by Barry Paris
The lady beneath the mod exterior was not a very happy one. The Countess has an astrological interpretation of her: “She was a real Taurus—a rather stuffy sign. I’m a Gemini—very flighty. That’s why we went together so well. She was a very loyal, honest, serious person. If she hadn’t been a film star, she would have been a stuffy matron, very normal and ladylike.”
Hepburn was extremely fond of Count Lollo, who was “very Italian,” his widow recalls. “He used to scold her because he wanted her to eat spaghetti and put on weight, she was so thin.” During the first months, she begged not to go out in the evening but gradually acquiesced. “My husband would protect her, and she would hide under his wing when we went out.”
What she much preferred was daytime walking. Lorean calls her “a maniac for fresh air,” always in the company of her little dog. The Countess, presumably, strolled with her?
“As little as possible,” she replies. “I hated walking. I used to follow her with the car. When she came to our house on the Isola del Giglio, every afternoon she would walk to the top of the mountain with my husband and children because I refused. I sat and watched.”
Pundits in New York used to call Greta Garbo “a hermit about town.” Something similar might have described Audrey Hepburn in Rome. But her semi-reclusion there was interrupted in April 1968 by the obligation to appear in Hollywood for the Academy Awards ceremony, at which she was both a nominee and a presenter.
The United States to which she returned was in chaos. Demonstrations against the Vietnam war were becoming more and more violent and, just four days before the Oscars, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., turned many American cities into riot zones. The awards were postponed for two days, and on April 10, under somber conditions, Audrey handed out the Best Actor award to Rod Steiger for his performance in the racially charged In the Heat of the Night. Audrey, as noted, lost to Katharine Hepburn amid deep sentiment over the death of Spencer Tracy. For the younger Hepburn, it was more of a chore than a triumphant night.
So, too, really, was the evening of the Tony Awards a week later in New York, where she was one of a half dozen recipients of a special lifetime-achievement Tony.bd No one was quite sure why Audrey had been included. “Anyway you look at it,” wrote Rex Reed, “a Tony Award to Audrey Hepburn for deserting the theatre for more money in Hollywood is preposterous.”4
She couldn’t wait to return to the warm embrace of the Lovatellis in Rome, where a fateful encounter awaited her.
AMONG THE GUESTS at one of Lorean’s soirees that May was Princess Olimpia Torlonia and her industrialist husband Paul-Louis Weiller, heir to a French oil fortune. The Weillers fell in love with Audrey on the spot and, before the night was over, invited her to cruise the Greek islands with them the following month. Their yacht and their money offered a service much like that provided by Aristotle Onassis to Jacqueline Kennedy at the same time—and with nothing better to do, Audrey accepted.
Also aboard that yacht in June 1968 was a handsome young psychiatrist named Andrea Dotti, an assistant professor at the University of Rome and director of his own clinic specializing in women’s problems with depression. Dotti was an authority on psychopharmacology—drugs used to treat mental illnesses. Like the fictional Dr. Kildare, he was charismatic, gentle and a good listener. He was nine years younger than Audrey, despite—or because of—which, they took to each other immediately. They would soon be seeing a lot more of each other at the Lovatellis’ Isola del Giglio estate, off the coast of Tuscany, where the Countess was none too pleased about the developing romance:
“She met Andrea, unfortunately, on the cruise, when she ought to have been in my house on the island. She said, ‘I have eight days on Olimpia’s yacht and then I will come.’ So she met Andrea and then came to my house for the rest of the summer, and I had to invite Andrea too. I was very cross. I knew Andrea very well, and I knew he wasn’t the man for her.”5
Born in Naples on March 18, 1938, to Count and Countess Domenico Dotti, Andrea was a playboy as well as a psychiatrist. He claimed to have first met Audrey at age fourteen, during the filming of Roman Holiday, when he ran up to shake her twenty-three-year-old hand and then rushed home to tell his mother he was going to marry her. Allegedly, she was a recurring figure in his pubescent dreams after that. Nowadays, he was the attractive bachelor whom smart hostesses placed next to the likes of Christina Ford at Roman dinner parties. He said he and Audrey fell in love “somewhere between Ephesus and Athens. It was not [that she] came to cry on my shoulder about the breakup of her marriage or that I gave her comfort as a psychiatrist. We were playmates on a cruise ship with other friends, and slowly, day by day, our relationship grew into what it is.”6
If Mel Ferrer was a proud, severe Spanish type of Latin, Dotti was the sensual, laid-back Italian variety.7 “I will continue my career, and after a while all this interest in us will die down,” he said, by way of wishful thinking. “I’m not a public figure and won’t become one. I never think of Audrey as an actress but as a human being. Once anyone meets her, they forget she’s a star.”
