Mia's tale is a cry from the heart

What Falls Away

Mia Farrow

Doubleday/Transworld Publishers, London, 1997

370 pp.

Rp 72,100

JAKARTA (JP): There is no hidden agenda in Mia Farrow's memoirs. It is laid bare for all to see in the jacket photograph -- the actress, scrubbed of all makeup and looking decades younger than her 52 years, gazes beatifically ahead, all limpid blue eyes and a blanket of freckles mapping her face.

But the real Farrow, no relation to air-brushed images and the urgings of spin doctors, is revealed in her own words as she discusses the often tragic twists and turns of her life, particularly the tangled, sordid break up of her relationship with Woody Allen.

The Allen affair is less than a third of the book, which also spans Farrow's childhood, her acting career, marriages to Frank Sinatra and composer Andre Previn, and her adoption of children from around the world. But the Allen section inevitably makes for the most salacious, intriguing and also distasteful reading.

That said, any urge to skip forward to the final pages should be stifled. Farrow writes beautifully (there is no acknowledgement of a ghost writer) with perceptive, sensitive observations of growing up in the "business", daughter of director John Farrow and Maureen O' Sullivan (the ravishing Jane to Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan).

The first years of her life were a Beverly Hills idyll, the round of chauffeured limousines, posh schools, manicured lawns and sprawling homes which made up the charmed lives of the film community's offspring. Then, at the age of nine, she contracted polio, the first in a series of upheavals which would rock her family's emotional foundation.

John Farrow was subsequently implicated in Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunt in Hollywood in the 1950s. Although the allegations were later exposed as nothing more than malicious grandstanding by a power-hungry drunk, Farrow was blacklisted in the United States. The director of classics like Bill of Divorcement and The Big Clock was reduced to directing minor films in Europe, packing up home and taking his wife and seven children along with him on location.

More catastrophes followed. Mia Farrow's older brother, Mike, was killed in a freak plane accident at the age of 20, ripping the family asunder. John Farrow retreated within himself, finding solace in alcohol and other women. O'Sullivan would retire every night to bed, sobbing herself to sleep as Mia crouched outside, wishing to salve her mother's hurt.

John Farrow's death of a heart attack left the family scrambling to make ends meet. His eldest daughter opted to shoulder the family burden by acting, landing theatrical parts and eventually a coveted role as the small town beauty in TV's Peyton's Place.

The rest is the stuff of teen gossip magazine lore. Farrow impetuously chopped off her signature blonde tresses into a boyish cut, ran in and out of a turbulent marriage to father figure Sinatra ("he smelled just like my father") and began an international film career with Rosemary's Baby. All this was abruptly put on hold when Farrow married Previn, set up home in rural England and began to form a brood of both biological and adopted children.

She divorced Previn in the mid 1970s and moved to New York, where the fateful meeting with Allen followed in 1981. Despite her rabid animosity toward Allen now, Farrow lets down her guard and slips into almost girlish delight in describing their first meeting.

Allen was hardly a Svengali to her Trilby, but he came to occupy a dominant role in her life. He shaped a resurgence in her career, drawing out accomplished, textured performances which towered over the anemic characterizations of her early years.

Their relationship, professional as well as personal, was dictated by Allen. Farrow recounts his dislike of children and his infrequent visits to her apartment for this very reason; his myriad and overriding hang-ups over food and hygiene; his peremptory approach to dealing with others; and his chronic belittlement of her.

This characterization may well be true, but uneasy doubts persist, fanned by a case of the "lady doth protest too much". Allen is probably a domineering neurotic (as many other sources attest), but Farrow still chose to spend nearly a decade of her life with him. A woeful judge of character, perhaps, but this sanctimonious, self-serving skewering of Allen today rings a tad hollow.

Their relationship ended forever when she found nude pictures of her adopted daughter, Soon Yi, in Allen's apartment (her reaction, she writes, was to run through her home shouting "Woody's f*****g Soon Yi" in front of her children). The detailing of the case is at once fascinating and repulsive to read, a voyeur's delight, but neither Allen or Farrow come off unsullied. While Allen was obviously guilty of inappropriate behavior with younger children in the family, Farrow has seemingly done everything to poison their minds against both their former father and sister.

During media exposure of the Mia-Woody-Soon Yi triangle, Farrow was sketched in wildly different caricatures -- put-upon victim of a manipulative pervert, or jilted love hell-bent on both revenge and sainthood for taking hard-luck cases under her wing.

She falls somewhere in between, a woman who has survived losses and disappointments by soldiering on, fortified by the shield of her Catholic faith that perseverance ultimately prevails. The text returns time and again to the word "responsibility", her life maxim as she desperately tries to pick up the pieces and make everything better for the emotionally and physically wounded.

Along the way, throughout the wrenching tragedies and numbing betrayals, Farrow appears to have inured herself by erecting a wall of stoic detachment. Emotions for this seeming Lady Bountiful are conveyed with a jarring coldness and lack of affect -- terrible events are brushed aside as inevitable and the only recourse is to pull oneself together and plug away with life.

Another realization comes after closing the book. Shutting ourselves off from the realities of ugly situations is as clinically efficient as packing them away in the attic trunk. In doing so, we buffer ourselves from the unbearable truth that we cannot be the savior for everyone. Adult Farrow, tending to her children and denouncing injustice, is not far removed from the sad little girl longing to mend her fractured family.

-- Bruce Emond