The Weekly Screed (#947)

The purple prose of Farrow

by David Benjamin

““I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.” 

— Woody Allen

PARIS — Ronan Farrow has spent his life striving to spit out the silver spoon he was born with. When he does one of his cool and princely TV interviews, you can — if you listen close — hear it clattering against his back teeth.

Farrow can’t be blamed for being the offspring of a marriage — between two of the more celebrated people on earth, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow — that spent years making headlines in the New York tabloids. And, bless his heart, he’s done an admirable job trying to live down that fortuitous nativity. He has fought hard to achieve fame and fortune in his own right. For a guy who’s still shy of 40, he has cut a swath of good works and bulldog journalism that anyone twice his age would consider an exemplary lifetime. When he was fourteen, he was already traveling the world as a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth. This owed largely to to his mom’s prior involvement with UNICEF. But still…

He graduated from Bard College at age 15 and then scurried off to Yale for his law degree! 

Farrow’s ascension to a celebrity that almost rivals that of his “father” (Mia has speculated that Ronan might actually be spawn of Frank Sinatra) followed his exposure, through The New Yorker,of the most powerful and impregnable sexual predators in public life, starting with the now notorious Harvey Weinstein. Farrow went on to reveal the sexual tyrannies of quickly disgraced New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves and (less decisively) Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Without Ronan Farrow’s fierce journalism and the publication of his book, Catch and Kill, the #MeToo movement might have never been born.

My only quibble is that, well, I know at least two dozen reporters who — had they been blessed with Farrow’s birthright, fame, connections and resources — could have pursued the same story and broken the same scandal. Often, in journalism, the skeleton key to the dirty secrets of the high and mighty is to have the support of the highest and mightiest of news organizations. Call this the Mike Wallace Effect. Big Media has had Farrow’s back since he first dipped his toe into journalism. Most rank-and-file reporters only dream of having so much juice.

To his credit, I think Farrow appreciates the blessed luck and career glory bequeathed to him by a lifelong intimacy with the Manhattan elite and the gods of media. His hard work and attention to detail testify to his determination to succeed on his own merits. He knows he didn’t hit a triple.

This is why I find it troubling that Farrow has launched a campaign against the publication of Woody Allen’s latest autobiography (he has written several), Apropos of Nothingby the Hachette Book Group, Hachette happens to be the house that published Catch and Kill. Farrow has accused Hachette of scheming behind his back and betraying him. He has announced his divorce from Hachette suggesting that the publisher should halt its plan to release Apropos of Nothing.

This uproar derives from Farrow’s longstanding accusation that Woody Allen molested Dylan Farrow — Allen’s daughter and Ronan’s sister — when she was as young as five. Here’s what Farrow wrote in the Hollywood Reporter in 2016: “I believe my sister. This was always true as a brother who trusted her, and, even at 5 years old, was troubled by our father's strange behavior around her: climbing into her bed in the middle of the night, forcing her to suck his thumb — behavior that had prompted him to enter into therapy focused on his inappropriate conduct with children prior to the allegations.” 

Heck, I believe her, too. How old, again, was Mariel Hemingway when she played Woody’s babe in Manhattan?

But here’s where the issue of unearned privilege rears its homely head. Farrow has at least implied that Hachette exercise prior restraint on Woody Allen’s speech, a First Amendment trespass that Farrow would oppose strenuously if applied to any speaker other than his estranged dad. 

More significantly, looking at this clash from the viewpoint of a writer and author, wow!

No run-of-the-mill author would even entertain the suicidal notion of severing an established, contractual relationship with a huge, rich publisher because he or she objects to another book that another division of the huge publisher was planning to release. This is because in the real, non-silver spoon world beyond midtown, getting a major publisher to print even one of your books is the end of the rainbow. It’s the gift horse you do not dare look in the mouth. It’s Raquel Welch in a fur bikini.

The only stupider idea would be to ask that publisher to reconsider a book by another author (even one you don’t like) that’s already paid for, listed, previewed, printed, bound and promised to Ingram and a forty-percent discount. This stupidity escalates when that other author is more famous than you are (yeah, Woody’s still bigger than Ronan) whose self-serving memoir is more likely to be a bestseller than your own forthcoming novel Hush,scheduled to be published by St. Martin’s in the fall.

Whoa!

You heard that, right? Ronan Farrow, thanks to his fame, family and a fat advance, has another huge, important New York publisher standing by, in reserve. 

Who has that? Nobody.

Regular writers don’t have two publishers. Most of us don’t have half that many. I had one once, called Random House. Right around the time Random House was releasing my book, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked,the new head honcho made it known to his editors — about eighty of them in one division — that he expected each one to “acquire” three new bestsellers a year. When this lunatic quota failed, the boss responded by firing the entire division that had published me. Thus ended my brief romance with Random House. 

I did not have a backup publisher. Regular writers don’t have eager New York publishing giants waiting in line for us to righteously kiss off Hachette and declare free agency. Regular people don’t have backup jobs, backup careers, backup benefactors. 

We have free-lancing, unemployment insurance and the classifieds. 

Ronan Farrow called the publication of his father’s memoir, “an egregious abdication of Hachette’s most basic responsibility.”

He did not mean that Hachette’s most basic responsibility is to sell books, but that’s what it is. This has been true of publishers ever since the “bestseller” became the sacred measure of American literary merit. Catch and Kill spent eleven weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. 

Ronan Farrow’s heart is in the right place. He is defending his sister’s honor and standing up for principle. But the principles of a former UNICEF Youth Spokesman and those of a capitalist publishing empire are consistent with each other not by altruism but, once maybe in a blue moon, by coincidence. Farrow will survive this dispute without getting his hair mussed. So will Hachette. Woody Allen will, too, because they all hold deep reserves of wealth, and impunity from the vagaries of fortune, that lie beyond the reach of almost everyone else. 

Or, as Ronan Farrow said, “ This provides yet another example of the profound privilege that power, money and notoriety affords.”