Audrey Hepburn (33 page)

Her director disagreed. “She's as good as the other Hepburn,” Huston declared. This was drama, not melodrama. Audrey's role in
The Unforgiven,
in fact, represented a big departure from her previous princesses and saints: an adopted Indian girl entangled not only in the violence and racial nightmares of frontier Texas but, simultaneously, in an incestuous relationship with her brother (Lancaster).

Since Texas no longer resembled itself in the 1860s, Huston decided to film in Durango, Mexico, which retained the primitive look of the early Lone Star panhandle. But at Durango's Casablanca Hotel, where the cast was ensconced, there was some tension. Audrey got along with everybody, but Lillian Gish, playing her mother, developed an intense dislike for costar Audie Murphy. He was then under a serious charge of cattle rustling that required studio influence and the full manipulation of Murphy's World War II hero status to overcome. He also nearly drowned one day in a boating accident on a nearby lake.

Murphy had escaped disaster by inches. Audrey did not. On January 28, 1959, she attempted to ride bareback on a white stallion, aptly named Diablo and formerly owned by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Determined to do all her own riding in the film, she had firmly rejected the idea of a stand-in, despite her lack of equestrian experience. For hours, she practiced riding around a corral and did well enough for Huston to make some preliminary shots. Mel Ferrer takes up the account from there:

“[As she was] cantering toward the cameras, they decided to retake the scene and stopped the cameras. A horseman was sent out to tell her to ride back slowly. Arabian stallions are very fiery animals. This one saw the other horse coming, stopped short and threw his head down. Audrey had nothing to hold on to and was pitched over the stallion's head.”
⁶¹

She landed on her back, before the horrified eyes of the company, including Huston and Lancaster, who rushed toward her with three wranglers to get the horses under control. Before fainting, she had the presence of mind to joke to Lancaster, “I had to do something to get out of this hellhole.”
⁶²

She was sure her back was broken but was far more concerned about her unborn baby—as yet a secret from the world—and about Mel's reaction. He was doing promotional appearances in New York for
Green Mansions
and a guest shot on
What's My Line?
When informed, he immediately flew to Durango, where he found her in capable hands at the local hospital but horribly afraid she might be paralyzed. “I'd hate to see her become another Susan Peters,” said Burt Lancaster, with some lack of tact—referring to the rising young film actress who was injured in a 1944 hunting accident and never walked again.
⁶³

Mel sent for Dr. Howard Mendelson, Audrey's Hollywood physician, who confirmed what the X rays showed: four broken vertebrae, torn muscles in her lower back, and a badly sprained foot. Dr. Mendelson arrived with none other than Marie-Louise Habets—the real-life Sister Luke—who took personal nursing charge of Audrey. “Sister Lou” persuaded her to return on an ambulance plane to California on February 2 and nursed her for the next month, tending to her injuries and salving her conscience for holding up production of the film.

“In thirty years of experience, I never before had a patient like her,” said Habets. “She refused all narcotics and sedatives, and despite her pain she never once complained.”
⁶⁴

Audrey bore her recuperation with regal stoicism indeed. She wrote more than one hundred thank-you notes to her well-wishers in the first two weeks alone, prompting journalist Eleanor Harris to elaborate on the theme of her need for admiration: “Throughout each day, she strives ... to be a shining example of good character and good manners.” One friend provided an illustrative account of visiting her in the hospital:

Her attitude toward the stallion was typically benevolent. In her first phone conversation with Mel after the accident, she had said, ‘“Don't get angry at the horse! It wasn't the horse's fault,”' Ferrer recalled.
⁶⁶

The doctors assured them there was no danger of paralysis. Though there was some hemorrhaging, the fractures were clean breaks, no surgery was needed and there was little to do but let the hemorrhages drain and the fractures heal. She would have to complete the final work on the picture in an orthopedic brace.

She returned to Durango as she left it—on a stretcher—and was back on the set by March 10. Huston welcomed her with fireworks and a mariachi band, and together they reorchestrated her remaining scenes. There was no getting around the fact that, to match the shots made before the accident, she had to ride Diablo once more. But this time he was sedated, she was properly secured, and all went well.

Thirty-five years later, shortly before his death, costar Doug McClure (who played Audrey's younger brother in the film) recalled being mesmerized by her on the set:

Hepburn's opening line of dialogue in the film requires her to say “ain‘t” for the first time on screen—or probably in her life. Chekhov's Three Sisters longed for Moscow; Audrey and her Three Brothers long for Wichita—the symbol of civilization. Director Huston seems to be preparing for
The Misfits:
The violent horse-breaking scenes harbinger those of Clark Gable a year later. Here, the “code of the West” supplies an analogy for the sixties, and the film overall is so shocking as to be almost—but not quite—politically correct. “Red niggers, all of ‘em!” screams one character. Gish has a stunning “mad scene” in which she beats the horse out from under a lynching victim, for having revealed her adopted daughter's Indian origin. And in the chilling climax, Lancaster orders McClure, his brother, to “Kill one!”, meaning an Indian—
any
Indian—deliberately provoking a massacre and the death of his own mother.

