Audrey Hepburn (56 page)

Even if Audrey knew that, it was small consolation to her in view of the immense publicity, for even a partial list of Dotti's outings and the women who appeared on his arm in those days is staggering. On an elegant Roman coffee table, Menicucci lays out an immense stack of photographs of Dr. Dotti taken during his marriage to Hepburn: Some are with Luca and Sean and Audrey. A few are with such celebrities as Ringo Starr and Olivia de Havilland. But most are with the beautiful young women “who were important in his life then,” Menicucci says, of whom the following are but a Whitman's Sampler:

Actress Daniela Trebbi (1979, et al.); Lupua Yerni and actress Karin Shubert (1979); Countess Coppotelli Latini at Bella Blue (1979); actress Christiana Borghi, one of Dotti's favorites, in Bologna and Rome (1980, et al.); Beatrice Corri of Italian TV and French actress Carol Andre (1975); Manuela Croce (1976); actresses Dalila Di Lazzaro and Marinella Giordana (1978); Countess Iliana Coritelli Lovatelli (Lorean's daughter) at Bella Blue (1980); actress Marilù Tolo (1982).

The pictures go on and on.... They appeared in
Novella, Ava Express, Stop, Oggi, Gente, Gioia, Annabella
and
Paris-Match,
to mention only a few.

Menicucci's most dramatic encounter with Dotti produced “a sentiment that was not friendly,” says the photographer, with a classic Italian shrug. “Son of a bitch!” Dotti yelled at him. “Don't you ever go to sleep? I don't want pictures!” With actress Dalila Di Lazzaro, especially, he became as “wild as a hyena” and would run to his car in an effort to hide her.
⁹⁷

Anna Cataldi felt it was “as if Andrea somehow wanted to provoke Audrey. It was a neurotic relationship. Audrey was a strong person. She set limits and was rather inflexible, and Andrea suffered for that. But Andrea had a rather schizophrenic personality. One side was looking for glamour. The other was a serious person who was a good doctor, a good father, a brilliant man. I think his relationship with Audrey had the same schizophrenia. One part of him was very impressed with the ‘Audrey Hepburn' glamour but also battling against it. The other part had a real relationship with a real human being.

“Andrea had enormous respect for her. ‘Audrey is a very straight person, very honest,' he would say. But Andrea destroyed Audrey's dream to have a little family and house when Luca was born. He disappointed her enormously and had some kind of rebellion against her.”
⁹⁸

Some of the Dottis' mutual friends were struck by Andrea's attentiveness to Audrey in many ways. Others, such as actor David Niven, were struck by the opposite:

“When Audrey married Dotti and was swept off to Rome, she was, I think, determined to be a very good wife to this very socially minded Roman, [but] the longer it went on, many people felt she was much too good for him and that he took incredible advantage of her and that she gamely played the wife of the social Roman and really let her career just stand still, on purpose, to help him.”
⁹⁹

Billy and Audrey Wilder's opinions are always of interest.

“He didn't make any impression on me,” says Mr. Wilder.

“They didn't go together,” says Mrs. Wilder. “You look at two people and you say, yes or no, and this was no.”
¹⁰⁰

Hepburn's friend Camilla Pecci-Blunt thought the same, even though, like Anna Cataldi, she knew and liked Andrea very much. “It seemed to me they didn't belong together at all,” says the Countess. “They just led very different lives. He was a very good father, and he has grown up a great deal since then. But he was rather childlike in those times.”
¹⁰¹

Eli Wallach has the last word: “She seemed to have a tendency to get involved with men who didn't take good care of her. I don't know exactly what happened, but when she married that Italian psychiatrist, she went dotty.”
¹⁰²

CHAPTER 9

“A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people who like that kind of book) but in actual life she is a nuisance.”

