Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  For Anna Cataldi, the news and the denial were even more intense. After parting with Audrey in Somalia, she had gone on immediately to Bosnia to observe the UNICEF-proposed ceasefire for which Audrey had made a video appeal, with Serbo-Croatian subtitles, that was broadcast twelve times a day in Yugoslavia.

  “I went to Bosnia because of Audrey,” says Cataldi. “She did an appeal for the ‘Week of Tranquility’ at the end of October, to help the children in Sarajevo before winter arrived. There she was on TV—when we had electricity—such a vision. I think if Audrey had been well, she would have gone to Sarajevo herself.”

  Cataldi stayed there a month before escaping by car with two other journalists and a ten-month-old baby with an amputated leg. “They shot at us,” she says, “but we drove through the mountains and finally we arrived in Croatia, where there was peace. I saw a little restaurant. I’d been cut off from the world.... My first call was to my family. The second was to Audrey. I was going to tell her that I saved a baby, which I knew would make her happy. I said, ‘Giovanna, give me la Signora.’”

  But la Signora could not come to the phone, and Anna would not see her again.

  Cataldi arrived in Tolochenaz the night before the funeral. “The house was full of people—Givenchy, all the Ferrers, the Dotti clan, everybody,” she recalls. “At one point, Giovanna said, ‘La Signora ... she is in the living room.’ I opened the door, nobody there. In the middle of the room was Audrey’s coffin, closed. That beautiful white living room—white floor and couches, impeccable, everything exactly the way Audrey kept it. Just one little vase with one rose.”19

  In Tolochenaz, funerals were not allowed on Sunday, but the rules had been changed. A huge number of people lined the way from the house to the church, and from there to the cemetery. Audrey’s simple pine coffin was carried from La Paisible to the church by Sean, Luca, Givenchy, Rob, Audrey’s brother Ian, and her longtime friend and lawyer Georges Müller. Mel Ferrer, seventy-five, walked behind them. Sean saw him waiting in line. “Come, Papa,” he said, hugging his father as they entered the stone church.20 Some six hundred villagers listened outside via loudspeaker to the service presided over by eighty-three-year-old pastor Maurice Eindiguer, who had married Audrey and Mel in 1954, baptized Sean in 1960, and given Audrey the last rites just two hours before her death.

  Rob had asked UNICEF’s Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan to deliver a eulogy, and he did so with extemporaneous eloquence. “She was an extraordinary star in every sense of the word,” said the Prince, who had known and loved her from their first meeting after a performance of Ondine forty years before. He spoke of what she symbolized to the world—of her ability to touch everyone who came in contact with her and of her insistence that the welfare of the children was the adult world’s most solemn responsibility.

  “To know the affluence of places like California and then suddenly to be placed in the Sudan was a tremendous shock,” he said. “When she came back from one of those trips, you could see it had taken a lot out of her, physically and morally. But at the same time, she felt we could somehow turn things around. She kept going. Always, there was her underlying optimism.”21

  Sean then read the Sam Levenson poem she liked so much and added, “Mummy believed in one thing above all: She believed in love. She believed love could heal, fix, mend, and make everything fine and good in the end.”

  At the end of the thirty-minute ceremony, hymns were sung by a children’s choir from St. Georges International School in Montreux. At the village cemetery, she was laid to rest atop a small hill overlooking Lake Geneva. Her grave would be marked by a plain pinewood cross.

  “SHE LEFT the biggest vacuum anybody could leave,” says Doris Brynner. “A great big black empty hole.”22 But it was Audrey’s “three men” that Anna Cataldi worried about most. She speaks of them with maternal bluntness:

  “One hour after the funeral, Sean was putting on the California New Age act, talking so esoterically. And poor Luca, just out of art school.... When my book, Letters from Sarajevo, came out in Italy, he did the cover design. He’s very good. When Luca was with Andrea, he was shy. But when he was with Audrey, he behaved like a Hell’s Angel, speaking Italian with an accent of Roman suburbs, in front of his mother! ... But can you imagine, to lose a mother like Audrey?”23

  John Isaac says “Robert was completely devastated. He was pretty strong until the last moment when they lowered the coffin. That’s the first time I saw him just break down.”

