Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  “Do you carry the memory of hardship with you?” Fryer asked.

  “There’s a curious thing about pain or hardship,” she replied softly. “In the beginning, it’s an enemy, it’s something that you don’t want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you’ve lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can’t bear it, but as the years goes by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly of them—that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remain so vivid for me because of the pain. Being without food, fearful for one’s life, the bombings—all made me so appreciative of safety, of liberty. In that sense, the bad experiences have become positive in my life.“15

  The last concert destination in the United States was New York City, where Anne Frank was performed for the United Nations General Assembly on March 25, 1990, and where her thoughtfulness and sense of fun lifted everyone’s spirits.

  “It was exciting,” maestro Thomas remembers, “because Audrey had become so friendly and involved and generous with all these young musicians by then. The last night in New York after the concert, I said, ‘There’s an orchestra party. Would you like to go over?’ She said, ‘Of course!’ By the time she arrived at the hotel, this big disco party was going strong, everybody acting like twenty-three-year-olds. When they saw Audrey, there was a groundswell—everybody wanted to dance with her. She got right out on that dance floor with the double bass player, the cellist.... She did the requisite rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm ’n’ blues numbers, too. I couldn’t believe she did that for us all.”

  Only Thomas and Wolders knew how much every performance took out of her. “Narrating Diary of Anne Frank,” she said, was “terrifying. To get up in front of a big concert hall with ninety professional musicians behind you and narrate for half an hour.... I’ve suffered from stage-fright all my life in the worst way. It affects my stomach, I get headaches. It’s awful. But when I’m shivering backstage and Michael is conducting the overture or first piece he’s doing, already I feel better.... I stand there absolutely petrified. And then the first strains of music make you forget yourself.”16

  During the engagement in London, she revealed a trade secret about how she managed it: “I act the same way now as I did forty years ago ... with feeling instead of technique. All my life I’ve been in situations where I’ve had no technique, but if you feel enough you can get away with murder.”17

  The critics called her May 1991 Anne Frank with the London Symphony Orchestra “heartbreaking.” On the recommendation of Leonard Bernstein, Thomas had reworked and improved the finale. That Barbican concert hall performance constituted Audrey’s first London stage appearance in forty years, and her last. She had received a letter from Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s half-sister in England, asking her to become a patron of the new Anne Frank Educational Trust, to which she agreed. Schloss—an Auschwitz survivor—came backstage after the Barbican concert, deeply moved. “She and Audrey had a very emotional encounter,” says Rob. Audrey, through the Trust, issued an emotional statement:

  “The memory of Anne Frank is with us today as it will be forever, not because she died but because she lived—just long enough to leave us her undying message of hope, of love, and above all forgiveness.”18

  That London experience featured a joyous reunion. While studying dance with Rambert in the late forties, Audrey had lived briefly in a rooming house across the hall from London Symphony violinist Patrick Vermonth, who took care of her when she was sick. At the first “Anne Frank” rehearsal, she spotted him. “My God, Patrick!” They had a grand embrace. She cherished him most in relation to England’s chronic postwar shortages. “Patrick had an airline-steward friend,” says Thomas. “He flew to the Bahamas a lot in those days—and always brought back nylons for Audrey.”

  Michael Tilson Thomas pauses long, when asked for a final summation, before formulating it:

  “She was the dearest soul I ever met or worked with. She had that quality of ‘recognizing’ you even when meeting you for the first time. She looked at you in those first seconds with a delicious surprise—as if, ‘My dearest friend, you’ve suddenly appeared, how wonderful to see you again!’ She made you feel there was some special secret you shared with her, some beautiful melody playing that perhaps just the two of you could hear.”

  Thomas wanted to do more performances with her, “but when I’d ask, ‘What are you doing on February 25, 1997?’ she’d just laugh. She couldn’t believe how far in advance the music world worked.” The last time he saw her was a year later in Gstaad, when she made him a pasta dinner. “We were eating,” he recalls, “and I said, ‘Listen, how about it? We’ll do the concert again and record it then.’ She said, ‘Well, the old girl’s not getting any younger. I don’t know if I should still be going on stage.’ I said, ‘Oh, please—of course you’re going to do it.”’