-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

 

 

 

A
UDREY HEPBURN WAS HAUNTED BY THE TRAUMA OF HER FIRST marital breakup and almost fanatically determined to avoid another one. In sadder but wiser hindsight, she assessed the situation as follows:

“I decided that if and when there was a second marriage, I would not let my fame or anything at all get in the way of personal happiness—for myself, for him, for my son and for the second child I hoped for. [Andrea] and I had what you could call an open arrangement. It's inevitable, when the man is younger. I wanted the relationship—the marriage—to last. Not just for our own sake, but for that of the son we had together.... I still believe the child has to come first.
¹

“[Divorce is] one of the worst experiences a human being can go through. I tried
desperately
to avoid it.... I hung on in both marriages very hard, as long as I could, for the children's sake, and out of respect for marriage. You always hope that if you love somebody enough, everything will be all right—but it isn't always true.”
²

It was time to act on a statement of principles she had made four years earlier to journalist Curtis Bill Pepper:

“Marriage should be only one thing: Two people decide they love each other so much that they want to stay together.... So, if in some way I don't fulfill what he needs in a woman—emotionally, physically, sexually, or whatever it is—and if he needs somebody else, then I could not stick around. I'm not the kind to stay and make scenes.”
³

Audrey, says Anna Cataldi, “behaved fantastically. She even stayed in Rome after they separated because she wanted Luca not to be split between his father and mother.”
⁴

Dr. Dotti would later tell a
People
magazine reporter, “I was no angel—Italian husbands have never been famous for being faithful. But she was jealous of other women even from the beginning.”
⁵
Hepburn would later come to a less Italian conclusion. “Those open marriages don't work,” she said. “If there's love, unfaithfulness is impossible.”
⁶

 

 

“THE DIFFICULTY with stars,” says Billy Wilder, “is, what do they do at fifty or fifty-five?”
⁷

It struck Audrey—as it had stricken the critics and millions of her fans--that
Bloodline
was no proper way to end such a grand film career. Her next picture, if she ever made one, might well be her last and had better be good. Among those clamoring for her film presence was director Peter Bogdanovich, who flew her to Los Angeles in January 1980 and instantly charmed her with his personality and with a script idea.

The title
They All Laughed
was borrowed from a Gershwin song composed for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in
Shall We Dance
(1937). The story was a quirky romance-suspense caper concerning four private detectives in New York whose love lives get mixed up with their sleuthing.

Barbra Streisand, after working with Bogdanovich in the hilarious
What's Up, Doc?,
called him “a horny bastard but brilliant.” He had been in a slump since the poorly received
Daisy Miller
(1974) and
At Long Last Love
(1975)—starring his paramour, Cybill Shepherd. He spent the next three years breaking up with her, and then made
SaintJack
(1979), Paul Theroux's novel of a Singapore pimp, starring Ben Gazzara.

“Benny couldn't get a job in a feature to save his life then,” Bogdanovich recalls. “None of the majors wanted him. I said, ‘Fuck it,' I was fed up with the whole system, so I went to Roger Corman and we made
Saint Jack
for under $2 million. When I screened it for Barry Diller and Michael Eisner in my projection room in Bel Air, they both flipped over Ben, and the next day—literally—they cast him in
Bloodline.”

Thenceforth, Gazzara was an unsolicited hotline of information. During
Bloodline,
Bogdanovich recalls, “he was constantly calling me about Audrey.... ‘Is she wonderful? Oh, Jesus, an angel come down from heaven!' They fell in love, he said. But Benny was going through a very bad time. His divorce was about to start. He would tell me these things candidly.

“So I wrote
They All Laughed
for Audrey, knowing what I knew because Ben had told me. I wrote those things into the script, and she knew it when she read it. It was what she was going through, an unhappy marriage, ten-year-old kid—all written for her based on what was happening in her life.

“The original idea of the detectives getting involved with their own clients was much like movie people who get involved romantically during their movies. It's an occupational hazard. So it was really a thinly veiled picture of our own lives.”
⁸

Cinema à clef.
David Susskind bought the first draft of the script, but by the time it got to production, “it was totally different—almost unrecognizable except for the title,” says the director, “and Susskind was going crazy.” The project was sold to Time-Life Films, a new arm of the media conglomerate, which was looking for its first big hit and felt Audrey was the star to launch it. If
They All Laughed
even approached the success of
Paper Moon
or
What's Up, Doc?,
everyone would be in clover.

The first version of the script was melancholy. In it, the detective played by John Ritter was still getting over a girl based on Shepherd. “It was going to be just Cybill's photograph,” says Bogdanovich. “That was the joke. She and I had just broken up. But in November [1979], I met Dorothy, and she and I fell madly in love. Her original part was just one scene. But I decided to stretch her story out into a happy ending, and I rewrote the whole thing from the middle on.”
⁹

Gorgeous Dorothy Stratten, a twenty-year-old Canadian model, was
Playboy's
1980 Playmate of the Year. When Bogdanovich met her at a Hugh Hefner party, all thoughts of Cybill Shepherd vanished from his mind. Stratten's previous film work consisted of one unreleased film and one that should have remained
unreleased——Galaxina
(1980), a kind of
Star Wars
spoof in which she played a robot. But Bogdanovich was smitten and determined to make her a star. He also wanted to marry her, but she was already married to (though separated from) a small-time Los Angeles hustler named Paul Snider. While Stratten was shooting in New York, Snider was enraged by press stories of her affair with the director. He bought a shotgun and told friends, “I'm going to kill Bogdanovich,” but nobody paid attention to his threats.

Another marriage was breaking up, as well. The Dottis had begun divorce proceedings by the time Hepburn arrived in New York City in mid-1980 to begin filming
They All Laughed.
She was depressed about that, and her life in general. Gazzara's casting had been reason for her acceptance of the film: She was happy to be reunited with him, though she was distressed by the new round of tabloid stories blaming her for Gazzara's divorce from Janice Rule. That subject was avoided in a
New York Times
interview with Michiko Kakutani on June 4, 1980, at the Cafe Pierre, where she sounded her “family values” theme once again but otherwise limited the discussion to her role.

She would be playing a Euro-millionaire's wife in search of a Manhattan escapade—“witty and fragile and strong,” said Bogdanovich. “What I think is interesting is bringing an actor and character together so you don't know where one leaves off and the other begins.” Audrey went along with it. “You have to refer to your own experience,” she told Kakutani. “What else have you got?” That—and her directors, whom she credited, as always, for her film success :

“I'm not trying to be coy. I really am a product of those men. I'm no Laurence Olivier, no virtuoso talent. I'm basically rather inhibited and I find it dif ficult to do things in front of people. What my directors have had in common is that they've made me feel secure, made me feel
loved.
I depend terribly on them. I was a dancer and they managed to do something with me as an actress that was pleasing to the public.”
¹⁰

She still tried to control her wardrobe, at least. But in the case at hand, Bogdanovich recalls, “I came up to her room one day at the Pierre, laid out all her clothes, and said, ‘I like this shirt, these pants, this scarf.' She said, ‘Fine.' No Givenchy. Blue jeans, a pea coat, a silk shirt. Everything she wore in the movie was what she walked around in normally.”

Several scenes in the film were shot on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day, and the actors had to mill around in the stores during the setups. There were no luxury trailers for the stars, but “Audrey complied without a sigh,” says Bogdanovich, and “never threw her weight around. Everyone knew her, of course, so after ten minutes, she would come out of a shop beaming: ‘Just look at what they gave me, Pete-ah. Look at this lovely umbrella! This wonderful handkerchief!' I told her, ‘You can work the other side of the street tomorrow.”'

As she never asked for special treatment, she also never asked for any of her lines to be changed. Instead, says the director, if she didn't like her dialogue, “What she'd do in her own sweet way [was] simply change the line. She'd say, ‘Oh! Terribly sorry, Pete-ah. I thought that
was
the line.'
¹¹
...

“I caught onto it after a while. I'd say, ‘That's not the line.' She'd say, ‘Oh, isn't it? I'm so sorry. I'll say the line—what was it?' I'd say, ‘No, yours was better.' She'd say, ‘Oh, no, no. Are you sure?' I'd say, ‘Yes, darling ... ”'
¹²