by Barry Paris
Bloodline was Sheldon’s second novel to be filmed. Producers David Picker and Sidney Beckerman bought the screen rights for $1.5 million and hired Laird Koenig (author of the fine Jodie Foster film, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane) to write the potboiler screenplay about industrial intrigue and murder. It had an international all-star cast to ensure a profit on the Continent. The one superstar was Audrey. There was James Mason for the British. Gert Frobe and Romy Schneider would make the Germans happy. Omar Sharif was an ersatz Italian. Irene Papas would please the Greeks. Ben Gazzara, Beatrice Straight and Michelle Phillips might draw in the Americans.
Heroine of the turgid tale was Audrey, a paleontologist who is first seen in Bloodline in the act of cleaning a dinosaur—symbolic of her task in the film. She is the object of a grand conspiracy, but her romantic involvement with Gazzara and most other elements of the plot end up submerged in random violence and a series of pornographic “snuff-film” murders.
When Hepburn finally realized, in mid-production, just how sleazy the film was really going to be, she complained—too late—to Frings, who told her sex and violence were necessary these days for a hit film and she should adjust to the times.
Audrey’s periodic brushes with death are heralded by Ennio Morricone’s corny “suspense” music, while an even cornier soprano chorus accompanies her romantic moments with Gazzara. Audiences didn’t know which to dread more, the brushes with death or the bad dialogue of the love scenes: “Isn’t it instantly plain to the naked eye I’m in love with you?” she tells Ben.
The ending is a combined rip-off of Wait Until Dark and Charade-cut phone lines, flames engulfing her house, Audrey forced to decide whether the real culprit is Mason or Gazzara.
The final credits clear up the most compelling question:
“Miss Hepburn’s jewels by Bulgari.”
DURING BLOODLINE shooting, Audrey told a British journalist that Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, with Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, had moved her to tears. She identified powerfully with the introspective Ullmann character, “inwardly turned and tortured, psychologically crippled.” Audrey knelt on the sofa, arms outstretched, miming the girl’s anguish, then added a soft non sequitur: “I am a very interior person.” There was an unspoken sense that her own career had run into a dead end.91
On Bloodline location in Sicily, Audrey had several bodyguards, said a cast member, “until she realized that even kidnap by the Mafia would be preferable to having to finish this script.”92 The critics were correspondingly merciless.
Variety: “It’s a shock to see Hepburn playing a role that even Raquel Welch would have the good sense to turn down.”93
New York Daily News: “Bloodline offers the chance to see Hepburn on the screen again but under what rotten circumstances. As a team, she and Ben Gazzara evoke no spark, no charisma.”94
Denver Post: “Hepburn is showing the passage of time.”95
Devastated by the reviews, Audrey wondered if she’d lost her touch for picking winners. What remained of her confidence was deeply shaken. It occurred to her that Mel’s input, overbearing as it often was, was something she rather missed.bk
The only thing more disastrous than Bloodline was her marriage, whose instability hadn’t been helped by reports during filming that she and Gazzara were becoming involved. Ben (né “Biago”) Gazzara was a year younger than Audrey, a product of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio and, for a while, thought to be a potential new Brando. He’d starred on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Hatful of Rain and had a hit TV show, Run for Your Life (1965-68). He was separated from Janice Rule at the time he and Audrey met, and their relationship became the object of great press speculation during Bloodline.
But an “affair”? Her friends, and possibly Audrey herself, relished the rumor for giving Andrea a taste of his own medicine. But if her brief infatuation with Gazzara was anything serious or profound, Hepburn never mentioned it—then or later—to her confidantes Connie Wald or Doris Brynner or anyone else.
Andrea was, in fact, disturbed by the Hepburn-Gazzara gossip, but not enough to renounce his ways. His extracurricular socializing continued unabated, and so did the Roman public’s fascination with him. His favorite haunts were Bella Blue, Rome’s most chic private nightclub, and Jackie 0, just 150 meters away. The man who knew and followed his movements most closely—and whom Dr. Dotti loathed above all others—was a genial working stiff named Tony Menicucci.
“I am not a paparazzi!” Menicucci declares in Rome. “I am a photojournalist. Paparazzi shoot people when they are shopping or with friends—unimportant times.” Menicucci shoots them when they’re somewhere, or with someone, important. That is his legal right, he declares, going on to defend it at length. It’s a sensitive issue—and his occupational hazard. But as one of Europe’s greatest celebrity catchers, he is proud of his work, in general, and of his extensive knowledge of Dr. Dotti’s nocturnal habits, in particular. Typically, he says:Dr. Dotti went to the movies at eight p.m., then to eat about ten-thirty, then the nightclub. He very much liked the nightlife—to stay up after work, go to the clubs and meet a girl. At one-thiry or two, he’d leave. I took my pictures a lot at two to three a.m., when people were coming out of the clubs. He went mostly with other women, not with Audrey. I remember only one time Audrey went to “Jackie O” with him. She didn’t like to go out. With Audrey, he went only to restaurants, where they stayed two-three hours, to eat slowly. To the clubs, he went with married and single women both.96
What was it about Dr. Dotti that so many women loved?
“I don’t know,” the photographer replies. But, it seems to have been his mind more than his body, and Dotti, in turn, seems to have been more interested in their company than in sex. Says Menicucci, with the investigative certainty of a Woodward-Bernstein: “I know he didn’t take them to his house.”
Even if Audrey knew that, it was small consolation to her in view of the immense publicity, for even a partial list of Dotti’s outings and the women who appeared on his arm in those days is staggering. On an elegant Roman coffee table, Menicucci lays out an immense stack of photographs of Dr. Dotti taken during his marriage to Hepburn: Some are with Luca and Sean and Audrey. A few are with such celebrities as Ringo Starr and Olivia de Havilland. But most are with the beautiful young women “who were important in his life then,” Menicucci says, of whom the following are but a Whitman’s Sampler:
Actress Daniela Trebbi (1979, et al.); Lupua Yerni and actress Karin Shubert (1979); Countess Coppotelli Latini at Bella Blue (1979); actress Christiana Borghi, one of Dotti’s favorites, in Bologna and Rome (1980, et al.); Beatrice Corri of Italian TV and French actress Carol Andre (1975); Manuela Croce (1976); actresses Dalila Di Lazzaro and Marinella Giordana (1978); Countess Iliana Coritelli Lovatelli (Lorean’s daughter) at Bella Blue (1980); actress Marilù Tolo (1982).
The pictures go on and on.... They appeared in Novella, Ava Express, Stop, Oggi, Gente, Gioia, Annabella and Paris-Match, to mention only a few.
Menicucci’s most dramatic encounter with Dotti produced “a sentiment that was not friendly,” says the photographer, with a classic Italian shrug. “Son of a bitch!” Dotti yelled at him. “Don’t you ever go to sleep? I don’t want pictures!” With actress Dalila Di Lazzaro, especially, he became as “wild as a hyena” and would run to his car in an effort to hide her.97
Anna Cataldi felt it was “as if Andrea somehow wanted to provoke Audrey. It was a neurotic relationship. Audrey was a strong person. She set limits and was rather inflexible, and Andrea suffered for that. But Andrea had a rather schizophrenic personality. One side was looking for glamour. The other was a serious person who was a good doctor, a good father, a brilliant man. I think his relationship with Audrey had the same schizophrenia. One part of him was very impressed with the ‘Audrey Hepburn’ glamour but also battling against it. The other part had a real relationship with a real human being.
“Andrea had enormous respect for her. ‘Audrey
is a very straight person, very honest,’ he would say. But Andrea destroyed Audrey’s dream to have a little family and house when Luca was born. He disappointed her enormously and had some kind of rebellion against her.”98
Some of the Dottis’ mutual friends were struck by Andrea’s attentiveness to Audrey in many ways. Others, such as actor David Niven, were struck by the opposite:
“When Audrey married Dotti and was swept off to Rome, she was, I think, determined to be a very good wife to this very socially minded Roman, [but] the longer it went on, many people felt she was much too good for him and that he took incredible advantage of her and that she gamely played the wife of the social Roman and really let her career just stand still, on purpose, to help him.”99
Billy and Audrey Wilder’s opinions are always of interest.
