Audrey Hepburn (49 page)

Warners left Young's picture exactly the way he made it.

Wait Until Dark
opened in November 1967 to record-breaking grosses at Radio City—the ninth of Audrey's sixteen starring films to premiere there. It earned a hefty $11 million for the happy studio and a fifth Oscar nomination for the less happy but much acclaimed Hepburn. “That performance is so extraordinarily authentic,” says costar Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (the blind girl's kind but useless husband). “Working with her was heaven, even though she was going through hell with Mel.”
⁴⁵
Audrey withheld her true feeling until long afterward : “I was nominated for
Wait Until Dark
when I liked myself better in
Two for the Road
that year.”
⁴⁶
But playing the besieged, hysterical blind girl had been a vital catharsis, says Ian Woodward, “an emotional release far more purgative than any psychological ‘remedy' dispensed by the average Hollywood headshrink.”
⁴⁷

Maybe a little too purgative. It would be nearly a decade before Hepburn made another film.

 

 

“I HAD BEEN completely miserable while making
Wait Until Dark
because I had been separated from my son, Sean, for the first time,” she would say.
⁴⁸

The Ferrers's working relationship was brilliantly successful during that production but, by its end, the only thing more painful to Audrey than Sean's absence was Mel's presence. MacEwen claimed one reason for the rift was Ferrer's “auditions” of way too many pretty models for the five-second bit-part of a girl found hanged behind a door. But Richard Crenna says, “It was only later we heard that Audrey was having a very difficult time in her marriage.” Terence Young knew more about it because “both Audrey and Mel had confided [some] things to me. But they were a class act in every sense, and very little showed.”
⁴⁹

One insight, a la
Upstairs, Downstairs,
comes from some unpleasant words overheard by chef Florida Broadway: “One time Mr. Ferrer wanted Mrs. Ferrer to work more than she wanted to. She felt she worked too much, and he was pushing and driving her more than she was willing. Something she said about being tired started it. They had their little tiffs and arguments.”
⁵⁰

In addition to the stresses and strains of thirteen years of marriage, her miscarriages upset and occupied her obsessively. In January 1967 she sent a heartfelt condolence letter to Sophia Loren, strongly identifying with Loren's miscarriage that month.
⁵¹
Five months later, Hepburn herself was pregnant again, at thirty-eight, but soon miscarried once more. Losing those babies, she said, was her greatest trauma, “as painful as my parents' divorce.”
⁵²

A few weeks later, she and Ferrer separated for good. Years earlier, Audrey had decided that 110 pounds was the ideal weight for her height. But she had now dropped down to ninety-five and, by one brutal assessment, resembled “an emaciated grasshopper.”
⁵³

Mel was always accused of being a Svengali who called the shots and dictated her decisions. But in the end, it was Audrey who seemed to be in the driver's seat and to have been so, in many ways, from the beginning. “It's a problem when the wife outshines the husband as Audrey does me,” Ferrer said, with painful candor, back in 1960. “I'm pretty sensitive when producers call and say they want to discuss a film with me, when in reality they're angling for Audrey and using me as bait.”

The estimations of their friends differ widely.

“Mel was—probably still is—a hypersensitive person,” says Leslie Caron, “and I think he gets hurt easily. I think that happened in his relationship with Audrey, although I cannot say too much about it because I wasn't ‘holding the candle,' as we say—an expression in French. It means I could not see inside their private chamber.”
⁵⁴

Yul Brynner, on the other hand, wondered how Audrey put up with Mel for so long: “I suppose she was so desperate to make it work [and] so sweet, loyal and human.... Mel was jealous of her success and could not reconcile himself to the [fact that] she was much better than he in every way, so he took it out on her. Finally, she couldn't take it any longer. God knows, she did everything a woman could do to save her marriage.”
⁵⁵

Designer Ken Scott couldn't understand how Mel and Audrey ever got together in the first place. “She is so lively, charming and youthful,” said Scott, “and he was a stick-in-the-mud, old beyond his years.”
⁵⁶

Actor Robert Wagner's analysis is gentler:

“I met her when she first came to Hollywood with Mel. They used to come to our house when Natalie [Wood] and I lived on Beverly Drive. I think they loved each other very much, but two [high-profile careers] make a relationship more intense, and that intensity can work both ways. Mel was with her when she was very young, and it all changes as your life progresses.”
⁵⁷

“Mel was the
sabio
—the guy that knew everything,” says Peter Viertel. “Once he called me and said, ‘You should forget this woman Gardner—she'll destroy you.' He loved to give advice. Audrey listened and was impressed by his knowledge of the movie business. She was a good wife and
believed
in being a good wife. That's what he wanted, and I suppose she lured him into thinking she could provide it. I think they just outgrew each other.”

Mel Ferrer, now seventy-nine, says, “I don't think anybody could compete with Audrey [and there was no] sense in trying to. I had a great deal to do with her career, and I'm delighted I was able to contribute. But I didn't benefit from it.”
⁵⁸

Documentarist Gene Feldman insists, “Mel was no ogre. He genuinely loved her. Obviously, he's a man of enormous ego and drive. Suddenly he became ‘the husband,' which in our society is very difficult. Audrey understood that, and I think diminished herself incredibly so that she wouldn't threaten him. That's like walking stooped all the time. It's hard.”
⁵⁹

For a long while they worked together well, says Rob Wolders. “Audrey had her most productive period then, in large part because Mel was looking after her. People conveniently forget that they made a lot of good choices together.”

