Song Lyric of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on ‘Some Kind of Trouble’ With ‘Luka’)

“If you hear something late at night

Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight

Just don't ask me what it was.”— Suzanne Vega, "Luka," from Solitude Standing (1987)

The singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega might have been born 55 years ago yesterday in Santa Monica, Calif., but she is far more associated with the city where she grew up, went to college, and set one of her most famous songs, “Tom’s Diner”—i.e., New York. Even “Luka” seems more a product of East Coast alienation than the sunny West Coast.

In fact, she saw a child by that name outside her apartment building. Thin, sensitive, he also seemed like he could be a tough kid. Above all, he “seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children,” so she grafted a history onto him to explain why he seemed so set apart: the abuse he suffered at the hands of a parent.

“Luka” works through ambiguity and implication. Start with the child’s name: it’s probably, but not necessarily, a boy’s. He could come from a number of countries.

Nowhere does the boy, the song’s narrator (itself an act of creative daring), come right out and state that he has been hit. But he keeps coming close. The second verse, the one quoted above, observes that “Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight” might be observed; later, he thinks he might be “clumsy” or “crazy,” as if blaming himself for the trouble; and the last verse notes that “they only hit until you cry,” with the “you” the thinnest linguistic veneer that it could be someone else, except himself, being hit.

Earlier in the song, “you” is used more conventionally, yet subversively. “I live on the second floor,” Luka says, “I live upstairs from you.” This is more than a child meeting an adult in the song; “you” is now the listener who might find an example of child abuse right where he or she lives. "You" is implicated now in what is told: What are "you" going to do about the suspected violence?

In a transcript for the show “The Infinite Mind,” Vega related how, while performing the song at an Albany, NY appearance on behalf of the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, she was startled by the sight of a crying woman in the audience. It wasn’t until after the show that she could identify the woman: Hedda Nussbaum, the abused partner of Joel Steinberg—the man who had killed their adopted daughter, Lisa Steinberg, in one of the most heinous instances of domestic violence of the last few decades.

(For more about Vega--specifically, her song "Caramel"--please see this prior post of mine.)

Lawyers, Guns and Woody: A Family and Film Post-Mortem

Nancy (played by Sheila Sullivan): “My lawyer will call your lawyer.”

Allan Felix (played by Woody Allen): “I don't have a lawyer. Have him call my doctor.”—Woody Allen, Play It Again, Sam (1969)

Earlier this week marked the 45^th anniversary of the premiere of Play It Again, Sam, which represented Woody Allen’s only appearance as an actor on a Broadway stage. I thought that the lines in the comedy that established the template of his character on film in the early 1970s—inept, timid, helpless with women, and all the more endearing for all of that—would appear ironic in light of his more recent rocky love life. But I never thought that a line on the law might become newly relevant. As it happens, neither a lawyer nor a doctor can cure what ails him now.

Warren Zevon fans know the line that follows the reprise of his 1970s gonzo song, “Lawyers, Guns and Money”:  “The shit has hit the fan.” For Allen, no other line captures the true nature of his wrangling with former lover Mia Farrow. 

In the early 1990s, a one-word tabloid headline—inevitably, “BANANAS”—was perfectly adequate in summarizing how Allen was discovered to have taken naked photos of Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn; how Allen, who had never married Farrow, went on to wed Soon-Yi; and how, amid the resulting suit and countersuit over custody of children Dylan and Satchel (later Ronan), child-molestation accusations were hurled against the filmmaker.

The latest upheaval, however, is of an entirely different magnitude. Just a few months before a musical adaptation of his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway appears on the Great White Way, only three weeks after a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes presented by frequent co-star Diane Keaton, Allen now faced something different: a party not heard from two decades ago. Adopted daughter Dylan Farrow alleged, in an open letter to The New York Times (published by family friend and that paper’s columnist, Nicholas Kristof), the nature of the abuse suffered at his hands when she was seven years old.

That wasn’t the only aspect of the situation that was new. This time, the child, now grown, put on the spot those who had gone on to work with Allen more recently. It made many people mighty uncomfortable.

Cate Blanchette, by all accounts a lovely person, looked distinctly pained when asked about being called out on her working relationship with Allen, and, as you might expect, spoke of the family’s “long and painful situation.”

Alec Baldwin, also true to form, was more vitriolic, in a tweet to a fan pressing him for a response: “What the f@% is wrong w u that u think we all need to b commenting on this family’s personal struggle? You are mistaken if you think there is a place for me, or any outsider, in this family’s issue.  USA is supposed to be THE place where you get a fair trial. Can a fair trial be conducted w everyone’s tired opinions on the internet? Americans have fallen victim to a sanctimony about things they know little about. You don’t ‘defend’ either party. You defend due process.”

