by Barry Paris
Audrey instantly connected with the Wolders clan, most of all with Rob’s mother, Cemelia, whom she would soon call “Mama.” They developed a strong, surrogate mother-daughter relationship, says Dr. Glegg, husband of Rob’s sister Grada: “The Wolders family is very tightly knit. Audrey recognized that and fit in closely on many warm occasions in Rochester around the dinner table with a dozen relatives.” Otherwise, her favorite place there was most unlikely: the huge, suburban Irondequoit Mall.
“It’s the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen!” she’d exclaim. “Can we go?” Glegg recalls her “teenager’s pleasure there—and she looked like a teenager, too, in her jeans and sweater.” He savors, even more, her visits with him and Grada at their home on Longboat Key in Florida: “She loved the pristine beauty, the birds, the barefoot walks in the sand. She tended to take charge of our kitchen, and that lady in the kitchen with no makeup and curlers in her hair didn’t mind being seen that way.”95
All of her life she had been searching for a man capable of returning her love unequivocally. In Rob, she had finally met “her spiritual twin, the man she wanted to grow old with.96 It took me a long time to find [him, but] it is better late than never. If I’d met him when I was eighteen, I wouldn’t have appreciated him. I would have thought, ‘That’s the way everyone is.’
“I still feel I could lose everything at any moment. But the greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings.... I’m a long way from the human being I’d like to be. But I’ve decided I’m not so bad after all.”97
Her need for the quiet life was fully in sync with his own, says Wolders: “Sometimes, Audrey would become exasperated because Doris or somebody would say, ‘What do you do all day?’ We found that the day would fly by because the things we were involved with took a lot of time—the market, and so forth. You cook a meal carefully, hours go into that. For our own sake, but mostly for the dogs, we’d go to the lake and take our walks there. On a Sunday afternoon, if the weather allowed, we would have a swim, take some sun—in— variably, at some point, Audrey would disappear and come back with a basket of fruit or vegetables.”
Wolders recalls the summer of 1990 when the huge, seventy-year-old willow tree outside their home keeled over and crashed to the ground—“this thing that we both loved. It was so big that even lying on its side, the branches were still higher than the house. Then Tuppy, our Jack Russell terrier, died.” Those events might strike others as trivial, “but they were tragedies for us. It’s amazing how such things become so important when you lead that kind of life. Luca once laughed his head off because adjacent to the house was the little village church, and its bell would sound on the hour and half hour. It was a major part of our lives, but they were doing some renovation and we missed those wonderful sounds. One day, the bells started to peal at noon and we both yelled. We were so delighted. Luca thought we were nuts. But it was a part of our lives that had been restored.”
Life in Tolochenaz, after all, was simple.
“We would go to town to shop,” Rob recalls, “which meant going to the dry-goods store, the stand where we bought our mushrooms, etc. Audrey loved shopping—and she was a maniac in a supermarket. She said it harked back to the starvation days when you needed a coupon to get an ounce of butter in Holland. The supermarket in Tolochenaz didn’t exist until about five years ago, but she loved it. She was like a child, and we would end up with a lot of stuff we didn’t need. In the smaller shops, she’d settle into a discussion with the owners, and I preferred those places because she wouldn’t go bananas.”
When asked what, for her, would constitute the perfect day, Audrey once replied, “It’s going to sound like a thumping bore, but my idea of heaven is [having] Robert and my two sons at home—I hate separations—and the dogs, a good movie, a wonderful meal and great television all coming together. I’m really blissful when that happens. [My goal] was not to have huge luxuries. As a child, I wanted a house with a garden, which I have today. This is what I dreamed of. I’d never worry about age if I knew I could go on being loved and having the possibility to love. If I’m old and my husband doesn’t want me, or my children think me ugly and do not want me—that would be a tragedy. So it isn’t age or even death that one fears, as much as loneliness and the lack of affection.” 98
There was no danger of her children rejecting her, and no lack of affection from Rob. Paradoxically, for not being her husband, she found she could count on him even more.
