What falls away : a memoir (3 page)

My grandfather went off to fight in World War I, but returned in a few months, his right arm shattered. Doctors recommended amputation, but he refused, and fought all

his life to keep it. My grandmother couldn't face suffering, and nervous breakdown followed nervous breakdown.

My mother, her father's favorite, went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. She hated it. They had to wear vests in the bath, and were told that "whistling on the stairs makes Our Lady cry." Vivien Leigh was in the same class, the only girl m the school, according to my mother, who had any sense of direction: from the age of eleven she knew she would be an actress. The others just wanted to be socially successful and travel the world. Vivien Leigh was voted "prettiest girl in the school," and when my mother came in second, she cried all day, unable to believe that anyone thought she was pretty.

Mom was indeed pretty and was "discovered," Hollywood-style, by the director Frank Borzage, who was in Ireland looking for an Irish colleen and a little boy to play in the movie Song o^ My Heart, starring the famous tenor John McCormack.

My mother describes it this way: "It was the last night of Horse Show week and I wanted to celebrate. I was invited out by a very attractive young bachelor from Trinity College. My mother thought I looked tired and told me not to go out, but I went anyway. There was a dance band. Frank Borzage was sitting at the next table with a group of people and they were watching me. I knew exactly who they were. Everybody knew. They were looking for a young girl for a part in the film. The most beautiful girl in Dublin, Grace McLaughlin, went for an interview. A lot of my friends had tried out, and been turned down or were working as extras. But I didn't. I didn't think I was good-looking enough. Actually, they had given up looking for an Irish girl and were going back the next week, havmg decided to use a Hollywood actress. Eventually my escort wanted to go home, but I had a feeling something was going to happen, and I said, 'No, let's stay and have one more dance.' That dance sealed my fate. When I came back to my table and

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WHAT FALLS AWAY 17

sat down, the hcadwaiter brought over Frank Borzage's card, on the back of which was written, 'If you are interested in films, will you come to my office tomorrow at eleven?' Frank signed me for three pounds a week." In October 1929, eighteen-year-old Maureen O'SuUivan, with a six-month contract, set sail for Hollywood, accompanied by her mother.

Three years later, my mother was signed by MGM and began work on Tarzan, the Ape Man, the first of six Tarzan movies she made with Johnny Weissmuller. She says she got bored of being rescued from mad elephants, alligators, and hippopotamuses. She found the monkeys particularly loathsome, and said they were "all homosexuals" who adored Johnny and were jealous of her, biting her at every opportunity. To this dav she refers to Cheetah the Chimp as "that bastard."

She says she was "extremely fond of Johnny, but he would drive me crazy with his practical jokes. I remember once on my birthday he brought me a huge cake, and when I put the knife in, the whole thing exploded in my face. While all America thought we were having an affair, there was never a glimmer of a romance between us."

To date, my mother has played leading roles in sixty-two movies, including The Thin Man (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), and The Big Clock (1948), one of several films she starred in that was directed by my father.

John Villiers Farrow was a conflicted, incongruous figure in Hollywood. He was a movie director, but failed to see film as art, and so could not respect his own endeavors. He read serious books and he wrote serious books, which he did respect, and he fraternized with Jesuits. He was a devout Catholic, and a womanizer of legendary proportions. He was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1904. According to

Farrow family lore, he was the product of a relationship between Lucy Savage and King Edward VII. Whatever the truth, it went to the grave when beautiful, nineteen-year-old Lucy died during my father's birth. All he ever possessed or knew of his mother was the oval portrait he kept with him throughout his life. He never knew his father, Joseph Farrow, so "Jack," as my father was then known, was raised by an aunt, and at fifteen sent to Winchester College in England to complete his education. But a restless spirit and some measure of unhappiness led him to lie about his age and run away to sea. He spent his youth in the merchant marine and the Royal Canadian Navy.