Despite the difference in tone, the Blue Jasmine co-stars shared a subtext: Leave me alone, okay? This is a family matter. This is way too complicated for me, an actor, to make judgments.  As if reading their minds, an artful flack at Sony Pictures Classics, the distributor of Allen’s recent well-received films Blue Jasmine and Midnight in Paris, noted in a press release: “This is a very complicated situation and a tragedy for everyone involved.”

“Complicated.” Hmmm…for all their undoubted intelligence, these individuals, like so many of their other brothers and sisters in the profession, simply don’t understand that the word “complicated” does not apply to Allen’s situation. Nor do a couple of other “C” words. Really, there is only one that, indisputably, works.

But let’s consider first why “complicated” doesn’t apply. Complicated is onetime Los Angeles Dodger great Steve Garvey getting two women pregnant while marrying a third. (It's also irresponsibly stupid, but that's another matter.) In the case of many people who are getting divorced, complicated might involve two people, already with families, engaging in an extramarital affair. In terms that the Woodman might understand, taking up with a sister-in-law—as Michael Caine’s character did, in Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters—is very complicated. (I bet he would agree that the same description might apply to Mia Farrow’s close relationship with ex Frank Sinatra, which—judging from her recent Vanity Fair admission that son Ronan might “possibly” have been the singer’s offspring—crossed the line into intimacy, nearly two decades after their divorce.)   

Crass doesn’t even describe the actor-hyphenate’s relationship with the Farrows. That adjective best applies to a one-liner in his nightclub days about Harlene Rosen, whom he had divorced: “My first wife lives on the Upper West Side and I read in the paper the other day that she was violated on her way home—knowing my first wife, it was not a moving violation.”

Even the word criminal, used by both Allen’s allies and critics, isn’t relevant—at least, not now. Even if Allen did molest Dylan Farrow two decades ago, the statute of limitations has expired, so he currently faces no criminal liability from that act or any others of a similar nature occurring before it.

No, I’m afraid that the appropriate word for Allen’s predicament--his conduct, really--is creepy. I’m not even talking here strictly about the age difference between Ali, 57 years old at the time, and Soon-Yi (somewhere between 19 and 21), when their relationship was disclosed. (Among movie moguls and captains of industry, a much younger woman attached to an older woman is known as a “trophy wife.”) 

No, Allen had an affair with, then married, the adopted daughter of his longtime lover and mother of two other children he had adopted with Farrow. Even Los Angeles Times writer Robin Abcarian, who several weeks ago cautioned against a rush to public judgment about the case, also exactly summarized what Allen had done in this instance: “That is moral, if not legal, incest.”

(Or, as Phil Hartman’s Frank Sinatra told Dana Carvey’s Woody Allen, in a great Saturday Night Live skit about the affair at the time:  "Listen here, Wood-man: I know how it feels to want to trade up, but you gotta keep your hands off the kinder!")

Allen, famously in psychoanalysis for 30 years, stopped going after his marriage to Soon-Yi. Evidently, all that time on the couch never made him aware that sleeping with (and wedding) the adopted daughter of your lover is, as the judge deciding the custody battle between Allen and Farrow wrote, “grossly inappropriate.”

All Allen seems to have learned is a statement he issued when news of the affair broke: “The heart wants what it wants.” It is, of course (a phrase used by the filmmaker, in his open letter to the New York Times last week denying Dylan Farrow’s accusations), not his heart that was primarily responsible for the unresisted impulse to sleep with a woman who, by age and relationship, could not have been less appropriate for him.

In Allen’s 1988 Bergmanesque drama, Another Woman, the cardiologist Ken responds to a wife’s accusations of adultery on two separate occasions using the exact same, almost practiced speech: “I realize that you’ve been hurt, and if I’ve done anything wrong I’m sorry. I accept your condemnation.”

Screenwriter Allen condemns Ken as self-involved and heartless. In fact, whatever the truth about Allen and Dylan, his own role in tearing apart the Farrow family is not less so. Count the casualties: Soon-Yi, cut off from her family; brother Moses, who has taken Woody's side in the fracas; Ronan, no longer speaking to the man he regards (correctly) as his father and brother-in-law; and Dylan, either a pawn in a lover's quarrel (Allen's version) or a victim of horrible abuse (Dylan's and Mia's). In fact, Allen doesn’t accept any responsibility for the turmoil and hurt his lack of impulse control has caused over two decades. 

