Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (41 page)

The
plot of the movie is irresistible: Susie Hendrix (Audrey), recently blind, is
left alone in her basement apartment in Manhattan when her husband (Efrem
Zimbalist, Jr.) is lured away by a hoax. The three perpetrators of the ruse
(Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, and Jack Weston) then show up to search for a
heroin-filled antique musical doll unwittingly in her possession.

Director
Terence Young, best known as the overseer of several James Bond movies, would
give the movie a heart-stopping pace that caused audiences around the country
to scream aloud at its most frightening moments. But in the beginning, he, too,
was most concerned with Audrey’s giving a realistic performance, and in New
York, he introduced her to several pupils from the Lighthouse for the Blind.
They taught her to distinguish various sounds and helped ease her fear of the
darkness. “The best thing I learned was how to put lipstick on without a
mirror,” Audrey said. “I count it as one of my major
accomplishments.”

“We
would walk around together with blindfolds,” Young recalled, “but Audrey’s
patience won her the ability to learn to do things without sight, while I would
get too frustrated. She was fascinated by the whole process, you could just
tell. She’d talk to me about the feel of things and what they sound like with
such highly descriptive language that I sensed she was discovering a new way of
seeing, herself.”

Her
heightened appreciation of all of her senses led Audrey to insist upon
afternoon tea every day during filming. Unbelievably, the production would shut
down every afternoon precisely at 4:00 p.m. and the cast and crew would sip
tea, eat dainty sandwiches, and talk quietly with one another.

“Looking
back,” said Richard Crenna, “it’s still hard to believe we really did
have tea—in china cups, I might add—every day we worked. It was an amazingly
civilized thing to do, and only Audrey would have thought of it. But it brought
us into a close camaraderie without the sloppy familiarity that would have
resulted from our drinking together every evening. This was tea—and it was polite,
genteel, and oh so Audrey.”

The
strain of working with Ferrer was beginning to take its toll, however. As she
did in so many times of stress, she just stopped eating. Jack Warner, who had
worried about her health throughout the making of
My Fair Lady,
now wondered if she was going to make it through
Wait Until Dark. After seeing her gaunt
face and progressively scrawnier body on some of the dailies, he sent her
baskets of fruit and boxes of chocolates. Although she thanked him profusely,
the gifts went uneaten.

To
make matters worse, Ferrer was trying to interest studios in another production
of the tragic love story
Mayerling,
but
this time around he wanted Catherine Deneuve to play the role Audrey had done
so well.

“I
was in a bad way,” she recalled. “I missed Sean tremendously and I
worried night and day what would happen if Mel and I didn’t make it. My own
childhood was ruined when my father left. It was as if I didn’t have a
childhood after that. I had to grow up and be a good girl and help my mother,
and I never could scream and say I wanted my daddy. I was so afraid for Sean
that I vowed to stay with Mel.”

In
fact, even after there was no hope of a lasting reconciliation, Audrey became
pregnant again in July of 1967. She lost the baby in August, “and I knew
the ruse was over,” she said. In September, just before
Wait Until Dark was officially released,
lawyers announced the end of the Ferrer-Hepburn marriage in a succinct
statement that belied the pain and suffering each of them had endured:

“Audrey
Hepburn, thirty-eight, and Mel Ferrer, fifty, have separated after thirteen
years of marriage. Ferrer is in Paris and Miss Hepburn is at their home in
Switzerland with their son, Sean, seven.”

Audrey
would never say anything to diminish her ex-husband in the eyes of their son.
She sadly explained to him that Mommy and Daddy would not be living together
any longer, but that they both loved him as much as ever.

“It
brought me back to the time when my own parents separated,” Audrey
recalled. “And as much as I wanted to believe those same words that were
said to me, I couldn’t help then but think it was all my fault.

“But
then it came to me: If I thought somewhere in my soul that my own parents’
divorce was because of me, then I was perpetuating all this unhappiness. I was
giving a legacy of sadness to my son. I did my best to get rid of the guilt I
had—misplaced though it was, it was real—over my own parents’ breakup, so
that I could make crystal clear to Sean he had nothing to do with the troubles
between his mommy and daddy.

“I
never wanted to be divorced,” Audrey continued. “To this day, I hate
the word. I cringe when it’s applied to me. My own ideal was always to be
married once, and forever. It’s the way I was. I thought a marriage between two
good people should last until one of them died, and then I believed the other
person would just live quietly on the memories.

“But
life didn’t work out that way. Mel and I were both good people, but we didn’t
forge a lasting bond. Life, and celebrity, got in the way.”

Audrey
would begin to blame celebrity—and the rigors of living up to an image that
was not real—for a lot of her heartache. She made up her mind to carve a new
life for herself, one that did not rely on bright lights.