Audrey Hepburn (74 page)

Shortly after her death, Wolders was asked by UNICEF to put together a
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film from video footage he had taken in the field. The resulting documentary,
Audrey Hepburn in Her Own Words,
was modest in length (twenty-three minutes) but soaring in content—the most moving film record of her last years' work. Soon after that, he immersed himself in the preparation of a marathon, three-hour “Audrey Hepburn Memorial Tribute” benefit concert at the United Nations General Assembly in New York—the most star-studded performing-arts event in UN history.* “They all came in without even a rehearsal,” Rob recalls. “Henry Mancini didn't quite know what he was going to play. I kept begging him to do ‘Moon River.' He heard Frederica von Stade was going to sing it and didn't want to do it twice—but then he did it anyhow, with a ‘special stamp' on it for Sean and Luca and me.”

Wolders' business interests include a longtime association with Public Storage Partners, a conglomerate with its own management company, and he continues to give as much time as he can to UNICEF. But his friends worry about him.

“Every time we speak on the phone, he always comes back to, ‘Should I have done this or that?'” says John Isaac. “I say, you can't blame yourself. You were helping her. That's what she wanted. She did what she wanted.”

Wolders muses constantly on that, and on Audrey.

“They say the pain lessens with time,” he says. “But it's not true.”

 

 

HEPBURN AND WOLDERS never married and kept their finances scrupulously separate. He had suffered after the death of Merle Oberon from false reports characterizing him as a gold digger, and he was determined not to let it happen again.

“People assume Audrey was wealthy, but they forget that she hadn't worked for years and that she educated and supported her two children largely by herself,” Wolders says. “Long before her death, I insisted that I
not
be part of her estate.”

That decision startled Hepburn's sons. But Wolders did agree to serve on the board of directors of a new foundation created by Sean and Luca to carry on their mother's work.

The Audrey Hepburn Hollywood for Children Fund is located at 4 East 12th Street in New York's Greenwich Village. “We originally thought we could become a subcommittee of UNICEF,” executive director Rose Ganguzza told film writer Maria Ciaccia. “But the bureaucracy was mind-boggling. We wanted to be able to work on things more efficiently, to be a storefront operation—to have a lasting effect, something ongoing and grass roots.”
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The Fund's member-advisors include Martin Short, Whoopi Goldberg and Jim Carrey, plus many others who have never before loaned their names to such a cause.
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UNICEF's institutional nose is a little out of joint. “Our understanding at first was that we would be one of the beneficiaries,” says a UNICEF official, “but Sean has not yet made a clear decision where funding will be going. He wants to create a foundation to benefit various organizations, including places where UNICEF is not operating, like the United States and England. He wants it to be independent.”

Many, including the chief director's father, think it should be relocated to the West Coast. “I've been giving Sean a lot of free advice,” says Mel Ferrer. “There's no point calling it ‘Hollywood for Children' and having it based in New York.”
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One of its goals is to be a conduit to other charities. The organization is still embryonic, but Hepburn's sons are “caring individuals,” says Ganguzza, “and they'll find the way. She left them her loving legacy. It's a lot to live up to.”
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The sons are constantly asked to testify to that legacy, beyond just UNICEF. The little matter of her film career was at the forefront in 1994, with the $600,000 restoration of
My Fair Lady.
Over thirty years, the film had deteriorated to the point that it was in danger of total ruin. Its glorious color had faded and spotting of the negative was serious. Typical of the cinematic dermatology was a three-second spot on Audrey's face, which cost $10,000 to fix. Film restoration experts Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz had done handsome reconstructions of
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Spartacus,
but
My Fair Lady
was an even bigger job—literally—the first rescue of a Super Panavision 70 film.

“I am so very moved,” Sean told the jammed audience at the
My Fair Lady
gala “re-premiere” in New York, September 19, 1994. “One day our little Emma will be able to look up and see her grandmother ... see her, feel her, and love her.”

Jeremy Brett, better known by then as PBS's Sherlock Holmes, was one of the very few surviving costars in attendance. (“I got better notices for Freddy this time around than I did before,” he said.
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) The refurbished print was gorgeous, but most in the audience felt the highlight of the night came during the final credits: As a fine postscript, the restorers added the soundtrack of Audrey's own rendition of “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?”

Silenced for thirty years in the vaults, she finally got to sing it herself.

 

 

My FAIR LADY'S
restoration was just the beginning. In the two years since, the postmortem fascination with Audrey Hepburn has burgeoned into a major cultural and commercial phenomenon. Countless Hepburn film retrospectives, on network and cable television and in theatrical screenings across the country, have recaptivated millions of old fans and created generations of new ones. What accounts for such renewed and renewable popularity? One simple answer comes from Patricia Davis, a program-scheduling executive at American Movie Classics: “You always felt good after you saw Audrey Hepburn.”
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Contemporary Hollywood, meanwhile, having fashioned a new
Sabrina
in 1995, is also planning a remake of
Two for the Road,
to star Meg Ryan and to be written by Carrie Fisher. A 1991 Asian-American film production by Sharon Jue was called
My Mother Thought She Was Audrey Hepburn.
The most worshipful new project, similarly titled, is
Why Can't I Be Audrey Hepburn?,
a comedy tentatively set for production by Steven Spielberg's new “Dreamworks SKG” company, with Téa Leoni starring as a woman obsessed by Hepburn. Producer Robert Evans has something similar in development called
Golightly,
whose heroine is fixated on Holly in
Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Audrey-obsessed films and books seem to constitute a whole new genre. The most serious entry is Alan Brown's novel,
Audrey Hepburn's Neck
(Pocket Books, 1996), film rights to which have been bought by director Wayne
(Smoke)
Wang. In this tale, it's not a woman but a young man who is mesmerized by Audrey. The setting is a semi-surreal Japan, where the rural womenfolk eat grilled eel while watching their beloved Hepburn movies.

