by Barry Paris
Nearly everyone else decided that Hepburn and Connery were well matched—“silk and chain mail,” said one critic—and superb together.
At the film’s outset, a disillusioned Robin returns from the Crusades, scarred and exhausted, to find things in very bad shape: Good King Richard Lionheart is off his rocker, and the Sheriff of Nottingham is more entrenched than ever. Marian, the love of his life, has gotten herself to the Kirkely Abbey nunnery for the last eighteen years, and is now its abbess.
Lester and Goldman tantalize us—delaying her entrance for nearly thirty minutes. When it finally comes, Audrey as Marian looks haunting and perfect, and so is Goldman’s dialogue. In her first encounter with Robin, she tells him her confessions were “the envy of the convent.” He says, “I never meant to hurt you, and yet that’s all I ever do.” A pause. “You never wrote,” she complains sadly. “I don’t know how,” he replies.
Their later love scenes are as fascinating as the sometimes bizarre lines. “Hurt me, make me cry!” says Marian before one big clinch. “I’d be twenty for you if I could.... I’d do everything for you but mourn.”
One of the film’s most beautiful scenes belonged to Hepburn and Nicol Williamson:
“You’ve never liked me, have you?” Marian asks Little John.
“You’re Rob’s lady,” he answers with sullen fidelity, and then a quiet afterthought, “If you’d been mine, I would never have left you.”
That scene with Williamson was “one of my favorites,” says Lester. “When we shot it, we had a problem with the film stock, and in theory we should have gone back and shot it again. But I liked the original so much, I just said, ‘I don’t care what it looks like.’ It played right the first time, and often, when you do it again, it doesn’t come up to that original frisson. So I said, ‘To hell with it, we’ll just have it as it is.”’
Marian, as ever, is a pawn in the men’s political games. More than once, Robin goes to her rescue, albeit more creakily than in the olde days. He is the world’s first guerilla warrior, and the peasants still rally to his call. The final duel between him and the Sheriff is the last, sad, slow-motion battle of two aging titans. After a shocking murder-suicide denouement, the film ends on a grimly perfect shot of rotting apples.
Audrey later complained to Rex Reed about that final image, offended by the suspicion that it was designed to symbolize herself and Sean Connery. But there was no denying its impact, or the impact of the film overall.
“Robin and Marian is really a story about loss,” wrote Caroline Latham, in which “Hepburn at last plays the part of a fully mature woman responsible for her own destiny.”
“Am I old and ugly?” Marian asks Robin poignantly at one point. The answer is of course no, but that’s not enough. In the end, rather than see him die in battle or crippled in bed, she commits the ultimate crime. Pauline Kael, for one, was appalled: “When Robin—who has survived body-smashing combat with the Sheriff—is poisoned by Marian, who has also poisoned herself, I was disgusted and angry.”
Frank Thompson, in American Film, was less judgmental on the moral issue: “Robin and Marian is a sad and satisfying hymn to heroism, myth and lost youth.... Hepburn’s Marian is the heart of the film; for once, neither fragile nor innocent. Her performance has steel in it, and a touch of madness.”74
Audrey’s portrayal was the triumph of her late career. Something about Marian inspired her—some identification with a woman who “gives it all up” for the cloisters but, finally, can’t bear the isolation and must return to the world. Marian was spiritually close to Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story.