In the midst of the final siege, Audrey asks Burt if he would “fancy her” if he weren't her brother. His answer takes the form of a passionate kiss. Her next move is to shoot and kill her
real
Indian brother outside.

When released in April 1960,
The Unforgiven
was compared by some to George Stevens's
Shane-a
sincere “adult Western” delving into miscegenation. But it was mostly panned. Lillian Gish, who rarely uttered a critical word, would say “Audrey's talent was never used properly in the film.” Stanley Kauffmann said it more brutally: “That Huston cannot get a good performance out of Burt Lancaster can hardly be held against him, but he has achieved here what no other director has ever managed: to get a really bad performance out of the lovely Audrey Hepburn.”

Huston felt that all the performances but Burt Lancaster's were doomed from the outset. “Some of my pictures I don't care for,” he said, “but
The Unforgiven
is the only one I actually dislike.... The overall tone is bombastic and overinflated. Everybody in it is bigger than life. I watched it on television one night recently, and after about half a reel I had to turn the damned thing off. I couldn't bear it.”
⁶⁸

Many years later, Audrey privately confided that she took the picture seriously and was “very disappointed that Huston did not, and that he showed disdain for it.”
^69
ao
In any case, film historian Molly Haskell feels its erotic and emotional subtexts exemplified the Freudian implications of Audrey's
oeuvre
overall:

IN REAL LIFE, there was no such dark subtext with Audrey's own two half brothers, who adored their glamorous little sister and kept in regular touch. Elder brother Alexander, his wife, Miep, and their children, Michael and Evelyn, traveled extensively for Bataafsche Petroleum (Shell), moving from Indonesia to Japan, then Holland, later Brunei and back to Japan again, remaining with Shell until his retirement in 1970. Currently, Alexander had a new two-year assignment to Congo-Leopoldville.

Brother Ian, too, was a one-company man for life. He, his wife Yvonne and their daughter, “Audrey II,” lived in Holland, where Unilever's fast-growing personal-products division now included Pepsodent, Elizabeth Arden, Calvin Klein and Helene Curtis cosmetics, and various perfumes. Ian and family had recently paid a surprise visit to
The Nun's Story
set in Rome, during which “Audrey I” made a big fuss over “Audrey II.”

There was never a problem with her brothers. But there was the complex, ongoing dilemma of her father. Around this time, her mother wrote her to say she had heard that Ruston died. “I was so distraught,” Audrey recalled. “I realized how much I cared.... I just couldn't bear the idea that I wouldn't see him again. Mel said, ‘Maybe it's not true.' ... He went about finding him, and discovered that he was still living in Dublin.”
⁷¹

The joy and the pain of that news were about equal. “He had never tried to reach me, nor did he ever want to see me,” she said. “It is hard for children who are dumped. It tortures a child beyond measure.... I never saw him from the time he left when I was six. [But] at age thirty, I had this great need [and] I traveled to Dublin with Mel. My father was living in a tiny apartment, just two rooms.... He looked the way I remembered him. Older, yes, but much the same. Slim and tall. He was married to a woman some thirty-odd years his junior, almost my age.”
⁷²

Ruston would turn 75 that November. Audrey attributed their long separation to “his sense of discretion” and fear that his fascist politics and imprisonment might hurt her reputation. He was up to date on her fame and unsympathetic about her riding accident on
The Unforgiven:
“He had been a great horseman in his youth, and he said to me, ‘Of course you were a fool to ride a gray stallion.' He was cross with me for riding a horse that I should have known was likely to throw me.”

From then on, she sent him a monthly check and took care of his every need for two decades, until he died in his nineties. “It helped me to lay the ghost [to rest],” she said.
⁷³

Audrey and Mel's own little family now occupied her mind: She was a happily pregnant woman and, after completion of
The Unforgiven,
returned to Burgenstock for the duration of her term. But soon after, she miscarried again. “I blamed God,” Audrey recalled. “I blamed myself. I blamed John Huston. I was a bundle of anger and recrimination. I couldn't understand why I couldn't have children. Mel and I were so much in love.”
⁷⁴

Ferrer called it “a tragedy” and said, “It has broken her heart and mine.” Audrey went into a deep depression. Her weight fell to ninety-eight pounds, and she was smoking three packs a day. In an effort to snap her out of it, Mel made her keep a commitment to do a six-city tour for the European release of
The Nun's Story
in October 1959. After London, Stockholm and Paris, they went to Amsterdam, where her reception was more subdued than the 1954 mob scene that greeted her. Reporters found her looking tired from the heavy schedule, but she rose to the occasion and gave “clean Dutch answers” to various weighty questions, while Mel stood by and smiled uncomprehendingly.