Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (39 page)

The
village of Tolochenaz, above Lake of Geneva and a half-hour drive from
Lausanne, where she found her house, typified her desire for a normal life. A
bourgeois hamlet, it was populated primarily by farmers who tended orchards and
vineyards.

“It
was exactly what I wanted,” Audrey said about La Paisible (“The
Peaceful Place”), the two-story, eighteenth-century farmhouse of pinkish
stone. “It looked rooted and strong and there was not a pretentious beam
in its body. When we were looking it over, Assam of Assam [the Yorkie who
replaced Mr. Famous after his untimely death] lay down right in the dining room
as if he knew this would be his home. It was a house for living, and it
remained one.”

In
a further attempt to cement their failing marriage, she and Ferrer bought a
summer residence near Marbella, on Spain’s Costa del Sol. “It was one of
the only reckless financial decisions we ever made,” she recalled.
“But I guess we felt if we bought enough things together, we could create
roots where there weren’t any.”

Newscaster
Hugh Downs remembered inviting Audrey to his nearby villa. His housekeeper/cook
was serving a delectable lunch of local fish and rice. “By the time all
the guests were served, there was about two teaspoons of the concoction left
for me,” Downs recalled. “All the guests immediately began heaping on
portions from their plates. My dish was passed from hand to hand. Naturally, by
the time the plate was returned to me, it had more food than anyone else’s.
Audrey had the perfect rejoinder: `You did plan that deliberately, didn’t you?‘
she said. We all laughed so much. The few times my wife and I saw her again
during that stay, all we did was laugh.”

But
in reality, things were glum at home. It was time now to pay for the new
houses. William Wyler called just in time with a slick new comedy-thriller,
How to Steal a Million that Audrey
thought read a lot like
Charade.
Ever
since
Roman Holiday,
she’d felt a
loyalty to Wyler. He could easily persuade her to do any film, but she was glad
this one was a frothier concoction than
The
Children’s Hour,
their last joint venture.

A
madcap story of art forgery and familial loyalty,
How to Steal a Million
costarred Peter O’Toole as a detective who
specializes in art-related crimes (and who is mistaken for a thief by Audrey’s
character). Hugh Griffith played Audrey’s father, the master forger.

“I
didn’t want to work with her at all,” O’Toole recalled. “No way. I
thought she was going to be a stuck-up, prissy mannequin who would do anything
to keep her hands clean. She surprised me totally.

“Audrey
Hepburn knew how to get down and dirty and have some prankish good fun. For the
sequence in which we both try to steal back from a museum one of her father’s
creations, we were hiding in a closet. A lot of the scene took place right in
those close quarters, and we really got to know each other well. We were on the
same wavelength. She told me I broke her up, and indeed, a lot of takes were
ruined because one or the other of us would burst into a fit of laughter. Willy
would get hopping mad, but at me, not his darling Audrey. She was the one—and
I think only—actor who could soften his resolve. She just had this wonderfully
sweet way about her, and he was very smitten. He sent her fresh flowers for her
dressing room, all white ones, I recall.”

Wyler,
as well as O’Toole, sensed the end of Audrey’s marriage just by the fact that
Ferrer wasn’t around. “I had heard he ruled her on various sets,”
O’Toole said, “and I didn’t see him once on this one. She never spoke
about it, but there was this sadness that surrounded her like a shroud. She
kept trying to blow it off with giggles, but as soon as she stopped laughing, I
could sense her heart was about to break.

“I
fell in love with Audrey Hepburn on that movie. I just wanted to mend her
broken heart. But I didn’t say a word, which is very unlike me. She made it
very clear that she was holding up just by a thread and that any mention of the
real reason for her unhappiness might send her over the edge. Don’t get me
wrong: There was nothing spoken. If anybody took it to a court of law, I would
have to say she was very happy, on the surface, anyway. We laughed a lot. But
underneath, she was desolate. You just know something like that.”

She
and Ferrer were still not ready to give up. Back at La Paisible, they tried to
make one last go of it. They enjoyed roughhousing with Sean and his young
friends, children of the farmers who surrounded them. On warm nights, they all
went outside to catch fireflies. When autumn arrived, they rolled in massive
piles of leaves. As winter approached, they collected wood for the fireplace.
Everything was fine when all three were together, but when Audrey and Ferrer
were alone, they didn’t have much to say. In spite of the obvious distance
which had grown between them, Audrey became pregnant in the winter of 1966. It
was just before Christmas and she felt a sister or brother for Sean would be a
gift for the whole family. She had hope, she said, that another baby would help
forge a stronger bond with her husband.

At
the Christmas pageant in Sean’s school, she and Ferrer were delighted with his
strong and clear delivery of a Nativity poem, and their pride in him made them
both hope that his enthusiasm and verve might rub off on them. Instead, in what
was becoming a familiar though no less painful occurrence, Audrey suffered
another miscarriage in the week after Christmas.

“It
hurt just as much as the first. It hurt just as much as the second. I’m not
sure you can ever get over something like that. I kept wondering what I did
wrong. Did I overdo the gardening? Was I too active? Was the stress from my
career eating me up? I had no answers. But I think around that time Mel and I
both knew that we weren’t going to survive another disappointment like that.
When Kurt called with a movie, I barely read the script, I was so eager to get
out of the house.”

Ironically,
Two for the Road
, directed by Stanley
Donen, one of Audrey’s favorite directors, turned out to be an evocative portrait
of the demise of a marriage after twelve years, the same amount of time she and
Ferrer had spent together. In truth, it would hurry along the end of her own
somber union by opening her eyes again to the spirit of fun.

Frederic
Raphael’s script for
Two for the Road
—about
the courtship and marriage of Joanna (Audrey) and Mark Wallace (Albert
Finney)—used a highly successful flashback technique which made the standard
story of a marriage gone bad seem fresh and provocative. It also required more
rehearsal time than usual for the two stars, since they had to interact
seamlessly in the past and the present, and make distinctions between the two
with the slightest gestures.