Scenes From A Breakup

By RICHARD CORLISS

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.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/ New York, with other bureaus