Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Thirty-five years later, shortly before his death, costar Doug McClure (who played Audrey’s younger brother in the film) recalled being mesmerized by her on the set:Audrey Hepburn as an Indian girl raised by a frontier family? It was odd because she had that slight English accent. But so many wonderful things were going on inside her, and she looked like such a little girl in Lancaster’s arms. I thought she played it very realistically. There was a lot of rewriting; between Hecht, Lancaster and John, I don’t think they ever really agreed on the ending....

  I played chess with Audrey once. She asked me to come to her trailer. She didn’t have makeup on, and I hadn’t seen her without makeup—but those eyes! We played chess, and she didn’t really know how. We talked about her war experience, and she opened up a lot. I was twenty-three, with a bunch of very big stars. I never matched it later.67

  Hepburn’s opening line of dialogue in the film requires her to say “ain‘t” for the first time on screen—or probably in her life. Chekhov’s Three Sisters longed for Moscow; Audrey and her Three Brothers long for Wichita—the symbol of civilization. Director Huston seems to be preparing for The Misfits: The violent horse-breaking scenes harbinger those of Clark Gable a year later. Here, the “code of the West” supplies an analogy for the sixties, and the film overall is so shocking as to be almost—but not quite—politically correct. “Red niggers, all of ‘em!” screams one character. Gish has a stunning “mad scene” in which she beats the horse out from under a lynching victim, for having revealed her adopted daughter’s Indian origin. And in the chilling climax, Lancaster orders McClure, his brother, to “Kill one!”, meaning an Indian—any Indian—deliberately provoking a massacre and the death of his own mother.

  In the midst of the final siege, Audrey asks Burt if he would “fancy her” if he weren’t her brother. His answer takes the form of a passionate kiss. Her next move is to shoot and kill her real Indian brother outside.

  When released in April 1960, The Unforgiven was compared by some to George Stevens’s Shane-a sincere “adult Western” delving into miscegenation. But it was mostly panned. Lillian Gish, who rarely uttered a critical word, would say “Audrey’s talent was never used properly in the film.” Stanley Kauffmann said it more brutally: “That Huston cannot get a good performance out of Burt Lancaster can hardly be held against him, but he has achieved here what no other director has ever managed: to get a really bad performance out of the lovely Audrey Hepburn.”

  Huston felt that all the performances but Burt Lancaster’s were doomed from the outset. “Some of my pictures I don’t care for,” he said, “but The Unforgiven is the only one I actually dislike.... The overall tone is bombastic and overinflated. Everybody in it is bigger than life. I watched it on television one night recently, and after about half a reel I had to turn the damned thing off. I couldn’t bear it.”68

  Many years later, Audrey privately confided that she took the picture seriously and was “very disappointed that Huston did not, and that he showed disdain for it.”69ao In any case, film historian Molly Haskell feels its erotic and emotional subtexts exemplified the Freudian implications of Audrey’s oeuvre overall:In Hepburn’s films, a romantically overlaid incest theme, injecting a note of melancholy and unease, crops up over and over in the feverishly heightened love of father- and brother-surrogates. [In The Unforgiven), she and Burt Lancaster are raised as brother and sister only to discover that she is actually an Indian, brought up as white, so they are now free to love and marry, thus sealing an attraction that has been felt subliminally throughout the film.... Her frequent pairing with older men was a pattern that [many] were baffled by. She was fated, as Richard Corliss put it, “to be courted by most of Hollywood’s durable ... senior citizens.” The matching vulnerability was the point: where these stars might have looked ridiculous with lustier females, Hepburn rescued them romantically, both within the film and as stars on the decline....

  This was the romantic heroine’s traditional vocation—to melt the man’s inhibitions, urge him on to a discovery of the forgotten parts of himself, including an awakening to love. But Hepburn’s compulsion to idealize involves an identification with the man bordering on the morbid.70

  IN REAL LIFE, there was no such dark subtext with Audrey’s own two half brothers, who adored their glamorous little sister and kept in regular touch. Elder brother Alexander, his wife, Miep, and their children, Michael and Evelyn, traveled extensively for Bataafsche Petroleum (Shell), moving from Indonesia to Japan, then Holland, later Brunei and back to Japan again, remaining with Shell until his retirement in 1970. Currently, Alexander had a new two-year assignment to Congo-Leopoldville.

