New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s

Chapter 5. Mia Farrow: Categorically Intangible

91 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 5 Mia Farrow Categorically Intangible LESLIE H. ABRAMSON Amid the intoxication of metamorphosis, the magnetizing struggles of cultural transformation that constituted the 1960s, Mia Farrow emerged as an icon of mutability, a resonant emblem of the intangible. Transliterated into the mass-circulated domains of celebrity profiles, gossip columns, interviews, fashion shoots, and reviews, her image was, in large part, that of a figure of free-spirited changeability, a captivating cipher. Farrow’s attraction activated in Hollywood discourse the infatuation with permutation and indeterminancy as well as a converse urge toward circumscription , engaging the fascination and problematics of definition. In essence, Farrow’s celebrity conjugated the epistemology of stardom with the dynamism of the modern decade. Consistently characterized as ethereal, indefinable, and otherworldly, a considerable measure of Farrow’s allure was located in her status as a personality graspable only in the abstract, the embodiment of the transitional , indefinite, and unbound. The remarkable nature of such mesmeric typecasting was that Farrow’s elusiveness, her celebrated intangibility, was a shared illusion, a fantasy in which the performer, press, and public manifestly conspired. This exemplar of modernity was, ironically, a figure whose materialization as a star and continued notoriety was entirely indebted to her status as an individual firmly bound to the industry and cultural milieu of the Hollywood Establishment by genealogical cords as well as through the professional and personal attachments she formed in the course of the decade. In a historical moment during which rebellion against the System defined youth culture, Farrow simultaneously represented compelling individualism and the institution of American cinema. In the conjunction between her highly publicized offscreen life and onscreen performances, Farrow became a marker of the decade’s tensions, a nexus of the competing rhetoric of classical stardom, Establishment values, and liberation discourses. Emerging as a celebrity in 1964, when, at age nineteen, she starred as a virginal, illegitimate teenager in “Peyton Place,” a hugely controversial new television soap opera depicting small town licentiousness, Farrow was best known for her strong associations with Hollywood studio culture and moral conservatism as the Catholic school–educated daughter of 1930s movie star Maureen O’Sullivan and film director John Farrow. By the end of the decade, when her fifth feature film was released, Farrow had become a contract actress, wife and divorcée of middle-aged singer and veteran film star Frank Sinatra, celebrated nonconformist , established magazine cover image, modern fashion icon, devotee of Transcendental Meditation, temporary ashram resident, and paramour of conductor and film composer Andre Previn, by whom the unwed Farrow was pregnant in 1969. Farrow’s sphere of intimates and acquaintances, with whom her associations were followed by the media with considerably more interest than her screen work, included 1940s and 1950s studio stars, aged surrealist painter Salvador Dali, the Maharishi Yogi, and such contemporary performers as the Beatles. Taken together with her handful of film roles exploring untethered and delimited femininity, including the pregnant housewife victimized by devil worshippers in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), her sole box office hit, Farrow’s almost universally agreed-upon charming image attracted intensely debated issues of the Generation Gap, the sexual revolution, gender roles, experimental spirituality, and shifting moral codes. At the same time, Farrow was a critical figure of suture, linking the Establishment and youth culture, the studio system and New American Cinema, domestic and foreign aesthetics, classical art and modern media, 92 LESLIE H. ABRAMSON matrimony and liberated womanhood, and traditional, folk, and contemporary spiritualism. In the process, Farrow reinvigorated public fascination with celebrity in a fashion that both hearkened back to studio culture’s longed-for Golden Age and celebrated the new. During a decade of hemorrhaging box office returns, when no less than the industry of American cinema itself seemed to be at stake, the immense stardom of Mia Farrow constituted one of the few affirmative ways of resolving the question, “Can Hollywood survive the 1960s?” ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ Cover Girl Though her image was mass distributed on no fewer than sixty magazine covers in the course of the 1960s, issues of apprehension were foremost in media discourse dedicated to the representation of Mia Farrow as a star.1 A figure whose inhabitance of the celebrity sphere not only predated but almost consistently overshadowed her display of talent as a screen performer, one of a contemporary breed of star defined by historian Daniel Boorstin in 1961 as...