CHAPTER 10
Apotheosis (1988-1993)
“Somebody said to me, ‘You know, it’s really senseless what you’re doing. There’s always been suffering, there will always be, and you’re just prolonging the suffering of these children [by rescuing them].’ My answer is, ‘Okay, then, let’s start with your grandchild. Don’t buy antibiotics if it gets pneumonia. Don’t take it to the hospital if it has an accident.”’
—AUDREY HEPBURN
I AM SORT OF MARRIED TO ROBERT,” SHE TOLD HIS HOMETOWN newspaper, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, in 1989. ”We’re always together and we have been for almost ten years now.“1
She turned sixty that May, and it was assumed that her film career was finished. But she now surprised everyone by agreeing to a cameo role in a new Steven Spielberg movie.
“She was as uncertain and nervous and undecided about her last film as she had been with Roman Holiday, her first,” says Wolders.2 Hepburn and Spielberg had never met. But she finally accepted the job because she admired his films and because he promised her it could be done in just a few days that summer.
“We left everything behind and got on a plane [for] Montana,” she said.3 By the time she arrived, costar Richard Dreyfuss had finished most of his own shooting and now turned over the house he was renting—a wonderful log cabin in the Montana woods—to Audrey and Rob.
Always (1989) starred Holly Hunter, John Goodman and Brad Johnson, as well as Hepburn and Dreyfuss. It was pure, nostalgic Spielberg—a remake of Victor Fleming’s World War II “morale booster,” A Guy Named Joe (1943), in which flier Spencer Tracy, killed in action, returns as a friendly ghost to watch over his girl, Irene Dunne, and her new romance with Van Johnson. Spielberg transposed his version to the present-day American west; the soldiers in battle became firefighters in a national forest.
The original had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who also wrote Roman Holiday, thus providing an alpha-omega bracket to her American career. But Audrey’s tiny role in this one was hard to describe. “Nobody knows what I am,” she said, “even Steven Spielberg! I would say I’m a spirit.... but not an extraterrestrial. It’s just plain old me with a sweater on.”4
Wolders recalls it as “a fantastic experience for Audrey. She worked a great deal over the phone with the writers, who wanted to tailor it to Audrey and get her input. Then Spielberg and Dreyfuss came to this lovely house in the woods, and they sat around and talked about what was she going to wear. I even went into the little town, Libby, to see what was in the shops there. All they had were hardware stores that also sold clothes. They finally decided on a simple turtleneck instead of wings.”
The typical Spielbergian opening is full of suspense: Dreyfuss’s plane is out of fuel but he manages to land. The gripping forest-fire scenes employ spectacular footage taken during the 1988 fires at Yellowstone National Park. But soon enough, after Dreyfuss executes a brilliant midair rescue of Goodman, his own plane catches fire and explodes.
Enter Audrey as “Hap”—a New Age angel in slacks, sent down to assist the freshly deceased Dreyfuss. Quietly, she explains that he must return to earth to inspire others and that true love means letting go. Only Hepburn’s sincerity redeems her platitudinous dialogue: “The love we hold back is the only thing that follows us here.” The “here” is evidently heaven—a meadow. “Time’s funny stuff,” she tells him.
Down below, dispatcher Holly Hunter grieves for Dreyfuss as she listens to their painfully ironic theme song—“Smoke Gets in Yo
ur Eyes.” Hunter is the best thing in the film, exuding erotic presence and an exquisite sense of longing. In the movie’s most haunting moment, she dances in a seductive white dress with Dreyfuss’ ghost, without ever touching.
Hunter and Hepburn had no scenes together but enjoyed each other off the set. Wolders has fond memories of the time it was arranged for the whole cast and crew to go on a special outing to Coeur d’Alene Lake, just across the Idaho border from Spokane:
“They hired two huge busses to accommodate one hundred people, and it tells you something about Audrey and Holly that—as good professionals—they were the first ones on the bus. But only about six other people showed up, probably because they didn’t think Audrey or Holly or anybody else ‘important’ would go. While we were sitting there waiting, the radar thing in the bus kept beeping, and finally Holly yelled, ‘Shut that fucking thing up!’ Audrey found that extremely funny, and we spent a lovely evening on the boat with Holly that night.”
