Taking all these intertwining histories into account reveals an archaeology of power. This is not just a history of Farrow’s life, but a cultural history of the link between celebrity, adoption, and the idealisation of the nation-state.
Originally published May 3, 2014
I. A Fecund Mother Teresa1
The ongoing and now reignited Allen-Farrow dispute has earned Farrow the status of a feminist victim, and her celebrated role as a mother many times over has served to cement both her case that she has been wronged by Woody Allen and that Dylan Farrow was molested.
But Mia Farrow is not simply a white woman who has many children (fifteen so far); she is a white woman who has also adopted as many as nine, most of them from countries recognised as the “third world,” and many of them with physical disabilities that made them difficult or impossible to adopt. Farrow was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2000 and has staged protests on behalf of various causes related to Africa.
Taken together, Farrow’s roles as a “humanitarian activist” and a voraciously maternal woman have combined to give her the aura of a fecund Mother Teresa.
This aura has shielded her from public scrutiny, and she has successfully painted herself as a powerless woman wounded by a powerful and wealthy man. Allen is certainly wealthy and powerful, but Farrow has a lineage in Hollywood that is much older than his, and possesses tremendous political and cultural influence. Much of her power has manifested in the ways that she has managed to even change the law to enable her to satisfy her urge to adopt.
So effective has this shield been that writers have ignored or actually simply missed the contradictions presented in Farrow’s adoptive history, even as they make claims about Allen’s purported abuse. For instance: Kathleen Geier’s op-ed in Washington Monthly criticises Robert Weide’s Daily Beast defense of Allen. Weide suggested that the fact that Allen had been able to adopt two daughters from China even after the initial controversy over Dylan’s alleged sexual abuse meant that the authorities found him not guilty after all. Geier cricised Weide for a “gullible belief that rich and powerful people would never be allowed to adopt if there were any doubts whatsoever that they’d ever committed abuse…” She goes on to cite a particular case of a child who died in her adoptive parents’ care as proof of “how completely underregulated adoption agencies are…”
Geire is absolutely right, of course. Transnational adoption agencies are especially notorious for unethical adoption practices, which range from shoddy record-keeping to outright kidnapping, and a wilful disregard for the lives of the children they corall and parcel out to desperate parents willing to pay tens of thousands for the chance to adopt.
Yet Geire ignores a crucial fact: Mia Farrow has been among those powerful people, so much so that she was able to use her considerable political influence to change an adoption law to her advantage. In 1977, with the help of her friends, the writer Bill Styron, his wife Rose and Massachusetts Congressman Michael Harrington, she was was able to adopt the child who would be named Soon-Yi Previn from Korea, magically having a private bill in her name to circumvent the law that each family could only be granted two international adoptions.
In her autobiography and articles about her, this act is portrayed as that of a determined mother who flew across continents to secure a child to safety. But this picture fails to consider the enormous power and privilege that go into such a process, something utterly unavailable to any average American.
The history of both domestic and transnational adoptions is implicated in the neo-colonialist and racist history of the United States. If military power is the materialisation of political power through guns and devastation, adoptions are the “soft” idealisation of that power. The logic of imperialism is intertwined with adoption from the start, whether that of domestic or foreign adoptions: First the US creates the problems, then it mines those areas for children it can rescue as proof of its munificence.
As Tobias Hübinette and other scholars have shown, international adoptions set the stage for the First World to establish itself as an industrialised, civilised, safe haven where the Third World’s ravaged and war-torn orphans might find homes. This assurance of safety comes, ironically, only after the First World has brought about economic and political havoc in the latter.
Farrow’s adoptions are part of that history, and they are particularly significant because the United States is the world’s largest importer/adopter of children from overseas. In addition, the US’s history of domestic adoptions and foster care is problematic and racist and reveals the colonialist and genocidal impulses at the heart of its history. Dorothy Roberts provides ample evidence in Shattered Bonds that Black women’s children, even when present in the single digits, are separated from them and funnelled into the foster and adoption industry. Historically, Native American children were routinely wrenched from their birth families and placed in orphanages and boarding schools in an attempt to wipe them clear of cultural influences and bring them to a state of white civilisation.
Farrow’s adoptions are also part of a larger narrative she has sought to forge about her life, a narrative that seeks to desexualise her even as she embarked upon unconventional and even what some might call adulterous relationships. This is not to cast a moral judgement upon her or to not acknowledge that some of her maternal zeal may indeed be genuine (if oddly and particularly zealous) but to point out that, as with many such high-profile adoptions, the veneer of domesticity has historically served to rescue celebrities from the taint of sexual scandal. Neither Farrow nor her son Ronan have been shy about revealing supposedly intimate details, including the possibility that he is in fact Frank Sinatra’s child, to the public in well-orchestrated public dramas.
