by Barry Paris
Audrey once told me she never felt loved by her mother, but Ella did love her, believe me. Often, people can’t tell the object of their love they love them; they’ll tell other people, instead. I probably would have hated Ella as a mother, but I loved her as a friend.
In the last letter she wrote to Gershe, from Tolochanaz in 1982, Ella enclosed a picture of herself and said, “We hope to see you over here after the snow leaves us. We shall have the garden in bloom and plenty of butterflies, and they should be free.”bq The letter ends with, “I love you, Lenny!”
“She never wrote that before,” says Gershe, “and I never heard from her again.”
Baroness Ella lived with her daughter at La Paisible in Tolochenaz for the last ten years of her life. She died there, on August 26, 1984.
YEARS LATER Hepburn was asked, “Since your marriage to Mel Ferrer in 1954, you’ve always lived with a man. What have you learned about them?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “What can one learn about them? They’re human beings, with all the frailties that women have. I think they’re more vulnerable than women. I really do. You can hurt a man so easily....
“I love Robbie very, very much. It’s not Romeo and Juliet; we’ve had our tiffs, but very few. It’s a wonderful friendship; we like each other.... He is solid in every way. I can trust him. I trust his love; I never fear I’m losing it. He reassures me. We like the same life, being in the country, the dogs, making trips together.... He’s absolutely there for me.”44
Said Wolders at the time: “It’s important that I convince Audrey that love is still possible, because I think she must have begun to feel that it’s not in the cards for her anymore.”
Rob had moved in with her at Tolochenaz much earlier, even though her divorce was not finalized at the time. Andrea had been dragging his feet, insisting that Luca remain in his custody in Rome while he continued to attend school there.
“I witnessed her pain during the process of the divorce, and it was heartwrenching,” says Wolders. Such was her hypersensitivity that she identified with Dotti’s pain as well.
“Audrey told me, ‘I suffered so much for Andrea,”’ says Anna Cataldi. “She used that exact phrase. For her, Andrea was so important. She said, ‘If Andrea would ask for my skin, I would give it to him.’ I never, never heard her say anything negative about him. I think she knew it was quite negative for Andrea’scareer to be with such a famous woman. He was a doctor, not a real-estate agent, after all. The publicity, he was looking for in the beginning, but he got more than he bargained for.“45
The divorce finally came through in 1982.br For all the depth of her relationship with Wolders, she was in no mood for another wedding. Journalists kept asking when she and Rob were going to get married, and if not, why?
“We’re happy as we are,” she said.
Wolders’s elaboration was wise: “Everyone knows how unhappy her marriage to Mel was, and the second, to Andrea, was even worse. It would be like asking someone who has just got out of an electric chair to sit back on it again.”46
THOUGH AUDREY was essentially retired these days, Eleanor Lambert thought she had a tempting little non-film offer that might appeal to her. Lambert was a prominent publicist, writer and consultant whom Hepburn credited with helping shape and promote her image in the very beginning.
“I’d known Audrey for a long time,” says Lambert, “and she was still a sort of symbol of Tiffany’s because of the film.” Lambert handled Tiffany’s publicity, and when the store expanded in 1981, she suggested Audrey as the perfect spokesperson and guest of honor at the opening of Tiffany’s new branches. “They thought it was a lovely idea,” says Lambert, and so did Audrey. Lambert sent her a detailed itinerary—press conferences, photo shoots, ribbon-cutting appearances—and Hepburn agreed.
“But suddenly, she changed her mind,” says Lambert. “She was traumatized about being photographed candidly. She would [only] pose for photographs. She was too timid to appear in a casual way—which she later did extensively [for UNICEF]. But that relaxed way of seeing herself must have come through years of thinking it over.”47
The bridge between her movie career and her next vocation would not be a commercial gig for Tiffany’s, although it did involve public appearances: a series of retrospectives for some dear friends in the film and fashion worlds. However nervous such affairs made her—and they did—it was time to pay back old favors in that most valuable currency, her presence.
