Soon Yi Previn breaks 25 years of silence to eviserate her adopted mother
More than a quarter-century after the public learned of the affair that “broke every taboo,” in the words of child psychiatrist Paulina Kernberg, the 47-year-old Soon-Yi is ending her silence. She’s long believed that her relationship with Allen fueled the inquiry into the allegations surrounding Dylan, but only recently has she felt compelled to tell her own side of things, to talk about what drove her away from her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow — and toward the man who’s now been her husband for 20 years. “I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia — none of that,” Soon-Yi tells me quietly but firmly. “But what’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust. [Mia] has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t.”
Soon-Yi says that from the very beginning, she and Farrow were “like oil and water,” suggesting that maybe it was because by the time she was adopted she was too old to be shaped to Farrow’s specifications. “Mia wasn’t maternal to me from the get-go,” she says with some vehemence. Soon-Yi remembers, for instance, the first bath that Farrow gave her, in a Korean hotel room, as traumatic. “I’d never taken a bath by myself, because in the orphanage it was a big tub and we all got in it. Here, it was for a single person, and I was scared to get in the water by myself. So instead of doing what you would do with an infant — you know, maybe get into the water, put some toys in, put your arm in to show that you’re fine, it’s not dangerous — she just kind of threw me in.”
Soon-Yi’s first home with Farrow was in Surrey, England, in what she describes as “a beautiful, picturesque house with a thatched roof,” surrounded by “daffodils as far as the eye could see.” Theirs was a blended family avant la lettre: André Previn, who adopted Soon-Yi; Daisy and Lark; Farrow; and the couple’s three biological children, the twins Matthew and Sascha, followed by Fletcher. The household included a virtual menagerie featuring a talking parrot, dogs and cats, newts, and a ferret. Despite the pastoral tranquillity, Soon-Yi says, she felt achingly unhappy, a state of affairs that was not helped by Mia’s and André’s “bone-chilling tempers” or by Mia’s playing favorites. “There was a hierarchy — she didn’t try to hide it, and Fletcher was the star, the golden child,” she says. “Mia always valued intelligence and also looks, blond hair and blue eyes.” Soon-Yi had arrived without knowing a word of English, and Mia was impatient with her new daughter’s learning curve. “She tried to teach me the alphabet with those wooden blocks. If I didn’t get them right, sometimes she’d throw them at me or down on the floor. Who can learn under that pressure?” Soon-Yi, whom Farrow briefly renamed Gigi (perhaps because Previn had composed the music for the film of the same name), says she was left wondering if she would fit in better elsewhere. “I’d see other houses far away in the distance,” she says wistfully, “and think, Oh, maybe they would like a nice Korean girl. You know, a nice little girl.”
During our many talks, I ask Soon-Yi several times if she has any positive recollections from her years with Farrow. She unfailingly answers that she doesn’t. “It’s hard for someone to imagine, but I really can’t come up with a pleasant memory.” Despite that, I’m unsure whether Soon-Yi has always seen her mother in such stark terms or whether this is a portrait that has been shadowed over time, its darkness inevitably added to by the abrupt and almost surreal way in which their relationship would come to an end after Farrow discovered some nude Polaroids Allen had taken of Soon-Yi after their affair had begun. Soon-Yi says that she “regrets” that her mother found the pictures — “I think it would have been horrible for her” — but notes that they were taken in the privacy of Allen’s home, for themselves. “You know, we were both consenting adults,” she says (she was 21 at the time), before conceding that there “could be something very Freudian” about the fact that Allen left a few of them on his mantel.
http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/soon-yi-previn-speaks.html
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