  All those men without Audrey—Rob, Sean, Andrea, Luca. “Audrey was the focus,” says Anna. “She was surrounded by men.”

  Audrey had called Sean “my best friend”—mature even as a child. “He’s been a rock in my life, enormous support,” she said. “He was born with a marvelous nature. He’s one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met.... I’m totally crazy about my sons.” The feeling was mutual. “I still carry her every day in my heart,” he says, “so she is still my best friend, too.”24 A year after her death, in Tolochenaz, Sean Ferrer assesses his mother in remarkably candid terms:She always followed the program and her life was very continuous. She tried to get up and eat and take her walks and go to sleep at the same hour. She saved up strength like you would save up a handful of water for your last drink. Instead of using it to do commercials or whatever, she used it for the kids, because that’s what mattered to her.

  I think that connects back to her childhood—to the loss of her father and the fears that never left her. First it was fear of a tough mother, fear of being alone and being abandoned by the father, fear of the war. And then she was damned scared all her life through her career. She was scared to death, man. She was scared to death.25

  Was it a fear of potential loss?

  No, of being up there, of having to perform—afraid she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t as beautiful as all the other women and had to work harder and know her lines better than anyone, get up earlier and have the best makeup person and the best costume man and the most beautiful clothes. They were almost like an armor in which she was protected....

  In her case, the motivation was fear, and love for her family. From her youth, she never saw herself as we did. She thought it was a gift that could go away any day. Most artists believe that somehow they’re going to be “found out”—models most of all. They’re all glitz on the outside but on the inside they’re [trying] to keep up this exterior cupola that may crash if you remove the center stone....

  That’s why people love her on the screen, because when she cries, she really is feeling it, really living through it. She is believing, reliving—she’s actually there. And you want to take her in your arms and hug her.26

  Sean attended the March 1993 Oscar ceremonies to accept Audrey’s Jean Hersholt Award. “On her behalf,” he said, “I dedicate this to the children of the world”—his own, included. Soon after Audrey’s death, Sean and Leila learned they were about to become parents. “My God, how Audrey would have loved that!” Doris Brynner exclaimed. Emma Audrey Ferrer, born in Tolochenaz, inherited a closet of hand-embroidered baby clothes worn by her father and a nursery that was her grandmother’s dressing room.

  “She missed seeing her first grandchild,” says Sean. “But there’s a little bit of her in that baby.”27

  Sean Ferrer continues in the film-production business, commuting from Switzerland to Los Angeles and New York. Luca the graphic artist works with computers, shares his mother’s desire for privacy, and lives quietly with his boarding-school sweetheart, Astrid, in Paris.

  Robert Wolders lives in the Rochester, New York, suburb of Irondequoit, near his mother and sister Claudia who, like his older sisters Margaret and Grada, were very close to Audrey. He travels a great deal, tending to commercial and UNICEF interests—and to the memory of Audrey Hepburn.

  The Wolders home is an elegant “Dutch” environment in white. It is no maudlin shrine but contains enough images of Audrey to ensure that her presence is strongly felt. Something else ensures that in a lively
way—tiny little “Missy,” the Jack Russell terrier who cuddles into the sleeves of Rob’s sweater and never leaves him as he sits and talks. Audrey gave him the dog five years ago, and Missy is a precious living link to her now.

  Shortly after her death, Wolders was asked by UNICEF to put together a cdfilm from video footage he had taken in the field. The resulting documentary, Audrey Hepburn in Her Own Words, was modest in length (twenty-three minutes) but soaring in content—the most moving film record of her last years’ work. Soon after that, he immersed himself in the preparation of a marathon, three-hour “Audrey Hepburn Memorial Tribute” benefit concert at the United Nations General Assembly in New York—the most star-studded performing-arts event in UN history.* “They all came in without even a rehearsal,” Rob recalls. “Henry Mancini didn’t quite know what he was going to play. I kept begging him to do ‘Moon River.’ He heard Frederica von Stade was going to sing it and didn’t want to do it twice—but then he did it anyhow, with a ‘special stamp’ on it for Sean and Luca and me.”

