Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  “Audrey and I both had lessons as blind people,” recalled Young just before his death in 1995, “but Audrey was miles faster than I. She was quickly able to find her way, blindfolded, around the Lighthouse rooms and corridors. She mastered the routine of filling a kettle, lighting the gas, boiling the water, putting tea in the teapot and pouring it without spilling a drop. When it was my turn, every natural disaster took place.”37

  She learned to differentiate textures with her fingertips, to judge people’s distance by a sound, to tell by the tapping of her cane whether she was walking on tile, wood or stone, and to put on makeup without a mirror. It was a profound experience, and one of the people who led her through it was college student Karen Goldstein, blind from the age of six.

  “Karen came to the Warner Studios and was to run through the movements of the scenes so that Audrey could then copy her,” said Young. “She picked up a lot from Karen—dialing a phone, judging the height and eyes of someone with whom she was speaking so that conversation was natural—all from the sound and direction of the voice. After a few days, she decided to work on her own. But being Audrey, she went to Jack Warner and persuaded him to pay Karen her full salary for the rest of the twelve-week schedule.”38

  Filming of Wait Until Dark began in New York City in early 1967. Mayor John Lindsay helpfully agreed to block off traffic in the Village for the ten-day shoot, as thousands of gawkers crowded the barricades for a glimpse of Audrey. Interiors were shot at Warners’ Burbank studio, where technicians who had worked with Audrey on My Fair Lady thought she now looked tired and gaunt. For the second time in a row, her friend Hubert was passed over. “She went somewhere like Saks and bought her meager two costumes off the peg,” Young remembered. “We settled on the most ordinary ones—she was blind and the colors weren’t important. Givenchy was obviously not for this particular epic.”39

  When production chief Walter MacEwen saw the rushes, he thought Audrey’s expressive eyes belied blindness. Contact lenses irritated her, but she agreed to them in certain close-ups when she could not avoid reacting with her eyes. “I ran picture after picture to see previous attempts of other actors playing blind and I never saw anybody nearly as good,” said Young. “She was able to focus in the far distance, and to keep the focus so that even if she was talking to someone very near, her eyes would not refocus on that person.”40

  Young debunked the reports that MacEwen and Jack Warner were furious about Mel and Audrey’s expenses: “Mel was an exceptionally efficient producer. Kurt Frings would have certainly got all of that worked out in her contract. He told me, with awe, that after [The Nun’s Story] she returned several thousand dollars to the studio because she hadn’t needed so much for her expenses. That had to be a unique occasion in the history of the cinema.”41

  Unique, too, was the formal English tea break taken daily at the stroke of four on the Wait Until Dark set. The ceremony was very elaborate. Audrey adhered rigidly to the rule of one spoonful of tea for each guest and one for the pot, with a steeping period of precisely ten minutes. Terence Young related how it came about:Originally I had arranged for tea to be brought on the set for myself. Audrey said she would like tea as well, because the coffeemaker on the set got a little tired by the end of the day. The next stage was that Audrey bought a couple of mugs and hand-painted on them THE TOFF, which is what she had nicknamed me, and AUD for herself. Charles Lang, the cameraman, told us he much preferred tea, so a day later he joined the gang with his own mug. Richard Crenna and Jack Weston asked why they were being treated as second-class citizens and said they, too, wanted tea, which I’m sure they hated, but it was all part of the fooling around that went on off the set, which I strongly encouraged.

  The weekend intervened, and I went to a tea party given by the actress Edana Romney, whom I had directed in my first film, Corridor of Mirrors. She was comfortably installed in Beverly Hills having brought her maid and in particular, her butler, Freddy, who was a terrific character. I invited Edana to tea at the studio and [asked her to] bring Freddy plus the solid silver tea service.... I had the Props Department lay out a square of fake grass with pedestals and huge vases at the four corners, filled with ghastly plastic flowers.

