Spot the error in the People magazine headline: "Woody Allen's Ex-Wife, Mia Farrow, Shares Tribute to Diane Keaton Despite Complicated Past."

 Link to article.

"It’s the people who aren’t artists who sacrifice. Artists somehow stumble onto the best life in the world, and I have no complaints."

Said Gena Rowlands, asked about any "regrets about having sacrificed her life to her art."

Quoted in "Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Brought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94/Known for playing on-the-verge characters, she twice earned Oscar nominations for her work in films directed by John Cassavetes, her husband" (NYT).

She sometimes said that if she had not married Mr. Cassavetes, her career might have taken a very different turn: She could have been the blonde in romantic comedies. But, she contended, physical beauty was so common in Hollywood that it was irrelevant. When People magazine named her one of the most beautiful people in the world (she was 69) and asked for beauty tips, she suggested: “Sunglasses are the secret. Sunglasses and a little lipstick will take you to the market.”

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wis....

ADDED: Here's the clip from "A Woman Under the Influence" that I blogged when Peter Falk died in 2011: 

And here's something Mia Farrow wrote that I blogged about in 2009:

One workday, while we were waiting to shoot, Roman [Polanski] was discoursing about the impossibility of long-term monogamy given the brevity of a man's sexual attraction to any woman. An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.

Everyone seems to be telling her story at long last, so here — after "decades of silence" — comes Soon-Yi Previn.

New York Magazine has the big story. The author is Daphne Merkin (her name has been commented on many times, so spare me) who has been friends with Woody Allen for 40+ years and pronounces herself "mystified" by his "almost Aspergian aloneness" and "genuine diffidence." Here's some material from the second half of the article, about the relationship between Woody and Soon-Yi. I'll get to

Both of them are vague on how and when their friendship turned sexual — “It was 25 years ago,” she says... "and to the best of my memory I came in from college on some holiday and he showed me a Bergman movie, which I believe was The Seventh Seal, but I’m not positive. We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it. We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other.”....

“I know this is no justification,” she goes on, sitting across from me, her back ramrod straight. (“Posture,” she says quietly to Allen whenever he begins to slump. “I married her for her posture,” he quips.) “But Mia was never kind to me, never civil. And here was a chance for someone showing me affection and being nice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I’d be a moron and an idiot, retarded” — she pauses here, mindful that this is one of her mother’s words for her — “if I’d stayed with Mia.” She adds, as if to set the record straight, “I wasn’t the one who went after Woody — where would I get the nerve? He pursued me. That’s why the relationship has worked: I felt valued. It’s quite flattering for me. He’s usually a meek person, and he took a big leap.”....

“I was madly in love with him,” she announces. It sounds completely heartfelt and as though it just happened yesterday. “Completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he’d said that I’d meet someone in college, but I’d already decided. I came to realize how understanding he was and what a sweet person he was. He grew on me.” In an email she sends me, she slightly revises the scenario, showing a different side of herself, one in which she comes across less as the vulnerable, virginal girl she was than as a charming flirt: “I think Woody liked the fact that I had chutzpah when he first kissed me and I said, ‘I wondered how long it was going to take you to make a move.’ From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him.”...

The couple have two adopted children (two judges investigated each adoption, as is routinely done, and okayed them) because of Soon-Yi’s strong convictions about the narcissism inherent in having biological children. “I could definitely have children,” she says, “but I was never interested. I find it the height of vanity and very egocentric. I don’t need kids out there who have similar traits to me and look similar to me and Woody. Why is one’s DNA so special? Why would one keep on breeding when there are so many kids out there who need a loving home?”...

Now that the girls are grown... the couple are more close-knit — you might call it symbiotic — than ever. Allen describes how they spend their time together as “parallel play,” which makes Soon-Yi laugh. “Parallel play,” she repeats. “Yes, I think you’re right..."

