Activist, lawyer and now TV news host, Ronan Farrow is a force to be reckoned with. But what really caught people's attention was his quip following his mother Mia Farrow's revelation that his father might not be Woody Allen but Frank Sinatra. Jesse Lichtenstein meets him in New York
Ronan Farrow had a cold. "Probably from a source," he joked. It wasn't clear who gave it to him — the big pop star in LA or the Minnesotans fighting against terrorist recruitment in their community. Farrow had been out of town reporting pieces on both, and his voice was almost shot.
It was a Monday in December, and as part of the preparations to host his own daily news show on American cable channel MSNBC in January, Farrow was scheduled to do a quick "hit" on one of the network's daytime shows: a few obligatory minutes riffing on young people's attitudes towards President Obama's healthcare plan, a few more on income inequalities. He had a conference call, then make-up, then he would be on camera, then he was leaving directly for eight days of reporting in Kenya.
On set in Studio 3A you could barely hear his voice across the room, but the microphones picked it up, and on camera he was scratchy but cogent. Solutions for income inequality "are incredibly difficult to stomach," he said. It means "increasing the minimum wage, which in turn may mean more expensive goods for Americans; it means reducing executive compensation". Each time the show cut away, he soothed his throat with tea.
Last summer, when he got the call from MSNBC, Farrow was living in a charmingly musty room at Magdalen College, Oxford. He had left a job at the State Department for a Rhodes Scholarship, studying politics and international relations. Farrow assumed MSNBC wanted him to make appearances as a talking head on their shows. He had written articles decrying what he saw as the American government's obsession with secrecy and the partisan tenor of the Congressional hearings on Benghazi, and had been invited to talk about them on television. But Phil Griffin, the president of the network, had other ideas. He'd seen clips of Farrow giving interviews and speeches and was impressed. "I started following him on Twitter," he told me recently, "and loved the way he talked about things." When Farrow was in New York, the two sat down for a chat. "Within 20 minutes I wanted to hire him," Griffin says. "He's got it."
Farrow, 26, is in many ways an obvious choice to step in front of a camera. The only biological child of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, he has his mother's looks and an impressive lineage. His grandmother starred as Jane across from Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan; his grandfather was a director and an Oscar-winning screenwriter. John Lennon wrote "Dear Prudence" about his aunt. But celebrity is something he has assiduously avoided for much of his life. His trajectory has been unfailingly, precociously serious: college at 11; Yale Law School at 18; liaison to NGOs for American diplomat Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and more recently special adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
His public persona is friendly but guarded; he prefers not to address rumours about whom he's dating. So working as a TV personality seems a strange choice; it's likely to foreground all the things he has been so keen to leave in the background – his looks, his family, his private life. "Not everything that's said is going to be kind," he says, "but over time, with the kind of show that we want to build and the emphasis on telling real stories, I think people will hate or love me based on the issues, not based on who I am."
That doesn't mean the show won't be named after him. MSNBC has yet to give it a title, but on Twitter, the leading candidates are Times New Ronan, Ronan the Barbarian and The Ronan Empire. "I don't know about the last one," Farrow says.
In a darkened editing room, Farrow, in well-worn shoes and jeans, sat one leg crossed over the other, a pen and notebook in hand. Together with Brian Drew, an editor, and Anthony Terrell, a producer, he watched a red-scarfed version of himself on four monitors. On screen, Farrow strolled through the Little Mogadishu neighbourhood of Minneapolis with a man whose nephew was recruited by the Somali-based terrorist organisation Al-Shabaab, the Al-Qaida-affiliated group responsible for the Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi in September. (The nephew was later killed in Somalia.)
"I liked the nexus of international and domestic stuff," Farrow said, turning to Drew and Terrell. "It's important to us going into this show that it's not NGO-TV, it's not just the foreign stuff that was my bread and butter before."
Izzy Povich, MSNBC's vice president of talent and development, ducked into the room.
"I got some really emotional interview testimony," Farrow told her. "We've got a lot of guerrilla stuff – from this last story and LA, too. We've got hand-held stuff that I did."
The editor ran through "walk-and-talk" footage and shots of women on the street in traditional Somali garb. Then the monitors showed a former member of an FBI anti-terrorism task force. "Do they have an aspiration to conduct violent terrorist attacks against innocents in the United States?" he asked. "I think their rhetoric tells us: absolutely."
"Boom," Terrell said.