  The white table had an umbrella, and Props unearthed some very delicate China to replace our mugs. The cast sat down and had tea as if they did this every day; the butler served them, everybody spoke with English accents, and then it was back to work. The Tea Garden was left intact on the stage, and all the cast brought something different—cakes, biscuits, you name it. The end of the week, at four o’clock, there were sounds of music from the direction of the garden. They had arranged a string trio, three elderly ladies, while Jack and Richard fox-trotted to the music of “Tea for Two.” Thereafter, I gave up.42

  “Thanks to Audrey, we shot on European hours,” said Richard Crenna. “We came into the studio at eleven a.m. for makeup, never took lunch, and went home at seven. [At the four p.m. break] all the actors tried to outdo each other and put on a bigger and better tea. It got to a point where you just walked past the table and you gained ten pounds—except Audrey.”43

  In fact, she lost fifteen pounds during Wait Until Dark. The gossip columnists blamed it on her marital problems, but Young thought otherwise: “It was one of the most rigorous roles Audrey ever played. She worked herself so hard that you could see the pounds rolling off her each day.”44

  The final result was worth it: Wait Until Dark is a virtually perfect thriller—from the first to the last time Hepburn leaves her door unlocked. Charles Lang’s moody lighting heightens the suspense at every turn. Audrey’s frantic lightbulb-breaking scene became a classic, but no more than her deadly struggle with the psychopathic Arkin and his final, terrifying leap at her in the eerie light of the refrigerator.bc By today’s standards, the film was just mildly violent (brass knuckles, verbal abuse and a knife or two are the only weapons) but extraordinarily sadistic since the tormented victim was sightless. To test public reaction, worried studio executives held a sneak preview—at which the audience shrieked repeatedly in that uniquely cinematic, disturbingly neurotic, commercially fantastic combination of horror and delight.

  Warners left Young’s picture exactly the way he made it.

  Wait Until Dark opened in November 1967 to record-breaking grosses at Radio City—the ninth of Audrey’s sixteen starring films to premiere there. It earned a hefty $11 million for the happy studio and a fifth Oscar nomination for the less happy but much acclaimed Hepburn. “That performance is so extraordinarily authentic,” says costar Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (the blind girl’s kind but useless husband). “Working with her was heaven, even though she was going through hell with Mel.”45 Audrey withheld her true feeling until long afterward : “I was nominated for Wait Until Dark when I liked myself better in Two for the Road that year.”46 But playing the besieged, hysterical blind girl had been a vital catharsis, says Ian Woodward, “an emotional release far more purgative than any psychological ‘remedy’ dispensed by the average Hollywood headshrink.”47

  Maybe a little too purgative. It would be nearly a decade before Hepburn made another film.

  “I HAD BEEN completely miserable while making Wait Until Dark because I had been separated from my son, Sean, for the first time,” she would say.48

  The Ferrers’s working relationship was brilliantly successful during that production but, by its end, the only thing more painful to Audrey than Sean’s absence was Mel’s presence. MacEwen claimed one reason for the rift was Ferrer’s “auditions” of way too many pretty models for the five-second bit-part of a girl found hanged behind a door. But Richard Crenna says, “It was only later we heard that Audrey was having a very difficult time in her marriage.” Terence Young knew more about it because “both Audrey and Mel had confided [some] things to me. But they were a class act in every sense, and very little showed.”49

  One insight, a la Upstairs, Downstairs, comes from some unpleasant words overheard by chef Florida Broadway:
“One time Mr. Ferrer wanted Mrs. Ferrer to work more than she wanted to. She felt she worked too much, and he was pushing and driving her more than she was willing. Something she said about being tired started it. They had their little tiffs and arguments.”50

  In addition to the stresses and strains of thirteen years of marriage, her miscarriages upset and occupied her obsessively. In January 1967 she sent a heartfelt condolence letter to Sophia Loren, strongly identifying with Loren’s miscarriage that month.51 Five months later, Hepburn herself was pregnant again, at thirty-eight, but soon miscarried once more. Losing those babies, she said, was her greatest trauma, “as painful as my parents’ divorce.”52

  A few weeks later, she and Ferrer separated for good. Years earlier, Audrey had decided that 110 pounds was the ideal weight for her height. But she had now dropped down to ninety-five and, by one brutal assessment, resembled “an emaciated grasshopper.”53

  Mel was always accused of being a Svengali who called the shots and dictated her decisions. But in the end, it was Audrey who seemed to be in the driver’s seat and to have been so, in many ways, from the beginning. “It’s a problem when the wife outshines the husband as Audrey does me,” Ferrer said, with painful candor, back in 1960. “I’m pretty sensitive when producers call and say they want to discuss a film with me, when in reality they’re angling for Audrey and using me as bait.”

