Audrey Hepburn (62 page)

Swiss society and geography lent itself to a kind of selective intimacy. “Everybody respected everybody else's privacy,” says Rob Wolders. “Even with someone like Hubert, a great friend of forty years, months went by when we wouldn't see him. But then he and Audrey would pick up right where they left off. She had very strong friendships like that. The strongest was with Doris Brynner, though Doris used to be annoyed with us because she thought we were antisocial sticks-in-the-mud. But from the time Audrey and I met, we basically made time only for each other and didn't go out much. We loved films and I got tapes of everything of any consequence, which we watched.”

Watching movies on TV was her favorite pastime, she told
Wichita Eagle
film writer Bob Curtwright at the time.
⁹¹
She loved Gerard Depardieu's
Cyrano
“because they kept it intimate,” and Spielberg's
ET,
and “anything with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. I like to watch them in my bed—that's the best place! I just saw Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons in The Mission and thought that was a lovely film. And I very much liked
Prizzi's Honor.”

When asked to name her favorite contemporary actresses, she cited Pfeif fer, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and Cher (see Cher's letter to Hepburn, Chapter 10, pp. 328-29.) “Cher has an enormous scale of emotions and total lack of inhibition, which I haven't,” she said. “Meryl Streep is a phenomenon. She can make herself look any way she wants and become so many different people. She can do anything she wants. I can't.”
⁹²

Wolders was fascinated by the way Audrey influenced people like Julia Roberts and Liza Minnelli. “Like so many of the younger actresses I saw with Audrey, she and Liza had this wonderful hugging thing—this trust.” Nastassia Kinski encountered Audrey for the first time in Paris, at the French Oscars. “I felt a tap on my shoulder,” says Rob, “and this demure little girl whispered, ‘Can I meet her?' Audrey turned around at that moment and they recognized each other. Kinski took Audrey's hands and, not quite knowing what to do, just held her hands to her face and kissed them like a child.”

On the few occasions when she went into Geneva, Rob or Doris would drive her. Doris had a boutique there. But something about Geneva did not appeal to her—perhaps its obsession with money.
“C'est juste”
is one of the most common expressions there, meaning “That's right,” as when correct change is given. Like most things in Geneva, it implies an economic transaction. The better shop doors, with their POIGNÉE AUTOMATIQUE signs, open by themselves at your approach to make it easier to buy. In that haven of commercialism, it seems that few ideas and even fewer feelings are exchanged. Thousands of elderly women (“Greta Garbos,” some call them) walk around in fur coats, often talking to themselves. The great Swiss banking culture has created not only a
prix fixe
for everything but great social distance.
⁹³

In subtle ways, it reinforced Hepburn's reluctance to go there more than necessary. Doris Brynner was better equipped and more adept at dealing with it, but even she understood the social and professional implications for her friend: “We were always pushing Audrey to make another movie,” Doris says, “but the only thing she really looked forward to was staying home.”

 

 

ROB WOLDERS looked forward to the same thing, bewitched by Audrey and everything about her—not least, conversing with her in their native tongue. “She was the only person I ever knew who made Dutch sound beautiful,” he says. They spoke it frequently “because there are Dutch expressions that just don't exist in English. Audrey was able to do various Dutch accents very well, especially the more vulgar dialects, which amused her very much. She would break me up. Sometimes we used Dutch to say things we didn't want anyone else to understand. Her Dutch was heavenly, the most palatable I ever heard—the kind spoken prior to the war, learned from her mother and grandfather.” Says Rob's brother-in-law, Dr. Ronald Glegg: “When she went into Dutch, her sense of humor came through more. Her tone of voice changed, and she became more childlike and endearing.” But linguistics were only the most obvious of their many cultural and emotional ties.