First of the lot was the American Film Institute’s 1981 tribute to Cary Grant in Washington, for which she wrote and delivered a lyrical poem on friendship, dedicated to Grant, “a very special player who’s also been my friend.” Thrilled and moved by her appearance, Grant wept at the end of it, even as he traded hugs with Ron and Nancy Reagan.
Over the next five years, Audrey materialized at four separate testimonials for her favorite—Hubert—in New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She was honorary chairperson of the affair in Los Angeles, where Givenchy received the first California Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award at an event that raised a half million dollars for the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
In May 1983, she cochaired a Givenchy retrospective at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where designer Jeffrey Banks, who had fallen in love with her at age eleven when he saw Funny Face, couldn’t wait to meet her. They were introduced by his friend John Rizzuto, President of Givenchy America, but the longed-for meeting fell short of Banks’s expectations:I was a little disappointed. She was perfectly cordial but she seemed distant. It wasn’t the magical moment I had created in my head. John called me the next morning and explained that Audrey’s mother had fallen and hurt herself just before Audrey left Switzerland, and she really didn’t want to leave. She got up several times during the evening and called her. Every other time I saw her, she made you feel like you were the only person on earth. She was just totally preoccupied with her mother that night.48
The decline and death of her mother had been preceded by the 1979 death of her brother Alexander, at fifty-eight, in a freak domestic electrical accident in Spain.49 It was a time of milestones: She was distraught about David Niven, her old British pal and neighbor of the last twenty-five years. In happier days, they used to visit Noel Coward together in Paris. Now, she and Rob were making sickbed calls as he suffered through the final stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Niven died at seventy-four in the village of Chateau d’Oex, near Gstaad, in August 1983.
William Wyler had passed away two summers before. In 1985, at the request of his daughter Cathy, Hepburn went to New York to participate in a PBS documentary tribute to Wyler. There, she was interviewed by New York Post reporter Stephanie Mansfield at the Algonquin, on the condition she not be asked personal questions. But there was nothing to prevent Mansfield from reporting a Kodak moment she witnessed at the end of their chat:
“She leaves the suite, slings her purse over one bony shoulder, and meets Sean, a tall, handsome twenty-four. Standing in the elevator, she gazes at him with obvious pride. In the lobby, she links her arm through his and dons an enormous pair of Holly Golightly-style black sunglasses.”50
“Best friends” Audrey and Sean had always been close but now seemed to draw even closer. Sean’s career in film production was advancing. Later that year, he married Italian designer Marina Spadafora, daughter of the scion of a leading continental fashion company. The two twenty-five-year-olds were wed at St. Peter’s Church in Los Angeles, and both of the groom’s parents were present—the first time they’d been seen together since their divorce.bs Audrey’s wedding gift to the newlyweds was a $375,000 house in the Hollywood Hills, which they would not occupy together for very long.51 Sean and Marina were divorced in 1989.
The year 1986, for Audrey, held a new spate of high-profile galas, starting with her first appearance at the Academy Awards in some years. There to hand out the award for best costume design (to Emi Wada for Kurosawa’s Ran), she got a standin
g ovation and stole the show in her stunning, pink, sari-type Givenchy gown, edged in sparkling gold, offset by an audacious set of triple-tiered earrings.
A few weeks later, she hailed a beloved mentor at the American Film Institute’s “Salute to Billy Wilder.” She also appeared, in these years, at no fewer than four separate tributes to Gregory Peck.
“We wanted to interview her for a biography of Gregory Peck,” says documentary filmmaker Gene Feldman, “so I called her agent, Kurt Frings. A woman answered and said, ‘One moment, please.’ Well, it was fourteen or fifteen minutes that I waited. Finally, a voice came on and I could hardly distinguish it. Mr. Frings had had a stroke and could barely speak. But he was still her agent. In this cutthroat, miserable business, that was an insight into the unique kind of woman she was. People were telling her, ‘You must get a new agent.’ But she refused.”bt
For that shoot at the Pierre Hotel in New York, Audrey showed up at the appointed hour of ten a.m. but said, “Oh, Gene, I have a problem. I forgot earrings. One minute, I’ll be right back.” She returned a few minutes later, Feldman recalls, “and with her was a very burly man who I thought was some friend she had met on the elevator. He came in and stood there eyeballing her the whole time. She had gone down to Bulgari’s in the lobby and borrowed clip-ons worth $45,000, and they had sent up this man to guard her while she did the interview.”52
George Eastman House in Rochester held a tribute to Gregory Peck during a week in 1987 when Rob and Audrey were visiting Rob’s mother there. As a surprise, “we sneaked Audrey in through the back door,” says Wolders. The honoree beamed as she recalled the thrill of being “cast opposite Gregory Peck—the beautiful, quiet, gentle hero of countless marvelous movies. In my innocence I thought he’d be just like that in real life. He was.”