  The estimations of their friends differ widely.

  “Mel was—probably still is—a hypersensitive person,” says Leslie Caron, “and I think he gets hurt easily. I think that happened in his relationship with Audrey, although I cannot say too much about it because I wasn’t ‘holding the candle,’ as we say—an expression in French. It means I could not see inside their private chamber.”54

  Yul Brynner, on the other hand, wondered how Audrey put up with Mel for so long: “I suppose she was so desperate to make it work [and] so sweet, loyal and human.... Mel was jealous of her success and could not reconcile himself to the [fact that] she was much better than he in every way, so he took it out on her. Finally, she couldn’t take it any longer. God knows, she did everything a woman could do to save her marriage.”55

  Designer Ken Scott couldn’t understand how Mel and Audrey ever got together in the first place. “She is so lively, charming and youthful,” said Scott, “and he was a stick-in-the-mud, old beyond his years.”56

  Actor Robert Wagner’s analysis is gentler:

  “I met her when she first came to Hollywood with Mel. They used to come to our house when Natalie [Wood] and I lived on Beverly Drive. I think they loved each other very much, but two [high-profile careers] make a relationship more intense, and that intensity can work both ways. Mel was with her when she was very young, and it all changes as your life progresses.”57

  “Mel was the sabio—the guy that knew everything,” says Peter Viertel. “Once he called me and said, ‘You should forget this woman Gardner—she’ll destroy you.’ He loved to give advice. Audrey listened and was impressed by his knowledge of the movie business. She was a good wife and believed in being a good wife. That’s what he wanted, and I suppose she lured him into thinking she could provide it. I think they just outgrew each other.”

  Mel Ferrer, now seventy-nine, says, “I don’t think anybody could compete with Audrey [and there was no] sense in trying to. I had a great deal to do with her career, and I’m delighted I was able to contribute. But I didn’t benefit from it.”58

  Documentarist Gene Feldman insists, “Mel was no ogre. He genuinely loved her. Obviously, he’s a man of enormous ego and drive. Suddenly he became ‘the husband,’ which in our society is very difficult. Audrey understood that, and I think diminished herself incredibly so that she wouldn’t threaten him. That’s like walking stooped all the time. It’s hard.”59

  For a long while they worked together well, says Rob Wolders. “Audrey had her most productive period then, in large part because Mel was looking after her. People conveniently forget that they made a lot of good choices together.”

  On September 1, 1967, their lawyers’ jointly announced that Hepburn, thirty-eight, and Ferrer, fifty, would divorce. Mel was in Paris. Audrey was home in Switzerland with Sean. Much later she would say, “I hung on to my marriage because of Sean.” She now sat him down for the much-dreaded talk. “We’re not happy together,” she said. “It’s not going to affect you right now, but we’ve chosen not to live together anymore.”

  Sean developed a good understanding of it, says Rob Wolders: “It was extremely important to Audrey that the relationship between Sean and Mel should not suffer. Although she may have had certain negative feelings about Mel, she would never show them to Sean—or to anyone else. She never bad-mouthed Mel.”

  Like most things in her life, the divorce was conducted with what Sheridan Morley called “an avalanche of good manners.”60 Neither of them ever went public with their feelings. “Audrey never spoke about private, personal things and neither did I,” says Mel. “It was kind of an agreement that we had.”61 In later years, Audrey would express a curious kind of guilt that the marriage had failed to work. Never having recovered from her parents’ divorce, she would never quite recover from this one either.

  Eva Gabor felt Mel indeed tried to dominate Audrey, “but I don’t know that he got away with it, because Audrey was a very strong woman. She wasn’t a weakling by any means. When you’re in love, men get away with things. But only for a while. That’s why I think they got a divorce.”62

  Audrey went into self-imposed exile with Sean at La Paisible and told Frings to stop sending scripts. She was depressed and indifferent about whether she ever worked again. “I thought a marriage between two good, loving people had to last until one of them died,” she said. “I can’t tell you how disillusioned I was. I’d tried and tried. I knew how difficult it [was to be] second-billed on the screen and in real life. How Mel suffered! But believe me, I put my career second. [Even] when it was clear the marriage was ending, I still couldn’t let go.”63

  In Audrey’s mind, it was her personal failure and defeat.

