For Those of You Freaking Out About Woody Allen

[pnwmom]

150. You haven't read either of the long Vanity Fair articles, which included interviews

from most of the living siblings.

None of the 8 interviewed for the 2013 article complained that adopted children had been treated any differently, much less like scullery maids; in fact, they said the opposite.

Soon-Yi was adopted by Farrow and Previn only one year before they were divorced, and Allen and Farrow began their relationship one year after that. So Soon-Yi saw more of Allen than she did of Previn. There are reports that falsely imply that Allen never spent any time at their residence. That was probably true in NY, but it wasn't in Connecticut. The Vanity Fair article said Woody often stayed in Mia's house there, until the problems started and Mia made him stay in the guest cottage.

FROM 1992:

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1992/11/farrow199211

Previn has also been supportive of Mia, and has told friends, “If Mia is not a good mother, then Jascha Heifetz didn’t know how to play the violin.” Ironically, Woody Allen in the recent past praised Mia specifically as a mother. He told Eric Lax, the author of his 1991 biography, “She has raised nine children now with no trauma, and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day.”

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To those on the inside, however, who have watched the departure of Soon-Yi from the family, who have heard Dylan on the videotape and seen her changes of behavior, who have read the lurid headlines about Mia, who know about another approach Woody apparently made within the family, and who wonder if their phones are being tapped, Woody Allen is a chilling figure of power, a potentate of reel life who doesn’t seem to have to play by the rules. “This man is so exalted in the business—no one has the position he has. Until recently he hasn’t had to submit a script or anything,” says Leonard Gershe. “I think when you get up into that stratosphere you no longer have to pay attention to the law of gravity. Regular morals, conscience, ethics—that’s for slobs like you and me.” The effect, says Gershe, “spills over into real life. He’s treated like a little god, and little gods don’t have to do what everybody else does.” “He just scares me,” says a member of the household. “I think he scares everyone who knows all the things he has done. And anybody who is close to him—that he has the potential of destroying—I think is scared of him.”

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“Most of my students are New York City kids. Many have parents who are glamorous and famous, and most of these kids are very neglected and troubled and grow up very fast,” says Audrey Sieger, who has been tutoring the children in the Previn-Farrow-Allen household for the last 12 years. “Mia’s family is very unusual. She—at any time in these 12 years—has been able to tell me in detail about every one of her kids. These kids travel on buses with bus passes. They cook dinner for each other. They do their own laundry. Different kids over the years have been assigned the job of going to the supermarket. They have not been raised by nannies.” Mia, according to Sieger, was “warm, loving, sincere, and throughout all my years of working with the kids, having them at my office, calling at home, they were happy kids, giggling and laughing and involved with each other.”

“I couldn’t get over how much the biological kids weren’t favored. They all viewed each other as equal and always referred to each other as ‘my brother,’ ‘my sister,’ ” says Lorrie Pierce, who has gone to the house to teach the children piano for the last seven or eight years. “Mia passes down family heirlooms to each one, without regard to who is adopted.” The piano teacher echoes the tutor: “She’s the one that kids threw up on. She gets right in the arena and does all the dirty work. She doesn’t push them off onto the help.” Every September, Mia would start a new film with Woody, and, according to those in the household, there was rarely a day when at least one of the children didn’t accompany her to the set; she turned her dressing room at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios into a nursery for them. Creating a large family “is not the act of a compulsive. It’s too much hard work,” says Mia’s friend Rose Styron, the human-rights-activist wife of novelist William Styron, who is Soon-Yi’s godmother. “I’ve never known anyone who cared so selflessly about children, and who put so much of herself into them.… They always came first.” Perhaps that was the key issue for Woody: who came first? One of the people who has spoken up for him, his costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, said in New York magazine, “Why this constant need [of Mia’s] for infants and little ones? Get on with your life!”

FROM 2013:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2013/10/mia-farrow-children-family-scandal

Twenty years after Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth reported on the sexual-abuse case involving Woody Allen and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan, Orth reconnects with Farrow to discuss her human-rights work, her relationship with Frank Sinatra, the home she created for her 14 adopted and biological children, and the scandal that nearly destroyed it, 20 years ago. For her piece in the November issue, Orth talks to eight of Farrow’s children, including the long-silent Dylan, who speaks on the record for the first time about the alleged incident.

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Farrow’s son Fletcher Previn, who built his first computer at the age of 13, tells Orth that he has Photoshopped Allen out of every single family photo and edited him out of family videos so that none of them would ever have to see him again. “We can look at them and be reminded of the good and not be reminded of the bad,” Fletcher tells Orth. Of the family’s reaction to the crisis with Soon-Yi, Fletcher says, “To my siblings and me, you thought of (Allen) as another dad. It can disrupt your foundation in the world. It resets the parameters of what is possible.” He also discusses the impact Allen’s actions had on the family, telling Orth, “There were casualties, who were totally derailed. It had a different impact on everyone, but everyone had a reaction.” Fletcher singles out Lark, who died at 35. “I really do think he’s got some blood on his hands,” he says of Allen.



http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/11/mia-farrow-frank-sinatra-ronan-farrow

“There were never more than eight children at a time living at home,” Mia says. In essence, there are two sets of siblings, six Previns and eight Farrows. The oldest are the Previn twins, Matthew and Sascha, and their brother, Fletcher Previn. Matthew, the father of two and married to a lawyer, is a partner in a Park Avenue law firm. Sascha, a teacher, is the stay-at-home dad of a baby girl, whose mother, his second wife, is a pediatric cardiologist. Fletcher is an executive assistant at IBM; his wife is a graphics designer. The next in age, Lark, adopted from Vietnam, died in 2008 of complications from pneumonia and left two little girls; her estranged husband has a criminal record. Daisy, also from Vietnam, is a construction manager in Brooklyn, married to a musician, with a son from her first marriage. Both women as babies suffered from severe malnutrition. Soon-Yi, from Korea, now married to Woody Allen, was adopted at seven, after having been abused and abandoned by her prostitute mother. She is totally estranged from Mia’s family, and she and Allen have adopted two daughters. Her father, André Previn, says, “She does not exist.”

Mia adopted Moses, who has cerebral palsy, from Korea at two. He is a family therapist and a photographer. Separated from his wife and two children, Moses does not keep in touch with any of the others.

Dylan was adopted in 1985 from Texas. After Mia gave birth to Ronan, she adopted Isaiah, an African-American born to a crack-addicted mother; he is a senior at the University of Connecticut. Tam, a blind girl from Vietnam, died from heart problems in 2000. Next came Quincy, also African-American, who at 19 attends college and wants to be an aid worker. Thaddeus is a paraplegic; he was adopted from India. A car mechanic, he is studying to become a police officer. The last daughter, Minh, from Vietnam, is also blind.

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I was able to speak to eight of Mia’s children, who uniformly said they were not especially aware of how unique their situation was growing up. “I knew the status of my mom, but to me we were normal. My brothers were my brothers, and my sisters were my sisters. There was nothing special,” Daisy Previn, 39, told me. “We each had our own life, went to school, did our homework. My mom was there to sit down for dinner with us.” There was help in the house, but not a lot, and sometimes the teenage girls would complain about how much they had to babysit. I asked Daisy about their emotional issues and physical handicaps. “It wasn’t considered that you can’t see or you have this disability or that,” she said. “It was more that it was time to clean your rooms, so one person would help another one do it.” One of the accusations Woody Allen’s side made during the uproar with Soon-Yi was that Mia favored her biological children. Daisy disagrees: “If we got into trouble, it was no different than if a biological kid got into trouble. As far as love was concerned, there was no distinction. I gave my mom some very hard times growing up, but in the end she always said, ‘Remember, Daisy, I love you.’ ”

Most of the children used the same adjective for their situation: cool. “Not many people have that much variety, diversity. I liked that,” says Sascha Previn. “We all pitched in and helped each other out; we had to.” Isaiah, 21, who at six feet three and 275 pounds defines himself as “the large black male of the family,” adds, “In terms of size, composition, and disabilities, we weren’t normal, but we were great—we were so cool.” He credits Mia’s “unflinching honesty. She was very open about what each one of us is and where we came from. That became more normal to me than the regular 2.2 nuclear family. We got used to that as soon as we were old enough to understand some of us have physical or mental disabilities—so what? We are defined by more than just blood; we are brought together by love.”

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