On September 1, 1967, their lawyers' jointly announced that Hepburn, thirty-eight, and Ferrer, fifty, would divorce. Mel was in Paris. Audrey was home in Switzerland with Sean. Much later she would say, “I hung on to my marriage because of Sean.” She now sat him down for the much-dreaded talk. “We're not happy together,” she said. “It's not going to affect you right now, but we've chosen not to live together anymore.”

Sean developed a good understanding of it, says Rob Wolders: “It was extremely important to Audrey that the relationship between Sean and Mel should not suffer. Although she may have had certain negative feelings about Mel, she would never show them to Sean—or to anyone else. She never bad-mouthed Mel.”

Like most things in her life, the divorce was conducted with what Sheridan Morley called “an avalanche of good manners.”
⁶⁰
Neither of them ever went public with their feelings. “Audrey never spoke about private, personal things and neither did I,” says Mel. “It was kind of an agreement that we had.”
⁶¹
In later years, Audrey would express a curious kind of guilt that the marriage had failed to work. Never having recovered from her parents' divorce, she would never quite recover from this one either.

Eva Gabor felt Mel indeed
tried
to dominate Audrey, “but I don't know that he got away with it, because Audrey was a very strong woman. She wasn't a weakling by any means. When you're in love, men get away with things. But only for a while. That's why I think they got a divorce.”
⁶²

Audrey went into self-imposed exile with Sean at La Paisible and told Frings to stop sending scripts. She was depressed and indifferent about whether she ever worked again. “I thought a marriage between two good, loving people had to last until one of them died,” she said. “I can't tell you how disillusioned I was. I'd tried and tried. I knew how difficult it [was to be] second-billed on the screen and in real life. How Mel suffered! But believe me, I put my career second. [Even] when it was clear the marriage was ending, I still couldn't let go.”
⁶³

In Audrey's mind, it was
her
personal failure and defeat.

CHAPTER 8

“Please don't say I'm self-effacing. You have to face something to be self-effacing.”

—AUDREY HEPBURN
¹

 

 

 

A
T THIRTY-NINE, HAVING MADE ALL (BUT ONE) OF HER GREAT films, Hepburn retreated into motherhood. Her friend Doris Brynner threw various soirees to cheer her up. But soon enough, after Sean went off to school, the loneliness of Tolochenaz got to her.

She was, after all, single and “available” again—on the strength of which, she now felt free to make a delicate entry into the European jet set. In December 1967, for example, she met Prince Alfonso de Bourbon-Dampierre, a pretender to the Spanish throne, and enjoyed New Year's Eve with him in Madrid.

But most often, she flew to Rome, the site of her first great film triumph,
Roman Holiday.
There, she had a guaranteed welcome among friends established over the years—aristocrats who, like her, had time and money on their hands, such as Count Dino and Countess Camilla Pecci-Blunt, who often hosted Audrey in Tuscany in the summers. One of her most loyal Roman friends was Arabella Ungaro, a member of the “impoverished nobility” who these days worked for the
Corriere della Sera
and later sold a small house on her property to Audrey. Another close friend was Laura Alberti, whom Audrey called “my Roman Connie [Wald].”

They tended to be somewhat older, maternal women, and one of the most important of them to her at the time was Countess Lorean Franchetti Gaetani-Lovatelli, wife of Count Lofreddo (“Lollo”) Gaetani-Lovatelli. She and Audrey met through Lorean's sister Afdera Franchetti, who was married to Henry Fonda at the time Hepburn and Fonda were filming
War and
Peace in Rome.

“I usually find cinema people boring,” she says today. “But with Audrey, something clicked, and we became fast friends.” A pillar of the Roman aristocracy, Lorean made her magnificent home available to Audrey regularly from then on—and now more than ever. Melancholy celebrity exiles were her specialty, as the irrepressible Countess Lovatelli recalls:

Audrey's arrival had thrown the Lovatellis' household staff into some confusion, as the Countess told interviewer John Barba:

“It was the time of the first Mary Quant very, very short skirts and frocks, which Audrey was one of the first to wear here. When she arrived, my maid took her to the guest room and then opened her valises to hang out her clothes. We were in the drawing room chatting, and my maid came and said, ‘Signora, she must have forgotten some valise.' I said, ‘Why?' The maid said, ‘Because she only has blouses. I hung up twenty blouses.' I said, ‘Those are frocks!' So short. We weren't used to them yet.”
³

The lady beneath the mod exterior was not a very happy one. The Countess has an astrological interpretation of her: “She was a real Taurus—a rather stuffy sign. I'm a Gemini—very flighty. That's why we went together so well. She was a very loyal, honest, serious person. If she hadn't been a film star, she would have been a stuffy matron, very normal and ladylike.”

Hepburn was extremely fond of Count Lollo, who was “very Italian,” his widow recalls. “He used to scold her because he wanted her to eat spaghetti and put on weight, she was so thin.” During the first months, she begged not to go out in the evening but gradually acquiesced. “My husband would protect her, and she would hide under his wing when we went out.”

What she much preferred was daytime walking. Lorean calls her “a maniac for fresh air,” always in the company of her little dog. The Countess, presumably, strolled with her?

“As little as possible,” she replies. “I hated walking. I used to follow her with the car. When she came to our house on the Isola del Giglio, every afternoon she would walk to the top of the mountain with my husband and children because I refused. I sat and watched.”