A LETTER FROM NEW YORK : How the Apple Is Coping With a Fallen Icon

The city is beside itself. This can’t be happening. Not him . Not Woody Allen. He seemed like such a nice Jewish boy, deep down. But there is nowhere to hide this week from the news that Woody Allen, sweet cinematically neurotic Woody Allen, apparently has been to bed with his Mia Farrow’s Korean-born daughter, Soon-Yi, who is thought to be 21 but might be as young as 17. Bad enough that he had broken up with Mia Farrow, but not this, no, not from the man who made “Annie Hall,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Manhattan.”

The Republican Convention was said to be taking place in Houston this week, but in New York the only thing anybody was talking about on the street and at parties was: How bad a person is he really? There has been nowhere to hide from the news. Beginning Monday, when the Daily News screamed “BANANAS!” over pictures of Woody and Mia, the tabloids have led every day with the scandal. On Tuesday, Newsday’s cover announced correctly, “IT’S GETTING UGLY” and the Daily News splashed, “WOODY SPEAKS OUT: IT’S LOVE.” The New York Post advanced the story with “MIA’S GOT NUDE PIX,” and then came others such as “IT’S WAR” and “WOODY: MIA TRIED TO SHAKE ME DOWN.”

It was one thing when the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, was being dispatched to prison last spring or when Doc Gooden and a few of his Met teammates were accused of rape in spring training or when 17-year-old Amy Fisher blasted her way into tabloid heaven by shooting Mary Jo Buttafuco, the wife of her boyfriend, earlier this summer. But Woody Allen? The one who made “Shadows and Fog” and “September”?

Local television stations interrupted regular programming to cover live Allen’s press conference Tuesday at the Plaza Hotel, where he read from a prepared statement that refuted allegations made by Farrow’s lawyers that he might have been guilty of sexually abusing two of their other children and reaffirmed his love for Soon-Yi Farrow Previn.

Wednesday, the New York Post, whose readership probably does not contribute significantly to Allen’s box-office grosses, managed to dish dirt from another unlikely tabloid subject, conductor Andre Previn. Previn, who was married to Farrow when Soon-Yi was adopted from an orphanage in Korea, told the Post, “As a father, I don’t think I have enough vocabulary to tell you what I think of the affair. My opinion of (Allen) gets lower every day.”

Previn, the former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and England’s Royal Philharmonic, also said in the interview, “She’s young and didn’t have the knowledge, the experience or the sophistication to withstand him when he went after her. . . . She’s a kid, she doesn’t know any better. It’s just that she’s come under the influence of an articulate older man.”

Reporters were dispatched to Mia Farrow’s Bridgetown, Conn., home, where they were unsuccessful in actually talking to the actress and mother of 11, but were able to stand close enough to the house to report “the actress’s voice could be heard teaching the children arithmetic.”

This is the country home, to be sure. New Yorkers and perhaps film followers everywhere are versed in the urban folklore of how Woody and Mia, who never went so far as to get married, maintained separate apartments on opposite sides of Central Park--he on the East side, she on the West.

Alas, like so many illusions about the romance of New York, this one now too is history.

Film critics and other editorial analysts were suddenly re-examining Allen’s films for signs of his incipient depravity. The movie that came to everyone’s mind first was naturally “Manhattan,” in which Allen played a 47-year-old television writer in love with the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway. It seemed warm and charming at the time. Then there was “Hannah and Her Sisters,” in which Allen arranged to have Michael Caine, married in the film to Mia Farrow, betray her for one of her sisters, played by Barbara Hershey. In 1986, that seemed so, well, so human , so understandable.

But when Allen faced the cameras on Tuesday, his statement had a different effect on film journalists here. When he described Soon-Yi as “a lovely, intelligent, sensitive woman who has and continues to turn my life around in a wonderfully positive way,” Newsday’s Lynn Darling was moved to ask bluntly, “wonderfully positive? That’s the kind of thing one of Allen’s trademark targets, the self-deluded psychobabble-spouting bourgeois bores would say. What happened to the Allen wit, the Allen irony?”

The New York Times has been characteristically demure thus far in its coverage of the sordid affair. Allen has been a favored citizen in its arts pages, and the new development must pose a dilemma for editors and critics there.

The New York Observer, the weekly pink broadsheet that covers society and the publishing world, the very heart of Woody Allen country, strangely carried nary a peep in the new edition, which came out Wednesday. Possibly the Observer is planning to devote an entire issue to the subject.

In the only extended interview that Allen gave this year, in March, to the Los Angeles Times, he cautioned his audience not to confuse him with his films. “People always used to think that I was some poor little schnook who lived in Greenwich Village who was physically weak and so on, and I always tried to explain that this is the natural material of a comedian, whether it’s Charlie Chaplin or Bob Hope. . . . I did a certain kind of character publicly but in real life I lived on the Upper East Side in a nice apartment. I was an athletic kid when I grew up and was not what people thought I was. I thought there was something wrong with the culture for wanting to think that.

“People always think I’m being facetious when I say this, but I’ve always meant it for real when I say that it was only because of my glasses that people thought I was more bookish than I was. I’ve never been bookish. I’ve always been the guy who preferred watching a baseball game or a Knicks game to an opera or reading a book.”

OK, so he’s a Knicks fan. But romancing his virtual stepdaughter?

“How old is he?” an older woman was heard to ask her luncheon companions yesterday at an Upper West Side restaurant. “How old? Fifty-two? 53 . . . 56?! And how old is she?” The four voices at the table then emitted clucking noises of disgust and dismay.

Allen, who was writing 30 jokes a day when he was still in high school, which will give you some idea of how talented he was and is, has now become the butt of jokes, most of them unprintable here.

Life, evidently, is different from art, at least in terms of the way New Yorkers have reacted this week. For many, this confirms their suspicion that most famous people are truly horrible if you could only get to know them. Yet Woody Allen was different. Hard to say whether he can seem quite so different now.