Richard Lester’s bottom-line characterization of Hepburn was as “a very hard, methodical, almost mechanical performer who worked at it very much the way dancers would, in that everything was blocked. Audrey was not the kind of person to whom, in the middle of a scene, you would suddenly throw a prop from off-camera and expect her to catch it with her left hand, carry on, and do a number with it.”75
Robin and Marian was a jaundiced view of the heroism business among the formula-ridden action genres of the seventies. “It turned out to be much more of a success than we all realized at the time,” said Audrey. “It had marvelous notices, but it was never ‘commercial.’ ”76 Yet it holds up remarkably to the test of time now—and of Time then:
“Audrey Hepburn has not made a movie in seven years. The moment she appears on screen is startling, not for her thorough, gentle command, not even for her beauty, which seems heightened, renewed. It is rather that we are reminded of how long it has been since an actress has so beguiled us and captured our imagination. Hepburn is unique and now, almost alone.”77
After the New York premiere of Robin and Marian, Audrey flew to Hollywood for the Academy Awards ceremony, at which she was to present the Best Picture Oscar. Again as so often “out of the loop,” she had to ask a reporter which movies had been nominated and, when informed, said, “Oh, yes—I have seen Nashville and Jaws.”78 (The other nominees were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)
Her appearance March 29, 1976, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, in a dazzling pink Givenchy gown, drew a standing ovation. She was genuinely excited to announce Cuckoo’s Nest as the winner, having known Michael Douglas, its producer, from his boyhood. Douglas later said that getting the award from Audrey was more important than the award itself. Jack Nicholson—named Best Actor for the same film—felt similarly. He considered Hepburn one of the few “un-phony” actresses of the times.
She was escorted that night by Dr. Dotti. Later, after the ceremony, they decided to skip the Governor’s Ball in favor of Swifty Lazar’s legendary Oscar bash in Beverly Hills. Swifty told her he’d seen Robin and Marian and that she would be the guaranteed winner of next year’s Oscar race.
But when the time rolled around, she never even got a nomination.
As ALWAYS, she was glad to get back home—for all its drawbacks. “It’s difficult to live in Rome nowadays,” she said, “but my roots are here now.”79
She had agreed to be interviewed again by Jim Watters for People in the living room of her friend Arabella Ungaro’s Monti Parioli home. Suddenly, the hostess rushed off to get them a glass of mineral water, apologizing that “there’s not one drop of tap water in my house today.” It was a typical aggravation of life in even the best parts of Rome. “From June to November I had no hot water,” Audrey chimed in. “I had to bathe at my husband’s office. You might say I went to Spain last summer to make Robin and Marian just so I could take a bath!”80
A much worse vexation was in vogue: kidnapping for ransom, to which the rich and famous in Rome were prey. Most notorious was the abduction—and grisly ear-slicing—of J. Paul Getty III. The danger was constantly, almost obsessively on her mind.
“It’s a very anguishing period in Rome,” she told Rex Reed. “They’re even kidnapping tourists for $50 apiece, ransacking apartments and breaking into cars.... Some do it for political reasons, some for money, and [some just] for kicks. Two years ago, the joy of Rome was to walk around in the streets at night.... Not anymore. The whole world has changed.”81
She was alarmed by a warning, evidently from the police, that Sean and Luca were being followed in the streets of Rome. Next came a serious of intimidating phone calls—for Audrey, the last straw. At dawn one morning, a car drew up at their home and took her and the boys at high speed to Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Two hours later, Sean and Luca were safely ensconced at La Paisible, where Audrey decided they should stay indefinitely, enrolling them in an exclusive academy at Le Rosey.82
She now had the stress of commuting even more frequently between her boys in Switzerland and her husband in Rome, since Andrea reiterated his refusal to give up his clinic and teaching in Rome. Audrey’s fears for him increased—for good reason.
In broad daylight, as Dotti was leaving his clinic on the Via Ettore Ximenes, four men in ski masks jumped from a Mercedes and tried to drag him into
the car. He struggled and got clobbered on the head with a gun butt but made enough noise to draw the attention of two guards outside the nearby Egyptian Embassy. The assailants fled. Dotti was taken to a hospital for seven stitches in his head.
Audrey was in Switzerland when it happened, and Dotti’s close call confirmed and fueled her worst fears about Rome. From then on, she lived in a state of increased terror for him, for herself, and for the boys. Her insecurity—and a certain tension—came to the surface in a bantering but revealing way during the only joint interview she and Andrea ever did, in 1976, for McCall’s. Asked if he thought Audrey’s childho .d under Nazi terror in Holland accounted for her fear of loss, psychiatrist Dotti replied with his belief that the search for security and the search for love go hand in hand.
“It’s difficult to have both,” said Andrea, “especially for women, since security is based on a fixed social and economic situation, a status quo with prearranged agreements or contracts, while love is wild, unfixed, unpredictable.... No doubt Audrey’s childhood experiences intensified these drives.