“Robbie is totally Dutch,” she told Alan Riding of
The New York Times
Paris bureau. “The two of us discovered how much pride we had in our roots and the respect we have for the Dutch.... They've always had an immensely practical and courageous way of dealing with things. They're not fussers, they're solid and very liberal.... Rob has a lovely Dutch family—umpteen sisters and a wonderful mother. As you get older, it's nice to feel you belong somewhere—having lived a rather circus life.”
⁹⁴

Audrey instantly connected with the Wolders clan, most of all with Rob's mother, Cemelia, whom she would soon call “Mama.” They developed a strong, surrogate mother-daughter relationship, says Dr. Glegg, husband of Rob's sister Grada: “The Wolders family is very tightly knit. Audrey recognized that and fit in closely on many warm occasions in Rochester around the dinner table with a dozen relatives.” Otherwise, her favorite place there was most unlikely: the huge, suburban Irondequoit Mall.

“It's the most beautiful one I've ever seen!” she'd exclaim. “Can we go?” Glegg recalls her “teenager's pleasure there—and she looked like a teenager, too, in her jeans and sweater.” He savors, even more, her visits with him and Grada at their home on Longboat Key in Florida: “She loved the pristine beauty, the birds, the barefoot walks in the sand. She tended to take charge of our kitchen, and that lady in the kitchen with no makeup and curlers in her hair didn't mind being seen that way.”
⁹⁵

All of her life she had been searching for a man capable of returning her love unequivocally. In Rob, she had finally met “her spiritual twin, the man she wanted to grow old with.
⁹⁶
It took me a long time to find [him, but] it is better late than never. If I'd met him when I was eighteen, I wouldn't have appreciated him. I would have thought, ‘That's the way everyone is.'

“I still feel I could lose everything at any moment. But the greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings.... I'm a long way from the human being I'd like to be. But I've decided I'm not so bad after all.”
⁹⁷

Her need for the quiet life was fully in sync with his own, says Wolders: “Sometimes, Audrey would become exasperated because Doris or somebody would say, ‘What do you do all day?' We found that the day would fly by because the things we were involved with took a lot of time—the market, and so forth. You cook a meal carefully, hours go into that. For our own sake, but mostly for the dogs, we'd go to the lake and take our walks there. On a Sunday afternoon, if the weather allowed, we would have a swim, take some sun—in— variably, at some point, Audrey would disappear and come back with a basket of fruit or vegetables.”

Wolders recalls the summer of 1990 when the huge, seventy-year-old willow tree outside their home keeled over and crashed to the ground—“this thing that we both loved. It was so big that even lying on its side, the branches were still higher than the house. Then Tuppy, our Jack Russell terrier, died.” Those events might strike others as trivial, “but they were tragedies for us. It's amazing how such things become so important when you lead that kind of life. Luca once laughed his head off because adjacent to the house was the little village church, and its bell would sound on the hour and half hour. It was a major part of our lives, but they were doing some renovation and we missed those wonderful sounds. One day, the bells started to peal at noon and we both yelled. We were so delighted. Luca thought we were nuts. But it was a part of our lives that had been restored.”

Life in Tolochenaz, after all, was simple.

“We would go to town to shop,” Rob recalls, “which meant going to the dry-goods store, the stand where we bought our mushrooms, etc. Audrey loved shopping—and she was a maniac in a supermarket. She said it harked back to the starvation days when you needed a coupon to get an ounce of butter in Holland. The supermarket in Tolochenaz didn't exist until about five years ago, but she loved it. She was like a child, and we would end up with a lot of stuff we didn't need. In the smaller shops, she'd settle into a discussion with the owners, and I preferred those places because she wouldn't go bananas.”

When asked what, for her, would constitute the perfect day, Audrey once replied, “It's going to sound like a thumping bore, but my idea of heaven is [having] Robert and my two sons at home—I hate separations—and the dogs, a good movie, a wonderful meal and great television all coming together. I'm really blissful when that happens. [My goal] was not to have huge luxuries. As a child, I wanted a house with a garden, which I have today. This is what I dreamed of. I'd never worry about age if I knew I could go on being loved and having the possibility to love. If I'm old and my husband doesn't want me, or my children think me ugly and do not want me—that would be a tragedy. So it isn't age or even death that one fears, as much as loneliness and the lack of affection.”
⁹⁸

There was no danger of her children rejecting her, and no lack of affection from Rob. Paradoxically, for
not
being her husband, she found she could count on him even more.

