Mia, who previously testified that Woody wouldn’t take a shower at her country house because the drain was in the middle of the floor, drew more titters last week with her continued litany of his neuroses. He loathed visiting the country house, she said, because he was deeply afraid of deer. When she got a phone call last January from ex-husband Andre Previn, Mia said Woody began rolling on the floor. Clutching his stomach in apparent agony, he begged her not to tell Andre with whom she’d adopted SoonYi-about his sexual liaison with the girl, now 22. According to Mia, Woody also told her the affair “was good for Soon-Yi. It gave her confidence.”
Then it was Susan Coates’s turn. A clinical psychologist and Woody’s witness, she added a few surprise brushstrokes to the unflattering portrait Mia had painted. Under crossexamination, the stern-faced therapist who treated Satchel, 5, and evaluated Dylan, 7 (nobody in this family seems to go unshrunk), said Woody’s relationship with Dylan was “inappropriately intense because it excluded everyone else. “His affair with Soon-Yi, she found, was “an act of extremely bad judgment.” (And this was Woody’s witness.) Particularly distressing to Coates-who was paid by Woody-was his failure to see the emotional devastation his romance had wreaked on Mia and her brood.
Finally Woody’s sister, Letty Konigsberg Aronson, actually said something nice about him: that he was a devoted father to Satchel. She also claimed Mia phoned her in February 1992, railing that Woody had taken advantage of a retarded girl by raping Soon-Yi. (Mia testified earlier that she’d never described Soon-Yi as retarded.) According to Aronson, Mia said she was surprised only that Woody had done this to SoonYi-and not to Dylan.
With armies of attorneys bristling on each side and a judge who’ll have to deliver a Solomonic decision, this melodrama could be “L.A. Law.” The appealing cast of rescued orphans and those frissons of quasi incest hint at “All My Children.” On some days the court scene belongs to a vintage Woody Allen comedy. But maybe after all we’re watching a Greek tragedy unfold. We’ve seen a fall from grace, heard the alleged threats of death and ocular evisceration, all interpreted by a doleful chorus of shrinks. But don’t hold your breath for any catharsis when the last line has been delivered.
