On Filmdom’s F*cked Up Farrow Family

Mia Farrow’s birthday is February 9; February 10 was the birthday of her father, the less remembered writer and director John Farrow (1904-1963).

John Farrow’s self-reported early life sounds so close to his own fiction and to the traditional Melville/London/Conrad thing that it’s difficult to swallow hook, line, and sinker. Originally from Sydney, Australia, Farrow went to sea in his youth, traveling to places like Fiji, Guam, and Hawaii, and participating in revolutions in Mexico and Nicaragua, before a chance encounter with Robert J. Flaherty drew him into the film business. Having already tried his hand at poetry and short story writing, Farrow got his foot in the business writing titles for silent films, which then turned into screenwriting in the sound era. Following his divorce from his first wife, he had a long term relationship with actress Lila Lee. Their engagement was broken off due to Farrow’s infidelity. He was also said to have dated Dolores Del Rio and Diana Churchill, Winston Churchill’s daughter.

One of the first movies Farrow directed was Tarzan Escapes, released in 1936, the same year he married Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Jane. Farrow directed mostly B movies, crime dramas, war pictures, rugged westerns, and the like. Few of them have endured as classics, hence the infrequency with which his name appears on lists of great directors of the classic studio era. I hasten to point out that Farrow was a perfectly good director, he just never achieved transcendence of the sort that keeps memories alive. I’ve seen several of his films, including Five Came Back (1939), California(1947), Hondo (1953), Ride Vaquero (1953), and the admittedly dreadful John Paul Jones (1959). He was replaced as director of what became King of Kings (1961) by Nicholas Ray. There are a couple of Farrow’s movies I’d love to check out on the basis of their nautical themes as well as their relevance to his own experiences, such as Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and Botany Bay (1953).

So: what used to be called a “man’s man”. Unsurprisingly he was by all accounts a drunken and abusive husband and father, and a serial philanderer. Much that follows plainly springs from that.

Before we get to Farrow’s legit children with O’ Sullivan, an interesting digression, though I can’t and won’t vouch for its authenticity. It has been claimed by the son of George Hodel, a prime suspect of the Black Dahlia murder, that Hodel also murdered a dancer and actress naked Lillian Hamilton a.k.a Lillian Lenorak (1917-1959) and that Lenorak had also born John Farrow’s illegitimate child, who later called himself John Lenorak Farrow (1946-2010). Sounds dubious to me, but you can read about it here.

Farrow and O’Sullivan’s children were:

Michael (1939–1958), who died at age 19 in an airplane collision while taking a flying lesson.

Patrick (1942–2009), a sculptor who committed suicide by means of a gunshot to the head.

John (b. 1946), who served 10 years in jail for child abuse of two boys.

Prudence (b. 1948), most famous as the subject of The Beatles’ song “Dear Prudence” and as a TM instructor who taught such famous students as Andy Kaufman. She dated convicted serial killer Robert Durst for three years.

Stephanie (b.1949), a top model in the late ’60s and early ’70s

Teresa, known as Tisa (1951-2024) was also a model, and an actress who appeared in around 15 French, Italian, and American films, many of them in the horror genre. I am particularly interested in her first film Homer (1970) in which she co-starred with Don Scardino, who went on to be a terrific TV director of shows like 30 Rock and Law and Order and the 2013 film The Incredible Burt Weatherstone. Another interesting one is the erotica film Some Call It Loving (1973) in which one of the other actors was Richard Pryor.

And of course Mia (b. 1945), the third oldest, who I have saved for last, for there is the most to tell about her.

Like all of the Farrow children, Mia endured a suffocatingly strict Catholic upbringing. According to son Moses, she reported being the victim of attempted molestation from within her own family. The wispy, willowy waif was only 19 when she was cast on the tawdry prime time soap Peyton Place, and all of 21 when she married 50 year old Frank Sinatra. Sinatra wanted Mia all to himself. When she resumed her acting career following a brief break he divorced her. In 1968, she joined her sister Prudence at the Maharishi’s retreat in India. John Lennon’s song “Sexy Sadie” is reputedly about the Maharishi’s macking on her. In turn, that song’s title became the handle of one of the key members of Charles Manson’s band of murderers. Meanwhile, Farrow starred in the Satanic film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), directed by future convicted pedophile Roman Polanski.

That same year, when she was 23 years old, Farrow began an affair with married composer/conductor/concert pianist Andre Previn. The news caused his wife, songwriter Dory Previn, to have a breakdown, for which she had to be institutionalized. Farrow and Previn married in 1970.

Farrow enjoyed a respectable career over the ensuing decade, including such films as John and Mary (1969) with Dustin Hoffman, The Great Gatsby (1974), Peter Pan (1976), Avalanche (1978), Robert Altman’s A Wedding(1978), and Agatha Christie’s A Death on the Nile (1978). Previn and Farrow divorced in 1979.

