by Barry Paris
The picturesque place to which the Ferrers relocated would remain Audrey’s home for life: the village of Tolochenaz-sur-Morges, above Lake Geneva, fifteen miles from Lausanne and thirty from Geneva. There in the French-speaking canton of Vaud, Audrey—not Mel—purchased a fine old eighteenth-century farmhouse. It was an eight-bedroom villa built of the local peach-colored stone, surrounded by a white picket fence and situated on Tolochenaz’s one and only street, Route de Bière, with beautiful Alpine vistas. It was called “La Paisible” (The Peaceful Place) and, for Audrey, would always live up to its name.
Tolochenaz dated back to an early Celtic settlement of lake dwellers, who built their homes on stilts.2 Its current inhabitants—barely five hundred of them—were mostly farmers with fruit orchards and vineyards and a few cattle. It was quite near the Geneva-Lausanne highway but set back far enough to retain its quiet, isolated charm. A hardware shop and a grocery were pretty much the sole businesses on the sole street.
“Come with me, I want to show you the exact angle the moment I first saw the house!” Audrey told Anna Cataldi, a good friend of later years, on Anna’s initial visit. Audrey led her into the garden and enthused, “I was here when I had the first glance of the house and it was spring and fruit trees were in blossom, and my heart stopped beating. I said, ‘This is my place!”’3
It was a place where her domestic instincts and love of family life led her to an old-fashioned testimonial: “I have never gotten over the wonder of being married,” she said. “Like many teenagers, I thought I was such an ugly thing that no one would ever want me for a wife.... Which is why I always say to Mel, ‘Thanks to you I’m off the shelf!’”4
Within a year, she would get over the wonder and the home front would not be so blissful. But for now, in mid-1965, they were happy with their post-My Fair Lady rapprochement, which was based on her becoming a full-time wife and mother. She put her career on hold in order to “be there” every day when Sean came home from the two-room schoolhouse where he was fast adding French to the four other languages he knew (Italian, Spanish, English and German). Staying home was no sacrifice when the alternative was being miserable on a movie set. From now on, Tolochenaz was her “harbor,” she said, “the absolute opposite of the life I led working. I was to a great extent left in peace. The Swiss press doesn’t care what you do. If I had lived in London or New York or Hollywood, it would have been outlandish. I never liked the city. I always wanted the countryside.”5
Life in Tolochenaz was made more paisible and pleasant by the presence of an artiste named Florida Broadway. “I once asked if that was her real name,” says Leonard Gershe, “and she said, ‘Would anybody make up a name like that?’”6
Florida was the African-American chef par excellence, hired by the Ferrers in California during My Fair Lady on Gershe’s recommendation. “Audrey was so crazy about her, she took her to Switzerland,” he recalls. Florida had previously worked for the likes of Joan Fontaine and Diahann Carroll, “but no one as nice as Miss Hepburn,” she says. For two years, she created gourmet and everyday meals for the Ferrers and was a member of the family, as she recalls today in her soft-spoken, regal way:I didn’t like Mr. Ferrer at first—he was so stiff, where she was so warm and had a marvelous sense of humor. But I grew fond of them both. I was terribly lonely there at first. She’d invite me to go on walks, and I was allowed to make calls at least twice a week to my family in the U.S. They did other nice things—they let me use the chauffeur on my day off, and I’d go into the city and get lost.
Mr. Ferrer was a little fussy about food, but she ate everything and always wanted to experiment. If I was fixing something special for myself—some—thing ethnic—she’d want to come back and have some of it. Like greens—collards. I’ll never forget what we went through in Rome, trying to find this kind of smoked pork that I liked. Every time they went into the city, they’d come back with the wrong thing. It was never what I wanted. She kept trying and trying and finally found it—oh, I was ecstatic! I said, “I’m going back to my roots.” She said, “After all this trouble, I’ve got to have some of this!” So she came back into the kitchen and sat down and enjoyed it the same as I did.7
A frequent visitor in those days was Audrey’s mother, who “got a big bang out of her title,” Florida thought. “The Baroness really liked goulash. Mrs. Ferrer, on the other hand, liked a good hearty soup and I made great soup.” Sean she describes as “a very privileged little boy, and why not? His food was all prepared fresh. He turned out to be a chunky fellow—he liked a lot of bread and cake.”
