Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  I said, “Not very well, but I’m going to try.”

  She said, “Give me those.”

  I said, “No, if anyone finds out you ironed my clothes, I’m in trouble.” We were fighting over my pants.

  “Give me them.”

  “No.”

  “Now, stop it, and let me have them.”

  So I gave in and she stood there happily ironing my pants and shirt, folded them beautifully.

  “There you go,” she said. “Now we don’t have to look at you in wrinkled clothes tomorrow.”

  And that was that.25

  Leifermann found the sophisticated star easily delighted by a bug or a bird. “It wasn’t a put-on. She genuinely loved the beauty of small things. She was connected to the simplicity of how life could work and tried not complicate it.” Her love of problem-solving reached a comic peak in Paris at the Jardins de Luxembourg, where Audrey had a big trailer in which to change clothes and relax when she wished. Midway in shooting, Julie had to go to the bathroom, and Audrey said she’d go along. They walked through the park to the motor home but, once there, couldn’t find the driver, who had the key:I said, “I really have to go.” Audrey said, “I do, too—come here!” She takes me around to the back end of the trailer and says, “I’m going to boost you up. Go through the window and unlock the door.” So there’s Audrey down low, hoisting and pushing—trying to get me up high enough to grab onto something. “You’d better hurry,” she says. “We’ve got a crowd around us.” I pull open the window, get halfway through, legs flailing, half of me is in, half out. She’s pushing me and I don’t know what I’m falling into. Finally she shoves me through—and the crowd starts to applaud! I ran around, opened the door and she scooted in. It was, “Image be damned! I have to go to the bathroom!” 26

  Audrey wanted to be sure the series made a statement about the environment—“something people hadn’t heard before,” says Blackschleger. “So we had her write up what she wanted to say, and we decided to open and close the series on that statement.”

  It declared that, “Gardens remind us of the beauty we are in danger of losing. The arts of the garden nurture and comfort the human spirit, [offering] man a chance to regulate at least one aspect of his life ... and show himself as he wishes to be.”

  Hepburn’s favorite site in Japan was Kyoto’s Saiho-ji, the contemplative monastery garden, created in 1339 by a Zen Buddhist priest, with hundreds of different mosses and sculpted evergreens in bamboo-enclosed seclusion. Its “grammar of formality,” she said, beautifully demonstrated that each garden, like each country, had a unique language. So did Hepburn herself, says Blackschleger—a language of distinct gender:One of the things Audrey brought to the world was a feminine point of view. If we had a language that ended in o’s and a’s, if we understood masculine and feminine in those fundamental terms—but we don’t. How few words we have that end in “a.” How few feminine visions. Tropical gardens, for instance, do not have a linear history the way most European gardens do. We wanted to tell the tropical story as one of beauty and fragility, not conquest. That is essentially a more feminine idea. We don’t have that clear masculine-feminine distinction in our cultural view of the world, which is really more pleasing to both. We go to the extreme of feminist, which is something different.27

  “WHEN YOU WERE with Audrey you felt prettier, better about yourself and your own possibilities,” Blackschleger says.28 Millions felt the same—espe—cially seeing her in Gardens of the World, dressed in the stylishly casual designs of Ralph Lauren.

  Like Givenchy, Lauren had both a personal and professional relationship with her, though of much more recent vintage. They had met three years earlier in his New York flagship store at Seventy-second Street and Madison Avenue.

  “She came in with Rob,” the designer recalls, “and my wife Ricky said, ‘Ralph, you’ll never believe it. Audrey Hepburn’s in the store. Do you want to meet her?’ I said, ‘I’d love to, but let her go through the store.’ Later, she came up to see me. I said how much of a fan I was, and she said, ‘Well, I’m a fan of yours,’ and asked for my autograph. I wanted her autograph!”

  On a subsequent visit to his store, she told Lauren the clothes she wore as a girl were “simple, European classic”—the exact quality she liked in his designs. “She knew my clothes before I knew her,” he says. “She knew exactly what she wanted. Nobody could tell her what to wear.”

