Parade Jan 2 1965
Mia Farrow. TV's New Soap Opera Queen.
Many years ago I worked on a film at MGM with a director named John Farrow. He was an intelligent, talented, unhappy, bedeviled, frequently frustrated, insecure and arrogant man who should have become an actor—only he disliked actors intensely. A handsome, blond Australian who'd come to Hollywood as a portrait painter, Farrow developed over the years into a great Casanova—he bowled over almost everything in 'sight—and a fair film director. After one unsuccessful Hollywood marriage, he met and fell in love with a warm, sweet, gentle, beautiful actress who'd been raised in County Wicklow, Ireland. Her name was Maureen O'Sullivan, and she had played opposite Johnny Weismuller in the Tarzan series. Farrow converted to Catholicism, married Maureen and between film assignments wrote many works on the great figures of the Catholic Church, which led to his becoming a Papal Knight.
In 10 years Maureen O'Sullivan Farrow gave birth to 7 children—4 girls and 3 boys, one of whom died in a plane crash. For the most part the Farrows lived an elegant film colony life complete with cook, governess, gardeners, swimming pool, private schools, all the accoutrements befitting a family with an income of $150,000 a year and up.
During the film I worked on with Farrow—it turned out to be a Western atrocity starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner—we discussed one afternoon Ava's seemingly perpetual unhappiness, her insecurity, her lack of personal identity, her indulgence in various escape mechanisms. Farrow thought these characteristic of most actresses. "Ill tell you one thing," he asserted. "No daughter of mine is ever going to become an actress." John Farrow died almost two years ago, on January 27th, 1963. " Since then, his oldest daughter, Mia, 19 (real name—Maria), has become night-time television's first queen of the soap opera and one of the fastest-rising young actresses in the Hollywood constellation. Under contract to 20th Century-Fox at $ 1,000 a week, Mia plays Allison Mac Kenzie in Peyton Place, a serial which airs over ABC-TV every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 :3 0 P.M. She is also under contract for feature films and has finished one, Guns at Batasi, in which she replaced Peter Sellers' wife, Britt Eklund.
It's as a TV actress, however, that Mia is winning her first national fame. Each Tuesday and Thursday night she is exposed to millions of video-viewers as the bright, pretty, sensitive 17-year-old who doesn't know the awful small-town family secret: that she's illegitimate. Based loosely—very loosely—on the characters in the original novel by the late Grace Metalious, Peyton Place on TV has been described variously as "a situation orgy," as "a show in which everyone loves everybody—frequently" and as "a program in which the characters are more than realistically obsessed with their sex lives."
WHY ITS A SUCCESS
Although it is little more than a trashy souped-up soap opera, Peyton Place has become one of the outstanding hits of the new TV season, and Mia Farrow a hit along with it, ranks so high in the ratings—it's among the first 20 programs in popularity—is that it's become a sanctuary for watchers who are tired of the endless comedy and adventure series which the networks have so monotonously programmed. Of the 95 prime-time TV shows aired by the 3 networks, more than 40 are comedy programs and most of the others ridiculous Western-type or adventure series. Under the circumstances, Peyton Place, bad as it is, is welcome. Mia Farrow, of course, does not consider her soap opera banal, pedestrian, phony, nonintellectual, substandard or catering to the lowest common denominator of mass audience appeal. "I'm delighted," she says, "to be connected with a success, and while the success may come as a surprise to some, it's not to me." "Sex is a basic preoccupation of our age," she; continues in her soft, carefully modulated English finishing school voice, "and I think it's handled tastefully on Peyton Place. As you probably know, I play the youngest character on the show, only 17, and the truth is that the script writers don't really know what to do with me. They're afraid to get me into trouble, so thus far I've played endless scenes with my mother [Dorothy Malone] in which I constantly accuse her of not preparing me for life. I act someone who's always upset, and that's perfectly marvelous. I guess a lot of teenagers must identify with me. "I do two shows a week, and I plan to stay with Peyton another three years at best. I hope the studio will put me into other films, because I don't want to spend my entire career in television."
DETERMINED TO ACT
Blonde and blue-eyed, ethereal and fragile-looking, generating an air of innocence at odds with her will of iron, Mia Farrow is a resolute, well-bred child of Hollywood heritage who is sincerely determined to become "a good, serious actress." "I know," she admits, "that my father didn't want me to become an actress, but for sure in the end he would have relented. Anyway, I've always wanted to become one, and Mother certainly has been there for me." Says Maureen O'Sullivan: "Mia's father really had two lives. His true love was writing, and I think he felt that the films he made were not on a par with his ability. So that the best share of his creativity went into the books he wrote.