“She’s a perfectionist, with a strong need for security. She must have matters under control and she’s afraid of surprises. For example, if she has to go to Geneva next month, she buys the ticket now. I do it the day before, and maybe then I’ll change my mind and go to Sardinia.”
Audrey interrupted him: “No, love, you wouldn’t fly off anywhere, because for Sardinia there’s always a waiting list.”
Dotti responded brightly: “She’s right—absolutely! So you see, we’re good for each other. We compensate. I’m a curious Pisces and she’s Taurus with both feet on the ground. That’s very good for a marriage.” He paused, with a twinkle in his eyes. “But for a love affair, Cancer is best.”
Audrey: (coolly) “How exciting. Do tell us more.”
Andrea: “She’s composed of categories, like boxes. It’s either good or bad. It can be done or it can’t. In between, we don’t discuss. That’s good, too, since it makes for great mental economy.”83
During the six weeks of Robin and Marian shooting, she had returned as often as possible to Rome on the weekends to be with Andrea. That still left him many free weeknight evenings to kill in the nightclubs, but she was tolerant to a fault:
“He’s done it all his life. It’s not as if all of a sudden he’s breaking out at the age of thirty-seven to go to nightclubs. It’s his way of relaxing, and I think it’s important for him to feel free. I don’t expect him to sit in front of TV when I’m not there. It’s much more dangerous for a man to be bored.”84
But the photographic reports of his infidelities hurt almost as much as the final miscarriage she now suffered, at age forty-five.
By way of consolation, her sons were making excellent progress at school. For distraction, she had only to go to her mailbox and ponder the endless stream of scripts submitted to her. Now and then one would cause her to linger wistfully. One such was the offer of female “lead” in Richard Attenborough’s all-male war epic, A Bridge Too Far (1977), with Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, James Caan, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal and a battalion of others. Attenborough wanted her to play Kate ter Horst, a Dutch national heroine and mother of five who turned her home outside Arnhem into a secret hospital for the Allies. But Audrey could not bear the thought of re-creating the horror and violence of her girlhood.bj
Most of the time Audrey could look back at the final result of such rejected projects as Bridge Too Far and feel she had been correct to decline. But “the one that got away” was Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point (1977). She was deeply intrigued by the part of the aging ballerina star and ideally suited to it because of her dance background. She would have been teamed with Shirley MacLaine, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne. But Anne Bancroft had evidently been cast in the part by the time Audrey learned of it. By another account, Hepburn was offered her choice of roles in the film but refused. In any event, she didn’t appear in the picture—and always regretted it.
Also lamented was a project dear to the heart of her friend Anna Cataldi, who had spent a great deal of time in Africa, fallen in love with the continent, and wanted to do a movie about Karen Blixen (“Isak Dinesen”), the author of Out of Africa.
“The first person I contacted was Audrey,” Cataldi recalls. “I went to Switzerland in 1977 and spent a few days with her, and she told me she wanted to do it. She knew everything about Isak Diniesen. But there were several dif ferent proposals for this movie. She said, ‘If you want to do it, the person I would like you to see is Fred Zinnemann,’ who had done Nun’s Story with her and knew Africa. I went to London and had several meetings with him and discussed Out of Africa. Then Audrey said, ‘Now go to Los Angeles and meet Kurt Frings.’ And that was awful. He said, ‘You want to put my client in a stupid adventure movie? Forget it. Audrey will never do another movie.’ ”85
DIRECTOR TERENCE YOUNG described the elaborate danse macabre of approaching Audrey Hepburn with a movie project, in general, and with his current project, in particular:
“First of all you spend a year or so convincing her to accept even the principle that she might make another movie in her life. Then you have to persuade her to read a script. Then you have to make her understand that it is a good script. Then you have to persuade her that she will not be totally destroying her son’s life by spending six or eight weeks on a film set. After that, if you are reallylucky, she might start talking about the costumes. More probably she’ll just say she has to get back to her family and cooking the pasta for dinner, but thank you for thinking of her.“86
Anna Cataldi was just as persistent as Young, if ultimately not as persuasive. Refusing to give up on Audrey’s participation in Out of Africa, she shook off Kurt Frings’s first rebuff and, the next day, made a second stab and called Frings again.