Of all the distant ports, my father loved Tahiti best. During one of his numerous extended visits, he assembled the first French-English-Tahitian dictionary, and wrote a novel, laughter Ends. He kept a scrapbook with black pages and careful white handwriting. The tiny photographs show a very fit, handsome young man, flaxen-haired, with a dazzling smile and a flowered cloth sarong around his waist, in various poses with native women of Bora Bora, Tahiti, and Moorea, and a beautiful, bobbed brunette named Lila.

It was in Tahiti that he learned of the life of Father Damien, and came to admire him deeply. Among my mother's notes I found the following account of how that came about, in my father's words:

"After a wretched passage on a small trading cutter we reached one of the more remote islands. The sudden peace of the lagoon so enchanted me that I determined to stay there a few days. A consultation with the amiable half-Chinese, half-Tahitian captain soon settled the matter. He would proceed to the next island, pick up a cargo of copra, then after three days' time, return for me. But given the ways of manners in those pleasant waters, it was not surprising when he did not return for nearly three months.

"Excepting for a gendarme who lived in a different village, I was the only white man on the island and as such

was treated as a personage. One hospitable family came forward, insisting I should stay with them smce they actually had a bed, an unusual and prestigious article of furniture m those regions, which defined the owner as being a person of wealth, culture, and initiative. My hosts were rightly proud of their bed. It was a huge and grand affair, made of glittering brass and shining mother-of-pearl, ornamented with colored shells and swathed in clouds of mosquito netting. Each evening when it was time to retire, my solemn-eyed friends would gather to wave farewell as I disappeared through the tall curtains. For about two weeks I had been sleeping there in great comfort when, one morning as I was going to the lagoon to fish, I met the gendarme. 'If you are interested to know,' he told me in the most casual of tones, 'the bed you are sleeping in is the bed of a leper.'

"A frantic check revealed this to be true. The son of my hosts was a leper, who had been relegated to a hut of his own behind the main house. I further learned that we had been sharing the same dishes. I got hold of the stongest disinfectants available and scrubbed till the blood ran. After a week had passed, drawn by boredom and the pessimistic certainty of my own fate, I began to visit the leper and we became friends. He was only twenty-five and resigned to his affliction. He strummed the guitar and in a patois of French, Tahitian, and English, he told me stories about the leper colony and the exploits of a character so heroic as to seem highly fictitious—called Kamiano. Tale after tale, punctuated by bobbings of reverent salutes, filled me with curiosity. When at last I sailed back to Papeete I learned that Kamiano was the native name for the priest who had worked and lived among the lepers until he too contracted the disease, and died a leper's death. His name was Father Damien."

My father's biography of Father Damien, Damien the Leper, was published in 1937. In the foreword, Hugh Walpole wrote: "I scarcely know how Mr. Farrow has been able to

leave so vivid a picture of Father Damien in the reader's mind with so few words ... I feel that I have Damien as a companion for the rest of my days. This is an addition to one's spiritual experience." Pope Pius XI responded to the book by naming my father a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

In one port, San Francisco, my father lingered to pursue a seventeen-year-old beauty from a prominent local family. Always a voracious reader, he took the opportunity to formalize his education and earned a degree in literature from Loyola Marymount University, staying afloat by painting portraits of socialites. A brief, stormy marriage to that same young woman produced his mirror-image daughter, my half sister Felice.

In 1927, while writing for a local theater, my father became friends with the producer David Selznick, who tried to convince him to become an actor. But while Dad had no interest m acting, David's stories about HoUywood were intriguing enough to bring him to Los Angeles, to try his hand at screenwriting.

His first credit for a screenplay came that same year, for The Wreck of the Hesperus, based upon Longfellow's poem. Before long he had a contract with Paramount, where he wrote scripts for, among others, William Wellman, Gary Cooper, William Powell, Victor Fleming, and Clara Bow. His short stories were by then appearing in The Atlantic Monthly.

My parents first met in 1931 at the Cotton Club in Culver City. My mother's escort that night was Oscar Levant; she says my father was "flirtatious" that evening, and his date, Dolores Del Rio, was furious. "He was, without any doubt, the most colorful, fascinating character on the Hollywood scene," she told me, "and at twenty-six, he had the worst reputation in town. When he asked me for a date, he told me that the first evening he had free was in two weeks' time. Here I was with every night of the week free! But I was very excited about going out with him. He wasn't

like other people in the industry: he was a complete mystery to me, which was all part of the attraction."

