Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (43 page)

At
thirty-nine, she felt just as young as his thirty. But she knew, too, that
someday she would turn into a mature woman while he remained a young man.
Still, she decided not to think about that.

What
really forged a bond between them was the fact that both their sets of parents
had divorced when they were young and neither of them had seen their father
much after the breakup. They each suffered from a profound fear of abandonment
because of this, although they approached their fears in very different ways.
Dotti had trouble with commitment, preferring to surround himself with hordes
of adoring women rather than count on (and possibly be disappointed by) one
love interest. Audrey, on the other hand, flung herself headlong into
monogamous relationships, not actually knowing what she should look for in a
mate because she didn’t have a father figure with whom to compare him.

Dotti
did have a stepfather however, Vero Roberti, the distinguished correspondent
for the daily newspaper
Corriere della
Sera,
with whom he shared confidences. Roberti and Dotti’s mother, Paola,
were initially distraught when their beloved son mentioned his growing
involvement with Audrey. An actress for a wife? Heaven forbid. A divorced woman
with a child? An older woman?

She
easily won them over, however, during her first visit to their home over the
1968 Christmas holidays. After midnight mass, when the family exchanged gifts,
Paola took Audrey aside and told her she was the nicest present her son could
have ever given her.

“The
family embraced me as if I had always been part of it,” Audrey recalled.
“They were an extremely aristocratic clan, educated, wise, but they were
also some of the most loving people I have ever met. If I had any doubts about
the marriage before I met them, they were completely gone after that Christmas
together. I loved the idea of expanding my family in one easy step.”

Marriage
would bring Audrey an expanded immediate family, which she loved. Dotti had
three brothers—an electrical engineer, a banker, and a sociologist—and when
they all got together with their wives and children and Dotti and Audrey and
Sean, she was never more content.

After
announcing their banns in the post office of Tolochenaz, Audrey and Dotti were
quietly married on January 18, 1969, in the town hall of nearby Morges. The
local registrar, Denise Rattaz, had to momentarily stop the ceremony because
she was crying. “I had never seen a more beautiful bride before that day,
and I never would,” she said.

Audrey
was dressed in a simple, short, pink Givenchy ensemble with sleeves that
petaled out like tulips at the wrist. “She was so serene that day,”
recalled Capucine, who witnessed the ceremony along with Yul Brynner’s wife
Doris. “I believe she had never been happier.” According to Paul Weiller,
who introduced the couple on that fateful cruise of the Greek isles,
“There was no doubt in my mind that this marriage was a great thing for
both of them. It gave Andrea someone to love and it gave Audrey security.”

The
idyll would not last long, however. Dotti had trouble loving just one woman and
that made Audrey terribly insecure.

But
throughout the winter and spring of 1969, Audrey reveled in her new life. She
and Dotti had located a marvelous apartment overlooking the Tiber River near
the Ponte Vittorio in Rome, and Audrey delighted in decorating it, often
accepting wonderful antiques lent to her by her doting mother-in-law. Sean
adjusted beautifully to life with a stepfather, and he seemed to delight in
living in a city, exploring every inch of Rome.

Audrey
often walked her husband to work in the morning, returned home to see Sean off
to school, spent the morning planning the evening’s meal with the cook, then
did the marketing herself.

I
was in heaven, pure and simple,“ she said. ”I had wanted so long to
actually run a household day in and day out. With Mel, we were never in one
place for more than a month or two at a time, so even at home, things felt
temporary. In Italy, I could finally develop a routine. I think I probably
overdid the `wife and mother‘ thing a little in those first couple of months,
but then I calmed down and was never happier. I began to shop for clothing and
really enjoy it. All those years of people raving about my style, and for that
brief moment, I knew what they meant.“

Audrey’s
simple elegance was at its height. Not only did she purchase more of her
beloved Givenchys, she also began buying Valentino, another classic couturier.
She finally began to like how she looked, just a little bit.

The
family went to little trattorias for long lunches, or spent leisurely, stolen
afternoons at the Gambrino Beach Club. Countess Gaetani, who had introduced
Audrey to her hosts for the Greek cruise, invited the Dottis for weekend
sojourns to her spectacular property on the Islo Giglio in the Mediterranean.
They toured museums together. They even went to the movies like ordinary
people.

Audrey
loved being a homebody in Italy, and the sweet regularity of her days made her
happier than she’d ever been. The honeymoon—for that’s what daily living felt
like to her—was lasting longer than she’d ever hoped. When she became pregnant
in April, she thought she had finally found the world of domestic bliss she had
always sought.

“I
was beginning to think I’d finally found peace,” Audrey recalled. “In
my usual dramatic way, I decided I never wanted to work again in motion
pictures; I would just tend to my family. It was giving me so much satisfaction
to be a wife and mother, I wished for a time I had never become an
actress.”