Reading Woody Allen

I owe my life in academia, in large part, to Woody Allen. Growing up in the blue collar town of Buffalo, New York in the 1970s and 1980s, I glimpsed a world beyond factories, food stamps, and football fanatics, one where smart, articulate, quick-witted women debated ideas on equal footing with men, where New York city hosted museums, concerts, and theaters, not just thugs, con artists, and murderers, and, most intriguingly of all, about dinner tables where family and friends debated history and hermeneutics, ethics and existentialism, instead of bills and barbs. Without these portals to a different life, I might have ended up working at a poultry factory cutting up chicken wings not just as a summer stint but as a decades-spanning career. My four-foot, nine-inch tall grandmother, who had immigrated to America in 1923 with her seven siblings from a farm just outside Rome where goats lived in the basement crawl space and “important people,” such as the local police, frequented the saloon set up in their parlor, told me as much when I broached the topic of college. “Why do you want to go college? I only went to fourth grade and I did good. There are so many factory jobs around.”

Allen’s films exhibited the equal opportunity skewering of extremes that I admired in the only two books (besides an over-sized gilded Bible) in our house in Buffalo’s Italian ethnic enclave called Lovejoy. I read with envy about Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, who, unjustly imprisoned on a remote island, Chateau d’If, dug a tunnel to the adjacent cell inhabited by a Jesuit priest, Abbé Faria, an Italian intellectual and political prisoner. For two and a half years Edmond spent hours on end soaking up the Abbé’s lectures on history, science, philosophy, math, and languages. What bliss, I thought, to spend days gaining knowledge rather than starting each morning trying to rev a junk car to life, putting the gas pedal to the floor on a sub-zero January morning, in order to get to a job pumping gas (where my brother was held up at gun point and tied up in a back room). Dantès also got to avoid schoolyard taunts for not trying “rush,” “speed,” or other drugs. And, in the end, he is redeemed while the rich men who plotted against him endured ruin for their treachery.

The second novel offered another nineteenth century narrative about learning: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The plot centers on an Enlightenment era scientist who tried to usurp God’s domain by engineering a human being. His creation soon became an ugly, miserable, and dangerous monster. While The Count of Monte Cristo had taught me about the arrogance of power, I gleaned from Frankenstein the arrogance of knowledge.

Woody Allen’s father owned only one book, The Gangs of New York, which instilled in the future director infinite intrigue with gangsters and crime. As an auteur, Allen curated a midway space between extremes of left and right, heartless communism and artless capitalism. His films celebrated the flawed individual who compromises rather than the bilious ideologue who spawns harm. His masterpiece, “Hannah and Her Sisters,” which I’ve watched dozens of times, has served at various points as an aspiration, invitation, instruction, and reflection. The 1986 movie depicted a Manhattan awash with poetry-reciting accountants, brilliant reclusive artists, Columbia University professors, and sympathetic, phobic writers. “Hannah and Her Sisters” embodied Allen’s greatest queries and conclusions about life: sophist scholars hawk crocks; zealots fuel ruination; and the dicey endeavor of choosing life over death in a universe that allows, perhaps even fosters, Hitler and the Holocaust, might be acceptable, as shown in the character of Frederick, an artist who regularly rails against modern consumer culture and spews scorn at televangelists: “the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third grade con men telling the poor suckers that watch them that they speak with Jesus, and to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” Equally loathsome to Frederick are pretentious academics unable to reckon with essential human nature: “The reason they can never answer the question “How could it [the Holocaust] possibly happen?” is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is why doesn’t it happen more often?” Allen balances such fatalism with the foibles of hypochondriac Micky, who embarks on a religion-shopping spree to cope with a meaningless world hurtling toward entropy. After a failed suicide attempt, he happens into a screening of “Duck Soup” and finds in the Marx Brothers’ silly antics that “It’s not all a drag.” Meanwhile, e.e. cummings-quoting financial consultant Elliot, in the midst of a midlife crisis, muddles into an affair that ends up saving his marriage. Deep questions, deft humor, and decent ideals draw me again and again to this film.

The moment Woody Allen’s memoir dropped online, amidst the coronavirus-induced stay-at-home orders, as I struggled to put my three classes online for the university where I teach modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, I dropped everything to delve into it. Beginning with the title Apropos of Nothing, Allen’s typically self-deprecating humor rings through in this era of high confidence men and hubris. Along those lines, he recounts a Fifth Avenue doorman “eyeing me like a spore culture,” derides himself variously as “an immature, maladjusted wreck,” “illiterate imbecile,” “nincompoop,” “nonentity,” “submental,” and clarifies: “I wasn’t any simpleton. I was a simpleton extraordinaire.” His extensive repertoire of anxieties get play across the pages, including something he calls “entering phobia,” which prevents him from crossing the threshold into a home. At one point, he stood outside Sidney Lumet’s townhouse immobilized as a cavalcade of celebrities, including Bob Fosse and Paddy Chayefsky, walked in.

