Audrey Hepburn (55 page)

Most of the time Audrey could look back at the final result of such rejected projects as
Bridge
Too Far and feel she had been correct to decline. But “the one that got away” was Herbert Ross's
The Turning Point
(1977). She was deeply intrigued by the part of the aging ballerina star and ideally suited to it because of her dance background. She would have been teamed with Shirley MacLaine, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne. But Anne Bancroft had evidently been cast in the part by the time Audrey learned of it. By another account, Hepburn was offered her choice of roles in the film but refused. In any event, she didn't appear in the picture—and always regretted it.

Also lamented was a project dear to the heart of her friend Anna Cataldi, who had spent a great deal of time in Africa, fallen in love with the continent, and wanted to do a movie about Karen Blixen (“Isak Dinesen”), the author of
Out of Africa.

“The first person I contacted was Audrey,” Cataldi recalls. “I went to Switzerland in 1977 and spent a few days with her, and she told me she wanted to do it. She knew everything about Isak Diniesen. But there were several dif ferent proposals for this movie. She said, ‘If you want to do it, the person I would like you to see is Fred Zinnemann,' who had done
Nun's Story
with her and knew Africa. I went to London and had several meetings with him and discussed
Out of Africa.
Then Audrey said, ‘Now go to Los Angeles and meet Kurt Frings.' And that was awful. He said, ‘You want to put my client in a stupid adventure movie? Forget it. Audrey will never do another movie.' ”
⁸⁵

 

 

DIRECTOR TERENCE YOUNG described the elaborate
danse macabre
of approaching Audrey Hepburn with a movie project, in general, and with his current project, in particular:

“First of all you spend a year or so convincing her to accept even the principle that she might make another movie in her life. Then you have to persuade her to read a script. Then you have to make her understand that it is a good script. Then you have to persuade her that she will not be totally destroying her son's life by spending six or eight weeks on a film set. After that, if you are reallylucky, she might start talking about the costumes. More probably she'll just say she has to get back to her family and cooking the pasta for dinner, but thank you for thinking of her.“
⁸⁶

Anna Cataldi was just as persistent as Young, if ultimately not as persuasive. Refusing to give up on Audrey's participation in
Out of Africa,
she shook off Kurt Frings's first rebuff and, the next day, made a second stab and called Frings again.

“I'm rushing to Paris,” he told her. “Audrey is doing a fantastic movie!”

Cataldi was aghast. “Yesterday you said she would never work again,” she protested.

“But this is an extraordinary movie,” Frings replied, “with a fantastic cast. Givenchy is doing the clothes!”
⁸⁷

When
Out of Africa
was eventually made in 1985 by director Sidney Pollack, Cataldi got credit as an associate producer and the film won many Oscars, including Best Picture. But it would be Meryl Streep and not Audrey Hepburn in the lead role.

The picture she made instead, and the one Frings was so enthused about, was
Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline
(1979). The self-promotional title of that trashy bestseller pretty much told the whole story: She had chosen a blatantly commercial mish-mash over a host of worthier offers under the pressure of Terence Young and the enticement of a cool $1 million (plus percentage) for just six or seven weeks' work.
Bloodline
was a multinational coproduction designed, in large part, to provide its American and European investors with a tax shelter. Much of its $12-million-dollar budget would end up in the pockets of agents and travel bureaus. But that wasn't Audrey's concern.

At the time, it seemed like a great deal. In retrospect, it wasn't nearly enough. A certain cynicism about the whole project prevailed, as Nicholas Freeling detected when he interviewed her at that time in Rome, in a story called “Audrey Hepburn at 50”:

The answer was complex: First of all, money. Andrea's earnings were respectable but insufficient to support the family in the style to which they were accustomed. Second, her longtime friendship and confidence in director Terence Young, who felt he had a certain “right” to her in view of the huge success of their
Wait Until Dark.
When he gave her Sheldon's book, she failed to read it; she only knew that her role was fairly small and that she would not have to “carry” the film herself. Third, the shooting locations would be close to home—mostly at Rome's Cinecittà, with runouts to Munich, Copenhagen and Sardinia.

The final factor was perhaps the most significant: a last-ditch effort to make Andrea mend his ways. It was the worst period of her marriage to Dotti, and her friends were unanimously encouraging her to get out of the house. In the past, she had threatened to go back to work if he did not stop seeing other women, but Andrea did not believe her.

This time, however, the press was rough on her.
The London Sunday Times,
for example, filed an acerbic report from Munich where, in November 1978, she flew for four weeks of shooting:

“I never gave a thought to the question of my age when I was asked to do this film,” she maintained—but the producers did. Her role had been rejected by Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen and Diane Keaton, among others, but Young “flattered her into believing she could pass for fifteen years younger” and assured her that the script “only needs ten pages changing” to conform to her age.
⁹⁰
Such was the novel's depth! Sheldon dutifully rewrote it to make her thirty-five instead of the original twenty-three.