Two years ago, asked during a round of interviews for Midnight in Paris about his past notoriety, he responded, “What was the scandal? I fell in love with this girl, married her. We have been married for almost 15 years now. There was no scandal, but people refer to it all the time as a scandal and I kind of like that in a way because when I go I would like to say I had one real juicy scandal in my life."

In a way, it is understandable that so many people have continued to work with Allen over the past two decades. They can say, truthfully, that he was never charged with molesting Dylan (though the district attorney in the case has stated that this was due at the time to the massive difficulties involved with having the child testify). It is also the case that one would never work on a film or play again if one found objectionable any of the following as co-workers: not just child molesters, but also wife- and husband-stealers, raging drunks, drug peddlers, bodyguards and private investigators who act like organized-crime associates, financial chiselers, producers whose self-importance exceeds their duties, and bullying directors, any one of whom is likely to be associated with a production of any size. In fact, the only thing that might make people treat you like a disease carrier in Hollywood is if you make movies that lose a ton of money--a fate that Allen has avoided.

But Dylan Farrow, in effect, has not only called out all those who have worked with Allen, but all those (including myself) who have continued to watch his films. We may have been troubled, even shocked, at the time, but nothing was ever proven, all the facts in the case seemed to fade away, and, like a Presidential scandal of that decade, many regarded this as a "personal" matter from which everyone would be better off if all would just "move on." 

Now the allegations have been given greater force. Some fans who continued to patronize his films might snub his work completely from now on. Others will be more reluctant to part with their cash on such a man.

Possibly two of the darkest works in Allen's considerable filmography, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, involve men who seemingly get away with their offenses--not just in the eyes of the law, but even from a god whose existence they cannot recognize. They are left, in the end, with a private emptiness. Perhaps, despite the late-life acclaim and public denials of anything wrong, Allen feels the same moral vacuum. 

You wish, at the final credits, that it could all be resolved with "I've Heard That Song Before," the bouncy entry from the Great American Songbook that he used in Hannah and Her Sisters. But I'm afraid that, for the duration, we'll be left with the storm und drang of Zevon, in the cacophony of tweets, journalists, critics, publicists, and lawyers. 

This Day in Pop Music History (Jackson Settles Sex-Abuse Suit for $15 Million)

January 25, 1994—Facing screaming tabloid headlines, beset by growing physical and mental instability, Michael Jackson signed a multimillion-dollar agreement to settle a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of a 13-year-old boy who alleged he had been molested at the singer’s Neverland estate two years before. The settlement was a mixed blessing, however: while the 31-page agreement went a long way toward assuring that no criminal indictment would be filed based on any testimony in the civil case and it explicitly stated that Jackson denied any wrongdoing, it raised the question of why, if the charges were untrue, he had not fought harder to save his reputation.

At very least, the allegations made millions of fans question the judgment of the 35-year-old entertainer. These questions would only multiply in the 15 remaining years of his life, as the self-styled “King of Pop” endured further legal troubles and lived out a private life that could only be regarded as bizarre.

For most of his early career, the public had a different view of the star: as the high-voiced child star of Motown’s Jackson 5 who had grown up to become the high-voiced solo act who had created the top-selling album of all time, Thriller and, with the release of “We Are the World,” had earned an equally exalted perch as a philanthropist and advocate on behalf of hunger relief in Africa.

More recently, however, Jackson had told Oprah Winfrey in a televised interview, after years of speculation about his changing appearance, that he suffered from a skin condition and that he had been emotionally abused by his father as a child.

The more recent allegations raised the specter of a troubled star to an entirely different level. Beginning in May 1992, when Jackson met the plaintiff’s stepfather at the car rental business where he worked, the boy had become a regular visitor at the 2,700-acre Neverland Ranch. What had started out as playing video games, riding in golf carts and taking family vacations with the singer had evolved into Jackson inviting him to sharing his bed and open-mouth kissing, fondling and oral sex, according to the allegations. A civil suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in September 1993, asked for unspecified damages for sexual battery, seduction, willful misconduct, intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud and negligence against Jackson.

The Jackson camp, alarmed by the legal threat, engaged the services of Johnnie Cochran, who, though not yet famous for representing O.J. Simpson, had already become the go-to guy for stars in jeopardy, having gotten off football legend Jim Brown on a rape charge and former Different Strokes actor Todd Bridges on an attempted murder rap. Yet with Jackson, Cochran and chief assistant Carl Douglas decided not to take the case to trial.

