by Barry Paris
Several scenes in the film were shot on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day, and the actors had to mill around in the stores during the setups. There were no luxury trailers for the stars, but “Audrey complied without a sigh,” says Bogdanovich, and “never threw her weight around. Everyone knew her, of course, so after ten minutes, she would come out of a shop beaming: ‘Just look at what they gave me, Pete-ah. Look at this lovely umbrella! This wonderful handkerchief!’ I told her, ‘You can work the other side of the street tomorrow.”’
As she never asked for special treatment, she also never asked for any of her lines to be changed. Instead, says the director, if she didn’t like her dialogue, “What she’d do in her own sweet way [was] simply change the line. She’d say, ‘Oh! Terribly sorry, Pete-ah. I thought that was the line.’11...
“I caught onto it after a while. I’d say, ‘That’s not the line.’ She’d say, ‘Oh, isn’t it? I’m so sorry. I’ll say the line—what was it?’ I’d say, ‘No, yours was better.’ She’d say, ‘Oh, no, no. Are you sure?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, darling ... ”’12
Bogdanovich did her other favors during production, not least of which concerned her son Sean. The previous year, at nineteen, he had decided that one semester at the University of Geneva was enough and that he’d rather go to work—in films. With his mother’s intercession, he was hired as an assistant director on the Terence Young film Inchon, a Korean war epic produced by the Reverend Sung Myung Moon’s Unification Church, starring a deeply uncomfortable Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur (and, coincidentally, Ben Gazzara in a supporting role). On one of Sean’s first days on the Korean set, an extra was killed in a crowd scene, and it fell to young Ferrer to collect the body.
“Audrey worried so much and wanted Sean to banish it from his mind,” recalls Rob Wolders. “But it was the school of hard knocks. He really wanted to make his own way.”
Before production of They All Laughed began, Audrey invited Bogdanovich to an intimate family dinner. It was clear that he was not just to have supper but also to see if a place for Sean might be found on the picture:
“It was love at first sight. I sat next to him and you looked into his eyes and you wanted to hug him. He was the most adorable kid you’ve ever seen. I thought, ‘I’d like to look at him every day,’ so I asked if he wanted to be my assistant. He said yes, and that was it. He carried my script, my cigars, woke me up at six o’clock, made omelets for me on a hot plate—he’s a brilliant cook—drove me, whatever I had to do. He was my guy.
“And then I wrote him into the picture. There was a Latin guy named José, and I said, ‘Why don’t we have Sean play it? He’d be great.’ Sean said, ‘I don’t think I can act.’ But he became that part, got so many laughs based on his attitude—totally Sean. At one point, he’s walking with Colleen Camp and she says, ‘You’re very rich,’ and he says, ‘Rich? Oh, a little ...’ A nothing line. I don’t think it was even in the script. But the way he delivered it was fabulous.” 13bl
The four private eyes in the film are played by Gazzara, Ritter, Blaine Novak and George Morfogen, who all work for the Odyssey Detective Agency and fall in love with the women they’re trying to follow. The audience, for its part, must try to follow a plot with more twists and turns than the Pacific Coast Highway.
Ritter was then regarded as a hot property from his Three’s Company TV series, but his physical-shtick comedy in They All Laughed is unfunny and progressively more annoying, providing an example of Bogdanovich’s weakness for choosing actors on the basis of looks. But on the other hand, his casting of the unknown Blaine Novak (as dope-smoking Arthur) and George Morfogen (as the boss detective, Mr. Leondopoulos) was inspired. Morfogen and Novak were coproducers as well as costars of the film, as Bogdanovich recalls:
“George Morfogen was an old friend of mine. In What’s Up, Doc?, he had a small part but got big laughs as the wine steward in the banquet scene.... I’m for having the actors get involved. George was particularly good with scripts, and we were rewriting as we were shooting. We would all sit around—George, Benny, me—and then we added Blaine, who had worked for [John] Cassavetes on the distribution of Woman Under the Influence.