Recounting his rise to the top, Allen remains humble, acknowledging the help he received at each step along the way. Like his child prodigy son, Ronan (né Satchel) Farrow, Allen was a wunderkind, who topped the charts of an IQ test as a young boy but could not enroll in Hunter College’s program for child geniuses because of the long commute. By the age of eighteen, he earned more than his parents’ combined income by writing jokes for established comics. At the age of twenty-two, he had an agent and reaped major bank as a television writer. Allen brushed elbows with the likes of young Stephen Sondheim and parlayed his success into a Peabody-winning gig that vaulted his career: writing for Sid Caesar whose talent corps included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Lucille Kallen. “Blown away” by Mort Sahl (the first comedian featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1960), Allen devoted spare time to composing his own act and soon made the transition to performing. His rise was meteoric. He did standup at the Bitter End on the same stage as Peter, Paul, and Mary, Carly Simon, and Dick Cavett. His savvy and supportive agent, Jack Rollins, saturated the media with news items about his client. The New York Times published a favorable review of his performance. David Brinkley pulled from the newspaper’s plaudits to rave about Allen’s legendary improv on nightly news. Mike Wallace then asked him to be on a television show called PM East, appearing at the same time as Barbara Streisand. Soon, none other than President Lyndon B. Johnson invited him to the White House (Allen arrived early to stare down his “entering phobia” and attend the dinner where “hot flashes crippled me with discomfort”).

The cards kept falling in his favor. Warren Beatty caught Allen’s standup act, introduced him to his half-sister Shirley MacLaine, and through her he received an offer to write a screenplay that became the movie “What’s New Pussycat?” Even Allen’s bad luck turned good: when Warren dropped out, Peter O’Toole, fresh off “Lawrence of Arabia,” stepped in to co-star in the picture alongside Peter Sellers, just off his “Pink Panther” success. Two of the era’s greatest musical talents became involved: Burt Bacharach wrote the title song, which was sung by Tom Jones and became a huge hit. Allen’s comedy albums, however, did not sell well, but because the content was not “topical” the jokes are actually now considered “timeless.” Allen moved in elite circles, lunching with Groucho Marx and regularly visiting good friend Dick Cavett, who suffered from depression, in the hospital. His idol, Bob Hope, hired him while talk show icon Johnny Carson had the comic guest host the Tonight Show for two weeks.

Instead of incurring resentment or competition (with few exceptions, such as Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan) for this success, Allen overwhelmingly inspired support, explaining that fellow comics “rooted for me because I was polite and respectful and was not a new comic disdainful of the older Borscht Circuit Comics. Quite the opposite, I loved their acts and let them know it.” Allen fondly recalls the many discussions with this cohort at a local deli, bringing to mind the opening scene of his 1984 love letter to old school comedians and ethical talent agents, “Broadway Danny Rose,” one of so many of his films that bring into stark relief a lost world of good-hearted, well-meaning individuals beset by contemporary avarice.

In addition to antiquated values, Allen shows his knack for archaic words: bombinate, bunco, collywobbles, coprolalia, erg, fumfered, hoosegow, ichor, ichthyology, kip, lammister, lubberly, monkeyshines, seppuku, syzygy, tsuris, tummler, zook. Apropos of Nothing is chock-full of hilarious one-liners. To give one example: [about his grandparents]: “Two characters as mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit, they disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards.”

The memoir offers some surprises even for the most die-hard aficionado. At various times in his life, Allen contemplated pursuing a career as a baseball player, cowboy, FBI agent, gambler, investigative journalist, jazz musician, private eye, and sportswriter. Far from his on-screen shtick as a klutz, Allen excelled in poker and sports. Growing up, he played second base and could adroitly field. He participated in schoolyard basketball and medaled in track. For much of his adult life he played tennis for hours on end (and taught his son Moses all of these sports). It was film editor, Ralph Rosenblum, who originally came up with the idea to score Allen’s first feature “Take the Money and Run” with jazz music. Allen took this idea and ran with it for the next half century. The director who declared “the life bucolic affected me like chloroform” actually enjoyed sun-kissed palm trees in Hollywood, sightseeing with his first wife in D.C., hanging out in the Hamptons, doing standup at Caesar’s in Las Vegas, and seriously pondering a move to London.

Unsurprising is the way Allen regularly comments on the looks and sexual appeal of actresses in his films. Unconvincing is his attempt to puncture the perception that he preferred underaged girls. True, his first and second wives were three years younger; Keaton was eleven years his junior. Allen dated seventeen-year-old (the age of consent in New York) Stacey Nelkin when he was forty-one and he admits inviting Mariel Hemingway (then starring in “Manhattan” for which she earned an Oscar nomination) on a trip to Paris when she turned eighteen and he was forty-four. In the memoir, Out Came The Sun, Hemingway explains the angst this triggered: “I wasn’t sure if I was even going to have my own room. Woody hadn’t said that. He hadn’t even hinted it. But I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me.” In his memoir, Allen admitted that he knew nothing of the stress the offer had prompted. Albeit, with so many of his films involving skeevy pairings of older men with much younger women, the failure to acknowledge this along with the many references to and inclusions of sex workers in his films, demonstrates either cavalier disregard or a high degree of cluelessness. Either he is responsible, or he is irresponsible.