She was the honoree herself that October, in New York, at the annual benefit tribute of the Museum of Modern Art to raise money for its Film Preservation Fund. She had lost none of her drawing power: At $1,000 a ticket, a sellout crowd showed up for screenings of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, My Fair Lady and Robin and Marian.
The following April, 1988, she was back for the sixtieth annual Academy Awards to present the Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Screenplay Adaptation (John Patrick Shanley for Moonstruck and Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci for The Last Emperor) in the company of Greg Peck.
“I hated going out to those black-tie things,” says Rob, “and so did Audrey, but they were obligations. We would steel ourselves to get through it and, when it was over, rush home and tear off the formal clothes. You’d be on your best behavior and then get the hell out of there. But Audrey knew it was usually her last opportunity to pay tribute to the colleagues she loved, people like Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. In a sense, it was fun and one looked forward to it—until you had to go.”
Much more fun than usual for both of them was a major festival in Holland, “Film and Fashion,” arranged by Leendert de Jong of The Hague’s Filmhouse, to honor film costume designers such as Yves St. Laurent, Edith Head and of course Givenchy.
“I wrote to her,” says de Jong, “and a week later, I got a call from a man who spoke Dutch and said, ‘We would like to know more.’ I thought he was her agent or something and forgot to ask his name. The next time he called, I said, ‘I’m sorry, but who the hell are you?’ He laughed and said, ‘Audrey and I have lived together for years.’ I blushed to the phone. After that, he was amazing. He organized everything with so much calm and humor.”53
Audrey opened the festival on November 18, 1988 and spent four days in The Hague with Rob. De Jong decided to kick off the series with Funny Face because “it is of course the best fashion film. Beforehand she said, ‘I hope you find a good print and that the colors are still bright.’ I said, ‘When was the last time you saw it?’ She said, ‘At the premiere.’ She hadn’t seen it since then, and Robert had never seen it! I was amazed.”
After Funny Face, the Filmhouse held an auction of couture dresses and a big bottle of Givenchy’s perfume, the money from which was given to UNICEF. A wide variety of Dutch film and political celebrities was present, and there was a tense moment when a woman showed up for the auction in the exact same Givenchy dress that Audrey was wearing. “Everyone said, ‘Oh my God, she’s got on the same dress!’ But Audrey just laughed and said, ‘Let’s take a picture.’ She told the other lady, ‘It suits you well.’ ”
The next day, she opened an exhibition titled Givenchy, Worn by Audrey Hepburn at the Municipal Museum of The Hague, to which she had contributed four suitcases of her own clothes.
When it was time to leave, de Jong drove Hepburn and Wolders to Schiphol International Airport and, on the way, got an unexpected insight into—of all things—Audrey’s late mother:
“As we neared Amsterdam, we saw a windmill, and it reminded Audrey about visiting Holland with her mother in the early ‘60s. Her mother had pointed and said, ‘Audrey, that is the last windmill in Holland.’ Audrey said, ‘No mother, there are a lot of windmills.’ She said, ‘No, you’re wrong. This is the very last one.’ She thought all the rest were destroyed.”54
There are, of course, hundreds of beautiful windmills remaining in Holland. But Ella van Heemstra believed otherwise, and no one could dissuade her from that conviction.
DOMINICK DUNNE in Vanity Fair told a fine anecdote from around this time: At one of Swifty and Mary Lazar’s famous Academy Award parties, Dunne watched Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor give each other a warm embrace, after which Audrey pointed to one of Elizabeth’s enormous jewels and asked, “Kenny Lane?”