... I ask Soon-Yi whether she thinks she’s been reshaped by her husband. “Reshaped?” she asks. “I mean, he’s given me a whole world, a whole world that I wouldn’t have had access to. So if you mean that way, then yes.”...

Lots more in the article. I've skipped most of it. I'll go back to the get-Mia things later.

ADDED: Maybe I'll stick with my original skipping of the get-Mia stuff. I'm seeing this:

My statement on New York Magazine: pic.twitter.com/xml6pdaZqb

— Dylan Farrow (@RealDylanFarrow) September 17, 2018

"One summer day, Mia accused me of leaving the curtains closed in the TV room."

"They had been drawn the day before when Dylan and Satchel were watching a movie. She insisted that I had closed them and left them that way. Her friend Casey had come over to visit and while they were in the kitchen, my mother insisted I had shut the curtains. At that point, I couldn’t take it anymore and I lost it, yelling, 'You’re lying!' She shot me a look and took me into the bathroom next to the TV room. She hit me uncontrollably all over my body. She slapped me, pushed me backwards and hit me on my chest, shouting, 'How dare you say I’m a liar in front of my friend. You’re the pathological liar.' I was defeated, deflated, beaten and beaten down. Mia had stripped me of my voice and my sense of self. It was clear that if I stepped even slightly outside her carefully crafted reality, she would not tolerate it. It was an upbringing that made me, paradoxically, both fiercely loyal and obedient to her, as well as deeply afraid...."

Moses Farrow tells his story in a blog post titled "A Son Speaks Out."

"Satchel" = Ronan Farrow.

"Now that I no longer live in fear of her rejection, I am free to share how she cultivated and brainwashed me."

Said Moses Farrow, quoted in a new biography of Woody Allen, reported by the NYT (which uses a photo of Woody Allen in which his glasses prescription magnifies one of his eyes ridiculously in comparison to the other).

Asked to comment, Ms. Farrow issued a statement: “Moses has cut off his entire family including his ex-wife who was pregnant when he left. It’s heartbreaking and bewildering that he would make this up, perhaps to please Woody. We all miss and love him very much.”

ADDED: The photo of Woody got me thinking about the word "cock-eyed," which means "topsy-turvy, absurd, ridiculous" (OED):

1960 M. Spark Ballad of Peckham Rye x. 201 He gathered together the scrap ends of his profligate experience..and turned them into a lot of cock-eyed books....

1942 Chicago Tribune 18 May 12/1 Communists are cockeyed... Today we shall dwell not upon their dangerousness, but upon their cockeyedness.

"I had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favorite, was collared and part of a study until the end of the hunt."

"I relied on the expertise of my local professional guides to ensure a legal hunt."

ADDED: This story of Walter James Palmer, the American dentist who killed Cecil the lion, got Meade playing the old Beatles song "The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill." We got to puzzling over the facts of the song, but there's no need to puzzle. They're set out quite nicely at Wikipedia:

This song mocks the actions of a young American named Richard A. Cooke III, known as Rik, who was visiting his mother, Nancy Cooke de Herrera, at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh at the same time that the Beatles were staying with the Maharishi. According to his mother, both she and her son maintained friendly relations with all of the Beatles except for Lennon, who by Cooke de Herrera's account was "a genius" but distant and contemptuous of the wealthy American Cooke de Herrera and her clean-cut, college-attending son. According to Nancy's life account, Beyond Gurus, the genesis of the song occurred when she, Rik, and several others, including guides, set out upon elephants to hunt for a tiger (allegedly presented by their Indian guide as a traditional act). The pack of elephants was attacked by a tiger, which was shot by Rik. Rik was initially proud of his quick reaction and posed for a photograph with his prize. However, Rik's reaction to the slaying was mixed, as he has not hunted since. Nancy claims that all present recognised the necessity of Rik's action, but that Lennon's reaction was scornful and sarcastic, asking Rik: "But wouldn't you call that slightly life-destructive?" The song was written by Lennon as mocking what he saw as Rik's bravado and unenlightened attitude.