Mel was allergic to garlic. “Oddly enough, so was Ella,” says Gershe. “They were also allergic to each other. Anyway, Florida had to find some other way to spice up the pasta.”
It was her greatest culinary challenge.
“My God, how can you cook without garlic?” she says. “So I invented a spaghetti sauce using green olives instead of garlic. The olives, and the slow process of cooking it forever, did the trick. They really liked it. She used to say she had spaghetti all over the world but never quite as good as mine.”
In the dessert department, Florida’s dilemma was that “one of them liked chocolate cake and the other liked white, so I made an ‘integrated cake’ for them—half chocolate and half white. Mr. Ferrer got a big bang out of me calling it that. Some people treat their help as just hired hands, but they weren’t like that. I only had one experience with her that I was upset about....”
Florida, out of loyalty and discretion, hesitates to tell the story but finally decides to do so: The household was fully staffed. I was the chef. One day, on the maid’s day off, Mrs. Ferrer came in and noticed a dirty spot in the kitchen. She asked if I would clean it up. Well, there wasn’t a mop—and anyway, that wasn’t my job. So I said that the girl would be back the next day to do it. She said, “Well, you could just get down on your hands and knees and do it yourself.” I was horrified. I said, “You know something, Mrs. Ferrer, I only get on my knees to pray.” And she said, “Well, pray the while!” I was offended. It sounded medieval, like a Shakespearean play. I thought, “What does she mean?” Then it occurred to me she was saying, “Pray the while you’re down there!” So I said to her, “I would rather not.” It was the only time I got really angry with her. To me, that was like insulting my religious beliefs, and I let her know it.8
This, by all accounts, was Audrey Hepburn at her most “vicious”—and predictably, she felt guilty about it.
“I never did clean the spot up,” says Florida. “She must have regretted it because she did all sorts of little things for me that afternoon to kind of make up for it.”9
WHEN ASKED if she ever noticed any eating disorder on Audrey’s part, Florida Broadway responds with a categorical no:
“For a tiny woman, she had an enormous appetite. I really doubt those bulimia or anorexia stories. She loved to eat, and they had all kinds of things with butter and cream. They liked chocolate souffle, roast duck, rich things. Once when Yul Brynner came to dinner, I made this roast duck and, oh, you never heard such carrying on over a duck in all your life.”10
Brynner was married to Audrey’s beloved Doris Kleiner, one of the prominent, jet-setting Beautiful People of the day. Born in Yugoslavia, she grew up in Santiago, Chile, came to Paris in the 1950s, and was working there at Pierre Cardin’s when she met Audrey. The Brynners married in 1960, during the making of The Magnificent Seven, and took up residence in a beautiful lakeside property near Lausanne, just ten minutes from Tolochenaz.
“We became close friends right away,” says Doris. “Nothing happened in my life without her knowing about it or in her life without my knowing about it. Soul mates. It only happens once in a lifetime. Audrey really cared and really listened. Most people don’t. If you really listen, it’s because you really care. I don’t listen to half of what I hear—but Audrey did.”
She listened especially to Doris’s daughter Victoria—her godchild. Audrey was no figurehead godmother, but an acti
vely functioning one who “always gave incredibly sound advice whenever I had problems with my parents or boyfriends or if I was scared about something,” says Victoria. “It was heaven, having this generous, adorable, loving person who was never critical.”
At one point Victoria considered becoming an actress and took Method-acting classes in Paris. “I came back distraught and flabbergasted by the system,” she says. “They told me to imagine I was holding a cup of coffee and how I would drink it, with my eyes closed sitting on a chair. When I related this to Audrey, she said, ‘That seems funny—either you drink a cup of coffee in a natural way or you don’t.’ She was graced with such a natural talent herself, it made no sense whatsoever to her.”11ay
She always had time for Victoria who—like her mother—became an integral part of Audrey’s family. As always, nothing was more important than family, Doris Brynner reconfirms:
“She wasn’t a social person. Her biggest joy was being at home with her children or in the garden. That was where she wanted to be most. She was a great cook and loved her food. Yul didn’t like pasta, so whenever he went on trips, Audrey would come to my house and we’d have pasta and vanilla ice cream and fudge sauce. That was our great treat. We lived more than twenty years within sight distance, just above her. She’d come up or I’d go down for walks with the dogs.... The prime time was to have a plate of spaghetti and chat, just the two of us.”