  He found that out firsthand. One day in the store when he approached her with a suggestion, she cut him off with, “All right, Ralph, you can go now.” Lauren was offended: “I thought, so this is what Audrey’s really like—bossy. It was the manner I didn’t like. I walked out very angry at her.”

  Earlier, Audrey and Rob had accepted Lauren’s invitation to spend a three-day weekend at his house in Jamaica, and Ralph didn’t see her again until their departure for Kingston.

  “On the plane, she was very effervescent,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Audrey, I want you to know I’m angry at you,’ and I told her why. She said, ‘Ralph, I really felt I was holding you up—it must have come out the wrong way. I’m very sorry.’ I was always very direct with her. I think she valued that in people.”

  Lauren says many of his conversations with Audrey were left unfinished or interrupted by other people. That didn’t bother her but it did him, and one day he gave her his theory: “I said, ‘Audrey, you don’t really want to listen. You’re too tight.’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said I felt she wasn’t receptive to hearing certain things. She said, ‘That’s insecurity, Ralph.... All my life, I was too tall, long neck.... I never thought I was pretty.’ I said, ‘How could you think that?’ But she did. She was a very protected person. She was assured about who she was but, at the same time, insecure in so many ways.”29

  When Gardens of the World came up, it was Lauren she called upon for her wardrobe. “I love Givenchy for night,” she told him, “but I love your sport clothes for daytime.” Today, when asked to elaborate on the differences between his and Givenchy’s fashion, Lauren chooses his words carefully:

  “Givenchy is a charming, elegant man, and they had a fine connection. But I must say, you could take Audrey into Sears Roebuck or Givenchy or Ralph Lauren or an army-surplus store—it didn’t matter, she’d put something on and you’d say, ‘It’s her!’ Very few people can do that. Clothes look great or not so great, depending on who’s wearing them. I truly feel Audrey gave Givenchy a look. As time went on, they collaborated, but I think she picked what was Audrey out of Givenchy. The same for my clothes. She just picked from them what was right for her.”30

  One delightful result, in the Gardens of the World series, was her outfit—with its feminine hint of a military collar—worn during the tour of George Washington’s gardens at Mt. Vernon. Surely, it was an original designed for that occasion?

  “No,” Lauren replies. “We just went through the store and she picked it out. They were all existing designs.”

  A partial preview of the Gardens series and high tea in Audrey’s honor were held at Cartier’s New York headquarters in March of 1991. “They wanted to be able to say, ‘She has breakfast at Tiffany’s, but she has high tea at Cartier‘s,”’ Blackschleger recalls. “Audrey said, ‘I’ve had breakfast at Tiffany’s and high tea at Cartier’s—I guess this means I have to have dinner at Bulgari’s.’ She knew how to weave all those commercial interests together and make everybody happy.

  “Audrey and Robbie paid attention to all the details. They were amazing together. It was incredible to see two human beings be so elegant and responsible but also kind and caring.”

  Julie Leifermann recalls asking Audrey, “‘How do you and Rob do it? How do you spend all this time together, travel together, live together, without killing each other?’ She said, ‘We just enjoy going through the world together.’ It was the sweetest thing to see their little jokes—that playful, mischievous side of her. She was so smart, so well-read, spoke gazillions of languages. No wonder Robbie ne
ver got bored with her.”31

  SHE WOULD make no new movies, but neither would she forsake the past. It was a time to look back and pay tribute: Between 1989 and 1992, Audrey was an honored guest, or guest of honor, at no fewer than sixteen film galas. The full list would be taxing, but the highlights provide insight into the depth of her friendships.