Farrow’s multiple adoptions reveal the power of the fantasy of the adoptive family as a place of safety and refuge, and it is an extremely white fantasy as well. The discourse on adoption and foster care is immensely racialized and racist, enabling the image of the white family as not only the norm but the saviour of Black and Brown child from the purportedly dangerous worlds of crack whores and welfare queens. Farrow’s adoption of children with disabilities in particular further renders whiteness as not only desirable in terms of race but health itself.
Yet, to date, few have considered the dynamics evident in Farrow’s adoptive family. Looked at through the lenses of celebrity transnational and domestic adoption, hitherto unseen issues about gender, sex, power, and imperialism come into sharp view.
Narratives about incest and betrayal are at the heart of the Farrow case, and they have served to make it a particularly potent topic of discussion in the public arena. Incest and betrayal are hardly limited to adoptive families, but in the Farrow-Allen case, the distinctions between adopted and biological children play out on lines of race and gender.
Taking all these intertwining histories into account reveals an archaeology of power. This is not just a history of Farrow’s life, but a cultural history of the link between celebrity, adoption, and the idealisation of the nation-state.
2. “A Will to Power”: Farrow, Celebrity, and the History of Adoptions
In her November 2013 essay on Mia Farrow, Maureen Orth, writes elegiacally of the positive effects of adoption on her various children. At one point, she alights upon Thaddeus, adopted from India, and describes his case history:
As a paraplegic in Calcutta, he was discarded in a railway station and forced to crawl on his hands and stubs of legs to beg for food. Later, at an orphanage, he was chained to a post, and kids would throw rocks at him to prompt the mannish growls he made. When Mia saw him, she says, she had a powerful reaction: “That’s my son.” Mia thought he was 5, but when doctors examined his teeth, they determined he was 12. He was so filled with rage that he would bite Mia and try to pull her hair out. But she taught him that even if he could not choose how he was born he could choose how to behave.
Orth goes on to write about what she claims Thaddeus said to her “I came back at Christmastime to tell Mia, ‘I know I never really said thank you, Mom.’ I just let out emotions I would never let myself express. Finally I was able to.” In her summation, she writes of this revelation by him thus, “I witnessed a real example of redemption…”
The term “redemption” requires us to believe that Thaddeus rose from a debased state to something else. Orth’s choice of word is also significant in the context of the narrative she and Farrow’s supporters spin out about her many adoptions: here, Farrow doesn’t merely give children like Thaddeus a home, she is practically godlike in having rescued them from an elemental, atavistic state of non-being to becoming fully human. Over and over, in Orth’s and others’ descriptions of how Farrow’s family came to be, the adopted children are portrayed as becoming human after being touched by Farrow and brought into her home.
It’s not that Thaddeus could not have experienced such treatment as a child—in a country as desperately poor as India, children like him, with disabilities that would be a burden on poor families, are seen as disposable. But the rendition of his story, repeated by Farrow in her autobiography, places him as an animal who was taught to become a human. The description of his “mannish growls” is a peculiarly detailed word-picture and its origin is uncertain, but it has been accepted as reality. The examination of his teeth to determine his age make him analogous to a feral animal, reined in, captured, thoroughly examined, and finally tamed to a point where he can be allowed into civilised society.
To be precise, that’s also a Christian society; Orth writes that “[a] girlfriend had started taking him to church…and he had a spiritual awakening. He became a Good Samaritan, stopping to help people stranded along the roadside change their tires.” Read in this context, the word “redemption,” as used by Orth, is hardly accidental: Thaddeus’s salvation is configured in Christian terms, and they accidentally or explicitly speak to Mia Farrow’s faith, and how it has in fact overdetermined her life and her voracious appetite for motherhood. Despite the presence of her strong and conservative Catholicism, as described in her memoir, Farrow’s maternal zeal has shielded her from question or scrutiny about the more conservative tenets of the faith she upholds.
In 1976, Mia Farrow was among those who supported the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), an organisation which also claims that rape-related pregnancies are “extremely rare” and advocates that women not only have the babies that result from rape but also continue to mother them. This photograph, of her sitting triumphantly in the midst of a large pile of petitions by SPUC to tighten restrictions on abortion, is a rare (perhaps the only) visual record of her active anti-abortion work. Her opposition to abortion is rarely noted in the press. For the most part, interviews with or profiles of her focus on her large brood but never make a connection between her adoptive zealotry and her reproductive politics. In recent years, Farrow has either had a shift in her views or simply learnt to keep them hidden. In 2011, she was a keynote speaker for Planned Parenthood, but the only description available states that she spoke of the power of adoption to form families like hers.
