Spectator, The: Her stardust memories

WHAT FALLS AWAY by Mia Farrow

Doubleday, 16.99, pp. 370 Roman Polanski, who directed

Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, remarked, `There are 127 varieties of nuts. Mia's 116 of them.' He wasn't wrong. But, believe it or not, the first 100 or so pages of this retributive memoir are not half bad. Her father was an Australian writer, director, wild womaniser and fervent papist; her mother, the actress Maureen O'Sullivan, a wondrous Irish beauty. Mia was their strikingly cherubic third child of seven and, for a while, they all lived happily at the swish end of Beverly Hills.

Little Mia was an oddity from the off. She kept a shoebox full of roll-up bugs and a collection of 87 hamsters.

If anyone gave me a doll, I'd thank them, and go straight behind the house and bash its head on the brick steps to get the eyes out before my brothers did.

Her nocturnal habits were similarly ghoulish:

I used to wander around and look at my family, sound asleep, and every once in while, with my thumb, I'd very carefully open up somebody's eyes, just for a second, to look at the eyeball there.

She was packed off to convent schools which only inflamed her taste for the bizarre. Snooping in a nun's room, she found a crown of thorns on the bedspread and underneath a small whip in a black satin bag. A brother died, then her father. At 17 she stumbled, nymphetlike, into Peyton Place, that prototype of all soaps, met Salvador Dali, who took her to an hermaphrodite party and gave her a rat devouring a lizard in a blue glass vase as a birthday present. Her childlong crush, Michael Boyer, son of Charles, blew his brains out playing Russian roulette.

So far, so breathless. At 19 she met Frank Sinatra (he was 50) and `felt a column of light rising inside me, pulling particles from dead corners'. Sinatra, feeling good old-fashioned lust, sends his private plane so Mia and her cat can join him in Palm Springs, where Dean Martin observes, `Hey, I've got a bottle of scotch that's older than you.' Peyton Place obligingly put her into a coma so that she could take a boat trip with Blue Eyes. They married (Red Skelton, who had just shot his wife, was a witness), although not for long; never mind - flickering shades of the convent - `All the occurrences of our common time, tender or troubled, were linked as surely as the beads on a rosary.'

With Sinatra back at the gaming tables, Mia heads for the Himalayas to meditate at the Maharishi's feet with the Beatles. She exchanges her rosary for happy beads and the book's essential goofiness takes wing as she discovers `my illusive tools for survival, gifts from some primaeval ancestor, passed in secret along the chain of my forebears'. From then on, it's guff and puff all the way down the Chapters of Doom, with summary blips to record passing film or theatre performances.

After Sinatra, she married Andre Previn, a virtual stranger, and begins collecting children instead of hamsters. Some are their own, some adopted orphans palsied, blind, traumatised - from blitzed areas of the globe. A staggering 14 in all. She asks the Queen Mother what is the most important thing to teach them. After a pause of understandable rectitude, Her Majesty replies, 'I believe that manners can get you through anything.'

Remiss Previn, conducting around the world, dumps her and her gynaecological problems in a damp patch of Surrey. So, it's off with that marriage and back to New York where she meets Woody Allen over a bottle of 1949 Mouton Rothschild and they talk about stuff like Plato, existentialism and Mahler's slow movements. She found him `more attractive, more interesting' than his films. He warned her, 'I have zero interest in kids.' He also loathed her cats.

During their 12-year, 12-film liaison they kept separate apartments on either side of Central Park. He had his shrink; she had the children, who also had their shrink. He refused to use her shower because `the drain is in the middle'. Another child was imported; they even had one of their own. Allen then allegedly took porno-snaps of Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi (with whom he now lives) and may have `interfered with' the youngest.

Why did I stay with Woody Allen when so much was wrong? How can I explain it to my children? Was he only an illusion I loved all along?

Search me.

The whole sorry business climaxed in bathetic public squalor in the Supreme Court, with police, paediatricians and clinical psychologists concluding that `this family is an unchartered therapeutic area'; in other words, about as dysfunctional as they come. You and I would suggest a brisk, cold shower - but only, of course, if the drain was in the right place.