Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  “She was extraordinarily close to her makeup man, Alberto de Rossi, and to his wife, Grazia. When he died, Audrey was destroyed—not only for Grazia. Her own pain was so intense that Andrea thought it excessive. He could not comprehend the depth of her sorrow, and that contributed to their rift; Audrey’s melancholia was so intense that it became difficult for Andrea to deal with, and he criticized her, she told me. Without making herself the victim and him the villain, she was investigating where she might have failed. I think she was also keen to find out what had made Merle’s and my marriage so successful.”

  ROBERT WOLDERS was born on September 28, 1936, in Rotterdam, the son of a KLM airline executive. He was four years old during the Nazi destruction of Rotterdam, after which a farmer friend of his mother’s said, “You can bring your children here.” Dutch people in those days used to take their china and silver into the countryside to trade with the farmers for food. Rob and his sister spent the terrible Hongerwinter of 1944 with that farm family in a tiny village near Zwolle, just ten miles from Arnhem.

  “There is a great irony in the fact that Audrey and I were so close to each other then,” he says. Later, in discussing the impact of the war on their childhood, they found that they both shared the odd feeling that “this was the way things had to be. An occupation wasn’t anything unusual. I thought everybody lived like that. We thought America was someplace up in heaven—it didn’t really exist. Audrey frequently pointed out, and I experienced it, too, how close families grew to each other and the humor we found in everything—her mother’s extraordinary dedication to her and her grandfather and her aunts. She said those were, in a sense, among the best years of her life.”31

  After the war, several members of his family emigrated to Rochester, New York. Rob joined them in 1959, with a goal of becoming an actor. He enrolled at the University of Rochester, where he founded an avant-garde theatrical group called “Experiment ’60.” He was much praised for his production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and for his bold direction of Ghelderode’s Escuriel-a “triumph that should elevate him to professional echelons,” wrote one Rochester critic. On the strength of three successful seasons as the leading figure and guiding spirit of that group, Wolders was accepted by the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where he studied for two years. He was then engaged, in July 1963, as a novice at the Spoleto Festival, where he directed (and played “Greeneyes” in) a much-admired production of Jean Genet’s Deathwatch, supervised by Jerome Robbins.

  By 1966, Wolders was costarring with Neville Brand and Philip Carey in the NBC-TV series Laredo, where his appearance in some fifty episodes drew raves. Variety hailed him as “a very suave addition to the Texas Rangers.” The Hollywood Reporter said he set a record “for authoritative audacity” on the Show.32

  Soon enough, he got a movie contract. “Handsome Dutch Import Groomed as Star,” read one headline. Said Monique James, a talent scout for Universal: “We have started a momentum for him by introducing him importantly in Beau Geste and following it up with a good role in the forthcoming Tobruk. I have no doubt that his face will register immediately with the movie public, but we want him to be an experienced, knowing actor.”33

  Sadly for Wolders, neither film lived up to expectations. Beau Geste (1966), costarring Rob with Telly Savalas, Guy Stockwell, Doug McClure and Leslie Nielsen, was the least successful version of that French Foreign Legion adventure. Tobruk (1967), directed by Arthur Hiller, costarred Wolders with Rock Hudson and George Peppard in a World War II action tale of the destruction of Rommel’s fuel supply in the Sahara. It was better than Beau Geste but sabotaged by its slow pace.

  In 1970, at thirty-four, Wolders met and became involved with the veteran star Merle Oberon, then fifty-nine. Soon after, she emerged from retirement to produce and costar with him in her final film-a steamy “vanity picture” called Interval (1973).

  Shot in and around the Mayan ruins of Chichen-Itza, Mexico, Interval was the tale of a globetrotting older woman, on the run from her past, who finds true love with a much younger man—Rob Wolders. Their common bond is purely existential: both are caught in the “interval between being born and dying.” Oberon looks nowhere near her sixty-two years, and hunky Wolders makes a noble effort to be fascinated by her; their modestly undraped love scenes are tasteful enough (see photo 43). Oberon and screenwriter Gavin Lambert deserved credit for at least trying to address the age issue.