Their lives were centered around their children and their homes, in the beautiful vineyard country near Lausanne, where the grapes ripen from the reflection of the sun off the lake. They left the area only rarely. “We weren’t shoppers,” says Doris. “Maybe twenty years ago, life was different, we would go to a party in Portugal or take off to get away for a bit. But that was long ago. Anybody who just gets on a plane to go shopping in Paris is a fool. Your priorities change over the years, thank God.”12
BUT AUDREY, we know, always had a weakness for Paris. She now flew there, in July 1965, not for a shopping spree but to make How to Steal a Million for director William Wyler—their third together—at the Boulogne Studios. The screenplay by Harry Kurnitz, from a story by George Bradshaw, was a light confection in the Pink Panther vein: Hepburn plays the daughter of art forger Hugh Griffith, whose flawless fake of a Cellini statue of Venus is about to be exhibited as the real thing. Ethical Audrey is so upset about it, and worried for her father’s impending arrest, that she joins forces with burglar Peter O’Toole to steal it from the museum.
Wyler and 20th Century-Fox pulled out all the artistic stops: Master designer Alexandre Trauner of Hungary was hired to create the beautiful sets. He, in turn, hired expert copyists for the gigantic labor of creating all the phony Renoirs, van Goghs and Picassos needed for the film.13az Mel had agreed to stay in Tolochenaz with Sean while Audrey worked in Paris and flew home on the weekends. Terribly fearful of kidnappers, she had bought a German shepherd (and later an Australian sheepdog) to guard their home and refused to let Sean be photographed by anyone. Her fears were increased in Paris when, one morning, a group of men in masks tied up the studio concierge and made off with the production’s payroll.
But her consolation was Peter O’Toole—and the fun they had during the eleven days it took to shoot the sequence in which they are locked up together inside a cramped museum closet, awaiting the precisely timed moment to execute their heist.
“If you’re not in a place like that with somebody you like, it can be very boring,” she said. Years later, the very mention of O’Toole’s name would make her burst into laughter. “My friend! He was very dear and very funny. I don’t know why, but he used to call me the Duke of Buckingham....”14
O‘Toole knew why. As he later explained to writer Ian Woodward, the reference was to the great nineteenth-century actor Edmund Kean and a colleague—both heavy drinkers—who were playing Richard III and the Duke of Buckingham in Richard III. Kean as the King tottered onto the stage, “thoroughly polluted with liquid light, started his soliloquy and the audience began to call and bawl ‘You’re drunk!’ ‘He’s drunk!’ ... Kean glared at them and said, ‘If you think I am drunk, wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham,’ and, waiting at the side of the stage, was indeed the Duke of Buckingham on his hands and knees.”
But what did that have to do with Audrey?
“We were filming an exterior in Paris and the weather turned round and became very, very cold indeed,” O’Toole related. “Audrey had to walk across the street, get into a waiting car and drive off, but the poor child had turned bright blue with cold. The light was going and the shot was needed. I pulled Audrey into the caravan and gave her a shot of brandy. She went all roses and cream, bounced out of the caravan, radiated towards the motor car, hopped into it and drove off, taking with her five great big lamps [being used to light the scene], the trimmers of which had flung themselves on the cobbles out of the way. From then on she was my Duke of Buckingham.“15
Director Wyler complained—but not too bitterly: “They react on each other like laughing gas, and the trouble is they’re in almost every scene together.”
Freewheeling O’Toole, an erstwhile drummer and banjo-player, was as fond of jazz and he was of drink, and obtained both in quantity at a Parisian bistro called Le Living-Room. More than once he helped shut the place down at its closing time (six a.m.). He attributed his nocturnal habits to childhood days of tagging along with his bookmaker father and falling asleep under the tables at which good Irish whiskey was consumed—and good horse-racing tips exchanged—into the wee hours.
