Audrey Hepburn (52 page)

Three months later, she agreed to one other professional appearance for exactly the opposite reason: lucre, not charity. She made four one-minute TV commercials in Rome for the Tokyo wig manufacturer “Varie” and received the amazing sum of $100,000 for two days work, which she reportedly invested in annuities for Sean and Luca. Written into the contract was a stipulation that the commercials would never be shown outside Japan where—ever since Roman
Holiday
—she had been a national idol.

She had been absent from the big screen for four years. But she could never be absent from the world of fashion. Her physical image, even in semi-retirement and divorced from movies, retained enormous power and influence, even though the object of all the attention viewed it in a strictly personal way.

“I depend on Givenchy,” she said, “in the same way that American women depend on their psychiatrists.”
³⁶
That statement was made on the record, and she meant it. But privately to Lorean Lovatelli, she confided, “Givenchy is so terribly expensive—can't you tell me of a good dressmaker in Rome?”

“Doesn't Givenchy give you things?” replied the Countess in surprise.

“No,” said Audrey, “I insist on paying for everything. He pays when he goes to my movies, doesn't he?”

Lorean recommended a young dressmaker who had made a name for himself in Italy—Valentino [Garavani]. “I took Audrey to him,” she says, “and she loved his designs. Now Valentino is so famous he doesn't do beautiful things anymore. Now he designs only for rich old women and Japanese.”
³⁷

Audrey's friend New York designer Jeffrey Banks assesses that development in more professional terms:

“When she was married to Dotti, she wore some Valentino. She wore a Valentino costume to the Rothschilds' famous ‘Remembrance of Things Past' masked ball, where everybody dressed as their favorite Proust character. I think she felt that since she lived in Rome, it was the right thing to do, and I don't think Givenchy felt abandoned....

“Givenchy told me that he had not altered the mannequin he made for her in 1954 in four decades. She had the same figure close to forty years later—an amazing thing. It was not a question of conflict or rivalry. It was a question of practicality, especially later when she wasn't making any money for the UNICEF work she was doing. Givenchy was more for special occasions, the tributes and salutes. Ralph Lauren's clothes [which she also wore later] were far less expensive and more practical in terms of the things she had to do.
^bg
I think she enjoyed wearing all three men's clothes.”
³⁸

There were a few strands of grey in her hair now—she would never color it. But during the seventies, no less than in the two previous decades, what she wore and how she looked continued to fascinate millions of women, who clamored for her beauty secrets—which were few and not very secret: She washed her own hair every five days with a special shampoo from London trichologist Philip Kingsley. She used the skin-protective makeup products of Dr. Ernest Laszlo. That was about it. No magic formula.

“It's all in their minds,” she said. “I use [the Laszlo] creams because I have dry skin, and I'm a nut on sleep. If I go without sleep, I feel like I have the flu.... In Italy, I get up early to get Andrea off to the clinic by seven-thirty, and he doesn't come home until after nine p.m. So we don't eat until ten and midnight is an early night, but it ain't early for me. I have to make up for it by taking afternoon naps. I take care of my health, and this world takes care of my thoughts.”
³⁹

“ROME is a cesspool now!” declares the ever-outspoken Countess Gaetani-Lovatelli today. “I'm sorry to sound snobbish, but it's true. It used to be enchanting, when Audrey was married to Andrea and lived here. Everybody adored her. She was very, very popular.”
⁴⁰

Not everyone agrees. Anna Cataldi says many people in the Dottis' Roman circle were not only “not nice to her, a lot of them were awful.” It was sad, Anna thought, because “Andrea's friends fascinated her. Andrea's group was very different from the movie people. It was European society people like Paul Weiller, who was really a very boring man. She desperately needed to have friends and warmth, but she was the famous actress—‘too much' for most of them. She didn't get much friendship. She was so nervous, she made
them
nervous.”
⁴¹

Cataldi remembers the summer of 1972, for example—still fairly early in Audrey's new life—as a time when “everybody in Rome was having a lot of fun doing
Andy Warhol's Frankenstein,”
directed by Paul Morrissey. Warhol, Morrissey and everyone else, it seemed, rented villas in town, Carlo Ponti, Franco Zefferelli and Roman Polanski among them. “It was
la dolce vita
at the time,” says Cataldi, “and sometimes Audrey was there, too, with Andrea, because he was very social.” But Morrissey was quick to notice she was different from the rest. “She never integrated because she was not a gossip,” he said. In those decadent circles, Audrey was the “straight” one—always up eighty-thirty a.m., perfectly dressed when the shops were barely open, shopping or sending her son off to school while the other Beautiful People in Rome's exclusive Parioli section were still sound asleep.

In today's parlance, she was “out of the loop.” Years earlier, she had met Marcello Mastroianni and they had talked most of a night. “I was thrilled,” said Audrey then, “because I'd been dying to meet him for years.”
⁴²
But much later, when asked why—despite all her years in Rome—she never worked with the great Italian actors, she replied, “I don't know people like Mastroianni or Vittorio Gassman very well,” adding that even during
War and Peace
she and Gassman had virtually no contact.

Cataldi recalls shopping one day with Hepburn in Milan at La Rinascente, a Bloomingdale-type department store, “when a woman approached me and said, ‘Is that Audrey Hepburn?' I was about to say yes, but Audrey became pale. ‘Don't tell,' she said. ‘Otherwise, people will gather around.' ”

But chef extraordinaire Florida Broadway detected something more akin to approach-avoidance. In her opinion, “Miss Hepburn liked the limelight. She would have the dark glasses on, but she would enjoy it when we'd be out someplace and somebody recognized her. Sometimes I think she made sure that they did, although she was subtle about it.”
⁴³

That seemed true, in a way, of Dr. Dotti as well. Unlike Countess Lovatelli and many of Audrey's other friends, Cataldi was fond of Andrea and much amused by him. In particular, she felt, Andrea was redeemed by his “enormous love for Luca,” who was the idol of both his parents' eyes: “When we were in Tuscany, Luca broke his arm. It was in plaster, and he was so courageous. Another time in Gstaad in the winter, Luca was about four. All the paparazzi were around him, saying, ‘Ah, you are the son of Audrey Hepburn?' And little Luca very proudly looked up at them from the snow and said, ‘No, I am the son of Signora Dotti!' ”
⁴⁴

In the long run, Signora Dotti's decision to give up all for Luca may or may not have been best for him or for the mother-son relationship. In later years, she would often call Sean “my best friend.” She had dragged him back and forth across the ocean, on and off her movie sets, and yet those experiences seemed to make him a more urbane, secure adult. Luca would have more difficulty finding himself, perhaps somewhat suffocated by her doting, compared to the upbringing of her “buddy” Sean.

In November 1973, Hepburn and Dotti made a rare trip together to New York, where Audrey saw actress Marian Seldes for the first time since they had performed together in
Ondine.
“What did we talk about? Our careers? No, our children,” said Seldes, who was thrilled when Audrey came to see her in
Equus
that week.
⁴⁵
Speculation ran high that Hepburn's return to the States signaled a new movie, but she insisted she was really only accompanying Dr. Dotti to a medical conference in Washington—which was true.

Around the same time, on a shorter trip, she had a pleasant encounter with another face from her past. “The last time I saw her,” says Lord James Hanson, “was with my wife at the opening of the Aga Khan's Costa Smeralda Hotel in Sardinia. We didn't know she and Dr. Dotti would be there. I'd been knighted by that time, and she'd heard of it. She just walked into the room and gave me a little smile and said, ‘Haven't we done well!' That's how she was, always gracious and fun.”
⁴⁶

But she was always anxious to get back home.

“I'm a Roman housewife, just what I want to be,” she said. “Despite what you sometimes read, my marriage is working out beautifully, and watching my sons grow is a marvel. I'm also fully Italian now.... I never was part of Hollywood or anywhere else, and I've finally found a place that I can call home.”
⁴⁷

Among many who were curious about the
inside
of that home was director Billy Wilder. During a visit to Rome, his wife Audrey paid a call on his other Audrey, and when she returned, Billy asked her what the place was like.

“I don't care who you were—compared to Audrey Hepburn, everybody felt too fat,” says Audrey Wilder. “Most apartments in Rome are so heavy, with those heavy drapes and heavy, ornate paintings and gold. But Audrey's was totally different—bright and airy, lovely yellow and white. Her draperies were the kind of material that would lie on the floor. They actually
draped.
All those other apartments looked like lasagna by comparison.”

She gave Billy a detailed report—the colors, the big windows, and so forth—and then finally came up with the precise one-word description she was looking for:

“It's ‘non-fattening,' I said—just like Audrey.”
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By JUNE 1975, Sean was a six-foot-three fifteen-year-old and Luca, at five, no longer a toddler. “The happiest I've ever been has been in the seventies,” Hepburn said then. “I'm much less restless now, and no longer searching for the wrong values.... I've had so much more than I ever dreamed possible out of life—[no] great disappointments or hopes that didn't work out: I didn't expect anything much and because of that I'm the least bitter woman I know.... I've accomplished far more than I ever hoped to, and most of the time it happened without my seeking it.... I'm glad to have missed what's been happening in the movies these last eight years. It's all been sex and violence, and I'm far too scrawny to strip and I hate guns, so I'm better off out of it.”
⁴⁹

She had stayed out of it since 1967—but was about to make her first commercial film in eight years. The screenplay that lured her back was written by James Goldman, who had won an Oscar in 1968 for
The Lion in Winter.
This one,
Robin and Marian,
gave similarly ironic but lyrical treatment to the final adventure of a once-swashbuckling couple who could still summon enough energy, and command enough allegiance, for one last stand.

Goldman's interest in Robin Hood actually predated
The Lion in Winter,
when he was researching twelfth-century ballads. Audrey had been his first choice for Marian, but it took four years to put the deal together and half a dozen tentative directors, including Arthur Penn and John Frankenheimer. The ultimate choice was Richard Lester, director of
A Hard Day's Night, Help!
, The
Knack ... and How to Get It, The Three Musketeers
and other brilliantly offbeat films that did not particularly appeal to Audrey Hepburn. Film historian Kevin Brownlow sums him up best: “Lester can make a Beatles film, he can make an intimate film like
Petulia,
and he can do swashbuckling epics. He's an extraordinary filmmaker, whom one day people will recognize, but too late, of course.”

This project would require less swash and more buckle. Lester recalls its genesis:

Considering that the first film version of the Robin Hood legend was in 1909, it was high time the Merry Men came to grips with middle age.
^bh
How did they finish off their days? Did Marian remain a Maid?
Robin and Marian
was designed, wryly and perversely, to bring the tale to an end once and for all.