  “You’ve been very kind to me these last few days,” she says to Rob at one point, “but surely you want to be with young people.”

  “Are you afraid of the past?” he asks.

  “Not at all,” she replies. “I’m faced with it. Most of it’s not worth remembering.”

  As tearjerkers go, Interval was no Intermezzo or even Interlude, and the critics were brutal. But the film’s failure did not diminish the offscreen ardor of its costars. Oberon and Wolders were married two years later, in 1975, and took their places in the international jet set, where Rob thenceforth tended to her and her career instead of his own.

  One of Oberon’s closest friends was Mignon Winans, who often stayed with her in Acapulco during those years and watched the progress of her relationship with Wolders:

  “He’s such a kind, serious person, and Merle thought he was just wonderful. He understood women—the tender side of women. Some do and some don’t. They were certainly a happy couple. More than any of her marriages, this was the one that made her the happiest. His refinement is what she was very much attracted to. There aren’t too many men who have that quality, that aura. He gave her a lot.”34

  Rob was ever gentle, says Eleanor Lambert, who was also a friend of Oberon’s. “In a way, when he was with Merle, he was her slave. Not a slave of passion, but her adorer. If she had something within reach, she’d ask him to cross the room and hand it to her. That’s how courtly he always was.”35

  Now and then, the words “gold digger” came up; some assumed Wolders married Oberon for her money. The truth was otherwise. “Because Merle was married to a wealthy industrialist, the presumption was that she was very wealthy, which was not the case,” says Wolders. “When she left Bruno Pagliai, a man she loved a great deal, she did not ask for a major settlement.”bp

  Merle Oberon died on Thanksgiving Day 1979. Five months later, her legendary jewel collection netted $2,446,000 at a Christie’s auction. Some $1.4 million of that was divided into equal trust funds for her adopted daughter and son, Francesca and Bruno Pagliai, Jr. The remaining $1 million was bequeathed to the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital. Wolders got not a penny of it—by his own request, five years earlier, at the time Oberon made out her will. He was left only with the Malibu beach house which they had purchased jointly. It was reported that, shortly before her death, Merle had instructed him to find and marry someone else and not spend the rest of his life alone.

  “This thing about ‘instructions’ ... ,” says Wolders, shaking his head. “I had told close friends that when I said to Merle she couldn’t leave me because my life would be ruined, she became perturbed with me. She expected me to have more courage. She said, ‘You owe it to me to be happy, to restart your life.’ But instructions to find another woman to marry? No.”

  But it was true, he says, that Merle and Audrey had known and much liked one another:

  “Audrey talked to me a great deal about Merle. Once while Audrey was married to Mel and not having a very positive attitude, she saw Merle at Doris Brynner’s house. Audrey said she spent most of that day with Merle and it turned her around. One of the reasons why she extended herself to me so much at our first meeting was because of her admiration for Merle.”

  It was a curious coincidence that both women had played the same role in The Children’s Hour for William Wyler, but Wolders says they never commented on each other’s performances: “Neither Merle nor Audrey talked very much about their film work, but what struck me was the openness and vulnerability in both of their faces in that part. They both
had a similar type of naturalnessand innocence.” To some extent, they even looked alike, with their high cheekbones and exotic, slightly slanted eyes.

  The early stage of the Wolders-Hepburn match was complicated by the Hepburn-Gazzara gossip. “Her family was together at Christmas when those stories surfaced,” says Wolders, and despite the fact that the divorce was well along, “Andrea was consumed by jealousy. She resented that very much at the time. But we could laugh afterwards over her supposedly having an affair with Gazzara, when she and I were well into our relationship by then.”

  A few months later, he began to visit her in Rome, where he rented an apartment because “Audrey and I, for Luca’s sake, didn’t consider it quite right to live openly together.” Audrey’s fondest wish was that Luca and Rob would like each other, which was inevitably the case. Except for Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti, no one in or out of Hepburn’s family ever disliked Rob.

