What falls away : a memoir (22 page)

skies through the long Paris night, and the thousand golden moments—how cavalier we were with time, as if it were not irreplaceable.

1 accepted work without regard for where it took me, and in the summer of 1978, the children and 1 trouped to Bora Bora, a tiny dot in the South Seas. My father's stories about Polynesia had enthralled me since eaiiiest childhood —and in reality, the islands were even more remarkable. On silver beaches my children played with their native companions and swam in the turquoise lagoon. They fed fish the colors of plastics, climbed coconut trees, and learned to whistle crabs out of their shells. In the South Seas you can read by starlight.

I had come to Bora Bora to make The Hurruam with the Swedish director Jan Troell and to work with a superb cast: Jason Robards, who played my father, Max von Sydow, and Trevor Howard. The renowned cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, became a close friend. But it was Notes from Underground that rearranged the landscape of my mind. In that paradise on earth, while my marriage crumbled, I descended into Dostoyevsky's dark, uncompronusing world. The Idiots The Possessed^ The Brothers KaramazoVj and Crime and Punidmient gave a dangerous shape to my own inner life of turmoil, fear, loss, loneliness, and disillusionment.

I didn't go back to England when the movie ended. Instead I returned with my children to my beloved Wooden House on Martha's Vineyard. The children settled happily into the local Montessori school, and with snow on the driftwood I read works by Kierkegaard, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and I reread Kafka and Camus. A first encounter with Sartre sent me scurrying back to Plato, and when I looked up, it was spring. EXiring that time, except fi3r visits from Andre, and occasionally from Sven, or my neighbor and good friend Carly Simon, my only sightings of another adult occurred when I went to the market, or collected the children from school.

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TTic children and I kept a large saltwater tank with sea horses, starfish, anemones, and many fish, all named Gladys. We were happy on the Vineyard, but it was time for me to get back to work. A funny and wonderfully written play by Bernard Slade invited me to Broadway. So we arranged to move back with my mother, to the same apartment on Central Park West.

Gh apt er Cight

We made provisions for the fish named Gladys, and with two dozen mousetraps neatlv baited with peanut butter, and the encyclopedias dusted on their shelves, we locked the door and drove down the windy dirt road. The children were wildly excited but I was quiet. Who knew how long the play would run, or when we might be back, or what was ahead of us? With my home once again slipping away, dread echoed in emptiness.

We moved into the same apartment I had been returning to since I was eighteen. But this trip was unlike any previous visit to the city: I was no longer a teenager under my mother's protective wing, there was neither a movie company watching over me nor a limousine waiting; I had not come to hit the nightspots with Frank Sinatra, or to tag along while Andre Previn gave concerts. This time I had come to New York in the comfortless light of an ordinary day to earn a living.

In truth all I wanted in this world was to

turn back the clock and be with Andre, safe in the green hills of Surrey. But a new girlfriend had already moved into The Haven, and I had already been to Santo Domingo to sign divorce papers. On principle, I had retained no counsel and neither sought nor received any alimony. Through it all Andre and I managed to remain close: we had spent several weeks together that summer, and we spoke on the phone almost daily. We still thought of ourselves as a family, so from the beginning Andre had been in on the discussions about my adopting another child as a single mother. He was supportive, but when I told him that this time I wanted to adopt a child with special needs, he advised me to "be sure his hands are all right, so he can play the piano."

The agency presented me with a choice between a little girl who had been badly burned, or a little boy with cerebral palsy: both were in Korea and both were under two years old. I asked which child would be more difficult for them to place; the little boy, they said. Cerebral palsy scares away adoptive parents, and his prognosis was unknown. After discussing it at length with the other children, we applied for the little boy; he might not play the piano, but he was the right child for us. The kids could not have been more excited, especially Fletcher, whose brothers were considerably older, and he felt covered in sisters. Now we began the wait, hoping he would arrive by Christmas.

