by Barry Paris
“They brought in one hundred dress extras and at one a.m., when she came out to do her concert-pianist thing, they all stood and applauded her for three minutes. At that hour! She treated everybody so beautifully and created such a positive atmosphere around her. What you saw is what she was, in everything—my God, even her garden looked like her! I raise horses, and when she left to go back to Europe she gave me a wonderful painting of a horse, which I cherish and have hanging in my bedroom. She’s probably the most wonderful woman I ever met.”64
Contemporary critics were likewise enthralled with Hepburn but not with Thieves Like Us—a prototypical “TV-movie” shot mainly with commercial breaks in mind. By appearing in it, she was “stooping way down to conquer,” said Variety. 65
“Audrey Hepburn can do no wrong,” wrote John Leonard in New York magazine. “She can, however, be done wrong [as in] War and Peace, which was Tolstoy for morons. In the thirty years since her last appearance in an original television production [Mayerling], nobody at Lorimar seems to have learned anything.... Love Among Thieves wants to be witty and just sits there with a drool.”66
R. J. Wagner sighs and says, “I thought the critics were rather harsh with the picture. They were going for the ratings on TV and put it up against some pretty heavy stuff. Maybe they expected too much from it.”67
“IF A WOMAN of fifty is very thin, she can pass for years younger,” said Audrey Hepburn around 1979.
But what about a woman of sixty?
“Audrey was so beautiful, of course,” says Audrey Wilder. “But when you get older and you’re that thin, it doesn’t usually become you.”68
“She was too, too skinny when I saw her at parties,” insists Zsa Zsa Gabor.69 She had always been thin, but some thought she was now looking almost emaciated. In any case, it wasn’t her look but her health that mattered. The “A”-word was bandied about privately—anorexia—and a more aggressive series of interviewers got close to saying it when they questioned her.
“Why are you so thin?” asked Barbara Walters in March 1989.
“I was born thin,” Audrey replied. “My grandmother on my father’s side—we have exactly the same figure. I eat very well and I eat everything I want....”
“And nothing puts the weight on?”
“No.”
“May I ask what you weigh?”
“Fifty kilos. A hundred and ten pounds.”70
By current medical standards, a healthy woman of Audrey’s height (five-foot-seven) should weigh 127 pounds. She was thus only about 14 percent below “normal,” not enough to be clinically defined as anoretic.
“I don’t put on weight—it’s not part of my metabolism,” she told an Australian TV reporter in 1988.71 “I was just born this way,” she protested to another interviewer.72 Phil Donahue drew her feistiest responses to such personal probing in 1990:DONAHUE: You never became an egomaniac?
HEPBURN: How do you know? ...
DONAHUE: You are sixty.
HEPBURN: Sixty, yes—not sixteen, no.
DONAHUE: And you’ve had no cosmetic surgery?
HEPBURN: Naturally—not. [Applause; she turns to address the audience.] They said he was so great and so friendly. He’s asked me about my age and cosmetic surgery, and we haven’t done two minutes yet!
DONAHUE: And you’ve never had a weight problem?
