Audrey Hepburn (71 page)

Michael Tilson Thomas remembers one such occasion, just three weeks before she left for Somalia, when he visited Audrey in between performances with the London Symphony Orchestra on its tour of Switzerland:

Perhaps due to Thomas's influence, she had undertaken a recording project of Saint-Saëns's
Carnival of the Animals
and Ravel's
Mother Goose Suite
for Dove Audio Tapes in May 1992—her last professional endeavor. The result was
Audrey Hepburn's Enchanted Tales,
conducted by Lalo Schifrin and hailed by
Publishers Weekly
as “a perfect introduction to classical music.”
¹¹⁶
Its proceeds went to the ASPCA.

“Audrey was a great cutup—very impish and playful,” says Wolders. “It's a quality you find in children and in puppies, which might explain why she was so drawn to animals—and perhaps had more trust in animals than in human beings. Sometimes when she would show a great deal of love for someone on whom I felt it was wasted, I'd say, ‘Don't you expect something in return?' She would say, ‘No. My love for them doesn't mean I expect anything back. It's like with an animal.' ”
¹¹⁷

John Isaac recalled that, “no matter where we went, even in Bangladesh, she would say, ‘Oh, look at those pooches!' She'd be reminded of her puppies at home. She loved animals, people, trees—she basically just loved
life.”

The catalyst for her involvement with
Carnival of the Animals
was Roger Caras, president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He had met her in 1991 when she flew in to New York to attend an ASPCA fund-raiser. Later, pianist Mona Golabek asked if he would put her in touch with Audrey for the
Carnival
recording, and he did. It would win a Grammy award. Caras's fondness for her is boundless:

By SOME ACCOUNTS, Audrey first started to suffer from abdominal pain and colitis in the summer of 1992—before leaving for Somalia—but refused to heed her Swiss doctors' advice to go in for tests and, once in Somalia, “kept clutching her stomach and wincing in pain.”
¹¹⁹
Rob Wolders denies it: “We had no idea Audrey was sick when we went to Somalia. There were no warning signs of illness until we'd been back several weeks.”

It is true that, in some of the photographs, Audrey looks almost as thin as the starving children she is holding. But in her subsequent European and American press conferences, she appeared to be fine and there seemed no cause for alarm.

With Somalia behind, she had returned to Switzerland with Rob for a few weeks before setting off again for the United States in October to honor two long-standing engagements, one at the George Eastman House in Rochester and the other in New York two days later. Following that, they planned to spend ten days in the Caribbean on a much-needed holiday.

As she wanted to see Sean, they flew first to California for a short stay with Connie Wald. “The pain became intense in Los Angeles,” Rob recalls. “We rushed her to the doctor and she underwent every conceivable test. But they couldn't find anything and they said it would be all right to travel. They knew it was important to us. Perhaps it shouldn't have been that important.”

The events in Rochester, October 24 and 25, 1992, were rather more grueling than either she or Rob had expected. On the first evening, she met with the press at six o'clock—looking pained during the photo session—and attended a long dinner and social afterward, which began at eight and was still going on when she and Rob left much later in the evening.

She rallied the next night for the presentation of the Eastman Award, following a screening of
Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Aware that she was in some pain, Eastman director James Enyeart had proposed limiting the postfilm question-and-answer session to half an hour. It was agreed that Rob would give Audrey a sign when the half hour was up. She looked frail in her somber black satin Givenchy gown. But she got caught up in the spirit of the event, buoyed by a pleasant surprise midway and then by a series of intelligent questions on Somalia. When Rob signaled her that the half hour was up, she didn't want to stop and kept going.

The surprise took the form of an old pal. A woman in the audience stood up and asked if Audrey remembered the gentleman sitting next to her. Audrey stared in amazement: “Yes, absolutely! Of course I remember you! My God, you haven't changed a bit! Nick Dana, ladies and gentlemen, a fabulous dancer! We danced together in
High Button Shoes
in 1948! ... You were awfully good, flipping across that stage at the Hippodrome!”

Dana recalls that “Rob was crouched down the whole time on the side of the organ, checking on her, waiting to see if she got too weak.” But her adrenaline was flowing, and she was determined to make everyone happy and answer all the questions she could—including a nasty one from a man demanding to know why she had left the previous night's event so quickly.

“Forgive me for leaving early last night,” she said, “but I'm still very jet-lagged.”

