Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (30 page)

She
wanted to prove herself to Huston, show that she could do the stunts required
of her. She had overheard him compliment her in his offhand way to a visiting
reporter—“She’s as good as the other Hepburn,” he said, alluding to
Katharine, the star of his
African Queen
—and
Audrey wanted to prove him right.

She
agreed to do all the riding herself, using no stunt doubles. As Huston led her
over to the white stallion, Diablo (rumored to have once been the favorite
horse of Fulgencio Batista, who had just been ousted as Cuba’s leader), she
felt herself tighten with fear. But after several hours of practice, riding
with and without a saddle, Audrey felt confident that she could film the scene.

But
the addition of camera lights upset another horse, which galloped toward Diablo.
Diablo bolted toward the lights. A member of the crew threw up his arms to stop
the other horse. Instead Diablo stopped short. “I knew I was going to be
thrown,” Audrey said. “All I could think of was the baby.”

By
the time Huston and Dr. Felipe Hernandez, a Mexican doctor assigned to the
film, arrived at Audrey’s side on the cement-hard ground, she was slipping in
and out of consciousness.

“Every
time she would open her eyes,” the doctor recalled, “she would say,
`Please don’t tell Mel. Promise that you won’t tell Mel. He worries so much.‘
Frankly, I was extremely worried. I wasn’t sure Audrey Hepburn was ever going
to walk again. I was afraid she had broken her back.”

According
to Burt Lancaster, Audrey joked the whole time she was waiting for the
stretcher.

“I
had to do something to get out of this dump,” she said to him. The entire
company watched in disbelief.

“Her
voice was quavering,” Lancaster recalled. “That lovely, soft voice of
hers was even more tentative. Every time she tried to put us at ease, that
quiet little voice of hers made matters worse. She sounded like she was fading
away.”

The
sedative was taking effect. She was taken by ambulance to the Durango hospital,
where Ferrer and her personal physician, Dr. Howard Mendelson, were waiting.
They examined her while she slept.

When
she finally opened her eyes three hours later, Ferrer knew what she wanted to
hear. “The baby’s fine,” he said, “but the mother’s a little
battered.”

The
X-rays showed four broken vertebrae, two sprained ankles, a sprained wrist, and
torn muscles in her lower back. After consultation with her doctor, United
Artists shut down production on
The
Unforgiven
for three weeks, uncertain if the movie would ever be completed.

Audrey
was sent to recuperate at a rented Beverly Hills villa. Ironically,
Marie-Louise Habets, the former nun whose life had inspired
The Nun’s Story, was in the Los Angeles
area and was called in to minister to Audrey.

“I
was on my back for twenty days straight, listening to Mel rant and rave about
how careless John [Huston] had been. I was his captive audience, and I hated
it. I didn’t blame anyone, except myself maybe, because I’m sure I conveyed my
own fear to the horse. But I certainly wasn’t going to allow a picture to be
lost because of me. I heard the wait for my recovery cost about two hundred
fifty thousand dollars. If they spent that much hoping I’d get better, then I
wasn’t going to let them down.”

Audrey
completed the shoot wearing an uncomfortable orthopedic back brace. On the last
day of shooting, she had to remount Diablo for some additional footage.

“I
held my breath, said my prayers, and just did it,” Audrey recalled.
“This time, he was as calm as an angel.”

When
The Unforgiven
opened, critics found
it interesting, but flawed. They commented on its somber tone and its oddly
upbeat score by Dmitri Tiomkin. They wondered why one character disappeared
without a trace midway through the film. They snickered at a typically Huston
surrealistic scene in which Indians attack a piano (after Mattilda has played
some Mozart, presumably to calm the tribe). They questioned the acceptance of
incest between Rachel and her adopted brother in the movie.

But
they all agreed on Audrey’s performance. She grows in the part, they concurred,
from a bright, spontaneous young girl to a mature woman, one whose zest for
life is tempered by the knowledge of her heritage.

Audrey
was finally being reviewed as an actress, not an ingenue. “Some of my
pictures I don’t care for,” Huston said at the time. “This one I
actively dislike. But Hepburn was a trouper and I wished I had used her to
better advantage. She could have carried the picture if I let her.”

But
at home, she was still treated like a little girl. Ferrer was still incensed
about the riding accident, and he insisted that she return to Burgenstock in
the spring of 1959 and rest. In fact, her back was not fully healed, and she
needed to take it easy, but still she bridled at the thought of having nothing
to do but worry about the baby.

A
much-needed distraction came in the form of
No
Bail for the Judge,
a mystery written by Henry Cecil and adapted for the
screen—with Audrey in mind—by Samuel Taylor. Its main attraction was its
director—Alfred Hitchcock.

“I
adored the script that Mr. Hitchcock sent over,” Audrey said. “I’ll
never forget the story. I was to play a barrister in London. My father, a judge
at the Old Bailey, is wrongly accused of murdering a prostitute and I was
supposed to defend him. I hire a crook to help gather evidence, and the crook
was to be played by Laurence Harvey. I was so excited, I told Mr. Hitchcock to
send over the contracts.”