His parents’ marriage had ended in a civil annulment some twenty-five years before, leaving Andrea and his three brothers (a banker, an electrical engineer and a sociologist) to a largely fatherless childhood with which Audrey could identify. These days, Andrea’s mother was Signora Paula Roberti, remarried to Vero Roberti, the London correspondent of the Corriere della Sera, and had a few words of her own on the subject of her son’s wedding plans:
“For years and years, he talked of getting married and having lots and lots of children, but he continued to study and think about a career. But when he came back from the cruise, you could see he was in love. He made a film of the voyage and included everybody but Audrey. Love made him too shy even to photograph her....
“Andrea has two distinct personalities.... He would shut himself off for hours to study; then, when his work was done, he would be very witty and social and dying to get out. I always encouraged my boys to have a good time when young.”8
Young and old, Andrea Dotti would take his mother’s advice to heart. He had the dignity of a professional but also an underlying sense of humor, which was highly appealing to Audrey in her unhappy state of mind at the time. “He made her laugh, he made her feel good about herself,” says Robert Wolders.
Wolders believes Audrey was attracted to Dotti “because he was a cerebral man who at the same time did not take life that seriously—not because he was a psychiatrist and could ‘assist’ her. Audrey didn’t have much difficulty understanding herself. She never voiced the feeling that there was any psychological manipulation on his part.” More relevant was Dotti’s large, colorful family—mother, brothers, in-laws—“people Audrey became very close to. This was true, too, with the Ferrers. Her sister-in-law Mary Ferrer stayed one of her closest friends for life. To become part of a family was extremely important to her. Her own family had lacked that kind of closeness.”
THE WORST THING for Audrey, as for most others dissolving a marriage, was the mind-numbing legal haggle over distribution of assets. When the Ferrers’ divorce decree was finally issued, on December 5, 1968, all settlement details were kept under wraps except for the two things that mattered most to her: She got custody of Sean and the house in Tolochenaz (which, in fact, had been purchased by her). Mel would have unlimited visitation rights but could only take Sean out of Switzerland with her permission, and for no more than four weeks a year.
Years later, Ferrer would say, “I still don’t know what the difficulties were. Audrey’s the one who asked for the divorce and started the affair with Andrea Dotti.”9 At the time, however, he was involved with twenty-nine-year-old heiress Tessa Kennedy. In 1971, he would enter his lasting marriage with fourth wife Elisabeth (“Lisa”) Soukhotine, thirty-four, a children’s book editor. They remain together today in Carpinteria, California.
Ferrer never uttered a negative word about Hepburn in public, and Audrey was too thrilled with her new fr
eedom and new romance to harbor any grudge toward Mel.
“Do you know what it’s like when a brick falls on your head?” she said later. “That’s how my feelings for Andrea first hit me. It just happened out of the blue. He was such an enthusiastic, cheerful person [and] as I got to know him, I found he was also a thinking, very deep-feeling person.” The only potential problem was the one all the newspapers and magazines were harping on—age—which she addressed directly:
“I had lived longer than Andrea, but it did not mean I was more mature. Intellectually, he was older than I. His work had matured him beyond his years. Also, we were very close emotionally. So we met somewhere between [his] thirty-one and [my] forty!10 I was afraid of that age difference, that it might be a big handicap to a new relationship, let alone to a marriage.”11
But it was easier to believe that love would conquer all. They conducted themselves and their relationship with discretion, Audrey sometimes flying to Rome and Andrea sometimes flying to Switzerland for their weekend rendezvous. On Christmas, Andrea presented her with a ruby engagement ring and surprised her soon after with a large solitaire diamond ring from Bulgari’s. In the first week of January, their marriage banns were officially posted outside the little village post office in Tolochenaz.