I raise Farrow’s conservative Catholicism, which may or may not have changed over the years, because it has disappeared from view, subsumed by a larger narrative that combines her adoptive zeal with her humanitarian rescue projects, into a recognisably liberal discourse. It highlights the long and historical connection between Christian missionaries and adoption. As this fervently written paper by John Aloisi indicates, it’s not just that Christians are admonished to adopt as part of their earthly duties, but that God himself is construed as an adoptive father. Adoption in conservative Christian communities is not merely encouraged through pastoral directives, but actively supported through church-wide financial support. In a Nation article, Kathryn Joyce quotes Dan Cruver, head of Together for Adoption, “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.” Joyce also quotes Russell Moore, a proponent of Chritian adoptions, boasting that the 140 adopted children adopted by a ministry he pastors “don’t recognize the flags of their home countries…but they can all sing “Jesus Loves Me.”
Over the last many decades, the missionary zeal to adopt children has dovetailed with the US’s military and foreign policy agenda. In 2001, George Bush signed the Hope For Children Act, which provides for a tax credit to help families adopt children, internationally and domestically. This came at a time when, domestically, “welfare as we know it,” had already been drastically slashed making it difficult for poor women, and particularly women of colour, to keep their families. It also came in the midst of US military aggression and just before the invasion of Iraq, as well as the widening of US military bases worldwide.
Adoption has always been a way for first-world nations to establish their dominion over others, a domesticated strategy of soft imperialism rooted in the belief that poor and/or war-torn countries are incapable of taking care of their own children. Where colonial periods saw the spread of the missionary movement, today’s adoptive zeal takes over where the old and more blatantly Christian missionary projects ended their high visibility as the carriers of imperial munificence (although, of course, these still function in different forms)
What impels the push for Christian adoptions is a combination of factors which tie extreme religiosity to state imperialism, exemplifying what Anthony Shiu calls a “will to power.” Shiu’s discussion of this will to power involves an in depth discussion of the racial politics of transnational adoptions. As he writes, “the recent history of (international) adoption law is also the recent history of arguments by whites against ‘reverse discrimination,’ all to allow the adoption of racialized children into homes that, while financially solvent, are oftentimes wholly unaware of how racialization will affect their children and unwilling to even acknowledge that international adoption is, in a sense, a will to power.”
Indeed, if we take seriously the point that social ascendancy in countries like the US and Australia is closely linked to the attainment of whiteness as the signifier of ultimate stability, we have to consider that the actual racial makeup of adoptive families (most are white, with a small minority being of colour) is less the point than the will to power, the desire to achieve a status that is ultimately coded as white.
It is then inevitable that adoptee countries which are mostly either poor countries of black and brown people or countries like Russia facing the economic ravages of new orders, are treated like recalcitrant children if they don’t open up their borders and relax their regulations for adoptive countries.
Adoptee countries are rarely granted agency, except when it comes to placing blame on them when things go wrong, and there is little discussion of the circumstances that came about to make them such large purveyors of children. Natural disasters and economic crises are among the factors that create conditions ripe for adopters to swoop in and literally airlift children, without regard to whether or not they might actually be orphans.
Following the 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, hundreds of children were rushed out of the country as orphan adoptees even though their families were either partially or completely intact; liberal media like the New York Times insisted that all this was to the advantage of the children.* Several ended up in bureaucratic labyrinthes in the US, bounced from detention centers to foster homes, and Christian missionaries were implicated in child trafficking cases.
But Haiti was hardly an exception. In general, transnational adoptions have been mired in controversy. In 2007, Guatemala suspended adoptions in the wake of charges of bureaucratic corruption and coercion upon birth parents. Scott Carney’s 2009 Mother Jones investigative article revealed the wrenching story about an Indian child whose birth parents sought to regain the child they said had been kidnapped from the streets and funnelled into a white American family. The power imbalance between such parents, who are generally poor, and the wealthier adoptive families who pay tens of thousands of dollars to adopt, is such that restitution is unlikely.
The fact that there are such large numbers of children up for adoption is a reflection of dire economic circumstances in countries like India and Guatemala, but Western families looking for children have also internalised the logic that the world’s poorest simply would not miss their children. The impulse to adopt comes from the idea that the countries in question are barely human or humane, and that rescuing the children from such circumstances is tantamount to returning them them to their full humanity, as in the case of Thaddeus.
Neoliberalism and the breakdown of old regimes and systems of power have also meant the influx of children from countries with white populations, and countries Romania and Russia have become the new hot spots for adoption, often with disastrous consequences which include the large-scale penning of children in state-run orphanages and a heightened sense of their disposability. In 2010, Torry Hansen of Shelbyville, Tennessee, put Artyem Saveliev, whom she had adopted from a Russian orphanage, on a plane back to Moscow, with a note saying she no longer wanted him because of what she claimed were his severe behavioural problems.
In the wake of the furore that greeted the case, Russia has since tightened its restrictions. At this time, countries like Ethiopia and China remain the hot spots for adoption.
