Michael Heatley - The Girl in the Song: The Real Stories Behind 50 Rock Classics

Dory Previn

D ory Previn gained moderate fame in the early 1970s as a painfully honest singer-songwriter, part of the new wave of introspective female performers that included Janis Ian. In 1975, when twenty-four-year-old Janis was winning a Grammy for her song At Seventeen, Dory was turning fifty, a survivor of two serious nervous breakdowns induced by the men in her life.

The first, in 1965, was her delayed reaction to a traumatic childhood with her mentally unstable father. He had been gassed in World War I and suffered deep, violent periods of depression. Dorothy Langan (as Dory was born) had escaped into acting and singing and, in the 1950s, formed a personal and professional partnership with the composer Andr Previn, whom she met while working for MGM as a lyric writer. They wrote music for Hollywood and received two Oscar nominations for Best Original Song (one of them sung by Judy Garland). They were married in 1959.

Their last collaboration was on five songs for the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls. Andr began to accept work with orchestras around the world, but Dorys fear of flying prevented her from accompanying her husband. It was at the start of his tenure as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1968 that Andr began an affair with Mia Farrow, ex-wife of Frank Sinatra. Mia was twenty-four, nineteen years younger than Dory and fifteen years younger than her husband. Dorys discovery in early 1969 that Mia was pregnant ended her marriage to Andr and precipitated her second, more serious breakdown. She was institutionalized for a second time and received electroconvulsive therapy for her condition.

Beware of young girls who come to the door

Wistful and pale, of twenty and four

Delivering daisies with delicate hands

As she emerged from her trauma and returned to work, Dory found that her songwriting was contributing to her therapy and becoming more introspective. An early product of this soul-searching was 1970s Beware of Young Girls. The musical arrangement and lyrics have a lightness of touch through which her bitter sense of betrayal pours.

Andr and Mia married in due course, raising a family of six natural and adopted children and remaining on good terms after they divorced in 1979. In 1980 Farrow began dating film director Woody Allen, a mere nine years her senior. That relationship fell apart very publicly in 1992 when Farrow discovered Allens affair with Soon-Yi Previn, one of the children adopted by Mia and Andr, and thirty-five years Allens junior.

In 1997, Woody and Soon-Yi married. Mia refused to see Soon-Yi again, and that year Farrow published an autobiography in which she belatedly apologized to Dory. Dory collaborated with Andr again in 1997, for the first time since 1967, on a seventeen-minute piece for orchestra and soprano, entitled The Magic Number.

She seems at last to be at peace with herself: The world has delved into my lifeit knows all my secrets. Thats what Im here for. As for being at peace with Mia, she was asked in 2008 if she knew whether her betrayer had ever heard Beware of Young Girls. With her ego? Of course she did. Shes probably got the record framed in the bathroom!

Mia Farrow, looking suitably wistful and pale, in 1964.

DORY PREVIN found commercial music success after spending years writing songs for motion pictures. It was after this she used her wit and sense of irony to release songs to which many women could relate. Beware of Young Girls was released on Previns second LP, On My Way to Where, her first effort having been released under her maiden name of Langan, and came out some twelve years earlier. She went on to release no less than six more LPs before 1976. The often controversial nature of her material prevented Dory Previn from reaching the heights of commercial acceptance that many of her contemporaries achieved, but she did not perform for the recognition, rather the catharsis.