Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (42 page)

Chapter 24

She
couldn’t eat. The more she tried to force something down—a piece of toast, an
orange—the more the food disgusted her. She was even having a hard time making
meals for Sean, because the aromas from cooking sickened her.

A
month after her marriage to Ferrer broke up, Audrey’s weight had dropped to an
alarming ninety-four pounds. “I had never seen her so thin,” said
Germaine Lefebvre, the French-born actress better known as Capucine and one of
Audrey’s closest friends. “Her cheekbones were so pointy, I was afraid if
I kissed her they would hurt. And she wouldn’t leave the house. I felt she was
on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I would ask her what good she would be
for Sean if she had to be hospitalized.”

Capucine
thought that if Audrey were paid a little male attention, she might rally.
Rumors of Ferrer’s indiscriminate dating devastated Audrey. Capucine persuaded
her to go to the house in Marbella for a change of scenery, and once there, she
started to go out in the evenings, often on the arm of Prince Alfonso de
Bourbon-Dampierre or the Spanish bullfighter Antonio Ordonez.

Gossip
columnists reported her soulful gazes at Prince Alfonso. In the middle of
crowded Marbella nightclubs, she seemed completely engrossed in what he was
saying, not hearing anyone else. It looked to all the world like love.

“It
was a complete act,” Audrey said. “I have never been so scared in all
my life. I felt completely alone, and my friends had convinced me it didn’t
have to be that way. But I didn’t want to start dating. Once you reach a
certain age, the idea of telling a stranger your whole life story—in other
words, of getting to know someone and letting them get to know you—is a
frightening prospect. During those first tentative steps I took to socialize, I
hated every minute. I thought maybe if I looked interested enough I could avoid
the whole courtship thing and just quickly get married again. I wanted
desperately to be married. At least then I wouldn’t have to say I was
divorced!”

Friends
around the world became worried about Audrey, and the sense of desperation they
saw in her. Lollo and Lorean Gaetani Lovatelli, part of the “fun”
aristocracy she occasionally joined at parties in various European capitals,
invited her to dinner at their stately palace on Rome’s Piazza Lovatelli. It
was an extremely low-key affair, with all the guests lamenting the boring
months ahead with nothing to look forward to except a costume ball in Venice
during Mardi Gras. Despite her pedigree as the daughter of a baroness, Audrey
felt out of place among the jaded jet-setters. But she soon realized they made
it their business to pamper anyone in their set who might be feeling low; they
took care of their own. Despite the fact that she found the conversations vapid
and wearying, she also felt comforted in their midst. Tedium aside, at least
she would not be alone.

Princess
Olympia Torlonia had just that in mind when she invited Audrey for a cruise of
the Greek islands with her and her fabulously wealthy husband, French gasoline
king Paul Annik Weiller. The two-week cruise in June of 1968 would be just what
the doctor ordered, Princess Olympia said. It would be relaxing and
revitalizing. There would be several other guests, she said. They were all
congenial.

Audrey
had eyes for only one of them: Andrea Mario Dotti, M.D., a wealthy young
psychiatrist who specialized in treating women and depression. He was
solicitous and charming, empathetic and warm, everything Mel could never be.

Sunning
together on the prow of the boat, they spent hours talking alone. Dotti was
captivated by the innocence of the world-renowned movie star. It was clear to
all aboard that he was quickly falling in love with her.

She
was more reticent. Audrey was not at all averse to a little shipboard romance,
but as much as she purported to want to get married again, she didn’t think
Dotti was a suitable candidate. He was young—nine years younger than she and,
more telling, twenty-one years younger than Ferrer. But he was extremely
persuasive in his wooing, and his gentleness delighted Audrey.

Born
in Naples on March 18, 1938, Dotti also descended from a long line of counts
and countesses, but unlike Audrey, his regal lineage was well endowed. Audrey
was the first to admit to herself that she liked the idea that Dotti was
financially comfortable, but she liked even more that he worked long and hard
at his psychiatric clinic for a token salary. His dedication to his profession
proved to her that he had character. But these were mere musings to herself.
She was afraid to speak of her growing attachment to the handsome young doctor
to any of her friends, and especially her always-protective mother.

The
trip turned out to be one of the first real vacations she’d had in years.
Ferrer was always too ambitious and too often frustrated to relax for long.
Schemes to produce movies, or to popularize himself or Audrey, continually
interfered with any fun. But with Dotti, and the rest of her European
entourage, the talk was always of the beauty of the tiny, round-domed houses
against the blue of the water in Crete, of the possibility that Santorini was
really the lost island of Atlantis, of the bracing taste of retsina with a
wedge of feta and a fresh tomato. They lived each day in the present, and in
the present, Audrey and Dotti began to express their love for one another

Then
Dotti made a startling revelation, one that would endear him to Audrey for the
rest of her life. “ `I’ve met you before, you know,‘ he told me. `And you
don’t remember, do you? That saddens me so. You were filming
Roman Holiday, and I came out to see
you. I was barely a teenager,’ he said, `but I fell in love with you then. You
were the first woman for whom I remember having sexual urges. I fantasized
about you for the rest of my youth. You took my hand when we met and squeezed
it gently—more familiar than a shake—and I never forgot you.‘ ”

Audrey,
however, had no recollection of the meeting. “That’s because he was such a
young boy!” she said. “When Andrea told me that, it was clear to me
our age difference would again foul us up if we stayed together. I tried to
rationalize it—we loved one another, we had similar interests. He was older
than me intellectually; that was true. But always, in the back of my mind, I
remembered that Andrea was once a boy when I was a woman.”