“He didn’t make any impression on me,” says Mr. Wilder.
“They didn’t go together,” says Mrs. Wilder. “You look at two people and you say, yes or no, and this was no.”100
Hepburn’s friend Camilla Pecci-Blunt thought the same, even though, like Anna Cataldi, she knew and liked Andrea very much. “It seemed to me they didn’t belong together at all,” says the Countess. “They just led very different lives. He was a very good father, and he has grown up a great deal since then. But he was rather childlike in those times.”101
Eli Wallach has the last word: “She seemed to have a tendency to get involved with men who didn’t take good care of her. I don’t know exactly what happened, but when she married that Italian psychiatrist, she went dotty.”102
CHAPTER 9
Dutch Treat (1980-1989)
“A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people who like that kind of book) but in actual life she is a nuisance.”
-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
AUDREY HEPBURN WAS HAUNTED BY THE TRAUMA OF HER FIRST marital breakup and almost fanatically determined to avoid another one. In sadder but wiser hindsight, she assessed the situation as follows:
“I decided that if and when there was a second marriage, I would not let my fame or anything at all get in the way of personal happiness—for myself, for him, for my son and for the second child I hoped for. [Andrea] and I had what you could call an open arrangement. It’s inevitable, when the man is younger. I wanted the relationship—the marriage—to last. Not just for our own sake, but for that of the son we had together.... I still believe the child has to come first. 1
“[Divorce is] one of the worst experiences a human being can go through. I tried desperately to avoid it.... I hung on in both marriages very hard, as long as I could, for the children’s sake, and out of respect for marriage. You always hope that if you love somebody enough, everything will be all right—but it isn’t always true.”2
It was time to act on a statement of principles she had made four years earlier to journalist Curtis Bill Pepper:
“Marriage should be only one thing: Two people decide they love each other so much that they want to stay together.... So, if in some way I don’t fulfill what he needs in a woman—emotionally, physically, sexually, or whatever it is—and if he needs somebody else, then I could not stick around. I’m not the kind to stay and make scenes.”3
Audrey, says Anna Cataldi, “behaved fantastically. She even stayed in Rome after they separated because she wanted Luca not to be split between his father and mother.”4
Dr. Dotti would later tell a People magazine reporter, “I was no angel—Italian husbands have never been famous for being faithful. But she was jealous of other women even from the beginning.”5 Hepburn would later come to a less Italian conclusion. “Those open marriages don’t work,” she said. “If there’s love, unfaithfulness is impossible.”6
“THE DIFFICULTY with stars,” says Billy Wilder, “is, what do they do at fifty or fifty-five?”7
It struck Audrey—as it had stricken the critics and millions of her fans--that Bloodline was no proper way to end such a grand film career. Her next picture, if she ever made one, might well be her last and had better be good. Among those clamoring for her film presence was director Peter Bogdanovich, who flew her to Los Angeles in January 1980 and instantly charmed her with his personality and with a script idea.
The title They All Laughed was borrowed from a Gershwin song composed for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance (1937). The story was a quirky romance-suspense caper concerning four private detectives in New York whose love lives get mixed up with their sleuthing.
Barbra Streisand, after working with Bogdanovich in the hilarious What’s Up, Doc?, called him “a horny bastard but brilliant.” He had been in a slump since the poorly received Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975)—starring his paramour, Cybill Shepherd. He spent the next three years breaking up with her, and then made SaintJack (1979), Paul Theroux’s novel of a Singapore pimp, starring Ben Gazzara.
“Benny couldn’t get a job in a feature to save his life then,” Bogdanovich recalls. “None of the majors wanted him. I said, ‘Fuck it,’ I was fed up with the whole system, so I went to Roger Corman and we made Saint Jack for under $2 million. When I screened it for Barry Diller and Michael Eisner in my projection room in Bel Air, they both flipped over Ben, and the next day—literally—they cast him in Bloodline.”