CHAPTER 10

“Somebody said to me, ‘You know, it's really senseless what you're doing. There's always been suffering, there will always be, and you're just prolonging the suffering of these children [by rescuing them].' My answer is, ‘Okay, then, let's start with your grandchild. Don't buy antibiotics if it gets pneumonia. Don't take it to the hospital if it has an accident.”'

—AUDREY HEPBURN

 

 

 

I
AM SORT OF MARRIED TO ROBERT,” SHE TOLD HIS HOMETOWN newspaper, the Rochester
Democrat & Chronicle,
in 1989. ”We're always together and we have been for almost ten years now.“
¹

She turned sixty that May, and it was assumed that her film career was finished. But she now surprised everyone by agreeing to a cameo role in a new Steven Spielberg movie.

“She was as uncertain and nervous and undecided about her last film as she had been with
Roman Holiday,
her first,” says Wolders.
²
Hepburn and Spielberg had never met. But she finally accepted the job because she admired his films and because he promised her it could be done in just a few days that summer.

“We left everything behind and got on a plane [for] Montana,” she said.
³
By the time she arrived, costar Richard Dreyfuss had finished most of his own shooting and now turned over the house he was renting—a wonderful log cabin in the Montana woods—to Audrey and Rob.

Always
(1989) starred Holly Hunter, John Goodman and Brad Johnson, as well as Hepburn and Dreyfuss. It was pure, nostalgic Spielberg—a remake of Victor Fleming's World War II “morale booster,”
A Guy Named Joe
(1943), in which flier Spencer Tracy, killed in action, returns as a friendly ghost to watch over his girl, Irene Dunne, and her new romance with Van Johnson. Spielberg transposed his version to the present-day American west; the soldiers in battle became firefighters in a national forest.

The original had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who also wrote
Roman Holiday,
thus providing an alpha-omega bracket to her American career. But Audrey's tiny role in this one was hard to describe. “Nobody knows what I am,” she said, “even Steven Spielberg! I would say I'm a spirit.... but not an extraterrestrial. It's just plain old me with a sweater on.”
⁴

Wolders recalls it as “a fantastic experience for Audrey. She worked a great deal over the phone with the writers, who wanted to tailor it to Audrey and get her input. Then Spielberg and Dreyfuss came to this lovely house in the woods, and they sat around and talked about what was she going to wear. I even went into the little town, Libby, to see what was in the shops there. All they had were hardware stores that also sold clothes. They finally decided on a simple turtleneck instead of wings.”

The typical Spielbergian opening is full of suspense: Dreyfuss's plane is out of fuel but he manages to land. The gripping forest-fire scenes employ spectacular footage taken during the 1988 fires at Yellowstone National Park. But soon enough, after Dreyfuss executes a brilliant midair rescue of Goodman, his own plane catches fire and explodes.

Enter Audrey as “Hap”—a New Age angel in slacks, sent down to assist the freshly deceased Dreyfuss. Quietly, she explains that he must return to earth to inspire others and that true love means letting go. Only Hepburn's sincerity redeems her platitudinous dialogue: “The love we hold back is the only thing that follows us here.” The “here” is evidently heaven—a meadow. “Time's funny stuff,” she tells him.

Down below, dispatcher Holly Hunter grieves for Dreyfuss as she listens to their painfully ironic theme song—“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Hunter is the best thing in the film, exuding erotic presence and an exquisite sense of longing. In the movie's most haunting moment, she dances in a seductive white dress with Dreyfuss' ghost, without ever touching.

Hunter and Hepburn had no scenes together but enjoyed each other off the set. Wolders has fond memories of the time it was arranged for the whole cast and crew to go on a special outing to Coeur d'Alene Lake, just across the Idaho border from Spokane:

“They hired two huge busses to accommodate one hundred people, and it tells you something about Audrey and Holly that—as good professionals—they were the first ones on the bus. But only about six other people showed up, probably because they didn't think Audrey or Holly or anybody else ‘important' would go. While we were sitting there waiting, the radar thing in the bus kept beeping, and finally Holly yelled, ‘Shut that fucking thing up!' Audrey found that extremely funny, and we spent a lovely evening on the boat with Holly that night.”