Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (26 page)

“I
read about those honors as if they were being bestowed on another woman,”
she recalled. “Always when I stopped working, I felt very far away from
the Audrey Hepburn of the marquee. I had an awfully hard time incorporating
myself into my work, and vice versa, so when I read somewhere that somebody
thought I was a marvelous dresser, I realized I thought the clothes were nice,
too, but I didn’t take any credit for them. In any case, beautiful dresses
always seemed like costumes to me. I knew I could carry them off, but they
weren’t my attire of choice. That would be old, loose jeans, too short, pants
that I could garden in.”

Around
the time Audrey exiled herself in Switzerland in temporary retirement, she
discovered that her father was still alive. “My mother had told me in
passing that he had died, but for some reason Mel didn’t believe this, and he
did his own snooping. He discovered my father was alive, in Ireland, near
Dublin. I was the happiest I had been in a while on the day I flew to meet him.
But then reality set in. He was aloof when we met. I felt bad about interfering
with his new life. The meeting I had hoped for my whole life turned into one of
my biggest disappointments. We didn’t have a lot to say to one another. I never
heard from him again.”

To
take her mind off her personal troubles, Audrey decided to travel with her
husband when he was offered a supporting role in the film version of
Hemingway’s novel
The Sun Also Rises.

“I
went with him on location,” Audrey recalled, “and I had the time of
my life. It was the first time in our marriage that I felt like a real wife. I
was finally in the supporting role, and I adored it. I would go shopping in
Mexico with Ava Gardner for little trinkets while Mel was doing a little scene,
and at night, Errol Flynn and Ava and Tyrone Power and I would all go out for a
meal. It felt normal. It was new for me. My husband was at work during the day
and I stayed home. It was a division of labor that made sense.”

It
was probably as attractive a situation as it was because it followed one of the
truly disastrous events of their careers.

On
New Year’s Day 1957, after having asked Audrey not to take on any new projects
for a year, Ferrer flew her to New York to begin production with him on
Mayerling, a ninety-minute NBC special
about the site in Austria where, in 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf of the Hapsburg
Empire was found dead in a double-suicide pact with his mistress, Mary Vetsera.

Given
their own marital tensions, portraying the doomed couple was an ironic choice
of roles for Audrey and Ferrer, but as usual, Audrey acquiesced to her
husband’s wishes.

Director
Anatole Litvak, who got to know the couple when they rented his Malibu home
while Audrey was making
Funny Face,
had
always harbored a secret wish to do
Mayerling
with her. He had directed the original movie in 1936 in France that had
made stars of Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, and he only thought about
doing it again the first time he met Audrey.

“It
was not like me to repeat myself,” he told an interviewer in 1957,
“but when I met Audrey Hepburn, I knew I had no choice. She was
aristocratic and vulnerable, full of laughter and full of sorrow, just as I
pictured the prince’s mistress.”

Ferrer,
in the role of the Crown Prince, would not have been Litvak’s first pick, but
he didn’t have a choice. Audrey stipulated that she would play the part only if
her husband was given an equal role-with equal billing. Although Ferrer
presumably wanted Audrey to take a rest, his own career superseded those
desires. He had been dealing for several years with Audrey’s neuroses and insecurities
and he desperately needed some validation. Sadly, he was no longer considered
leading-man material, and he had to fight long and hard for roles, using
whatever means available to him, including his popular wife. And he truly
believed that if he worked closely enough with Audrey, he could monitor her
moods.

Her
depression over the loss of her baby continued, and Ferrer began to worry at
the extent to which Audrey lavished attention on the Yorkshire terrier. So did
director Litvak.

“I
had an inordinate amount of trouble getting Met and Audrey to create `heat‘
on-screen,” Litvak recalled. “Audrey seemed to have a better rapport
with that dog of hers.”

In
fact, in a photo in
Life
magazine
taken on the set of
Mayerling,
Litvak
is hugging Audrey as Ferrer looks on perplexed. The caption reads: “Litvak
as lover shows Ferrer how he should hold his wife, Audrey, to get the best
effect at romantic scenes.”

The
difficulties in shooting appeared in the finished product. When NBC aired
Mayerling as part of its
Producer’s Showcase series, critics
panned it mercilessly. “The lovers seemed more fated to bore each other to
death than to end their illicit alliance in a murder-suicide pact,” wrote
Sheilah Graham. “I knew the final outcome from my history books,” noted
Joe Hyams, “and I was counting the minutes to the inevitable.”

Audrey
was upset by the criticism, but she felt relieved that, because of it, she
didn’t have to go straight back to work. Other projects that were being
considered for Audrey and Ferrer were immediately nixed by Paramount. The joint
efforts that had been under consideration before the airing of
Mayerling included productions of
Look Homeward, Angel, based on Thomas
Wolfe’s stunning novel, and Jean Anouilh’s
The
Lark.

Back
in Switzerland, she tended her roses and tried to conceive. When Ferrer
recommended she read
The Nun’s Story,
a
semibiographical account of the life of Marie-Louise Habets written by her
friend Kathryn C. Hulme, she jumped at the chance to get out of herself and her
problems.

But
the story of the Belgian girl, Gabrielle Van Der Mal, who must choose between
following her heart and following the rules was close enough to Audrey’s own
emotional tug-of-war that she felt moved to explore the possibility of bringing
it to the screen.

A
few phone calls later, she discovered that director Fred Zinnemann, who had
overseen Gary Cooper in
High Noon,
had
been interested in
The Nun’s Story
since
the book was first published. He couldn’t get the project off the ground,
however; every studio had turned him down, feeling the story of a nun had
little commercial appeal. But with the addition of Audrey to the project,
executives at the movie companies changed their minds.

Zinnemann
credited Audrey with interesting Warner Brothers in the project. “It was
Audrey’s name alone which made the deal possible,” he said.

But
Audrey herself was not fully convinced that she wanted to do the role. As
usual, she would go through the motions of enthusiasm before the deal was
actually signed, but only after she had won over the other principals would she
begin any serious consideration of it herself.