Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly has her little Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, in Blake Edwards’ charming and enormously popular film version of the Truman Capote novel; it is the role perhaps most identified with Audrey.

  To most of the world, Audrey Hepburn had arrived fully grown, so to speak, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Suddenly there she was in 1953, the English princess incognito in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, falling in love with the cynical American reporter (Gregory Peck) and transforming him through her extraordinary beauty and charm, her magical innocence. The public and the media around the globe fell in love at first sight with Audrey, and our Academy here, along with everyone else, instantly recognized the seemingly miraculous birth of a superbly accomplished actress as well as a film star of the first magnitude. She received the Oscar as Best Actress of that year. Overnight, as they say, this English-Irish-Dutch-Belgian unknown, who had previously appeared only in tiny parts in six British films (1951–52), became a world-famous and vastly popular American star. She was twenty-four.

  The most respected and successful picture makers in the country all vied for her unique presence in their films; the fortunate ones who got her were: Billy Wilder (twice), King Vidor, William Wyler (three times), Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, Stanley Donen (three times), George Cukor, Terence Young (twice), Richard Quine, Richard Lester, Blake Edwards, and me. Her leading men, besides Peck and Gazzara, included Humphrey Bogart, William Holden (twice), Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer (who also directed her once), Anthony Perkins, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Fred Astaire, Rex Harrison, Cary Grant, Peter O’Toole, Sean Connery and Albert Finney. Upon receiving numerous honors in the last years of her life, these exactly were the two groups of people she thanked.

  Throughout the declining fifties and increasingly desperate sixties, Audrey Hepburn was a beacon of tasteful glamour, of sensitivity and of the integrity and innocence of youth; a symbol of unalloyed kindness, morality and goodness on a screen ever more darkened by the baser forms of life, and increasingly peopled by anti-heroes and ambiguous—or simply victimized, or eventually nonexistent—heroines. Audrey was as unlike Marilyn Monroe as she was unlike Grace Kelly or Elizabeth Taylor. It’s been said that this Hepburn’s appeal was a throwback to the world of silent pictures, a far more rewarding time for variety in women’s roles, or to the 1930s when that other Hepburn, Katharine, dominated side by side with Shirley Temple. The great French writer Colette had first spotted Audrey crossing a Riviera hotel lobby—she was doing a bit in Monte Carlo Baby (1951)—and knew at a glance that this young woman must play the title role on the Broadway stage of her now-famous coming-of-age heroine in Gigi. Looking back today, we can see clearly that in the final full decade of the golden age of movies, Audrey Hepburn became the last true innocent of the American screen.

  Robert Graves has said that a good way to understand people’s lives is to put them into a mythological context. This is particularly easy with the larger-than-life, uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon of a true film star, one whose own vivid personality becomes the human basis for all the roles he or she plays. Hadn’t Audrey played a princess and been entirely believable? The media certainly featured her as princess of the world from Roman Holiday onward. She had been the chauffeur’s daughter (in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, 1954, Hepburn’s second star-vehicle and second Oscar nomination), as well as a lowly detective’s daughter (in Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, 1957), who grew up to be a society princess solely because of the magnificence of her glamor, charm, talent and beauty. Wasn’t this Audrey herself?

  There was no great difficulty in thinking of her as a dedicated nun (in Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story, 1959, her third Oscar nomination), and no great coincidence that this was among her most popular films. Audrey not only had a deeply spiritual quality that shone through her eyes, hadn’t she also sacrificed herself to the sacred mission of her own children and the children of UNICEF? The best kind of movie casting is always when it is easiest to eliminate the dividing line between actor and character. With Audrey, she always—in George Stevens’ apt phrase about Jimmy Stewart—“extinguished disbelief.” Was there any problem accepting her as Fred Astaire’s new dancing partner (in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face, 1957)? Audrey had begun as a dancer, looked and moved like a dancer her whole life.