Despite such controversies emerging with regularity, transnational adoptions remain popular. Not surprisingly, a spike in economic downturns, caused by the rampage of neoliberalism, has meant there are more adoptions to and from the “first world” and “developing” or war and disaster torn countries. The ability to adopt is a first world, western privilege, and not being able to freely adopt successfully is seen as a sign of being refused access to western privilege.
But as in the case of Farrow’s brood, domestic adoptions are also a significant way to add to families and in the US in particular, these are often culled from poorer African American families. In Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts writes about the multiple ways in which children of poorer African American women, particularly single women on welfare, are forced to give up their children to the state on the pretext that they are incapable of taking care of them or place their children in danger. The state refuses to recognise the different non-normative family structures in which many African American might raise their children. For instance, it is not uncommon for women to take in their grandchildren and raise them in the absence of parents or even alongside parents who might be compelled to leave or be absent for periods of time. The bonds between grandparents and their grandchildren are ripped apart as insufficiently filial, even in cases where there are demonstrably close relationships between all concerned.
As with the children of Native Americans placed in boarding schools in the US and as with Aboriginal children in present-day Australia, African-American children are funnelled into a badly broken foster care system or placed in adoptive families. In recent years, such children have become totemic symbols for several white celebrities, deployed to deflect attention from distracting matters like sex lives or scandal, and allowing for a calmer, quieter narrative of domesticity.
For single female celebrities, the presence of children helps shield them from too many questions about their unmarried statuses and simultaneously imbues them with the aura of a white saviour. In 2007, the white South African actor Charlize Theron, then living with her lover Stuart Townsend, declared they would not get married until gays could get married everywhere. In 2010, she ended her relationship and set about adopting a child, an African-American boy named Jackson. In the same year, Sandra Bullock was faced with the most embarrassing news of her career, that her husband had been having affairs with several women. Perhaps even more awkwardly, photos of her husband in Nazi regalia more than hinted that he had Nazi sympathies, a fact that was unlikely to have escaped Bullock’s notice prior to or at least during their marriage. Bullock rapidly set about adopting an African African child, a boy she named Louis, and for months afterwards, the covers of entertainment magazines were replete with photos of her holding her child for the world to see.
But perhaps no single celebrity has been as famously adoptive as Angelina Jolie, the Mia Farrow of the 21st century. When Jolie burst onto the scene with her 2000 Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, she was quickly embroiled in several scandals and known for what the press reviled as wild and erratic behaviour, including a long and seemingly lustful kiss with her biological brother James Haven after receiving her award. Quickly turning away from the narrative about possible incest, Jolie immersed herself in another publicly erotic relationship, this time with Billy Bob Thornton. The two generally emerged from limousines coiled together and each wore a locket with the other’s blood around their necks. When that finally got to be too much for the public, Jolie entered a safer, maternal space when she adopted her first child Maddox from Cambodia – as she made Lara Croft, Tomb Raider in that country in 2001. That the film she starred in was about a character who essentially plundered treasures of the country she was adopting from was clearly an irony lost on the press as it enthusiastically embraced her new avatar. Over the next decade, Jolie embarked upon a complete revamping of her public image and became, in the mould of Mia Farrow and Audrey Hepburn, a UN Ambassador. Her maternal fervour, though still challenged by Farrow’s in its intensity, has served to shield her from scandals, even though, for instance, she began an affair with Brad Pitt while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston. While a lesser female figure might have been cast out in the moral uproar, Jolie’s life as a “humanitarian” prevented her from being banished into obscurity.
In 2008, the New York Times revealed, in a piece titled “Angelina Jolie’s Carefully Orchestrated Image,” that she deployed her adoption and childcare as part of a larger agenda to soften her persona and divert attention from her days as Hollywood’s wild child.
By now, Jolie is the maternal figure at the heart of a multi-national conglomeration of children, having adopted three children, from Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Vietnam, and having had three biological children with Pitt.
In the case of celebrities like Jolie, the combination of the gloss of being a “humanitarian activist” and a resolutely maternal figure has helped shore up her fame despite the lukewarm actual film career. Her investiture into the neoliberal Council of Foreign Relations has helped to solidify her image as a global ambassador. At the same time, her maternal zeal has proven profitable: the couple sold photos of their first child Shiloh for nearly $8 million, and images of Pax, her Vietnamese adoptee, sold for $2 million. The birth of their twins Knox and Vivienne in 2008 netted them $14 million.
But more than profit, which is rare, celebrity cross-racial and transnational adoptions reinforce the idea of the white family as a rehabilitative space; they help to make the women less threatening and make celebrity families seem like those of ordinary people. Jolie’s many caretakers are rarely seen in photos, where they are carefully cropped out of images, portraying only the Jolie-Pitts seemingly tending to their large brood entirely on their own. In the case of Jolie, her adoptive power combines with her celebrity in sometimes spectacular and unprecedented ways which demonstrate the extent to which poor and Black countries in particular can literally be bought up in the discourse around white celebrity. When she had her white baby Shiloh in Namibia, she and Pitt did so after getting the government’s guarantee that no press would be allowed into the country; they eventually donated $315,000, a fortune in that country, ostensbily for improving maternity hospitals and schools.
