How can a Woody Allen biography be so dull?

How do you make the life of Woody Allen unbearably dull? Mainly by retelling the plots of every one of his movies, along with lists of cast and crew, box-office receipts and critical reactions. And there are so many movies — fifty so far, but there’ll probably be another by the time you read this. Long ago, Allen got into the habit of making a film a year, and so he goes on. He once said he was “like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves” — he couldn’t stop.

So we have to wade through an awful lot of filmography before the juicy stuff — the scandal — begins. Mia Farrow doesn’t even appear until page 313 of Patrick McGilligan’s Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham. In 1979, when she first met Woody, she was divorced from Frank Sinatra and André Previn and had recently adopted her seventh child. Woody took her out to dinner and thought she couldn’t have been “nicer, sweeter,” though he said in his autobiography years later that he should have been “more alert” to the fact that her family was “rife with extremely ominous behavior.” (Her father, the film director John Farrow, was an alcoholic and possibly an abuser.)

Anyway, Woody started taking Mia out. One day in the cinema she suddenly said: “I want to have your baby.” But he changed the subject to lawn-mowers, and then promised to have to think about it, which she knew meant talking to his therapist. After they’d dated for six months, Mia decided she wanted to introduce him to her children, and he found them “very cute,” though at forty-five he had zero interest in children.

Mia wanted to get married, but he didn’t, so they lived in separate apartments facing each other across Central Park. He saw her every day and would take her out to dinner, but he never stayed the night because there were cats, dogs and gerbils running loose in her apartment and her bedroom was “strikingly nunlike,” with a crucifix over the bed. Nor did he like her country house, Frog Hollow, because the bathroom shower had a drain in the middle — he had a thing about showers. Still, Mia believed it was a “steady, secure and satisfying relationship.” And it seemed a good sign when he swapped his white Rolls-Royce for a stretch limo big enough to take all the kids.

Mia still kept saying she wanted to have his baby, and finally the therapist gave permission to go ahead. But then she didn’t get pregnant (she was almost forty), so she looked for a baby to adopt. She knew it would have to be a blue-eyed, blonde girl to appeal to Woody, and she found one and called her Dylan. Woody was immediately smitten and loved holding the baby and giving her his thumb to suck but said: “I don’t want to be there when the diapers are changed or anything awful happens.” Then Mia unexpectedly fell pregnant and had baby Satchel (later called Ronan); but Woody took no interest in his own son, “the completely superfluous little bastard,” and remained fixated on Dylan.

Woody wanted to adopt Dylan but was told he couldn’t because he was not married. Mia was secretly relieved. Meanwhile, he was getting to know her other children, especially the adopted Soon-Yi, who shared his passion for watching sports. Allen took her to New York Knicks games and to screenings when she was nineteen and kissed her while they were watching The Seventh Seal. Soon they were in bed together and he was taking Polaroids of her naked. He put most of them in a drawer, but left some on the mantelpiece where, inevitably, Mia found them and went berserk. She rang all her friends saying Woody had “raped her retarded daughter” — she always maintained Soon-Yi was retarded, though no one else thought so. She became increasingly convinced that Woody had molested Dylan and put a sign on the Frog Hollow bathroom door that read: “Child Molester at Birthday Party! Molded then Abused One Sister. Now Focused on Youngest Sister. Family Disgusted.”

Woody took no interest in his son, ‘the completely superfluous little bastard,’ and remained fixated on Dylan

Mia wanted to stop Woody seeing any of the children, but he successfully fought for visitation rights and fixed a custody visit for August 4, 1992. Mia went out but told the children to watch him like a hawk. They reported that he and Dylan had disappeared to a crawl space in the attic for twenty minutes, and Mia noticed that Dylan was not wearing knickers. Next day, she asked Dylan what happened and filmed her answer: “He touched my privates;” and “It hurt when he pushed his finger in.” Mia rang her lawyer, who told her she had to report it to the police. Woody then launched a lawsuit claiming that Mia was “emotionally disturbed” and had falsely accused him of abusing Dylan and Satchel. The news immediately swept round the world.

The press were soon on to his affair with Soon-Yi, and he put out a statement: “Regarding my love for Soon-Yi, it’s real and happily true.” He said that taking nude photos of her was “a lark of the moment.” She was by then a college student and they were dating. Soon-Yi gave interviews saying of Mia: “I don’t think you can raise eleven children with sufficient love and care. Some of us got neglected, some got smothered.”

Although Woody was never charged, and has always denied the sex abuse allegations, they have hovered over him ever since. Many people said they could never again watch a Woody Allen film, and actors (except Diane Keaton) said they regretted ever working for him. In 1997 he married Soon-Yi, then twenty-seven, in Venice, and they adopted two girls. He also stopped having therapy after thirty years and said it had not been as helpful as he hoped — though when he first met Mia she said he couldn’t even buy sheets without consulting his therapist.

Mia and Ronan (formerly Satchel) have kept up the war against Woody which was later joined by the #MeToo movement. Dylan continued to say that Woody had abused her. But Mia’s son Moses, who had denounced Woody at the time, later said that the Soon-Yi relationship was “not nearly as devastating to our family as my mother’s insistence on making this betrayal the center of all our lives from then on.” He added: “Life under my mother’s roof was impossible if you didn’t do exactly as you were told.”

Woody is now eighty-nine and still churning out a film a year. He is in good health, apart from deafness, and remains happily married to Soon-Yi. Patrick McGilligan has written countless film biographies, so it is reasonable to ask, as he does in his acknowledgements: “Why Woody Allen, and especially why now?” Perhaps, like basket-weaving, he just can’t stop. There are plenty of biographies of Woody Allen. This must be one of the dullest.