Audrey Hepburn (45 page)

“Whether Audrey was in jeans and a bandanna or all dolled up for the Oscars—she was so beautiful that you couldn't bear it. Audrey coming up and saying hello wilted strong men. Along with everybody, I would just drown in those eyes. I discussed this I suppose in a locker-room fashion with a few of my contemporaries, but there was almost never anything carnal in it. You wouldn't look at her and say, ‘Boy, would I like to—' She didn't provoke that. My wife once said to me, ‘How close were you to Audrey?' I said, ‘I was hopelessly in love with her.' She said, ‘Good,' because she knew it would never come to anything....

“Audrey knew how to handle flattery when it was not connected with a come-on. Once we were talking, and I kept looking at her until she said, ‘What's the matter, what are you looking at?' I said, ‘Audrey, you're just so beautiful, I can't stand it.' She giggled and took my hand and said, ‘Come to dinner.' I said, ‘Okay.' It was wonderfully done.”
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Her vulnerability was no longer childlike—but still very much a part of her. During one
My Fair Lady
recording session, Previn recalls going up to her and saying, “Audrey, when I turn to cue you in, you look like you've been caught in a deer snare. Could you keep the terror out of your eyes? You look like a fawn that's about to get shot.” At the end of filming, she presented him with a heavy, silver ceremonial baton from Mendelssohn's day inscribed, To
André, Love from a Fawn.

Hepburn's friend John McCallum, the Australian actor, opined that “Sex starts in the eyes. A film close-up of an attractive woman's face is far sexier than a close-up of naked breasts. There is an expression to the effect that men make love to women's faces, and I think there is a good deal of truth in it.”

Audrey agreed, and once expressed her own opinion on the subject with a surprising
lack
of self-effacement: “Sex appeal is something that you feel deep down inside. It's suggested rather than shown.... I'm not as well-stacked as Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, but there is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much appeal fully clothed, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.”
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Loren and Lollobrigida were hardly comparable to Hepburn. Leslie Caron was. Their gamine personas were similar, despite which, says Caron, no rivalry existed between them:

“I'm not somebody who's jealous. I truly thought Audrey was magnificent, and I thought she had many qualities I lacked, and perhaps I had one or two she didn't have. I thought she was so gorgeous, so elegant, so refined, and so adorable. But I thought perhaps I had more sense of drama than she had.”

In their twenties, Hepburn and Caron played many of the same parts, from Gigi to Ondine, but at this point, as actresses, they and their roles had totally diverged: Caron seemed to change. Hepburn seemed not to.

“It was partly a financial thing,” says Caron. “She wasn't under contract. She was free. She earned a great deal more money than I and didn't need to adapt so much to circumstances, whereas I really did have to go on working out of necessity—and I'm glad of it. I developed a sort of second career as a sometimes outrageous, frivolous, middle-aged woman, and sometimes the opposite type of modest, subservient woman, as when I played the wife of Lenin. I was forced to become more versatile.”
⁹⁶

There were reports that Hepburn had wanted the part of the pregnant French girl, superbly played by Caron in
The L-Shaped Room
(1963), but Caron says, “No, I don't think that's true.”

Audrey and her image didn't need it.

 

 

THE ISSUES of Hepburn's image and publicity were now causing problems with Mel and with her friend Henry Rogers. One of Hollywood's top publicists, Rogers had met her during
War and Peace
and, in the years since, had guided and protected her and played a large role in molding the public view of her. Rogers, in his memoirs, recorded intimate impressions of both Ferrers:

The beginning of the end of the Hepburn-Rogers professional relationship came on a Sunday at the Ferrers' home in Switzerland where Audrey, Mel and Henry engaged in a heated discussion of her career. At issue was the new Givenchy perfume, L'Interdit.

“Mel,” said Rogers, “resented the fact that she had given Givenchy her name and likeness to launch his first venture into the fragrance business.
Vogue, Harper's Ba
aar, Town and Country
and other mags all over the world were carrying a magnificent portrait of Audrey, indicating that the fragrance had been created exclusively for her. Givenchy had built a multimillion-dollar business using Audrey—without compensating her.”

At Mel's request, Rogers had stopped in Paris to meet with Givenchy's brother Claude and discuss compensation for the use of Audrey's likeness. Mel had said, “For Christ's sake, Henry, she doesn't even get a discount on the clothes he designs for her. As for the perfume, wouldn't you think he would send her gallons of it as a gift? She buys it herself—retail!”

Rogers now told the Ferrers about his meeting in Paris and said the Givenchys were agreeable to some payment. But Audrey said, “Neither of you seems to understand. I don't want anything from Hubert. I don't need his money. He is my friend. If I have helped him build his perfume business, then that's exactly what one friend should do for another.... Yes, I even want to walk into a drugstore and buy the perfume at the retail price.”

At that tense moment, according to Rogers, the doorbell rang and yet another crisis presented itself in the form of Favre Le Bret, director of the Cannes Film Festival, with whom Audrey, Mel and Rogers had been friendly for years. He had come to ask Audrey to attend the opening night of that year's festival.

