Audrey Hepburn (73 page)

In Switzerland that same day, January 10, Audrey took her last walk around the gardens at La Paisible, supported by Rob and Doris, stopping at each plot to remind them what was planted there and what kind of attention it would require come spring.

“Those last weeks would have been sheer hell if it hadn't been for Audrey's attitude,” says Rob. “Even a few days before her death she was trying to make me laugh and said, ‘Smile for me, Robbie.' I tried, for her sake.”

Of the pain, she would say, “It's not that bad,” but even with medication, it was terrible. At last, when she was slipping in and out of consciousness, Sean remembered, “She kept saying people were expecting her—angels or Amish people working in the fields were waiting for her.”
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Rob clarifies:

She was very calm. “I'm sorry, but I'm ready to go,” she told Luca.
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In the end, she survived the first operation by just seventy-nine days—even less than the three months her doctors had predicted. Audrey Hepburn died at home at seven p.m. on Wednesday, January 20, 1993.

 

 

INEVITABLY, there was more guilt and more hindsight.

“Would it have been better for Audrey to have been at home all the time, instead of having to deal with an American hospital and the
National Enquirer?”
Rob wonders. “I keep going around in circles. I had so many misgivings. About three weeks before her death, I asked Audrey, ‘Would it have been better, instead of working for UNICEF, if we would just have been together here with the dogs?' She said, ‘Think of all we would have missed. Think of what we did together!' But I had to ask myself, if she hadn't done it, would that have been better for her?”

There is no answer, of course. It is equally possible that Hepburn's UNICEF work prolonged, rather than shortened, her life.

Wolders speaks of a certain existential angst she had—not about death but about life, and “living it correctly.” Her ASPCA friend Roger Caras observes, “You can come out of her kind of background one of two ways, hard or soft. She came out soft. She wasn't hardened by her difficult experiences in life.”
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Sean recalls that, “My mother used to say, ‘Let us say that we are sitting in our house and we hear the terrible sound of screeching tires ... and we run outside and find that a child has been hit by a car.... You pick him up and you run all the way to the hospital. You don't stop and wonder who ran the red light or who should have looked both ways before crossing.'”
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Audrey cited the same parable to reporter Alan Riding when he asked her if she was “a person of faith.”

“Enormous faith,” she replied, “but it's not attached to any one particular religion.... My mother was one thing, my father was another, in Holland they were all Calvinists. That has no importance at all to me.... The minute something happens to a child, you pick it up and take it to a hospital. You don't think about religion or politics.”
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Her mother's Christian Scientism was not a huge influence on her, “but something about it might have remained with her,” says Rob, “perhaps involving an acceptance of fate. She never talked about religion. Not long before her death I brought it up, and she said, ‘My only religion is a belief in nature.'”

She said many things in her last weeks, says Sean, but one stands out most memorably: “The last time we all walked in the garden, Giovanni, her gardener, came up and said, ‘Signora, when you get better, you'll come and help me to trim and to plant again.' She smiled and said, ‘Don't worry, Giovanni, I will help you—but not like before.' ”
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AUDREY HEPBURN'S death occurred on the day of President Bill Clinton's inauguration and interrupted all the news broadcasts of those proceedings. It was also, oddly enough, the day on which rock ‘n' roll was declared the official music of the White House. There was no connection—except that four United States presidents sent letters of condolence to Rob Wolders.

The day she died, Tiffany's stores around the world put her photograph in their windows and placed memorial advertisements saying only: AUDREY HEPBURN—OUR HUCKLEBERRY FRIEND——1929-1993.

By coincidence on the following day, January 21, Audrey was seen by millions in the first of PBS-TV's six-part
Gardens of the World
series. Many papers carried the
Garden
reviews and Audrey's obituary in the same issue. The show was “off the charts,” producer Janis Blackschleger recalls: “We were in complete denial. We were insisting on this life-affirming statement she made in
Gardens,
and we had a lot of ads we were planning to do for the series. But still, to this day, it just doesn't feel right to say ‘the late' Audrey Hepburn.”

For Anna Cataldi, the news and the denial were even more intense. After parting with Audrey in Somalia, she had gone on immediately to Bosnia to observe the UNICEF-proposed ceasefire for which Audrey had made a video appeal, with Serbo-Croatian subtitles, that was broadcast twelve times a day in Yugoslavia.

“I went to Bosnia because of Audrey,” says Cataldi. “She did an appeal for the ‘Week of Tranquility' at the end of October, to help the children in Sarajevo before winter arrived. There she was on TV—when we had electricity—such a vision. I think if Audrey had been well, she would have gone to Sarajevo herself.”

Cataldi stayed there a month before escaping by car with two other journalists and a ten-month-old baby with an amputated leg. “They shot at us,” she says, “but we drove through the mountains and finally we arrived in Croatia, where there was peace. I saw a little restaurant. I'd been cut off from the world.... My first call was to my family. The second was to Audrey. I was going to tell her that I saved a baby, which I knew would make her happy. I said, ‘Giovanna, give me la Signora.'”

But la Signora could not come to the phone, and Anna would not see her again.

