LIKE MOTHER: Ronan Farrow, seen here with mother Mia Farrow, has not had contact with his father, Woody Allen, since the scandal and has instead followed her footsteps as a humanitarian. (Dave Allocca/startraksphoto.com)
LIKE MOTHER: Ronan Farrow, here with mother Mia Farrow at a UNICEF event, has not had contact with his father, Woody Allen, since the scandal and has instead followed in her footsteps as a humanitarian. (face to face/ABACAUSA.COM)
FAMILY AFFAIR: Allen and Farrow with kids (from left) Satchel (now Ronan), Lark, Dylan (now Malone), Fletcher, Daisy, Soon-Yi and Moses before scandal struck. Below right, Allen with Soon-Yi last month. (JANE MARTIN/IPOL/GLOBE PHOTOS)
As celebrity scandals go, it’s probably second only to the O.J. trial: Woody Allen leaving Mia Farrow, his girlfriend and muse of 14 years, for her adopted teenage daughter Soon-Yi.
That was way back in 1992, and what was unthinkable then has long since come to pass: Woody Allen has been forgiven by the public at large. His most recent film, “Midnight in Paris,” has made over $56 million at the US box office to date — his highest-grossing film ever. Along with Elaine May and Ethan Coen, he contributed a one-act play to Broadway’s “Relatively Speaking,” which opened this past October. He was recently the subject of a worshipful, two-part “American Masters” special on PBS.
Farrow, meanwhile, largely gave up acting to focus on her humanitarian work, with a special interest in the war-torn regions of Africa. In 2000, she became one of UNICEF’s most prominent ambassadors; in 2008, with a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored by her son Ronan, she got Steven Spielberg to step down from the advisory board for the Olympics in Beijing over human-rights abuses.
Today, however, it’s Ronan who’s the star. He is the former couple’s only biological child, and was originally named Satchel; Farrow changed his name after the split, as she did with Dylan, the daughter she and Allen adopted together. (She is now Malone.)
The young adult that Ronan has become — he turned 24 on Dec. 19 — is a testament to Farrow’s parenting: A child genius, he was, at 15, the youngest student ever to graduate from Bard College. He’s also a graduate of Yale Law School and has worked for the US State Department since 2009. This past November, he was named a Rhodes Scholar.
Ronan has had no contact with Woody Allen since the split. “He’s my father married to my sister,” Ronan has said. “That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression . . . I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children.”
If Farrow finds Allen’s great, nearly untrammeled success galling, she will not say. Instead, she has largely withdrawn from public life, finding pleasure in her quiet victories.
Raising her and Allen’s only son to be secure and capable, modest in his own abilities and achievements, well-adjusted despite all his early childhood trauma — is the kind of contentment, one suspects, that Woody Allen will never know.
Farrow and Ronan have always been particularly close. He, too, has been a UNICEF ambassador, and as early as 2001 began traveling throughout Africa, lobbying the United Nations for humanitarian aid and writing op-eds in The Washington Post, Boston Herald and International Herald Tribune, among others.
Curiously, it was Ronan who got his mother to return to acting.
“I’d wanted Mia from the get-go,” writer-director Todd Solondz tells The Post. He approached Farrow last year about starring in his new film, “Dark Horse,” but considered it a long shot.
“Really, it’s because her son Ronan is a big admirer of my work,” Solondz says. “He said, ‘Mom, you’ve gotta do it!’ Without reading the script, she agreed. Because of him.”
In the film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this past September, Mia plays Phyllis, mother to a grown man who lives at home and collects toys. Given her relationship with Allen — whom she has described as something of a child-man — the role wasn’t much of a stretch.
Mia Farrow met Woody Allen in the fall of 1979; she was 34, a mother to seven children, and twice divorced (married to Frank Sinatra at 19, then to Andre Previn, himself married when they met). Allen was 43, also twice divorced, an Academy Award-winning writer-director, professional humorist and neurotic who told Farrow he had “zero interest in kids” on one of their first dates.
In her 1997 memoir, “What Falls Away,” Farrow recounts Allen’s multiple failings as a partner and a father: Allen would have his secretary call her to make dates. He would rarely call her by her name. Upon the adoption of their first child, he tells her, “Look, I don’t care about the baby. What I care about is my work.”
Farrow starred in 13 Woody Allen movies — from 1982’s “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” to 1992’s “Husbands and Wives” — and he reportedly only ever paid her $200,000 a film.
Her friend Leonard Gershe told Vanity Fair that Woody often disparaged Farrow’s talent, saying “she was only good in his pictures, not anybody else’s. Nobody would ever hire her again.”