“Blaine was a long-haired, weird kind of hippie-radical kid, and so was his character in the film. In real life, he had six or seven girlfriends all the time—in this macho, fucking-around scene that I’d never been a part of. It was new to me, but I was getting into it. The film reflected that scene.”14
During They All Laughed shooting, Novak and Sean Ferrer became close friends. As Sean always called his mother “Mutti,” Novak started to call Audrey “Mutti,” too. “She didn’t mind at all,” says Bogdanovich. “She thought Blaine was funny.”15bm
Blaine was funny—in life and in They All Laughed—but the film, overall, was not. Its few good flashes of comedy called for Madeline Kahn and Ryan O’Neal, rather than Colleen Camp and John Ritter, while the Gazzara-Hepburn romance element of the story was Grade B Two for the Road, at best.
Years later, the question still remains: What was the sex appeal of Ben Gazzara ? On- and offscreen, why were beautiful women so eager to jump into bed with him? He seems so devoid of charm, so wooden, so unjustifiably smug.
“You see more of his charisma in Saint Jack than in They All Laughed because of his sad character,” says Bogdanovich, “but Audrey helped supply what he was missing. She knew how to pick up on the weak point of another actor and compensate for it without destroying her own performance.”16
But there was too much art imitating too much life. To an intimate new friend, she confided that Gazzara was just “walking through” his part, giving her nothing to work with. In the end, even Bogdanovich knew that Gazzara and Hepburn didn’t click. “Ben was going through his divorce,” he says, “and had started an affair with another woman he ended up marrying later.bn I think when Audrey realized all that, she was very disappointed.”
Gazzara felt Hepburn was pursuing him, and was alarmed. She was “the marryin’ kind,” and marriage was the last thing he wanted at that point. “I’d work with her anytime, anywhere, anyhow,” he said. “She’s a beautiful, sexy, talented woman.“17 But there would be no new romance between them, if indeed there had ever been one in the past.
Hepburn’s “rejection” by Gazzara, however, was a blessing in disguise. While They All Laughed was still shooting in New York, another man would not only console her but would eventually provide her with the happiest and most stable relationship of her life. Everyone assumed his name was Bogdanovich.
“The newspapers hinted there was something going on between Audrey and me,” says the director today with a chuckle. “Audrey and I kidded about it because something was going on with her, and Audrey knew that something was going on with Dorothy and me. So when it appeared that we were having an affair, we kind of encouraged it with some intimate photos taken when we were shooting on Second Avenue—me sitting in my chair, her sitting in my lap—that made it into the papers. We were very huggy and kissy. I absolutely adored her. Our relationship was very close, but of course it never got near an affair.”18 Bogdanovich was in love with her, all right—professionally:I’ve never seen anybody change so much in front of a camera as Audrey. In life, you’d think, ‘How is she going to get through the day or even the hour?’ Her hands are shaking, she’s smoking too much, she’s worried, she’s being kind of desperately nice to everybody, she’s so fragile—how the fuck can she survive? But between the time she stepped in front of the camera and you said ‘Action!,’ something happened. She pulled it together. A kind of strength through vulnerability—strength like an iron butterfly. You couldn’t possibly get her to be any righter. You could only say, ‘a little faster, a little slower.’ The performance was true, never weak, always strong and clear. It was an amazing thing to watch, this professional completely in charge of her instrument without even thinking about it. I think it was all second nature. 19
Bogdanovich’s personal, as opposed to pro
fessional, love was reserved for Dorothy Stratten, whom he encouraged to watch and learn from Audrey Hepburn on the set. Stratten did so and was fascinated by Audrey’s discipline. There were reports that the two women became very close.
“Not at all true, unfortunately,” says Bogdanovich. “I don’t think Dorothy and Audrey ever spoke. Dorothy was extraordinarily shy and awed by Audrey. They passed in one scene on Fifth Avenue—the only time you see them together. Dorothy looked like she wanted to talk to her, but it didn’t happen.”
Back in California in August 1980, a few weeks after shooting on They All Laughed was completed, Stratten was staying with Bogdanovich in Bel Air when she decided to pay a visit to her estranged husband for the purpose of expediting their divorce. Bogdanovich was later criticized for letting her go alone, but that was with the advantage of hindsight: Deranged and wildly jealous, Paul Snider terrorized her at gunpoint before blasting her in the face and then killing himself as well.
