‘Lust reigned supreme — we couldn’t keep our hands off each other'
Those are the shocking words of Woody Allen in his bombshell new memoir, as he reveals how he fell for Mia Farrow’s 21-year–old daughter and claims he’s a victim of smears
HE WAS a 55-year-old Oscarwinning actor and film director, she an ‘attractive, young girl in from college’ to whom he’d just shown a gloomy Ingmar Bergman film in his cosy editing room.
What could be more natural for him than to lean in and, in his words, ‘quite smoothly if I say so myself ’, kiss her?
She reciprocated. ‘I was wondering when you were going to make a move,’ she apparently told him. Soon it would go much further. ‘At the very early stages of our new relationship, when lust reigns supreme . . . we couldn’t keep our hands off each other,’ he excitedly recalled.
So begins Woody Allen’s breathless version of how he started his controversial affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the 21-year-old adopted daughter of his actress girlfriend Mia Farrow, with whom he had four children.
Given the 35-year age difference and their close family connection, the scandal led to the collapse of his relationship with the star of Rosemary’s Baby and The Great Gatsby. It was swiftly followed by accusations — which have since derailed Allen’s acclaimed career — that he sexually abused their seven-year-old daughter, Dylan.
Allen, 84, has now returned fire on his accusers — not only defending his own conduct but making devastating accusations about Farrow and their journalist son Ronan — in his searing new memoirs.
The mere existence of his book, Apropos Of Nothing, in the #MeToo era was so controversial that its original publisher Hachette, faced with a staff revolt, pulped the first print run.
And that was that, thought many of his critics. But yesterday, it was quietly released by an independent publishing house, Arcade, dropping like a bombshell on a New York already traumatised by coronavirus.
In a joke-laden, often self-effacing but highly defensive book, Allen stands up for his relationship with Soon-Yi and portrays himself as the hapless victim of a disturbed Farrow.
She, along with Ronan and Dylan, says he abused the latter, while the two siblings also raged against the injustice of Allen being able to publish his version of events without them being able to ‘fact check’ it. Indeed, a source close to the Farrow family said it was ‘not going to comment on yet another rehash of Woody Allen’s lies’.
Meanwhile others, including author Stephen King, expressed fears that Hachette’s panicked dropping of Allen’s book would only encourage censorship. Within hours of it going on sale yesterday, Allen’s 400-page memoir was denounced as ‘self-pitying’ and ‘tone deaf’.
FOR there can be no doubt that the director of Manhattan and Annie Hall doesn’t waste the opportunity of settling old scores. He insists his tawdry reputation for being attracted to ‘young girls’ is vastly undeserved as they account for only a fraction of the women in his life. Allen also claims to see nothing wrong with his relationship with Soon-Yi, which started in 1991 and — after they married secretly in Venice in 1997 — has continued ever since. They have two adopted children.
Allen met the ambitious Farrow, 11 years his junior, in 1979. She was already the mother of six children, three of them adopted. She had adopted Soon-Yi, the daughter of a Korean prostitute, as a seven-year-old when she was married to conductor Andre Previn.
During her 12-year relationship with Allen, she also adopted a two-year-old Korean boy named Moses in 1980 and a newborn American girl, Dylan, in 1985.
In 1987, Farrow gave birth to a boy, Satchel, now called Ronan, who was presumed to be the son of Allen — although Farrow has hinted he might have been sired by her former husband Frank Sinatra.
Allen claims in his book that he had initially found Soon-Yi — who Farrow told him was ‘retarded’ — to be sullen and hostile towards him, and feared she would punch him when he first kissed her.
Instead, he writes, they had soon embarked on an affair that was ‘passionate from that day on’. Addressing Farrow’s controversial discovery that he had naked pictures of her daughter, Allen says Soon-Yi took the ‘erotic photographs’ as he didn’t know how to use his camera. The shots, he adds, were ‘well calculated to boost one’s blood up to 212° Fahrenheit’ and he put them on his mantelpiece.
Allen does admit he ‘understands’ Farrow’s shock and rage on seeing them.
‘It was the correct reaction,’ he writes. ‘Soon-Yi and I thought we could have our little fling, keep it a secret, since Soon-Yi wasn’t living at home and I lived alone like a bachelor. I thought it would have been a nice experience, and probably Soon-Yi would eventually meet some guy at college and enter a more conventional relationship.’
But it soon became clear ‘how attached to each other we’d already grown’ and he left Farrow, insisting his relationship with the actress had already gone cold.
He continues: ‘It has resulted now in many happy years and a wonderful family. Who would have predicted? I only knew she was not the nonentity her mother had dismissed and written off. How wrong
Mia was.’ Allen dedicates the book to his wife, writing: ‘For Soon-Yi, the best.