That was partly true. “She didn't want to say, ‘I'm also in great pain,' ” says Rob. “Nobody knew how ill she was—how could they? I didn't, either. It was quite heroic what she did that night. They never had such a turnout and couldn't accommodate everyone in the [Dryden] Theater. They had to use the ballroom, with a closed-circuit TV, and Audrey made it a point at the end to go to the other hall and greet the people there as well.”

The next day, a call came from the doctors in Los Angeles saying that the test results indicated Audrey had an amoeba. She was given a prescription—essentially, a massive purge—which made her feel so terrible that she stopped taking it after the first few pills. They went on to New York City, where she did several more interviews and accepted a Maria Casita Award from Ralph Lauren at the Plaza Hotel. In just twenty-four hours, they were to leave for Antigua. But her pain became so intense during dinner that they canceled the holiday and decided to fly back to Los Angeles for urgent medical attention.

The following morning on their way to the airport, despite her pain, Audrey insisted on stopping first at Larry Bruce's apartment for a brief visit. He was dying, and she knew it.

GUILT AND hindsight go hand in hand.

“People said Audrey knew she was ill, but I absolutely know she didn't,” says Anna Cataldi. “She had a routine checkup in August in Geneva, including a colonoscopy,
before the trip to Somalia,
and they said she was okay.”

Cataldi had her own Somalia assignment for
Epoca
magazine in Milan, and for the rest of August, she and Audrey spoke frequently on the phone about what they had to do to prepare:

“Audrey did all the vaccinations—even meningitis. I did only yellow fever and tetanus, but she did everything. If a person knows she's sick, she would not go through all those vaccinations. Audrey led a healthy life, lived in the country, went to bed early. She was very careful. We were not protective enough towards her because she was always so healthy. People didn't think there was any reason to worry about her.”
¹²⁰

At the beginning of October, Cataldi stopped by Audrey's room in Nairobi's Intercontinental Hotel to say farewell before she left Africa for her press obligations in Europe. “When I hugged her,” Anna recalls, “I was scared. I had a shiver. She said, ‘War didn't kill me, and this won't either.' But I had the feeling that sooner or later, war kills you. She was so skinny. I felt something was really wrong.”

In their last conversation there, Cataldi recalls, “She told me what shocked her more than anything was Kismayu, because every child was dead. She said, ‘I have nightmares. I cannot sleep. I'm crying all the time.' She had seen a lot of terrible things with UNICEF, but she broke in Somalia. I went back in a state of shock myself.”
¹²¹
John Isaac, too, felt “it took a heavy toll on somebody as sensitive as Audrey,” adding that “I'm still recovering from Rwanda. I had to go for therapy. I couldn't function. I was totally stunned.”

Cataldi claims Audrey's beloved maid Giovanna “hated UNICEF” for its harmful impact on Audrey's health. “Andrea Dotti also felt it was UNICEF's fault in a way,” Cataldi says, “because when Audrey started to look bad, everybody just said, ‘Oh, she looks terrible because she is emotionally stressed.' Robert once asked me, ‘Do you think I made a mistake in letting her go?' I told him, ‘You didn't make her go. She had a need to go. She would have gone even if she had known that she had only a year to go.' She told me, ‘I have this obsession because of the children.' ”

In a dark corner of the New York restaurant where she is recounting those last days, Anna Cataldi kneads her handkerchief and takes a minute to compose herself before concluding:

“I witnessed a human being—the famous Audrey Hepburn—at the moment she had everything she wanted. She finally had the right man. She had a beautiful home. She said, ‘I would like to take a year and enjoy my garden, my house, Robbie, my children.... I worked since I was twelve years old. Now it's time to rest.”'

Audrey Hepburn's drawing of an Ethiopian mother and child, 1990 UNICEF card.

Doris Brynner expresses a similar view:

“She certainly did her job. She did get everything a human being could do for UNICEF. It was even more physically exhausting than making movies and much more emotionally involved. Whenever she came back here to Switzerland, all she wanted was to stay at home. She was going to give up the United Nations. She was tired—emotionally and physically drained.”
¹²²

To Alan Riding of
The New York Times
Paris bureau, Audrey said, “I decided to do as much as possible in the time that I'm still up to it. Because I'm running out of gas.... I've done it on a constant basis because I know I cannot keep it up for long.”
¹²³