Allen also reveals that Cecilia from “Purple Rose of Cairo” (which he deems one of his best works) is the character from his films that most resembles his authentic self. This goes some way toward explaining Allen’s comic genius originary because in Apropos of Nothing, he narrates a Brooklyn childhood brimming with love from an extended family: “there was no trauma in my life, no awful thing.” Sure, his mom hit him daily and his hapless dad could not support the family, stole, squandered, and fenced swag, but whenever spare money was at hand, he used it to buy his carrot-topped son the latest superhero comic book. Allen marvels that he “never attended a funeral: I was always spared reality.” No older family members bullied him. In fact, “the true rainbow of my childhood, my cousin Rita. Five years older” took him to the beach, Chinese restaurants, mini golf, and pizza joints. They played cards, checkers, Monopoly, and she let him hang out with all her friends. Most importantly, she took him to the movie theater, which sparked a life-long fascination with the “larger-than-life, the superficial, the falsely glamorous” particularly in the genre that he calls “champagne comedies.” As a result, while other teenaged boys identified with swaggering leading men, such as Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” sensitive, solitary, soul-searching Allen saw himself in more effete characters: “my point is, in real life I am Blanche. Blanche says, ‘I don’t want reality, I want magic.’ And I have always despised reality and lusted after magic.”

Other childhood delights that became lifelong pursuits include vaudeville acts: “I’m blown apart. I thrilled to every moment of those second raters.” For years, Allen attended performances each Saturday. He imitated their routines alongside those of magicians, and at the age of fourteen made his stage debut at a local social club, earning the princely sum of two dollars. His jokes proved more popular than prestidigitations, so he approached a friend’s older brother, who emceed college shows, to learn about bits, gags, and full-scale comic routines.

Whence, then, all the neuroses? Allen recoils recounting the antisemitism of elementary school teachers, regrets repeatedly striking out in the post-date porch goodnight kiss department as a teenager, and felt repelled by the toxic masculinity and misogyny of midcentury America. Yet the Woodman remains baffled: “I was not happy; I was gloomy, fearful, angry, and don’t ask me why.” Perhaps genetics, he wonders, or, more likely the disillusion wrought from the realization that “Fred Astaire movies were not documentaries.” Eight years on a psychoanalysts’ couch likewise yielded no answers nor did a succession of other shrinks. Having someone to volley ideas back and forth with, along with the illusion of taking action proffered some value to the visits. To this day, Allen tends to a robust stable of “fears and conflicts and weaknesses” harbored by his seventeen-year-old self. In any case, neither religion nor the hope of leaving a cultural legacy offer respite from the awareness that human existence is not a divine creation of “intelligent design” but, more likely, an accident by a “crass bungler.”

This state of pained perplexity may explain Allen’s avidity for jazz. Listening to New Orleans saxophonist Sidney Bechet “clicked” with something deep in his being: “The pleasure was so intense I decided I would devote my life to jazz.” Despite lacking the rhythm, ear, and execution of Louis Armstrong, George Lewis, or Jelly Roll Morton, Allen still practices every day and performs regularly.

When it comes to the field of entertainment, however, Allen is a virtuoso. He always had a keen sense for who would make it and those lacked talent. While performers wondered backstage if they needed a better writer or an “attitude,” Allen knew they simply did not have it: “nothing ever stuck. The audience never went home with anything—no human being, certainly no funny human. Just an extrovert who bought some one-liners.” Similarly, Allen’s theory about problems with films, at any stage of the process, can be whittled down to one issue: “the problem is almost always the script.”

In terms of sharing his recipe for success, Allen offers two pieces of advice for aspiring filmmakers. First, keep your eyes on the prize, work hard, and enjoy the work (Allen typically spends nine hours a day pecking away on the Olympia portable he purchased in 1951 and steering clear of time-sucking activities, such as gambling, news programs, and awards shows). He also issues warnings about the dangers of outer-directedness to productivity; luckily, vocationally, he possesses “disgusting self-confidence” and, personally, is inner-directed. Second: failure is part of the enterprise—a rare luxury given his privileged position, which means that box office bombs will not torpedo his career. He fought for this freedom early in his career so he can forego financial concerns in order to concentrate fully on making the best film possible.

Money did not drive him even when it became clear that his two good producer friends Jean Doumanian and Jacqui Safra had embezzled money from him, which resulted in the director being “probably the lowest paid filmmaker of my generation.” His naiveté had blinded him to the bilking: “You’d think it was a little late in life for me to learn that real life was not an MGM production.” After an audit revealed their fraud, Allen, who would have gladly loaned or simply given them any needed funds, proposed arbitration, which they refused, then a rabbi or anyone they trusted, anything to resolve the matter while saving their friendship. Only after court proceedings revealed, and tabloid headlines blared, the truth of their banditry did they settle. Still, Allen reached out to salvage their treasured friendship, but was rebuffed at every turn.