HEPBURN: No.... If I get nervous, I don’t eat. I like to eat. But I need not to be nervous to eat. I’m very nervous, you see. I’m nervous now.73
Leslie Caron thought she had, if not anorexia, at least some kind of eating disorder. “Shirley MacLaine told me that [during The Children’s Hour], all she had for lunch was a hard-boiled egg. I would think that at times, when she was very nervous, she was almost anorexic. I’ve had that throughout my life. In times of stress, I can become anorexic if I don’t counterattack.”74
Laurie Stone in the Village Voice had a feminist take. In the fifties and sixties, wrote Stone, “No one talked publicly about anorexia; no one, in describing Hepburn, discussed the impulse to escape [gender stereotypes] expressed in radical dieting.... Her image was fabricated to suppress evidence of struggle.”75
But Givenchy and virtually all her other friends maintain that Hepburn never adhered to any tyrannical diet. “Hubert told me she would make huge plates of spaghetti and eat it quite enthusiastically,” says Leslie Caron.76
“I know some people that eat nothing but salad and vinegar,” says Audrey Wilder. “But not her. She was always eating spaghetti or a version of it.” Billy nods in agreement, adding, “She was so thin because she was a dancer.”77
Some claimed that her problem was bulimia, evidenced by the frequent hoarseness of her voice. Others say no—she was merely a smoker, easily tired by interviews. “I never saw her jump up and run to the bathroom at dinner af fairs,” says Jeffrey Banks. “She was just one of these people who was blessed with being basically thin, and a lot of people were jealous of that.”78
Doris Brynner gets irate on the subject:
“How dare they say she was anorexic? She loved her food and her spaghetti and her ice cream. She was just lucky that she didn’t put on weight; we all do after a certain age, but she never did. She adored her food.”79
Eating disorders range widely, of course, and “anorexic” is a loaded cultural term when used loosely as an adjective. Its informal adjectival meaning is lack of appetite; almost everyone is “anorexic” when sick, for instance. Anorexia nervosa, on the other hand, is a serious psychological or personality disorder—an aversion to food and obsession with weight loss or body image, for reasons of vanity or self-denial. “There’s a fine line between ‘fashionably thin’ and neurotic,” says diet authority Marilynn Gump. “Audrey obviously chose to be thin, but that’s no evidence that she had any clinical inability to nurture herself or repulsion to food.”80
Later Hepburn chroniclers would make strong assertions of anorexia.81 But the fact was, Audrey’s eating pattern never really varied over the years, and neither did her weight.
“THE CITIES are not a place for you if you are famous,” she said. “With the paparazzi in Rome, there is no privacy.... It is because I live in the country in Switzerland that I can lead a totally unself-conscious life and be totally myself. 82 ... I have a delightful rose garden and I have an orchard and jams and jellies to preserve. Sean is grown and married now, but he’s still very much a part of my life. Luca attends boarding school in Switzerland but is home every weekend.”
She was very much “a citizen of the world,” says Doris Brynner, “but Switzerland was home, and for such a long time. She adored her house.”*
Tolochenaz is just forty minutes from Geneva by train—a little local that changes at Nyon. As it treks northward, a wide expanse of land unfolds before the sparkling lake; beyond that are the Swiss Alps with their snow-covered caps. Clusters of new apartments are interspersed with great stretches of carefully maintained grapevines and row upon row of meticulously espaliered fruit trees. It is agriculture très fin, indeed.
There is no “station” at Tolochenaz, just a small sign, a walkway up to the road, and no indication whether the town is off to the left or to the right. It’s to the left—a fifteen-minute walk—and on a typical Sunday, there’s not an open shop or a soul to be seen. Empty, quiet, shuttered. One passes straight through in a minute or two.
Off the main drag to the west, up a rigorous climb, is the first of several entrances to a stunning estate: On a stone herald, in a script muted by centuries of rain, are inscribed the words La Paisible. The house at first doesn’t seem charming, imposing or even caractéristique. It looks ordinary. Why would Audrey Hepburn choose a home so close to the road—perhaps fifty feet away—and such a busy road at that?83
The answer lay within and behind the rambling, 1730 vintage farmhouse, especially in its expansive orchard and gardens where the mistress of the manor could usually be found digging. “Wonderful therapy being down in the dirt,” she said. “I couldn’t be
ar to live a social life.84
“I can take long walks, as I understand Greta Garbo does, and no one interferes with my thoughts and tranquility. Come to think of it, the other day I was on Fifth Avenue [in New York] and I saw a woman who could very well have been Garbo; I was a bit tempted to go up to her, but then I thought, ‘My God, practice what you preach! If it is her, you’ll be intruding—just the thing you don’t like yourself.’ ”85
In her orchard, she declared proudly, “every fruit you can imagine grows. First it’s the cherries, then come the plums, the greengages, apples, pears and quinces. And the berries, too, the raspberries. It takes a lot of care.”86
Her gardener, Giovanni Orunesu, was a former shepherd and the brother of her housekeeper Giovanna, who served her through the years with Ferrer, Dotti and Wolders over two decades. “Audrey took him and his wife in after a terrible drought in the seventies when his whole herd died and he had no place to go and a child on the way,” says Wolders. “Audreybu and Giovanni worked closely together on the garden ever after.”