Farrow’s adoptions have rarely if ever been the come the subject of critical reporting, although it is unclear if that is because of her ability to play the press or because she has in fact never been a star on the scale of Jolie or Madonna.
The relative inattention to her prolific mothering may also have to do with the fact that Farrow’s heyday and early scandals came at a time when Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general operated differently in relation to each other as well as the fact that entertainment reporting was nowhere as diffuse as it is today.
But in fact Farrow’s sexual history and history of infidelities has been marked from the beginning of her career. One of Hollywood’s original wild children, she was involved with Frank Sinatra when she was 19 and he was more than twice her age (she has repeatedly claimed that he was her first lover, casting herself as an innocent). The affair caused shock waves, but in her memoir she portrays it as almost charmingly domestic. In 1968, she began an affair with the married composer André Previn, whose wife Dory Previn would eventually write a song about Farrow, titled “Beware of young girls.” In her memoir, Farrow makes no note of the scandal of her affair, and instead fills the chapter with letters between her and Previn concerning pillows, throws, and wallpaper choices. She became pregnant before they were married which was, in the 70s, far more scandalous than now, and gave birth to the first two of her children, Sascha and Matthew.
By the time Farrow became involved with Woody Allen, around 1980, stardom was shifting to celebrity and the two were ensconced as a famous couple, with the terms of their unusual living arrangements only lending to their allure. They lived in apartments on opposite sides of Central Park – she could see his lights from her residence – and both they and the many children she had collected often trooped back and forth between and through the grounds. Several photos from that era are of them walking around with an ever growing brood in tow. These images presage similar shots of the far more obviously glamorous Jolie-Pitts, who are snapped sauntering stylishly down boulevards and airports that seem to have been expressly cleared for them.
But Farrow’s rumpled maternity belies the will to power that has been at the center of her adoptive zeal and that, like Jolie, she has been able to exert tremendous power towards the goal of gathering her brood.
3. “A Huge Hoopskirt”: Joining and Leaving the Farrow Family
1977, Farrow wanted to adopt the child who would be known as Soon-Yi Previn, but federal law prohibited more than two adoption visas per family, and Farrow had already adopted Lark from Vietnam. A change would require nothing less than an act of Congress. She writes about this in her memoir, in a section that Shiu makes note of:
In 1971 and 1972, in London’s parks, I marched, pushing a twin stroller alongside Vanessa Redgrave, to protest U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. The senselessness of André [Previn] and I having another baby when already there were so many children in the world needing homes was dramatically underlined by the war, as it stretched on interminably. . . . It was in this climate that we decided to adopt a Vietnamese war orphan.
Eventually, because Vietnam was at the time too volatile, Farrow and Previn decided upon Korea, and were sent a photo of an eight-year-old girl. Farrow had her mind set of adopting Soon-Yi: “This was my daughter.”
What Mia Farrow wanted, Mia Farrow would get, and her “old friends, Bill and Rose Styron, sought the help of Massachusetts Congressman Michael Harrington, and he agreed to sponsor the bill that was necessary. . . . Finally, in 1977, Congress passed the bill. Soon-Yi could come home.” It’s significant that the Styrons would have helped her as would a Massachusetts congressman—among the friends of the Styrons were the Kennedys, who regularly visited and played with them. Rose Styron is the daughter of a wealthy merchant possessed of material power and influence.
In all of the coverage then and since, Farrow’s thirst for a child is portrayed as nothing but a maternal instinct, and no one notes the tremendous economic and political privilege which got her a child. In her memoir, she also writes casually about getting the then-child Soon-Yi out of the orphanage she was in and into what she knew was the “best in Seoul” institution in Korea, yet another indication of the political influence she wielded.
It was really as simple as all that.
And, as it turns out, this was not the first time that Farrow was able to finesse her power to get the child she wanted. As she notes in her memoir, the dual adoption of Dylan by both Allen and her would not have passed without the savvy help of experienced lawyers, in a state where unmarried couples were not permitted to adopt children together.
Both transnational adoptions, like those of Soon-Yi, Lark, and Tam and domestic adoptions, like those of Isaiah, the Black child who, it’s always emphasised, was born to a “crack-addicted” mother, are mired in the discourse, firstly, of whiteness as the preferred mode of the family. But as importantly, they indicate the extent to which adopted children, particularly those of celebrities, are subject to a constant vulnerability, never fully adopted and always having to seek validation by pitching their solidarity where they can. Celebrity adoptions in particular allow the parents concerned to get special favours and to be shielded from public scrutiny
If Mia Farrow had simply given birth to fifteen children, it’s likely that she would have been treated with the curiosity that greets all such white women, like Michelle Duggar. If Mia Farrow were a Black woman with that many children, she would have been dismissed as a welfare queen and perhaps even had her children taken away from her as the state declared her an unfit mother. Even poor white single women who choose to have many children are treated with contempt, but are unlikely to face the same repercussions. Nadia Suleiman would never have been allowed to have that many children at the same time or managed to keep them all (if just barely) if she had been Black.