Finally, Allen broaches politics, detailing his work on behalf of liberal causes. He campaigned and did shows for Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, and Eugene McCarthy, starred in “The Front,” a movie about McCarthy era Hollywood blacklisting, marched in Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr., donated heavily to the ACLU during the 1965 drive for the Voting Rights Act, and defended the right of African Americans to achieve their goals “by any means necessary.” Three of his kids are named after black heroes: Ronan’s original name was Satchel after pitcher Satchel Paige who had advocated integrating Major League Baseball even before Jackie Robinson. The two girls Allen adopted with Soon-Yi are Bechet, after jazz player Sidney Bechet, and Manzie, in honor of drummer Manzie Johnson.

As an intellectual and cultural historian of modern America and Europe, I found Allen’s self-education the most illuminating. To me, knowledge offered a route away from drudgery. For the looks-challenged Allen whose physique could very well have served as the model for weakling “Mac” in Charles Atlas ads featured in so many comic books, it proffered dates. Smitten early on with an interest in the other sex (“He’s always flirting with the girls” a teacher once told his mother, to which Allen responded: “What am I supposed to like, the multiplication tables?”), Allen turned to high culture, he professes, primarily as a way to woo women, after mobster minutiae failed to impress. A reading-averse perpetually truant college dropout he became an auto-didact to land what can be called the underfed, elegant, blondes/brunettes, slightly (sometimes terribly) tortured (UEBSTs) that so beguiled him. He read widely, from Aristophanes, Melville, and Dickinson to Joyce, Faulkner, and Wilde. Hemingway and Camus appealed because of their simplicity and ability to evoke emotions. He listened to classical music and was “blown away” at the Museum of Modern Art by Cézanne, Matisse, Chagall, and Jackson Pollock. Forever afterwards, Allen claims, he could pull out the great works of the western literary and artistic canon, in a kind of intellectual legerdemain, to dazzle when needed. But Allen here understates the critical intelligence and mastery such an aptitude demands. Although the motivation may have been strategic, the ability to probe deeply into the most vexing problems that plague human existence with dexterity and humor was not just magical but deeply meaningful, art for which he deserves to be in the pantheon, not merely entertainment.

This great ease in directing and diagnosing talent did not transfer over into Allen’s romantic life, which he dubs the “Theater of the Absurd.” It contains many of the themes found in his films, most notably the eclipse of reality by romanticism, which reached its apotheosis in the opening scene of “Manhattan”–that three-and-a-half-minute master class in cinematography, sound, editing, and realization of artistic vision forged against a backdrop of bankruptcies, crime waves, drug epidemics, and films by Gordon Parker, Sidney Lumet, and Martin Scorsese that glorified in graphic detail mayhem, decay, and trespass. And, just as he eschewed strict binary heteronormative gender stereotypes, Allen did not shy away from women whose actions, biochemistry, and demeanor eluded neurotypical norms. His Saturday matinee-informed imago had sent him in search of “that combination of Rita Hayworth’s sensuality, June Allyson’s supportive devotion, and Eve Arden’s sarcastic wit” but he found himself ineluctably drawn to UEBSTs: “For whatever irrational carnal singularity, those were the ones who captured my heart.” He got married at the age of twenty to Harlene, a working-class eighteen-year-old Hunter College coed. With her, he learned about Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Hegel as they read and debated philosophy together. But youth and inexperience resulted in battles that approximated “hit men in the Castellammarese War.” Allen took blame for the subsequent divorce, deeming her “much too good for me.” They remain friends to this day.

Charming, educated, and funny, Allen’s second wife Louise Lasser, “was a knockout” who “resembled the very young, remarkably beautiful Mia Farrow” grew up in the elite environs of Fifth Avenue with shopping excursions to Bergdorf and Tiffany’s and was cast as an understudy to Barbara Streisand on Broadway. Allen marveled: “I only knew this person was the fulfillment of all my dreams and fantasies.” She was the one to encourage him to submit work to the New Yorker. After eight years of dating they married but eventually episodes that we would now understand as bipolar (a condition that had also beset her mother) combined with her drug use and infidelities (“a cottontail’s libido,” Allen deemed it) to end their marriage. “We have always remained great and loyal friends,” Allen wrote.

By this stage in his life it, he asseverates, “It seemed like I was surrounded by great and wonderful people unstable as uranium.” Then Diane Keaton walked into his life. While Lasser remained Allen’s “blond lady of the sonnets,” Keaton became his “North Star” as well as the “go-to person” for his scripts (“one of the only people whose opinion I really care about”). Allen describes Keaton as “a male Huck Finn” who lit up not only a room but “a boulevard.” “Adorable, funny, totally original in style, real, fresh,” “magical,” she could also put away food like a lumberjack. After the relationship ran its course, they went their separate ways and remain treasured friends to this day.