  Nor, for that matter, was it hard for classics readers to accept her as Tolstoy’s innocent yet sophisticated Natasha of War and Peace (directed by King Vidor, 1956), nor as W. H. Hudson’s Rima the wild girl of the forest from Green Mansions (directed by Mel Ferrer, 1959): she was a natural for both—a striking indication of Audrey’s versatility within her own persona. She could easily flow from indomitable pioneer woman (John Huston’s 1960 The Unforgiven) to Greenwich Village bohemian (Blake Edwards’ 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, her fourth Oscar nomination and perhaps most enduringly popular and resonant incarnation) to a cockney flower girl (in George Cukor’s 1964 version of My Fair Lady) who is transformed into a mythical princess. Always back to nonhereditary royalty.

  Just like Robin Hood’s outlaw queen Maid Marian (Robin and Marian), named after one of the Old Religion’s earliest deities, Marian meaning “queen mother,” or “the fruitful mother of Heaven”; again, awfully close to the real Audrey, to whom her son Sean always referred privately as “The Mutti”—in German “The Mother.” The same one who had lived in Nazi-occupied Holland for all of World War II, who saw at close range the twentieth century’s most heinous crimes. Experiences of that nature shape you and remain with you for the rest of your life.

  At the age of thirty-four, she was approved by Cary Grant, age fifty-nine, to play opposite him in one of his last pictures (Stanley Donen’s delightful 1963 Charade); Grant actually retired only three years later because he felt he was getting too old to be a leading man opposite young women. With Audrey, however, the age difference was totally acceptable: she always seemed far wiser and more mature than her years, yet at the same time retained a kind of sacred innocence. In the last twenty years of her life she was most frequently associated with the free-spirited, unpredictable and inimitably stylish Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a girl born in the South. In the movie, when she says, “I love New York,” you love it for all the magic she herself brings to the mythology of a great melting pot. Blake Edwards—one of the best filmmakers of the last fifty years—understood this profoundly while making the picture. It’s clear by the way he brings Hepburn into the film at the very beginning: an empty, early dawn Fifth Avenue; a single cab; a tall, striking, unmistakable figure gets out, walks toward Tiffany’s in a long shot, and Hepburn’s title-card fades in, the “Moon River” theme playing with all the utter confidence of certain nostalgia. From start to finish, Edwards knew it: this was Hepburn’s picture, and he is never away from her for long.

  Audrey Hepburn, who always wanted to dance, in a musical number from Funny Face (1957), co-starring Fred Astaire, with classic songs by George and Ira Gershwin, directed by Stanley Donen.

  She is timeless. How beautifully she conveyed everything, and the subtle complications behind everything, and all with such amazing simplicity. Her silent looks, the grace and expressiveness of her movements, are a marvel. She is comparable in all those ways to the great women of the pretalkie era—Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford or Gloria Swanson—in whose eyes you could read volumes. She shared with some of the early stars that same abiding innocence—even when her character, like Holly, had certainly been around. When she sings “Moon River” with just a guitar, she could break your heart.

  She was equally convincing as a brilliantly brave blind woman (Terence Young’s version of the Broadway hit Wait Until Dark) and a chic modern sophisticate of privilege in a troubled marriage (Donen’s Two for the Road, 1967), who somehow comes to represent an era. And she played a similar role for another era (They All Laughed of 1981), but both European: Audrey Hepburn kept internationalism going in pictures. Eve
n when the romantic comedies fizzled a bit (1964’s Paris When It Sizzles, 1966’s How to Steal a Million), Audrey always kept up her end of the bargain—she always held out the unspoken promise of true and enduring love.