Actor Tony Curtis, who knew Stratten from Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, remembers her as “very naive about the profession she was getting into and easily manipulated by any guy who made an overture—and in those days everybody made overtures to everybody. She’s the perfect example of a tragedy that didn’t need to happen.”20
Hepburn was extremely supportive after the murder and described her as a very sweet kind of angel, says Bogdanovich, who quoted Audrey in his book about Stratten, The Killing of the Unicorn: “It’s as though she just came down long enough to make this picture, and then she was gone.”21
“It broke my heart,” he says.
The murdered Stratten thus became the tragic star of They All Laughed, and the film itself an object of morbid curiosity instead of a pleasant romp. “When Dorothy was killed, the picture was killed,” Bogdanovich says. “The melancholy story of Audrey was supposed to be juxtaposed with the happy story of Dorothy, but now there was no way to look at it without it being almost unbearable.”bo
Even morbid curiosity failed to generate much attendance, and neither did the reviews. “It’s aggressive in its ineptitude,” wrote Vincent Canby. “It grates on the nerves like a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm.” Newsweek called it “an aimless bust, unencumbered by a visual or structural scheme. It wanders through a series of boîtes, boutiques and hotel lobbies in the vagrant hope of witnessing a privileged moment.... At 52, the eternal gamine has become a figure of icy chic.”
“They all laughed, but you won’t,” said the Providence Journal, griping that Hepburn “can’t have had more than 10 pages of dialogue” in the film.22
Bogdanovich pleads nolo contendere:
“If I had not been struck by a terrible calamity, I think I would have edited it better. The director’s cut is clearer.... I lost $5 million of my own money on that picture, which was why I went bankrupt in 1985. We never could get it booked. You can’t fight the majors. I was so shellshocked—I went into therapy after that and found I was trying to destroy myself.”23
Bogdanovich is hard on himself and the film, but in fact it was acclaimed in such prestigious quarters as the Venice Film Festival and in Variety, which called it “probably Bogdanovich’s best film to date.” One of the most appreciative critics was Bill Cosford in The Miami Herald:
“Imagine Woody Allen’s Manhattan without the angst. [They All Laughed] recalls Manhattan just a little because it is a romantic comedy not just about people but about the city of New York, which always makes a good costar when properly handled.... This one should have been a hit.... For a flop, this is one interesting film.”24
The Atlanta Journal reviewer called it “oddly disjointed” but concluded, “I can probably forgive a movie almost anything if it allows me even a glimpse of Audrey Hepburn.”25
The next-to-the-last glimpse on film, as it turned out. Bogdanovich sums up the They All Laughed experience—and Audrey—with brutal candor:If it hadn’t had been for Audrey, we couldn’t have done it. And she didn’t want to do it that badly. Finally when I said, “Audrey, I wrote the whole picture for you!”, she said, “Oh, all right.” Even when I decided to use Sean, it wasn’t definite that she was going to do it....
She understood how to marshal everything she had. It was an extraordinary mechanism. Maybe she got tired of moving that mountain. She was very insecure. She was also so hurt. I noticed that she was somebody who had been wounded many times, and when you’re wounded in the same area, you grow scar tissue. She was a survivor, but it was painful. There was a sense of lost gaiety around Audrey that she could never quite recapture. I felt it was from all the guys that had treated her badly....
I sensed this would be her last film, which is why I did the ending as a montage of all those shots of her. I felt it was a farewell to that Audrey Hepburn. As the helicopter took her away, I thought, ‘The world is taking her away.’ I had a strong sense that she didn’t really enjoy making pictures anymore. The fun had gone out of it for her. She didn’t think it was important anymore.26
Hepburn and Bogdanovich “almost” made another picture together. In 1991, “I tempted her with Noises Off,” says the director. “She thought about it for a while, but then she said no.” The part went to Carol Burnett.
AUDREY WAS decidedly “down” during much of They All Laughed shooting, Peter Bogdanovich recalls, but “it became a happy thing. It started to happen for her, toward the end of shooting, when she met Robbie.”27
Robert Wolders, seven years younger than Hepburn, had been a costar of the popular television western series Laredo, and the fourth husband of the recently deceased Merle Oberon.
“I happened to be in New York when Audrey was doing the Bogdanovich movie,” says Anna Cataldi, “and she was very mysterious about this new man. When I went back to Italy, Andrea told me, ‘Audrey has found somebody!’ He was terrible about it. Everybody assumed it was either Bogdanovich or Ben Gazzara.”28
The fateful meeting of Hepburn and Wolders came about through Connie Wald, widow of the celebrated producer-writer Jerry Wald. She was Audrey’s closest friend and regular hostess in Los Angeles. Hepburn loved her beautiful but unpretentious stone house in Beverly Hills, with its wood-paneled library and state-of-the-art screening room full of Jerry’s film memorabilia, including his 1948 Irving Thalberg Award.
Connie had also been a good friend of Merle Oberon, and of Rob Wolders, for more than a decade. She was struck then, and still is, by his “intense caring and devotion to Merle,” especially after Oberon had open-heart surgery.
“Merle and I used to go to Connie’s often,” Wolders recalls. “Merle had died about two months earlier, and Connie felt I should be with friends because I had been keeping to myself. She said, ‘Come to the house for dinner. It’s just family.”’
Wolders arrived to find that the “family” included Billy and Audrey Wilder, William Wyler—and Audrey Hepburn, Connie’s current houseguest. (“We always had Billy and Willie together when Audrey came,” she says. “It was a love fest.”29) Also present were Kurt Frings, Lenny Gershe and Sean Ferrer.
Some claim that Connie was actively matchmaking. “Heavens no,” she says today. “That never works.” In any case, Wolders recalls, “Audrey was extraordinarily sweet with me that night. We spoke Dutch and talked about Merle a great deal. Sean was wonderful with me, too. Later he said he remembered that I seemed to be hiding behind a certain chair. Connie took a picture of the two Audreys on either side of me [see photo 45]. That evening helped me considerably.”
Audrey later told interviewer Glenn Plaskin, “I was charmed with him that night, but he didn’t register that much. He was getting over the death of Merle, [and] it was the worst period of my life, one of the low ebbs. We both cried into our beers.”30
Four months later, Wolders had to go to New York and Connie said, “Audrey’s doing a picture there—you should call her.”
He did so.
“She seemed pleased to hear from me but when I asked her to dinner, she said they were doing night shooti
ng and it would be impossible,” he says. “I thought it was a gentle, subtle way of rebuffing me. But I was in New York two more weeks and, on my last night there, I was dressing to go to a small party with some friends when the phone rang. It was Audrey, saying she wasn’t shooting that night and would I like to have dinner? I said I had another commitment and asked if she’d like to join us. She said, ‘No, thank you, but would you like to come by for a drink?’ I said, ‘Great.’ I wanted to see her again.
“So I met her at the Cafe Pierre, we sat down for a drink, and before I knew it, an hour had passed. Audrey said, ‘Do you mind if I have some pasta?’ I said no, of course. So she had a huge plate of pasta. An hour and three quarters passed, and I realized I was quite late. I joined my friends and had to leave early the next morning for Los Angeles. But after that, we spoke almost every day and got to know each other on the telephone.”
Those conversations in the beginning, he says, “were not romantic tête-à-têtes. She was counseling and advising me and then gradually, she started to talk about her own life and began to seek my counsel. I was the one calling her, but then one day, she called me, which gave me an entirely different feeling about her. It meant that she cared enough to speak to me, whereas, up to then, I thought perhaps she was just ‘accommodating’ me. That’s when I went back to New York and we began a kind of clandestine relationship, which she went into very reluctantly.”
Her main concern was for Luca, not Andrea. When she returned to Rome, Dotti said, rather flippantly, “You look very beautiful—you must be in love.” She replied, rather daringly, “I am!” Their marriage was by then irreparable, but it wasn’t entirely Andrea’s fault. To Rob, she confided an example of the problems caused by her own emotionalism a few years earlier:
