Audrey Hepburn (58 page)

The fateful meeting of Hepburn and Wolders came about through Connie Wald, widow of the celebrated producer-writer Jerry Wald. She was Audrey's closest friend and regular hostess in Los Angeles. Hepburn loved her beautiful but unpretentious stone house in Beverly Hills, with its wood-paneled library and state-of-the-art screening room full of Jerry's film memorabilia, including his 1948 Irving Thalberg Award.

Connie had also been a good friend of Merle Oberon, and of Rob Wolders, for more than a decade. She was struck then, and still is, by his “intense caring and devotion to Merle,” especially after Oberon had open-heart surgery.

“Merle and I used to go to Connie's often,” Wolders recalls. “Merle had died about two months earlier, and Connie felt I should be with friends because I had been keeping to myself. She said, ‘Come to the house for dinner. It's just family.”'

Wolders arrived to find that the “family” included Billy and Audrey Wilder, William Wyler—and Audrey Hepburn, Connie's current houseguest. (“We always had Billy and Willie together when Audrey came,” she says. “It was a love fest.”
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) Also present were Kurt Frings, Lenny Gershe and Sean Ferrer.

Some claim that Connie was actively matchmaking. “Heavens no,” she says today. “That never works.” In any case, Wolders recalls, “Audrey was extraordinarily sweet with me that night. We spoke Dutch and talked about Merle a great deal. Sean was wonderful with me, too. Later he said he remembered that I seemed to be hiding behind a certain chair. Connie took a picture of the two Audreys on either side of me [see photo 45]. That evening helped me considerably.”

Audrey later told interviewer Glenn Plaskin, “I was charmed with him that night, but he didn't register that much. He was getting over the death of Merle, [and] it was the worst period of my life, one of the low ebbs. We both cried into our beers.”
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Four months later, Wolders had to go to New York and Connie said, “Audrey's doing a picture there—you should call her.”

He did so.

“She seemed pleased to hear from me but when I asked her to dinner, she said they were doing night shooting and it would be impossible,” he says. “I thought it was a gentle, subtle way of rebuffing me. But I was in New York two more weeks and, on my last night there, I was dressing to go to a small party with some friends when the phone rang. It was Audrey, saying she wasn't shooting that night and would I like to have dinner? I said I had another commitment and asked if she'd like to join us. She said, ‘No, thank you, but would you like to come by for a drink?' I said, ‘Great.' I wanted to see her again.

“So I met her at the Cafe Pierre, we sat down for a drink, and before I knew it, an hour had passed. Audrey said, ‘Do you mind if I have some pasta?' I said no, of course. So she had a huge plate of pasta. An hour and three quarters passed, and I realized I was quite late. I joined my friends and had to leave early the next morning for Los Angeles. But after that, we spoke almost every day and got to know each other on the telephone.”

Those conversations in the beginning, he says, “were not romantic tête-à-têtes. She was counseling and advising me and then gradually, she started to talk about her own life and began to seek
my
counsel. I was the one calling her, but then one day, she called me, which gave me an entirely different feeling about her. It meant that she cared enough to speak to me, whereas, up to then, I thought perhaps she was just ‘accommodating' me. That's when I went back to New York and we began a kind of clandestine relationship, which she went into very reluctantly.”

Her main concern was for Luca, not Andrea. When she returned to Rome, Dotti said, rather flippantly, “You look very beautiful—you must be in love.” She replied, rather daringly, “I am!” Their marriage was by then irreparable, but it wasn't entirely Andrea's fault. To Rob, she confided an example of the problems caused by her own emotionalism a few years earlier:

“She was extraordinarily close to her makeup man, Alberto de Rossi, and to his wife, Grazia. When he died, Audrey was destroyed—not only for Grazia. Her own pain was so intense that Andrea thought it excessive. He could not comprehend the depth of her sorrow, and that contributed to their rift; Audrey's melancholia was so intense that it became difficult for Andrea to deal with, and he criticized her, she told me. Without making herself the victim and him the villain, she was investigating where she might have failed. I think she was also keen to find out what had made Merle's and my marriage so successful.”

