Audrey Hepburn (63 page)

With its overbearing John Williams musical score,
Always
is sweetly sappy, imbued with Spielberg's penchant for the supernatural and his simpleminded conviction that death, evil and everything else can be overcome through wishful thinking.

Variety
opined that Audrey was “alluring as always, but corny as a live-action fairy godmother.”
⁵
Leonard Maltin said
Always
suffered “from a serious case of The Cutes.” Pauline Kael in the
New Yorker
was most severe:

But Audrey was thrilled by her ten-day close encounter with Spielberg: “I loved it, and I wouldn't mind if he asked me again, like next summer. I'd be right back. I had really one of the best times of my life.”
⁷
The admiration was mutual. Spielberg said one of the greatest thrills of his life was to have worked with Audrey. Universal lobbied to get her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, but
Always
—and the last performance of Audrey Hepburn—were overlooked.

The final tally was twenty-nine motion pictures, counting her two TV films—a modest total for such a stellar career.

In the second of her two scenes in the Spielberg film, Hepburn gently lectures Dreyfuss: “What we gave you is a chance to say, ‘I'm glad I lived, I'm glad I was alive' ... and a chance to say goodbye.”

 

 

 

AUDREY'S DEEP involvement with UNICEF actually began a year before she made
Always
(and will be chronicled in detail below). But though all her UNICEF work was dramatic, no
formal
dramatic performance had been asked of her until an unusual benefit with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in December 1988.

“This evening brings together all the things I love—children, music and UNICEF,” she began, in English and French. Then, with conductor Bruce Pullan and the Bach Children's Chorus, she took part in a superb new
Winnie the Pooh
oratorio by David Niel for orchestra and children's chorus. Between musical sections, she read selected
Winnie
tales, as kids clustered around her onstage, mesmerized by a voice perfectly suited to A. A. Milne. “Pooh was doing his stoutness exercises before the glass ... ,” she began, and smiles instantly appeared on every young face. Words and music alike were magical.

Live concert-stage performances made her just as nervous as any other kind of public speaking. But that one set an important precedent for a more potent musical collaboration to come. “It came about because of Audrey's desire for it,” says conductor-composer Michael Tilson Thomas. Hepburn would read selections from
The Diary of Anne Frank,
integrated into an original orchestral work by Thomas, using themes from the kaddish, the Jewish mourner's prayer. A series of benefit concerts for UNICEF would take place in March 1990 with Thomas's Miami-based New World Symphony Orchestra in five American cities, plus a performance with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1991.

“Anne's story is my own,” she often said. “I knew so many girls like Anne. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I'd experienced and felt.”

She had resisted all previous invitations to portray Anne Frank. But at this point in her life, with Thomas's encouragement, she changed her mind. In a quavering voice, she tried to explain why to Larry King:

“When the liberation finally came, too late for Anne Frank, I took up my ballet lessons and went to live in Amsterdam with my mother in a house we shared with a lady writer, who one day handed me a book in galley form and said, ‘I think you'd like to read this.' It was in Dutch, 1947:
The Diary of Anne Frank.
I was quite destroyed by it. [Later, when] I was asked to do the picture and the play, I was never able to.
⁸
There were floods of tears. I became hysterical. I just couldn't deal with it.
⁹
”But now, I think it is a wonderful occasion to pay tribute to this child, and I think Anne Frank would be very happy that today her words will be used to bring solace to so many children in conflict, and in aid of UNICEF.“
¹⁰

Her emotional resistance had been overcome by the format and by the nature of her psychological approach. “The difference now is I'm not ‘playing' Anne Frank,” she said. “I'm just relaying her thoughts. I'm reading. I still wouldn't play her. It would have been like putting me back into the horrors of that war.”
¹¹
Even just reading the excerpts was painful, but she would do it. Composer Michael Tilson Thomas illuminates the process:

Thomas's result,
From the Diary of Anne Frank,
was a set of symphonic variations created “in a kind of stream of consciousness way,” he says. He had precious little time to put it together—two months to write nearly thirty minutes of music. Holed up with a coffeepot in Miami, he called Audrey now and then for moral support and completed the piano score. They then met in Zurich, where Thomas was conducting with the London Symphony. He played it through for her, for the first time.

“She was blown away,” says Thomas, with no hint or need of modesty. “She had no idea what it was going to be like. I think she was terrified that it would be some giant, bizarre, dissonant, horrible thing.”

What she heard, instead, was one of the century's most moving, melodic and muscular requiems, its tragic angularity both subtle and soaring. “She was relieved,” says the composer. “But it was still a major stretch for her to relate to this very intricate music. She didn't read music; she didn't have a musical education. She heard it in a very different way. It was an arduous process. She was nervous to do something like this live. It was a huge act of daring and devotion on her part.
¹³

Frank's diary, Thomas's music and Hepburn's speech merged in a richly creative way. It was her first true stage appearance in thirty-five years—in many ways more powerful than any film role she ever played. She read with astonishing simplicity and understatement, the melody of her voice an unpredictable delight. Her intensity brought audiences to tears. She had said she wasn't going to “play” Anne—but that, in the end, was precisely what she did.