Discussing the case after Jackson’s death (seen here in this post from the Web site “Vindicate MJ”), Douglas, without specifically addressing the reasons for the settlement, noted key events surrounding the singer in the weeks preceding the deal: cancellation of his “Dangerous” tour for health reasons, growing prescription-drug addiction, and Jackson’s fear that returning to the United States would result in his arrest, which according to Douglas, "would have been the death knell to Michael Jackson and his entire world."

Perhaps Cochran and Douglas concluded that the accuser would have a lower threshold of evidence in a civil rather than criminal case, and that an agreement would, in fact, also wipe out the chance of criminal charges emerging at all. They settled on setting up a $15 million trust fund for the accuser with an additional $1.5 million to each of his parents and $5 million for the plaintiff’s attorney, according to a copy of the pact obtained by Court TV’s Diane Dimond.

From the purely legal perspective, the strategy worked: The accuser and his parents not only did not testify in this case but refused to do so 10 years later when Jackson faced a harrowing criminal trial on similar charges with another boy, a cancer victim. But, from a public-relations viewpoint, it was a catastrophe. Or, rather, part of a PR mega-catastrophe. In a piece written for The Huffington Post after the singer’s death, entertainment publicist Kimberly Krautter noted that, whenever colleagues gathered together and challenged each other on how they would handle various PR disasters, “By far the most interesting and stimulating conversations have always been around Michael Jackson.”

The catalogue of “high ick-factor cringe moments of the past 25 years” that Ms. Krautter enumerated is as notable for its length as for what it leaves out: “The mysteriously blanching visage. The nose. Bubbles the Chimp. The hyperbaric chamber. The onstage (and obviously staged) full French kiss with Lisa Marie Presley. The burka-draped Prince and Paris. The dangling of baby Blanket from the balcony. And the ultimate train wreck that was the Martin Bashir interview.”

Only the last item—in which the singer spoke of sharing his bed with young visitors while denying any sexual component to it (“We go to sleep with the fireplace on; I give them hot milk, you know, we have cookies, it's very charming, it's very sweet, it's what the whole world should do")—hints at the enormous legal peril he faced—and, at minimum, his lack of recognition of the boundaries that adults must, by necessity, maintain with children.

At this juncture, it is difficult, if not impossible, to say what transpired between Jackson and these two cases in which formal charges were dropped—or, indeed, of other allegations that have emerged since his death of up to 24 boys molested. (One major objection might be made to this latter claim: If there were so many victims, why was only $35 million needed to silence all of them?) On the one hand, the singer, like so many in the entertainment field, made an inviting target for either crazies, those hoping for a huge financial score, or both—and the white-hot nature of celebrity makes it practically a law that a sensation-seeking news media that loves to take down celebrities they recently elevate also makes it difficult for those figures to find impartial judges of their case.

At the same time, the money and power gained by celebrities enable them to buy off—or strike back against—those who attempt to accuse them of crimes. In the old days, stars could rely on famous fixers such as Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling of MGM to cover up crisis pregnancies, vehicular homicides, even manslaughter. In the day of the entertainer as free agent, that responsibility has devolved upon, for instance, private detectives such as self-described “Sin Eater” Anthony Pellicano, hired by the likes of Kevin Costner, Farrar Fawcett, Stevie Wonder, Rosanne and James Woods (and Bill Clinton) to make problems go away. 

Pellicano’s career came to a crashing end following his 2008 conviction on 78 counts of wiretapping,  racketeering and wire fraud. As it happened, he worked for a while on the Jackson case, meeting privately for an hour with the accuser—and, some have claimed, frightening staffers at Jackson’s household about going to the police.  

Nearly 20 years later, his jailhouse statement about the entertainer was cryptic but intriguing. He had only worked briefly for Jackson, he said, because he had “found out some truths. He (Jackson) did something far worse to young boys than molest them.”

A February 1994 PBS Frontline documentary about the Jackson media feeding frenzy was entitled, aptly enough, “Tabloid Truth.” Twenty years removed from the initial event, that case, like all the other allegations against the late entertainer, continues to reside in that shadowy realm. Yet the messy circumstances surrounding exposure of the allegations do not argue totally against the claims’ dismissal. If the sex-abuse cases that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church teach anything, it is that the word of revered persons or institutions cannot be accepted strictly on faith—even if the individual happens to be, as Hampton Stevens wrote in an arresting (if somewhat hyperbolic) Atlantic article, the “first great televisual entertainer.”