What falls away : a memoir Read Online Free Page A

Tarzan movies she made with Johnny Weissmuller. She says she got bored of being rescued from mad elephants, alligators, and hippopotamuses. She found the monkeys particularly loathsome, and said they were "all homosexuals" who adored Johnny and were jealous of her, biting her at every opportunity. To this dav she refers to Cheetah the Chimp as "that bastard."
    She says she was "extremely fond of Johnny, but he would drive me crazy with his practical jokes. I remember once on my birthday he brought me a huge cake, and when I put the knife in, the whole thing exploded in my face. While all America thought we were having an affair, there was never a glimmer of a romance between us."
    To date, my mother has played leading roles in sixty-two movies, including The Thin Man (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), and The Big Clock (1948), one of several films she starred in that was directed by my father.
    John Villiers Farrow was a conflicted, incongruous figure in Hollywood. He was a movie director, but failed to see film as art, and so could not respect his own endeavors. He read serious books and he wrote serious books, which he did respect, and he fraternized with Jesuits. He was a devout Catholic, and a womanizer of legendary proportions. He was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1904. According to

    Farrow family lore, he was the product of a relationship between Lucy Savage and King Edward VII. Whatever the truth, it went to the grave when beautiful, nineteen-year-old Lucy died during my father's birth. All he ever possessed or knew of his mother was the oval portrait he kept with him throughout his life. He never knew his father, Joseph Farrow, so "Jack," as my father was then known, was raised by an aunt, and at fifteen sent to Winchester College in England to complete his education. But a restless spirit and some measure of unhappiness led him to lie about his age and run away to sea. He spent his youth in the merchant marine and the Royal Canadian Navy.
    Of all the distant ports, my father loved Tahiti best. During one of his numerous extended visits, he assembled the first French-English-Tahitian dictionary, and wrote a novel, laughter Ends. He kept a scrapbook with black pages and careful white handwriting. The tiny photographs show a very fit, handsome young man, flaxen-haired, with a dazzling smile and a flowered cloth sarong around his waist, in various poses with native women of Bora Bora, Tahiti, and Moorea, and a beautiful, bobbed brunette named Lila.
    It was in Tahiti that he learned of the life of Father Damien, and came to admire him deeply. Among my mother's notes I found the following account of how that came about, in my father's words:
    "After a wretched passage on a small trading cutter we reached one of the more remote islands. The sudden peace of the lagoon so enchanted me that I determined to stay there a few days. A consultation with the amiable half-Chinese, half-Tahitian captain soon settled the matter. He would proceed to the next island, pick up a cargo of copra, then after three days' time, return for me. But given the ways of manners in those pleasant waters, it was not surprising when he did not return for nearly three months.
    "Excepting for a gendarme who lived in a different village, I was the only white man on the island and as such

    was treated as a personage. One hospitable family came forward, insisting I should stay with them smce they actually had a bed, an unusual and prestigious article of furniture m those regions, which defined the owner as being a person of wealth, culture, and initiative. My hosts were rightly proud of their bed. It was a huge and grand affair, made of glittering brass and shining mother-of-pearl, ornamented with colored shells and swathed in clouds of mosquito netting. Each evening when it was time to retire, my solemn-eyed friends would gather to wave farewell as I disappeared through the tall curtains. For about two weeks I had been sleeping there