"I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest."

Said Frank Sinatra. I found that quote because I was Googling to try to find out how intelligent Frank Sinatra was, a propos of yesterday's PR from the Farrow family that it's possible that Ronan Farrow came into existence because Mia Farrow continued — during her long relationship with Woody Allen — to have sex with the love of her life, her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

Ronan Farrow seems to be a young man of very high intelligence (since he started attending Yale Law School at age 15), so one naturally wonders about the relative intelligence of the 2 possible fathers.

What's Woody Allen's IQ? He once said "I've got a 150, 160 IQ," but that was as a character in a movie. "To Rome With Love." One might only guess that it's actually Woody Allen's IQ, but we know that he wrote the dialogue, and he was smart enough to write the dialogue, which had Judy Davis coming back with: "You're figuring it in Euros. In dollars, it's much less."

How intelligent is Mia Farrow? Presumably intelligent enough for Sinatra — the liker of intelligent women — to have married her. But what kind of judge of intelligence was Sinatra? His quote is pretty funny, maybe not Woody Allen funny, but funny in that it has a set up and punch line. "I like intelligent women" is the straight line. The joke — "When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest" — also works as Sinatra's definition of intelligent: able to keep up one end of a conversation. That might be kind of a low standard. He's saying he wants someone at his level and we're hard-pressed to infer what his level was. (ADDED: In a staring contest, no one is talking, so he may be saying he's pretty dumb and somebody needs to be able to say something.)

Sinatra was a genius at singing, but does musical intelligence express itself genetically in offspring who do things like go to Yale Law School at age 15? I doubt it! [ADDED: Ronan was accepted to YLS when he was 15, but deferred admission until he was 19. In the interval, he worked for UNICEF.)

But that gets us no closer to the answer to the question who is Ronan's father, since Woody Allen is also a genius of a particular sort — writing comedy — and that sort of genius also seems disconnected from the sort of mind that gets drawn into law school at 15.

By the way, I love the question whether high-level legal analysis is more like comic writing or more like the vocal interpretation of song lyrics.

Googling for answers to my idle questions, I ran across the 1992 Farrow PR that — like this new piece — appeared in Vanity Fair. It came up because it had "IQ":

Soon-Yi issued her own statement... “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.”...

Mia’s family were astounded by the statement. “Soon-Yi doesn’t know half those words, what they mean,” one close to them said.... When Soon-Yi was in the third grade, her I.Q. tested as slightly below average.... “She’s a very typical L.D. kid, very socially inappropriate, very, very naïve,” says [a woman who tutored Soon-Yi]. “She has trouble processing information, trouble understanding language on an inferential level. She’s very, very literal and flat in how she interprets what she sees and how she interprets things socially. She misinterprets situations."

One might infer that Woody Allen is most likely the father, since Woody, unlike Frank, seems to have gravitated to females who don't seem so intelligent to him. Since both men gravitated to Mia Farrow, that may mean that Woody was more intelligent than Frank, if she seemed relatively dumb to Woody and relatively smart to Frank.