  “Robert made Audrey so happy,” said their friend, the late Eva Gabor. “She and I both chose very badly as far as men are concerned, as most actors do, because one doesn’t have time to give it a chance. But Robert was wonderful, very European and genteel—a true gentleman in every way.”36

  Wolders’ integrity and devotion were a revelation to Hepburn: Here, after so many years, was a gentle spirit who had no interest in dominating her, only in taking care of her and accepting her wishes. She had, says Wolders, “almost a child’s need or capacity to trust and to entrust herself to someone. Once she trusted someone, she would give them her life.”37

  Audrey felt like a new woman with new enthusiasm. There were things to do and places to go with a wholly sympathetic companion who would help her come to terms with the loose ends of her life, while retaining his own life and independence. They decided from the start to avoid the legal entanglements of marriage and to keep their finances completely separate. After years of Andrea’s tricks, she now had a Dutch treat.

  CHIEF AMONG Audrey’s “loose ends” was her kinfolk. During her ten years of marriage to Dotti, she had been preoccupied with him and Luca to the extent of neglecting her own relatives in favor of his. Now, with Rob’s stolid Dutch support, she once again turned her attention to them. Wolders has described Audrey’s mother as “a superior woman” but “biased and intolerant and critical of most everyone, including Audrey. She did, fortunately, have extremely demonstrative aunts.”38

  Her favorite was Miesje, widow of Otto, who was shot during the war. Miesje never hesitated to embrace and give her physical affection, says Wolders, and “Audrey regarded her almost as more her mother than Ella.” When Miesje moved to Switzerland in her seventies, Audrey and Rob visited her often and, when she became ill, went to see her daily. They got her into a special nursing home in Morges, where she died—in Audrey’s arms—in 1986.

  She was equally attentive to her youngest aunt, Jacqueline, the former lady-in-waiting to Princess Juliana. “It’s amazing what Audrey did for her aunts,” says her cousin, Hako Sixma van Heemstra, in the Netherlands. Audrey looked after Jacqueline until her death in 1990 and made her last years livable.

  Infinitely more complex, however, was Audrey’s relationship with Joseph Hepburn-Ruston—her father. Rob Wolders has a strong opinion on the subject:It’s not true Audrey was trying to hide the truth about him over the years, or that she thought of him as a skeleton in the closet. If it was important at all to her career, it was from about 1948 to 1952. After Roman Holiday, you could have had it on the front page and it would not have hurt her. With me, she seemed eager to talk about it and get my feelings, perhaps in part to explain why she couldn not love her parents as unconditionally as I or others loved theirs. But it didn’t wreck her life; it made her more just and fair. Audrey fought the tendencies to reject her parents. She was extremely good to both of them.39

  The melodramatic story that she never saw her father after he abandoned her in the 1930s has been shown to be untrue. It is known that, after the war, Audrey learned through the Red Cross that he was alive and eventually mustered the courage to see him in Dublin in 1959. Unknown is the fact that he came to visit her in Switzerland in the late sixties and that, ever after, she kept a photo of him and herself from that visit in her dressing room.

  In October 1980, when Hepburn received word that her father was gravely ill, she desperately wanted to see him again but was full of trepidation. She asked Rob to come with her.

  “We flew to Dublin, and it was an amazing experience,” Wolders recalls. “He reached out to me with the knowledge—I’m convinced—that what he conveyed to me, I would convey to Audrey. He said extraordinary things about her and about his regrets for not having given her more in her childhood, for not showing his love for her.”

  Joseph Hepburn-Ruston died the next day, October 16, 1980, at the age of ninety. The funeral was private, and there were no obituaries. His fascist past would be buried with him.

  “What’s important,” says Wolders, “is that she had no bitterness toward him. She felt a certain pity for his having been simplistic enough to believe in fascism, but her anger was directed toward the movement, not him.... I regret that Audrey chose not to do an autobiography. I wish the public would have known her feelings about her father. She didn’t hate him for his fascism, but she became what she was in reaction to it.”

  During an interview ten years later, Phil Donahue observed that at least her father “died knowing you loved him.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “and I knew that he loved me. It’s always better late than never.”40

  THE PROBLEM with her mother was entirely different.