Lennon later told his version of the story in a Playboy interview, stating that: "‘Bungalow Bill’ was written about a guy in Maharishi's meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers, and then came back to commune with God. There used to be a character called Jungle Jim, and I combined him with Buffalo Bill. It's sort of a teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke." Mia Farrow, who was also at the ashram during the period, supports Lennon's story in her autobiography; she writes, "Then a self-important, middle-aged American woman arrived, moving a mountain of luggage into the brand-new private bungalow next to Maharishi's along with her son, a bland young man named Bill. People fled this newcomer, and no one was sorry when she left the ashram after a short time to go tiger hunting, unaware that their presence had inspired a new Beatles song – 'Bungalow Bill.'"

Imagine the contempt if Rik had been a dentist!

AND: Bungalow Bill has a blog, and you can see a photo of him with the tiger and listen to his reminiscing about the incident here.

"Not that I doubt Dylan hasn’t come to believe she’s been molested, but if from the age of 7 a vulnerable child is taught by a strong mother to hate her father because he is a monster who abused her..."

"... is it so inconceivable that after many years of this indoctrination the image of me Mia wanted to establish had taken root? Is it any wonder the experts at Yale had picked up the maternal coaching aspect 21 years ago? Even the venue where the fabricated molestation was supposed to have taken place was poorly chosen but interesting. Mia chose the attic of her country house, a place she should have realized I’d never go to because it is a tiny, cramped, enclosed spot where one can hardly stand up and I’m a major claustrophobe. The one or two times she asked me to come in there to look at something, I did, but quickly had to run out. Undoubtedly the attic idea came to her from the Dory Previn song, 'With My Daddy in the Attic.' It was on the same record as the song Dory Previn had written about Mia’s betraying their friendship by insidiously stealing her husband, André, 'Beware of Young Girls.' One must ask, did Dylan even write the letter or was it at least guided by her mother? Does the letter really benefit Dylan or does it simply advance her mother’s shabby agenda? That is to hurt me with a smear. There is even a lame attempt to do professional damage by trying to involve movie stars, which smells a lot more like Mia than Dylan."

One paragraph in the long "Woody Allen Speaks Out," published by the NYT last night. Read the whole thing. It's quite cohesive and devastating, these words of a man who lets loose after holding his tongue all these years while a woman who passionately hates him sent her words flying everywhere.

Woody Allen's argument builds in a series of paragraphs, and I'm not choosing the most persuasive one to highlight, just the one with a striking item of evidence that I'd never seen before, "With My Daddy in the Attic," right there on the album with the song Dory Previn wrote about Mia, "Beware of Young Girls."

The psychodrama of Woody and Mia is mind-bending. Both of them lavish pity on the children who got caught up in their vortex, each blaming the other for hurting the children, each claiming to be the one who has struggled all these years to save the children.

Woody must have known the structure of Mia's psychology very well. He used her tender fragility in so many of his movies. She was his muse during the height of his artistry. Then he did something — suddenly letting her see he'd transferred his sexual love for her to her daughter Soon-Yi — and there's no denying that part of the story and Woody's active role unleashing Mia's wrath. I could believe every word of Woody's story and still think: You knew her, you understood her so deeply, you connected to her through children, and you made her crazy and vengeful.

It's no great wonder that he kept quiet all these years and that he ends his speaking-out with a vow never to speak about it again. "Enough people have been hurt." Surely, that much is true.

And now back to the movies, the made-up stories, the actors and actresses pretending to wound each other deeply and to spiral into evil, vengeful rages. Have you seen "Blue Jasmine"? It's wonderful. Cate Blanchett in the lead role of the sensitive blonde who comes unhinged, the role that would always go to Mia, back in the days when she was Woody's muse and had a lock on every lead.

"I think my sister is missing a great deal in life in not reconnecting with her father, who had always adored her."

