Scenes From Parenthood

EVEN WITH THE LIKES OF WOODY Allen and Mia Farrow on the witness stand, Room 341 of the State Supreme Court building in lower Manhattan can seldom be described as "hushed." The din of construction work and the shriek of police sirens outside easily penetrate the courtroom windows. The government-issue wooden chairs pop and creak when their occupants change position, which, given the occasional lulls of legalese, happens regularly.

Thus spectators and reporters had to strain to hear the response last week when Acting Justice Elliott Wilk asked a simple, direct question: Should the world-famous director/actor/writer or his leading lady and companion of 12 years be granted custody of the three children they share?

The witness whose opinion was requested -- Susan Coates, a clinical psychologist -- had been called by Allen's lawyers. Interestingly enough, even she would not choose outright between the contesting parents, saying, "What is critical for the children is that they find a way to have both a mother and a father."

That was a sensible, safe answer, but it did not address the growing conviction that those parents could not simultaneously be Woody and Mia. The picture their own testimony afforded left the sympathies of many onlookers not so much divided as wiped out entirely. So the judge's inquiry provided a welcome reminder that behind the scenes of their public squabble -- a spectacle that has been part psychodrama, part farce -- rests something important and tangible: the futures of three children.

It was easy to forget this elemental fact when Woody and Mia -- once filmdom's most ostentatiously reclusive couple -- took the stand at the custody trial. He wore his trademark rumpled tweed sport coat, prompting observers to wonder, Was it the same one every day, or did he own many jackets that just looked the same? She favored severe blazers and blouses buttoned all the way up. Costumes aside, both tried to give the impression that the other was unfit to be a parent. In large measure, they both succeeded.

Woody's claim to custody of five-year-old Satchel, their biological son, as well as their adopted daughter Dylan, 7, and son Moses, 15, was shadowed by his admitted affair with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, now 22, adopted daughter of Mia and her second husband, composer Andre Previn. While acknowledging at last that "perhaps this was wrong, not wise," Allen still professed some bewilderment at the furor this liaison has caused. "At the very outset," he testified, "it didn't occur to me that this would be anything but a private thing." And the Polaroid photographs he took of a nude Soon-Yi in January of last year? "She suggested that I take some pictures of her without her clothes on. I said, 'Sure.' " The problem, Allen said in mild and sometimes stuttering testimony, occurred when Farrow almost immediately discovered these snapshots on a mantelpiece in his Fifth Avenue apartment. Her fury, he testified, has resulted in "a nightmare none of us have recovered from."