  Yet what she represented on the screen and what she herself so richly deserved was denied her in life—except from some close friends and her two sons. Romantically, Audrey did not have such a happy time of it. On a picture in the early seventies, William Holden told his co-star (a good friend of mine at the time), that he and Audrey had fallen very much in love during her second picture, Sabrina. But Holden was already long-married and had had a vasectomy; Audrey very much wanted children, so they bid each other a heavy adieu. Holden’s drinking increased, and finally killed him years later. Audrey instead married Mel Ferrer, the co-star of her second Broadway show, 1954’s Ondine. (She won the Best Actress Tony for this only six weeks after winning her Oscar for Roman Holiday.) Although she and Ferrer worked together again—as co-stars (in War and Peace), as director and star (for Green Mansions), as producer and star (on Wait Until Dark), and had one son, Sean, whom they both adored—nevertheless, the union was not a fulfilling one for Audrey. Evidently, there was his temper, his infidelities.

  On location with Humphrey Bogart for her second starring film, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954), during which she and co-star William Holden fell in love; but he was married. Bogart liked Hepburn but disliked Wilder and the film.

  She did another picture with Holden (Paris When It Sizzles), but he was in bad shape by then, ten years after Sabrina was shot—years that included his biggest financial success, The Bridge on the River Kwai; his one Oscar win, for Stalag 17, came while he was mad about Audrey. And he never got over her, he told my friend, and one night—in an angry fit of frustration at his fate—Holden threw his Oscar into the Bay of Naples. He died in 1981. Audrey was greatly saddened, I remember, by Holden’s death. The marriage to Mel Ferrer had officially ended by divorce in 1968.

  In the following year, Audrey married Dr. Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychiatrist who was nine years younger than she; they lived in Rome (and later, in Switzerland) with Sean and then with their child, Luca. This marriage also was troubled by problems similar to the first, and because Hepburn described some of these to Gazzara, her real life became the inspiration for the character I wrote for her in our picture: a woman devoted to her young son, braving a jealous, philandering husband on the boy’s behalf, finding temporary respite in a brief but intense love affair.

  On the movie he made right after Bloodline, while Audrey was still married to the doctor, Ben Gazzara met his future third wife, Elke Stuckmann. By the time Audrey was free, Ben had remarried, and Audrey had met the last man in her life, former actor Robert Wolders. Previously, Wolders had been married to Merle Oberon until her death in 1979. Soon after, he and Audrey were introduced to each other, sometime during the making of They All Laughed—and when she had carefully ended her marriage, Wolders eventually settled down with Audrey in Switzerland. Though they never married, the two lived together for eleven years until her death, and while there reportedly were some troubles toward the end, Audrey generally seemed very contented with Wolders. She left her home and entire estate to her two sons.

  When I first met Audrey in 1979, I found she was still as determined as ever to create a home and an atmosphere of morality for her children. She had all the fame and fortune one could hope for, and considerable gratification as an artist, and felt that her first allegiance had to be to her children. She had seen plenty of show-business families (and other businesses’ families, too) where this had not been the case, and she had witnessed the often sad or difficult or tragic results. The fact remains that at the height of her career, after five or six of the biggest successes of the 1960s, and commanding a million dollars a film—at the time, top dollar for a superstar—Audrey Hepburn effectively retired from the movies. She was thirty-seven.

  Twelve years, and only two pictures, later, a great deal of persuasion still was required to convince her to do the movie I had by then written for her. Luca was only ten and in school in Rome, and she didn’t want to be away from him for very long. I have a hunch that what finally got her into the film was not the million dollars for six weeks’ work, nor Ben Gazzara as her co-star again—though both certainly helped—nor my abilities as a director, nor the script which I had tailored for her. (By the way, when I played this card in trying to woo her into the role, she said, “Oh, Peetah! don’t tell me that—I’ll feel so baaad if I don’t do it …!”) None of this did the trick until I offered to hire Sean Ferrer as my personal assistant. Sean wanted to work in films and Audrey thought this would be a good start for him. In fact, he turned out to be not only the best on-set assistant I had ever had, but a damn fine actor in the supporting role entirely rewritten to suit him.

  Audrey Hepburn with William Holden in their second film together, Paris When It Sizzles (1964); now she was married, too. The picture, directed by Richard Quine, didn’t work out either.

