Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (46 page)

She
did, however, travel to America to help promote
Robin and Marian,
and was treated as if she were a true princess
from Rome on holiday in New York and Los Angeles.

“It
was too much, too exaggerated,” she said about her overwhelming reception.
“I felt as if I had died and returned to life. I guess very few actresses
had retired and come back.” Audrey was wrong; many actresses had. But they
were not the stars of
Roman Holiday,
or
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
or
My Fair Lady. In Hollywood, Jack
Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, spoke for all
of her fans when he addressed her from the stage of the Santa Monica Civic
Center. “Welcome back, Audrey,” he said. “You’ve been away too
long.”

She
was beginning to feel the same way. Her marriage to Dotti was continuing to
disintegrate. His philandering continued, but now that she was living primarily
in Switzerland, she realized it didn’t bother her as much. It was a matter of
“out of sight, out of mind.” She was forced by circumstances to live
without him, and she was living. That was the first incontrovertible evidence
that her marriage was over. She was surviving on her own. Once Audrey stopped
caring, there was no point in continuing.

Publicly,
however, she kept up a good front. “My marriage is basically happy,”
she told one reporter who did not stick to her rules and ask questions only
about
Robin and Marian.
“We have
our differences, our disagreements, but we cope. We do our best at
coping.”

But
Audrey was not doing her best at coping. As much as she realized her marriage was
over, she could not bring herself to confront Dotti and officially end it.
“My pride was involved, of course,” she said, “and also my
overwhelming fear of being left alone. Even when I was doing the leaving, I was
afraid I would be left. It’s irrational, yes, but also very real.”

She
wanted to get out of the marriage, but she also wanted to make sure she would
have a project to occupy her and take her mind off her loneliness.
Consequently, she made one of the worst film choices of her whole career. Terence
Young, the director of
Wait Until Dark,
persuaded
Audrey to do Sidney Sheldon’s
Bloodline,
a
lurid melodrama about sex, violence, and greed, a stark departure from her
usual fare.

She
may also have been more interested in the tax advantages of
Bloodline, which was being filmed under
the auspices of a West German tax shelter, than she was in its titillating soap
opera plot about a woman thrust into the world of business.

She
insisted on, however, and won, many concessions. The majority of her scenes were
shot in Rome. There was only a minor stay in New York. If she had had to fly to
Copenhagen, Sardinia, and Munich with the rest of the cast, she would have
turned down the leading role of Elizabeth Rolfe. It would have interfered too
much with Luca’s school schedule. In addition, because she was a mother first
now, scenes of gratuitous sex and violence were excised from the script. Sidney
Sheldon agreed to tamper with his prose just to keep Audrey. He became so
enamored of her that he diluted some of his best sex scenes so as not to offend
her.

“She
had a quality no other actress had: a curious combination of lady and
pixie,” said Sheldon. “She was a joy to work with—enormous talent
and no ego.”

“It
was an awful time for me,” Audrey recalled. “I began worrying about
money for me and the boys when I thought about leaving Andrea, and I suppose
the million dollars for
Bloodline
was
a big inducement to taking on the picture. It offered financial security, which
meant more to me than artistic value at the time. And I felt I had to have
something to do or I would go crazy.”

While
filming, she became friendly with costar Ben Gazzara. He was going through a
difficult time in his marriage to Janice Rule, and they commiserated often
about wedded woes. “He was a lifesaver without even knowing it,”
Audrey said. “Just to hear someone else going through the confusion and
bitterness of a breakup made me feel less alone. We had these rambling
philosophical discussions about the meaning of love and commitment and really became
good friends.
Bloodline
may have been
awful, but it was redeemed in my eyes because I met Ben on it.”

During
the filming, the cast had a midnight spaghetti party. Liza Minnelli came and
gave an extremely gushing toast to Audrey. In response, Audrey got on the table
and started dancing, leaping with joy. “It came out of her
sweetness,” recalled Gazzara, “out of her being embarrassed by the
praise. I thought it was charming, better than words. Speaking words would have
made her cry. So she danced. How she danced around the spaghetti plates, I
don’t know. But she didn’t break one of them.”

When
the movie opened, it received the worst reviews of any film in Audrey’s career.
“It is a ghastly film,” wrote George Bishop in London’s
Sunday Express, “hackneyed,
humorless, grubby, and… so disjointed as to be a pain to follow.” But
the critics were still kind to Audrey. The only thing worth seeing in
Bloodline, they agreed, was Audrey
Hepburn as the dutiful daughter who inherits her father’s enormous pharmaceutical
empire and must do battle with her rivals within and without her family. Most
said she rose above the material and instilled a surprising vulnerability into
a stock character.

Audrey
needed to hear that she still had the ability to charm audiences. She was
getting worried that she had irreparably sabotaged her career by ignoring it
for so long and by picking so dreadful a commercial vehicle as
Bloodline. Gazzara told her a bold move
was in order. If she did not wish to be perceived as a has-been, he advised,
she had to avoid big commercial movies for the next few years. Hollywood had
changed, he said. The important movies were not being made by studios any
longer. The independent feature films now had all the cachet. He persuaded her
to take a look at Peter Bogdanovich’s
They
All Laughed,
the movie he had just agreed to do.