He and Farrow never lived together — she and the children stayed in her massive Upper West Side apartment, Allen on the Upper East Side — and though Allen saw the children every day, Farrow has said he mostly ignored them.
“One of my greatest regrets,” she has said, “is that I permitted this to continue through 12 irreplaceable years of their childhoods.”
No one’s quite sure when Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi, whom Farrow had adopted with ex-husband Previn in 1978, began. As a girl, Soon-Yi reportedly told her mother that Allen was “nasty and ugly,” but by the summer of 1991, he was taking her to Knick games and encouraging her to pursue an a career as an actress.
This was heady stuff, no doubt, for a girl who had been rescued by Farrow from the slums of Seoul, Korea. Her mother was a prostitute whose primary form of discipline was to slam a door against Soon-Yi’s head; eventually, she abandoned Soon-Yi on the street.
Farrow spent a year waiting to adopt Soon-Yi, who had lived through such neglect and abuse that she was nearly feral, unable to speak or recognize herself in the mirror. No one even knew how old she was, but when Farrow got her back to the States, a bone scan determined she was somewhere between 5 and 7 years old.
Farrow put her in private school, and though Soon-Yi made great strides, she struggled: The early trauma she’d suffered resulted in learning disabilities, difficulty socializing and showing affection. It’s been reported that she has an IQ of less than 100.
That Woody had taken an interest in the girl must have seemed — while out of character — utterly harmless.
In late 1991, while shooting Allen’s “Husbands and Wives” — in which Woody and Mia played a married couple who split up after the Woody character meets a 21-year-old girl — that Mia discovered nude Polaroids of Soon-Yi on Allen’s mantelpiece.
Incredibly, she agreed to finish the film, shooting the breakup scene in the immediate aftermath of her discovery. And for months, she went back and forth on whether to reconcile with Allen. “She was in denial, obviously,” her sister Tisa told Vanity Fair. “Her whole life was tied up with this man.”
For his part, Allen couldn’t see what the big deal was. As he so famously said: “The heart wants what it wants.”
Farrow unloaded her New York City apartment — which had belonged to her mother, actress Maureen O’Sullivan, and which figured prominently in Allen’s 1986 film, “Hannah and Her Sisters” — years ago. She and Allen went through a bruising custody battle, during which she accused him of molesting their daughter, Dylan. (The case was dropped in 1993.)
Today, Farrow is known to have 15 children, and it’s believed one still lives with her at her Connecticut farmhouse.
She has not publicly dated anyone since her split from Allen, although in 2008 she alluded to a budding relationship with — of all people — the novelist Philip Roth, another misanthropic Jewish humorist who has issues with women.
Farrow, in fact, seems to have spectacularly poor taste in men: She married Sinatra when she was 19 and he 51. When, against Sinatra’s wishes, she took the lead in Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” Sinatra had her served with divorce papers on set.
She has retained great affection for Polanski, despite his conviction, in 1977, of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Farrow has been one of his staunchest defenders, testifying on his behalf in a 2005 libel suit and appearing in the 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.”
Even her intimates can’t explain why Farrow — otherwise described as incredibly bright, warm and well read — is drawn to such men. Freudians might look to her relationship with her father, the director John Farrow, a heavy drinker and philanderer who, in many ways, Sinatra resembled. It’s a theory she has always dismissed, saying her attraction to Sinatra — long-suspected to have serious Mafia ties — was based on his “very strong moral structure.”
Farrow’s mother was also a drinker, and despite her husband’s well-known carousing, they had seven children together.
At age 9, Farrow contracted polio and spent three weeks in a hospital, partly in an iron lung. She was never the same.
“I was 9 when my childhood ended,” she wrote in “What Falls Away.”
In 1958, her 17-year-old brother, Michael, died in a plane crash. “My parents are Irish, and they started drinking, and my father couldn’t work again,” she has said. “We felt his heart just broke. He died at 58, after a series of heart attacks.”
In June of 1998, her mother died at the age of 87, and it was the first in a decade of devastating losses. March of 2000, her adopted daughter Tam died of heart disease at 19. Another adopted daughter, Lark, died of AIDS on Christmas Day, 2008; she was 35. In June 2009, Farrow’s brother Patrick committed suicide at his home in Vermont; he was 66.
“My faith has helped me through many difficult times,” she said in 2006.
Despite the many tragedies she has survived, her great humanitarian work, and the spectacular way her son has turned out, she knows she will always be defined by the Allen-Soon-Yi scandal.
She has had no contact with either of them to this day but has said she is willing to forgive. “I’ve got over it, you know,” she said in 2006. “You can get over almost anything. You just can’t go on mourning forever. And so I’ve moved on.”
The son she had with Allen, though, doesn’t feel the same way. “I cannot see him,” Ronan has said. “I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent.”