 

 

ROBERT WOLDERS was born on September 28, 1936, in Rotterdam, the son of a KLM airline executive. He was four years old during the Nazi destruction of Rotterdam, after which a farmer friend of his mother's said, “You can bring your children here.” Dutch people in those days used to take their china and silver into the countryside to trade with the farmers for food. Rob and his sister spent the terrible
Hongerwinter
of 1944 with that farm family in a tiny village near Zwolle, just ten miles from Arnhem.

“There is a great irony in the fact that Audrey and I were so close to each other then,” he says. Later, in discussing the impact of the war on their childhood, they found that they both shared the odd feeling that “this was the way things had to be. An occupation wasn't anything unusual. I thought everybody lived like that. We thought America was someplace up in heaven—it didn't really exist. Audrey frequently pointed out, and I experienced it, too, how close families grew to each other and the humor we found in everything—her mother's extraordinary dedication to her and her grandfather and her aunts. She said those were, in a sense, among the best years of her life.”
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After the war, several members of his family emigrated to Rochester, New York. Rob joined them in 1959, with a goal of becoming an actor. He enrolled at the University of Rochester, where he founded an avant-garde theatrical group called “Experiment '60.” He was much praised for his production of Samuel Beckett's
Endgame
and for his bold direction of Ghelderode's
Escuriel-a
“triumph that should elevate him to professional echelons,” wrote one Rochester critic. On the strength of three successful seasons as the leading figure and guiding spirit of that group, Wolders was accepted by the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where he studied for two years. He was then engaged, in July 1963, as a novice at the Spoleto Festival, where he directed (and played “Greeneyes” in) a much-admired production of Jean Genet's
Deathwatch,
supervised by Jerome Robbins.

By 1966, Wolders was costarring with Neville Brand and Philip Carey in the NBC-TV series
Laredo,
where his appearance in some fifty episodes drew raves.
Variety
hailed him as “a very suave addition to the Texas Rangers.”
The Hollywood Reporter
said he set a record “for authoritative audacity” on the Show.
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Soon enough, he got a movie contract. “Handsome Dutch Import Groomed as Star,” read one headline. Said Monique James, a talent scout for Universal: “We have started a momentum for him by introducing him importantly in Beau Geste and following it up with a good role in the forthcoming Tobruk. I have no doubt that his face will register immediately with the movie public, but we want him to be an experienced, knowing actor.”
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Sadly for Wolders, neither film lived up to expectations.
Beau Geste
(1966), costarring Rob with Telly Savalas, Guy Stockwell, Doug McClure and Leslie Nielsen, was the least successful version of that French Foreign Legion adventure.
Tobruk
(1967), directed by Arthur Hiller, costarred Wolders with Rock Hudson and George Peppard in a World War II action tale of the destruction of Rommel's fuel supply in the Sahara. It was better than
Beau Geste
but sabotaged by its slow pace.

In 1970, at thirty-four, Wolders met and became involved with the veteran star Merle Oberon, then fifty-nine. Soon after, she emerged from retirement to produce and costar with him in her final film-a steamy “vanity picture” called
Interval (
1973).

Shot in and around the Mayan ruins of Chichen-Itza, Mexico,
Interval
was the tale of a globetrotting older woman, on the run from her past, who finds true love with a much younger man—Rob Wolders. Their common bond is purely existential: both are caught in the “interval between being born and dying.” Oberon looks nowhere near her sixty-two years, and hunky Wolders makes a noble effort to be fascinated by her; their modestly undraped love scenes are tasteful enough (see photo 43). Oberon and screenwriter Gavin Lambert deserved credit for at least
trying
to address the age issue.

“You've been very kind to me these last few days,” she says to Rob at one point, “but surely you want to be with young people.”

“Are you afraid of the past?” he asks.

