Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (47 page)

A
light farce in which two detectives, played by Gazzara and John Ritter, fall in
love with the “unfaithful” women they are tailing (Audrey and Dorothy
Stratten),
They All Laughed
is a
romantic comedy of the old school, with plenty of surface charm and a
melancholy knowingness about the futility of true love. Yet its plot is quite
contemporary and was eerily similar to Audrey’s own life.

In
the movie, she plays an extremely wealthy, extremely attractive tycoon’s wife
who has not known love for a long time. In fact, it is her husband’s guilt over
his own infidelities that convinces him to hire the private eye and unwittingly
encourage the affair between her and the detective. Their relationship in the
movie is comfortable and bittersweet. “This is where I turn into a
pumpkin,” she tells her lover after one tryst.

Yet
in real life, Audrey enjoyed no such self-knowledge. She became completely
enamored of Gazzara, looking at him long and longingly throughout the shoot,
ignoring the fact that she’d landed her son Sean a small part in the film and
he was around to witness his mother’s lovesickness.

“It
was a very odd time,” Audrey said. “I didn’t know what I wanted, but
I knew I had to want something or else I would be better off dead. I was having
a hard time getting enthusiastic about anything. I could go through the
motions, you might not notice it if you just spent a little time with me, but
inside I was feeling pretty empty.”

A
month after
They All Laughed
completed
filming, a player in the movie and Bogdanovich’s most recent girlfriend, former
Playboy
centerfold Dorothy Stratten,
was brutally murdered by her estranged husband, Paul Snider. (Her death became
the subject of Bob Fosse’s movie
Star 80
.)
Audrey was distraught over Stratten’s death, a fact that was complicated by
rumors that Audrey herself was having an affair with Bogdanovich.

The
director became inconsolable over the tragedy of losing Stratten. He made a
hasty decision to distribute
They All
Laughed
himself, to prevent anyone from using Stratten’s death to enhance
the promotion of the movie.

His
decision hurt the chances for
They All
Laughed.
Although the movie was acclaimed when it debuted at the Venice
Film Festival in the summer of 1981 and
Variety
called it “probably Bogdanovich’s best film to date,” its release
in the United States was delayed by Bogdanovich’s inexperience in distribution.
When it finally opened in New York that winter, the critical response was lukewarm,
and the movie languished at the box office. Audrey had expected it to redeem
her from the mistake of
Bloodline.
When
it did not, she began to feel her career was over.

Her
friends rallied to her side. Close chum Connie Wald, widow of producer Jerry
Wald, threw a small dinner party at her Bel Air mansion and insisted Audrey
join her, Billy and Audrey Wilder, and Robert Wolders, the extremely handsome
young widower of legendary actress Merle Oberon. He was grief-stricken over
Oberon’s death several months earlier, Wald explained, and it was one of his
first nights out. To insure Wolders’s presence, Wald had told him that Audrey
was extremely depressed and might be cheered up by spending time with someone
else from the Netherlands.

“It
was a time in both our lives when we were very sad,” Audrey said. “We
had that in common. That was enough to keep us seeing one another as friends
for a long time.”

On
that first evening, from the moment they discovered they had spent their
childhoods in nearby towns in Holland, Audrey and Wolders never stopped talking
to one another. A former actor who had costarred in the television series
Laredo, Wolders had made a successful
switch to producing, mostly movies in northern Europe. “It was friendship
at first sight,” Audrey said. “But that was not enough to cause us to
fall in love. That happened later.”

In
the ensuing months, on the pretext of business, Wolders often mysteriously
showed up in whatever city Audrey happened to be. “I came more and more to
rely on him,” she said. “He made himself indispensable as a friend
and confidant. If he didn’t call for a few days, I began to miss him. It was a
gradual falling in love, but that’s what it was. I must say it took me
completely by surprise. I thought that part of my life was over, that I would
never have the romance I dreamed of as a girl. Then, when you least expect it…”

They
had much in common. They were both attractive and reticent and gentle and
Dutch. They both had suffered greatly during the war. However strong he looked,
Wolders endured terrible headaches that were the direct result of wartime
deprivation. Audrey understood his residual pain. He realized her eating
disorders were the result of her childhood traumas. They empathized with one
another.

“Audrey,
in the beginning, liked me as a friend and was trying to find me a good
woman!” Wolders said. “I always was attracted to her, I loved her
quite from the start, but I knew she had given up on love and I had to go very
slowly. That was fine with me.”

Their
courtship inched along. Although her divorce from Dotti did not officially come
through until 1982, her marriage to him was long over. “Robbie was
extremely persistent,” Audrey remembered, “but not in an overbearing
way. He would call regularly, and we had some of the best times on the
telephone! It was wonderful—I didn’t even have to get dressed to see him. It’s
funny, but in all the years I knew Merle, I had never met Robbie with her. She
raved about him—how loving, how devoted—but I had a different image of him,
someone not quite his own person. That was not the case at all. He is
completely comfortable with himself, serene. He has definite likes and
dislikes. But he genuinely wants another person in his life, as I do, and is
willing to compromise and share to achieve harmony.”