Bloodline
was Sheldon's second novel to be filmed. Producers David Picker and Sidney Beckerman bought the screen rights for $1.5 million and hired Laird Koenig (author of the fine Jodie Foster film,
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane)
to write the potboiler screenplay about industrial intrigue and murder. It had an international all-star cast to ensure a profit on the Continent. The one superstar was Audrey. There was James Mason for the British. Gert Frobe and Romy Schneider would make the Germans happy. Omar Sharif was an ersatz Italian. Irene Papas would please the Greeks. Ben Gazzara, Beatrice Straight and Michelle Phillips might draw in the Americans.

Heroine of the turgid tale was Audrey, a paleontologist who is first seen in
Bloodline
in the act of cleaning a dinosaur—symbolic of her task in the film. She is the object of a grand conspiracy, but her romantic involvement with Gazzara and most other elements of the plot end up submerged in random violence and a series of pornographic “snuff-film” murders.

When Hepburn finally realized, in mid-production, just how sleazy the film was really going to be, she complained—too late—to Frings, who told her sex and violence were necessary these days for a hit film and she should adjust to the times.

Audrey's periodic brushes with death are heralded by Ennio Morricone's corny “suspense” music, while an even cornier soprano chorus accompanies her romantic moments with Gazzara. Audiences didn't know which to dread more, the brushes with death or the bad dialogue of the love scenes: “Isn't it instantly plain to the naked eye I'm in love with you?” she tells Ben.

The ending is a combined rip-off of
Wait Until Dark
and
Charade-cut
phone lines, flames engulfing her house, Audrey forced to decide whether the real culprit is Mason or Gazzara.

The final credits clear up the most compelling question:

“Miss Hepburn's jewels by Bulgari.”

 

 

DURING
BLOODLINE
shooting, Audrey told a British journalist that Ingmar Bergman's
Autumn Sonata,
with Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, had moved her to tears. She identified powerfully with the introspective Ullmann character, “inwardly turned and tortured, psychologically crippled.” Audrey knelt on the sofa, arms outstretched, miming the girl's anguish, then added a soft non sequitur: “I am a very interior person.” There was an unspoken sense that her own career had run into a dead end.
⁹¹

On
Bloodline
location in Sicily, Audrey had several bodyguards, said a cast member, “until she realized that even kidnap by the Mafia would be preferable to having to finish this script.”
⁹²
The critics were correspondingly merciless.

Variety:
“It's a shock to see Hepburn playing a role that even Raquel Welch would have the good sense to turn down.”
⁹³

New York Daily News: “Bloodline
offers the chance to see Hepburn on the screen again but under what rotten circumstances. As a team, she and Ben Gazzara evoke no spark, no charisma.”
⁹⁴

Denver Post:
“Hepburn is showing the passage of time.”
⁹⁵

Devastated by the reviews, Audrey wondered if she'd lost her touch for picking winners. What remained of her confidence was deeply shaken. It occurred to her that Mel's input, overbearing as it often was, was something she rather missed.
^bk

The only thing more disastrous than
Bloodline
was her marriage, whose instability hadn't been helped by reports during filming that she and Gazzara were becoming involved. Ben (né “Biago”) Gazzara was a year younger than Audrey, a product of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio and, for a while, thought to be a potential new Brando. He'd starred on Broadway in Cat
on
a Hot Tin Roof and
A Hatful of Rain
and had a hit TV show,
Run for Your Life
(1965-68). He was separated from Janice Rule at the time he and Audrey met, and their relationship became the object of great press speculation during
Bloodline.

But an “affair”? Her friends, and possibly Audrey herself, relished the rumor for giving Andrea a taste of his own medicine. But if her brief infatuation with Gazzara was anything serious or profound, Hepburn never mentioned it—then or later—to her confidantes Connie Wald or Doris Brynner or anyone else.

Andrea was, in fact, disturbed by the Hepburn-Gazzara gossip, but not enough to renounce his ways. His extracurricular socializing continued unabated, and so did the Roman public's fascination with him. His favorite haunts were Bella Blue, Rome's most chic private nightclub, and Jackie 0, just 150 meters away. The man who knew and followed his movements most closely—and whom Dr. Dotti loathed above all others—was a genial working stiff named Tony Menicucci.

“I am not a paparazzi!” Menicucci declares in Rome. “I am a
photojournalist
. Paparazzi shoot people when they are shopping or with friends—unimportant times.” Menicucci shoots them when they're somewhere, or with someone, important. That is his legal right, he declares, going on to defend it at length. It's a sensitive issue—and his occupational hazard. But as one of Europe's greatest celebrity catchers, he is proud of his work, in general, and of his extensive knowledge of Dr. Dotti's nocturnal habits, in particular. Typically, he says:

What was it about Dr. Dotti that so many women loved?

“I don't know,” the photographer replies. But, it seems to have been his mind more than his body, and Dotti, in turn, seems to have been more interested in their company than in sex. Says Menicucci, with the investigative certainty of a Woodward-Bernstein: “I know he didn't take them to his house.”