“Not at all,” she replies. “I'm faced with it. Most of it's not worth remembering.”

As tearjerkers go,
Interval
was no
Intermezzo
or even
Interlude,
and the critics were brutal. But the film's failure did not diminish the offscreen ardor of its costars. Oberon and Wolders were married two years later, in 1975, and took their places in the international jet set, where Rob thenceforth tended to her and her career instead of his own.

One of Oberon's closest friends was Mignon Winans, who often stayed with her in Acapulco during those years and watched the progress of her relationship with Wolders:

“He's such a kind, serious person, and Merle thought he was just wonderful. He understood women—the tender side of women. Some do and some don't. They were certainly a happy couple. More than any of her marriages, this was the one that made her the happiest. His refinement is what she was very much attracted to. There aren't too many men who have that quality, that aura. He gave her a lot.”
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Rob was ever gentle, says Eleanor Lambert, who was also a friend of Oberon's. “In a way, when he was with Merle, he was her slave. Not a slave of passion, but her adorer. If she had something within reach, she'd ask him to cross the room and hand it to her. That's how courtly he always was.”
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Now and then, the words “gold digger” came up; some assumed Wolders married Oberon for her money. The truth was otherwise. “Because Merle was married to a wealthy industrialist, the presumption was that she was very wealthy, which was not the case,” says Wolders. “When she left Bruno Pagliai, a man she loved a great deal, she did not ask for a major settlement.”
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Merle Oberon died on Thanksgiving Day 1979. Five months later, her legendary jewel collection netted $2,446,000 at a Christie's auction. Some $1.4 million of that was divided into equal trust funds for her adopted daughter and son, Francesca and Bruno Pagliai, Jr. The remaining $1 million was bequeathed to the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital. Wolders got not a penny of it—by his own request, five years earlier, at the time Oberon made out her will. He was left only with the Malibu beach house which they had purchased jointly. It was reported that, shortly before her death, Merle had instructed him to find and marry someone else and not spend the rest of his life alone.

“This thing about ‘instructions' ... ,” says Wolders, shaking his head. “I had told close friends that when I said to Merle she couldn't leave me because my life would be ruined, she became perturbed with me. She expected me to have more courage. She said, ‘You owe it to me to be happy, to restart your life.' But instructions to find another woman to marry? No.”

But it was true, he says, that Merle and Audrey had known and much liked one another:

“Audrey talked to me a great deal about Merle. Once while Audrey was married to Mel and not having a very positive attitude, she saw Merle at Doris Brynner's house. Audrey said she spent most of that day with Merle and it turned her around. One of the reasons why she extended herself to me so much at our first meeting was because of her admiration for Merle.”

It was a curious coincidence that both women had played the same role in
The Children's Hour
for William Wyler, but Wolders says they never commented on each other's performances: “Neither Merle nor Audrey talked very much about their film work, but what struck me was the openness and vulnerability in both of their faces in that part. They both had a similar type of naturalnessand innocence.” To some extent, they even looked alike, with their high cheekbones and exotic, slightly slanted eyes.

The early stage of the Wolders-Hepburn match was complicated by the Hepburn-Gazzara gossip. “Her family was together at Christmas when those stories surfaced,” says Wolders, and despite the fact that the divorce was well along, “Andrea was consumed by jealousy. She resented that very much at the time. But we could laugh afterwards over her supposedly having an affair with Gazzara, when she and I were well into our relationship by then.”

A few months later, he began to visit her in Rome, where he rented an apartment because “Audrey and I, for Luca's sake, didn't consider it quite right to live openly together.” Audrey's fondest wish was that Luca and Rob would like each other, which was inevitably the case. Except for Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti, no one in or out of Hepburn's family ever disliked Rob.

“Robert made Audrey so happy,” said their friend, the late Eva Gabor. “She and I both chose very badly as far as men are concerned, as most actors do, because one doesn't have time to give it a chance. But Robert was wonderful, very European and genteel—a true gentleman in every way.”
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