  The “futuristic” dates Thomas had in mind were April and May of 1995, for New York and Rotterdam. She was particularly intrigued by the latter venue, for obvious reasons. But it would be Debra Winger and Dutch actress Pauline van Rhenen, not Audrey Hepburn, who would do those performances.

  DURING THE Miami portion of her Anne Frank tour came shocking news from Europe about someone close to Audrey—a mysterious beauty with no surname.

  Capucine, the striking French actress-model with the Nefertiti-like features, was born Germaine Lefebvre, in 1933, into a middle-class family in Toulon. She earned a degree in foreign languages and modeled for such haute couture houses as Dior and Givenchy. Her first meeting with Hepburn in Paris at Givenchy’s was the start of an intimate forty-year friendship.

  In the late fifties, Capucine left France for Hollywood, under contract to producer Charles K. Feldman, and settled on her odd solo pseudonym: Capucine (“kap-u-SEEN”) was the French word for nasturtium. Her sultry beauty and deep voice led some to hail her as a possible new Garbo. The picture that really launched her was Edward Dmytryk’s deliciously lurid Walk on the Wild Side (1962), in which she turned in a memorable performance as the oppressed call girl in lesbian Barbara Stanwyck’s bordello. She then moved successfully upward in such stylish international hit comedies as The Pink Panther (1964) and What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). She was also in demand for a host of European features, including Fellini Satyricon in 1970.

  Privately, she lived in Lausanne, not far from Audrey, in a small and troubled world. Audrey’s friend Anna Cataldi recalls living in Capucine’s apartment building as a student—the same building whose penthouse was occupied by Yul and Doris Brynner. More than once, Cataldi bumped into actor William Holden in the elevator, on his way up to tryst with Capucine. Their stormy affair had begun years earlier, during the making of two adventure films together, The Lion and The Seventh Dawn.

  In the late seventies and eighties, when her film heyday was over, Capucine came to visit Audrey and Rob in Tolochenaz at least twice a week. On her good days, she and Audrey did all sorts of things together. But there were many bad days, related to her declining career, compounded by depressing memories of Holden.

  For all his romancing of Audrey, Capucine and a dozen other women, Holden had remained married to Brenda Marshall for thirty tempestuous, unfaithful years—often separated but just as often reunited. Capucine had helped—or tried to help—him through many of his alcoholic binges. Blake Edwards recalls seeing Holden and Capucine at a screening of Days of Wine and Roses, after which Holden turned to Capucine and said, “Was I that bad?”

  “Worse,” she said.

  “Did I put you through that?” he asked.

  “More,” she replied.

  Holden’s sexual fidelity to her was zero but his financial help was substantial after the flop of her later European films. The persistent, bizarre reports that Capucine was a transsexual seem to have been debunked by Holden, whose amorous preferences were decidedly and conventionally macho.

  In November 1981, William Holden fell and hit his head, in a drunken
stupor, and bled to death in his Santa Monica apartment. Both Holden and producer Feldman—and possibly Darryl Zanuck and Peter Sellers, as well—“generously remembered” Capucine in their wills. Holden, in fact, remembered her to the tune of $50,000, enabling her to continue living fairly well in Lausanne.

  But these days she was lonely and unhappy and worried about sliding into old age, without a mate or a source of income. She seemed to live in the past, often threatening suicide. “Cappy was a great friend of mine as well,” says R. J. Wagner. “She did some Hart to Hart episodes with me, and I loved her very much. But she was a very disturbed person.”

  Rob Wolders often drove her to her clinic. “She was a manic-depressive,” he says. “Audrey had many trying times with her. They were very close, but it was the kind of friendship that rested largely on Audrey’s compassion.” Wagner says Audrey and Rob once saved Capucine’s life from an overdose of pills, but “when she came to, she was disappointed.”19 Rob, too, felt she resented them for helping thwart the attempt. “I’m weary,” she said. “I’d like to work, but the enthusiasm is gone. But then, so are the opportunities.”20

  The grim call came on March 19 to Audrey’s hotel room in Miami, where Anne Frank was being performed that night. “Audrey answered the phone and turned ashen,” says Wolders. “She managed to get out the word—‘Capucine.’ ” At fifty-seven, she had finally succeeded in killing herself that afternoon, leaping from a window of her eighth-floor apartment in Lausanne.

  Some weeks later, after they returned home to Switzerland, Audrey and Rob were visited by Capucine’s psychiatrist, a kind man they knew through many “Cap crises.” He told Audrey something that shocked her: “The pain Capucine was suffering was so immense, this was really the best solution.” Only then, says Rob, did Audrey make her peace with it.

  In death, Capucine made an extraordinary gesture to Audrey. She was largely broke, her money from Holden long gone. Her sole asset was a modest equity in her apartment. She stipulated in her will that, when it was sold, half of the money was to be given to the Red Cross and the other half to UNICEF, both gifts in honor of Audrey’s work. It was about $100,000 apiece, and Audrey was asked to designate the projects to which it should go.

  Capucine’s obituary in The New York Times concluded with, “Her only known survivors were her three cats.”

  PERHAPS WITH Cap on her mind, she said, “All I really want now is not to be lonely, and to have my garden.”21

  She often said she wasn’t much of a gardener and that her only real skill was “pulling weeds.” But that was, of course, more self-effacement. Her beautiful grounds at Tolochenaz contained a fruit-producing orchard and extensive vegetable and flower tracts. She was far more serious about gardening than the world knew. But it was about to find out.

  “What fascinated me from the very beginning was, when you would just say, ‘Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn,’ people’s faces would light up,” says Janis Blackschleger. “It was such a pleasing combination and such a natural one.”

  Blackschleger, a Peabody Award-winning documentary maker, was executive producer of that stunning six-part series, first proposed in January 1989. British garden authority Penelope Hobhouse and American garden writer Elvin McDonald were hired as consultants, and so was the perfect host. “I think [coordinating producer] Julie Leifermann was the first to utter Audrey’s name,” says Blackschleger. “She loved the idea. I think the appeal for her was to be out in and around beauty, and to bring that to people. With Audrey involved, you set a certain expectation, and our job was simply to fulfill that expectation.”

  Who better to stroll down a garden path with than Audrey? The ambitious Gardens of the World series would take viewers on an around-the-world expedition exploring the greatest gardens on the globe—from Europe to North and South America and the Far East. Hepburn was filmed among the luxuriant cypresses of Tuscany, the bare rocks of Saiho-ji in Kyoto, and the perfect geometrical lines of the Jardins de Luxembourg in Paris, examining their philosophies and styles as she went. Each half-hour episode focused on a botanical genre: “Roses and Rose Gardens,” “Tulips and Spring Bulbs,” “Formal Gardens,” “Flowers and Flower Gardens,” “Country Gardens” and “Public Gardens.”

  Her narration, elegantly written by Glenn Berenbeim, contained a lot of Hepburn’s input. It was not to be a garden history, producer Stuart Crowner made clear. It was about being there, responding to the gardens and figuring out how and why they were created. But at the outset, there was a bit of concern when Audrey said she thought the series should be “poetic.”

  “We didn’t quite know what she meant,” Blackschleger recalls. “We were a little afraid of it at first. We thought it might mean ‘sentimental.’ But we came to understand that her definition of poetic was the fusion of image, idea, music, art. She meant poetic in the fullest sense of lyrical.

  “From when we first met with her, it was clear that Audrey favored a more natural style of garden. She wasn’t so enthralled with formal gardens and the notion of perfection. Our job was to reconcile Penelope’s discriminating requirements with Audrey’s more folksy, less rigorous ideas.”22

  The professional and the amateur ended up a fine team. When work on the series began, Hepburn was sixty and Hobhouse was fifty-nine. “Penelope adored Audrey and thought, ‘I’m going to learn how to be sixty from Audrey,’” Blackschleger recalls. “Together, they were as conscientious as two sixth-grade schoolgirls. If you’ve never been one yourself, you might not know just how conscientious that is.” Hobhouse supplied the expert’s grand pronouncements, Hepburn the layperson’s warm enthusiasm.

  Their itinerary was jammed tight, and gardens have no respect for production scheduling. They barely made it from Italy to England, for instance, in time for the once-a-year blooming of the old roses in the walled garden at Mottisfont Abbey. Then it was on, quickly, halfway across the planet to the Dominican Republic, where Gustavo Tavares led her among the six-foot vanda orchids of Villa Pancha, the exquisite “jungle” his family had been cultivating there for sixty years.

  “That was the one venue that lacked a good hotel,” says Julie Leifermann, “and the first time Audrey stayed with a garden owner. She had a lovely time. Every evening when the sun would start to set, Gustavo made rum old-fashioneds and we all sat on his wonderful veranda and talked about the day.”bw

  Leifermann had many duties on the production, but her primary job was to keep Audrey happy and functional. Audrey did not have or want an entourage—no hairdresser, no makeup or wardrobe person, no personal maid. “I’m a big girl,” she said. “I don’t need all those people fussing over me.” As her liaison to the production, Julie tried to help her with such things and to watch over her in general. But soon enough, the tables started to turn, Leifermann recalls:She ended up becoming my caretaker. When she got comfortable with you and cared about you, she had this need to fuss over you, do things for you.... It became a running gag. I was always dashing back and forth from Europe to L.A. during the production and having perpetual jet lag. Invariably, sitting in the backseat of a car with Audrey, I’d fall asleep. I’d wake up with my head on her shoulder, and everyone would tease me about how I drooled on her. But she would say, ‘Come on, just put your head down on my lap,’ and cover me with her blue cape and I would sleep on her with her arms around me. She knew a little snooze would keep me going. So I slept on Audrey Hepburn through many weeks of travels around the world.23

  The first location shoot on “Gardens of the World,” in April 1990, was in Holland for the tulip episode. It was a homecoming, of course, and Netherlanders took advantage of the opportunity to honor her with the official christeningof “the Audrey Hepburn tulip”—a luminous white one—in a ceremony at her family’s ancestral home in Doorn, now a museum. There, she saw Baroness Jacqueline van Heemstra, her eighty-seven-year-old maiden aunt and last of her mother’s siblings, for the final time. “It was a very emotional moment,” Leifermann says. “Her aunt was in a whe
elchair and they hugged and kissed and spoke in Dutch.” Hollanders take their tulips seriously. Doorn was full of spectators and news media, Julie recalls, and the ceremony full of protocol :There was a big pedestal with the tulip in a beautiful glass vase on a pillow. But the moment the ceremony began, a huge black cloud rolled in out of nowhere and the wind knocked the vase off just as the tulip was to be handed to her and named in her honor. It started to downpour, and everyone said, ‘Oh, my God, what do we do?’ But Audrey just laughed and ran around the podium after the tulip, grabbed it, stuck it back in the vase, and put it all back. Then the cloud moved off, the sun came out, and everything was fine. She had taken charge and righted it all.24bx

  In their three months together on the road, Audrey’s ministrations to Julie continued to the end:When I got sick in Italy, she was constantly checking to see if I had a temperature, sticking a cough drop in my mouth—the mother hen fussing over her chick. In England, on our last location, I ran out of clothes. We had a half day off and Audrey wanted me to go shopping with her in a little village called Broadway—spend the afternoon together and do girl stuff. I said, “I have to get my clothes cleaned and ironed for tomorrow.” She said, “Bring them with you. We’ll figure it out.” So I did. My hotel washed them, but they wouldn’t iron them.

  So we went and did our shopping, and then we went back to her room, and she said, “Give me your pants and your shirt, I’m going to iron them.”

  I said, “You can’t iron my clothes.”

  She said, “Do you know how to iron?”