Allen doesn’t care what you think
Apropos of Nothing Woody Allen Arcade
“See what you think.”
With these words, halfway into his nearly-not-published autobiography, Woody Allen plunges into the thesis that he was falsely accused of child molestation in 1992. This was the year, amid a blistering breakup and custody battle with Mia Farrow, that he was investigated for assaulting her seven-year-old daughter, Dylan, a story he posits was a premeditated smear by Farrow.
Apropos of Nothing is the book that Allen’s accusers on the Farrow
side were appalled to learn was scheduled for publication by Hachette — the very firm that, in 2019, had published Catch and Kill by Dylan’s brother, the journalist Ronan Farrow.
Hachette’s staff walked out in protest. The publisher responded to the outrage by pulping the book. Now, the smaller firm Arcade has stepped in, releasing Apropos of Nothing without fanfare. Three hundred of these 400 pages cover, unapologetically and with gossipy glee, the unrelated sprawl of Allen’s life and work. The harrowing Dylan drama is addressed in unsparing detail. Allen reasserts his position — that Dylan was schooled and “brainwashed” into remembering something in the attic crawl space of her mother’s Connecticut home — and marshals his case compellingly, more or less wherever you’re sitting. On his side, he does have the two official investigating teams from 1992-93 who threw out the charges; a series of psychologists, several nannies and caretakers (fired by Farrow); and most potently, Dylan’s older brother Moses, whose 2018 open letter, contradicts almost point-bypoint the testimony Dylan set down when she reaccused Allen in 2014. Were there toy trains in the attic, as she recalls and Moses disputes? Why would Allen wait to abuse an adored child in the most toxic and closely watched circumstances of his adult life? No one outside the family can realistically claim to have all the answers here.
Allen romps through his childhood as a smart-alecky Brooklyn film nut, and bounds into his fluky (as he sees it), career breaks with the irresistible self-deprecation that’s always been his stock-in-trade. Name-dropping just enough high culture to make his punchlines sparkle was a grifter’s skill in itself, launching him halfway to fame as a screenwriter and standup comic. It was all down to the gift of the gab.
True, he takes heterosexuality to weirdly neurotic extremes — so much so he panics even at sharing a bathroom with another man.
As an unlikely Lothario, Allen has few equals. Is he obsessed with barely legal sex partners? He says no, claiming only his current wife, the 35-years-younger Soon-yi, is significantly his junior, along with ex-girlfriend Stacey Nelkin, on whom he based Tracy, Mariel Hemingway’s 17-year-old character in Manhattan. He’s never been less apologetic than he is at 84. Believe him? Write him off as a rapist who got away? He says he’ll be dead too soon to care profoundly, but you might as well know where he stands.
London Daily Mail