  CHAPTER 8

  Roman Holiday II (1968-1979)

  “Please don’t say I’m self-effacing. You have to face something to be self-effacing.”

  —AUDREY HEPBURN1

  AT THIRTY-NINE, HAVING MADE ALL (BUT ONE) OF HER GREAT films, Hepburn retreated into motherhood. Her friend Doris Brynner threw various soirees to cheer her up. But soon enough, after Sean went off to school, the loneliness of Tolochenaz got to her.

  She was, after all, single and “available” again—on the strength of which, she now felt free to make a delicate entry into the European jet set. In December 1967, for example, she met Prince Alfonso de Bourbon-Dampierre, a pretender to the Spanish throne, and enjoyed New Year’s Eve with him in Madrid.

  But most often, she flew to Rome, the site of her first great film triumph, Roman Holiday. There, she had a guaranteed welcome among friends established over the years—aristocrats who, like her, had time and money on their hands, such as Count Dino and Countess Camilla Pecci-Blunt, who often hosted Audrey in Tuscany in the summers. One of her most loyal Roman friends was Arabella Ungaro, a member of the “impoverished nobility” who these days worked for the Corriere della Sera and later sold a small house on her property to Audrey. Another close friend was Laura Alberti, whom Audrey called “my Roman Connie [Wald].”

  They tended to be somewhat older, maternal women, and one of the most important of them to her at the time was Countess Lorean Franchetti Gaetani-Lovatelli, wife of Count Lofreddo (“Lollo”) Gaetani-Lovatelli. She and Audrey met through Lorean’s sister Afdera Franchetti, who was married to Henry Fonda at the time Hepburn and Fonda were filming War and Peace in Rome.

  “I usually find cinema people boring,” she says today. “But with Audrey, something clicked, and we became fast friends.” A pillar of the Roman aristocracy, Lorean made her magnificent home available to Audrey regularly from then on—and now more than ever. Melan
choly celebrity exiles were her specialty, as the irrepressible Countess Lovatelli recalls:When her marriage finished, she called me and said, “May I come and stay with you?” I said, “Of course.” She was very unhappy. She believed in marriage. When her marriage didn’t work, she came here to hide. She needed a friend and she needed to be cheered up. She lived for eight months in my house during the divorce. I would give little dinner parties for her and there was always an extra man, but I won’t tell you any names....

  She met all Rome through me. Everybody was enchanted by her. While she was staying with me waiting for the divorce, there was the revolution in Greece [December 13, 1967], and King Constantine and his wife had to leave in a hurry. They came to Rome with the mother, Queen Frederika, ran away during the night. They went to stay with Prince Henry of Hesse, their cousin, who has a beautiful villa in Rome. They were very depressed. It was rather gloomy, being kicked out of one’s own country, leaving everything behind.

  Prince Henry is a great friend of mine—the nephew of King Umberto. He called me and said, “I have to do something to keep up their morale.” So I gave a little dinner for them to meet Audrey. They were so enchanted with her that they kept coming back! She had just done Wait Until Dark, and Constantino hadn’t seen it, so we screened it privately for them. They loved it. After the film, we went into the kitchen and had scrambled eggs with the king and queen.2

  Audrey’s arrival had thrown the Lovatellis’ household staff into some confusion, as the Countess told interviewer John Barba:

  “It was the time of the first Mary Quant very, very short skirts and frocks, which Audrey was one of the first to wear here. When she arrived, my maid took her to the guest room and then opened her valises to hang out her clothes. We were in the drawing room chatting, and my maid came and said, ‘Signora, she must have forgotten some valise.’ I said, ‘Why?’ The maid said, ‘Because she only has blouses. I hung up twenty blouses.’ I said, ‘Those are frocks!’ So short. We weren’t used to them yet.”3