Lorean Lovatelli tried to talk Audrey out of it, “but I didn’t manage it,” she says. “She wanted me to go to Switzerland to be her witness. I accepted. She gave me a beautiful necklace she had made for her witnesses, enamel with a little medal written ‘Andrea and Audrey.’ But at the last moment I called and said, ‘I can’t come. I don’t want to be a witness. Forgive me.’ Andrea was a friend of mine for years before, a very amusing fellow, but she was a sort of fairy princess and needed somebody who understood her. I don’t know the other Dottis. I found Andrea quite enough.”12
Audrey, on the other hand, knew and liked the other Dotti brothers, and they were likewise fond of her. Shortly before the wedding, one of them bluntly advised her: “Don’t marry him. Just live with him.” But it was a very Catholic country, and their plans—plus family pressure—called for children.
On January 18, 1969, six weeks after her divorce from Mel, Audrey Hepburn and Dr. Andrea Dotti were married in a private ceremony in the town hall of Morges, presided over by the town’s clerk of records, Denise Rattaz. Nine-year-old Sean watched his mother and new stepfather exchange vows. Audrey looked perfect, as ever, in a pink jersey ensemble designed by Givenchy, with a matching scarf to protect her from the drizzle outside.
Instead of Countess Lovatelli, Audrey’s maid of honor was Doris Brynner, who knew Dotti and approved of the marriage. The bride’s other witness was Germaine Lefebvre, better known as actress Capucine from the popular Pink Panther series. The groom’s men included the distinguished Italian painter Renato Guttoso—Andrea’s uncle—and loveboat captain Paul Weiller.
At the reception, Paola Dotti Roberti was expansive: “Audrey will be an ideal daughter-in-law. She is such a delicious person, a dream. The age difference doesn’t matter. She has become so much the perfect woman for Andrea that, for us, she doesn’t have any age.”13 Audrey was bubbly, as well. After the ceremony, she phoned Givenchy in Paris to say, “I’m in love and happy again! I never believed it would happen to me. I had almost given up.”14
There would be no formal honeymoon, just a quiet week at Tolochenaz before settling down in Rome. La Paisible would be kept as a weekend retreat and summer home, its staff to be supervised by Baroness van Heemstra, who now lived there year-round. Sean would attend the French Lycée Chateaubriand in Rome.
They were now looking for the perfect Roman home for three, and soon found it: a beautiful penthouse apartment by the Ponte Vittorio, overlooking the Tiber and Castel Sant’Angelo. It was said to have been the home of the mistress of a famous cardinal four centuries earlier, which increased its serendipitous cachet in the Dottis’ minds. There, Audrey settled in to something like domestic bliss—while it lasted. Her greatest joy throughout the marriage was that Sean did not resent or reject Andrea. On the contrary, “the boys” liked each other a lot, thanks to Dotti’s sensitivity and his wise decision to become the child’s friend more than stepfather. “Sean’s already got a father, and a very good father, whom he loves very much,” Dotti would say.
Audrey grew gayer and more extroverted. “Now Mia Farrow will get my parts,” she said cheerfully, “and she’s very welcome to most of them.... After all, I worked nonstop from when I was twelve until I was thirty-eight. I feel a need to relax, sleep in the morning. Why should I resume work and the life I rejected, when I married a man I love, whose life I want to live?”15
She had no interest in being called “Countess,” to which she was rightfully entitled. She was Signora Dotti, plain and simple, and their number was listed in the Rome directory. “I don’t have a secretary, I don’t have attack dogs, I don’t go to parties or official functions, and I answer my own phone,” she said.16 She also did her own shopping and now discovered an up-and-coming young hairdresser who would become a good friend.