  Wolders’ business interests include a longtime association with Public Storage Partners, a conglomerate with its own management company, and he continues to give as much time as he can to UNICEF. But his friends worry about him.

  “Every time we speak on the phone, he always comes back to, ‘Should I have done this or that?’” says John Isaac. “I say, you can’t blame yourself. You were helping her. That’s what she wanted. She did what she wanted.”

  Wolders muses constantly on that, and on Audrey.

  “They say the pain lessens with time,” he says. “But it’s not true.”

  HEPBURN AND WOLDERS never married and kept their finances scrupulously separate. He had suffered after the death of Merle Oberon from false reports characterizing him as a gold digger, and he was determined not to let it happen again.

  “People assume Audrey was wealthy, but they forget that she hadn’t worked for years and that she educated and supported her two children largely by herself,” Wolders says. “Long before her death, I insisted that I not be part of her estate.”

  That decision startled Hepburn’s sons. But Wolders did agree to serve on the board of directors of a new foundation created by Sean and Luca to carry on their mother’s work.

  The Audrey Hepburn Hollywood for Children Fund is located at 4 East 12th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. “We originally thought we could become a subcommittee of UNICEF,” executive director Rose Ganguzza told film writer Maria Ciaccia. “But the bureaucracy was mind-boggling. We wanted to be able to work on things more efficiently, to be a storefront operation—to have a lasting effect, something ongoing and grass roots.”28 The Fund’s member-advisors include Martin Short, Whoopi Goldberg and Jim Carrey, plus many others who have never before loaned their names to such a cause.ce

  UNICEF’s institutional nose is a little out of joint. “Our understanding at first was that we would be one of the beneficiaries,” says a UNICEF official, “but Sean has not yet made a clear decision where funding will be going. He wants to create a foundation to benefit various organizations, including places where UNICEF is not operating, like the United States and England. He wants it to be independent.”

  Many, including the chief director’s father, think it should be relocated to the West Coast. “I’ve been giving Sean a lot of free advice,” says Mel Ferrer. “There’s no point calling it ‘Hollywood for Children’ and having it based in New York.”29

  One of its goals is to be a conduit to other charities. The organization is still embryonic, but Hepburn’s sons are “caring individuals,” says Ganguzza, “and they’ll find the way. She left them her loving legacy. It’s a lot to live up to.”30

  The sons are constantly asked to testify to that legacy, beyond just UNICEF. The little matter of her film career was at the forefront in 1994, with the $600,000 restoration of My Fair Lady. Over thirty years, the film had deteriorated to the point that it was in danger of total ruin. Its glorious color had faded and spotting of the negative was serious. Typical of the cinematic dermatology was a three-second spot on Audrey’s face, which cost $10,000 to fix. Film restoration experts Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz had done handsome reconstructions of Lawrence of Arabia and Spartacus, but My Fair Lady was an even bigger job—literally—the first rescue of a Super Panavision 70 film.

  “I am so very moved,” Sean told the jammed audience at the My Fair Lady gala “re-premiere” in New York, September 19, 1994. “One day our little Emma will be able to look up and see her grandmother ... see her, feel her, and love her.”

  Jeremy Brett, better known by then as PBS’s Sherlock Holmes, was one of the very few surviving costars in attendance. (“I got better notices for Freddy this time around than I did before,” he said.31) The refurbished print was gorgeous, but most in the audience felt the highlight of the night came during the final credits: As a fine postscript, the restorers added the soundtrack of Audrey’s own rendition of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”

  Silenced for thirty years in the vaults, she finally got to sing it herself.