  Brother Ian, too, was a one-company man for life. He, his wife Yvonne and their daughter, “Audrey II,” lived in Holland, where Unilever’s fast-growing personal-products division now included Pepsodent, Elizabeth Arden, Calvin Klein and Helene Curtis cosmetics, and various perfumes. Ian and family had recently paid a surprise visit to The Nun’s Story set in Rome, during which “Audrey I” made a big fuss over “Audrey II.”

  There was never a problem with her brothers. But there was the complex, ongoing dilemma of her father. Around this time, her mother wrote her to say she had heard that Ruston died. “I was so distraught,” Audrey recalled. “I realized how much I cared.... I just couldn’t bear the idea that I wouldn’t see him again. Mel said, ‘Maybe it’s not true.’ ... He went about finding him, and discovered that he was still living in Dublin.”71

  The joy and the pain of that news were about equal. “He had never tried to reach me, nor did he ever want to see me,” she said. “It is hard for children who are dumped. It tortures a child beyond measure.... I never saw him from the time he left when I was six. [But] at age thirty, I had this great need [and] I traveled to Dublin with Mel. My father was living in a tiny apartment, just two rooms.... He looked the way I remembered him. Older, yes, but much the same. Slim and tall. He was married to a woman some thirty-odd years his junior, almost my age.”72

  Ruston would turn 75 that November. Audrey attributed their long separation to “his sense of discretion” and fear that his fascist politics and imprisonment might hurt her reputation. He was up to date on her fame and unsympathetic about her riding accident on The Unforgiven: “He had been a great horseman in his youth, and he said to me, ‘Of course you were a fool to ride a gray stallion.’ He was cross with me for riding a horse that I should have known was likely to throw me.”

  From then on, she sent him a monthly check and took care of his every need for two decades, until he died in his nineties. “It helped me to lay the ghost [to rest],” she said.73

  Audrey and Mel’s own little family now occupied her mind: She was a happily pregnant woman and, after completion of The Unforgiven, returned to Burgenstock for the duration of her term. But soon after, she miscarried again. “I blamed God,” Audrey recalled. “I blamed myself. I blamed John Huston. I was a bundle of anger and recrimination. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t have children. Mel and I were so much in love.”74

  Ferrer called it “a tragedy” and said, “It has broken her heart and mine.” Audrey went into a deep depression. Her weight fell to ninety-eight pounds, and she was smoking three packs a day. In an effort to snap her out of it, Mel made her keep a commitment to do a six-city tour for the European release of The Nun’s Story in October 1959. After London, Stockholm and Paris, they went to Amsterdam, where her reception was more subdued than the 1954 mob scene that greeted her. Reporters found her looking tired from the heavy schedule, but she rose to the occasion and gave “clean Dutch answers” to various weighty questions, while Mel stood by and smiled uncomprehendingly.

  Was it true that she cried in Stockholm because the authorities would not let her dog enter Sweden?

  No, she hadn’t.

  Was she afraid of a maniac in England who was said to be stalking her there?

  No, she wasn’t.

  Was she going to do another movie directed by her hu
sband?

  No, again.

  The Nun’s Story premiere in Amsterdam was a benefit for the Dutch war-veterans alliance she had long supported. The last and most poignant event on her Netherlands agenda was a side trip the next morning to Doorn, site of the van Heemstras’ erstwhile “castle,” where one of the town’s streets was to be renamed “Audrey Hepburnlaan” in her honor. Amid much pomp and mountains of red roses, she “unveiled” the road that would bear her name. Veterans Alliance president W C. J. M. van Lanschot said it was originally to have been called “Audrey Hepburn Way,” but “way” seemed too modest and they upgraded it to “lane.”

  She talked to the veterans a bit and then left. “Everybody was very emotional and happy,” said the local paper.75

  EVERYBODY WAS HAPPY except Audrey. In the wake of the miscarriage, family and children were on her mind more than ever. “From the earliest time I can remember, the thing I most wanted was babies,” she said later. “My miscarriages were more painful to me than anything ever, including my parents’ divorce and the disappearance of my father.76 ... If and when [a baby] comes along, it will be the greatest thing in my life.”

  In the meantime, she told a friend that Christmas, “I must work to forget. Only work can help me; holidays give me time to think, and that’s bad for me.”77 Almost in desperation, she turned back to her work. The Unforgiven had not helped her career, but neither had it inflicted any great damage. Living in the Swiss Alps left her relatively insulated from Hollywood’s self-absorbed obsession with the hits and failures of the moment.

  For some time, negotiations had been under way for her to costar with Laurence Harvey in the forthcoming Alfred Hitchcock film, No Bail for the Judge. She would play a London barrister whose magistrate-father is wrongly accused of a murder she sets out to solve herself. Contracts had been drawn up and casting announced in the press, based on her approval of the initial script she had read. But late in the day, she learned that a new scene called for her to be dragged into Hyde Park and raped. It was typical of Hitchcock to humiliate the “pure” heroine—he would do it often, with Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint and Tippi Hedren. But Hepburn was notoriously squeamish about violence: She had been unable to watch Susan Hayward’s execution scene in I Want To Live and had allegedly fainted at the premiere of A Farewell to Arms during the scene in which Jennifer Jones dies in childbirth.78

  “I think the reason I did not do the Hitchcock picture was there was another picture that was conflicting,” Audrey told Larry King years later.79 But that was a polite lie.

  “Audrey didn’t even like to watch Hitchcock films,” says Rob Wolders. “She thought they were too cynical. When I asked her about this once, she said she had no recollection at all of any joint project. It seems to have been something her agent, Kurt Frings, was arranging on his own that got leaked prematurely.”

  No Bail for the judge was first postponed and then canceled entirely, Hitchcock losing $200,000 in the process. By some accounts, he held Audrey responsible for backing out of the project and hated her for it. It was further said that his resentment against her was what motivated him to cast no major stars at all in his next film—a low-budget thing called Psycho that became the biggest box-office hit of his career.

  Audrey declined some other historic film parts in 1959: The title role in Cleopatra eventually went to another Kurt Frings client, Elizabeth Taylor— perhaps luckily for Hepburn—while the female leads in Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal and Robert Wise’s West Side Story were taken by Carol Lynley and Natalie Wood. It had nothing to do with the roles: Audrey was pregnant again—and this time, no film work would jeopardize the child.

  “Audrey is a mental wreck,” said a friend, even as she was ecstatically knitting baby clothes. Though refusing all picture deals, she did accompany Mel to Rome for the making of Roger Vadim’s campy horror yarn, Blood and Roses (1961), which had the look and feel of an Ed Wood film. Elsa Martinelli and Annette Vadim both try to seduce handsome Ferrer, who has precious little to work with in a vampire film without bite. Hepburn also joined Mel in France while he made The Hands of Orlac (costarring her old acting coach, Felix Aylmer), but otherwise stayed close to home, awaiting the birth of her baby.

  His arrival came on January 17, 1960, at Lucerne’s Municipal Maternity Clinic. According to a delivery-room nurse, the thirty-year-old Audrey cried out, “Let me see my baby, let me see it at once. Is it all right? Is it really all right?” When told yes, she uttered a cry of relief and then promptly passed out. At nine and a half pounds, he was a big boy for such a diminutive mama. His parents named him Sean, an Irish form of Ian, meaning “Gift of God,” in honor of Audrey’s brother, who—with Mel’s sister, Terry—served as godparents. He was his father’s fifth child.

  Sean was baptized in the same Bürgenstock chapel and by the same Pastor Maurice Eindiguer who had married Audrey and Mel six years earlier. The baby yelled heartily at that event, prompting Grandma Ella van Heemstra to quote the Dutch maxim, “A good cry at the christening lets the devil out!” Mother and son were then beautifully photographed by Richard Avedon in their Givenchy-designed christening clothes, and the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Henry Taylor, Jr., presented the baby with an American passport and a brand new fifty-star American flag.

  “Like all new mothers, I couldn’t believe at first he was really for me, and I could really keep him,” Audrey said to a reporter from Look at the time. “I’m still filled with the wonder of his being, to be able to go out and come back and find that he’s still there.... I would like to mix Sean with all kinds of people in all countries, so that he will learn what the world is all about. He should take his own small part in making the world a better place. ”80

  When he read those sentiments back in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock responded with icy irony: “Every word she said was pregnant with meaning.”81

  Audrey’s joy was mixed with anxiety. She fretted about kidnapping and even about the effect the baby would have on her dog: “This may sound silly, but I took special pains to soften the blow to Famous’s self-esteem.” Mel’s self-esteem concerned her, too—if somewhat as an afterthought. “With the baby I felt I had everything a wife could wish for,” she said. “But it’s not enough for a man. It was not enough for Mel. He couldn’t live with himself just being Audrey Hepburn’s husband.”82

  FOR MANY, the role Audrey Hepburn was “born to play” most of all was Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Years later, in her oddly restrained way, she called it “the one I feel least uncomfortable watching. But the two things I always think of when I see it are ( 1 ) how could I have abandoned my cat? and (2) Truman Capote really wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part.”83

  Capote confirmed it:

  “Marilyn was my first choice to play the girl, Holly Golightly. I had seen her in a film and thought she would be perfect for the part. Holly had to have something touching about her ... unfinished. Marilyn had that.”84

  Capote had sold the film rights for $65,000 to producers Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd for Paramount, and they hired George Axelrod to tailor the screenplay for Monroe. “She wanted it so badly,” said Capote, “that she worked up two whole scenes all by herself to play for me. She was terrifically good.” But Monroe’s dramatic advisor, Paula Strasberg, declared “that she would not have her play a lady of the evening.” After Monroe’s elimination, “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey,” said Capote. “She was just wrong for that part.”85

  Holly was a latter-day Manhattan version of Sally Bowles—a cross, said Time, “between a grown-up Lolita and a teen-age Auntie Mame.” Holly’s agent calls her “a phony, all right—but a real phony!” She was really a hooker, but Axelrod converted her into a whimsical ingenue and Audrey found her “irresistible.” In October 1960, she left Sean in Bürgenstock with her mother and a nanny and flew to New York to begin filming. There, on Fifth Avenue, in her beehive hairdo, Givenchy gown and evening gloves, Holly sipped c
offee from a plastic cup, munched a Danish, and broke the hearts of audiences around the world.ap

  Director Blake Edwards’s big casting mistake was Mickey Rooney as Holly’s Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi, complete with buck teeth—a portrayal worthy of the worst World War II racial stereotypes. But George Peppardwas an attractive Paul, the aspiring novelist with whom Holly falls in love, and Patricia Neal was superb as Paul’s “patroness” and Holly’s rival. Neal has piquant memories of making the film:I had only one scene with Audrey, but she was quite friendly and even invited me to her house for supper. Mel was very strict with her during production, so it was one drink, a light meal and good night. I don’t think the sun had set by the time I got home. I’d never seen anything so fast in my life. But I sure knew how she kept her looks.

  I was a little pissed off because I’d worked at the Actors Studio with [Peppard], and we got along fabulously—he had a crush on me. So I thought, good, I’m happy to be doing this with him. But my God, he had gotten so big-headed. My character was a society matron known only as 2-E, the apartment she keeps for the writer. I dominated him in the original story, and he didn’t want to be seen in that way. He and Blake almost had a fistfight. Unfortunately, I said, ‘Let’s talk about this,’ and Blake gave in and shot it his way. I could have killed myself for getting involved. I had fantastic lines, but they wrote my part down [for] gorgeous George. I always felt that had Blake stood his ground, the film would have been stronger.86