The next relationship did not end smoothly, and they remain enemies to this day. Mia Farrow was the first to make contact, sending Allen a fan letter with these final words: “Quite simply, I love you.” Traveling in similar circles, their paths crossed but for Allen at least “the earth didn’t move.” Years passed, and one day, after she sent him a gift, he asked her to lunch. With parents in the business, Farrow had grown up surrounded by Hollywood royalty; eventually he discovered that the Farrow family was far from a fairy tale, with alcoholism, criminal records, drug abuse, and institutionalization among their ranks. One brother died piloting a plane, another committed suicide, while the third, John, remains incarcerated, serving a twenty-five-year (with fifteen years suspended) sentence in prison for sexually abusing two boys under the age of ten over the course of seven years. But this came later.

In the heady days of their courtship, Allen found Mia “bright, beautiful,” “cultivated” and charming.” Nevertheless, red flags began to make their appearances in no short measure. Just a few weeks into their dating, she suddenly declared, “I want to have your baby.” Taken aback, Allen reminded her that they barely knew each other. Miffed, she returned several weeks later and, this time, suggested marriage. Allen again demurred. Eventually, they settled into a mellow routine: Allen alone on the Upper East Side; Farrow with her seven kids on the Upper West Side, with meet ups for dinner at Elaine’s or Rao’s. He “spent no time with any of her kids except for Moses” (adopted when Mia was single, so he had no father, unlike the other children) and never spent the night at her apartment though he did visit her Connecticut country home a couple of times each summer. After the first few years neither Allen nor Mia were in love, but they provided each other companionship.

Another red flag arose, he says, with Farrow’s “unnatural closeness with Fletcher,” which “seemed very odd and a tad creepy.” “He was the uniquely favored child” who accompanied her on dates with Allen. She refused a vacation in Europe unless Fletcher (not any other members of her brood) could join them. She once adopted a boy with spina bifida but after Fletcher expressed dismay, she gave him up to another family (Mia stated his physical needs were too great to handle). The same pattern of obsession occurred with Ronan, causing Moses and Soon-Yi to feel like “second-class” citizens. Soon-Yi likened Farrow’s initial rush of adopting a child to the thrill of a new toy. The “saintly reputation, the admiring publicity” proved a bonus. But in reality, Soon-Yi alleges, Farrow did not care for child raising. Some visitors to the abode thought the adopted kids were servants (Soon-Yi said she and the other adopted children felt like “domestics”), given all their household chores. Judy Hollister, a housekeeper, and Sandy Bolluch, a babysitter, who both witnessed incidents while working in the home, corroborated these claims. The two women also stated they saw Mia, with no clothes on, sleeping in the same bed as Ronan, up until he was eleven.

In a 2018 blog post, Moses recounts frightful instances of neglect, physical and emotional abuse against the kids, including Thaddeus, a paraplegic, who was made to wear heavy iron leg braces when he went outside instead of lighter plastic pair that could be worn under slacks. Allen questions if Farrow did this for publicity and sympathy. According to Moses, Mia also once locked Thaddeus overnight in a shed for some infraction. Thaddeus died from a self-inflicted gunshot. When adopted daughter Tam died at the age of twenty-one, Mia said publicly that Tam had a “weak heart” and had succumbed to cardiac arrest. According to her brother Moses, however, Tam’s life ended through a purposeful overdose of pills taken after a fight with Mia. Another adopted daughter Lark became pregnant with the child of a convicted felon and died, according to Allen, “alone of AIDS in a hospital on Christmas day,” although Mia had claimed only that she died of pneumonia.

What does Allen’s memoir add to the double scandals that followed? Here is the narrative he crafts. Several years into their relationship, after the bloom had wilted, Mia propositioned Allen, saying that she wanted another baby and insisting he would not have any responsibility for raising the child. Before she got pregnant, Mia adopted two more children, Dylan and Moses. Once Mia became pregnant with Allen’s biological child, Ronan, another red flag surfaced. She warned Allen not to “get too close” to the “upcoming baby” because “she had questions about our relationship continuing.” She asked him to return the key to her apartment and did not put Allen’s name on the birth certificate (even though he held her hand throughout the delivery). After Ronan’s birth, the intimacy ended. Allen’s schedule now entailed arriving in the morning to take the kids to preschool (Farrow rarely acknowledged his arrival in her home) work all day, then pick them up. After dinner he read them bedtime stories. Allen was the only one to attend parent-teacher conferences at The Brearley School. Allen’s therapist “pointed out” that Allen was “mainly a sponsor in the household.” For a decade, Allen had hired Mia to work in movies and also employed Farrow’s sister, brother, and mother. He gave her a million dollars to help out with expenses. Looking back, Allen postulated that: “I served my purpose knocking her up and had become irrelevant.” Had it not been for Dylan, Moses, or Ronan, Allen would not have bothered to go over anymore. In 1991 Allen filed adoption paperwork for Dylan and Moses with Mia affirming Allen’s devotion as a father.

