by Barry Paris
Some of the news media, flippantly but fondly, called her “Mother Teresa in designer jeans.” Columnist Liz Smith was one of the first to refer to her as “Saint Audrey.” Sally Jessy Raphael recalled the day she appeared on Raphael’s program to talk about Somalia: “The people who work with me are pretty tough cookies. But during the interview with Audrey, [everyone] showed such love and such respect. The crew lined up afterward and she went down the line shaking hands. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those hardened men and women almost wept. It was as if they knew they would never see her again.”107
Shortly afterward, the United States military went into Somalia in full force. “She was very glad when they did,” says Christa Roth. “I think that was something she prompted.”
NEVER BEFORE in film history had so great a star lent herself so vigorously to such an urgent crusade. But the toll was enormous. “She suffered terribly inside,” said Elizabeth Taylor. When she saw the things she did in Somalia, “she didn’t reflect that to the children,” says Roger Moore. “She hid from them what was going on inside her. It doesn’t do to show a person who is suffering that you’re terribly upset by it.”108
She spoke of that agonizing problem herself:
“There’s this curious—embarrassment or timidity that comes over one when you walk into a feeding center like that. I feel I shouldn’t be there. I think I should leave them alone. It’s like walking into somebody’s room who is dying, and only the family should be there. [You long] to pick up one of those children and give it some kind of warmth.... They’re so frail that I worry I am going to break their little body and—and it’s unbearable. It just is so totally unacceptable to see small children die in front of your eyes.”
Somalia was the worst. “She came back and said, ‘I’ve been to hell,’” says her son Sean, “and every time she spoke about it, she had to relive it. Nothing ever prepared her for going to a camp and meeting a little kid and coming back the next day and he wasn’t there anymore. You’re supposed to go back to your hotel room and drink bottled water? Get on a plane and go back to your regular life? It throws your whole world out of balance.”
In the end, says Anna Cataldi, “she had this rage. The more she saw, the more rage she had. In Somalia, she was really furious with what she constantly was seeing.”109
Audrey used the same word: “I’m filled with a rage at ourselves. I don’t believe in collective guilt, but I do believe in collective responsibility.”110 Buckminster Fuller, the great philosopher-inventor, once said, “Politics is simply a function of the inequitable distribution of food and other basic life necessities.” It was Hepburn’s principle as well.
“Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics,” she would say. “Politics has nothing to do with one’s helping a dying child. Survival, that’s what it’s about.111 ... I think perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics.”
She and Rob were “closet politicians” in many ways. During the Gulf War, while most Americans were tying yellow ribbons on their mailboxes and celebrating the fact that only seventy-five Americans died, Hepburn and Wolders were concerned about the enormous brutality and the real statistics—concealed by both Saddam Hussein and George Bush—that 150,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians and many of them children, were killed in the American bombings.
A week after that conflict began, Audrey and Rob attended a meeting of the UNICEF national committees in Geneva, where Jim Grant spoke optimistically about what could be done for Iraqi children once the war was over.
“He didn’t talk about the horror of the war or what the overall results might be from a historical perspective,” Wolders recalls. “We were aghast. It was as if he were talking about Grenada. Audrey was as close to depression as I’d seen her over the whole situation, and when it came her turn to speak, she said it was UNICEF’s duty to speak out against the injustices that caused such misery, and not simply to help out after the damage was done. There wasn’t a single person who didn’t come up to thank her. They thought there was something wrong with Jim for making no mention of the significance of the war, which we felt was going to interfere immensely with UNICEF’s work.”
In 1992, when asked to identify UNICEF’s single greatest problem, Hepburn’s one-word answer was, “War.” Currently, she said, “the developing countries spend about $150 billion on arms each year. Meanwhile, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council sell 90 percent of the world’s arms.”112
She was no figurehead ambassador. “The work Audrey does for UNICEF is imperative for us,” said Lawrence E. Bruce, Jr., the president of the United States Committee for UNICEF. Under Bruce’s leadership, the U.S. Committee had more than doubled its fund-raising revenue, from $18 million in 1985 to $46 million in 1992. Audrey was extremely fond of him.113
“He was very warm and generous,” says Jill Rembar, who worked for him for four years. “He had much to do at UNICEF, but Audrey always came first with him because she was so important to fund-raising, and because, personally, he just adored her.”
Bruce died at forty-seven, on Christmas Eve 1992, of AIDS.
Rembar remembers the video footage of Audrey’s first UNICEF trip with Bruce, to Ethiopia: “Audrey was walking around the refugee camps, reaching out to people. Emaciated babies, flies on their eyes. She’s picking them up, kissing them, without knowing what diseases they might have. I said to Rob, ‘It looks like Audrey didn’t care what was the matter with them. She had no thought for herself.’ Rob said, ‘Well, you’d be the same.’ A chill went through me. I thought, ‘I don’t think so.’ But that’s how he was—and that’s how she was, too.”114
THE HORROR OF SOMALIA was indelible. But, even so, it would be wrong to think that Audrey Hepburn saw only misery in her last years. “It wasn’t all heartache,” says Rob. “We weren’t endlessly traveling for UNICEF. We’d always come back to the haven at home. UNICEF took over a certain part of our lives, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t time for the other things we enjoyed. In the last year, we spent a great deal of time in Gstaad in the mountains, where Audrey had a small condominium-chalet. We had missed going there for a few years, but during that summer, Audrey was bursting with energy and we took walks that we had planned to take for years.”