Thenceforth, Gazzara was an unsolicited hotline of information. During Bloodline, Bogdanovich recalls, “he was constantly calling me about Audrey.... ‘Is she wonderful? Oh, Jesus, an angel come down from heaven!’ They fell in love, he said. But Benny was going through a very bad time. His divorce was about to start. He would tell me these things candidly.
“So I wrote They All Laughed for Audrey, knowing what I knew because Ben had told me. I wrote those things into the script, and she knew it when she read it. It was what she was going through, an unhappy marriage, ten-year-old kid—all written for her based on what was happening in her life.
“The original idea of the detectives getting involved with their own clients was much like movie people who get involved romantically during their movies. It’s an occupational hazard. So it was really a thinly veiled picture of our own lives.”8
Cinema à clef. David Susskind bought the first draft of the script, but by the time it got to production, “it was totally different—almost unrecognizable except for the title,” says the director, “and Susskind was going crazy.” The project was sold to Time-Life Films, a new arm of the media conglomerate, which was looking for its first big hit and felt Audrey was the star to launch it. If They All Laughed even approached the success of Paper Moon or What’s Up, Doc?, everyone would be in clover.
The first version of the script was melancholy. In it, the detective played by John Ritter was still getting over a girl based on Shepherd. “It was going to be just Cybill’s photograph,” says Bogdanovich. “That was the joke. She and I had just broken up. But in November [1979], I met Dorothy, and she and I fell madly in love. Her original part was just one scene. But I decided to stretch her story out into a happy ending, and I rewrote the whole thing from the middle on.”9
Gorgeous Dorothy Stratten, a twenty-year-old Canadian model, was Playboy’s 1980 Playmate of the Year. When Bogdanovich met her at a Hugh Hefner party, all thoughts of Cybill Shepherd vanished from his mind. Stratten’s previous film work consisted of one unreleased film and one that should have remained unreleased——Galaxina (1980), a kind of Star Wars spoof in which she played a robot. But Bogdanovich was smitten and determined to make her a star. He also wanted to marry her, but she was already married to (though separated from) a small-time Los Angeles hustler named Paul Snider. While Stratten was shooting in New York, Snider was enraged by press stories of her affair with the director. He bought a shotgun and told friends, “I’m going to kill Bogdanovich,” but nobody paid attention to his threats.
Another marriage was breaking up, as well. The Dottis had begun divorce proceedin
gs by the time Hepburn arrived in New York City in mid-1980 to begin filming They All Laughed. She was depressed about that, and her life in general. Gazzara’s casting had been reason for her acceptance of the film: She was happy to be reunited with him, though she was distressed by the new round of tabloid stories blaming her for Gazzara’s divorce from Janice Rule. That subject was avoided in a New York Times interview with Michiko Kakutani on June 4, 1980, at the Cafe Pierre, where she sounded her “family values” theme once again but otherwise limited the discussion to her role.
She would be playing a Euro-millionaire’s wife in search of a Manhattan escapade—“witty and fragile and strong,” said Bogdanovich. “What I think is interesting is bringing an actor and character together so you don’t know where one leaves off and the other begins.” Audrey went along with it. “You have to refer to your own experience,” she told Kakutani. “What else have you got?” That—and her directors, whom she credited, as always, for her film success :
“I’m not trying to be coy. I really am a product of those men. I’m no Laurence Olivier, no virtuoso talent. I’m basically rather inhibited and I find it dif ficult to do things in front of people. What my directors have had in common is that they’ve made me feel secure, made me feel loved. I depend terribly on them. I was a dancer and they managed to do something with me as an actress that was pleasing to the public.”10
She still tried to control her wardrobe, at least. But in the case at hand, Bogdanovich recalls, “I came up to her room one day at the Pierre, laid out all her clothes, and said, ‘I like this shirt, these pants, this scarf.’ She said, ‘Fine.’ No Givenchy. Blue jeans, a pea coat, a silk shirt. Everything she wore in the movie was what she walked around in normally.”