Romantic Comedy opened strongly, and we settled into the Barrymore Theater for a run. Tony Perkins, playing opposite me, was brilliant in his role, and we got along fine. His two boys and one or another of my kids could usually be found backstage. Soon Holly Palance, who played Tony's wife, moved downstairs to share my too-large dressing room, and our company became a happy family. Meanwhile my mother opened to wonderful reviews in Mornings at Seven, and we cabbed each night to our respective theaters, as we had done sixteen years earlier; but now we were both on Broadway, just two blocks apart. Apparently it was the first

time a mother and daughter had starred m concurrent Broadway shows.

Most nights I was out of the theater ahead of the audience, and in bed before eleven. I had to be on deck at seven to get the kids up, dressed, brushed, breakfasted, and walked to school. Only very occasionally, when someone I knew appeared backstage, I would consider going out for a drink, or even a late supper. It was in this way that, to my great delight, my dear friend Ann Casey from convent school reentered my life.

I even found our old Irish cook from Beverly Hills, Eileen. Once again, in the afternoons, I had tea with Eileen, but now we both drank from grown-ups' teacups. She was old and frail and had been working for a decade as housekeeper in the enormous mansion of Benjamin Sonnenberg. Now she was ready to retire. I helped her move into her own little apartment on the Lower East Side. She told me that after a lifetime "in service"—living in other people's houses, taking care of other people's things, and making no judgments—when the time came for her to buy a couch, or a lamp, or dishes, she discovered that she had no tastes or preferences.

The night Michael Caine, an old friend from Fox Studios, came to see the play, he asked me to come along to Elaine's restaurant afterward, where he would be joining Mick ]ag-ger. It was Wednesday and I was already tired from doing a matinee and an evening performance, and Elaine's was way uptown on the East Side; it would be jammed, too noisy to talk, and it takes forever to get served. I was looking forward to getting home, raiding the refrigerator, having a bath, and getting into bed with Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoy. On the other hand it had been a year since I'd seen Michael, and it would be fun seeing Mick Jagger, and really

I ought to go out every now and then. It was a flip-of-the-com decision that landed me in Elaine's that night.

As we threaded our way toward our table, where Mick was waiting, Michael stopped to say hello to Woody Allen, who thanked me for the fan note I had written him about his movie Manhattan. I was stunned that he remembered. "It made my day," he said, without smiling.

Less than a year earlier I had saved the picture of him from the cover of the New York Times Magazine. He was standing under an umbrella on a gray day. I tore it from the magazine and put it in my giant dictionary for safekeeping, because there was something so interesting and appealing in his face or expression I thought I might want to look at it again. When, over a glass of wine, I confessed this to Michael, he dashed back to Woody's table and returned with a compliment for me.

Within weeks a printed invitation to Woody AUen's New Year's Eve party arrived at my apartment.

My sister Steffi, now divorced, was living with her young son, only a block away from me in New York. That New Year's Eve, following the performance of Romantic Comedy, we made our way over to the Harkness House, a great old mansion off Fifth Avenue. I presented my invitation to one oi the women seated behmd a table in the marble foyer and then Steffi and I were directed toward a staircase where Woody Allen stood, greeting his guests. New York's most starry figures, as they moved past him up the stairs. A lovely, dark-eyed young actress smiled by his side. Upstairs, hundreds of people—movie stars, icons of Broadway, socialites, politicians, and basketball players—milled together through the huge rooms. There was unlimited caviar, shellfish, and every other kind of food. Two bands played on different floors. My sister found some friends of hers and stayed on. I left before midnight. The following day I sent him a book. The Medusa and the Snail, with a note of thanks.

My son Moses Amadeus Farrow, whom we called Misha at first, after mv brother Mike, arrived in 1980, the week before his second birthday, January 27, which he shares with Mozart. When he was just a few days old, he had been left, wrapped m a pink blanket, in a phone booth in Seoul. His right side was afflicted with cerebral palsy. He had no speech yet. He was a beautiful angel.

I spent the remainder of the winter getting to know my new son, tending to the rest of the brood, and doing eight shows a week. During intermissions I knitted many small, red mittens and hats and a seventh Christmas stocking. I also embroidered a "tooth pillow," as my children were suddenly losing teeth at a wondrous rate.

Ours was one of the £tw buildings on the Upper West Side that was not co-op, which meant we didn't own our apartment, we rented. When my family moved there in 1963, you could buy or rent on the West Side for peanuts by today's standards. Under the law, they could only raise the rent by some three percent every few years. Hardly a week passed without Mom or I noting how lucky we were to have the place.

It was a gorgeous building, built near the turn of the century, when ceilings were ten or eleven feet high. The nine spacious rooms of our apartment retained all their original moldings, paneling, and floors. Our kitchen was big enough for ten people to sit comfortably at the long butcher-block table. The dumbwaiter in our larder wall was only a spooky, spidery hole now, but a half century earlier it brought hot food up to the apartments from basement kitchens. Just off the lobby, where Lee Strasberg's library is now, was the old dining room. I imagined the carriages and coaches drawing up at the rear doors, and people, beauti-

fully dressed in formal wear, laughing softly under crystal chandeliers. I'm told that on Friday and Saturday evenings there was chamber music in the dining room, all those years ago. Some nights as I lay in bed, beautiful music drifted up the stairwell and almost reached my ears before the noise of traffic drowned it out.

The room where I now slept had been my mother s, when I was a teenager. It was she who trained the ivy to weave through the black curls of the heavy wrought-iron screen that divided the room. The space that had been her office was now a cheerful nook for my youngest son. I tied wooden toys, stuffed animals, and colorful origami shapes to his side o£ the screen, and I covered the walls with quilts and children's paintings. When he awakened during the night, I lulled him back to sleep in the same chair that I had rocked his brothers and sisters in, back at The Haven. I don't know many lullabies, so I sang Christmas carols.

In April 1980, a phone call from Woody Allen's secretary made my stomach jump. She asked if I would have lunch with Mr. AUen. We set the date for the following week, April 17, at one o'clock.

**You never heard of Lutece!" Tonv Perkins was incredulous. Every night we waited in our positions onstage for five or so minutes before the curtain rose and the play began. That was the time when we exchanged our news. "It's only the 7nost chic restaurant in New York City! What are you going to wear?"

"He doesn't care about clothes, does he?" I asked, thinking of Diane Keaton's thrift-shop ensemble in Annie Hall, and his own casual rumpled look.

"Are you kiddingY' snorted Tony, who knew Woody Allen.

I was a little fidgety on the morning of the 17th, so I set out on foot, with my hair still wet, at 10:30 A.M. For a

second the clothes thing threw me, but in the end I dressed warmly in a skirt and an Irish sweater, with sensible shoes, leggings, and socks. It was a brisk, windy day.

At one on the dot the maitre d' led me to the table where Woody Allen waited, wide-eyed behind black-rimmed glasses. He was handsomely dressed in an unrum-pled tweed jacket and tie.

The wine was 1949 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. As it sank in its bottle, we traded fragments of our respective histories. He asked many questions, and before I knew it we were talking about Mozart, and Mahler's slow movements, Schubert, the Heifetz recording of the Korngold, Plato, Christianity and Jefferson, Walter Kaufmann as a guide through existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, the poems of Yeats, my children, and my lifelong passionate albeit imaginary relationship with James Agee, who died before I could meet him but whose wife had actually been named Mia. Floodgates opened; it had been so long since I had shared these sorts of thoughts. He too loved Yeats and Mahler's slow movements, and I hadn't known he played the clarinet, and I had never heard of Sidney Bechet or Jelly Roll Morton or Johnny Dodds, but I couldn't wait. And so It went.

When we left the restaurant it was dark outside. A chubby uniformed chauffeur named Don was opening the door of a white Rolls Royce. Woody offered to take me home. During the ten-minute drive, he said he would be in touch when he returned from Paris the following week, if I liked. I told him yes.

Less than a week later, his secretary called to propose a dinner date for Sunday, when there was no performance of the play. This set the pattern for the next months; each week his secretary would call to confirm the date and time. The fact that he never phoned me himself made things a little strange. But instead of talking on the phone, we left notes and small gifts with each other's doormen. Two

Z76 MIAFARROW

records arrived with a note explaining that the Bach, second selection, and the second movement of Stravinsky's Concerto in D for Strings, contained his favorite slow movements. Another time it was the Apollo Suite, with the notation "great." There were antique postcards, a slide of a frog's foot, and a poem by E. E. Cummings: