Scenes From Parenthood

By Paul Gray

EVEN WITH THE LIKES OF WOODY Allen and Mia Farrow on the witness stand, Room 341 of the State Supreme Court building in lower Manhattan can seldom be described as "hushed." The din of construction work and the shriek of police sirens outside easily penetrate the courtroom windows. The government-issue wooden chairs pop and creak when their occupants change position, which, given the occasional lulls of legalese, happens regularly.

Thus spectators and reporters had to strain to hear the response last week when Acting Justice Elliott Wilk asked a simple, direct question: Should the world-famous director/actor/writer or his leading lady and companion of 12 years be granted custody of the three children they share?

The witness whose opinion was requested -- Susan Coates, a clinical psychologist -- had been called by Allen's lawyers. Interestingly enough, even she would not choose outright between the contesting parents, saying, "What is critical for the children is that they find a way to have both a mother and a father."

That was a sensible, safe answer, but it did not address the growing conviction that those parents could not simultaneously be Woody and Mia. The picture their own testimony afforded left the sympathies of many onlookers not so much divided as wiped out entirely. So the judge's inquiry provided a welcome reminder that behind the scenes of their public squabble -- a spectacle that has been part psychodrama, part farce -- rests something important and tangible: the futures of three children.

It was easy to forget this elemental fact when Woody and Mia -- once filmdom's most ostentatiously reclusive couple -- took the stand at the custody trial. He wore his trademark rumpled tweed sport coat, prompting observers to wonder, Was it the same one every day, or did he own many jackets that just looked the same? She favored severe blazers and blouses buttoned all the way up. Costumes aside, both tried to give the impression that the other was unfit to be a parent. In large measure, they both succeeded.

Woody's claim to custody of five-year-old Satchel, their biological son, as well as their adopted daughter Dylan, 7, and son Moses, 15, was shadowed by his admitted affair with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, now 22, adopted daughter of Mia and her second husband, composer Andre Previn. While acknowledging at last that "perhaps this was wrong, not wise," Allen still professed some bewilderment at the furor this liaison has caused. "At the very outset," he testified, "it didn't occur to me that this would be anything but a private thing." And the Polaroid photographs he took of a nude Soon-Yi in January of last year? "She suggested that I take some pictures of her without her clothes on. I said, 'Sure.' " The problem, Allen said in mild and sometimes stuttering testimony, occurred when Farrow almost immediately discovered these snapshots on a mantelpiece in his Fifth Avenue apartment. Her fury, he testified, has resulted in "a nightmare none of us have recovered from."

That seems incontestable, given Farrow's allegation last August that Allen had molested Dylan in the actress's house in Bridgewater, Connecticut. Allen has vigorously denied this accusation, implying it is simply Farrow's revenge for his affair with Soon-Yi. Allen and his team of lawyers claim that a private report by child-abuse specialists at Yale-New Haven Hospital has cleared him of the abuse charge. Farrow and her lawyers dispute the report's conclusion.

On the stand, Farrow described Allen as a man who ignored his other children while attending to Dylan so obsessively that the girl screamed, "Hide me! Hide me!" when he came for visits. Yet Farrow found it hard to explain why, if she had long been troubled by Woody's behavior toward Dylan, she allowed him to adopt the girl in 1991. (Farrow adopted Dylan shortly after her birth in 1985.) Further, she admitted that after learning of the affair between Soon-Yi and the man she began calling a "moral tumbleweed," she seriously considered marrying him. Allen described two trysts with Farrow at a Manhattan hotel at which he hoped to placate his furious longtime companion. At one, he said, she grew hysterical: "I thought she was going to jump out the window. Then I realized, mercifully, that the Carlyle's windows are glass walls."

By the time they got through with each other on the stand, glass walls surrounded the entire Woody/ Mia menagerie. An angry letter from Moses to Allen ("I hope you get so humiliated you commit suicide") was read aloud; Allen countered that the wording sounded as though it had been provided by Farrow. Both parties charged the other with emotional and physical mistreatment of children. Mia hit Soon-Yi. Woody pushed Dylan's face into a plate of hot spaghetti and threatened to break Satchel's leg. On and on the recitation of damage went, as if both Allen and Farrow were determined to prove again that all unhappy families are unhappy in different -- and remarkably tawdry -- ways.

Eventually Judge Wilk will have to make a custody decision in this case, perhaps one of the least appealing chores in recent memory. In the Old Testament, King Solomon faced a similar dilemma, which he solved by proposing to cut the contested child in half. He presumed that the more loving parent would relinquish the child rather than see it harmed. That approach might not work this time. Given what they have already done to each other and their children, there is no guarantee that Allen or Farrow would say no.