Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Among many who were curious about the inside of that home was director Billy Wilder. During a visit to Rome, his wife Audrey paid a call on his other Audrey, and when she returned, Billy asked her what the place was like.

  “I don’t care who you were—compared to Audrey Hepburn, everybody felt too fat,” says Audrey Wilder. “Most apartments in Rome are so heavy, with those heavy drapes and heavy, ornate paintings and gold. But Audrey’s was totally different—bright and airy, lovely yellow and white. Her draperies were the kind of material that would lie on the floor. They actually draped. All those other apartments looked like lasagna by comparison.”

  She gave Billy a detailed report—the colors, the big windows, and so forth—and then finally came up with the precise one-word description she was looking for:

  “It’s ‘non-fattening,’ I said—just like Audrey.”48

  By JUNE 1975, Sean was a six-foot-three fifteen-year-old and Luca, at five, no longer a toddler. “The happiest I’ve ever been has been in the seventies,” Hepburn said then. “I’m much less restless now, and no longer searching for the wrong values.... I’ve had so much more than I ever dreamed possible out of life—[no] great disappointments or hopes that didn’t work out: I didn’t expect anything much and because of that I’m the least bitter woman I know.... I’ve accomplished far more than I ever hoped to, and most of the time it happened without my seeking it.... I’m glad to have missed what’s been happening in the movies these last eight years. It’s all been sex and violence, and I’m far too scrawny to strip and I hate guns, so I’m better off out of it.”49

  She had stayed out of it since 1967—but was about to make her first commercial film in eight years. The screenplay that lured her back was written by James Goldman, who had won an Oscar in 1968 for The Lion in Winter. This one, Robin and Marian, gave similarly ironic but lyrical treatment to the final adventure of a once-swashbuckling couple who could still summon enough energy, and command enough allegiance, for one last stand.

  Goldman’s interest in Robin Hood actually predated The Lion in Winter, when he was researching twelfth-century ballads. Audrey had been his first choice for Marian, but it took four years to put the deal together and half a dozen tentative directors, including Arthur Penn and John Frankenheimer. The ultimate choice was Richard Lester, director of A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, The Knack ... and How to Get It, The Three Musketeers and other brilliantly offbeat films that did not particularly appeal to Audrey Hepburn. Film historian Kevin Brownlow sums him up best: “Lester can make a Beatles film, he can make an intimate film like Petulia, and he can do swashbuckling epics. He’s an extraordinary filmmaker, whom one day people will recognize, but too late, of course.”

  This project would require less swash and more buckle. Lester recalls its genesis: [Columbia production chief] Peter Guber came to my office, sat down with a series of three-by-five cards, and said, “Columbia wants to make a picture with you,” which doesn’t happen very often. He started reading off scripts that were in turnaround and other ideas, one of which was “Robin Hood as an old man meets Maid Marian.” I said, “I’ll do it.” He said, “Don’t you want to see a script?” I said, “No, I think I know how to do that.” I instantly thought it was the kind of thing I would like to do and would know how to do.50

  Considering that the first film version of the Robin Hood legend was in 1909, it was high time the Merry Men came to grips with middle age.bh How did they finish off their days? Did Marian remain a Maid? Robin and Marian was designed, wryly and perversely, to bring the tale to an end once and for all.

  But as Audrey had not worked for years, “It was important that I fit what she had to do into a period that was convenient for her and her children’s school,” says Lester, “and that wouldn’t interfere with their lives.” That was Mission Nearly Impossible—but Lester accomplished it.

  “Such a poetic idea, to find out what happened to Robin and Marian,” Audrey enthused. “Everything I had been offered before then was too kinky, too violent or too young.” She liked the idea of playing a woman her own age. Most of all, she liked the reaction she got from Sean and Luca: “They begged me to do the film. They were so thrilled at the idea of meeting James Bond.”

