Certain families in Hollywood are often described, with no hint of irony, as "Hollywood royalty." The phrase brings with it dynastic implications -providing an heir is half the battle in any royal family. In Hollywood royalty, however, what is being passed down to the heirs is not a title or land (although Beverly Hills real estate may be part of the inheritance), but what is known in the movie business as "above-the-line talent"-so called because there is a line in a printed budget that divides the section relating to the fees paid to the writer, producer, director and key actors from the sections relating to the fees paid to lesser mortals such as the location manager or wig-maker. By and large, the fees below the line can be accurately computed in advance. Above-the-line, the sky's the limit.
Although the phrase "Hollywood royalty" is nowhere to be found in Mia Farrow's memoir What Falls Away, she nevertheless encapsulates it. The daughter of a movie star and a director, her story follows the classic three-act structure of any princess's life: dysfunctional family, bewildering marriage, messy split.
Throughout the book, Mia rarely leaves the royal world: "The Goetzes threw a big wedding party for us and my godfather, George Cukor, brought Katherine Hepburn; Spencer Tracy arrived separately." Her social life: "In New York, there were the Paleys and the Cerfs, the Guinesses and Gables. In Beverly Hills, it was Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, the Deutches and the Wilders-and especially Edie and Bill Goetz." Even royalty has its pecking order-the "especially" is because Edie Goetz is the daughter of Louis B Mayer, MGM's founder.
Her trips into the outside world, mostly to pick up another prospective adoptee, have an unconvincing air as if she is not entirely sure how to evaluate them. "By chance Mother Theresa was also having breakfast one morning in the dining room of the Hanoi government guesthouse, unruffled by the giant rats that zigzagged across the room and under the tables." As they talk, Mia tells Mother Theresa how she and her children had stood in line to meet her in New York and how she had run around to the end of the line to do it again.
"As children of show business, we came naturally to the business of shows," she says as she and her childhood friend Maria, daughter of Hal Roach, producer king of the silent era, put on a play. Another friend is Michael Boyer, son, naturally, of Charles.
The prose in What Falls Away often seems drawn from literary or cinematic antecedents. Mia as Holden Caulfield: "Maybe now is the moment to mention my sense of direction because it's bound to come up again: it's as bad as they come. It's a curse. I can't find my way anywhere or back again..." Mia as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby: "The ceremony was brief. There was a cake that nobody touched. The Goetzes were there, and Jack Entratter, and Red Skelton, who had just shot his wife." And most tellingly, Mia as the unnamed Mrs de Winter in not just one, but two marriages. Her first Manderley is in Bel Air, and her Maxim is Frank Sinatra: "Every hour seemed like dusk inside the house of our highest hopes. Exhausted, I lay on the practically new king-size bed. There was a fireplace in our bedroom but we had never got around to lighting it. The logs were fake-who even knew how to turn it on?... The housekeeper... who looked at me strangely would know how to turn on the heat but I couldn't bring myself to ask."
One marriage on, nothing much has changed except the husband (Andr? Previn), the temperature and the name of the housekeeper: "I am in the flat Andr? rented on Eaton Square. It is full of somebody else's ugly stuff. Even though the place is suffocatingly overheated, I put my patchwork quilt on the bed to make myself feel better... A housekeeper, Rosario, came with the flat. She scares me."
But the voice which allows Mia to tell her story most movingly is that of Joan Didion. Like Maria Wyeth, the central character in Didion's Play It As It Lays, Mia "was holding all the aces, but what was the game?" Like a Didion heroine, Mia seems to lack the connective tissue that would bind her to any of the three difficult men she lived with, and yet she is somehow incapable of leaving them.
Her descriptions of life at the Las Vegas court of King Frank have the poignancy of fairy stories in which a child princess is sent to be queen in a far-off country. The first Christmas she and Frank are together she is "hoping for a puppy." Instead, she is in Las Vegas with "women who didn't seem to mind being referred to as 'broads,'" women who "sat up straight with their legs crossed and little expectant smiles on their carefully made-up faces. They sipped white wine, and eyed the men." Often, Mia says, she fell asleep "with my head on my arms folded on the table." She is married to a man whose royal carriage of choice is a golf cart, a man who is driving her, for reasons unspecified, at five in the morning, with the gas pedal down as far as it will go, straight at a shiny plate-glass window. He is "wearing a shoe box on his head to keep the sunlight out of his eyes."
With the broads, the courtiers and the housekeepers, Mia tells us, "Things were so well organised, I'd get a migraine." Soon, in common with so many royal marriages, her husband began to "metamorphose into a virtual stranger and would forget many things, including me."
Before long, she finds herself staring in the mirror. "The telephone was ringing. I unwrapped a Wilkinson razor that was lying by the sink, then I couldn't think why I did that and neatly I refolded the paper around it... There was nothing to move toward, nothing to return to." But Mia already knows what separates her from the others-in the words of Didion's Maria Wyeth: "I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing."
Her next marriage to Andr? Previn, like that to Sinatra, has the air of a royal arranged marriage: an older husband, an alien world, a barely understood unravelling. What both marriages begin with is the chilling politeness of strangers worried they will disappoint each other, or worse, themselves.
With Frank, she holds hands during a private screening. He invites her to Palm Springs. "Now?" she asks. She declines because she does not know what to do with her cat who only eats baby food. With Andr?, a relationship begins to form, Mia tells us, "via telephone," the modern equivalent of the sealing-waxed messages passing between distant kingdoms negotiating the detail of the marriage. Everything agreed; they spend two weeks in Ireland.
Andr? is putting his best foot forward: "A raconteur second to none... he loved modern art... he had, it seemed, read every book ever written." But most importantly, "he was more interested in me than anyone had been in my life." But clearly there is more than politeness and fine conversation. She gets pregnant. He tells her he loves her. Hearing that, she says, "I loved him too, even though I barely knew him."
Their Manderley is a house in Surrey called "The Haven," where she brings forth twins. Maxim let Rebecca keep Mrs Danvers. Andr? is not so indulgent: he makes Mia get rid of the secretary who "keeps everything going." What she loved about the early Andr?-"he was so quick, he arrived before he even left"-has changed. Now he leaves before he has even arrived: "During the second year of my marriage to Andr?, if you connected all the days he wasn't somewhere else, we spent 15 days together." No wonder they have to adopt. Within a few years there are six children, three of their own and three adopted.
At first she only takes work in England to stay close to home and husband, although he is never at home. Then she relaxes this rule and dips a toe into the water of working a little away from home: she accepts a film in Bora Bora. She and the children never return to Andr?.
Other kingdoms, other eras. "Frank and I stayed in touch. Sometimes I missed him more than was appropriate," she says in the early years of her second marriage. Back in the US with the children after Bora Bora, "Andr? and I remained close. In truth all I wanted in the world was to turn back the clock and be with Andr?." Too late: "A new girlfriend had moved into The Haven, and I had been to Santo Domingo to sign divorce papers."
There can be few who are ignorant of the details of her relationship with Woody Allen and, in particular, his relationship with her children and their children. Curiously, it is the least interesting part of her book. The plot turns are more conventional, the outrages clearly, and wearyingly, amplified at full volume. But the dialogue between Woody and Mia is crisper than in any of her marriages to date. It is the film that Woody Allen never made-"Hannah and Her 14 Children," or a nightmare version of The Sound of Music with Woody playing Maria von Trapp.
The glue that binds the relationship together, in common with other royal relationships, is real estate: his apartment, her apartment, her summer home. Should they keep her apartment, should he buy a summer home at the Hamptons, should he buy a house in the city for all of them? "It could be like Meet Me In St Louis," he says in a statement that defines the triumph of hope over experience.
The children, the alleged abuse, the betrayal, the hearings, the judgements. She keeps as much as she can intact-her children, although too numerous to differentiate with any precision, have acquired some royal strength-and when the pain is over, she does what any princess worth her salt does after a spot of bother: "I got an agent."
In the final pages of the book, the voice that may finally be authentically her own comes through: the voice of the greeting card or Christmas round-robin. "There is a brand-new doll and a brown Steiff teddy bear waiting on that spare bed that will be Minh's." Or "I will travel lightly into an unknown future, trusting we will all be safe and that a meaningful new life will create itself." The last sentence of the book defines the concerns of all royal families, from Balmoral to Beverley Hills: "We are looking for the right pony."
What falls away
Mia Farrow
Doubleday 1997, ?16.99