"I wanted to have a sort of gritty reporting style to it," Farrow said, "so we've got a lot of Handycam stuff."
Griffin has said that he hopes the show will feel rough and spontaneous, not polished and packaged. On screen we caught glimpses of a second cameraman in the frame, of the lights that illuminated a sit-down interview.
"We like showing the set-up as much as possible, giving it in the raw," Farrow said.
When I first met Farrow two years ago in Amman, Jordan, he was in full diplomat mode. He was then serving under Clinton, leading a new office of Global Youth Initiatives. He had recently returned from meeting young people in Nepal and would soon be off to Latvia – but the Middle East and North Africa had a special urgency. It was roughly a year after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and, over the course of nine days, Farrow visited Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Tunisia and Algeria. I tagged along for several legs.
Farrow spent much of his time in meetings with young entrepreneurs, university students and youth-oriented civic groups. In Algeria he convoked a "youth council" — one of about 70 now affiliated with US embassies around the world – made up of young Algerian leaders invited to advise the US ambassador. "It's a change of culture," Farrow said at the time, "the idea of really treating young people as serious diplomatic partners."
Throughout our travels in the Middle East, Farrow remained rigorously, even wearyingly, on message. He insisted that his appointment was simply a kind of "meta-narrative" for the State Department's engagement with the young people he was meeting. There was no need to focus on his precocity, his parents – or the gossip.
For a brief time in the early 1990s, Farrow's family was the most famous, or infamous, in America. Its dissolution – the bitter separation and allegations, the affair between his father, Woody Allen, and his adopted sister, Soon-Yi (Previn) – seemed ripped from the pages of Sophocles. Twenty years later, nearly every mention of him makes allusion to the scandal. Whenever anyone asks Farrow about his family, he braces himself for what he thinks is coming next.
But in the Middle East, most of the teens and 20-somethings he encountered had never heard of Hannah and Her Sisters or Husbands and Wives. So when a young girl in Madaba, Jordan, asked him about his family, instead of bristling, he softened.
"I grew up in a family that had young people adopted from all over the world," Farrow said.
Another girl asked what his siblings did. "I have a brother who's a schoolteacher, a sister who's a graphic artist, a brother who is a lawyer," Farrow said. "I have a brother who's a carpenter."
"Is it quite a large number?" someone asked.
"I was one of 14," Farrow said
Forty sets of eyes widened. More than a few gasps. All smiles.
"I grew up in a family where you could never be the centre of attention," Farrow told me, one evening in Algiers. It was the end of the trip, and we were walking across a vast plaza beside the towering monument to the martyrs of the revolution. "I was pretty insulated from the entire Hollywood thing," he said of his childhood in a sprawling Connecticut farmhouse. "We were every minority in the town."
For volume and variety, it's hard to match the Farrow household – it was a United Nations General Assembly in the dining room, but the outside world was sometimes less welcoming. Farrow remembers that his "black siblings got the N-word thrown at them all the time". His sister, Quincy, would invite the offenders home, Farrow said, and tell them: "This is where we're going to be friends. This is what it is to be friends of different colours." "She was a little peacemaker," he says. "My brother Isaiah took it much more to heart."
Many of Farrow's adopted siblings arrived from harrowing situations in Vietnam, in Calcutta and even in the USA, and many had serious health challenges. One brother was severely malnourished and suffering from polio, a disease Farrow's mother also battled against as a child. He was abandoned outside an orphanage in Calcutta after being chained to a post and fed scraps for years. Depending on which side of his body you scanned, Ronan recalls, his brother appeared to be either eight or 12. The family decided to split the difference and make him 10, the same age as Farrow at the time.
Farrow entered college a year later – "I was a huge nerd, and I didn't want to be bored" – but there was never any pressure on him to stand out. "My mom always supported me," he says, "but she definitely played the role of, like: 'Why? Why? Just stay in grade school! Be normal. Have a normal life.' "
Normal is relative. By the time he was 10, Farrow had travelled with his mother to South Africa, where he had private conversations with Nelson Mandela about the power of non-violent protest. Between college and enrolling in law school, he served as a Unicef spokesman for youth, making multiple trips to conflict zones in Africa. On a trip to a refugee camp in the Sudan, he met a young rebel his own age, a refugee from Darfur whose family had been slaughtered. It's an archetypal story, one that Farrow has told so many times that the memory of it and its assigned meaning seem inseparable. A boy, named Yahia, holds his gun to the sky and shouts: "This is how I can have my voice heard. How can you judge me for that?" From his trips to Sudan and research on Chinese investments there, Farrow wrote an opinion piece with his mother in the Wall Street Journal that called the 2008 Beijing Games the "genocide Olympics".
