Audrey Hepburn (59 page)

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Authors: Barry Paris

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Wolders' integrity and devotion were a revelation to Hepburn: Here, after so many years, was a gentle spirit who had no interest in dominating her, only in taking care of her and accepting her wishes. She had, says Wolders, “almost a child's need or capacity to trust and to entrust herself to someone. Once she trusted someone, she would give them her life.”
37
Audrey felt like a new woman with new enthusiasm. There were things to do and places to go with a wholly sympathetic companion who would help her come to terms with the loose ends of her life, while retaining his own life and independence. They decided from the start to avoid the legal entanglements of marriage and to keep their finances completely separate. After years of Andrea's tricks, she now had a Dutch treat.
 
 
CHIEF AMONG Audrey's “loose ends” was her kinfolk. During her ten years of marriage to Dotti, she had been preoccupied with him and Luca to the extent of neglecting her own relatives in favor of his. Now, with Rob's stolid Dutch support, she once again turned her attention to them. Wolders has described Audrey's mother as “a superior woman” but “biased and intolerant and critical of most everyone, including Audrey. She did, fortunately, have extremely demonstrative aunts.”
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Her favorite was Miesje, widow of Otto, who was shot during the war. Miesje never hesitated to embrace and give her physical affection, says Wolders, and “Audrey regarded her almost as more her mother than Ella.” When Miesje moved to Switzerland in her seventies, Audrey and Rob visited her often and, when she became ill, went to see her daily. They got her into a special nursing home in Morges, where she died—in Audrey's arms—in 1986.
She was equally attentive to her youngest aunt, Jacqueline, the former lady-in-waiting to Princess Juliana. “It's amazing what Audrey did for her aunts,” says her cousin, Hako Sixma van Heemstra, in the Netherlands. Audrey looked after Jacqueline until her death in 1990 and made her last years livable.
Infinitely more complex, however, was Audrey's relationship with Joseph Hepburn-Ruston—her father. Rob Wolders has a strong opinion on the subject:
It's not true Audrey was trying to hide the truth about him over the years, or that she thought of him as a skeleton in the closet. If it was important at all to her career, it was from about 1948 to 1952. After
Roman Holiday,
you could have had it on the front page and it would not have hurt her. With me, she seemed eager to talk about it and get my feelings, perhaps in part to explain why she couldn not love her parents as unconditionally as I or others loved theirs. But it didn't wreck her life; it made her more just and fair. Audrey fought the tendencies to reject her parents. She was extremely good to both of them.
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The melodramatic story that she never saw her father after he abandoned her in the 1930s has been shown to be untrue. It is known that, after the war, Audrey learned through the Red Cross that he was alive and eventually mustered the courage to see him in Dublin in 1959.
Unknown
is the fact that he came to visit her in Switzerland in the late sixties and that, ever after, she kept a photo of him and herself from that visit in her dressing room.
In October 1980, when Hepburn received word that her father was gravely ill, she desperately wanted to see him again but was full of trepidation. She asked Rob to come with her.
“We flew to Dublin, and it was an amazing experience,” Wolders recalls. “He reached out to me with the knowledge—I'm convinced—that what he conveyed to me, I would convey to Audrey. He said extraordinary things about her and about his regrets for not having given her more in her childhood, for not showing his love for her.”
Joseph Hepburn-Ruston died the next day, October 16, 1980, at the age of ninety. The funeral was private, and there were no obituaries. His fascist past would be buried with him.
“What's important,” says Wolders, “is that she had no bitterness toward him. She felt a certain pity for his having been simplistic enough to believe in fascism, but her anger was directed toward the movement, not him.... I regret that Audrey chose not to do an autobiography. I wish the public would have known her feelings about her father. She didn't hate him for his fascism, but she became what she was in reaction to it.”
During an interview ten years later, Phil Donahue observed that at least her father “died knowing you loved him.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and I knew that he loved me. It's always better late than never.”