  Lester’s initial casting idea was Sean Connery for Little John and Albert Finney for Robin Hood, but the latter was not available. The former, in the end, would be the ideal masculine rogue to complement Hepburn’s ideal femininity.51

  Both Robin and Marian were equally pleased with their costars, and Audrey packed her bags for Spain.

  “I took Luca with me,” she said, “and he saw the Spanish countryside, played with horses and had a grand time.”52 She arranged for him to take archery and riding lessons from experts on the set and, all in all, pronounced it “a grand experience for a little boy.... He kept saying, ‘Why isn’t Daddy playing Robin Hood?’ I told him that was impossible, and he said, ‘I know why—because Daddy doesn’t have the right suit.”’

  Audrey, however, had her problems, starting with the fact that the script handed to her in Spain was very different from the one that had originally sold her on the project. She was especially annoyed by the way she was first informed of it: Upon arrival at the Madrid airport, she caught sight of producer Ray Stark going up an escalator as she was going down. “Hi, Audrey!” he yelled. “Wait ‘til you see the new script!”53

  She was also annoyed by the way Richard Lester first greeted her—offhandedly, through the fence of a tennis court, without interrupting his game. “Audrey could get along with Hitler,” said a Columbia executive, “but Lester is not in her scrapbook of unforgettable characters.”54 Due to Lester’s frenetic pace, she could not be accorded her customary star-status arrangements. He shot the picture in a lightning-like thirty-six shooting days.

  “I’m prone to be impatient,” he says. “Hard Day’s Night was just under seven weeks. juggernaut was six. Musketeers was seventeen weeks for the two parts, about eight and a half apiece. On Robin, I set out to shoot eight or nine pages a day. There were about fifty pages under a bloody tree, so why not?

  “We had a location which suited the temperaments of the cast and, more important, their tax arrangements. There were five members of this distinguished English cast who couldn’t set foot in England for tax reasons. In Nottinghamshire, where Sherwood Forest really is, there are very few trees left that aren’t held up by hope and heavy bits of steel. So we shot in Spain.”

  Pamplona, some two hundred miles north of Madrid, “looks like everyone’s idea of what England looked like in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” says Lester. It had castles and forts much like those of Robin’s time, plus “wonderful old oak trees, rocks, moss, waterfalls, wildlife and wildflowers.”55

  Liz Smith, who came on the set to interview Audrey, wasn’t so impressed with the place:

  “Pamplona is a man’s town with macho in the air and leftover bull dung in the streets. It is sadly worn-out.... Nowhere evident is the enchantment that Ernest Hemingway wrote about in The Sun Also Rises. This is the last place one expects to find romance—legendary or real.”

  The interview took place on a path beside a brook. There, wrote Smith, when Audrey looked about “for a rock most suitable to her bony bottom,” a press agent offered her his Louis Vuitton briefcase as a cushion. She let out a squeal of delight at the appearance of that unlikely item—and talked bravely.

  “Robin and Marian was really worth waiting for,” she told Smith, later adding, “There’s a great need in films today for mature women to be seen playing mature women.” Things had changed a lot since she made her last movie, Wait Until Dark, she said. The technical advances were amazing, “and Dick Lester is so fast and unencumbered by ego or dramatics. He is a whiz-bang with his many cameras and single takes.”56

  But behind the scenes, she and Lester were said to be having script quarrels. Time reported that Lester kept cutting down on the love story between Robin and Marian, and that Hepburn was fighting to retain s
ome of her best romantic lines. “With all those men,” she was quoted, “I was the one who had to defend the romance in the picture. Somebody had to take care of Marian.”57

  Lester denies it: “There was very little dialogue cut. We never had arguments or disagreements about cuts. It’s true that I’m not sentimental in any way, either in life or in my films, and I don’t think Jim [Goldman] was either. The picture is unsentimental, but I think it remains romantic and poignant.”58

  What he does not deny is that Audrey was “unaccustomed to working at that speed, and with a multiple camera technique. She had to adapt to that, and we had to try to adapt to suit her.” Her greatest anxiety lay in not knowing how she now looked on the screen after such a long absence, because Lester did not run the daily rushes. “I never look at rushes,” he says. “I stopped in about 1965, and it was important to me that nobody else looked, either. But this was unusual for her. Normally, she did.”59

  Adding to her insecurity was the fact that she had not been consulted about the choice of cinematographer—Lester’s friend David Watkin, who preferred unfiltered close-ups that she feared would be unflattering.

  “The first thing she said was, ‘When are you doing camera tests?’” Lester recalls, “and David said, ‘You’ll have to take your chances like everyone else, won’t you, dear?’ And she did. It was difficult for her, because she had come from a studio system and she’d been dressed by Givenchy and photographed by the old masters. Here, we had two cameras working so her close-ups were being done at the same time as the long shots, and the scenes were being played theatrically.

  “But to her credit, once she knew that this was the way I worked, and that all the other actors were happy with it, she tried to adapt to it, and I think did very well. What we did in exchange was to shoot the angles favoring away from her first. The other actors, like Sean, who liked to work quickly, would go first, giving her a chance, with her back to the camera, to perfect what she wanted to do.”60

  Audrey’s initial reaction to Lester’s techniques was the equivalent of a primal scream. “I was literally petrified the first day on the set,” she said. “Even after a few days, I was still shivering and shaking before each take. My hands were clammy. Making movies isn’t like riding a bicycle. It doesn’t all come back to you at once.”61 She would later reflect that “even in the best artistic surroundings, in the end you are still alone.”62 And she didn’t consider these the best surroundings.

  But she wasn’t alone on screen. Lester had done her the service of assembling one of the most distinguished casts of British actors ever: In addition to Connery, Robert Shaw (straight from Jaws) was the Sheriff of Nottingham, Nicol Williamson was Little John, Denholm Elliott was Will Scarlett, Ian Holm was King John, and Richard Harris played Richard the Lionheart. She got along famously with them all—best of all Connery, with whom she remained friends for life. Her major offscreen outing, says Lester, was the Sunday that Sean Connery took her to the running of the bulls:

  “Someone arranged for an apartment with a balcony overlooking the street, and Sean and Audrey went. I stayed at home curled up in the fetal position, worrying about what I was going to do the next week.” One would think she would have hated anything to do with bullfighting. “But it was just the running. The bulls have a pretty good track record—they kill more than get killed. They charge down the street and people hop about like idiots, blind drunk. It turns out they’re mostly New Zealanders and they get gored so they can go home with a story.”

  Pamplona was experiencing a terrible heat wave that summer, and Audrey was among many in the cast who suffered both from the heat and from diarrhea. At one point, she offered fellow-sufferer Denholm Elliott some pills, with the observation, “They may not be the real answer, but they’re a damn good cork. I’ve been using them all week.”63 Lester says “Denholm wouldn’t stay in the hotel with the rest of us and found a monastery that made a rather serviceable red wine. He got into a monk’s cell and decided to stay there because the wine was cheap.”

  It was reported that Audrey’s doctors had instructed her to drink beer to keep her weight up. If so, says Lester, “the doctors must have told that to the entire crew, as well.” In general, he doesn’t remember her being in fragile health. On the contrary, the director had evidence that she was quite robust:

  “We had a sequence where the wagon turned over in the water, which wasn’t planned. The carriage, as it went across the muddy river, slowly fell on its side. Instead of redoing it, I decided to keep it in and shoot around it. We had Sean fish her out and put her on the bank in the next scene. She was in the water quite a while and managed it very well.”

  That scene got a good, cheap laugh in the theaters thanks to the line devised for Robin as he surveys Marian’s toppled wagon in the water: “She never could drive.”

  Audrey’s recollection was much less sanguine than Lester’s. “It was actually very frightening even though the water wasn’t very deep,” she said.64 “We very nearly drowned. I was scared to death, stuck under the canvas with that big horse bucking his legs out in front of me, and those nun’s habits got terribly waterlogged and heavy and dragged us down even more.”65bi

  Accidents aside, her mood throughout the shooting was upbeat, says Lester, as was his own. But when production was over, he would have—and lose—a major battle with the studio over the picture’s title and the publicity department’s slogan, “Love is the greatest adventure of all.”

  “I felt it was wrong to advertise the film as Columbia did,” Lester says. “People expected another Three Musketeers, and when it ends up with the leading characters dead on a bed, they were confused. I always felt the one thing you have to do is to advertise a film accurately, so the audience knows what it’s going to see. When they don‘t, there is a built-in resentment. Jim’s original title was The Death of Robin. Everybody said, ‘You can’t have a film with “Death” in the title—it’s depressing.’ But that’s what people were going to see. ‘Love is the greatest adventure of all’ was not what it was about.”66

  In March 1976, Audrey came to the United States for a promotion blitz to kick off Robin and Marian’s premiere in New York. There, the press went crazy over her emergence from retirement, showering her with questions about her “comeback” until her annoyance and defensiveness finally broke through.

  “I never ‘retired,’” she said. “I’m not Garbo. I always hoped to make another film. The time was right for me and the part was right, too.... I’m not one of those people who retire and then come back year after year. I’m not making a ‘comeback’ because I never consciously went away. And now that I’ve come back in Robin and Marian, I may not stay back.”67

  But, in fact, she had gone away “consciously”—for the very reason she went on to explain to that same reporter: Acting was simply “not that important to me,” she declared, “not all that real. The home is the last stand—the last thing we’ve got.”68 At that New York press breakfast, “her hands shook noticeably and she smoked without letup,” Jim Watters reported.69 But Audrey endured, and pitched the picture in yeoman fashion.

  “People associate me with a time when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music,” she said. “Now people are frightened by the movies. Robin and Marian is really about how much two people love each other. It’s an intimate story, and that’s why I wanted to do it.”

  Despite her cooperation, Columbia had a serious problem. A private survey had revealed, to the producers’ dismay, that young people—who comprisedmost of the potential audience—weren’t quite certain who Audrey was. Most of them were in the cradle at the time she made Roman Holiday and Funny Face. But everybody knew James Bond—and thus Sean Connery, of the two costars, was the more important draw. His role in Robin and Marian was a major departure from Bond; among other things, he revealed his baldness for the first time. He was now pressed into service for the promotion and came through eloquently.

  “I like films that
dispel time,” Connery told Liz Smith, “and this appealed to me because not only it’s an interesting legend, but also an examination of the legend. It’s tremendously concerned with dying.70 [Robin] at this point in his life is in his twilight. A ripe old age in his day was anything over forty, and in our film he’s something like fifty But he’s an exceptional man. Remember, Joe Louis only came back for a couple of rounds, but for those two rounds he was as good as ever!”71

  A Columbia official put it even more—well, baldly:

  “Let’s face it, this is primarily a woman’s film, and women are the ones in our society who usually decide what movies the family sees, right? On Robin and Marian we’re leaning heavy on the romance angle, placing a lot of thirty-second ad spots using the kissing scenes on daytime TV. All the women watching soap operas are going to see themselves in Sean Connery’s arms.”72

  The night before the premiere, Columbia threw a lavish, medieval supper-dance at which Audrey nibbled caviar until midnight. The next day, Robin and Marian headlined the big Easter show at Radio City Music Hall, where the Rockettes in white bunny suits frolicked to the tune of “Cocktails for Two” with a dancing chorus of Day-Glo Easter eggs. Audrey drew a standing ovation from the full house of 6,200, and long, rowdy shouts of, “We love you!” From the stage, she told the crowd, “I keep hearing that I am making a comeback. I don’t think of it as that. It is a homecoming.”

  Never having seen any rushes, it was literally her first glimpse of the film and her performance as Marian. Asked later what she thought of herself, she replied carefully, “I shall have to see it again before I decide.”73