  My first reaction after spending some time with Audrey had been to wonder how anyone of such extraordinary fragility and gentleness, with a profound shyness and self-deprecation, could possibly have been able to deal with this ruthless, often cutthroat business. How could she, in fact, ever get up in front of a camera and perform? And I kept that thought right up until the first time I watched her step in to do a shot. An amazingly subtle yet uncanny transformation then happened: this vulnerable, kind and self-effacing woman of incandescent goodness somehow could marshal all of her own sensibilities into a forceful, magical power to express all those qualities, to live and breathe even more naturally than she did in day-to-day life, with all the finest nuances of character and meaning behind her words and looks. John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and Audrey was living proof of that; watching her in a picture was seeing beauty and truth revealed at every shimmering moment.

  To make everything even harder, our picture was not done under sound-stage circumstances of comfort and ease. We shot entirely on the crowded streets of Manhattan, in real shops, hotels, restaurants. In order to achieve verisimilitude, and not able to close down part of Fifth Avenue for a week and people it with extras, we ended up trying to be as inconspicuous as possible and just “steal” the shots. Film crews and Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara and John Ritter, not to mention Dorothy Stratten and Patti Hansen, were nothing if not conspicuous as hell. To be able to get these scenes, we had all but three or four crew members remain by the trucks twenty blocks away; had no chairs on the sidewalks for actors or crew, no dressing rooms or honeywagons nearby; used a handful of extras to stand casually around literally blocking the camera from sight; and asked Audrey (and the other actors) to wait in one or another of the stores along Fifth. When the camera was ready, Audrey was sent for, silent gestures gave the cues, the shot was done, and then she was sent back to wait in a store for the next take or shot. Not only did she never complain, she did not give even one second’s indication that she might consider complaining. She was always gay, cheerful and encouraging. “Oh, look, Peetah,” she’d exclaim, “those nice people in the store gave me this lovely haaandkerchief!” Or, “Look, Peetah, they gave me this beautiful umbreeella!” We had a joke about that: “OK, let’s send Audrey over to work the other side of the street.”

  People gave her things everywhere—and she always seemed as pleased and surprised as a girl of ten—but it was not really a surprise to me. Audrey was a person you wanted to give things to, maybe because she gave so much of the best of herself to everyone and to everything she did, whether cooking up some pasta or risotto—which she made brilliantly—and looked breathtakingly lovely and graceful while doing so. Her risotto is my most memorable risotto. Or, revealing herself in a close-up of ineffable beauty and sadness or joy or both combined. Audrey could do anything.

  Whenever the lines didn’t quite suit her, she would alter them and they always sounded better her way. Often I would compliment her b
y saying, “That’s not the line, but it’s better that way.” And invariably she would say, “Oh, isn’t it?! I thought it was. I’ll say it the way you want—I thought it was that line.” And I’d always have to reassure her that her rewrite, instinctual or conscious, was an improvement. But she invariably claimed ignorance of any difference and repeatedly said she’d do it my way. I never let her.

  A tragedy occurred one month after They All Laughed completed shooting—Dorothy Stratten was murdered—and our bittersweet romantic comedy could never again be what it had been meant to be. This horrific killing affected not only perceptions of the film but its commercial appeal, and yet Audrey’s only concern was for the actress who had died and for me, who had been in love with her. She said to me that Dorothy had been like “an angel who was only allowed to come to earth for a little while and touch all of us.” At a time in my life when most people turned away, Audrey did the opposite—she was there to offer hope, faith and love.

  This is exactly what she gave to her own children, and to movie audiences around the world, and finally, to all the thousands of UNICEF children mired in tragic circumstances whom she visited throughout her last years. I could hear the sense of mission in her voice over the phone as we spoke of other pictures I continued to ask her to do: the only time she had now, she would say, was for the unfortunate children. Maybe she could do this or that movie between her tours, but probably not—her UNICEF work was too demanding, too exhausting, too painful emotionally—though she never said that, nor complained in any way.