Then Farrow asked Allen to spend time with Soon-Yi, the daughter she referred to as “hopelessly stupid” and refused to take to movies, theaters, museums, or walks in the park. Soon-Yi, who had been found in Seoul foraging for food in garbage had been raised in an orphanage by supportive nuns. She resented being taken away from everyone she knew to live with Mia who displayed “no warmth or empathy” and “was strict and impatient with a fierce temper.” Mia punished Soon-Yi for not learning to “spell faster by holding her upside down, dangling her, and threatening to put her into an insane asylum if she didn’t learn quicker.” A (quack) theory at the time held that increased blood flow to the head aided learning. Soon-Yi challenged what she saw as Farrow’s “cruel authority.” At odds constantly, Mia threw a hairbrush, phone, and a ceramic rabbit at her adopted daughter. In a 2018 article for Vulture, Soon-Yi recounted “screaming fights” between Mia and her then-husband André Previn. They divorced in 1979.

Allen took Soon-Yi to a Knicks game and inquired about her long-held disdain for him. She expressed that he was “foolish” and a “patsy” for thinking Mia “ever loved him.” Did he not see how badly she treated him? Was he “a consummate sap” for not noticing the way she abused her kids? Did he know nothing about Mia’s “great romantic interest in her friend and neighbor, Mike Nichols”? Over the next few months they kept talking and he “began to realize this was not an empty young woman as Mia had painted her but quite an intelligent, feeling, perceptive one. It was the start of a friendship that would slowly grow over time and climax with the preposterous realization that we cared a great deal about each other. It took a long, long time to move from square one to this mutual caring, but it would happen and surprise us both.” When he leaned in for a kiss, the twenty-one-year old college student remarked: “I was wondering when you were going to make a move.” Neither told Farrow because they thought it might be just a short fling (why cheating was okay, Allen does not divulge).

After Farrow came upon Polaroids of a nude Soon-Yi (left accidentally, not purposely as some have intimated, on a fireplace mantel by Allen), all hell broke loose. Mia immediately told her other kids that Allen had raped their sister and notified friends that he had raped her underage mentally-challenged daughter. According to eyewitnesses, four-year-old Ronan went around saying, “My father’s fucking my sister.” Mia hit and kicked Soon-Yi, locked her in in her room and did not allow access to a phone. A friend recommended Soon-Yi see a psychoanalyst, who then asked to meet with Mia. According to Allen, after one meeting, the doctor became convinced that she was “an unhinged and dangerous women.” When Mia phoned Dr. Coates and told her: “He must be stopped.” Dr. Coates called Allen and advised him to get Soon-Yi away from Mia. At the hearing that ensued, Dr. Coates testified on his behalf.

Allen admitted that he had caused the mess and asked Mia to think of the children’s best interests, pleading that that they not be used as pawns and punishment. But Farrow’s actions became increasingly ominous. She called Allen telling him that Soon-Yi regretted everything, wanted to take her own life, and then lambasted him with threats. “She was so raging and incoherent on those vicious calls,” Allen remembers. “They would come any hour of the day and night.” She sent Allen a homemade collage around Valentine’s Day with a knife planted in the card’s red heart. She called Letty Aronson, Allen’s sister and said: “He took my daughter, I’m going to take his.” When Letty insisted, “A child should have a father,” Farrow allegedly responded, “I don’t care.” And then her rage “crossed the line from understandable to unforgivable and then to unconscionable.” Farrow phoned him and said: “I have something planned for you.”

At this point in the memoir, Allen tries to trace the etiology of what happened next by recounting Mia’s previous relationship history. At the age of twenty-one, she married fifty-year-old crooner Frank Sinatra. After their divorce a couple of years later, Mia lived with friends, Dory and André

Previn. Mia and André began an affair that led to the breakup of the Previn marriage. Dory would later write Allen to warn him about Mia, telling him about the 1970 song she wrote “With Daddy in the Attic.”  Dory was “certain that’s what gave Mia the idea.”

Then, on August 6^th, 1992 Mia alleged to a pediatrician that two days before, during a visit to Mia’s Connecticut home, Allen had sexually molested Dylan. Allen asks why, in the midst of an ugly divorce in a house filled with Mia’s kids and friends who had been told to watch him like a hawk, being head-over-heals in love with Soon-Yi, all of a sudden he would have chosen that day to become a child molester in an unfinished crawl space no less despite his claustrophobia. He denied ever being up there, though, when a hair was found on a picture he wondered if he might have peeked in there at some point over the years.

The sequence of events, according to Allen, also begs questions. Mia brought the allegation to Dylan after a friend said Allen had laid his head on the girl’s lap. Dylan denied the abuse happened, even when asked in front of a doctor. After leaving and getting ice cream from Mia, they returned to the doctor and Dylan changed her story. At home, Mia videotaped Dylan, who sometimes did not have any clothes on, about the alleged incident. Monica, the nanny, watched as Mia turned the camera off and on at various points, as Mia prompted her on what to say.

Stops and starts also mired Mia and Dylan’s accounts. Under questioning, Mia claimed Dylan left the unfinished crawl space and wept in Larks’ arms, but Lark was not there that day. Decades later, Dylan included a new detail: during the attack, she watched an electric train go around the tracks. However, there was no such train up there (nor was there room for such a set-up in the clutter). Moses said the space was filled “with exposed nails and floorboards, billows of fiberglass insulation, filled with mousetraps and droppings and stinking of mothballs, and crammed with trunks full of hand-me-down clothes…The idea that the space could possibly have accommodated a functioning electric train set, circling around the attic, is ridiculous.”

Mia alleged under oath that Allen saw a psychiatrist because of “inappropriate relations” with underage girls, which was proven false. She said he liked to have Dylan suck his thumb but in his 2018 blog post Moses insisted he never saw any such thing. Ronan, who, again, was four when all this went down, still insists that it happened. Mia’s friends contacted Stacey Nelkin and asked her to lie by saying she was underage when she dated Allen. She wasn’t and she wouldn’t. Mia said that Allen frequented prostitutes, but the receipts her legal team cited as evidence actually came from another man with the same name. Allen took a lie detector test administered by Paul Minor, chief polygraph examiner for the FBI from 1978 to 1987 and passed with flying colors. Mia refused to take the test.

There was never a trial because two extensive investigations concluded that no molestation took place. Connecticut police tasked the Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic with the inquiry. After six months, they concluded that not only was Dylan not sexually abused, but they believed that Mia had coaxed the girl’s statements on film because they had “a rehearsed quality,” something Moses confirmed: “Those conclusions perfectly match my own childhood experience: coaching, influencing, and rehearsing are three words that sum up exactly how my mother tried to raise us.” When Yale released the results, Mia flew into a “rage. She is given to rages, as Moses described, Soon-Yi described,” Allen writes. One of the investigators told Allen that “Dylan had been very inconsistent and even said at one point that I had never molested her and she was never in the attic with me.” When Farrow’s employee Sandy Boluch asked Dylan why she was crying, the seven-year-old responded: “Mommy wants me to lie” (previously, Mia had taken Dylan to a psychiatrist because she “had serious problems telling the difference between reality and fantasy”).

Then the New York State Child Welfare office investigated for fourteen months. The 1993 conclusion stated that “No credible evidence was found” therefore the claim was “unfounded.” Dylan was interviewed nine times. State’s Attorney, Frank Maco, did not bring forward an indictment against Allen. He claimed he did not want Dylan to have to endure a trial, but why would he not pursue truth, enforce the law, and perform his job duties, especially in such a high-profile career-advancing case? Maco’s he-did-it-but-I-won’t-prosecute method has perpetuated the shroud of guilt that hovers over Allen. Then there is also the curious fact that during the custody hearing he took Mia out to lunch several times—attempts to start a relationship, Allen claims, that tainted what were supposed to be objective proceedings. Nevertheless, in the custody hearing, Judge Eliot Wilk, with no medical training or investigation of his own, doubted the Yale team and NY Child Welfare office findings. He granted Farrow full custody of Dylan. Allen notes that Mia had become friends with Wilk’s court clerk during the proceedings, giving her rides home on a number of nights. Mia named the son she next adopted Gabriel Wilk Farrow, after the judge.

For the next two decades, Allen and Soon-Yi lived their lives in relative quiet. They got married, adopted a couple of children (Allen had no problems with the two judges who determined his fitness to adopt), and in 2011 “Midnight in Paris” went on to become the highest-grossing film of his career. But then Ronan Farrow’s MSNBC show was scheduled for February 24, 2014. In the months leading up to it, Mia stoked interest by revealing in an October 2013 Vanity Fair interview with long-time friend Maureen Orth that Frank Sinatra quite “possibly” was Ronan’s biological father. Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, felt “cranky with Mia” for such “nonsense,” and complained that her children were now having to deal with questions. If true, this would have meant that Mia cheated on Allen during their relationship and committed fraud by accepting childcare payments for eighteen years. The month the Vanity Fair piece came out was the month Mia’s brother John entered jail after having been found guilty as a child sex abuser. Mia made no mention of that (nor, apparently, did Maureen Orth ask). Mia has not addressed her brother’s crimes against children in public. When documentarian Robert Weide (whose articles on the topic make a convincing case of Allen’s innocence) was asked to assemble a montage for the Golden Globes tribute to Allen on January 13, 2014, he approached Mia for permission to include a clip with her in it. She signed the release without hesitation but then, curiously, complained when the montage played, tweeting: “A woman has publicly detailed Woody Allen’s molestation of her at age 7. GoldenGlobe tribute showed contempt for her & all abuse survivors.” She followed this up with another tweet: “Is he a pedophile?” and included a link to the Vanity Fair article. Around that time, Mia gave interviews for a documentary on the making of “Rosemary’s Baby” in which she extensively praised Roman Polanski, who pled guilty to felony statutory rape (for sex with a thirteen-year-old after he drugged her) in a 1977 plea deal and remains a fugitive for fleeing the country while awaiting sentencing, as a brilliant director. In 2005 she even flew to London to testify on his behalf in a libel trial and to this day has not spoken out about Polanski’s crime against an underaged girl.