‘I had her eating out of my hand and then I noticed my arm was missing.’
According to Allen, Farrow reacted hysterically to discovering their affair, telling her children Allen had raped Soon-Yi and hit her daughter with a phone. She also vowed, he says, that just as he had taken away her daughter, he would take away his — Dylan, whom he ‘adored’.
In fact, Farrow was supposedly so determined to poison the family against Allen that, when he visited them at her Connecticut country home in August 1992, she pinned a note on his bedroom door which read: ‘Child molester at the barbecue. Molested one daughter, now after another.’
For his part, Allen claims
Soon-Yi was hardly a child anyway as she was in her 20s at the time — and he believes the note was an indication that he was being ‘set up for a false accusation’.
During that visit, a babysitter claimed she saw him put his head in seven-year-old Dylan’s lap as they watched TV — though Allen says it would have been ‘utterly harmless and totally appropriate’.
The incident would ‘over time somehow metamorphose’ into Farrow’s allegation that he sexually abused Dylan in the attic of the house.
It was, he claims, ‘a totally nonexistent event, obviously made up by a woman who deeply sought vengeance, [that] would turn into an international cavalcade, an industry that would cost millions and millions of dollars and touch many lives’.
In the toxic custody battle that followed, Allen claims he was contacted by Andre Previn’s exwife, Dory, who told him Farrow had once written a song called ‘Daddy in the attic’ which she believed had given her the idea for the ‘fake’ story.
ALTHOUGH Allen was never charged, he lost custody and even visitation rights with Dylan, whom he hasn’t seen since.
He said his letters to her were intercepted by Ronan who would write back saying his sister wasn’t interested in seeing him.
Allen writes that his inability to be able to raise Dylan has been ‘one of the saddest things of my life’. She had grown up ‘with the fake story relentlessly drummed into her that she was abused’.
Looking back, he blames his own naivety for not recognising the ‘red flags’ that Mia Farrow was trouble. While he was the relatively innocent product of a modest but happy family upbringing in Brooklyn, Farrow was ‘an extremely troubled woman’ and a ‘convincing actress’ whose Hollywood royalty family had a history of drugs, crime, suicide, mental illness and a brother convicted of child molesting.
Allen claims he wrongly believed she had been ‘unscathed’ and was instead bowled over by the intelligence and beauty of this ‘dream girl’. With the benefit of hindsight, he claims he failed to note that there was anything ‘more than unusual’ about a woman who had three biological children and then adopted four more.
‘She liked the saintly reputation, the admiring publicity but she didn’t like raising the kids and didn’t really look after them,’ he says mercilessly, saying he is only quoting Soon-Yi. He claims she treated the adopted children as ‘new toys’, sending them back if they were too problematic. But
Allen wasn’t put off by her insistence on taking things fast.
Just weeks into their relationship, he says Farrow turned to him and said: ‘I want to have your baby.’ A few weeks after that, she suggested they get married.
Allen said ‘No’ and reveals that in their dozen years together, he never spent a single night at her Manhattan home (always returning to his own apartment across Central Park).
He compares her to a Black Widow spider, who was desperate to have his children but once he had ‘impregnated’ her with Ronan — who was born in 1987 — saw no further need for him.
Turning to his son, Allen claims that Ronan, now a journalist who played a key role in exposing the predatory behaviour of Harvey Weinstein, has a ‘creepy motherson’ relationship with Farrow.
He says the domineering Farrow was ‘unnaturally obsessed’ with him and — according to a babysitter — would sometimes sleep naked in bed with her ‘prized’ son until he was 11. ‘I don’t know what the anthropologists would say about that, but I can imagine what the guys in the pool room would say,’ Allen writes.
Quoting Moses — one of Farrow’s adopted children who has since sided with Allen — he says that Farrow once forced Ronan to have immensely painful cosmetic surgery on his legs to make them longer. Although Farrow insists he needed the surgery after contracting a disease abroad, she allegedly told Moses that Ronan needed to be tall for a career in politics.
On rumours that Ronan may be Sinatra’s son, Allen writes: ‘I think he’s mine, though I’ll never really know. She may still have been sleeping with Frank, as she hinted, and may have had any number of outside affairs, for all I know.’
Meanwhile, Allen admits the accusations about Dylan have made him a ‘pariah’ for many in the film industry and he had immense difficulty finding actors willing to work on his most recent film, A Rainy Day In New York, which remains unavailable in the US due to his notoriety.
But that’s as far as Allen goes in expressing any regret.
‘Sometimes, when the going got rough and I was maligned everywhere, I was asked if I had known the outcome, do I ever wish I never took up with Soon-Yi?’
His response is unequivocal: ‘I always answered I’d do it again in a heartbeat.’