With its overbearing John Williams musical score, Always is sweetly sappy, imbued with Spielberg’s penchant for the supernatural and his simpleminded conviction that death, evil and everything else can be overcome through wishful thinking.
Variety opined that Audrey was “alluring as always, but corny as a live-action fairy godmother.”5 Leonard Maltin said Always suffered “from a serious case of The Cutes.” Pauline Kael in the New Yorker was most severe:Was there no one among Steven Spielberg’s associates with the intellectual stature to convince him that his having cried at A Guy Named Joe when he was 12 was not a good enough reason for him to remake it? [He] has caught the surface mechanics of ‘40s movies [but has] no grasp of the simplicity that made them affecting. He overcooks everything, in a fast, stressful style.
Audrey Hepburn ... delivers transcendental inanities in the cadences that have stoned audiences at the Academy Awards and other film-industry shebangs ; people see her, rise to their feet, and applaud. She’s become a ceremonial icon, ravishing and hollow. Where has the actress gone—the one who gave a magnificent performance in The Nun’s Story? There’s no hint of her in this self-parody....
In 1943, it was the finality of death that was being repressed. What the New Age hell is being repressed now?6
But Audrey was thrilled by her ten-day close encounter with Spielberg: “I loved it, and I wouldn’t mind if he asked me again, like next summer. I’d be right back. I had really one of the best times of my life.”7 The admiration was mutual. Spielberg said one of the greatest thrills of his life was to have worked with Audrey. Universal lobbied to get her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, but Always—and the last performance of Audrey Hepburn—were overlooked.
The final tally was twenty-nine motion pictures, counting her two TV films—a modest total for such a stellar career.
In the second of her two scenes in the Spielberg film, Hepburn gently lectures Dreyfuss: “What we gave you is a chance to say, ‘I’m glad I lived, I’m glad I was alive’ ... and a chance to say goodbye.”
AUDREY’S DEEP involvement with UNICEF actually began a year before she made Always (and will be chronicled in detail below). But though all her UNICEF work was dramatic, no formal dramatic performance had been asked of her until an unusual benefit with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in December 1988.
“This evening brings together all the things I love—children, music and UNICEF,” she began, in English and French. Then, with conductor Bruce Pullan and the Bach Children’s Chorus, she took part in a superb new Winnie the Pooh oratorio by David Niel for orchestra and children’s chorus. Between musical sections, she read selected Winnie tales, as kids clustered around her onstage, mesmerized by a voice perfectly suited to A. A. Milne. “Pooh was doing his stoutness exercises before the glass ... ,” she began, and smiles instantly appeared on every young face. Words and music alike were magical.
Live concert-stage performances made her just as nervous as any other kind of public speaking. But that one set an important precedent for a more potent musical collaboration to come. “It came about because of Audrey’s desire for it,” says conductor-composer Michael Tilson Thomas. Hepburn would read selections from The Diary of Anne Frank, integrated into an original orchestral work by Thomas, using themes from the kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer. A series of benefit concerts for UNICEF would take place in March 1990 with Thomas’s Miami-based New World Symphony Orchestra in five American cities, plus a performance with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1991.
“Anne’s story is my own,” she often said. “I knew so many girls like Anne. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.”