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THE PROBLEM with her mother was entirely different.
“She taught me to stand straight, sit erect, use discipline with wine and sweets, and to smoke only six cigarettes a day,” was Audrey's wry summary. “She opposed both my marriages, maybe knowing neither man was going to be totally good to me. But I must say, she adored Robbie.”
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Ella was bedridden during most of the time Wolders knew her, but they spoke a lot of Dutch together, he recalls, and as with Audrey's father, “I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was a sort of conduit between her and [Audrey]. Her mother, I think, suffered a great deal because she was unable to show her sentimentality. But Audrey's father's second wife, after his death, forwarded to us a series of letters her mother had written to him, talking of her extreme pride in Audrey. They were able to express it to one another, but not to Audrey.”
The greatest insight into Ella van Heemstra comes from an unlikely source—
Funny Face
author Leonard Gershe:
“I met her when we were shooting the musical numbers in Paris. The two most unnecessary things on a set are the star's mother and the writer, not in that order, so the two of us would go off and have a Dubonnet in a café. That's how our friendship began, and it flowered from there.
“She stayed with me in Los Angeles when she was trying to decide where to settle out here in the early sixties. I didn't know the Greg Pecks then—they're good friends of mine now, but this was a long time ago—and one day, Ella got a call from Véronique Peck. ‘She wants to take me to lunch tomorrow,' Ella said. ‘Will you tell her how to get here?' I got on and gave her directions —second right, then the first left, etc....”
The next afternoon, when Gershe asked Ella how her luncheon had gone, she said Véronique had been almost an hour late to pick her up, and then supplied the details:
Véronique made a wrong turn and went to the wrong house. A housewife in her apron answered, and Véronique said, “Hello, I'm Mrs. Gregory Peck,” and the woman invited her in. She sat down. The woman said, “Would you like something?” Véronique said, “Are you going to have something? All right.” The woman told her how much she liked Gregory Peck, and they chatted about his pictures. Finally, the woman said, “Mrs. Peck, are you here about some charity?” “No,” she said, “I'm waiting for Baroness van Heemstra.” The woman said, “Oh, is she coming, too?”
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Ella found it hilarious. “She had great humor and so did Audrey,” says Gershe, “but unfortunately they didn't have it together—they didn't share laughs. I adored her mother, but Audrey did not like her very much. She told me Ella had been a fascist, had gone along with her husband, and when she got rid of him, she got rid of that, too, and was ashamed of him. I was always perplexed about that. If Audrey said it, it was true. Audrey did not lie. But the Ella I knew was nothing like that.”
Ella eventually picked San Francisco over Los Angeles as her residence through the early seventies. There, she did volunteer work and “came to all of us, including Audrey and me,” says Gershe, “to raise money for the boys coming back from Vietnam, who weren't getting proper benefits because it was an undeclared war. The Ella I knew was working her ass off in a VA hospital.”
Once or twice a year, she came back to Los Angeles to visit her friend Mildred Knopf, wife of producer Edwin, and to be entertained by George Cukor, among others. “Ella was a very dignified and commanding presence,” recalls Connie Wald, “quite majestic.”
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Gershe was struck by the fact that both the mother and the daughter stuck rigorously to their roles:
Ella played the role of stern mother. She was a different person when she talked about Audrey—judgmental—and she took her role of Baroness quite seriously. She was proud, in the pejorative sense. You could tell by the way she walked into a room that she felt slightly superior to everyone else. It was not one of her endearing qualities, but there it was. It embarrassed Audrey, who was exactly the opposite, and that was another one of the walls between them.
On the other hand, Ella could be very silly when she wanted to be, and so could Audrey. But Audrey never knew that woman. They didn't know they were really very alike. There was always that hand held up—“Don't come any closer!” ... Ella thought Audrey was a wonderful actress, but she couldn't tell her that. She was very proud of being the mother of Audrey Hepburn. That was even better than being a baroness. Ella once said to me, “When I was young, the three things I wanted most to be was thin, beautiful and an actress. Isn't it ironic that I should have a daughter who's all three?”