Inside, the house was comfortable, balanced and pleasing. “It was beautiful and spectacular, but it wasn’t for show,” says garden enthusiast (and PBS producer) Janis Blackschleger, who visited her in September 1989. “It was for use.”87
On the solid white walls in the main hall was a huge painting of her grandfather and his brother with their dogs. On a nearby bureau sat photos of Audrey hugging Sean, her father on horseback, her brothers as children, Colette, Connie Wald, and—the only solo portrait of herself—a signed Cecil Beaton shot. On the ground floor was a room containing nothing but baskets, where she arranged her flowers. Overall, the furnishings were sparse, but “she loved every piece of furniture there,” says Anna Cataldi. “She would say, ‘I bought this dining table when I got married,’ and then tell you about it. Everything was white and beautiful in that house....
“My daughter Giaccaranda was in a Swiss boarding school then and sometimes spent the weekend at Audrey’s. My other daughter was a manic depressive [in a clinic at] Lausanne. They asked, ‘In case of emergency, who is the person to contact first?’ The name was always Audrey. We all asked too much of her.”88
By then, Audrey had lived in Switzerland for more than a quarter of a century.
“I love it,” she told Dominick Dunne. “I love the country. I love our little town and going to the open market twice a week. And Robbie and I are potty about our dogs.... They are totally dependent on you, and therefore completely vulnerable. And this complete vulnerability is what enables you to open up your heart totally, which you rarely do to a human being. Except, perhaps, children. Who thinks you’re as fantastic as your dog?”89
She was also very fond of ducks, and had a great number of duck decoys scattered about the house, though she hated the idea of hunting. For that matter, she had no real interest in any sports, including—to the amazement of the Swiss—skiing. She and Rob shared not only interests but disinterests. “We talked about the fact that in our Dutch childhood, skiing was for the elite,” says Wolders, “and you had to have money—which we didn’t—to go to Austria or Switzerland to do it.”
She was much more interested in the quietude of her home and the people she cared about, one of whom was Leendert de Jong. When he took her and Rob to the airport at the end of the 1988 “Film and Fashion” festival in Holland, she had kissed him and said, “Leendert, you must visit us in Tolochenaz.” He thought she was just being polite but found out otherwise in 1989:I called and said, “Audrey, my friend and I are going to the Venice film festival. Can we drop by?” She said, “You’re very welcome.” So we drove to Tolochenaz and stayed for four days. We just shared their daily routine—the market, shopping, meals together in the evening. We spoke about her mother and children ... personal things ...
She liked to get up very early. She said, “I have some sins,” and one them was smoking. She was smoking cigarettes and answering letters in her white dressing gown with her hair loose, no makeup. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t wear makeup at home.” I said, “Of course not.” She would take us to the kitchen and make breakfast.... One night at dinner when I asked her something about “stardom,” she said, “Oh, come on, I’m not a movie star. Liz Taylor is a movie star.” I think she really meant it. She said, “You chose to be in films as a programmer of an art house. I happened to be an actress. It was not my first choice, but I did my best to do it as well as I could. I became this, you became that, another person becomes a carpenter....” As a movie buff, I wanted to hear some stories, but she didn’t like to speak about that so much. My friend was a big Montgomery Clift fan and he said, “Did you ever meet Monty?” She said, “Oh, yes, a darling man.” And then she walked into the kitchen, and that was the end of the discussion....