Audrey isn't the first film icon to be embraced by whole societies and woven into their artistic and psychological fabric. The Swedish sphinx preceded her and inspired such “personal” works of art as the fine Anne Bancroft film
Garbo Talks
and an intriguing novel
The Girl Who Loved Garbo
by Rachel Gallagher. But otherwise, the only comparable icons are Valentino, Harlow, Dean and Monroe, whose cults have one great morbid prerequisite in common: an early, tragic, preferably violent death.

There was no such imperative in the case of Audrey Hepburn, whose sphere of influence went far beyond film. An au courant example is the list of “Most Fascinating Women of Our Time” in the July 1996 issue of Britain's influential
Harpers & Queen:
The surprise is not Hepburn's inclusion but her ranking—number one. That corresponds to her powerful, ongoing force in fashion and advertising. More à la mode now than ever, her look and her look-alikes again dominate the runways of Prada, Calvin Klein and, of course, Givenchy and Lauren, and adorn the toniest European and Madison Avenue advertisements from L'Interdit fragrance to Nicole Miller scarves. There's no end to the phenomenon, but there's a final item of note for the pop-music scene:

The thirty-five-year-old movie containing Audrey's only smash musical success, “Moon River,” provided both the title and the whimsy for a major hit tune of 1996—the offbeat love song “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” by Texas band Deep Blue Something. Songwriter Todd Pipes, who was born well after the movie was made, estimates that he has seen it more than fifty times.

 

 

AUDREY WOULD NOT write her autobiography. Over and over she was asked, and over and over she said no. “In the last year,” she told Ed Klein, “I've had seven requests from publishers for the Audrey Hepburn story—you know, the definitive book. It's an idea [I hate:] How boring to have to sit there and write your whole life.... The other thing that makes me hold back is that you cannot write your life as if you'd live in a [vacuum]. You've lived with lots of other people. So perforce you have to talk about others. I have no right to do that nor would I.”

And to other interviewers: “Memoirs? I don't want to relive it, nor do I need the psychotherapy—get on with it!”
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Sean had encouraged her to write a book, “if for no one else, then for Luca and myself,” and because it might have guaranteed her financial security for the rest of her life. “But you and Luca already know everything,” she replied.

Her “three men” respected that decision. But after her death, a spate of Hepburn books appeared, one of which outraged and mobilized them into legal action: Diana Maychick's
Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait
(Birch Lane Press, 1993), made much of Hepburn's alleged anorexia, but its greater offense, in the family's view, was Maychick's claim that Audrey had actively cooperated with her in a series of phone interviews.

“Never, ever did Audrey speak with her,” Wolders insists. “I keep very careful records, and I even got hotel phone records where we stayed. Maychick claims to have had interviews when, in fact, Audrey was dying.” The suspect book was optioned for a possible TV miniseries, now stalled pending resolution of the Estate's litigation against Maychick and her publisher.

Rob Wolders strokes little Missy on his lap and looks out his living-room window in Rochester at the ever-present snow, still on the ground in April. He has just read two other film-star biographies and is troubled by the problematic contrast he sees in trying to capture Hepburn's life on the page.

“Audrey was in a sense an open book,” he says finally. “She was not enigmatic like Louise Brooks or Greta Garbo. There was a wonderful darkness in their personalities—a ‘mystery' to be uncovered. There's nothing like that with Audrey.”

Back in 1954, British critic Clayton Cole had called her not just a “weird hybrid with butchered hair” but also “insincere” as an actress.
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As the years went by, however, most people felt sincerity was her biggest asset. “Hepburn was first of all a human being,” says Eleanor Lambert.
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It was her personality more than her acting that made her a star.

Her early films were fairy tales, of course. “One would like to see her play stronger parts which would broaden her,” said a fan magazine in the early fifties. “Could she play the daughter in
The Glass Menagerie
or Sally in
I Am a Camera?
Only her future acting will answer that.”

The answer seems to have been no.

“I've never been driven,” she said, except “by the need to provide for my mother and myself.”
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Even that drive soon disappeared “because I had the luxury of not needing it. After
Roman Holiday,
the offers came in. It was not in my nature to be terribly ambitious or driven because I didn't have the confidence.... My confidence came and went with each movie.”

A psychiatrist who “shrank” her for
Good Housekeeping
in 1959 asserted that her early life contained a dozen things that might have driven a less controlled person to an analyst.
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“She shared her joys with friends, but kept her unhappy moments to herself,” said Hubert de Givenchy.
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And at least she knew the source of her problems.

“People all have fears,” she said, “but mostly they are distant and unknown to them. They are afraid of death, which they haven't gone through; they are afraid of getting cancer, which they don't have; they are afraid of getting run over, which hasn't happened. But I've known the cold clutch of human terror. I've seen it, I've felt it, I've heard it.”
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Phil Donahue jumped to the conclusion that “living under the Nazis left you very insecure?”

“That is not what left me insecure,” she answered. “My father leaving us is what left me insecure.
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[It] has stayed with me through my own relationships. When I fell in love and married, I lived in constant fear of being left.... Whatever you love most, you fear you might lose.”
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Yes, yes—she had always wanted the security of love and children more than her career. So much so, that she could never quite face or self-efface her enduring screen presence:

“Many years ago, my mother said to me, ‘Considering that you have no talent, it's really extraordinary where you've got.'
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She said it in the middle of all the successes I was having. She wasn't putting me down. She was saying how fortunate I was. She was right. I don't have this huge talent. I'm not a Laurence Olivier or a Meryl Streep.... I landed in this business because I had to earn a living.
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