by Barry Paris
The proud parents soon returned to Rome, where they showed off Luca to the adoring Dotti family and friends, and where Audrey now immersed herself fully in the dual role of mother and doctor’s wife. There was no trace of the star in the woman who pushed the pram in the park, tossed her own special herbal pasta salads, and blended in comfortably with the Dotti family.
Author Dominick Dunne vividly remembers seeing her at “a large and boisterous spaghetti dinner” in Andrea’s mother’s home. “I watched her sit in dutiful daughter-in-law docility, drawing no attention to herself,” Dunne recalled, “while her husband’s mother reigned as the undisputed star of the evening.”22
Journalist Anna Cataldi, who knew all three Dotti brothers and met Audrey through them, felt Audrey was deeply generous when faced with Andrea’s reluctance to give up his practice in Rome and move to Switzerland, where she felt more secure:
“She adored her house in Switzerland, but to a big extent she gave it up for the life she was building for herself and Andrea in Rome. She took the role of the doctor’s wife very seriously. She would help him when the lithium arrived and they had to measure out the doses. One time when Andrea was very sick after an operation—he developed an infection—the person who saved his life was Audrey. She was impeccable with him.
“It was a very strong, complicated relationship. When Audrey started to find out about his infidelity, she said, ‘I’m going away.’ He said, ‘I promise it won’t happen again,’ and she believed him. She later found out he couldn’t be believed, but I think he was genuine when he promised. I never met Mel Ferrer, but I think Andrea was more human. Certainly, he never wanted to promote himself through her.”
Audrey increased her own efforts to make things work. She met him for institutional dinners at the hospital when he had to work late and otherwise accommodated him in every way. She let him and everyone else know she was fascinated by his work:
“It is most interesting being married to a psychiatrist,” she said, and she wanted to hear all about his patients’ case histories—anonymously, of course. Her own two-penny psychiatric theory was that most people’s anguish stemmed from either the reality or the fear of loneliness.
Housewifery, to hear Audrey speak of it, was downright idyllic: “It’s sad if people think that’s a dull existence, [but] you can’t just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It’s the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don’t want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn’t it?”23
Part of the motivation was guilt. It had struck her during Wait Until Dark that she could no longer “take the stress of being away from Sean.”24 From his birth in 1960 to 1967, she regretted missing much of his childhood and, in her highly self-critical way, felt she had shunted him aside to make movies. When Luca was born, she resolved to stay home and dote on him—with the full support of Andrea, in contrast to Mel’s constant pressure to keep working. She would not repeat the “mistake” she felt she made with Sean, who was now almost out of her nest.be
Though Rome was home, a powerful kind of homesickness still lingered for La Paisible, and so she took Sean and baby Luca to Switzerland for the summer of 1970. Andrea visited on weekends and spent the whole month of August there, during which he and Audrey rebonded and rebounded from their rifts.
“If I could have had more than my two sons, if I could have had daughters as well—and dozens of them—then I certainly would,” she said.25 Andrea wanted a larger family, too, but Audrey’s doctor advised against it, telling her, “You shouldn’t tempt the devil.”26
That advice matched Audrey’s own instinct: She always felt profoundly grateful for what she had—but profoundly fearful of losing it. She expressed that in a Vogue interview, romantically titled, “The Loving World of Audrey Hepburn Dotti and Her Family in their Swiss Farmhouse,” reflecting on her wartime experiences and the things for which she was now most thankful:That my child can eat three meals a day and be free and with no danger of somebody banging on the door. That I’m not afraid of somebody taking Andrea away or that he’s going to be picked up in the street. Or if he’s an hour late, maybe the Germans got him.... These things reassure me that I’m not going to be taken away, or my family taken away, as were millions of others who once lived around us....
Love does not terrify me. But the going away of it does. I have been made terribly aware of how everything can be wrenched away from you and your life torn apart. That’s why I guard against it so much. If I had known very secure nights all my life, if I had never seen or felt the fear of being tortured or deported or blown up into a million pieces, then I would not fear it....
Today there are so many [things], and the more there is, the less I want. The more man flies to the moon, the more I want to sit and look at a tree. The more I live in a city, the more I search for a blade of grass.27
HER LIFE was not entirely a Roman holiday, of course. The paparazzi dogged her and her toddler’s every move. “I could take him nowhere,” she complained, “not to a park, not down the street, not put him on a terrace without paparazzi. [It] really drove me mad ... to have photographers jump out from behind trees and he would be howling because he was so startled.“28 Luca echoed that later. ”I would get very angry,” he said. “I wanted to walk around like other people.”
To escape that nuisance, she and the children spent more and more time at her more isolated La Paisible. Which meant that Andrea, back in Rome, spent more and more time in the clubs and discos—photographic evidence usually appearing in the next morning’s papers. But for that matter, even when Audrey was in Rome, Dotti was often out and about late at night without her. Hepburn, says Rob Wolders, “was humiliated.”29
But she did her best not to show it, stuck doggedly to her home front, and continued to turn down one movie script after another—some of them plums. Offered the tsarina in Nicholas and Alexandra, she left it to Janet Suzman. William Wyler wanted her to play the divorcee in Forty Carats, but the studio would not agree to her request to film it in Rome. (Liv Ullmann finally took the role and Milton Katselas, not Wyler, directed.) It was reported in April 1971 that she would star in a film based on Anne Edwards’s novel, The Survivors, to be directed by Terence Young. But it didn’t happen. Neither did a Ross Hunter film planned for her, The Marble Arch, nor the movie version of Garson Kanin’s novel, A Thousand Summers. Jeanne Moreau wrote and directed a screenplay called Lumière, hand-tailoring a role for Audrey. But Hepburn declined and Moreau did the part herself.
When confronted, through the media, with the disappointment of her fans, she protested, “I’ve never believed in this ‘God-given talent.’ I adored my work and I did my best. But I don’t think I’m robbing anybody of anything.”30
Over and over, to the same question, she replied with variations on the theme: “Some people think that giving up my career was a great sacrifice made for my family, but it wasn’t that at all. It was what I most wanted to do.” Sometimes the replies got a bit testy—or even sarcastic: “Let me put it simply. I have absolutely no desire to work. And it’s not worth going to a psychotherapist to find out why.”31
One defense was to cut down even further on the press’s access to her. “I’m an introvert,” she told Rex Reed. “You’d think after all these years I’d be accustomed to all the fuss, but it never gets any easier.”32 From now on, she would insist on limiting interviews to a thirty-minute maximum. “After that,” she said, “the questions become personal.” She once even canceled a scheduled interview on the Today show because, after so many years in Rome, she didn’t know Barbara Walters and wouldn’t discuss her personal life with a “stranger.”33bf
Audrey now occupied a curious existential and cinematic position, as Warren Harris points out: At forty-two, she and her primary peers—Elizabeth Taylor (thirty-eight), Leslie Caron (thirty-nine), Jean Simmons (forty-one)-were
past the ingenue age. The women stars of the moment were Jane Fonda (thirty-three), Vanessa Redgrave (thirty-three), Faye Dunaway (thirty), Julie Christie (twenty-nine), Barbra Streisand (twenty-eight), Catherine Deneuve (twenty-seven) and Mia Farrow (twenty-five). One couldn’t quite see Hepburn in any of the Oscar-nominated roles of 1970: Jane Alexander (thirty-one) for The Great White Hope; Glenda Jackson (thirty-four) for Women in Love, Ali MacGraw (thirty-two) for Love Story, Sarah Miles (twenty-nine) for Ryan’s Daughter or Carrie Snodgress (twenty-four) for Diary of a Mad Housewife.34
It was both her glory and her problem that “she remained a young girl, even in her forties,” said Leslie Caron, who around this time encountered Audrey and sons in Sardinia while Leslie was vacationing there with her own two children. But there was no movie talk. “We [just] compared and admired our respective offspring with motherly pride.”35
Motherhood was indeed her occupation these days, but in 1971 she made a delicate “return,” of sorts, to pictures in the TV documentary special, A World of Love, produced by UNICEF and hosted by Bill Cosby and Shirley MacLaine for broadcast at Christmas. The guest stars represented their state or country to illustrate UNICEF’s work there: Audrey spoke for her adopted Italy; Richard Burton and Julie Andrews for Britain; Barbra Streisand for California ; and Harry Belafonte for Florida. It was, in effect, Hepburn’s first volunteer work for UNICEF.
Three months later, she agreed to one other professional appearance for exactly the opposite reason: lucre, not charity. She made four one-minute TV commercials in Rome for the Tokyo wig manufacturer “Varie” and received the amazing sum of $100,000 for two days work, which she reportedly invested in annuities for Sean and Luca. Written into the contract was a stipulation that the commercials would never be shown outside Japan where—ever since Roman Holiday—she had been a national idol.
She had been absent from the big screen for four years. But she could never be absent from the world of fashion. Her physical image, even in semi-retirement and divorced from movies, retained enormous power and influence, even though the object of all the attention viewed it in a strictly personal way.
“I depend on Givenchy,” she said, “in the same way that American women depend on their psychiatrists.”36 That statement was made on the record, and she meant it. But privately to Lorean Lovatelli, she confided, “Givenchy is so terribly expensive—can’t you tell me of a good dressmaker in Rome?”
“Doesn’t Givenchy give you things?” replied the Countess in surprise.
“No,” said Audrey, “I insist on paying for everything. He pays when he goes to my movies, doesn’t he?”
Lorean recommended a young dressmaker who had made a name for himself in Italy—Valentino [Garavani]. “I took Audrey to him,” she says, “and she loved his designs. Now Valentino is so famous he doesn’t do beautiful things anymore. Now he designs only for rich old women and Japanese.”37
Audrey’s friend New York designer Jeffrey Banks assesses that development in more professional terms:
“When she was married to Dotti, she wore some Valentino. She wore a Valentino costume to the Rothschilds’ famous ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ masked ball, where everybody dressed as their favorite Proust character. I think she felt that since she lived in Rome, it was the right thing to do, and I don’t think Givenchy felt abandoned....
“Givenchy told me that he had not altered the mannequin he made for her in 1954 in four decades. She had the same figure close to forty years later—an amazing thing. It was not a question of conflict or rivalry. It was a question of practicality, especially later when she wasn’t making any money for the UNICEF work she was doing. Givenchy was more for special occasions, the tributes and salutes. Ralph Lauren’s clothes [which she also wore later] were far less expensive and more practical in terms of the things she had to do.bg I think she enjoyed wearing all three men’s clothes.”38
There were a few strands of grey in her hair now—she would never color it. But during the seventies, no less than in the two previous decades, what she wore and how she looked continued to fascinate millions of women, who clamored for her beauty secrets—which were few and not very secret: She washed her own hair every five days with a special shampoo from London trichologist Philip Kingsley. She used the skin-protective makeup products of Dr. Ernest Laszlo. That was about it. No magic formula.
“It’s all in their minds,” she said. “I use [the Laszlo] creams because I have dry skin, and I’m a nut on sleep. If I go without sleep, I feel like I have the flu.... In Italy, I get up early to get Andrea off to the clinic by seven-thirty, and he doesn’t come home until after nine p.m. So we don’t eat until ten and midnight is an early night, but it ain’t early for me. I have to make up for it by taking afternoon naps. I take care of my health, and this world takes care of my thoughts.” 39
“ROME is a cesspool now!” declares the ever-outspoken Countess Gaetani-Lovatelli today. “I’m sorry to sound snobbish, but it’s true. It used to be enchanting, when Audrey was married to Andrea and lived here. Everybody adored her. She was very, very popular.”40
Not everyone agrees. Anna Cataldi says many people in the Dottis’ Roman circle were not only “not nice to her, a lot of them were awful.” It was sad, Anna thought, because “Andrea’s friends fascinated her. Andrea’s group was very different from the movie people. It was European society people like Paul Weiller, who was really a very boring man. She desperately needed to have friends and warmth, but she was the famous actress—‘too much’ for most of them. She didn’t get much friendship. She was so nervous, she made them nervous.” 41
Cataldi remembers the summer of 1972, for example—still fairly early in Audrey’s new life—as a time when “everybody in Rome was having a lot of fun doing Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,” directed by Paul Morrissey. Warhol, Morrissey and everyone else, it seemed, rented villas in town, Carlo Ponti, Franco Zefferelli and Roman Polanski among them. “It was la dolce vita at the time,” says Cataldi, “and sometimes Audrey was there, too, with Andrea, because he was very social.” But Morrissey was quick to notice she was different from the rest. “She never integrated because she was not a gossip,” he said. In those decadent circles, Audrey was the “straight” one—always up eighty-thirty a.m., perfectly dressed when the shops were barely open, shopping or sending her son off to school while the other Beautiful People in Rome’s exclusive Parioli section were still sound asleep.
In today’s parlance, she was “out of the loop.” Years earlier, she had met Marcello Mastroianni and they had talked most of a night. “I was thrilled,” said Audrey then, “because I’d been dying to meet him for years.”42 But much later, when asked why—despite all her years in Rome—she never worked with the great Italian actors, she replied, “I don’t know people like Mastroianni or Vittorio Gassman very well,” adding that even during War and Peace she and Gassman had virtually no contact.
Cataldi recalls shopping one day with Hepburn in Milan at La Rinascente, a Bloomingdale-type department store, “when a woman approached me and said, ‘Is that Audrey Hepburn?’ I was about to say yes, but Audrey became pale. ‘Don’t tell,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, people will gather around.’ ”
But chef extraordinaire Florida Broadway detected something more akin to approach-avoidance. In her opinion, “Miss Hepburn liked the limelight. She would have the dark glasses on, but she would enjoy it when we’d be out someplace and somebody recognized her. Sometimes I think she made sure that they did, although she was subtle about it.”43
That seemed true, in a way, of Dr. Dotti as well. Unlike Countess Lovatelli and many of Audrey’s other friends, Cataldi was fond of Andrea and much amused by him. In particular, she felt, Andrea was redeemed by his “enormous love for Luca,” who was the idol of both his parents’ eyes: “When we were in Tuscany, Luca broke his arm. It was in plaster, and he was so courageous. Another time in Gstaad in the winter, Luca was about four. All the paparazzi were around him, saying, ‘Ah, you are the son of Audrey
Hepburn?’ And little Luca very proudly looked up at them from the snow and said, ‘No, I am the son of Signora Dotti!’ ”44
In the long run, Signora Dotti’s decision to give up all for Luca may or may not have been best for him or for the mother-son relationship. In later years, she would often call Sean “my best friend.” She had dragged him back and forth across the ocean, on and off her movie sets, and yet those experiences seemed to make him a more urbane, secure adult. Luca would have more difficulty finding himself, perhaps somewhat suffocated by her doting, compared to the upbringing of her “buddy” Sean.
In November 1973, Hepburn and Dotti made a rare trip together to New York, where Audrey saw actress Marian Seldes for the first time since they had performed together in Ondine. “What did we talk about? Our careers? No, our children,” said Seldes, who was thrilled when Audrey came to see her in Equus that week. 45 Speculation ran high that Hepburn’s return to the States signaled a new movie, but she insisted she was really only accompanying Dr. Dotti to a medical conference in Washington—which was true.
Around the same time, on a shorter trip, she had a pleasant encounter with another face from her past. “The last time I saw her,” says Lord James Hanson, “was with my wife at the opening of the Aga Khan’s Costa Smeralda Hotel in Sardinia. We didn’t know she and Dr. Dotti would be there. I’d been knighted by that time, and she’d heard of it. She just walked into the room and gave me a little smile and said, ‘Haven’t we done well!’ That’s how she was, always gracious and fun.”46
But she was always anxious to get back home.
“I’m a Roman housewife, just what I want to be,” she said. “Despite what you sometimes read, my marriage is working out beautifully, and watching my sons grow is a marvel. I’m also fully Italian now.... I never was part of Hollywood or anywhere else, and I’ve finally found a place that I can call home.”47