  She once said that the first thing she saw when she arrived in America was the Statue of Liberty—and the second was Richard Avedon. On January 14, 1989, at the Council of Fashion Designers salute to Avedon in New York, she appeared in a red strapless gown, her neck and shoulders drawn but proud, and lionized him:

  “For Richard, I’ve happily swung through swings, stood in clouds of steam, been drenched with rain, and descended endless flights of stairs without looking and without breaking my neck.... Only with Richard have I been able to shed my innate self-consciousness in front of the camera. Is it his sweetness? Is it his sense of fun? The assurance that you know you’re going to end up looking the way you wished you looked? ... How many unknowns like myself were put on the map by Richard Avedon?”32

  The next year she was thrilled, in view of her advocacy for children, to stand on a Broadway stage for the first time in forty years and hand out a 1991 Tony award to little Daisy Egan for The Secret Garden.

  But most affecting personally was the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Gala Tribute to Audrey Hepburn” of April 22, 1991, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, with tributes delivered by Billy Wilder, Stanley Donen, Gregory Peck, Alan Arkin, Tony Perkins, Harry Belafonte and many others.

  What did the Lincoln Center tribute mean to her?

  “I don’t know what it means,” she replied. “It’s a huge honor.”

  What had her career meant?

  She struggled for an answer before concluding that the key thing was the “experiences with other performers who somehow make you open up to them. For me, it always has to do with some kind of affection, love, warmth. I was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it. That’s what I’d like to think maybe has been the appeal. People have recognized something in me they have themselves—the need to receive affection and the need to give it. Does that sound soppy?”33

  That fund-raising event was the most successful since the first Lincoln Center Film Society tribute, in 1972, to Charles Chaplin. Tickets were sold out months in advance, and hundreds of checks had to be returned to disappointed Hepburn fans. Avery Fisher Hall seated 2,700 but, “We could have done this in Shea Stadium,” said one Lincoln Center publicist. Gala chairman Ralph Lauren set the evening’s tone by, professing a lifelong adoration of Hepburn. Stanley Donen topped him by noting, “My passion for her has lasted through four marriages—two of hers and two of mine.” He was topped in turn by Billy Wilder, who said he fell in love with her within five seconds of meeting her on the set of Sabrina, and then reprised one of his best lines: “I talk in my sleep, but fortunately, my wife’s name is Audrey.” Alan Arkin got an even bigger laugh—the biggest of the night—following a film clip from Wait Until Dark (see opening passsage of Chapter 7, p. 222). Wendy Keys, who programmed and directed the Lincoln Center tribute to Hepburn, recalls certain delicate, behind-the-scenes moments—with Anthony Perkins, for instance:

  “I was nervous because I didn’t have or want any clips from Green Mansions. I said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t have an excerpt from the film.’ He said, ‘I’m thrilled.’ ”34 Yet when he spoke that night, Perkins told the audience he had given up an offer to costar in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot for the chance to meet and work with Audrey in Green Mansions.35by

  One of very few invitees who failed to attend was Sean Connery, then shooting a film in Mexico. Another was a person only Rob Wolders expected to show up: “Cher was a great personal favorite of Audrey’s. When Wendy pointed out we had all men and no women, I suggested her as a surprise for Audrey, who adored her in Moonstruck.” But forty-eight hours before the event, Cher got sick and, on April 20, 1991, had to send Audrey her regrets:This is a very hard letter for me to write because what I had dreamt of doing all my life was to be able to tell you in person.... the profound effect you have had on my life.

  On the night I won the Oscar, you touched my hand and said you were glad I’d won.... You can never imagine what that meant to me. Since I was a little girl you have been my idea of a “star” and it was partly because of you that I became an actress.

  You were a brilliant light for me in a sometimes dark childhood. I so wanted to be like you in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” that I put my hair in 2 pony-tails, bought huge sunglasses, and wore the closest thing to “you” I could put together. I got suspended from school for the sunglasses....

  Someone once said to me that I was like a “3rd World Audrey Hepburn” —I’m not sure how they meant it, but it’s one of my favorite comments. [Your work] has inspired me again and again. I love you [and] you will never know how sad I am to miss this opportunity to say it in person.

