Audrey Hepburn (51 page)

She and Sergio chatted of everyday things—“the remodeling of the house, a lot about the garden, because we both loved gardens, and we both had a love for birds—she used to have a canary wherever she lived. She was not chatty about her personal feelings. She was British in that way—friendly, kind, but with that reserve of ‘Don't get too close to me.' I cannot say what her relations were with her husband. I had too much respect for her. You could see she had a problem, but it wasn't discussed. I'm not that kind of hairdresser who trades confidences.”
¹⁸

Their conversation was never intimate until the day when Audrey gently confronted him about the fact that he seemed depressed. “She said, ‘Sergio, I think you need my husband,' and she made an appointment for me with him. She arranged it. He took care of me.”
¹⁹

The “problem” between Audrey and Andrea, which Sergio was too discreet to probe, was a three-pronged one concerning sex. In the first place, her private eroticism consisted more of restrained tenderness than of the passionate abandon preferred by an Italian husband. Secondly, though she was nearing the end of her child-bearing years and had always had gynecological difficulties even when much younger, she was now—in May 1969, just four months after her wedding—pregnant again. Finally, on the heels of that exciting news and tending to spoil it, was the persistent rumor that Andrea was seeing other women.

“Rumor” was a euphemism. There was plenty of photographic evidence, thanks to the paparazzi, widely published for all who wished to see. Audrey was not among those who wished to see, but she could hardly avoid all the newspaper and magazine pictures of her husband in the company of some of the most striking and, in some cases, infamous Roman beauties.

Take the jet-set model Daniela Ripetti, for example, a favorite of photographers all over Europe for her guaranteed scandalous behavior on all occasions. She once interrupted a Beatles press conference in Milan to insist that the Fab Four listen to her sing and take her in as their Fab Fifth. Later, she became engaged to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who died soon after of a drug overdose. She herself had spent nine months in prison on drug charges—and now, she was cavorting with Andrea in the hot nightspots of Rome.
²⁰

Dr. Dotti was snapped with many other female companions at the clubs. It was all the more galling to Audrey because she was in Switzerland expecting a baby at the time—a fact loudly trumpeted by the press. In the early months of her term, Audrey happily relaxed at the fashionable Gambrino Beach Club in Rome. But in the last six months, her confinement became exactly that, and on doctors' orders she stayed in bed or on a couch at La Paisible. It was during that period, predictably enough, that Andrea's nightlife skyrocketed.

Dotti's friends offered the creative excuse that what looked like fun and games were really part of his “research” for a book he was writing in his area of expertise—the use of psychotropic drugs for depression in women. “Major tranquilizers, but not LSD,” he clarified. “We dispensed with [LSD] years ago. My approach to psychotherapy is closer to Freud's than to that of Jung, more physical and emotional than religious.”
²¹

Freudian or Jungian, it was the physical approach that had Audrey worried.

 

 

LUCA DOTTI was born on February 8, 1970, by caesarean section at the Cantonal Hospital in Lausanne and named for his father's youngest brother. If Audrey and Dotti's family had been annoyed with Andrea for his indiscretions, things were now smoothed over, temporarily, by the joy of Luca's arrival. Once again, her most precious gift came from Sean: He not only failed to show any sibling rivalry toward the new baby but was actively fond of him and, from the start, developed a strong, avuncular relationship with his little brother that would last a lifetime.

The proud parents soon returned to Rome, where they showed off Luca to the adoring Dotti family and friends, and where Audrey now immersed herself fully in the dual role of mother and doctor's wife. There was no trace of the star in the woman who pushed the pram in the park, tossed her own special herbal pasta salads, and blended in comfortably with the Dotti family.

Author Dominick Dunne vividly remembers seeing her at “a large and boisterous spaghetti dinner” in Andrea's mother's home. “I watched her sit in dutiful daughter-in-law docility, drawing no attention to herself,” Dunne recalled, “while her husband's mother reigned as the undisputed star of the evening.”
²²

Journalist Anna Cataldi, who knew all three Dotti brothers and met Audrey through them, felt Audrey was deeply generous when faced with Andrea's reluctance to give up his practice in Rome and move to Switzerland, where she felt more secure:

“She adored her house in Switzerland, but to a big extent she gave it up for the life she was building for herself and Andrea in Rome. She took the role of the doctor's wife very seriously. She would help him when the lithium arrived and they had to measure out the doses. One time when Andrea was very sick after an operation—he developed an infection—the person who saved his life was Audrey. She was impeccable with him.

“It was a very strong, complicated relationship. When Audrey started to find out about his infidelity, she said, ‘I'm going away.' He said, ‘I promise it won't happen again,' and she believed him. She later found out he couldn't be believed, but I think he was genuine when he promised. I never met Mel Ferrer, but I think Andrea was more human. Certainly, he never wanted to promote himself through her.”

Audrey increased her own efforts to make things work. She met him for institutional dinners at the hospital when he had to work late and otherwise accommodated him in every way. She let him and everyone else know she was fascinated by his work:

“It is most interesting being married to a psychiatrist,” she said, and she wanted to hear all about his patients' case histories—anonymously, of course. Her own two-penny psychiatric theory was that most people's anguish stemmed from either the reality or the fear of loneliness.

