Wild and Woody

Though there may have been sex scandals more far-reaching, surely the most downright bizarre one that we’ve covered is the love affair between Woody Allen and Soon

Yi Previn. Ever since it broke in 1992, polite New York society has been horrified — and fascinated — by their, er, remarkable romance. After a series of horrified denials by Allen’s flacks, it finally emerged that Allen was dating Previn, the adoptive daughter of Allen’s thenwife Mia Farrow and conductor

André Previn. In a revelation icky for the couple, Page Six reported in April 1997 that the couple were “quietly trying to adopt a baby girl” from “the same Texas agency from which Woody and his former flame Mia Farrow adopted their own daughter, Dylan.” At the time, Allen’s longtime flack Leslee Dart said: “It’s not true, I’m afraid.” The couple have since adopted two children.

On Christmas Eve that year, we reported that Allen and Previn had married in Venice. The endlessly acrimonious custody battle between Allen and Farrow over their adopted kids Moshe and Dylan (who Allen has been accused of molesting, a claim that the director has persistently denied) proved no less jaw-dropping. After Farrow claimed in court that an ex — assumed to be Mob-connected Frank Sinatra — had offered to have Allen’s legs broken by John Gotti’s associates, we reported that “Allen . . . believed he was in real danger” and recruited “a Queens private detective known as “Gotti’s P.I.” to go to the federal prison “where the Dapper Don [was] serving a life sentence, to plead the Wood Man’s case.”