“Mel had asked me what I thought about it,” said Rogers. “I told him I was opposed, that there was no reason for Audrey to attend the opening ceremonies. She didn't have a film that was being screened. She did not need or care about the publicity she would get out of it. [But] Mel kept insisting I talk to him.”

Audrey left the room. “I'm going upstairs to see Sean,” she said. “You fellows decide what to do.” Rogers told Le Bret there had to be a reason for Hepburn to attend—and soon came up with one himself. The festival, he proposed, should create a new annual award—“a special tribute to one person, an actor, an actress, a producer, or a director who has made an outstanding contribution to [film]. This year it could be Audrey.” Le Bret said he'd think about it. The next morning, Rogers's hotel phone rang and the sobbing voice at the other end was Audrey's.

“What's wrong?” he asked. “Is something wrong with Sean?”

“No, Henry, it's you. You know how much I care about you—how much I value your friendship. I'm crying because I have decided that I don't want you to represent me anymore.... I just can't stand any more of this. I just don't like what is happening to me, and my life and my friends.... First you embarrassed me with Hubert, [and last night] Favre Le Bret told me you had tried to blackmail him, that you told him the only way I would go to the Cannes Film Festival would be if he gave me some kind of phony, trumped-up award. Henry, I don't want you to work for me anymore. Will you still be my friend?”

Rogers was stunned. “Here was a lively, sensitive person, genuinely sobbing her heart out,” he said. “She really did not want to be involved in the complex world which is part and parcel of the motion picture industry—the intrigue, the deals, the negotiations that go on behind the scenes.” Of course they would remain friends, he told her, but “you must understand one thing. You have known me for many years. You know how I work. You know very well that I never tried to blackmail Le Bret. If he is stupid enough to interpret my proposal [that way], I never want anything to do with him again—and you shouldn't either.”
⁹⁸

Hepburn and Rogers did remain friends. But the man who really instigated Rogers's dealings with Le Bret and Givenchy was Mel Ferrer—and he took her dismissal of Rogers hard.

CHAPTER 7

“I'm the only person alive who has attacked Audrey Hepburn, and in public. I've tried to make up for it with a series of heartwarming performances on public television.”

—ALAN ARKIN

 

 

 

D
IRE PREDICTIONS OF THE FERRERS' IMMINENT MARITAL COLLAPSE had been rife—and wrong—for a decade. The Givenchy and Le Bret flaps produced additional stress but did not prevent their agreement, with Sean's future in mind, on the major decision to leave Bürgenstock.

Sean would recall her saying that not least of the reasons why his mother chose to live in Switzerland was because “it was a place where there would never be a war.” As a boy then (and long after), his term of endearment for her was
Mutti,
a German diminutive of mother.
¹
Audrey loved the pet name but not much else about that language and what it represented for her: Bürgenstock was in the heart of the German part of Switzerland, and the idea of her son attending a German school was repellent.

The picturesque place to which the Ferrers relocated would remain Audrey's home for life: the village of Tolochenaz-sur-Morges, above Lake Geneva, fifteen miles from Lausanne and thirty from Geneva. There in the French-speaking canton of Vaud, Audrey—not Mel—purchased a fine old eighteenth-century farmhouse. It was an eight-bedroom villa built of the local peach-colored stone, surrounded by a white picket fence and situated on Tolochenaz's one and only street, Route de Bière, with beautiful Alpine vistas. It was called “La Paisible” (The Peaceful Place) and, for Audrey, would always live up to its name.

Tolochenaz dated back to an early Celtic settlement of lake dwellers, who built their homes on stilts.
²
Its current inhabitants—barely five hundred of them—were mostly farmers with fruit orchards and vineyards and a few cattle. It was quite near the Geneva-Lausanne highway but set back far enough to retain its quiet, isolated charm. A hardware shop and a grocery were pretty much the sole businesses on the sole street.

“Come with me, I want to show you the exact angle the moment I first saw the house!” Audrey told Anna Cataldi, a good friend of later years, on Anna's initial visit. Audrey led her into the garden and enthused, “I was here when I had the first glance of the house and it was spring and fruit trees were in blossom, and my heart stopped beating. I said, ‘This is my place!”'
³

It was a place where her domestic instincts and love of family life led her to an old-fashioned testimonial: “I have never gotten over the wonder of being married,” she said. “Like many teenagers, I thought I was such an ugly thing that no one would ever want me for a wife.... Which is why I always say to Mel, ‘Thanks to you I'm off the shelf!'”
⁴

Within a year, she would get over the wonder and the home front would not be so blissful. But for now, in mid-1965, they were happy with their post-
My Fair Lady
rapprochement, which was based on her becoming a full-time wife and mother. She put her career on hold in order to “be there” every day when Sean came home from the two-room schoolhouse where he was fast adding French to the four other languages he knew (Italian, Spanish, English and German). Staying home was no sacrifice when the alternative was being miserable on a movie set. From now on, Tolochenaz was her “harbor,” she said, “the absolute opposite of the life I led working. I was to a great extent left in peace. The Swiss press doesn't care what you do. If I had lived in London or New York or Hollywood, it would have been outlandish. I never liked the city. I always wanted the countryside.”
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