Says a female cast member who wishes to remain anonymous:
“The three men who started out on that film—Hugh Griffith, Peter O’Toole and George C. Scott—were wonderful actors but often incoherent by eleven a.m. Scott said he was ill. They sent a doctor, but George threw him out bodily. So they fired George.”
Scott was to play a crass American tycoon who has a fixation on the Cellini statue and is desperate to buy it—and Audrey. His role now went to Eli Wallach, imported on a kind of emergency leave of absence from the Broadway production of Luv.
“There was one scene in the movie where I had to kiss her,” says Wallach, “and Audrey was quite tall. ”She looked at me and smiled and said, ‘I’ll take my shoes off.’ I said, ‘I love you, I love you.’ She took her shoes off and played the scene.“16
The unlikely duo of Wallach and O’Toole were good friends on and off the set. “Peter was in his prime,” says Wallach, “—a bright man who liked to tease. He had his evil spirits. The alcohol sent the editor of his brain home. But he had great respect for Audrey, which came across on the screen. And when he was finally told he had to stop drinking—he did. For good.”
O’Toole was a cutup but also a good observer. He found Audrey to have a fine sense of fun but also “a modesty and a sadness” about her. And he was fascinated by Charles Boyer, who played the part of a gallery owner in the film.
“Charles had just lost his son,” O’Toole recalled. “We had to shoot a gay scene. I wondered, at such a moment, if his memory would hold out. It did; Boyer thought of nothing but playing the scene well, but we all had tears in our eyes.... Bloody total perfection.”17ba
Of equal perfection in How to Steal a Million is the first memorable glimpse of Audrey Hepburn in her white suit, white gloves, white “bobby” hat, white stockings, white shoes and white sunglasses. Everything is white—except her flaming red sports car, for outrageous contrast. Soon after, she is lying sexily in bed (reading an Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazine) when she hears a burglar break into her father’s art gallery below.
It’s O’Toole, of course, and it’s one of the film’s funniest scenes: She catches and holds him at gunpoint. The gun goes off accidentally, and they both faint as a result of his flesh wound. “I’m a society burglar,” he complains when revived. “I don’t expect people to rush about shooting me.” He talks her out of calling the police and into driving him back to his hotel. She puts her go-go boots over her neglig
ee and gripes, “This is crazy—you should be in jail, and I should be in bed.” But she is smitten, inevitably, after his first bold kiss.
Hepburn is stunningly dressed by Givenchy in every scene, most notably in a black voile dinner dress and lace “mask” midway. Wyler’s pace is leisurely—the film is two hours and seven minutes long. He gives the audience its money’s worth of Audrey. She and O‘Toole are as good as the script, which is not as Hitchcockian as it wants to be. In Charade, Hepburn was really a foil to Grant; in Million, O’Toole is the foil to Hepburn.
“Take off your clothes,” he orders after they’re locked inside the closet, handing her a scrubwoman’s outfit.
“Are we planning the same sort of crime?” she enquires.
The closet scene was photographed with masterful irony by Charles Lang—just a narrow strip of lighted space in the middle of the huge, wide and otherwise pitch black Panavision frame. Such was their proximity and for so long, said O’Toole, that he had a hard time restraining himself. Romantic as well as funny, that sequence fueled press rumors of an affair, encouraged as usual by the film’s publicists and, as usual, false.
Wyler had been pleased to make a comedy in the wake of his depressing previous picture, The Collector. But when it was released in July 1966, the critics were less pleased. “They have her repeat her characterization of the jeune fille undergoing romantic awakening, a role in which she is now expert to the point of ennui—a kind of upper-class Debbie Reynolds,” wrote Richard Schickel in Life. Crowther in the New York Times called both the movie and the Givenchy wardrobe “preposterous.” To look at it, one would never suspect that the glossy, lumbering How to Steal a Million was made in the raging middle of the Vietnam war. Wyler made only two more films before retiring in 1970.