"I'VE never paid for sex," the hero in Shadows And Fog, a serious Woody Allen film, says. "You just think you haven't," his lover replies. With the publication this week of Mia Farrow's revenge memoir, What Falls Away, Allen's one-liner seems bitterly ironic.
He has paid all right. The self-confessed neurotic with an aversion to real life ("I hate reality but where else can you get a good steak dinner?") has been dealt an overdose, first in the courtroom and now on the page.
Farrow took Joseph Kennedy senior's advice and improved on it - she got mad and she got even. Wounded by Allen's affair with her daughter Soon-Yi and convinced that he had abused their daughter, Dylan, Farrow called in the holy trinity of the Manhattan elite - the lawyer, the therapist and the publisher. The result, five years later, is in the great tradition of celebrity complaint disguised as autobiography - less Mia Her Life than Mia Her Martyrdom.
"All of this would have seemed inconceivable in the early, halcyon days of our relationship," Mia Farrow writes in one of the many wistful flashbacks scattered throughout her book. Back in 1979, even though Halcyon has become a brand name sleeping tablet, things are rosy. Woody and Mia have lunch, fall in love, semaphore with their apartment lights across Central Park and watch each other through binoculars. All so normal, all so Manhattan. Just them, the kids, some servants and a psychic shield of therapists to cushion the blows of existence.
What Falls Away is full of blows, even before Woody turns up. There is Mia's childhood battle with polio and her unfulfilled desire to become a doctor in the tropics, episodes which particularly impressed Doubleday publishers in December 1992 when Farrow negotiated a $3 million advance for the book. A "genuinely excellent self-written chapter" about those early traumas reportedly clinched the deal. Contract negotiations were handled by agent Lynn Nesbit whose daughter, Priscilla Gilman, was then engaged and later married to Matthew Previn, one of Farrow's twin sons by Andre Previn. Nobody, however, joked about an "incestuous" book deal. Mia was, after all, still recovering from the "axe blow" of Woody Allen's affair with her daughter and irreverence was not appreciated.
THE fact that Farrow was negotiating a book contract while she was charging Allen with child molestation and while he was accusing her of extortion seemed to confirm what some long-time acquaintances maintain - Mia may be fragile but that does not mean she is impractical. The day after she learned of her child's alleged molestation in 1992, for example, she made an appointment with the costume designer of Allen's upcoming film, Manhattan Murder Mystery, demonstrating a professional detachment that seems uncharacteristic for the vulnerable author of What Falls Away.
"I do think she is unstable at some level," a screenwriter who has known the actress since the 1950s told me. "On the set of Peyton Place she was famous for cutting her hair halfway through the series and causing massive continuity problems - a sure sign of instability. But money is important to her. And she probably resented the fact that Woody only paid her $100,000 a movie when other actresses get millions. If revenge is a prime publishing motive here, then money comes a very close second."
Time magazine put it still more cynically at the height of the Mia/Woody scandal in August 1992 when it noted that "these days ... every scandal is a career move". For Madonna, for Hugh Grant, perhaps, but surely not for the finely-boned and even more finely-tuned Farrow and Allen? Even New Yorkers refused to believe it. "He can put his career in an envelope and mail it to Roman Polanski," divorce attorney Raoul Felder commented when the Soon-Yi scandal erupted, consigning Allen to the moral scrapheap alongside the Polish director who was charged with rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.
But Woody, like Mia, surprised his public. His revenge was already in the can. "When I saw Husbands and Wives, I couldn't separate it from what was happening in real life," writer and director Nora Ephron later told Rolling Stone magazine, "I saw a whole other level of cruelty on his part". The story about a married college professor who seduces a student one-third his age starred Mia Farrow as a manipulative, hysterical wife. "I don't know how I did them," Farrow recalls of the final scenes which were shot after her discovery of Allen's affair with Soon-Yi.
The director's upcoming films are even more explicit attempts to satirise and refute Farrow's allegations. Deconstructing Harry, currently in production and originally called The Worst Man In The World, is about " ... a nasty, shallow, superficial, sexually-obsessed guy," Allen recently told New Yorker magazine, adding, "I'm sure everybody will think it's me".
He also plans "a kind of documentary that's funny and sad and original" called An Error In Judgement, about a man accused of sexual misdemeanours.
Alien has made one movie a year since 1969. His professional reputation is secure. Farrow, on the other hand, has been Allen's on-screen icon for the 12 years, of their relationship. She is an ageing actress in an industry that still worships the young, for all the menopausal euphoria about The First Wives Club.
"There's a realisation a woman comes to very late in life," Nora Ephron recently commented, "it's Just me". That realisation may have come particularly late to Farrow whose fragility attracted lovers as varied as Salvador Dali and Frank Sinatra.
"Our ages finally mattered," she wrote last year of the Sinatra marriage, "I was too ill-at-ease with his remoteness and unable to fathom his complexities."
"Remote" and "complex" are not terms usually associated with the New Jersey tough guy, but Sinatra has never liked bad publicity and Farrow's diplomatic silence on the subject of his darker qualities was not only kind but wise.
"I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of 15, the mistress of the Earl of Craven," Harriette Wilson, the 18th-century courtesan wrote in her memoirs. "The fact that Woody had slept with my daughter had to be kept secret from the outside world," Mia Farrow writes in What Falls Away. "I have always been very private," actress Claire Bloom writes in Leaving A Doll's House, her recent reminiscence of life in hell with Philip Roth.
The blushing heroine forced to reveal all is a convention of the revenge memoir - only the rewards have changed. Harriette Wilson needed cash, sold her secrets and was blunt about the transaction. In the late 20th century, however, those indulging in literary castration cite loftier motivations, demanding not just, money, but also sympathy and respect. Reassured by therapists who preach the healing gospel of revelation, and by agents who calculate their percentages, it is easy to see how Farrow was persuaded to publish the worst lines of her, career. What Falls Away? In this. case, not enough.