  “She taught me to stand straight, sit erect, use discipline with wine and sweets, and to smoke only six cigarettes a day,” was Audrey’s wry summary. “She opposed both my marriages, maybe knowing neither man was going to be totally good to me. But I must say, she adored Robbie.”41

  Ella was bedridden during most of the time Wolders knew her, but they spoke a lot of Dutch together, he recalls, and as with Audrey’s father, “I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was a sort of conduit between her and [Audrey]. Her mother, I think, suffered a great deal because she was unable to show her sentimentality. But Audrey’s father’s second wife, after his death, forwarded to us a series of letters her mother had written to him, talking of her extreme pride in Audrey. They were able to express it to one another, but not to Audrey.”

  The greatest insight into Ella van Heemstra comes from an unlikely source—Funny Face author Leonard Gershe:

  “I met her when we were shooting the musical numbers in Paris. The two most unnecessary things on a set are the star’s mother and the writer, not in that order, so the two of us would go off and have a Dubonnet in a café. That’s how our friendship began, and it flowered from there.

  “She stayed with me in Los Angeles when she was trying to decide where to settle out here in the early sixties. I didn’t know the Greg Pecks then—they’re good friends of mine now, but this was a long time ago—and one day, Ella got a call from Véronique Peck. ‘She wants to take me to lunch tomorrow,’ Ella said. ‘Will you tell her how to get here?’ I got on and gave her directions —second right, then the first left, etc....”

  The next afternoon, when Gershe asked Ella how her luncheon had gone, she said Véronique had been almost an hour late to pick her up, and then supplied the details:Véronique made a wrong turn and went to the wrong house. A housewife in her apron answered, and Véronique said, “Hello, I’m Mrs. Gregory Peck,” and the woman invited her in. She sat down. The woman said, “Would you like something?” Véronique said, “Are you going to have something? All right.” The woman told her how much she liked Gregory Peck, and they chatted about his pictures. Finally, the woman said, “Mrs. Peck, are you here about some charity?” “No,” she said, “I’m waiting for Baroness van Heemstra.” The woman said, “Oh, is she coming, too?”42

  Ella found it hilarious. “She had great humor and so did Audrey,” says Gershe, “but unfortunately they didn
’t have it together—they didn’t share laughs. I adored her mother, but Audrey did not like her very much. She told me Ella had been a fascist, had gone along with her husband, and when she got rid of him, she got rid of that, too, and was ashamed of him. I was always perplexed about that. If Audrey said it, it was true. Audrey did not lie. But the Ella I knew was nothing like that.”

  Ella eventually picked San Francisco over Los Angeles as her residence through the early seventies. There, she did volunteer work and “came to all of us, including Audrey and me,” says Gershe, “to raise money for the boys coming back from Vietnam, who weren’t getting proper benefits because it was an undeclared war. The Ella I knew was working her ass off in a VA hospital.”

  Once or twice a year, she came back to Los Angeles to visit her friend Mildred Knopf, wife of producer Edwin, and to be entertained by George Cukor, among others. “Ella was a very dignified and commanding presence,” recalls Connie Wald, “quite majestic.”43 Gershe was struck by the fact that both the mother and the daughter stuck rigorously to their roles:Ella played the role of stern mother. She was a different person when she talked about Audrey—judgmental—and she took her role of Baroness quite seriously. She was proud, in the pejorative sense. You could tell by the way she walked into a room that she felt slightly superior to everyone else. It was not one of her endearing qualities, but there it was. It embarrassed Audrey, who was exactly the opposite, and that was another one of the walls between them.

  On the other hand, Ella could be very silly when she wanted to be, and so could Audrey. But Audrey never knew that woman. They didn’t know they were really very alike. There was always that hand held up—“Don’t come any closer!” ... Ella thought Audrey was a wonderful actress, but she couldn’t tell her that. She was very proud of being the mother of Audrey Hepburn. That was even better than being a baroness. Ella once said to me, “When I was young, the three things I wanted most to be was thin, beautiful and an actress. Isn’t it ironic that I should have a daughter who’s all three?”