In
the wake of a Golden Globe Lifetime Achievement Award, his adopted daughter
Dylan, now 28, comes forward to accuse him of sexually abusing her at age seven.
We are not in the murky area of childhood memory here: A Connecticut prosecutor
concluded back then there was enough evidence to charge him but dropped criminal
proceedings to spare her.
(Full
disclosure: A decade older, I met Woody Allen in 1965 when he was doing standup
at a dinner I emceed. The audience was baffled [“My wife had a tough divorce
lawyer—-If I get remarried and have children, she gets them”] and, as he came offstage in a daze, I tried to
comfort him [“You were great, it’s not you, it’s them”].
(I
enjoyed and admired his early movies but was increasingly so put off by his
whiny self-love and moral disingenuousness I found it hard to watch him on
screen. Only when someone else finally inhabited his persona, as in “Celebrity”
and “Match Point,” could I relent and watch his protagonists’ atrocious behavor.)
Dispassionate
as we try to be, can we decline to judge? This is the man who was living back
then with Mia Farrow, who discovered pornographic pictures of another child
Soon-Yi, whom he later married. Allen shrugged: “I fell in love with my girlfriend’s
adopted daughter.”
By
all means, let him keep his Lifetime Achievement Award and other honors as a
film maker, but the rest of us can retain our opinions of him as a human being.
Reading
Nicholas Kristof’s account of it all, along with the accompanying links, may
not turn your stomach but it will certainly keep you from watching “Annie Hall”
or “Hannah and Her Sisters” with the same eyes again.
When
it comes to aging movie icons, I’ll take Clint Eastwood, chair and all.
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