  My FAIR LADY’S restoration was just the beginning. In the two years since, the postmortem fascination with Audrey Hepburn has burgeoned into a major cultural and commercial phenomenon. Countless Hepburn film retrospectives, on network and cable television and in theatrical screenings across the country, have recaptivated millions of old fans and created generations of new ones. What accounts for such renewed and renewable popularity? One simple answer comes from Patricia Davis, a program-scheduling executive at American Movie Classics: “You always felt good after you saw Audrey Hepburn.”32

  Contemporary Hollywood, meanwhile, having fashioned a new Sabrina in 1995, is also planning a remake of Two for the Road, to star Meg Ryan and to be written by Carrie Fisher. A 1991 Asian-American film production by Sharon Jue was called My Mother Thought She Was Audrey Hepburn. The most worshipful new project, similarly titled, is Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?, a comedy tentatively set for production by Steven Spielberg’s new “Dreamworks SKG” company, with Téa Leoni starring as a woman obsessed by Hepburn. Producer Robert Evans has something similar in development called Golightly, whose heroine is fixated on Holly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  Audrey-obsessed films and books seem to constitute a whole new genre. The most serious entry is Alan Brown’s novel, Audrey Hepburn’s Neck (Pocket Books, 1996), film rights to which have been bought by director Wayne (Smoke) Wang. In this tale, it’s not a woman but a young man who is mesmerized by Audrey. The setting is a semi-surreal Japan, where the rural womenfolk eat grilled eel while watching their beloved Hepburn movies.

  Audrey isn’t the first film icon to be embraced by whole societies and woven into their artistic and psychological fabric. The Swedish sphinx preceded her and inspired such “personal” works of art as the fine Anne Bancroft film Garbo Talks and an intriguing novel The Girl Who Loved Garbo by Rachel Gallagher. But otherwise, the only comparable icons are Valentino, Harlow, Dean and Monroe, whose cults have one great morbid prerequisite in common: an early, tragic, preferably violent death.

  There was no such imperative in the case of Audrey Hepburn, whose sphere of influence went far beyond film. An au courant example is the list of “Most Fascinating Women of Our Time” in the July 1996 issue of Britain’s influential Harpers & Queen: The surprise is not Hepburn’s inclusion but her ranking—number one. That corresponds to her powerful, ongoing force in fashion and advertising. More à la mode now than ever, her look and her look-alikes again dominate the runways of Prada, Calvin Klein and, of course, Givenchy and Lauren, and adorn the toniest European and Madison Avenue advertisements from L’Interdit fragrance to Nicole Miller scarves. There’s no end to the phenomenon, but there’s a final item of note for the pop-music scene:

  The thirty-five-year-old movie containing Audrey’s only smash musical success, “Moon River,” provided both the title and the whimsy for a major hit tune of 1996—the offbeat love song “Breakfast at
Tiffany’s,” by Texas band Deep Blue Something. Songwriter Todd Pipes, who was born well after the movie was made, estimates that he has seen it more than fifty times.

  AUDREY WOULD NOT write her autobiography. Over and over she was asked, and over and over she said no. “In the last year,” she told Ed Klein, “I’ve had seven requests from publishers for the Audrey Hepburn story—you know, the definitive book. It’s an idea [I hate:] How boring to have to sit there and write your whole life.... The other thing that makes me hold back is that you cannot write your life as if you’d live in a [vacuum]. You’ve lived with lots of other people. So perforce you have to talk about others. I have no right to do that nor would I.”

  And to other interviewers: “Memoirs? I don’t want to relive it, nor do I need the psychotherapy—get on with it!”33

  Sean had encouraged her to write a book, “if for no one else, then for Luca and myself,” and because it might have guaranteed her financial security for the rest of her life. “But you and Luca already know everything,” she replied.

  Her “three men” respected that decision. But after her death, a spate of Hepburn books appeared, one of which outraged and mobilized them into legal action: Diana Maychick’s Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (Birch Lane Press, 1993), made much of Hepburn’s alleged anorexia, but its greater offense, in the family’s view, was Maychick’s claim that Audrey had actively cooperated with her in a series of phone interviews.