Audrey once told me she never felt loved by her mother, but Ella did love her, believe me. Often, people can't tell the object of their love they love them; they'll tell other people, instead. I probably would have hated Ella as a mother, but I loved her as a friend.
In the last letter she wrote to Gershe, from Tolochanaz in 1982, Ella enclosed a picture of herself and said, “We hope to see you over here after the snow leaves us. We shall have the garden in bloom and plenty of butterflies, and they should be free.”
bq
The letter ends with, “I love you, Lenny!”
“She never wrote that before,” says Gershe, “and I never heard from her again.”
Baroness Ella lived with her daughter at La Paisible in Tolochenaz for the last ten years of her life. She died there, on August 26, 1984.
 
 
YEARS LATER Hepburn was asked, “Since your marriage to Mel Ferrer in 1954, you've always lived with a man. What have you learned about them?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “What can one learn about them? They're human beings, with all the frailties that women have. I think they're more vulnerable than women. I really do. You can hurt a man so easily....
“I love Robbie very, very much. It's not
Romeo and Juliet;
we've had our tiffs, but very few. It's a wonderful friendship; we like each other.... He is solid in every way. I can trust him. I trust his love; I never fear I'm losing it. He reassures me. We like the same life, being in the country, the dogs, making trips together.... He's absolutely there for me.”
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Said Wolders at the time: “It's important that I convince Audrey that love is still possible, because I think she must have begun to feel that it's not in the cards for her anymore.”
Rob had moved in with her at Tolochenaz much earlier, even though her divorce was not finalized at the time. Andrea had been dragging his feet, insisting that Luca remain in his custody in Rome while he continued to attend school there.
“I witnessed her pain during the process of the divorce, and it was heartwrenching,” says Wolders. Such was her hypersensitivity that she identified with Dotti's pain as well.
“Audrey told me, ‘I suffered so much for Andrea,”' says Anna Cataldi. “She used that exact phrase. For her, Andrea was so important. She said, ‘If Andrea would ask for my skin, I would give it to him.' I never, never heard her say anything negative about him. I think she knew it was quite negative for Andrea'scareer to be with such a famous woman. He was a doctor, not a real-estate agent, after all. The publicity, he was looking for in the beginning, but he got more than he bargained for.“
45
The divorce finally came through in 1982.
br
For all the depth of her relationship with Wolders, she was in no mood for another wedding. Journalists kept asking when she and Rob were going to get married, and if not, why?
“We're happy as we are,” she said.
Wolders's elaboration was wise: “Everyone knows how unhappy her marriage to Mel was, and the second, to Andrea, was even worse. It would be like asking someone who has just got out of an electric chair to sit back on it again.”
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THOUGH AUDREY was essentially retired these days, Eleanor Lambert thought she had a tempting little non-film offer that might appeal to her. Lambert was a prominent publicist, writer and consultant whom Hepburn credited with helping shape and promote her image in the very beginning.
“I'd known Audrey for a long time,” says Lambert, “and she was still a sort of symbol of Tiffany's because of the film.” Lambert handled Tiffany's publicity, and when the store expanded in 1981, she suggested Audrey as the perfect spokesperson and guest of honor at the opening of Tiffany's new branches. “They thought it was a lovely idea,” says Lambert, and so did Audrey. Lambert sent her a detailed itinerary—press conferences, photo shoots, ribbon-cutting appearances—and Hepburn agreed.
“But suddenly, she changed her mind,” says Lambert. “She was traumatized about being photographed candidly. She would [only] pose for photographs. She was too timid to appear in a casual way—which she later did extensively [for UNICEF]. But that relaxed way of seeing herself must have come through years of thinking it over.”
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