“No, Richard Burton,” replied Taylor, and both stars screamed with laughter.55
Their friendship was nurtured by Doris Brynner, a good friend of Taylor’s. “We did a fund-raiser for AIDS in Basel,” says Brynner. “Elizabeth was cochairing it, and Audrey came because I asked her to, if I may take credit. Audrey and Elizabeth had tremendous respect and admiration for each other.”56 The following year, at an event honoring Taylor for her AIDS work, Audrey delivered a moving tribute:
“Never have I been more heartbroken than by [seeing] babies with AIDS. I will be haunted by the unspeakable suffering in the eyes of their mothers.” If and when a vaccine is found, it would be thanks to tireless researchers but “above all, to the determination and love of one woman, Elizabeth Taylor, who at a time when AIDS was spoken of only in whispers, had the courage to speak out with such force that we were obliged to listen.”57
When in Hollywood, says Doris Brynner, “Audrey might see Elizabeth or Billy and Audrey Wilder or the Jimmy Stewarts, whom she was very fond of, and have dinner with them. But she really wasn’t the Hollywood type. She worked there—rented a house, did the job—and then came back to Switzerland.” 58
These days, Audrey had no pressing financial need to work. Nevertheless, in February 1987 she agreed to make her first film in seven years and first TV film in thirty years—Love Among Thieves, directed by Roger Young. Some said she was motivated by the desire to let her aging, ailing agent Frings collect his commission on her $750,000 fee. But her costar Robert Wagner debunks the idea that she did it as an act of charity: “Kurt was pretty well financially set. Audrey was always in demand and would always have given the fee to Kurt, no matter what.”
Together with Jeffrey Hunter, Robert (“R.J.”) Wagner shared the “Prince of 20th Century-Fox” crown in the 1950s, playing a variety of juvenile roles. In the end, however, he was not well served by his studio, which seemed determined to keep him from developing into a full-fledged leading man. “I was left there,” he once said, “with a tennis racket in one hand and a beach ball in the other.”59 But he eventually found great success in several television series, It Takes a Thief ( 1968-70), Switch ( 1975-78) and—most of all—Hart to Hart ( 1979-84).
The last of those happened to be one of Audrey’s great favorites. “I love Hart to Hart,” she told a reporter, “and I’ve seen every episode on TV in Swit
zerland.” But why would she choose an ABC-TV film above all other proposals? It was because of executive producer Karen Mack, she said: “I wasn’t really all that keen to work. I’ve become very lazy. But I was tempted and said I would like to do something if it was going to be fun, something cheerful. Karen came up with [Love Among Thieves], and when she threw in R.J. Wagner, that did it.”60
They had long known each other, both in Hollywood and in Gstaad, where Wagner had a chalet and saw her on and off. But they had never worked together. Now, when he heard she wanted to appear with him, “I was very flattered. I read the script and said, ‘Show me where to go for makeup and let’s get started.’ Working with Audrey was one of the highlights of my career.”61
It was a mystery-heist story with elements of Charade and How to Steal a Million: Audrey, a baroness and concert pianist, is now also a thief—forced to steal some priceless Fabergé eggs and deliver them to ransom her kidnapped fiancé in Latin America. Wagner, her seatmate-from-hell on the airplane, is relentless with the wisecracks and the running gag of annoying Hepburn with his cigar. Their adventures take place in the fictional country of “Yaruba”; the actual location was a kingdom called Tucson.
“I’m not very elegant,” said Audrey of herself in the role. “I only have one dress, and it was filmed in Tucson, where it was 102 degrees.”62 Wagner, who had a home there, recalls “a lot of running around in cars in the heat. Audrey arrived every morning looking absolutely terrific, with her dogs.”63 But on film, she didn’t look quite so terrific in either of her two Givenchy creations—the black and white gown at the beginning (concert pianists do not wear hats!) or an unflattering red one at the end. She looked all fifty-eight of her years, in fact—but was none the less effective for that. Wagner most remembers the shooting of the finale in a government building in San Francisco:
