The only thing we love to do more than put celebrities up on pedestals is tear them down. When a celebrity is accused of anything, they are automatically guilty. Sometimes their careers can survive. Richard Gere never suffered professionally from all those gerbil rumours that some people still believe. If the accusation is especially bad then they are probably finished. You can ask Fatty Arbuckle all about that.
Actually, this applies to the rest of us as well. The court of public opinion never renders an acquittal. And now with the internet we can all express our completely uninformed opinions on all the evil things that other people do whilst making ourselves feel superior. The world wide web is the greatest ego inflater ever invented.
In 1992 Mia Farrow found out about Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. She was upset by all accounts. Mia and Woody had dated off and on for about 12 years. I can call them Mia and Woody because I have seen their movies and read about them, therefore I know them intimately enough to be on such a familiar level. Right?
Mia Farrow immediately sought sole custody of their three children, Satchel, Moses and Dylan. Andre Previn has always been the father of her older children. Woody refused to annul his adoption of Moses and Dylan. Then things got ugly.
According to Mia Farrow, Woody visited the Farrow summer home in the middle of this bitter custody battle, took 7-year-old Dylan up to the attic and molested her. Mia then videotaped an interview with Dylan over the course of two or three days and then alerted the authorities.
The public immediately went apeshit. And this was long before Twitter. Woody was now a monster. Never mind the fact that there had not been a trial or any form of investigation at this point. He was merely accused of doing something monstrous. That is enough.
This is when the public decided that Soon-Yi was Woody’s daughter, that Woody and Mia were married, that Soon-Yi was a child when she and Woody started dating. So it was rumoured and so it shall always be. What is wholly irrelevant is that Woody Allen has married three times in his life. His first marriage ended badly but provided a good deal of stand up comedy material. This was back when Woody was a stand up comedian. His marriage to Louise Lasser ended amicably and they worked together several times afterward. His third marriage was to Soon-Yi. They are still married.
Woody and Mia adopted two children together, Moses and Dylan. Soon-Yi was adopted by Mia and Andre Previn before Woody and Mia ever met each other. And Soon-Yi was born in either 1970 or 1972. She was young when she started dating Woody in 1992 but not a child.
The Connecticut police launched a full investigation into Mia Farrow’s accusations against Woody. Connecticut is one of those states that is not at all impressed by celebrity and will nail you to the wall if they think you are guilty. They get none of that California and New York movie money. Their investigation concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Woody and that Dylan’s story changed too many times to be credible. They also took into account the complete lack of medical evidence and the testimony of one of the nannies that Dylan was with her the entire time Woody was at the house. Another nanny said that she was pressured by Mia to say terrible things about Woody.
Less significant are the facts that everybody who has ever met Woody Allen can tell you that he would not do such a thing. Even his son Moses, who grew up in Mia’s anti-Woody house, has said that he did not do it. That is not evidence but people who know him obviously know him more than the rest of us. Woody has always famously been a breast man. Watch any of his early movies. Men who are attracted to full figured adult women are rarely inclined to molest 7-year-olds in a house full of people.
Woody and Soon-Yi went on to adopt two girls. There is a thorough investigation process to adopt children in the United States. Even more so when a man who has been accused of molesting a girl is trying to adopt a girl. The people who approved of both adoptions knew that they would be crucified if anything happened to either child. Both girls are now teenagers and their only complaint about their father is that he knows as much about Justin Bieber as they do about macroscopic quantum phenomena.
There is also the issue of Mia’s questionable moral choices but that does not prove guilt either.
Custody of all three children was given to Mia but Woody’s adoption was not annulled. Satchel changed his name to Ronan and Dylan became Malone. Moses remained Moses. The whole sordid affair died away, save for the rumours that Woody married his own daughter. That will live forever.
Then Ronan got a job on a TV programme. Suddenly Mia wanted to work tirelessly to warn people about how evil Woody is. Dylan, who had always publicly been unsure about what happened, declared that it was all true. Mia announced that Ronan is probably Frank Sinatra’s son and that she and Frank had never stopped knocking boots. Ronan became a household name just in time for his TV debut.
Call me a cynic but if I were Mia and I truly believed that my boyfriend molested my daughter I would never stop telling people about how horrible he is. I would not wait 20 years until my son had a new TV deal to start it all up again. I would also not Twitter about how horrible Woody is and then praise my good friend Roman Polanski on the same day. That is simply bad form.
For the record, I am a Woody Allen fan and not at all a Mia Farrow fan. Other than her work in Rosemary’s Baby, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose, I think she is overrated. I was relieved when they broke up since it meant Woody would be working with other actors. Some of his movies with her, especially September, Another Woman, Alice, would have been better with a different lead.
I was also not present during the crime for which Woody was never charged. Neither was anybody else who is talking about it. The only person who truly knows what happened is Woody Allen. He probably never reads all the blog and Twitter posts about him. He probably does not know what a blog is.
Obviously I hope that this horrible rumour is untrue. I say obviously because it seems to me that no reasonable person would want any of this to be true. The damage to Dylan/Malone has already been done. She has been told for most of her life that something horrible happened to her. Whether she was molested or not makes little difference to her psyche at this point. But there is still time to save Woody. If he did it then he should be castrated. But if he did not then he should be allowed to live his life and make great movies. Being accused of something should not be enough to ruin somebody’s life.
It would be nice if people could be innocent until proved guilty. Too bad that never happens.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I try not to pay much attention, if any, to celebrity woes and opinions as they are just people like the rest of us, far away, talented in a certain manner. The heroin death of Philip Seymour Hoffman and the recent increase of heorin use in parts of our country did make me wonder how much of it is caused by a crack down by authorities on opiates in pill form manufactured in regulated controlled quality manufacturing systems versus illegal heroin.
I ignore celebrity gossip so much that I did not even know that Philip Seymour Hoffman was a junkie. When I heard that he died I assumed it was a heart attack or some other weight related issue. He was a great actor nonetheless.
This is not meant to rationalise anything, but we really have to separate art from artists. Much as we would like to think that our favourite artists (whatever their medium) are also lovely people, it ain't necessarily so. More often than not, the two are mutually exclusive.
So allowing for the possibility that Woody Allen is a scumbag, his work was either always good or it never was. Same goes for Phil Spector, Ike Turner, Leadbelly, Lewis Carroll, Wagner...
People can boycott his films all they like, but it's clear that if commercial success meant a damn thing to him, then his career would have been pretty different.
Some have said that Mia brought these accusations back to prevent Woody from winning some Oscars. If that is true then she does not know him very well.
Even if Woody did everything he has ever been accused of it would not affect the quality of his work. But it would most definitely affect his legacy. Too many great filmmakers are more remembered for their public image than for their great films.
Without Charlie Chaplin we probably would not have movies today. But he was mostly abandoned by the public for being a communist, which was false, and for his fondness of teenage girls, which was true. DW Griffith influenced everybody and was completely destroyed because audiences could not separate the subject and the filmmaker. There is currently an effort to portray Alfred Hitchcock as a lecherous skirt chaser even though only one actress ever accused him of anything untoward whilst many others contradicted Tippi Hedren’s depiction.
Post a Comment