody-Mia
story was a liaison for the ages. This was the last light that
failed.

    The moral: Never believe in the fairy tales movie people
create. They will buoy your spirit and, with the flick of a
headline, crush it. Another moral: Don't always heed what you
read. The tabloid newspapers, especially in New York City, have
feasted on this fracas, one-upping each other daily in the body
count of revoltin' developments. With all the soiled laundry of
unverified allegations, the facts are hard to determine, let
alone the truth. Every journalist is, perforce, a garbologist.

    So what can we find in the rubble?

    Allen and Farrow have been a couple since 1980. For the
first five years, their affair was carried on mostly at his
apartment, rarely at hers, which for years has been overflowing
with kids and pets: Farrow now has four biological and seven
adopted children. "She likes to spend tons of time with kids,"
he told author Eric Lax in a biography published last year, in
enumerating the opposites that attracted him to her. "I like to
spend . . . only a limited time with kids." But the warming
intensity of their companionship led Allen to a decision he had
avoided in two marriages, to Harlene Rosen and actress Louise
Lasser, and in a long affair with actress Diane Keaton: to have
a child. Satchel (named for ageless pitcher Satchel Paige) was
born in 1987. In this Allen found the joy of fatherhood -- and
of his relationship with Farrow. Mia, Woody told Lax, "has
brought a completely different, meaningful dimension to my
life."

    Allen, by all accounts, radiated a fatherly devotion
toward Satchel and the two children he adopted with Farrow:
Dylan and 14-year-old Moses. Says an old friend, TV personality
Dick Cavett: "He completely rearranged his man-killingly busy
life so that he could lavish time and money and attention on the
children, probably more than many orthodox parents do. He'd get
up at 5 and religiously make it over there seven days a week."
And Farrow was devoted to his devotion. But after Satchel's
birth, the romance began to wane. Their partnership has been
platonic for four years, Allen says, and it is not known what
efforts either party made for sexual companionship in the
interim.

    Allen frequently escorted Farrow's children to sports
events, movies, the circus. Two years ago, Allen, who says he
had previously paid little attention to Soon-Yi, began taking
her to Knicks games at the Garden. Allen said in an interview
with TIME that their sexual relationship blossomed late last
year. It was not until January that Farrow learned of the
affair. Yet the director and his star continued working on their
new film Husbands and Wives, due to be released on Sept. 23.

    A few weeks ago, Allen visited Farrow's family in her
Connecticut home. Shortly thereafter, Farrow talked with Dylan,
and recorded the conversations on videotape, to determine
whether the child had been abused. Farrow took Dylan to a
physician, who, obliged by Connecticut law to do so, reported
the claim of abuse to the police, and Allen was a candidate for
questioning. Within a week he filed for custody of his three
children. And early last week he publicly announced his love for
Soon-Yi. In a phrase echoing his declaration about Farrow, he
said Soon-Yi "has and continues to turn around my life in a
wonderfully positive way."

    It didn't stay wonderful. As New York Newsday blared in
its Tuesday headline: IT'S GETTING UGLY. The Connecticut
charges hit the papers, and Farrow's support team started
spreading the bad news. Her friend Maria Roach released a Farrow
letter, eloquent in its rage and despair: "I have spent more
than a dozen years with a man who would destroy me and corrupt
my daughter, leading her into a betrayal of her mother and her
principles, leaving her morally bankrupt with the bond between
us demolished. I can think of no crueler way to lose a child or
a lover." Another adopted daughter, Lark, 18, visited the
offices of the New York Post, telling of a traumatic powwow
Farrow held with her older children during which Soon-Yi was
told to choose between Woody and Mommy.

    In addition to the lawyers advising her on the custody
case, Farrow retained attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has acquired
the odor of a Lamborghini ambulance chaser for his showboating
defenses of the rich and heinous (Claus von Bulow, Leona
Helmsley, Mike Tyson). Dershowitz contended that Allen's custody
suit was "concocted" to obscure the issue of child molestation.
He denied Allen's charge that Farrow, who took no alimony in her
divorces from Frank Sinatra and composer-conductor Andre Previn,
was demanding $7 million as a payoff to retract the child-abuse
accusation. "Baloney," said Dershowitz; Farrow only "wants her
family back. She wants to protect her children from Woody. She
does not want him to have unrestricted visitation. Protection,
not money, has been her main concern."

