Audrey Hepburn (34 page)

Was it true that she cried in Stockholm because the authorities would not let her dog enter Sweden?

No, she hadn't.

Was she afraid of a maniac in England who was said to be stalking her there?

No, she wasn't.

Was she going to do another movie directed by her husband?

No, again.

The Nun's Story
premiere in Amsterdam was a benefit for the Dutch war-veterans alliance she had long supported. The last and most poignant event on her Netherlands agenda was a side trip the next morning to Doorn, site of the van Heemstras' erstwhile “castle,” where one of the town's streets was to be renamed “Audrey Hepburnlaan” in her honor. Amid much pomp and mountains of red roses, she “unveiled” the road that would bear her name. Veterans Alliance president W C. J. M. van Lanschot said it was originally to have been called “Audrey Hepburn Way,” but “way” seemed too modest and they upgraded it to “lane.”

She talked to the veterans a bit and then left. “Everybody was very emotional and happy,” said the local paper.
⁷⁵

EVERYBODY WAS HAPPY except Audrey. In the wake of the miscarriage, family and children were on her mind more than ever. “From the earliest time I can remember, the thing I most wanted was babies,” she said later. “My miscarriages were more painful to me than anything ever, including my parents' divorce and the disappearance of my father.
⁷⁶
... If and when [a baby] comes along, it will be the greatest thing in my life.”

In the meantime, she told a friend that Christmas, “I must work to forget. Only work can help me; holidays give me time to think, and that's bad for me.”
⁷⁷
Almost in desperation, she turned back to her work.
The Unforgiven
had not helped her career, but neither had it inflicted any great damage. Living in the Swiss Alps left her relatively insulated from Hollywood's self-absorbed obsession with the hits and failures of the moment.

For some time, negotiations had been under way for her to costar with Laurence Harvey in the forthcoming Alfred Hitchcock film,
No Bail for
the
Judge.
She would play a London barrister whose magistrate-father is wrongly accused of a murder she sets out to solve herself. Contracts had been drawn up and casting announced in the press, based on her approval of the initial script she had read. But late in the day, she learned that a new scene called for her to be dragged into Hyde Park and raped. It was typical of Hitchcock to humiliate the “pure” heroine—he would do it often, with Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint and Tippi Hedren. But Hepburn was notoriously squeamish about violence: She had been unable to watch Susan Hayward's execution scene in
I Want To Live
and had allegedly fainted at the premiere
of A Farewell to Arms
during the scene in which Jennifer Jones dies in childbirth.
⁷⁸

“I think the reason I did not do the Hitchcock picture was there was another picture that was conflicting,” Audrey told Larry King years later.
⁷⁹
But that was a polite lie.

“Audrey didn't even like to
watch
Hitchcock films,” says Rob Wolders. “She thought they were too cynical. When I asked her about this once, she said she had no recollection at all of any joint project. It seems to have been something her agent, Kurt Frings, was arranging on his own that got leaked prematurely.”

No Bail for
the
judge
was first postponed and then canceled entirely, Hitchcock losing $200,000 in the process. By some accounts, he held Audrey responsible for backing out of the project and hated her for it. It was further said that his resentment against her was what motivated him to cast no major stars at all in his next film—a low-budget thing called Psycho that became the biggest box-office hit of his career.

Audrey declined some other historic film parts in 1959: The title role in
Cleopatra
eventually went to another Kurt Frings client, Elizabeth Taylor— perhaps luckily for Hepburn—while the female leads in Otto Preminger's The
Cardinal
and Robert Wise's
West Side Story
were taken by Carol Lynley and Natalie Wood. It had nothing to do with the roles: Audrey was pregnant again—and this time, no film work would jeopardize the child.

“Audrey is a mental wreck,” said a friend, even as she was ecstatically knitting baby clothes. Though refusing all picture deals, she did accompany Mel to Rome for the making of Roger Vadim's campy horror yarn,
Blood and Roses
(1961), which had the look and feel of an Ed Wood film. Elsa Martinelli and Annette Vadim both try to seduce handsome Ferrer, who has precious little to work with in a vampire film without bite. Hepburn also joined Mel in France while he made
The Hands of Orlac
(costarring her old acting coach, Felix Aylmer), but otherwise stayed close to home, awaiting the birth of her baby.

His arrival came on January 17, 1960, at Lucerne's Municipal Maternity Clinic. According to a delivery-room nurse, the thirty-year-old Audrey cried out, “Let me see my baby, let me see it at once. Is it all right? Is it really all right?” When told yes, she uttered a cry of relief and then promptly passed out. At nine and a half pounds, he was a big boy for such a diminutive mama. His parents named him Sean, an Irish form of Ian, meaning “Gift of God,” in honor of Audrey's brother, who—with Mel's sister, Terry—served as godparents. He was his father's fifth child.

Sean was baptized in the same Bürgenstock chapel and by the same Pastor Maurice Eindiguer who had married Audrey and Mel six years earlier. The baby yelled heartily at that event, prompting Grandma Ella van Heemstra to quote the Dutch maxim, “A good cry at the christening lets the devil out!” Mother and son were then beautifully photographed by Richard Avedon in their Givenchy-designed christening clothes, and the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Henry Taylor, Jr., presented the baby with an American passport and a brand new fifty-star American flag.