Dylan spoke about the alleged abuse in the Vanity Fair piece then in February 2014, the month of her brother’s MSNBC debut, she published a New York Times open letter reiterating the claim.

That is when Allen’s career took a full nosedive, as actors and actresses rushed to distance themselves, expressed remorse for appearing in his films, and vowed never to collaborate again. For those who did not make this public pronouncement but expressed support for the #MeToo movement that started in 2017, Dylan had a few choice words, scolding them as hypocrites.

In her memoir, Everything Falls Away (1997), Mia Farrow, not surprisingly, tells a far different story, which includes some curious details, such as likening her marriage to Frank Sinatra (who she admits “had the same identical smell” as her father) as “an adoption that I had somehow messed up.” After the divorce to Sinatra she sought escape and enlightenment with the guru Maharishi in India. But she left in a panic after he embraced her from beyond during a private yoga session. Her sister Prudence explained it was a tradition for a holy man to embrace after a sitting, but Mia still felt violated. Embarking on her affair with André Previn, she neglects to mention her friendship with Dory, brings up the fact that he was married only in passing, and apologized not for the infraction against Dory but for having “contributed to her pain.” In her rendering, Allen is a verbally abusive director, a rude son, and totally indifferent toward her children throughout the relationship. Much of the book is devoted to supporting the narrative that Allen all along had an unhealthy fascination with Dylan, long before the alleged attack. According to Farrow, Allen began grooming Dylan in 1985. Mia claims she had Allen see a psychologist to deal with his aberrant interests. After discovering the affair with Soon-Yi, Mia admits she “pounced on her. I hit her on the side of her face and shoulders” and said that she hated her. The overall portrait sketched in the memoir, though, is one of a mother lovingly devoted to her children who regrets continuing the relationship with Allen once he set his sights on Dylan.

Wherein lies the truth? Those who do not completely distance and disavow themselves from the director risk ostracization. When Jeff Goldblum tweeted, “I believe women and think Woody Allen is a creep…There’s a presumption of Innocence until proven guilty,” the “cancelling of Jeff Goldblum” began apace.

As a child I looked to Allen’s films with awe and carefully scouted out clues to escape my lot. As a historian, I look at historical causality, complexity, context, source criticism, and the cool, calm objectiveness that are hallmarks of the profession. “Believe Women” resounds because it overturns millennia of ignoring women’s claims. However, the scandal surrounding Woody Allen is more akin to the moral panic surrounding daycares in the 1980s and 1990s. The title of Richard Beck’s study of the hysteria highlights the era’s dangerous credulity, We Believe The Children. Beginning with the 1983 allegations against the McMartin family preschool in California (leveled by Judy Johnson who was later diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia) to North Carolina where kids claimed teachers threw them into a school of sharks, to the Clinton era case in Wenatchee, Washington (population 22,000) that saw one police officer level 43 people with 29,000 counts of child sex abuse, Beck recounts testimonies about satanic rituals, human sacrifice, and child sex rings that riveted a nation weary of modern society’s disruptions where feminists had supposedly rendered kids, marriage, and the sanctity of traditional authority vulnerable while gays, pedophiles, and pornographers (synonymous to Reagan era conservatives) acted as super predators preying on children. The techniques used to interview children involved leading questions, bullying, and a reward system. “We believe the children” began with beneficent intent but became a mantra that resulted in unjust indictments and incarcerations across the country, many of which were overturned in the following decade. In the years that followed, professionals developed more sophisticated techniques, finding that children are eager to please, “highly suggestible,” broken down by long sessions of repeated questioning, subject to peer pressure, and influenced by interviewer bias.

In the end, the reminder by one tweeter holds some wisdom: “the Woody Allen situation is not as open-and-shut as many believe. We risk the credibility of the #MeToo movement if we can’t keep some humility about our level of certainty.” Similarly, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Michael Caine addressed the issue: “If he had a trial and someone proved he had done something. I wouldn’t do it. No. But I didn’t read of him being on trial and being found guilty or fined or sent to prison or anything…You can’t go on hearsay the whole time.” That is the point made by Cate Blanchett who received a Best Actress Oscar for her star turn in the 2013 “Blue Jasmine” but has garnered criticism from Dylan for supporting the #MeToo movement. “If these allegations need to be re-examined which, in my understanding, they’ve been through court, then I’m a big believer in the justice system and setting legal precedents.” Blanchett explained. “If the case needs to be reopened, I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in support of that.” Dylan, for example, could still seek remedy by bringing a civil suit against Allen. Blanchett rejects efforts to use social media as “judge and jury.” For Cherry Jones lack of resolution calls for caution: “There are those who are comfortable in their certainty. I am not. I don’t know the truth…When we condemn by instinct our democracy is on a slippery slope.” Emily Mortimer cited the need for due process: “I think these things really need to go through all the legal processes before anyone can judge. I don’t really have an answer to those questions.” Nor do I.