Michael Tilson Thomas remembers one such occasion, just three weeks before she left for Somalia, when he visited Audrey in between performances with the London Symphony Orchestra on its tour of Switzerland: She took an immense delight in having a quiet dinner with friends and saying, ‘Oh, it’s still light, let’s go for a walk’—a walk which was off the roads, down the cow tracks, up and down, over and across everything, very swift. Not exactly a leisurely stroll. She liked to move, very much appreciating each environment she came to—the smell of the flowers, the wonderful disorder of a harvested field—and she got you to appreciate it as well.
Those walks were wonderful. She talked about her friends and her concern for them, for me—was I working too hard? She was aware of the enormous pressure that people in ‘the business’ are under. She felt that even people who seemed to be perfectly fine were in danger psychologically. She was always looking at everyone and thinking, “Are you okay? Is there any way I can help?”115
Perhaps due to Thomas’s influence, she had undertaken a recording project of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals and Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite for Dove Audio Tapes in May 1992—her last professional endeavor. The result was Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales, conducted by Lalo Schifrin and hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a perfect introduction to classical music.”116 Its proceeds went to the ASPCA.
“Audrey was a great cutup—very impish and playful,” says Wolders. “It’s a quality you find in children and in puppies, which might explain why she was so drawn to animals—and perhaps had more trust in animals than in human beings. Sometimes when she would show a great deal of love for someone on whom I felt it was wasted, I�
��d say, ‘Don’t you expect something in return?’ She would say, ‘No. My love for them doesn’t mean I expect anything back. It’s like with an animal.’ ”117
John Isaac recalled that, “no matter where we went, even in Bangladesh, she would say, ‘Oh, look at those pooches!’ She’d be reminded of her puppies at home. She loved animals, people, trees—she basically just loved life.”
The catalyst for her involvement with Carnival of the Animals was Roger Caras, president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He had met her in 1991 when she flew in to New York to attend an ASPCA fund-raiser. Later, pianist Mona Golabek asked if he would put her in touch with Audrey for the Carnival recording, and he did. It would win a Grammy award. Caras’s fondness for her is boundless:Her desire for privacy was very real. She didn’t want to live like Madonna. Once I walked down a hallway at the St. Regis Hotel with her, and in all my years working with the press, I’d never been so blinded. I’d never seen photographers jump on someone as when Audrey Hepburn walked in that room in New York City. She was on my arm and I had to steady her. About five hundred flash bulbs went off in our faces. They went crazy. I never saw that kind of adulation.
She had a quality I found in Eleanor Roosevelt. When Audrey said to you, ‘How are you, dear?’ she looked in your eyes and wanted an answer. It was not a form of salutation. It was a question from someone who cared. It was that one-on-one quality that electrified everyone. When Audrey was talking or listening to you, you possessed her totally and she possessed you. There were differences between her and Eleanor, but they both built instant bridges to anyone they were with. What they wanted was your soul.118
By SOME ACCOUNTS, Audrey first started to suffer from abdominal pain and colitis in the summer of 1992—before leaving for Somalia—but refused to heed her Swiss doctors’ advice to go in for tests and, once in Somalia, “kept clutching her stomach and wincing in pain.”119 Rob Wolders denies it: “We had no idea Audrey was sick when we went to Somalia. There were no warning signs of illness until we’d been back several weeks.”
It is true that, in some of the photographs, Audrey looks almost as thin as the starving children she is holding. But in her subsequent European and American press conferences, she appeared to be fine and there seemed no cause for alarm.
With Somalia behind, she had returned to Switzerland with Rob for a few weeks before setting off again for the United States in October to honor two long-standing engagements, one at the George Eastman House in Rochester and the other in New York two days later. Following that, they planned to spend ten days in the Caribbean on a much-needed holiday.
As she wanted to see Sean, they flew first to California for a short stay with Connie Wald. “The pain became intense in Los Angeles,” Rob recalls. “We rushed her to the doctor and she underwent every conceivable test. But they couldn’t find anything and they said it would be all right to travel. They knew it was important to us. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been that important.”
The events in Rochester, October 24 and 25, 1992, were rather more grueling than either she or Rob had expected. On the first evening, she met with the press at six o’clock—looking pained during the photo session—and attended a long dinner and social afterward, which began at eight and was still going on when she and Rob left much later in the evening.
She rallied the next night for the presentation of the Eastman Award, following a screening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Aware that she was in some pain, Eastman director James Enyeart had proposed limiting the postfilm question-and-answer session to half an hour. It was agreed that Rob would give Audrey a sign when the half hour was up. She looked frail in her somber black satin Givenchy gown. But she got caught up in the spirit of the event, buoyed by a pleasant surprise midway and then by a series of intelligent questions on Somalia. When Rob signaled her that the half hour was up, she didn’t want to stop and kept going.