Yet, over the years, and despite the controversies surrounding her family, Farrow has been permitted to have no fewer than 15 children, without controversy. Even the evidence that she has at least on occasion not had the money to support them financially has been presented as evidence of her fierce maternal zeal. Orth’s 2013 piece reveals that she at one point had to be taken in by her mother and stepfather because she couldn’t afford to keep her family in Manhattan. But Orth also quotes Farrow’s old friend Carly Simon praising her maternal instincts: “She has a huge hoopskirt under which she has all these beloved children. She was always the model mother. Whenever my family found ourselves in a difficult position, we’d say, ‘What would Mia do?’ ”
Instead of the sort of curiosity that plagues poorer women, even with much fewer children, Farrow’s ability to move around in worlds of cultural and political privilege have allowed her an impenetrable shield. A 1994 New York Times piece titled “Picking up the Legos and the Pieces,” portrays hers as a charmingly disheveled homemaker, but who is still able to look youthful: “Yet she seems eerily younger than her age. Her skin is luminous, seemingly without makeup — or makeup applied so expertly it is undetectable. The impression of youth is enhanced by her clothes — jeans, worn white cotton T-shirt, Doc Martens.”
Over and over, Farrow and her children have testified that there were no distinctions between the adopted and biological children. Yet, looking closely at the various accounts over the years reveals that in fact her biological children have been largely left alone in the media, while her adopted children have had the details of their past lives replayed in public. Studying Farrow’s maternal history and the differences in the treatment of her adoptive and birth children reveals a larger widespread notion that the former are more disposable than the latter.
At the heart of the saga between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen is the question of children, both natural and adopted (to use the kinds of terminology that have been reinforced throughout this story). There have been, in total, fifteen altogether, with two having died. So complicated is the composition of her family, that Jezebel even features an explanatory guide to the children, explaining who they are and where they all are now.
Over the years, Farrow’s brood grew to its large proportions, beginning with the birth children of Andre Previn, Matthew and Sascha, twin boys, in 1970. In 1973, she adopted Lark Previn from Vietnam. Fletcher Previn, her third biological child with the composer was born in 1974. In 1976, the couple adopted Summer from Vietnam (the child would go on to name herself Daisy), followed by Soon-Yi from Korea in 1978 (she was in fact born in 1970). Moses Farrow was also adopted from Korea by Mia Farrow as a single mother in 1980, at the age of two.
Dylan Farrow, who renamed herself Malone, was born in Texas, and adopted by Farrow in 1985, the year of her birth; Allen would adopt her as well in 1991. Ronan Farrow is the last of Farrow’s biological children, born in 1987 (he changed his name from Satchel, given to him by Allen), and his parentage is now in question after Farrow disclosed that he might well be the child of Frank Sinatra, with whom she continued to have an affair while with Allen.
Tam Farrow, a blind Vietnamese girl born in 1979, was adopted by Farrow in 1992, a month after news of the Allen-Soon-Yi affair broke. Isaiah Farrow, an African-American born in 1992 and often referenced as “born to a crack-addicted mother,” was adopted by Farrow that same year; both he and Tam were adopted the same week. Gabriel Wilk Farrow, who would change his first name to Thaddaeus, was born a paraplegic in India in 1989 and was adopted by Farrow in 1994. Kaeli-Shea Farrow, also African American, was born in 1993 and adopted by Farrow in 1994, and Frankie-Minh Farrow, who is blind (and named after Sinatra) was born in Vietnam in 1989 and adopted in 1994 by her.
In all of this, Dylan, the white adopted child whose childhood photos reveal her to be an engagingly doll-like child with bright golden curls, has never had her birth history discussed. In sharp contrast, the details of all the children of colour have been splashed around in cringe-inducing detail to highlight the dramatic extent to which they have been saved by Farrow.
Details about these children are suffused with the kind of white saviour complex that overdetermine adoption narratives in general, but especially celebrity mothers in particular. And while the successes of the biological children are noted as exceptional (Ronan Farrow’s “genius” is frequently remarked upon), those of the children of colour are painted as entirely due to her exceptional mothering.
Yet, in all of the glorified retelling of the success stories that Orth in particular engages upon, there is a muted reference only to those who did not achieve what the others did, and those who have disagreed or acted in a way not in accord with the official narrative of what happened have been summarily cast out, signalling how easily disposable they are.
What Orth and many others have left out are the disasters that have overtaken Farrow’s children. In 2008, Lark died of AIDS-related complications and, by more than one report, in dire poverty, cleaning houses for a living. Both she and Daisy, now reported to be a medical technician, were caught shoplifting in 1991.