  Audrey’s own little speech that night was, of course, the climactic last act on the bill. Ralph Lauren saw her backstage just before she went on and was amazed that “she was so nervous ... pacing back and forth, smoking, her hands ice cold.”36

  Wendy Keys has a similar recollection:

  “If there’s a frozen moment, just one image I keep in my mind, it’s the view of her leaving from backstage to go out to the center of the Avery Fisher stage at the end of her tribute: She threw her shoulders back, and this beautiful white chiffon skirt swirled around her legs as she walked out to greet these people who were so thrilled to see her. It was heightened by the fact that she was so nervous. The sight of her back, with that beautiful French twist and those shoulder blades like nobody else’s—it was a moment I’ll never get over.”37

  Once on stage, her words were no less gracious and rather more humorous than usual. She thanked all the directors, costars and technicians who made a “marketable commodity out of a skinny broad.”

  The post-tribute dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park presented a dilemma. The restaurant’s tables held a maximum of ten, but many times that number had come to pay tribute to her and she was worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for them all at her table. “If there was a chance of their feeling slighted, Audrey would not allow it,” says Professor Richard Brown, one of her favorite interviewers, who was a guest and witness.38

  On this night above all others, says Keys, “She had to make sure that everyone who had come long distances sat close to her, but she couldn’t bear to decide who should or shouldn’t. So she had us make one tremendous table by pushing ten together into a giant oval that went on for miles. It was perfect. Nobody’s feelings were hurt. It never happened before or since at one of those events, because most people don’t care. But Audrey did.”39

  Keys felt that quality carried over onto the screen:

  “One thing she portrays on film so sharply is hurt feelings. You’re so overcome by her beauty you don’t really acknowledge the acting that goes on behind it. In My Fair Lady, when Higgins abuses her, you can see her hurt feelings and how honest they are. It was something close to her surface, that vulnerability I saw Rob react to in private. He would be so devastated when he saw that wounded expression—that look in her eye when she was struck down by something.”40

  RALPH LAUREN’S blunt, sometimes confrontational way of dealing with Audrey not only didn’t alienate her but seemed to draw them closer. His enormous affection for her was known by all, and Hepburn was the obvious choice to present him with the Council of Fashion Designers’ Lifetime Achievement award on February 3, 1992 in New York. Audrey’s was the most emotional of many emotional tributes to Ralph Lauren that night:

  “You’ve not only created a total concept of fashion and style, but by your consistency and integrity, protected it, always reminding us of the best things in life. As a designer, you conjure up all things I most care about—the country, misty mornings, summer af
ternoons, great open spaces, horses, cornfields, vegetable gardens, fireplaces and Jack Russell terriers.

  “As a man, I respect you for your total lack of pretension, for your gentleness, kindness, sincerity, simplicity. And as my friend, I love you.”41

  When Lauren’s turn came at the end, he said, “You want to know the lifetime achievement?” Then, addressing his best pal from boyhood, “Steve, remember we went to the movies in the Bronx thirty years ago? Remember the princess? I got her!”

  As noted, Hepburn graced no fewer than four tributes to Gregory Peck.bz “How much could they say about each other?” asks Rob Wolders rhetorically. But Audrey always found something more, notably at the Kennedy Center in December 1991:Gregory Peck is the most authentic actor of our time.... Because he was willing to fight the studio executives when they didn’t want to take the risk, we have Gentlemen’s Agreement and its landmark exposure to anti-Semitism. Only because he wanted to play the part did they make To KillA Mockingbird. Dearest Greg, to your generosity, I owe my career. For your courage and integrity, you have my deepest respect. For your friendship, your goodness, and your humor, you have all my love.

  Six months later, she was honorary chairperson of the American Cinemathèque’s tribute to Sean Connery. Their mutual friend Terence Young, who directed Connery’s great James Bond hits, sent regrets by telegram: “There are only two great stars in my recollection who’ve not been changed by great, massive success: Sean Connery and Lassie.”42 Said Audrey:

  “Like every actress in the world, for years it was my dream to work with Sean Connery—marvelous—looking, superb acting, warm, versatile and wildly sexy. I got my wish. But I was cast as a nun. Nevertheless, once Robin was back from the crusades in all his splendor, the nun’s veil just seemed to melt away.”