Cataldi arrived in Tolochenaz the night before the funeral. “The house was full of people—Givenchy, all the Ferrers, the Dotti clan, everybody,” she recalls. “At one point, Giovanna said, ‘La Signora ... she is in the living room.' I opened the door, nobody there. In the middle of the room was Audrey's coffin, closed. That beautiful white living room—white floor and couches, impeccable, everything exactly the way Audrey kept it. Just one little vase with one rose.”
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In Tolochenaz, funerals were not allowed on Sunday, but the rules had been changed. A huge number of people lined the way from the house to the church, and from there to the cemetery. Audrey's simple pine coffin was carried from La Paisible to the church by Sean, Luca, Givenchy, Rob, Audrey's brother Ian, and her longtime friend and lawyer Georges Müller. Mel Ferrer, seventy-five, walked behind them. Sean saw him waiting in line. “Come, Papa,” he said, hugging his father as they entered the stone church.
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Some six hundred villagers listened outside via loudspeaker to the service presided over by eighty-three-year-old pastor Maurice Eindiguer, who had married Audrey and Mel in 1954, baptized Sean in 1960, and given Audrey the last rites just two hours before her death.

Rob had asked UNICEF's Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan to deliver a eulogy, and he did so with extemporaneous eloquence. “She was an extraordinary star in every sense of the word,” said the Prince, who had known and loved her from their first meeting after a performance of
Ondine
forty years before. He spoke of what she symbolized to the world—of her ability to touch everyone who came in contact with her and of her insistence that the welfare of the children was the adult world's most solemn responsibility.

“To know the affluence of places like California and then suddenly to be placed in the Sudan was a tremendous shock,” he said. “When she came back from one of those trips, you could see it had taken a lot out of her, physically and morally. But at the same time, she felt we could somehow turn things around. She kept going. Always, there was her underlying optimism.”
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Sean then read the Sam Levenson poem she liked so much and added, “Mummy believed in one thing above all: She believed in love. She believed love could heal, fix, mend, and make everything fine and good in the end.”

At the end of the thirty-minute ceremony, hymns were sung by a children's choir from St. Georges International School in Montreux. At the village cemetery, she was laid to rest atop a small hill overlooking Lake Geneva. Her grave would be marked by a plain pinewood cross.

 

 

“SHE LEFT the biggest vacuum anybody could leave,” says Doris Brynner. “A great big black empty hole.”
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But it was Audrey's “three men” that Anna Cataldi worried about most. She speaks of them with maternal bluntness:

“One hour after the funeral, Sean was putting on the California New Age act, talking so esoterically. And poor Luca, just out of art school.... When my book,
Letters from Sarajevo,
came out in Italy, he did the cover design. He's very good. When Luca was with Andrea, he was shy. But when he was with Audrey, he behaved like a Hell's Angel, speaking Italian with an accent of Roman suburbs, in front of his mother! ... But can you imagine, to lose a mother like Audrey?”
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John Isaac says “Robert was completely devastated. He was pretty strong until the last moment when they lowered the coffin. That's the first time I saw him just break down.”

All those men without Audrey—Rob, Sean, Andrea, Luca. “Audrey was the focus,” says Anna. “She was surrounded by men.”

Audrey had called Sean “my best friend”—mature even as a child. “He's been a rock in my life, enormous support,” she said. “He was born with a marvelous nature. He's one of the nicest human beings I've ever met.... I'm totally crazy about my sons.” The feeling was mutual. “I still carry her every day in my heart,” he says, “so she is still my best friend, too.”
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A year after her death, in Tolochenaz, Sean Ferrer assesses his mother in remarkably candid terms:

Sean attended the March 1993 Oscar ceremonies to accept Audrey's Jean Hersholt Award. “On her behalf,” he said, “I dedicate this to the children of the world”—his own, included. Soon after Audrey's death, Sean and Leila learned they were about to become parents. “My God, how Audrey would have loved that!” Doris Brynner exclaimed. Emma Audrey Ferrer, born in Tolochenaz, inherited a closet of hand-embroidered baby clothes worn by her father and a nursery that was her grandmother's dressing room.

“She missed seeing her first grandchild,” says Sean. “But there's a little bit of her in that baby.”
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Sean Ferrer continues in the film-production business, commuting from Switzerland to Los Angeles and New York. Luca the graphic artist works with computers, shares his mother's desire for privacy, and lives quietly with his boarding-school sweetheart, Astrid, in Paris.

Robert Wolders lives in the Rochester, New York, suburb of Irondequoit, near his mother and sister Claudia who, like his older sisters Margaret and Grada, were very close to Audrey. He travels a great deal, tending to commercial and UNICEF interests—and to the memory of Audrey Hepburn.

The Wolders home is an elegant “Dutch” environment in white. It is no maudlin shrine but contains enough images of Audrey to ensure that her presence is strongly felt. Something else ensures that in a lively way—tiny little “Missy,” the Jack Russell terrier who cuddles into the sleeves of Rob's sweater and never leaves him as he sits and talks. Audrey gave him the dog five years ago, and Missy is a precious living link to her now.