“The acting was a surprise to me. It still is. I wanted to be a ballerina, that's all.... It's easier to be a shy ballerina than a shy actress. You don't have to talk. You can hide yourself in your music and just forget about yourself. That I became an actress is something of an accident.”
Michael Tilson Thomas marvels at how realistic she was about her good fortune: “She said, âI didn't really have to do much. I just had to be myself and it worked.' She had the best head on her shoulders. She could easily have bought into Hollywood and everything that it represented. Instead, she emerged as what she was: Her integrity and personal qualities were more powerful than all the films and good works.”
44
Hepburn's total output (just twenty starring films in forty years) was as modest as Garbo's (twenty-six), and of comparable impact. Also comparable were their continental ways, which seemed to evade a nationality, and their mesmerizing “low” voices: Garbo's was nearly a baritone; Hepburn's, a velvety contralto of “purred elegance,” said Peter Bogdanovichâa voice “that barely made the acquaintance of consonants,” as distinctive in accent as in the idiosyncratic way she used it.
“Audrey had a little speech pattern all her own,” says costar Eli Wallach. “Nobody else could do it.” Its tone had an unusual, emphatic kind of upward swing when she finished a sentence. Cecil Beaton called it “a singsong cadence that develops into a flat drawl, ending in a childlike query.”
45
Unfortunately, that voice lost most of its meaning to millions in the non-English-speaking world, with or without dubbing. But Audrey had something that rose above the Tower of Babel and crossed all international barriers of language: her eyes. “From
Sabrina
on, she was like no other actress,” Theodore Bikel told John Barba. “Innocence and mischievousness, wrapped into oneâan extraordinary mixture, acted with her eyes.”
46
There was a recurring holy trinity of words in the litany of her screen appeal. Bikel intoned the firstâ“innocence”âand is bolstered by Bogdanovich: “Audrey Hepburn became the last true innocent of the American screen.” The second is “gamine”âthe boyish but sexy waif with impish European style. The third word, “vulnerable,” is the quality most often attributed to both her real and screen character. One critic referred to it as her “indestructible frail-ness.” Director Fred Zinnemann considered it very real: “In her private life, she was emotionally vulnerable to [everyone, but especially] her mother, her brothers, and Mel.”
Rosalie Crutchley was dubious: “Audrey, vulnerable? Yes, maybe.... The one thing that is rather unpleasant about acting is that you have to reveal certain things about yourself through a character, and I don't think Audrey liked doing that.”
47
That contributed both to her ambivalence about making movies, and to the limitation of her roles. Richard Lester, after
Robin and Marian,
had described her as “a very methodical, almost mechanical performer. I would not say she was a varied actress. She was a star. She was always more or less Audrey in the way that John Wayne was always John Wayne. The qualities she had in person were the qualities she had on the screen.”
48
They were the qualities that Gregory Peck exalted: “Audrey is a magical combination of high chic and high spirits.”
49
And they were the qualities, coupled with her later UNICEF work, that made her one of the most beloved actresses of her time.
“When Nick Dunne was doing his piece on Audrey for
Vanity Fair,”
William Banks recalls, “I said to Rob, âAren't you a little nervous, because he can be so bitchy?' Rob said, âNobody can be bitchy about Audrey.' And of course, Dunne wasn't.”
50
But then, in the bottom of the ninth, up steps Nora Sayre to spoil the no-hitterâin
Running Time: Films of the Cold War:
“Many adolescent girls of the fifties were almost tyrannized by the image of Audrey Hepburn: Hers was the manner by which ours was measured, and we were expected to identify with her, or to use her as a model.... Flirtatious yet almost sexless, Hepburn appealed because she was utterly unmenacing to men. [The adulation of her] seemed to tell us that young women ought to be well-heeled, submissive and sexually spotlessâsophisticated at parties, perhaps, but free of genital vibrations.... Why did we rush pell-mell to choose a haughty pre-anorexic upon which to pattern ourselves, so slavishly and for so long?”
51
Â
Â
Is IT POSSIBLE to separate the actress from the flesh-and-blood woman? Nora Sayre didn't like
either
of them: Demure morality and the tyranny of the skinny waist were not to everyone's taste. There was a lot going on in the fifties and sixties that Audrey Hepburn represented, and a lot that she did not. Her typeâespecially her sexual typeâwas not the unanimous preference of all or even most men. Nobody put Marilyn Monroe out of business but herself.
But in the end, unlike most of her peers, the
personal
Audrey was even stronger than the screen Audrey. Even her “worst” traits were spoken of fondly. UNICEF's Horst Cerny, for instance, sheepishly cites “two things kind of contrary to her image: She smoked, whichâfor a non-smoker and for UNICEFâsurprised me. The other thing was her enjoyment of whiskey.”
Billy Wilder calls her “that unique lady! She's what the Latin calls
sui generis
âthe original, no more examples, and never will be.” Dominick Dunne asked her if she was surprised by the excitement she always caused wherever she went. “Totally,” she replied. “Everything surprises me. I'm surprised that people recognize me on the street. I say to myself, âWell, I must still look like myself.' ... I don't understand it. At the same time, I'm terribly touched by it.”
52
It was all the more surprising since she had deliberately distanced herself. Many considered her a snob because she held so aloof from the public and the mediaâand most of all, from Hollywood.
“I certainly did not intend to be untouchable,” she replied to that charge. “I came to work every day ... terribly nervous ... terribly insecure, was I going to get the words right, was I going to do it properly? And ah, the relief when they said, âPrint,' and Willie [Wyler] or Stanley [Donen] was happy. And then I went home at night and had my bath and my supper and learned my lines and got up again at four a.m.”
Ironically, Donenâwhom she was so eager to pleaseâconfirms her untouchability. “I longed to get closer,” he said, “to get behind whatever was the invisible but decidedly present barrier between her and the rest of us, but I never got to the deepest part of Audrey.... She always kept a little of herself in reserve, which was hers alone, and I couldn't ever find out what it was, let alone share it with her.”
53
Dr. Ron Glegg, Rob Wolders's brother-in-law, perceived much the same thing: “I sensed a sort of reserve, a hesitancy in her relationship with people. She was always prepared to withdraw from any event or discussionâshe could quickly, almost abruptly, bring it to an end. I'd give her an âA' in closure! It made her not less but more interesting.”
54
Audrey acknowledged that quality in herself but felt that, at least in her film work, it wore off as soon as “I discovered the [other] actors were just as insecure as I was, however famous and however long they had been at it. Gary Cooper used to get clammy hands like I did. Cary Grant and Rex Harrison worried like mad ... because people were expecting a lot of them, which they weren't of me, though I was expecting a lot of myself.”
She had had no huge disappointments or unfulfilled hopes. “I am the most un-bitter person in the world,” she told Rex Reed. “I was asked to act when I couldn't act, to sing in
Funny Face
when I couldn't sing, to dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance, and do all kinds of things I was not expecting and was not prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.”
55
But there was one thing that she sought and never quite achievedâserenâity: “I don't think it exists. [You] can be perfectly serene, then you spend two minutes thinking about the Kurds and want to shoot yourself. I mistakenly thought that with age comes serenity, when your job is done, maybe you have earned enough money so you can be secure and the children are okay.... Perhaps the only time you can be serene is when you are very small, when you don't know all these things.”
56
But if serenity was elusive, love was notâand that was Audrey Hepburn's open secret:
“Actors, directors, technicians ... there's something in some of them that makes you open up to them. With me, it always has to do with some kind of affection they conveyâa message of affection, love, warmth. I was born with an enormous need for affection. I have always been terribly aware of it, even when I was small. And a terrible need to give it, like every childâthey all want a dog, they want a cat, they all want a horse, they all want to cuddle a baby. That has been very strong with me.... Much more important than receiving affection is giving it.”
57
Â
Â
“THERE'S NEVER BEEN a helluva lot to say about me,” Audrey once declared, but the world begged to differ.
58
A great deal was said about her in Arnhem on April 23, 1994, at the dedication of a bust by Dutch sculptor Kees Verkade in Burgemeesters Plaza, near “Human Inference Street”âa midtown neighborhood of neat red brick houses characteristic of prewar Arnhem. Hundreds came to see the unveiling that sunny afternoon, as a dozen blue and white UNICEF flags snapped in the wind.
It was very much a family affair. Rob, Sean, Luca, Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey's brother Ian sat together in the front row listening to the speeches, all in Dutch. Popular performer Paul van Vliet, who had been inspired by Audrey to become UNICEF's goodwill ambassador in Holland, read an original poem:
I drink to the people who never play safe, who begin things without knowing how they will end.
I drink to the people whose joy is erased and who don't give a damn what's around the next bend ...
The bust itself isâwell, a bust in all ways. “It's not Audrey,” says Van Vliet. “It has no warmth in the eyes and mouth.” Indeed, with its distended neck and hollow eyes, it looks more like the blind girl Suzy in
Wait Until Dark
than the real Audrey Hepburn. The crowd's subdued reaction registers its disappointment. But the release of a dozen white doves, soaring gracefully up and away, provides a touching end to the ceremony.
Fame, Audrey said, “creates a certain curiosity. People want to see you. I'm using that curiosity for the children.”
59
In her lifetime, millions of curious people stared at Hepburn differently from the way they stared at other movie stars.
When someone said Hollywood wasn't very romantic any more, she replied, “Well, I am.... I could never be cynical. I wouldn't dare. I'd roll over and die before that.”
60
She was a romantic, all right, but at the same time, says Gene Feldman, her film documentarist:
She was a woman of enormous substance. She always described herself as not knowing, not being sure. But when she made a decision, it was totally fixed. When I saw her talking on Somalia, that was
ferocity.
That was a Golda Meir. Her performance as a human being was even greater than her performance as an actress. She activated something in us all. She was not some âvulnerable' or pathetic figure. There may have been moments in her life when she was battered or drawn to the wrong people. But she had the courage to pick herself up and go on to maintain her work, her kids, the man she loved, Rob, her basic notion of who she was: an independent woman. It wasn't God-given. She did it herself, and with a nobility of spirit.
61
Some movie stars have an impact greater than the medium can explain, and Hepburn was one of them. She was part of our shared cultural experienceâa huge influence on the way women looked and played the feminine role.
62
Our image of her really stems less from her films than from the fashion magazines. In any case, glamour queens, like good strippers, must keep something hidden to retain the audience's attention. If all is revealed, the show is over.
63
Hepburn, for that reason and others, chose to keep her personal life as private as possible.
“We think we know all about Elizabeth Taylor's weaknesses [for] men and food,” says Caroline Latham, “or Doris Day's love of home, children and dogs; or Marilyn Monroe's troubled search for love. But few of us attach any such intimate characteristics to ... Audrey Hepburn. If the result is somewhat two-dimensional in personal terms, it is all the more powerful as an icon.”
Her friend Leslie Caron says Audrey “conducted her life as discreetly as the way she dressed.” The irony is that Hepburn's fabulous “look” was essentially just something that evolved over time to camouflage what she considered her faults. But still today, decades after her peak, if a designer exclaims, “It's so âAudrey'!”, everyone knows exactly what he means.
64
“Through the years,” says designer Michael Kors, “Audrey Hepburn has projected an image of style and not of fashion.” Though she was not an American, Hepburn's style reflected the great American designs: “She became the symbol for what we all talk about today in fashionâa woman who has independence, confidence to do what she wants when she gets dressed,” offers Rebecca Moses. “She was the beginning of minimalism,” maintains Isaac Mizrahi. According to Christian Lacroix in Paris, “Audrey Hepburn didn't simply epitomize the style of Hubert de Givenchy. She symbolized a generation.”
65