After Unicef, Farrow led a research project for the federal Centres for Disease Control on post-traumatic stress disorder in the Kibera slum of Nairobi following the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008. He returned frequently to Africa as special assistant to the chief counsel on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. While in Sudan, Farrow contracted a bone infection that went untreated for too long. Through multiple operations, he found himself in and out of wheelchairs and for years required crutches and braces. "It sort of gave my character some wrinkles and complexities," he said, "maybe neuroses, too, but it made me have a fundamental sense of empathy when I go into situations where people are struggling with much worse problems."
It was an autumn day on the Upper East Side, and Ronan Farrow didn't yet have a cold, but he was working on it. He arrived for lunch completely soaked, having been caught in a downpour without an umbrella. We ordered our meals, talked books, movies, music (in Washington, he would occasionally busk on the sidewalk to try out the songs he has been recording for an album). At one point he pulled off a striking Katharine Hepburn impersonation. The conversation turned to his book, which he had just sold to Penguin. It explores the notion, shared with Holbrooke, his mentor, that America's habit of funding and arming "bad guys around the world" has had a powerfully negative effect on a new generation of leaders.
"It's the US creating Al-Shabaab, and the mall shooting in Kenya happening over and over," he said, then added, apologetically, "I sold it in as unwonky a way as I could."
Just after news of his book deal broke, on the very day that Farrow and MSNBC were set to announce their new TV show, a bit of gossip appeared. In an article in Vanity Fair, his mother let slip, somewhat coyly, that Farrow's father might not be Woody Allen, but Frank Sinatra, her first husband. (As she told Vanity Fair: "We never really split up.") "There was a very serious conversation at MSNBC about, 'Oh, crap, is this going distract from the story?'" Farrow said. "Spoiler: Yes!"
He made a pitch-perfect quip on Twitter – "Listen, we're all possibly Frank Sinatra's son" – and waited a few weeks for chatter of his parentage to run its course on the internet.
"Look, I get it, it's hilarious, it's wild," he said at lunch. "There are salacious aspects of the story I'm able to sit back and appreciate with everybody else. And then it's: 'OK, how do we move to the substance and redirect this conversation so we're actually talking about stuff that's useful?'"
Of course, no publicity is truly bad for a TV host trying to break into the ratings. Farrow knows curiosity about who he is can draw people to the issues he cares about. "In any way that I'm a source of interest or something that's relatable, that's a cool thing," he said. But he would still like to get out of the way as quickly as possible. "When we do a story," he said, "I want to make sure you walk away with the freshman-college knowledge, the cocktail-party take on it, something that when you go to recount it to your friends, you know the basics and also you know what the future is, and, if you happen to care about the issue, what you can do with that."
His models are a mix of old-school and new, a marriage of Bill Moyers and Twitter. Griffin, the president of MSNBC, told me that it was Farrow's presence on Twitter that he wanted him to emulate. "I look at his tweets and I say: 'The way you write those little 140 characters, they're great. That sensibility has got to be in everything you do.'" He was probably not thinking of the tweet that Ronan wrote the day after Thanksgiving: "The only thing better than Black Friday with your sister is Friday with your black sister." Some of his 150,000 followers must have wondered what this blond white guy was thinking. This drier side of his humour might fare poorly under daily media scrutiny; or it might be what attracts an audience.
Farrow said he felt liberated by no longer being a government spokesman: "I can say whatever I want. I will be nothing but unfiltered with my audience." While unfiltered Farrow has so far played it safe – tweeting jokes such as "Breaking: Iran to stop enriching uranium as soon as we stop enriching Kardashians" – an eye for absurdity may help leaven the measured, on-the-ground accounts from Kenya. "There's an element of gallows humour to any accurate surveying of the state of affairs in this country and around the world," he said. "I think capturing that is an honest representation of the news.
"The thing I'm cautious about," he added, as lunch wound down, "is talking about myself. That's a trap people fall into… I'm happy to throw down a few drinks and talk about this stuff, but the greatest security is being in a space where you're actually talking about issues you care about, not about yourself. Then you can just let totally loose."
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