New York!
Great gray city of misty dawns under bridges, of romantic taxi rides in the rain. City full of dreams, and psychoanalysts to interpret them. City of passions buried under the burdens of civilization like Croton water pipes, and bursting to the surface about as often.
New York the mysterious, where a white rag fluttering in a window high above Fifth Avenue may be just a white rag, or may be Woody Allen waving to Mia Farrow in her apartment across Central Park. New York lovers hide in plain sight, protected by the city's anonymous bustle. Where else but to a basketball game at Madison Square Garden could one of the world's most recognizable celebrities go to hold hands with his lover's college-age daughter, soon to become his new mistress?
And where else should all this come to light than in that Gothic shrine of old New York, the Plaza hotel? Making his first appearance before the press in years, the 56-year-old filmmaker acknowledged that he had transferred his affections from Farrow, 47, to her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn; that he was suing Farrow for custody of their three children, and that he had been accused of molesting his adopted daughter, 7-year-old Dylan O'Sullivan Farrow-an accusation he called "totally false and outrageous." As a result, New York was probably the only city in the world last week where serious, educated, intelligent people were paying almost no attention to the topless pictures of the Duchess of York.
For that matter, Allen's troubles almost drove Fergie off the front pages of the London papers. Not to speak of the French, who regard Allen as virtually another Jerry Lewis, only more cerebral. "We smile when this happens in Monaco, but Mia and Woody are the model couple," said one French film promoter. For Republicans, the event was an irresistible illustration of what they were running against when they talked about "family values." "Woody Allen is currently having nonincest with a nondaughter for whom he is a nonfather," Rep. Newt Gingrich told a Georgia crowd last week on the president's campaign trail, "because they [Democrats? or just New Yorkers?] have no concept of families ... it's a weird environment out there." About the only world-class city that wasn't consumed with the affair was Los Angeles, where the domestic troubles of a director whose films gross under $50 million are regarded as beneath gossip.