The surprise took the form of an old pal. A woman in the audience stood up and asked if Audrey remembered the gentleman sitting next to her. Audrey stared in amazement: “Yes, absolutely! Of course I remember you! My God, you haven’t changed a bit! Nick Dana, ladies and gentlemen, a fabulous dancer! We danced together in High Button Shoes in 1948! ... You were awfully good, flipping across that stage at the Hippodrome!”
Dana recalls that “Rob was crouched down the whole time on the side of the organ, checking on her, waiting to see if she got too weak.” But her adrenaline was flowing, and she was determined to make everyone happy and answer all the questions she could—including a nasty one from a man demanding to know why she had left the previous night’s event so quickly.
“Forgive me for leaving early last night,” she said, “but I’m still very jet-lagged.”
That was partly true. “She didn’t want to say, ‘I’m also in great pain,’ ” says Rob. “Nobody knew how ill she was—how could they? I didn’t, either. It was quite heroic what she did that night. They never had such a turnout and couldn’t accommodate everyone in the [Dryden] Theater. They had to use the ballroom, with a closed-circuit TV, and Audrey made it a point at the end to go to the other hall and greet the people there as well.”
The next day, a call came from the doctors in Los Angeles saying that the test results indicated Audrey had an amoeba. She was given a prescription—essentially, a massive purge—which made her feel so terrible that she stopped taking it after the first few pills. They went on to New York City, where she did several more interviews and accepted a Maria Casita Award from Ralph Lauren at the Plaza Hotel. In just twenty-four hours, they were to leave for Antigua. But her pain became so intense during dinner that they canceled the holiday and decided to fly back to Los Angeles for urgent medical attention.
The following morning on their way to the airport, despite her pain, Audrey insisted on stopping first at Larry Bruce’s apartment for a brief visit. He was dying, and she knew it.
GUILT AND hindsight go hand in hand.
“People said Audrey knew she was ill, but I absolutely know she didn’t,” says Anna Cataldi. “She had a routine checkup in August in Geneva, including a colonoscopy, before the trip to Somalia, and they said she was okay.”
Cataldi had her own Somalia assignment for Epoca magazine in Milan, and for the rest of August, she and Audrey spoke frequently on the phone about what they had to do to prepare:
“Audrey did all the vaccinations—even meningitis. I did only yellow fever and tetanus, but she did everything. If a person knows she’s sick, she would not go through all those vaccinations. Audrey led a healthy life, lived in the country, went to bed early. She was very careful. We were not protective enough towards her because she was always so healthy. People didn’t think there was any reason to worry about her.”120
At the beginning of October, Cataldi stopped by Audrey’s room in Nairobi’s Intercontinental Hotel to say farewell before she left Africa for her press obligations in Europe. “When I hugged her,” Anna recalls, “I was scared. I had a shiver. She said, ‘War didn’t kill me, and this won’t either.’ But I had the feeling that sooner or later, war kills you. She was so skinny. I felt something was really wrong.”
In their last conversation there, Cataldi recalls, “She told me what shocked her more than anything was Kismayu, because every child was dead. She said, ‘I have nightmares. I cannot sleep. I’m crying all the time.’ She had seen a lot of terrible things with UNICEF, but she broke in Somalia. I went back in a state of shock myself.”121 John Isaac, too, felt “it took a heavy toll on somebody as sensitive as Audrey,” adding that “I’m still recovering from Rwanda. I had to go for therapy. I couldn’t function. I was totally stunned.”
Cataldi claims Audrey’s beloved maid Giovanna “hated UNICEF” for its harmful impact on Audrey’s health. “Andrea Dotti also felt it was UNICEF’s fault in a way,” Cataldi says, “because when Audrey started to look bad, everybody just said, ‘Oh, she looks terrible because she is emotionally stressed.’ Robert once aske
d me, ‘Do you think I made a mistake in letting her go?’ I told him, ‘You didn’t make her go. She had a need to go. She would have gone even if she had known that she had only a year to go.’ She told me, ‘I have this obsession because of the children.’ ”
In a dark corner of the New York restaurant where she is recounting those last days, Anna Cataldi kneads her handkerchief and takes a minute to compose herself before concluding:
“I witnessed a human being—the famous Audrey Hepburn—at the moment she had everything she wanted. She finally had the right man. She had a beautiful home. She said, ‘I would like to take a year and enjoy my garden, my house, Robbie, my children.... I worked since I was twelve years old. Now it’s time to rest.”’
Audrey Hepburn’s drawing of an Ethiopian mother and child, 1990 UNICEF card.
Doris Brynner expresses a similar view:
“She certainly did her job. She did get everything a human being could do for UNICEF. It was even more physically exhausting than making movies and much more emotionally involved. Whenever she came back here to Switzerland, all she wanted was to stay at home. She was going to give up the United Nations. She was tired—emotionally and physically drained.”122
To Alan Riding of The New York Times Paris bureau, Audrey said, “I decided to do as much as possible in the time that I’m still up to it. Because I’m running out of gas.... I’ve done it on a constant basis because I know I cannot keep it up for long.”123
CHAPTER 11