Housewifery, to hear Audrey speak of it, was downright idyllic: “It's sad if people think that's a dull existence, [but] you can't just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It's the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don't want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn't it?”
²³

Part of the motivation was guilt. It had struck her during
Wait Until Dark
that she could no longer “take the stress of being away from Sean.”
²⁴
From his birth in 1960 to 1967, she regretted missing much of his childhood and, in her highly self-critical way, felt she had shunted him aside to make movies. When Luca was born, she resolved to stay home and dote on him—with the full support of Andrea, in contrast to Mel's constant pressure to keep working. She would not repeat the “mistake” she felt she made with Sean, who was now almost out of her nest.
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Though Rome was home, a powerful kind of homesickness still lingered for La Paisible, and so she took Sean and baby Luca to Switzerland for the summer of 1970. Andrea visited on weekends and spent the whole month of August there, during which he and Audrey rebonded and rebounded from their rifts.

“If I could have had more than my two sons, if I could have had daughters as well—and dozens of them—then I certainly would,” she said.
²⁵
Andrea wanted a larger family, too, but Audrey's doctor advised against it, telling her, “You shouldn't tempt the devil.”
²⁶

That advice matched Audrey's own instinct: She always felt profoundly grateful for what she had—but profoundly fearful of losing it. She expressed that in a
Vogue
interview, romantically titled, “The Loving World of Audrey Hepburn Dotti and Her Family in their Swiss Farmhouse,” reflecting on her wartime experiences and the things for which she was now most thankful:

HER LIFE was not entirely a Roman holiday, of course. The paparazzi dogged her and her toddler's every move. “I could take him nowhere,” she complained, “not to a park, not down the street, not put him on a terrace without paparazzi. [It] really drove me mad ... to have photographers jump out from behind trees and he would be howling because he was so startled.“
²⁸
Luca echoed that later. ”I would get very angry,” he said. “I wanted to walk around like other people.”

To escape that nuisance, she and the children spent more and more time at her more isolated La Paisible. Which meant that Andrea, back in Rome, spent more and more time in the clubs and discos—photographic evidence usually appearing in the next morning's papers. But for that matter, even when Audrey was in Rome, Dotti was often out and about late at night without her. Hepburn, says Rob Wolders, “was humiliated.”
²⁹

But she did her best not to show it, stuck doggedly to her home front, and continued to turn down one movie script after another—some of them plums. Offered the tsarina in
Nicholas and Alexandra,
she left it to Janet Suzman. William Wyler wanted her to play the divorcee in Forty Carats, but the studio would not agree to her request to film it in Rome. (Liv Ullmann finally took the role and Milton Katselas, not Wyler, directed.) It was reported in April 1971 that she would star in a film based on Anne Edwards's novel,
The Survivors,
to be directed by Terence Young. But it didn't happen. Neither did a Ross Hunter film planned for her, The Marble Arch, nor the movie version of Garson Kanin's novel,
A Thousand Summers.
Jeanne Moreau wrote and directed a screenplay called
Lumière,
hand-tailoring a role for Audrey. But Hepburn declined and Moreau did the part herself.

When confronted, through the media, with the disappointment of her fans, she protested, “I've never believed in this ‘God-given talent.' I adored my work and I did my best. But I don't think I'm robbing anybody of anything.”
³⁰

Over and over, to the same question, she replied with variations on the theme: “Some people think that giving up my career was a great sacrifice made for my family, but it wasn't that at all. It was what I most wanted to do.” Sometimes the replies got a bit testy—or even sarcastic: “Let me put it simply. I have absolutely no desire to work. And it's not worth going to a psychotherapist to find out why.”
³¹

One defense was to cut down even further on the press's access to her. “I'm an introvert,” she told Rex Reed. “You'd think after all these years I'd be accustomed to all the fuss, but it never gets any easier.”
³²
From now on, she would insist on limiting interviews to a thirty-minute maximum. “After that,” she said, “the questions become personal.” She once even canceled a scheduled interview on the
Today
show because, after so many years in Rome, she didn't know Barbara Walters and wouldn't discuss her personal life with a “stranger.”
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Audrey now occupied a curious existential and cinematic position, as Warren Harris points out: At forty-two, she and her primary peers—Elizabeth Taylor (thirty-eight), Leslie Caron (thirty-nine), Jean Simmons (forty-one)-were past the ingenue age. The women stars of the moment were Jane Fonda (thirty-three), Vanessa Redgrave (thirty-three), Faye Dunaway (thirty), Julie Christie (twenty-nine), Barbra Streisand (twenty-eight), Catherine Deneuve (twenty-seven) and Mia Farrow (twenty-five). One couldn't quite see Hepburn in any of the Oscar-nominated roles of 1970: Jane Alexander (thirty-one) for
The Great White Hope;
Glenda Jackson (thirty-four) for
Women in Love,
Ali MacGraw (thirty-two) for
Love Story,
Sarah Miles (twenty-nine) for Ryan's
Daughter
or Carrie Snodgress (twenty-four) for
Diary of a
Mad
Housewife.
³⁴

It was both her glory and her problem that “she remained a young girl, even in her forties,” said Leslie Caron, who around this time encountered Audrey and sons in Sardinia while Leslie was vacationing there with her own two children. But there was no movie talk. “We [just] compared and admired our respective offspring with motherly pride.”
³⁵

Motherhood was indeed her occupation these days, but in 1971 she made a delicate “return,” of sorts, to pictures in the TV documentary special,
A World of Love,
produced by UNICEF and hosted by Bill Cosby and Shirley MacLaine for broadcast at Christmas. The guest stars represented their state or country to illustrate UNICEF's work there: Audrey spoke for her adopted Italy; Richard Burton and Julie Andrews for Britain; Barbra Streisand for California ; and Harry Belafonte for Florida. It was, in effect, Hepburn's first volunteer work for UNICEF.