Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (28 page)

Offscreen,
most of the cast members marveled at her stamina as well. The Sabena Guest
House, where Zinnemann and his actors were staying while in Stanleyville (now
called Kisangani), one of the most populated towns in the Belgian Congo, was
nothing more than a series of modest bungalows loosely grouped around a main
office.

“It
was the opposite of palatial,” Dame Peggy Ashcroft said. “It was modest.
Very, very modest. But Audrey raved about it—how quaint, how perfect for her
dog! When we all could have started to wallow in self-pity, Audrey brought us
out. She was the best person to have in primitive surroundings: She was an
enthusiast!”

Torrential
rains in this equatorial region often postponed production. And when it wasn’t
raining, it was so humid, it felt like it was raining, “only without the
drops,” Zinnemann said.

In
one scene, Audrey got completely drenched during a day of filming and she
couldn’t determine if it was sweat or rain that had made her so wet. “My
memory is that I was just sopping the whole time, sopping and laughing,”
she said.

But
then a spiritual turning point for Audrey occurred.

Crutchley
recalled that Audrey had been “fairly obsessed” with children when
they all arrived in the Congo. “She’d talk on and on about my
children,” Crutchley said. “How beautiful they were, how angelic.
She’d finger their pictures so carefully, as if she could somehow hurt them. I
sensed so strongly that she wanted babies more than anything else in her
life.”

But
when a local photographer thanked Audrey for posing for him by giving her a
beautiful doll, she lost control. “I hate dolls,” she screamed at
him. “Dolls look like dead babies!” Then she began to weep and left
the set. When Ferrer heard about her outburst, he considered flying to her
side, but Zinnemann told him that he’d be more of a distraction than a help.

But
she experienced a profound lifting of her depression after she visited a leper
colony at Yalisombo, fifty miles up the Congo River.

“We
started out very early in the morning,” Audrey recalled, “and from
the moment I got up, I knew it was going to be a momentous day. We traveled by
ferry, very slowly it seemed, and I could hear every bird and every monkey in
the jungle. I was entranced. I felt, as they say, one with nature; I really
did.

“Time
passed in a very strange way after that. I can’t say it did pass. I was in sort
of a daze. I remember meeting Dr. Stanley Browne, the missionary who started
the leper colony twenty years before, and I saw this halo around his head. I
did! I hate for my vision to be so clichéd, but so be it.

“It
was Sunday and we all went to church. It was the most moving experience of my
life. Everybody spoke different languages, different dialects, but at the end,
when they played Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy,
I felt as if a great weight was gone. I was grateful for my life, my ability to
influence people, my talents, my enormous love. I had faith in God. If he
wanted me to have a baby, it would happen. I wasn’t going to worry about it
from here on in.”

Despite
her own personal joy, Audrey had to depict enormous internal eruptions when
Sister Luke is ordered to leave her beloved Africa. But World War II has broken
out, and she’s needed at a hospital near the border with Holland.

Audrey
gives a breathtaking performance as Sister Luke, easily and seamlessly
conveying her passions and her doubts. Because she is on the screen so much,
the slightest false note would have sounded glaringly. Yet there are only the
sound of the bells that call her to her duty to God.

Like
Audrey, she feels another duty as well: to her country. After the Nazis kill
her father, Sister Luke becomes more and more devoted to the Belgian underground
resistance, while her superiors advise her to remain neutral. Yet she wants to
seek revenge for her father’s death. She cannot forgive the Germans. She
realizes she is unworthy of her vocation.

The
final scene echoes the first one in the movie. Sister Luke removes the ring
that celebrated her as a nun. It is the same gold band that we saw her lovingly
twirl in the opening sequence of the movie, and it is a powerful reminder that
some commitments are better off broken.

In
a pattern that was painfully evident to everyone but her, Audrey moved from her
personal triumph in
The Nun’s Story
to
the dreadful experience of
Green Mansions
in a valiant yet futile effort to make her husband feel useful.

“Mel
was so excited about the movie that his enthusiasm rubbed off on me,
too,”. Audrey recalled. “Of course, I was pretty sick. I had
developed a case of kidney stones in the Belgian Congo and I was recuperating
in Rome when Mel flew in and asked if he should postpone. No way! He had worked
too hard for all of it to be lost over a little pain in my back,” she
said, downplaying the excruciating suffering she experienced. “We would
move forward,” she said, “because I said so! It was a nice sense of
power.”

Ferrer
had loved the “Romance of the Tropical Forest,” the subtitle of W. H.
Hudson’s
Green Mansions,
ever since
he’d read the book as a Princeton undergraduate. But he was not the first
filmmaker who wanted to bring it to the screen. It already had a checkered
history.

According
to film historian and author Charles Higham, RKO-Radio Pictures had purchased
the book as a vehicle for Dolores Del Rio in 1932. Eleven years went by without
it being made, and independent producer James Cassidy picked it up for next to
nothing. He sold it to MGM in 1945 for about $70,000. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer
was not satisfied with the eight attempts by as many writers in as many years
that he commissioned, but in 1953 the movie was almost made. Alan Jay Lerner
wrote a script for Vincente Minnelli to film in South America. Actress Pier
Angeli was hired to play the part of Rima, the jungle girl. But a change of
command at the studio relegated the movie to the shelf once again, until Ferrer
came along and decided it would be a perfect vehicle for his wife.

“He
wanted the world to see me as sexy,” Audrey recalled. “It didn’t
matter that I was straight as a board, a fine line in bone structure; he
thought I had real oomph appeal, and that Rima would bring it out.”

Set
in Venezuela on the cusp of the twentieth century,
Green Mansions
tells the fantastical love story of Rima (Audrey),
an otherworldly creature more at home with birds and deer than with humans, and
an explorer, Abel (Anthony Perkins), who tries to revive in her a feeling of
womanhood.