Thence followed Farrow’s creative and romantic partnership with Woody Allen, the product of which was a dozen films spanning a decade 1982-1992. The relationship proved amazingly fruitful, resulting in some of the best work either of the partners ever created.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes Farrow worked hard to replicate the large family dynamic in which she had grown up. All told, she was to become the mother of four biological children and ten adopted ones. With Previn, she bore the twins Matthew and Sascha (b. 1970) and Fletcher (b. 1974). Vietnamese infants Lark and Summer were adopted in 1973 and 1976. Korean born Soon-Yi and Moses were adopted in 1977 and 1980. Soon-Yi is estimated to have been born around 1970. Dylan was adopted as infant in 1985. Ronan (b. 1987), originally called Satchel, is the only biological child of Farrow and Woody Allen, although he certainly does look like Frank Sinatra. (The fact that he’s a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale and Oxford alum, and a Juris doctor indicate that he probably isn’t the son of Old Blue Eyes, Blue Eyes notwithstanding). After Satchel/Ronan came Tam (1979-2000, adopted 1992), Isaiah (adopted as an infant in 1992), Thaddeus (1988-2016, adopted 1994), Quincy (adopted as an infant in 1994), and Frankie-Minh (born 1989, adopted 1995). In 1992, Allen co-adopted Moses and Dylan. Allen never married Farrow, or lived with the family.

Mia Farrow seems to have run her family on the same strict autocratic lines on which Farrow and her siblings had been raised. Son Moses Farrow reports hair-raising physical abuse in this 2018 piece, which tells of crockery thrown at children, of beatings with objects like telephone receivers, of kids (including disabled ones) being thrown down the stairs and into closets as punishments. In the end, Tam committed suicide by an overdose of pills. Thaddeus shot himself in the head. Lark wound up a homeless addict and died of AIDS related causes.

According to Moses, Soon-Yi bore the brunt of Farrow’s worst excesses. The two never got along, and Farrow appeared eager to slough her off on someone else. A couple of years before the famous blow-up, she started encouraging Allen (who scarcely the knew Soon-Yi) to spend more fatherly time with her, and so he did, mostly by taking her to Knicks games. At this time, the young lady was about the same age as Farrow had been when she married Frank Sinatra. Far from being mentally retarded as Farrow and others claimed at the time, she went on to get a masters degree in special education. Anyway, obviously a line was crossed: Allen and Soon-Yi became involved. If Allen’s movies weren’t full of lascivious jokes about teenage girls, and if Soon-Yi hadn’t been Farrow’s adopted daughter, the world surely would have judged that relationship differently. And Farrow learned about the affair in the worst way possible — by finding naked Polaroids of Soon-Yi.

Yet Soon-Yi was an adult, an adoptee, and not Allen’s child, not even his adopted one. Neither pedophilia nor incest play any role in what occurred. But our minds are made to categorize. It’s nigh impossible not to corral Allen’s behavior into conceptual areas in which they do not technically belong. I recall being disgusted at the time the news broke. The feeling has never quite left, well over 30 years later.

Farrow seems to have funneled her understandable fury into a bottle containing other complex and volatile emotions from her past. According to one credible faction in the family squabble, she concocted this story of child sex abuse involving Dylan for revenge. She then browbeat and pressured all of the children and the servants (who were present) into supporting the story. One of the servants quit a few months afterward, rather than sign off on the mendacious account. Moses, who has cerebral palsy, reports being beaten and essentially tortured until he agreed, although he later recanted. Dylan’s memories of the event appear to have been planted and exaggerated. And yes I have seen Allen vs. Farrow (2021), and saw no evidence of what was described in the charges beyond Allen being a somewhat awkward, debatably inappropriate late-life father. The specifics of what are alleged seem impossible in light of the fact that Dylan and Allen were never even alone together on the occasion during which the alleged abuse is said to have been committed.

In the end, the impression I have is that Farrow was traumatized from her childhood, and became somewhat unhinged. She is clearly the victim of abuse herself, and sees it all around her. Woody Allen is no saint, but neither is he a child molester. He has been exonerated by multiple independent investigating agencies. That’s a low bar, I know, and often even meaningless. Ronan Farrow’s own brave and world class reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes show how the rich and powerful can cover such things up. Nowadays we are all primed to believe the woman, for experience teaches that they are almost always telling the truth. But this time genuinely does seem to be an exception. Woody Allen didn’t know it, but he was playing, rather recklessly, with a time bomb.

Unlike the thousands of people who have turned against Allen, e.g., the former fans who won’t watch his movies, the actors who won’t work with him, the stand-up comedians who joke that he “fucked his daughter”, I continue to enjoy Mia Farrow’s film work, and was delighted to see her recently on Ryan Murphy’sThe Watcher (2022) as a demented old busybody. “You know?” I said to my wife, “This is very good casting.”

In 2023, Marilyn Ann Moss, author of previous books on Raoul Walsh and George Stevens, published The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise, which I understand tells the family story about as I have, though I haven’t yet read it. You may wish to peruse it in conjunction with Mia Farrow’s 1997 memoir What Falls Away, and formulate your own diagnosis.