"It’s important that she assert her independence from our mother and not go through life with the false impression that she has been molested by my father. I am very happy I have come into my own power, separating from my mother, which has led to a positive reunion with my father."

Says Moses Farrow, defending Woody Allen. Moses is, we're told, a family therapist. He has some things to say about his mother: "From an early age, my mother demanded obedience and I was often hit as a child. She went into unbridled rages if we angered her, which was intimidating at the very least and often horrifying, leaving us not knowing what she would do."

Meanwhile, Mia is tweeting: "A lot of ugliness is going to be aimed at me. But this is not about me, it's about her truth."

I feel like shutting the door on this session of family therapy, but I'll just say "her truth" is a strange expression. The usual concept of truth is that it is simply the truth. When you put a possessive in from of it — this is my truth — it is ordinarily to concede that you are talking about the way things look or feel from your perspective. And it's odd to direct your audience to another individual's truth, as though you need people to think about the question at hand through the eyes of this other person over there. This is her truth. That's what's important. This is not about me. How do I know it's not about you or that "her truth" isn't really your truth? Do we even know that Dylan Farrow wrote her own letter?

"I think it's part of Mia Farrow's desire to hurt Woody Allen."

"His reaction is one of overwhelming sadness because of what has happened to Dylan. She was a pawn in a huge fight between him and Mia years ago. The idea that she was molested was implanted in her mind by her mother."

Said Woody Allen's lawyer Elkan Abramowitz, on TV today.

The NYT public editor registers 2 polite objections (where strong criticism would make more sense).

1. "As the Latest Christie Story Evolved, The Times Should Have Noted a Change."

“We made dozens of changes to this story, and it’s all happening live in front of the reader,” he said. “The story probably went through two dozen versions.” Editors can’t be expected to describe each one of those changes, [the Metro editor, Wendell Jamieson said].

And he added that no change, including the one I mention above, “alters the essential truth of the story, which is that a former Christie ally has opened fire on him in a big way.”

What an outrageous move! Defining something as "the essential truth" so that the thing that did change appears inconsequential: What really matters was that Christie was getting attacked, not the assertion that the attacker was in possession of "evidence" against Christie. But it was that evidence that got everyone excited, which was the point of the big scoop that Jamieson seeks to defend. The public editor, Margaret Sullivan, mildly chides him. There should have been "some sort of notice" of this edit.

2. "On Kristof’s Column About Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen..." Sullivan says that she's "troubled by the same questions raised" in email sent to her by a professor named Chris Rasmussen, whom she quotes:

The writers who are permitted to “columnize” for The Times have a tremendously influential platform, and I wonder whether they should use that platform to advocate on behalf of personal friends, as Mr. Kristof did yesterday....

Personal friends? Sullivan does not provide any detail about this personal friendship. I clicked the link to see Kristof's own disclosure, which specifies who the friendship is with, but not the degree of warmth and interaction: "I am a friend of her mother, Mia, and brother Ronan, and that’s how Dylan got in touch with me." That disclosure appears only at the column, not at the blog post, which is where Dylan's open letter appears in full and thus the page most people are reading. Can't Sullivan do more than say she's "troubled" and that there are "questions"? I had to Google "what is nicholas kristof's friendship with mia farrow" in an effort to get details. I found this at a website the credibility of which I don't know:

But Kristof and Farrow aren’t just ‘friends.’ They are close friends. Romantic? I’m not suggesting that. They travel together, Kristof writes about Farrow often, he Tweets and re-Tweets her.

Why couldn't Sullivan extract details from Kristof?

Come on, Sullivan, be there for us. Yes, yes, I know. You're all going to say that of course the "public editor" position is NYT PR and a fraud.

Woody Allen's "indifference to the gossip has always struck me not as a decision so much as an involuntary and organic reaction."

