BEWARE OF YOUNG GIRLS

Beware of young girls
Who come to the door
Wistful and pale of twenty and four
Delivering daisies with delicate hands

Beware of young girls
Too often they crave to cry
At a wedding and dance on a grave

If you didn't know the subtext behind Dory Previn's 'Beware Of Young Girls' you might be forgiven for finding it to be a relatively forgettable song on first listen - one that holds little musical interest as it seems almost deliberately humdrum by design, akin to listening to a woman's private mumble to herself whilst she twists the ends of her hair around her finger.

But perhaps that was the point: it reflects the mundane atmosphere of loneliness after losing someone you love and the casual, sneaky way a husband is stolen from a wife by a young woman who seemingly had a supernatural gift to reduce geniuses to simps in the blink of her flashing eyes.

Of course, it takes two to tango and Andre Previn clearly decided to dance away and change partners from Dory his singer/songwriter wife who he'd been married to for eleven years from 1959 to 1970.

Previn, at the age of 40, had begun an affair with 23 year old Mia Farrow who had recently divorced Frank Sinatra. As a consequence of this marital betrayal, Dory suffered from increasing fragile mental health resulting in time spent in a psychiatric unit where she underwent electroconvulsive therapy.

They say time is the great healer, but so is art and in this deceptively bitter song, Dory brilliantly pitches the tone of the wry sentiment expressed in the lyric in such a subtle and perfect way. It sounds just as if it was written in that same flower power, daisy chain wearing way that one imagines Mia Farrow would have floated into their lives and left, blowing on Dory's marriage like the scattering of dandelion spores.

Strangely, as brilliantly detailed in the episode 'Mia and Dory' from Karina Longworth's excellent 'You Must Remember This' podcast series, Dory Previn's sinister song 'Daddy In The Attic' was later referenced by Woody Allen as an example of Farrow's making up her allegations against him as he recalled Dory warning him during his custody battle that he must 'beware' of the actress.

“She (Dory) alerted me to a song she’d written, the lyric of which referred to some encounter that went on between a little girl and her father in the attic,” Allen later wrote. “She told me Mia would sing it, and she was certain that’s what gave Mia the idea to locate a fake molestation accusation she would make in the attic.”

Tenuous though this may sound as a line of defence, it's nevertheless true that Dory Previn's work often sat uncomfortably on that blurred line between what was real and what was imagined.

In the case of 'Beware Of Young Girls', however, there can be no doubt.

Her loss was painfully true.