    In midweek the Allen empire struck back. His lawyers
pointed out, as Allen had, that child abuse is an issue often
spuriously raised in custody cases and that the filmmaker had
passed a polygraph test on the issue of molesting his kids.
Farrow had recently adopted Tam, a blind Vietnamese girl, and
Isaiah, a crack baby. "To bring all these children with various
disabilities and other factors into the family is of great
concern to him," said one of Allen's attorneys, Harvey Sladkus,
painting his client as more concerned for the young children's
welfare than Farrow was.

    Friends and family rushed to defend Allen and attack
Farrow. The day after she allegedly learned of her child's
molestation, she made a date with the costume designer of
Allen's next film -- not the behavior of a woman who believed
her ex-lover and director to have preyed on her daughter. Farrow
was a daft and brutal mother, the Allen camp said: she beat
Soon-Yi and tore up her clothes in anger at the girl's affair.
They whispered, as Soon-Yi finally said publicly, that the other
children had fallen into "theft, alcohol, arrests, severe
truancy and other symptoms."

    Allen's sister, Letty Aronson, a vice president at
Manhattan's Museum of Television and Radio, catalogs Farrow's
sins: "Mia adopts children in a manic nature -- not for their
needs but for hers. She favors her biological children while
treating the older adopted kids as servants. I think Mia always
had a grand plan to meet Woody, have a relationship with him,
be in his films and eventually have his child. Once she did,
things began to deteriorate. But even after she knew about
Woody's affair, she still wanted to continue her relationship.
If he gave up Soon-Yi, Mia would make the children accessible
and drop the charges. She'd even want him back."

    Aronson denies that Allen was a father figure to Soon-Yi.
"Andre Previn was her father," she says. "He supported her; he
visited her; they saw him on vacations." She also disputes the
image of Farrow as an Earth-Mother Teresa. Early this year,
Aronson says, Mia journeyed to Vietnam to adopt a boy, and she
"dragged Satchel along -- he wasn't even four -- exposing him
to illnesses and disease." The adoptee was using a wheelchair.
When Mia returned, says Aronson, she took the boy to a doctor
and learned he might also be slightly retarded. "That was not
a handicap that suited her, so she pawned him off on another
family. She gave him back to the woman who had arranged the
adoption."

    Attending to this misery, thoughtful people feel sick.
Then they pose questions -- not whethers but whys: why Allen
stayed with Farrow through her adoption obsession; why Farrow
remained allied with Allen after discovering the affair; why
both are forcing or allowing their families, including their
children, to shill for them in the media. And of course, why
Allen could not have shown the slightest moral etiquette,
resisted temptation and kept his hands off Soon-Yi.

    Allen's argument goes like this: Once upon a time, he and
Mia were together, adopted kids, had one. When they stopped
having sex, it was as if they were divorced but retained joint
custody of the children. He was surely divorced emotionally; he
could see no betrayal of Mia by turning to Soon-Yi. Perhaps Mia
was still in love with him, assuming she had any love left
over. But if Farrow's love turned to total obsession -- the
woman-scorned syndrome, which could provoke fantasies of child
abuse -- Allen's had long since become total detachment. That
is why he admits not the slightest ethical error or ambiguity
in his affair with Soon-Yi. It is also what blinds him to one
crucial fact: he may not have considered himself Soon-Yi's
father; but he must have known that Farrow considered herself
Soon-Yi's mother.

    It is said, perhaps too easily, that we marry our parents
-- fall in love, that is, with people who resemble them. It is
also said that we repeat our parents' behavior. Children of
alcoholics are more likely to be alcoholics; abused kids too
often become abusing parents. In this case we can see, or at
least surmise, some piquant re-enactments of unusual life
stories.