Sergio Russo, for a decade, had worked in the famous Parisian hair salon of Alexandre, where Audrey had been a client in her “high” film days. In 1969, Alexandre recommended his former assistant to her, now in Rome, as Sergio recalls:We had a little corner where we put up a dressing screen, behind which she would be seated for privacy. It was a little difficult because the shop was quite small. I was just beginning. After a few months she said, “Sergio, I am so ugly? You put me behind the thing. Why don’t you take me with other people ?” ...
She came to me not as a film star but as an Italian woman. We spoke in Italian and joked a lot together. She had a nice word for everybody. I worked with her all the years she lived here. She still had her Sabrina kind of short hair in 1969—70, and then she let it grow a bit and be kind of curly. Her hair never required a lot of daily care. Then she did the chignon, very simple. She used to say, “When I do the chignon myself, I use three hairpins. When you do it, Sergio, you use thirty or forty. Why?”17
She and Sergio chatted of everyday things—“the remodeling of the house, a lot about the garden, because we both loved gardens, and we both had a love for birds—she used to have a canary wherever she lived. She was not chatty about her personal feelings. She was British in that way—friendly, kind, but with that reserve of ‘Don’t get too close to me.’ I cannot say what her relations were with her husband. I had too much respect for her. You could see she had a problem, but it wasn’t discussed. I’m not that kind of hairdresser who trades confidences.”18
Their conversation was never intimate until the day when Audrey gently confronted him about the fact that he seemed depressed. “She said, ‘Sergio, I think you need my husband,’ and she made an appointment for me with him. She arranged it. He took care of me.”19
The “problem” between Audrey and Andrea, which Sergio was too discreet to probe, was a three-pronged one concerning sex. In the first place, her private eroticism consisted more of restrained tenderness than of the passionate abandon preferred by an Italian husband. Secondly, though she was nearing the end of her child-bearing years and had always had gynecological difficulties even when much younger, she was now—in May 1969, just four months after her wedding—pregnant again. Finally, on the heels of that exciting news and tending to spoil it, was the persistent rumor that Andrea was seeing other women.
“Rumor” was a euphemism. There was plenty of photographic evidence, thanks to the paparazzi, widely published for all who wished to see. Audrey was not among those who wished to see, but she could hardly avoid all the newspaper and magazine pictures of her husband in the company of some of the most striking and, in some cases, infamous Roman beauties.
Take the jet-set model Daniela Ripetti, for example, a favorite of photographers all over Europe for her guaranteed scandalous behavior on all occasions. She once interrupted a Beatles press conference in Milan to insist that the Fab Four listen to her sing and take her in as their
Fab Fifth. Later, she became engaged to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who died soon after of a drug overdose. She herself had spent nine months in prison on drug charges—and now, she was cavorting with Andrea in the hot nightspots of Rome.20
Dr. Dotti was snapped with many other female companions at the clubs. It was all the more galling to Audrey because she was in Switzerland expecting a baby at the time—a fact loudly trumpeted by the press. In the early months of her term, Audrey happily relaxed at the fashionable Gambrino Beach Club in Rome. But in the last six months, her confinement became exactly that, and on doctors’ orders she stayed in bed or on a couch at La Paisible. It was during that period, predictably enough, that Andrea’s nightlife skyrocketed.
Dotti’s friends offered the creative excuse that what looked like fun and games were really part of his “research” for a book he was writing in his area of expertise—the use of psychotropic drugs for depression in women. “Major tranquilizers, but not LSD,” he clarified. “We dispensed with [LSD] years ago. My approach to psychotherapy is closer to Freud’s than to that of Jung, more physical and emotional than religious.”21
Freudian or Jungian, it was the physical approach that had Audrey worried.
LUCA DOTTI was born on February 8, 1970, by caesarean section at the Cantonal Hospital in Lausanne and named for his father’s youngest brother. If Audrey and Dotti’s family had been annoyed with Andrea for his indiscretions, things were now smoothed over, temporarily, by the joy of Luca’s arrival. Once again, her most precious gift came from Sean: He not only failed to show any sibling rivalry toward the new baby but was actively fond of him and, from the start, developed a strong, avuncular relationship with his little brother that would last a lifetime.