"In fact, during a written exchange that day in which I mentioned the tweet attack, he was more focused on giving me advice about a stye I had on my eyelid that I joked was probably a brain tumor: 'I agree, you probably do have a brain tumor. You should get your affairs in order quickly as those things can move rather rapidly. You’ll probably start to have some problems with your balance—don’t panic—it’s quite natural for a brain tumor.' He then counseled me not to use up my 'remaining days' fretting over Mia."

But if Woody Allen won't speak, Robert B. Weide will.

ADDED: "In 1969, at the age of 24, [Mia] became pregnant by musician/composer André Previn, 40, who was still married to singer/songwriter Dory Previn. The betrayal is said to have led to Dory Previn’s mental breakdown and institutionalization, during which she received electroconvulsive therapy. She would later write a song called, 'Beware of Young Girls' about Mia. Maybe sleeping with your friend’s husband doesn’t earn as many demerits as sleeping with your girlfriend’s adopted daughter, but if you’re waving the 'Never Forget' banner in Mia’s honor, let’s be consistent and take a moment to also remember the late Dory Previn."

"What You Should Know About the Abuse Allegations Against Woody Allen."

Summarized at Gawker, after Mia and Ronan Farrow tweeted hostility when Woody was honored at the Golden Globes. Some interesting comments over there:

"Ronan Farrow has "assiduously avoided" publicity "for much of his life," according to The NYT Magazine, arduously aching to bestow publicity upon him.

The 26-year-old son of Mia Farrow and Woody-Allen-or-Frank-Sinatra has also had an MSNBC show thrust upon him.

His public persona is friendly but guarded.... So working as a television personality seems a strange choice; it’s likely to foreground all the things he has been so keen to leave in the background — his looks, his family, his private life. 

Oh, no, no, no, no, don't speak about how beautiful I am. Do put that in the background. I'm so keen to put that in the background. And in the foreground, please put... what? What the hell else is there? Why is this lad on television and in The New York Times?

"I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest."

Said Frank Sinatra. I found that quote because I was Googling to try to find out how intelligent Frank Sinatra was, a propos of yesterday's PR from the Farrow family that it's possible that Ronan Farrow came into existence because Mia Farrow continued — during her long relationship with Woody Allen — to have sex with the love of her life, her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

Ronan Farrow seems to be a young man of very high intelligence (since he started attending Yale Law School at age 15), so one naturally wonders about the relative intelligence of the 2 possible fathers.

What's Woody Allen's IQ? He once said "I've got a 150, 160 IQ," but that was as a character in a movie. "To Rome With Love." One might only guess that it's actually Woody Allen's IQ, but we know that he wrote the dialogue, and he was smart enough to write the dialogue, which had Judy Davis coming back with: "You're figuring it in Euros. In dollars, it's much less."

"Possibly" Mia Farrow's son by Woody Allen is actually the biological offspring of Frank Sinatra.

That's the late-breaking scoop in Vanity Fair.

Scroll down for a photo of the son, now called Ronan Farrow. He looks a lot like Mia, but does he look at all like either Frank Sinatra or Woody Allen? He's got blue eyes...

No DNA tests have been done. When Orth asks Nancy Sinatra Jr. about Ronan’s being treated as if he were a member of her family, Sinatra answers in an e-mail, “He is a big part of us, and we are blessed to have him in our lives.”

Why have no DNA tests been done? It's easier, in this case, to think of reasons why there would be denial of DNA tests that were done. Considering the severity of Ronan and Mia's rejection of Woody Allen, you'd think they'd love to be able to say, as a scientific fact, that Ronan is not Woody's son. And what delight in being about to claim Frank Sinatra as one's father!

I smell hooey.

UPDATE: "Listen, we’re all *possibly* Frank Sinatra’s son." And: "It’s an unusual thing to do with one’s mother..."

ADDED: I indulge in much more analysis here. 

"Happy father's day - or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law's day."

A tweet, from Woody Allen's son Ronan Farrow.

The message was then retweeted by Allen's ex-wife Mia Farrow, who added the word: 'Boom'

Fathers should not marry their daughters. That's clear. But should moms retweet?