The Last Word

CREEP, GENIUS, AUTEUR

Ijust finished reading famed film maker Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, in which he discusses his life from childhood to his current age of 84. I borrowed it from the library, since as a disillusioned fan, I was not sure I wanted him to receive more of my money. I have kept up with him out of fascination for his artistry since I first encountered his work at age fifteen. His custody fight over the children he adopted with Mia Farrow first swept the news in the early 1990s, and recently was resurrected during the #MeToo era, as his purported son, Ronan Farrow, raked powerful men like movie impresario Harvey Weinstein over the coals for his abuse of women.

Although Woody Allen grew up in a loving home in Brooklyn, he describes himself as an anxious misanthrope by nature. From the very beginning, he was good at baseball and other sports, but hated the boredom and repetition of school despite, or probably because, of his high IQ. He also denies his reputation as an intellectual, saying that his black glasses and ability to extract apt quotations from serious thinkers and writers helped him gain that reputation. He proclaims that his penchant for intellectual, bohemian girls also made him bone up on certain academic subjects to attract them. His parents did not encourage intellectual activities, and he cut high school many times to go to the movies and art museums, also learning to play the clarinet after discovering a lifelong love for jazz.

At sixteen he started writing jokes and submitting them to various newspaper columns across New York City. Finally some of them made it into the paper, and he started making more money even than his shady but loving father, who bounced from job to job, letting his stern mother Nettie hold down the family and pay the bills. Once he was able, he married his first wife Harlene very young, eventually divorcing her and marrying actress Louise Lasser, a mercurial woman with undiagnosed mental illnesses whom he loved but couldn’t live with. In the meantime, he honed his craft, writing for the groundbreaking comedy variety series Your Show of Shows in the 1950s, and signing up with the fabled comedy agents Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, who pushed him to go out on the comedy circuit instead of just writing for other performers.

After his second divorce, Allen took up with the quirky, lovely, and unsophisticated Diane Keaton. While they only remained together romantically for one year, they remained lifetime friends. One of his first big hit plays and movies, Play It Again Sam, featured her as his lead actress. She would go on to win the Best Actress Oscar in one of Woody Allen’s most famous films, which incorporated aspects of her life and their sweet relationship. That movie also won Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Woody Allen, along with Best Movie for producer Charles Joffe, who stuck with him for most of his movies.

Eventually he came to know Mia Farrow, a gifted actress who had already established a pop culture presence through her Hollywood parents, director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’ Sullivan, and her marriage to Frank Sinatra. She also was known as a selfless maternal figure who had a number of children and adopted others, many from South Korea.

Allen and Farrow were together for twelve years. Most people who care about Allen’s films know that they were fruitful years artistically. Yet they ended in disaster when Woody Allen started an affair with Mia Farrow’s daughter, SoonYi Previn, then somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one according to her uncertain birth records. Allen sued unsuccessfully for custody of his so-called biological child, Satchel, renamed Ronan; Dylan; and Moses. The stigma of his leaving nude pictures of Soon-Yi on a mantelpiece, where Mia had originally found them, left many people, including me, disgusted and in shock.

Eight months after finding the pictures, Mia filed suit against him for molesting Dylan. Mutual accusations flew back and forth, in which Woody accused Mia of locking her adopted children into closets if they did not follow her orders and brainwashing her daughter Dylan, then seven years old, into testifying against him. Mia’s adopted son Moses, an adoption therapist, defected