So that he had two different lives: the life of the writer and the man who liked to live and travel well, and the theatrical life which he didn't really like. What he wanted for Mia was the good life, not the theatrical one. 'How many happy actresses do you know?' be used to ask-— to which I would reply, 'How many happy women do you know?" "Ever since she was a little girl Mia wanted to become an actress. After I went back to acting again—luckily I had a hit show in New York [Never Too Late]—Mia asked if she could study acting. I told her, 'If you want to go into this business just to be a star and for die glamour or the money, you'll have your heart broken. But if you want to go into it because you love acting and you'd be just as happy to be acting in a barn as in Hollywood, then do it. You must realize you'll have disappointments and ups and downs. But if acting is your true love, you have my good wishes and help if I can.'" - Instead of returning to finishing school in England—she'd previously attended a convent school there, too—Mia Farrow remained in New York with her mother and on her own landed a part in The Importance of Being Earnest. She made her New York stage debut on July 2nd, 1963, got excellent reviews working opposite such veteran actors as Melville Cooper and John Merivale. The show's management asked her to work in their next production, and while awaiting it Mia went into summer stock. "Somebody from Fox in New York," she says, "saw me. He came and asked if I could do an American accent. Yes,' I said, 'I can do one quite easily.' So he asked if I would be interested in a television series, and I said no. But he kept coming back, so I did a general screen test for Fox and then the producer of Peyton Place, Paul Monash, came to New York, and he convinced me, so I went out and did the pilot. And I signed a contract for TV and regular features. "I was rehearsing another play, which was scheduled to open in London, when one Thursday evening! got a call from the studio asking if I could be in London the following Monday to work in the Guns at Batasi. Later I learned that Britt Eklund had walked out of it to fly to her husband, Peter Sellers, who came down with a heart attack in Hollywood. "After Batasi I came back to Hollywood, and I've been working in Peyton Place ever since. I think we've finished 44 episodes to date." To be 19, to earn $1,000 a week, to drive around in a Jaguar, to have your own horse, Salvador, stabled in Malibu, to decorate your apartment in Beverly Hills, to date some of the most attractive men in town, from Frank Sinatra, 49, to John Leyton, 25, to do what you've always wanted to do—what more could any girl ask for?
"What I want," says Mia, "is to achieve a skill, to grow as a person, to learn from others. That's why I feel more comfortable with older men. They're interesting. They've lived. They've arrived. They've got experiences to share. "I don't have any boy friends or girl friends my own age. They scare me. I can see the struggle going on within them. They're trying to impress me, especially the boys. They tread too heavily. I'm a very affinitive person, if there is such a word. I try to find an affinity with everyone, but somehow I can't make it with people of my own age.
"I remember after I had been in school abroad I came back to Beverly Hills for my last year, and I was never more miserable in my entire life. They laughed at me for wearing socks. I was completely rejected. I just couldn't get with it. I didn't understand the dating system here, boys and girls going steady at such an early age. I just hated it, probably because I wasn't part of it. I was so anxious to go back to England. And of course, I did.
"Basically I'm an emotional person* I try not to be. I try to be intellectual, to think things out, but I'm terribly impulsive. The reason I'm so happy acting is that it's the only thing right now which makes me a full person, the only way I have of giving and receiving. I have no other place to give what I have to give and ' get what I have to get except on stage or in front of a camera." A few weeks ago when Hedda Hopper broke the news that Mia Farrow had been dating Frank Sinatra—it was no secret in Hollywood—Sinatra became most agitated. To calm him down studio executives immediately ordered a "kill" on all photos taken of Mia and Sinatra together. There had been many of these. While Sinatra was filming Von Ryan's Express on the lot, Mia used to wander onto his sound stage and study him adoringly while the photographers clicked away. When one of the publicity men at 20th Century-Fox heard of the "kill" order, he asked incredulously, "Are they nuts? Mia Farrow is under contract here. If we release those shots of the doll, it'll make her hotter than a firecracker." "She doesn't need it," he was told. "Peyton Place is making her hot enough."
By
Paul Raven ·
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