The issue is not to blame Farrow or Previn, and every family watches its children go through such growing pains, but to again lay bare a story of what we might call the failure of adoption and, more importantly to consider that Lark Previn’s death from AIDS has been erased from the picture altogether, as has her poverty as well as that of Daisy. Tam Farrow died in 2000, reportedly of a heart condition. In the case of Lark, surely it’s worth asking why the adopted daughter of a presumably wealthy conductor like Andre Previn and a relatively well-off and certainly well-connected celebrity like Mia Farrow would have died in poverty.
It may well be that there are details we don’t know – and this family portrait 1 shows at least one of the children of Lark, apparently healthy. But Lark Previn’s death opens up several questions that have never been asked, questions which would challenge the issue of not only the family structure but what could have made an adopted child of two powerful and well-known parents, at least one of whom is assuredly financially wealthy, to die of a disease that affected the poorest and most vulnerable.
In other narratives, children like Thaddeus have their life stories explained in great detail in order to offset the contrast between their former lives and the lives they ostensibly enjoy now. There are no such details about Dylan Farrow, even though the chances of getting a white baby are far less and the process is usually far more expensive. White babies cost on average $35,000 while Black babies go for $4000.
But it is in the relating of the story of Soon-Yi and the swift and dramatic retelling of that story that we see particularly stark and racialised differences.
In Orth and Farrow’s accounts, Soon-Yi is described, like Thaddeus, as an animal-like child, feral in her demands. Maureen Orth wrote, in 1992, that “[w]hen the orphanage found Soon-Yi, she spoke no known language, just gibberish,” and this is echoed in Farrow’s memoir. Even Jezebel points out that this is an odd detail: “According to Mia, Soon-Yi was found eating out of garbage cans on the streets and spoke ‘no known language, only gibberish.’ How then, would anyone know from where or whom she came?” Here is the description of Soon-Yi, in Farrow’s memoir, which is worth quoting at length.
She seemed delighted with her presents and sat on the floor holding her for the longest time until it occurred to me that she didn’t know about unwrapping, and opening gifts, so I ripped a little corner to show her inside, but that upset her, so I waited awhile, then, carefully not to rip the paper, I unstuck the tape and pulled out the candy-striped nightgown. Soon-Yi loved it. I held it up in front of her and carried her to see how good it looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Seeing the mirror, she jackknifed with a sound of pure fear and kicked it so hard we both fell backward nearly into the bathtub. On that day, it must have seemed that anything was possible—even a duplicate world where strange-eyed, pale-haired woman was holding another terrified child who holding another nightgown with pink candy stripes.
Soon-Yi didn’t know about mirrors, or revolving doors, or carpets, or elevators, or ice, or eggs (I picked the shells out of her mouth), or grass, or flowers, or in fact most of the things the rest of us take for granted. Whatever caught her fancy—paper clips, peanus, money, flowers, rubber bands, chewing-gum wrappers, Cheerios—she stashed in her underpants. And the only place she could fall asleep was on the floor next to my bed.
It’s hardly unusual for a child that young to not be familiar with, say, revolving doors or elevators, especially if she has largely been raised in an orphanage, perhaps in a non-urban area. So, for Farrow to claim that not knowing of these was somehow extraordinary, is disingenuous. But then she goes on to make a claim that stretches credulity, that a child would not know a mirror, or eggs, or grass, or flowers. Any orphanage which subjects a child to a life where grass and flowers are unknown is unlikely to send her into the outside. The passages here strain the imagination, and it’s difficult to think they’re anything resembling the truth.
Orth goes on quote several sources in her 1992 article, which claimed that Soon-Yi was of such limited mental capacity that she couldn’t even have produced the words she sent to Newsweek: “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.” Orth wrote about “several people insisting that she had a severe learning disability.” In fact, a learning disability is not the same as having limited mental capacity and Soon-Yi has a Masters’s in Special Education from Columbia.
In her 1997 memoir, Farrows writes that she still loves Soon-Yi. But by 2006, in an interview with The Guardian, she performs the ultimate rejection when she dismisses her and simultaneously returns Soon-Yi to her atavistic state, reducing her to the state of a forlorn orphan child who should be grateful
She was on the streets in Korea when she was captured and brought to the state orphanage,’ Farrow tells me. ‘And in a way I can see from her perspective – a very limited perspective – that she’s improved her situation. She’s got the penthouse, and the seat at Elaine’s, or – whatever I had, she has. For a little orphan kid from Korea … Perhaps she’s not to be blamed.