“It was an amazing kind of inward acting,” says Thomas, as if she was “imagining the cadences of the thought that the words represented, rather than ‘playing' it to the audience.” Rob Wolders was with her at every rehearsal and performance and says, “In my mind, she became Anne Frank almost against her wishes, in the expression of emotion, her whole comportment, not just the voice. It's a pity there is no videotape.”
^bv

Thomas's favorite moment was just before the premiere, when she was debating what to wear: “She said, ‘I can't decide if I should wear the pantsuit or the dress. Let me model them for you.' She went into the next room and came back wearing this very elegant pantsuit and struck some tomboyish poses. Then she got very serious and said, ‘Now, I'll show you the dress.' She disappeared and came back wearing this stunningly understated Givenchy creation which hugged her gorgeous frame. I was absolutely dumbstruck. I just stood there with my mouth open, speechless. After a moment, she looked at me very kindly and said, ‘I guess you prefer the dress.' ”
¹⁴

From the Diary of Anne Frank
premiered in Philadelphia on March 19, 1990. There, and throughout the tour, she was touched by the groups of schoolchildren who greeted her and gave her flowers and scrolls with messages to deliver—somehow—to children in the Third World. The production moved on to Miami, Chicago and then Houston.

“We were ‘down' after some mediocre reviews and had to travel to Houston the next day, changing planes, everybody exhausted,” says Rob. “The moment we got there, they had an interview set up for Audrey, who was terribly tired. But it was one of the best she ever gave.” Indeed, the delicate questions of KTRK-TV producer Shara Fryer on March 22 drew her out to an unusual degree. She sat unabashed in her wrinkled shirt and slacks and sneakers from the plane and, among other things, made an extraordinary statement on the subject of emotional pain.

“Do you carry the memory of hardship with you?” Fryer asked.

“There's a curious thing about pain or hardship,” she replied softly. “In the beginning, it's an enemy, it's something that you don't want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you've lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can't bear it, but as the years goes by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly of them—that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remain so vivid for me because of the pain. Being without food, fearful for one's life, the bombings—all made me so appreciative of safety, of liberty. In that sense, the bad experiences have become positive in my life.“
¹⁵

The last concert destination in the United States was New York City, where
Anne Frank
was performed for the United Nations General Assembly on March 25, 1990, and where her thoughtfulness and sense of fun lifted everyone's spirits.

“It was exciting,” maestro Thomas remembers, “because Audrey had become so friendly and involved and generous with all these young musicians by then. The last night in New York after the concert, I said, ‘There's an orchestra party. Would you like to go over?' She said, ‘Of course!' By the time she arrived at the hotel, this big disco party was going strong, everybody acting like twenty-three-year-olds. When they saw Audrey, there was a groundswell—everybody wanted to dance with her. She got right out on that dance floor with the double bass player, the cellist.... She did the requisite rock ‘n' roll and rhythm 'n' blues numbers, too. I couldn't believe she did that for us all.”

Only Thomas and Wolders knew how much every performance took out of her. “Narrating
Diary of Anne Frank,”
she said, was “terrifying. To get up in front of a big concert hall with ninety professional musicians behind you and narrate for half an hour.... I've suffered from stage-fright all my life in the worst way. It affects my stomach, I get headaches. It's awful. But when I'm shivering backstage and Michael is conducting the overture or first piece he's doing, already I feel better.... I stand there absolutely petrified. And then the first strains of music make you forget yourself.”
¹⁶

During the engagement in London, she revealed a trade secret about how she managed it: “I act the same way now as I did forty years ago ... with feeling instead of technique. All my life I've been in situations where I've had no technique, but if
you feel
enough you can get away with murder.”
¹⁷

The critics called her May 1991
Anne Frank
with the London Symphony Orchestra “heartbreaking.” On the recommendation of Leonard Bernstein, Thomas had reworked and improved the finale. That Barbican concert hall performance constituted Audrey's first London stage appearance in forty years, and her last. She had received a letter from Eva Schloss, Anne Frank's half-sister in England, asking her to become a patron of the new Anne Frank Educational Trust, to which she agreed. Schloss—an Auschwitz survivor—came backstage after the Barbican concert, deeply moved. “She and Audrey had a very emotional encounter,” says Rob. Audrey, through the Trust, issued an emotional statement:

“The memory of Anne Frank is with us today as it will be forever, not because she died but because she lived—just long enough to leave us her undying message of hope, of love, and above all forgiveness.”
¹⁸

That London experience featured a joyous reunion. While studying dance with Rambert in the late forties, Audrey had lived briefly in a rooming house across the hall from London Symphony violinist Patrick Vermonth, who took care of her when she was sick. At the first “Anne Frank” rehearsal, she spotted him. “My God, Patrick!” They had a grand embrace. She cherished him most in relation to England's chronic postwar shortages. “Patrick had an airline-steward friend,” says Thomas. “He flew to the Bahamas a lot in those days—and always brought back nylons for Audrey.”

Michael Tilson Thomas pauses long, when asked for a final summation, before formulating it: