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For the record, I abhor celebrity
gossip. I couldn’t care less who got noticed wearing the wrong dress with the wrong body, who tripped in front of
everybody, who might have gotten
drunk and unruly on a flight and WTF Ellen has been lying about all these years.
It’s none of my business. I don’t have time for their silly
distractions. Not when I’ve got bucket
loads of my own, mostly entirely invented, critics harping on my many faults and
others telling me to please go serve up some Rum Raisin ice cream and quick.
So how is it I’ve suddenly gone down
the rabbit hole?
I may have been drawn there by my shock
that Phillip Seymour Hoffman had died at 46.
He was a lovely, empathic, generous spirit whose magnificence telecommuted
to my brain through sound waves and sight lines. He taught me the phrase, “I sharted.” This came in handy when I was digestively impaired
by cancer treatments.
Here’s the thing. I am continually educated by the addicts and alcoholics
I know and love. The emotional and physical torments that face them are vicious
and unrelenting. Cancer survivors like
me are lucky. I cannot begin to imagine
the shame and craving and compulsion and despair that fueled Seymour’s last
binge. Those of you who are angry at him for
leaving his kids, please, just read a little about disease and neuroscience and
indulge yourself in a warm bath of there
for but the grace of God go I.
In case you were finding me tryingly
sympathetic to this famously homely, fabulously charismatic and sublimely
talented player in the motion picture
industry, do not worry. I am taking one
last whiff of restrained good-heartedness before plunging into the quicksand of questions regarding another titan of the
movie industry who bit the dust this week.
He too lacks the classic
good-looks of Hollywood. He too was a talent many admired, including myself, if
not for all of his movies, for his quotable one-liners.
I dreamed last night that Phillip
Seymour Hoffman was driven to his death by despair over Dylan Farrow’s Sunday
letter about her abuse at the hands of Woody Allen. Not necessarily because all of its accusations
were true (or false) but because,
like Ibsen’s onion, the story unravels to expose layers of futility, of
betrayal, of uncertainty and of such sordid details that they can not be easily
unremembered.
The basics as far as I can sort
them out: In 1991, after going to
therapy for “inappropriate behavior” with his seven year old daughter for
nearly two years, Woody Allen continued to be a fixture among Mia Farrow’s
extended family. Then, in December of
that year, Mia, visiting Allen’s apartment, discovered a stack of Polaroids of
her 19 (or 21) year old daughter, Soon Yi, legs akimbo, full frontal nudity,
face lit by the radiance of attention.
Later, Mr. Allen would marry the girl, whose
modeling aspirations he claimed to be nurturing the only way he knew how. Mia Farrow was upset. Everything that happened afterwards was later
characterized by Allen’s spokespeople as the vengeful actions of a woman
scorned.
Even after this December discovery
of an affair, however, Allen’s visits to
Mia’s farm continued. He slept in a
guest bedroom when he visited the children.
According to babysitters interviewed later, there had been a
longstanding, two year rule that Mr. Allen was not to be left alone with Mia’s
seven year old daughter, Dylan. In
August of 1992, while her mother and sisters were out, the babysitters began to
worry when they couldn’t locate Woody Allen and the little girl for a period of
somewhere between five to fifteen minutes.
When Mia returned, she found Dylan outside
in a dress, without underwear. (Others
dispute this.) Another babysitter
testified that she’d walked in on Daddy worshiping daughter by kneeling on the
floor with his head in her lap. (The sitter couldn’t say why it seemed "intimate.")
After Allen left the next morning, the little
girl told her mom that her father had taken her to a play space behind a closet
and penetrated her with his finger while whispering that if she was quiet, he
would take her to Paris and put her in his movies. She asked her mother if this was okay, if
this was what Mia’s daddy had done to her.
Mia took her to the
pediatrician. At first Dylan said Daddy
had touched her shoulder, later she told her mom she’d been too embarrassed to
say where he’d touched her. They
returned to the pediatrician, who reported the alleged abuse to the police, as
required by law. During these first
days, Mia recorded a video with her daughter.
Unfortunately, because it was stopped and started several times, it was
impossible to know if the mother had coached the alleged victim to say what she
did. One brother, who now sides with his
father, says her mom had to take it over several days because Dylan wasn’t
interested and kept not wanting to discuss what happened. (As a mother, I think a child who had been
genuinely traumatized might very likely seek to avoid talking about it.)
Murky leads to murkier, with famous
psychologists convening to question and interview seven-year-old Dylan,
reporting that they found no evidence (physical or otherwise verbally
convincing) that the penetration or abuse had taken place.
Meanwhile, the details of the story
that stick with me, that seem to awaken in me a protective mother’s instinct,
have little to do with the question of whether the attic incident took place. Rather, it’s Allen’s reported propensity to
follow his daughter from room to room,
to ask her to play under the covers with him, both dressed in their
underwear. His request that she suck his thumb was enough to make me feel slightly ill.
There is something to this detail that is telling in its ability to be
denied as sexual and also to be interpreted as clearly sexual. (While one babysitter among many sided with
Allen and said she felt the mother had coached the daughter, most others (and
there were many) sided with Mia. So have
all but one of the children, unless you count Soon Yi.)
Even if these were the mild boundary
crossings of an intellectually gifted but emotionally stunted individual, what
I find perhaps most chilling is the perfectly legal seduction and courtship of
Ms. Farrow’s daughter, Soon Yi. Can the world-famous, fabulously-wealthy,
universally-feted director seriously not find another woman who is not the child of his longtime romantic
partner to fetishize and photograph naked? Further, can he, when questioned about it, do
something better than proclaim grandiosely that “the heart wants what it wants.”
Notice the dis-assembly of the heart
from the self, from the brain and will. There is something very adolescent about his worldview, as Joan Didion pointed out many years ago.
Finally, back to the accusation that
Farrow’s outrage had to do with being a woman scorned: I think Mr. Allen
overestimated his sex appeal. I think her fury
was not that he was leaving her for her daughter but that he was taking her
daughter for a similar ride as he’d taken her.
She knew only too well how easily a young woman could be cowed by the
charms of the Great Artist. She
herself had been led down the garden path so skillfully that she sought to find
reasons that would explain away several ‘what is wrong with this picture’
moments involving Dylan. She must have
felt responsible for the possible infringement of both girls.
So, there you have it, the ravings of
a woman who’s been hoisted by her own petard, her pride about not sinking to
the level of discussing sordid details of the rich and famous, coupled with a
mild prompt from a dream about a man she greatly admired to explore the
underbelly of a universe in which a formerly admired man’s pleasure became that same reduced man’s
poison. And so the mighty have fallen, including
me. I’ve been drawn into a family feud I've got nothing to do with, kind of like Downton Abby or Bleak House, but
darker, dimmer. Maybe more like a Lolita,
except with a narrator who’s willfully ignorant of the pain he causes object of
his obsessive attentions. Oh wait, that is Lolita. Never mind.
Perhaps this is a real-life Greek tragedy into which the great director couldn’t
help but insert himself as the leading man while the unwitting cast could find
their only solace in the unceasing chorus of outsiders’ unseemly, daemonic laments.
