
DATE: Wednesday, March 19, 1997             TAG: 9703190057

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review 

SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON 

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

FARROW'S ``WHAT FALLS AWAY'' NOT JUST A CELEBRITY TELL-ALL

ON DAVID LETTERMAN'S show recently to hype her first book, ``What Falls Away,'' a high-spirited Mia Farrow told Dave that while she was on a book tour in Europe, she received a fax from her publisher, saying, ``Congratulations. Your book is number 7111 on the New York Times Best Seller List.''

Farrow showed the audience a photo of herself in her hotel room, jubilantly waving about the fax.

``I called my publisher, to say how happy I was that my book had just come out and already it was number 7,111 on the best-seller list.

``And you know what she told me?'' Farrow asked Letterman, her hand over her heart. ``She said that wasn't number 7,111. It was number 7, with three exclamation marks after it!''

It is this blend of naivete and humor, along with intelligence, grace and honesty that make Mia Farrow's memoir much more than the usual celebrity tell-all. She also wrote every word herself - no collaborator, she told Letterman. She wrote in the early hours before the seven of her 14 children who are still at home awoke.

``What Falls Away'' gives Farrow's side of the ugly child molestation accusations against, and custody battle with longtime partner Woody Allen. But we have to wait until the final few chapters for it. With Farrow's beautiful and believable writing, however, this is no chore.

``Visits to that place by the sea inspired intense and indecipherable feelings, a confluence of wildness and order, of magic and the commonplace, of vitality and death, contentment against unutterable yearning, instantaneous and eternal,'' she says of Fourth of July family visits to Malibu.

The book is chronological, beginning with Farrow's childhood in Beverly Hills, the first daughter and third of seven children born to actress Maureen O'Sullivan (Johnny Weissmuller's Jane) and direc-tor/author/painter/John Farrow. The family hung out with other Hollywood stars and their children, causing a ``catastrophic distortion" of life.

``I was nine when my childhood ended,'' Farrow says, explaining how polio set her on a lifelong path of reticence, introspection and appreciation for family. She writes poignantly about her oldest brother Michael's death at 19, while he was taking flying lessons; she was 13. ``Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing.''

We learn of her father's alcoholism, his extramarital affairs and his early death from a heart attack at 58. John Farrow ``filled a room,'' Mia says, and she and her father shared a passion for browsing in used-book stores. O'Sullivan, now 86, is presented as beautiful, patient, talented, supportive and strong.

The title of Farrow's book, ``What Falls Away,'' is taken from Theodore Roethke's poem, ``The Waking'': What falls away is always. And is near/I wake to sleep, and I take my waking slow/I learn by going where I have to go.

As the story of her life progresses we find out how Mia, more at home in an English boarding school than in Hollywood, is more or less pulled into acting by her father's death and her family's need for money. We read about her marriage to Frank Sinatra, 30 years her senior. The relationship doesn't seem so extraordinary the way Farrow explains it.

There are career stories (``Rosemary's Baby''), travel tales (Mia and the Beatles follow a Maharishi to India), more marriage chapters (pregnant with his twins, Mia marries conductor Andre Previn), and plenty of information about how Farrow's family eventually came to include 14 kids: four ``natural'' sons, 10 adopted children, including the youngest daughter, Frankie-Minh, named for Sinatra.

By the time we finally get to the sordid story of Woody Allen's affair with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi, we believe in Farrow and admire her sincerity, domesticity, sensitivity and responsibility. She builds a good case against Allen's emotional instability long before she gives the details of his alleged sexual abuse of another adopted daughter, Dylan.

Farrow doesn't write vindictively about Allen, his betrayal and their breakup. Rather, she quotes him, using excerpts from his authorized biography, and, in a most unusual move, includes the entire state supreme court decision regarding custody of three of Farrow's children, whom Allen wanted to live with him.

At 52, Mia Farrow has ``learned by going where I have to go'' and, she says, her life feels ``absolutely right.'' MEMO: Charlene Cason, a former Virginian-Pilot reporter, is a graduate

student in creative non-fiction at Old Dominion University. ILLUSTRATION: [Photo]

LYNN GOLDSMITH

Mia Farrow's memoir is beautifully and believably written.

BOOK REVIEW

``What Falls Away: A Memoir''

Author: Mia Farrow

Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 370 pp.

Price: $25.