“I’m rushing to Paris,” he told her. “Audrey is doing a fantastic movie!”
Cataldi was aghast. “Yesterday you said she would never work again,” she protested.
“But this is an extraordinary movie,” Frings replied, “with a fantastic cast. Givenchy is doing the clothes!”87
When Out of Africa was eventually made in 1985 by director Sidney Pollack, Cataldi got credit as an associate producer and the film won many Oscars, including Best Picture. But it would be Meryl Streep and not Audrey Hepburn in the lead role.
The picture she made instead, and the one Frings was so enthused about, was Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline (1979). The self-promotional title of that trashy bestseller pretty much told the whole story: She had chosen a blatantly commercial mish-mash over a host of worthier offers under the pressure of Terence Young and the enticement of a cool $1 million (plus percentage) for just six or seven weeks’ work. Bloodline was a multinational coproduction designed, in large part, to provide its American and European investors with a tax shelter. Much of its $12-million-dollar budget would end up in the pockets of agents and travel bureaus. But that wasn’t Audrey’s concern.
At the time, it seemed like a great deal. In retrospect, it wasn’t nearly enough. A certain cynicism about the whole project prevailed, as Nicholas Freeling detected when he interviewed her at that time in Rome, in a story called “Audrey Hepburn at 50”:The professionals of the movie industry do not want acting from Audrey Hepburn. Leave that to Liv, dear. We have $4 million here [on Bloodline] in pre-production costs and not a camera has yet turned.
Halfway through the interview comes a knock at the door. An Italian photographer with a bunch of stills. “These pictures have to go off today... Come and look at them with me.” [She] switches on a strong light above her head and examines them through a glass with a lamp built in. She is in profile to me.... On the curves of her jaw and cheekbones is a fine down. Her throat muscles are strongly corded and the whole of the celebrated neck has the intensely plastic, exaggeratedly anatomical modelling, full of movement of a Michelangelo drawing....
It is obvious that the illusion of youth, around the ey
es, demands a skilled make-up artist.
[But] why on earth did she take this film?88
The answer was complex: First of all, money. Andrea’s earnings were respectable but insufficient to support the family in the style to which they were accustomed. Second, her longtime friendship and confidence in director Terence Young, who felt he had a certain “right” to her in view of the huge success of their Wait Until Dark. When he gave her Sheldon’s book, she failed to read it; she only knew that her role was fairly small and that she would not have to “carry” the film herself. Third, the shooting locations would be close to home—mostly at Rome’s Cinecittà, with runouts to Munich, Copenhagen and Sardinia.
The final factor was perhaps the most significant: a last-ditch effort to make Andrea mend his ways. It was the worst period of her marriage to Dotti, and her friends were unanimously encouraging her to get out of the house. In the past, she had threatened to go back to work if he did not stop seeing other women, but Andrea did not believe her.
This time, however, the press was rough on her. The London Sunday Times, for example, filed an acerbic report from Munich where, in November 1978, she flew for four weeks of shooting:For the last three years Audrey Hepburn has done nothing more strenuous than strain spaghetti for her family: “I lead such a full life at home. I’m just like most women, caught up in household duties that keep me very busy....”
When she needs a match for a cigarette, the look on her face is like a deer on a rifle range. Clearly, if Hepburn hadn’t brought along a friend from Rome [Arabella Ungaro], she’d feel completely lost on this set.... In conversation I had no trouble believing her claims to ordinariness.... For her, an interview seems as much of an ordeal as trying to convince a camera that she’s 35.89
“I never gave a thought to the question of my age when I was asked to do this film,” she maintained—but the producers did. Her role had been rejected by Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen and Diane Keaton, among others, but Young “flattered her into believing she could pass for fifteen years younger” and assured her that the script “only needs ten pages changing” to conform to her age.90 Such was the novel’s depth! Sheldon dutifully rewrote it to make her thirty-five instead of the original twenty-three.