When my mother returned to Hollywood from a trip to Ireland they started seeing each other again, but before long he ran off to London and almost married one Mary Churchill. That fell through, and one night he rang up my mother to ask if she'd go to Tahiti with him. "You must be crazy!" Mom replied. 'Tve read in the papers what you've been up to. You're too unreliable for me!" And she hung up. A few days later she found out he'd flown to Tahiti with another girl, where he stayed for most of that year.

"He was my first real beau," my mother explained. "I didn't know anything. I was very angry and broke it off But somehow he'd always get around me, and eventually we got back together, but I never got over it."

Thev had been living together for two years, which was unheard-of at the time, when, one day at a gas station in Culver City, he said to my mother, "I guess I'd better marry you.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because you make me happier than anyone else," he answered.

Shortly after Michael was born, the war broke out, and my father rejoined the navy. He received decorations from Spain, France, and Romania, and was honored as a commander of the British Empire. But after contracting a severe case of typhus, which left his heart permanently weakened, he was sent home to Beverly Hills, where my mother cared for him. While recuperating, he wrote two books, The History and Development of the Royal Canadian Navy and Pageant of the Popes, a history of the papacy.

In 1943 at Paramount he filmed Wake bland, for which he won the New York Film Critics Award for direction, and received an Academy Award nomination. Of the seventeen

films he made in the forties, the best known was The Big Clock, in 1948, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and my mother, which has been praised over the years as bravura filmmaking. Alias Nick Beal, in 1949, is one of my favorites. Ray Milland, its star, recalls, "I loved that picture. Farrow was a strange man . . . We got along very well together. He was the most disliked man on the lot, but a good director." In 1950 he directed one of his finest films. Where Danger Lives, the first with Robert Mitchum; later that year they teamed up again to make His Kind of Woman. For Around the World in Eighty Days, made in the mid-fifties, we went to Mexico. I remember it well. I sat on a beehive, and had my first puff of a cigarette with the Mexican star Cantinflas. But Dad feuded with producer Mike Todd, and after a month or so of shooting, walked off the movie. Still, he received an Academy Award for his screenplay. In all, he made forty-three films.

I was too young to be aware of what my father went through during the McCarthy years, so I asked Joe Mankiewicz, who, as the head of the Directors Guild at that time, had been in the eye of the storm. Joe wrote me in 1993, as he was dying, which was extraordinarily generous of him. It seems that Cecil B. De Mille and his cohorts had proposed a guild amendment calling upon every screen director in the United States to sign a public oath of loyalty —otherwise, their director s credentials would be nullified. A petition to have Mankiewicz removed as guild chairman was also being circulated. It was my father who warned Joe of these shenanigans.

In his autobiograpy, Elia Kazan filled in some details. "George Marshall, one of the old-timers, had shown up at Farrow's house in the sidecar of a motorcycle. He walked into John's house and said, 'Here, sign this.* John said, *I will not sign it.' "

John immediately tried to reach Joe at the home of his brother Herman, to warn him. Joe wrote: "He came over

and gave me a whole bunch of totems and amulets, all blessed by various popes . . . and said, 'You must carry these tomorrow at the meeting.' I did carry them in my pocket . . . and I couldn't prove they didn't help." Sure enough, Joe won the vote, and the morning papers read, MANKIEWICZ IN OVERWHELMING VICTORY.

As Kazan summed it up, "The men who beat De Mille, an extremist of the right, were not from the left. Many were reactionaries, like John Farrow or Jack Ford . . . What they were defending was classic Americanism, our basic way of living . . . And they'd succeeded."

I can only imagine the Kafkaesque climate of the McCarthy era. The stakes were high—my father had seven kids. As it happened, his career was not damaged by his righteous stand, but at the time he had no idea what would unfold. He did what he always told me to do: stand strong for what you believe in.