She had resisted all previous invitations to portray Anne Frank. But at this point in her life, with Thomas’s encouragement, she changed her mind. In a quavering voice, she tried to explain why to Larry King:
“When the liberation finally came, too late for Anne Frank, I took up my ballet lessons and went to live in Amsterdam with my mother in a house we shared with a lady writer, who one day handed me a book in galley form and said, ‘I think you’d like to read this.’ It was in Dutch, 1947: The Diary of Anne Frank. I was quite destroyed by it. [Later, when] I was asked to do the picture and the play, I was never able to.8 There were floods of tears. I became hysterical. I just couldn’t deal with it.9 ”But now, I think it is a wonderful occasion to pay tribute to this child, and I think Anne Frank would be very happy that today her words will be used to bring solace to so many children in conflict, and in aid of UNICEF.“10
Her emotional resistance had been overcome by the format and by the nature of her psychological approach. “The difference now is I’m not ‘playing’ Anne Frank,” she said. “I’m just relaying her thoughts. I’m reading. I still wouldn’t play her. It would have been like putting me back into the horrors of that war.”11 Even just reading the excerpts was painful, but she would do it. Composer Michael Tilson Thomas illuminates the process:We both read the diary and made notations of the passages we liked most. We discovered there were a number of passages we both agreed on, and I asked Audrey to make me a tape of her reading those sections. I listened to that and started to think about how the music would work—to put order into it, how it would flow. But so much of the music, I realize now, was influenced by hearing the way she read, her voice, her personality. The piece is as much about Audrey as about Anne Frank.12
Thomas’s result, From the Diary of Anne Frank, was a set of symphonic variations created “in a kind of stream of consciousness way,” he says. He had precious little time to put it together—two months to write nearly thirty minutes of music. Holed up with a coffeepot in Miami, he called Audrey now and then for moral support and completed the piano score. They then met in Zurich, where Thomas was conducting with the London Symphony. He played it through for her, for the first time.
“She was blown away,” says Thomas, with no hint or need of modesty. “She had no idea what it was going to be like. I think she was terrified that it would be some giant, bizarre, dissonant, horrible thing.”
What she heard, instead, was one of the century’s most moving, melodic and muscular requiems, its tragic angularity both subtle and soaring. “She was relieved,” says the composer. “But it was still a major stretch for her to relate to this very intricate music. She didn’t read music; she didn’t have a musical education. She heard it in a very different way. It was an arduous process. She was nervous to do something like this live. It was a huge act of daring and devotion on her part.13
Frank’s diary, Thomas’s music and Hepburn’s speech merged in a richly creative way. It was her first true stage appearance in thirty-five years—in many ways more powerful than any film role she ever played. She read with astonishing simplicity and understatement, the melody of her voice an unpredictable delight. Her intensity brought audiences to tears. She had said she wasn’t going to “play” Anne—but that, in the end, was precisely what she did.
“It was an ama
zing kind of inward acting,” says Thomas, as if she was “imagining the cadences of the thought that the words represented, rather than ‘playing’ it to the audience.” Rob Wolders was with her at every rehearsal and performance and says, “In my mind, she became Anne Frank almost against her wishes, in the expression of emotion, her whole comportment, not just the voice. It’s a pity there is no videotape.”bv
Thomas’s favorite moment was just before the premiere, when she was debating what to wear: “She said, ‘I can’t decide if I should wear the pantsuit or the dress. Let me model them for you.’ She went into the next room and came back wearing this very elegant pantsuit and struck some tomboyish poses. Then she got very serious and said, ‘Now, I’ll show you the dress.’ She disappeared and came back wearing this stunningly understated Givenchy creation which hugged her gorgeous frame. I was absolutely dumbstruck. I just stood there with my mouth open, speechless. After a moment, she looked at me very kindly and said, ‘I guess you prefer the dress.’ ”14
From the Diary of Anne Frank premiered in Philadelphia on March 19, 1990. There, and throughout the tour, she was touched by the groups of schoolchildren who greeted her and gave her flowers and scrolls with messages to deliver—somehow—to children in the Third World. The production moved on to Miami, Chicago and then Houston.
“We were ‘down’ after some mediocre reviews and had to travel to Houston the next day, changing planes, everybody exhausted,” says Rob. “The moment we got there, they had an interview set up for Audrey, who was terribly tired. But it was one of the best she ever gave.” Indeed, the delicate questions of KTRK-TV producer Shara Fryer on March 22 drew her out to an unusual degree. She sat unabashed in her wrinkled shirt and slacks and sneakers from the plane and, among other things, made an extraordinary statement on the subject of emotional pain.