“Like all new mothers, I couldn't believe at first he was really for me, and I could really keep him,” Audrey said to a reporter from
Look
at the time. “I'm still filled with the wonder of his being, to be able to go out and come back and find that he's still there.... I would like to mix Sean with all kinds of people in all countries, so that he will learn what the world is all about. He should take his own small part in making the world a better place. ”
⁸⁰

When he read those sentiments back in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock responded with icy irony: “Every word she said was pregnant with meaning.”
⁸¹

Audrey's joy was mixed with anxiety. She fretted about kidnapping and even about the effect the baby would have on her dog: “This may sound silly, but I took special pains to soften the blow to Famous's self-esteem.” Mel's self-esteem concerned her, too—if somewhat as an afterthought. “With the baby I felt I had everything a wife could wish for,” she said. “But it's not enough for a man. It was not enough for Mel. He couldn't live with himself just being Audrey Hepburn's husband.”
⁸²

 

 

FOR MANY, the role Audrey Hepburn was “born to play” most of all was Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Years later, in her oddly restrained way, she called it “the one I feel least uncomfortable watching. But the two things I always think of when I see it are ( 1 ) how could I have abandoned my cat? and (2) Truman Capote really wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part.”
⁸³

Capote confirmed it:

“Marilyn was my first choice to play the girl, Holly Golightly. I had seen her in a film and thought she would be perfect for the part. Holly had to have something touching about her ... unfinished. Marilyn had that.”
⁸⁴

Capote had sold the film rights for $65,000 to producers Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd for Paramount, and they hired George Axelrod to tailor the screenplay for Monroe. “She wanted it so badly,” said Capote, “that she worked up two whole scenes all by herself to play for me. She was terrifically good.” But Monroe's dramatic advisor, Paula Strasberg, declared “that she would not have her play a lady of the evening.” After Monroe's elimination, “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey,” said Capote. “
^She
was just wrong for that part.”
⁸⁵

Holly was a latter-day Manhattan version of Sally Bowles—a cross, said Time, “between a grown-up Lolita and a teen-age Auntie Mame.” Holly's agent calls her “a phony, all right—but a
real
phony!” She was really a hooker, but Axelrod converted her into a whimsical ingenue and Audrey found her “irresistible.” In October 1960, she left Sean in Bürgenstock with her mother and a nanny and flew to New York to begin filming. There, on Fifth Avenue, in her beehive hairdo, Givenchy gown and evening gloves, Holly sipped coffee from a plastic cup, munched a Danish, and broke the hearts of audiences around the world.
^ap

Director Blake Edwards's big casting mistake was Mickey Rooney as Holly's Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi, complete with buck teeth—a portrayal worthy of the worst World War II racial stereotypes. But George Peppardwas an attractive Paul, the aspiring novelist with whom Holly falls in love, and Patricia Neal was superb as Paul's “patroness” and Holly's rival. Neal has piquant memories of making the film:

Audrey, too, found it difficult to work with Peppard, who was then considered a potential new James Dean. Peppard's reliance on Lee Strasberg's version of “The Method” was the opposite of Hepburn's technique—which was no method at all. But in the end, Peppard's significance was minimal. Of far greater impact was a song by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini that won the Oscar that year and inspired ninety-seven subsequent recordings.

“Without Audrey, there‘d've been no ‘Moon River,'” Mancini told documentarist Gene Feldman. “It was one of the hardest songs I ever had to write, because I couldn't figure out what this lady would be singing up there on the fire escape. Would she sing a pop tune? Would she sing something with a blues thing in it? It took me almost a month to figure it out.... Without Audrey there would have been no ‘huckleberry friend.' She sang that song with an honesty and such a dedication to the words. She knew what she was doing. She knew what the words were.”
⁸⁷

“Moon River,” Mancini said, was written to explain that Holly was really just a yearning country girl: “One night after dinner, it hit me that it should be very, very simple ... a ‘sophisticated country song.' You can play it all on the white keys. You can throw the black keys away and still play it, which is a trick that I wasn't aware of—it just happened.”

Mancini's wife Ginny recalls that he “agonized over it for a long time and wanted it to be true to the scene and appropriate for the character. So although it took him a month to figure it out, once he knew where he was going, it only took maybe twenty minutes. He had listened any number of times to her version of ‘How Long Has This Been Going On' [in
Funny Face]
and knew she could handle anything within that range.”
⁸⁸

Asked later if the song's astounding popularity surprised him, Mancini said, “It was the kind of a song that had [success] written all over it, but Johnny Mercer didn't think so. When we were in recording and Audrey sang it with the guitar, Johnny said, ‘Boy, that's pretty, but let's get on to something that's going to make some money here!”'

Its first recording was by black singer Jerry Butler. “Andy Williams grabbed it only because he was asked to do the Academy Awards that year,” said Mancini. “Columbia Records knew the song and picture were successful, got geared up and put ‘Moon River' as title of the album. Tuesday [after the Monday Oscars], it was all over the country and became number one in a matter of weeks.”