    Mia was born into Hollywood royalty, the third of seven
children of actress Maureen O'Sullivan (who played an
unflattering version of herself in Allen's Hannah and Her
Sisters) and director John Farrow (whose films include Sorority
House, Full Confession, Married and in Love and Easy Come, Easy
Go). As a child Mia had do-gooder dreams of becoming a
Schweitzer-like doctor in the tropics; each Christmas she staged
a pageant and sent the proceeds to the March of Dimes. The
actress scored hits as a moody teen on TV's Peyton Place and a
wife giving birth to the devil's son in Rosemary's Baby. At 21,
Soon-Yi's present age, Mia married a famous entertainer in his
50s: Sinatra. After the divorce she was befriended by songwriter
Dory Previn; she had an affair with Previn's husband Andre and
became pregnant. They married, had three biological children and
adopted three more. Soon-Yi was one of them.

    Allen was born into Bronx serfdom, the son of Martin and
Nettie Konigsberg, still happily married after 62 years. His
psychograph is to be found mainly in the emotional autobiography
he has transformed into comedy routines and then movie art. As
Ice-T can attest, it is treacherous to mistake the singer for
the song. And it is presumptuous for the public to believe it
"knows" Woody Allen. And yet Allen's work presents itself as so
nakedly, ostentatiously about himself that it seems fair to
subject it to a critic's equivalent of the psychoanalysis he has
undergone for decades. Many of his monologues and films have
dealt not just with middle-aged men falling in love with
teenagers or infantile women but with the titanic, tragicomic
struggle of intellect and lust.

    It is a struggle, his films say, of man with himself.
Women are the objects, the prizes, the threat. Perhaps this is
why he has often portrayed them as voracious or vapid, why a
hint of misogyny courses through his oeuvre. Allen's first wife
brought a $1 million suit charging Allen with "holding her up
to scorn and ridicule" after finding herself, as French critic
Robert Benayoun writes in a sympathetic biography of Allen, "the
source of numerous stories [that] turned her private life into
a national joke." Keaton and Farrow, his two longtime romantic
companions and frequent co-stars, often played neurotic
child-women, stuttering to finish a sentence, in wry awe of the
man in their grasp: Woody Allen. He may have idolized them too,
but with the indulgent devotion of a grownup to his precocious
daughter.

    These days, as notorious gentlemen from Rob Lowe to
Clarence Thomas have proved, every scandal is a career move.
Indiscretions that movie stars once paid to suppress they now
discuss on Oprah and Arsenio; those modern-day analysts' couches
have become celebrities' thrones. Allen the filmmaker can use
this publicity; his recent movies have been flops. (An industry
axiom: everybody knows Woody Allen, but nobody goes to his
movies.) It is even likely that the brouhaha will boost Husbands
and Wives at the box office, at least until people decide
whether they like it or not. For Farrow the actress, the spin
is not so profitable. For years she has taken the exclusive role
of Allen's Galatea. Now that's over. She has been replaced in
his next project, Manhattan Murder Mystery, by another actress:
Diane Keaton.

    The human heart is a dark forest. Most of us are strangers
to one another and to ourselves. At this late date in human
devolution, we should be surprised by no atrocity, no anarchic
spasm of the emotions, no paternal love turned to lust, no
feelings of rejection twisted into an urge to revenge. We should
be surprised only by our surprise. The innocent prurience of our
tabloid souls suggests that a deep part of us craves for people
to be good and for beginnings, at least, to be happy.

    So think of Allen as Woody, the movie gnome taking
pleasure in the pinwheeling of his mind and in the lust for
romantic love. And think of Farrow as Mamma Mia, years ago, just
after she had adopted Soon-Yi. To her friend (and onetime
stepdaughter) Nancy Sinatra, Mia wrote this: "My children are
a continuous joy. The latest is Soon-Yi (aged 6, 7 or 8 -- we're
saying 7). She's from Korea -- was found abandoned in the
streets of Seoul -- with rickets, malnutrition -- even her
finger nails had fallen off, she had lice and sores everywhere.
Now she speaks English and is learning to read, write, play
piano, dance ballet & ride a horse. She is also learning that
people can be believed in and even loved. These are golden times
and I am aware of that every single second."

    The thing to be astonished by, every single second, is not
that love can be tarnished but that times can ever be golden.