On Sunday when we were leaving for Venice, she said, “I’ll make lunch so you can eat it on your way.” We said no, don’t bother. “No, no—what do you like on your bread?” I said cheese and butter, and my friend said, no butter. She gave us two Chanel bags and we thanked her, kissed goodbye. Halfway to Venice we stopped and opened the bags. There were real glasses inside and two pieces of paper, one with my name and one with my friend’s—with and without butter. She was always taking care of people.90
Swiss society and geography lent itself to a kind of selective intimacy. “Everybody respected everybody else’s privacy,” says Rob Wolders. “Even with someone like Hubert, a great friend of forty years, months went by when we wouldn’t see him. But then he and Audrey would pick up right where they left off. She had very strong friendships like that. The strongest was with Doris Brynner, though Doris used to be annoyed with us because she thought we were antisocial sticks-in-the-mud. But from the time Audrey and I met, we basically made time only for each other and didn’t go out much. We loved films and I got tapes of everything of any consequence, which we watched.”
Watching movies on TV was her favorite pastime, she told Wichita Eagle film writer Bob Curtwright at the time.91 She loved Gerard Depardieu’s Cyrano “because they kept it intimate,” and Spielberg’s ET, and “anything with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. I like to watch them in my bed—that’s the best place! I just saw Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons in The Mission and thought that was a lovely film. And I very much liked Prizzi’s Honor.”
When asked to name her favorite contemporary actresses, she cited Pfeif fer, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and Cher (see Cher’s letter to Hepburn, Chapter 10, pp. 328-29.) “Cher has an enormous scale of emotions and total lack of inhibition, which I haven’t,” she said. “Meryl Streep is a phenomenon. She can make herself look any way she wants and become so many different people. She can do anything she wants. I can’t.”92
Wolders was fascinated by the way Audrey influenced people like Julia Roberts and Liza Minnelli. “Like so many of the younger actresses I saw with Audrey, she and Liza had this wonderful hugging thing—this trust.” Nastassia Kinski encountered Audrey for the first time in Paris, at the French Oscars. “I felt a tap on my shoulder,” says Rob, “and this demure little girl whispered, ‘Can I meet her?’ Audrey turned around at that moment and they recognized each other. Kinski took Audrey’s hands and, not quite knowing what to do, just held her hands to her face and kissed them like a child.”
On the few occasions when she went into Geneva, Rob or Doris would drive her. Doris had a boutique there. But something about Geneva did not appeal to her—perhaps its obsession with money. “C’est juste” is one of the most common expressions there, meaning “That’s right,” as when correct change is given. Like most things in Geneva, it implies an economic transaction. The better shop doors, with their POIGNÉE AUTOMATIQUE signs, open by themselves at your approach to make it easier to buy. In that haven of commercialism, it seems that few ideas and even fewer feelings are exchanged. Thousands of elderly women (“Greta Garbos,” some call them) walk around in fur coats, often talking to themselves. The great Swiss banking culture has created not only a prix fixe for everyt
hing but great social distance.93
In subtle ways, it reinforced Hepburn’s reluctance to go there more than necessary. Doris Brynner was better equipped and more adept at dealing with it, but even she understood the social and professional implications for her friend: “We were always pushing Audrey to make another movie,” Doris says, “but the only thing she really looked forward to was staying home.”
ROB WOLDERS looked forward to the same thing, bewitched by Audrey and everything about her—not least, conversing with her in their native tongue. “She was the only person I ever knew who made Dutch sound beautiful,” he says. They spoke it frequently “because there are Dutch expressions that just don’t exist in English. Audrey was able to do various Dutch accents very well, especially the more vulgar dialects, which amused her very much. She would break me up. Sometimes we used Dutch to say things we didn’t want anyone else to understand. Her Dutch was heavenly, the most palatable I ever heard—the kind spoken prior to the war, learned from her mother and grandfather.” Says Rob’s brother-in-law, Dr. Ronald Glegg: “When she went into Dutch, her sense of humor came through more. Her tone of voice changed, and she became more childlike and endearing.” But linguistics were only the most obvious of their many cultural and emotional ties.
“Robbie is totally Dutch,” she told Alan Riding of The New York Times Paris bureau. “The two of us discovered how much pride we had in our roots and the respect we have for the Dutch.... They’ve always had an immensely practical and courageous way of dealing with things. They’re not fussers, they’re solid and very liberal.... Rob has a lovely Dutch family—umpteen sisters and a wonderful mother. As you get older, it’s nice to feel you belong somewhere—having lived a rather circus life.”94