These words are strikingly brutal, and one could argue that a parent forced to endure the humiliation and shock of her own child having had a sexual relationship with her partner has a right to be so vicious. But still, it reveals the ways in which adopted children are particularly disposable and can swiftly be excised from accepted society. If they do manage to move on beyond the adoptive family, they will be cast out in terms like those laid out by Farrow, whose words are a cruel taunt but whose cruelty goes unremarked by the deeply sympathetic interview, who has previously noted the earlier death of her daughter, Tam, of heart disease, and who concludes the section thus: “You might say that Farrow has lost two daughters to failures of the heart.”
It’s not just Farrow who rejected her child. André Previn is quoted by Orth, saying about Soon-Yi that, “She does not exist.” In her memoir, Farrow writes that Andre Previn “wouldn’t talk to Soon-Yi and he sure as hell didn’t want her at his house in New York.” Again, while the circumstances are certainly dramatic enough, there is no sense of the parental bond—Soon-Yi is quickly and concisely banished from the heart of a large family.
That the erasure of an adopted child of colour and the placement of the blonde moppet who claims abuse, is so starkly marked has apparently escaped the notice of most commentators. This demonstrates the precarity of belonging, a state in which many adoptive children find themselves.
Biological children can indeed be cast off similarly, but this is the case of a child adopted at the relatively older possible age of eight; if she was nineteen at the time of the revelation of her affair with Allen, she had only been with them for about a decade. There are obviously stark issues at hand here: Soon-Yi did in fact sleep with the lover of her mother, and Dylan’s abuse charges, taken seriously, are indeed serious enough. But at the heart of all of this is the precarity of adoptive children, to be shrugged off, to die without notice or question, or to be installed at the center of a family drama after having sworn an oath of fidelity that requires the exile of the father.
In 2006, Moses Farrow was adopted by Allen, but put his weight behind his mother. In 2013, he came out to say that both Mia and Dylan Farrow were in fact lying. In response, Ronan and Mia Farrow have said, scornfully, that he cannot be believed, once again demonstrating how easy it is for an adoptive child to be cast out of the family. And in words that starkly evoke those of André Previn, Dylan Farrow has declared, about Moses, “My brother is dead to me.” More importantly, while media and commentaries have rushed to insist that Dylan’s version of events is correct, because she says so, few have granted Moses that same authority, despite the fact that he is a trained family therapist. His claim that Farrow beat him as a child has been granted no credence at all, receiving no attention while, meanwhile, both Farrow and son Ronan continue to spin charming stories about their happy, multicultural family. The racial distinctions between the children who are cast out and those kept around may seem like coincidence, but a deeper look reveals that race and ethnicity in fact mark how those children are, first, understood as children (or not), and the extent to which they are allowed to remain children, instead of being cast out, literally and metaphorically.
In the principles of transformative justice, giving credence to rape victims or any victims of abuse, those who have been harmed or claim to have been harmed, is a fundamental precept, and it’s meant to rectify the brutality of a world where victims are generally not believed. Even now, rape victims are blamed for having brought it upon themselves.
But the best solution to that is to not simply believe that a rape victim has been raped because, after all, there is still the matter of the accused, who may in fact not have committed the crime and who stands accused of a heinous act. Rather, the impulse should be to guarantee that anyone who alleges rape should first be given every possible kind of support, whether medical, social, or emotional, in order to help them recover. 2 But that needs to be separate from the question of deciding whether or not rape did in fact occur. If we were to apply the logic of only believing the accuser to every other kind of crime, it stands to reason that such an idea would be indefensible.
In the case of the Farrow-Allens, accusations have been made and then resurrected, with little to no consideration of the larger contexts in which a large and arguably unwieldy family was created. Those contexts include the racialised and racist world of transnational adoptions and the narratives about white saviours that have been replicated without question or critique. There can be no argument that, on the face of it, the sexual betrayals at the heart of the family, both alleged and real, are enormous ones that strain most social and cultural norms. Yet, one of the murkier issues that few have faced head-on is the fact that adoptive children, particularly when of a different race, are not only cast as the Other but sexualised differently. In that context, we might consider that Soon-Yi’s sexualisation as the partner of her adoptive mother’s lover was not an aberration as much as it was perhaps inevitable, even within the complicated questions about consent and intergenerational sex.
I want to tease out the sexual aspects of cross-racial/national adoptions in a separate piece. But for now, it’s worth remembering that the explosive nature of everything that happened within the Farrow-Allen household touches upon a host of questions and contexts that challenge the idea of it simply being about love and betrayal. Tracing out a cultural history at the intersections of celebrity, race, sex, and the logic of transnational and trans-racial adoptions requires us to move beyond simply the questions of believing or not believing the main players; it reveals the sedimented history of an archaeology of power.
* clause about liberal media added on April 29, 2021.
For more on adoption see also, “Cindy McCain: When Adoption Looks Like Trafficking.”
1 For an introduction to this series, and for Part 1, see “Why Now?: Introducing the Allen-Farrow Series.“
2 Many thanks to Michael Pollak for this point. 2
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