Audrey Hepburn: Still the Fairest Lady

The movie world’s first clear view of Audrey Hepburn was in a newsreel: the beginning of Roman Holiday showed the young actress, as the ruritanian Princess Ann, on a state tour of Europe. The world’s final view of Hepburn was in 1992 TV newscasts of her visit to Africa last October – three months before her death at 63 – as she bestowed first her compassion on starving children and then her modulated anger at the causes of their condition.

In the 40 years between Hollywood’s make-believe headlines and the horrifying reality of Somalia, Hepburn as actress and woman seemed an emissary from a finer world than ours. She taught, by example, what a lady was: a vessel of grace and gravity, ready wit, eldritch charm: a woman whose greatest discretion was to hide her awareness of her splendor. She refused to be tyrannized by her own beauty.

Today, these matters and manners may strike you as so very once-upon-a-time. Nobody “behaves” any more. In the post-Audrey age, when stars are in rehab before they’re out of their teens, when British royals rut as strenuously as rock stars and a President gets impeached for accepting fellatio from an intern, deportment is a Victorian concept. Even in the 50s, a decade of such screen seraphs as Vivien Leigh, Claire Bloom, Grace Kelly and Jean Simmons (William Wyler’s first choice for the role of Princess Ann), Hepburn was a glorious anachronism. She represented a moral and emotional aristocracy that no longer exists – if it ever did, outside of her pictures.

Hepburn, born on May 4, 1929, died 14 years ago today, and her ostensibly anachronistic glamour might have died with her. Yet it’s that regality, along with her relentless generosity of spirit, that keeps her alive, burnishes her glow. Consider these recent reminders:

– Last year’s Gap commercials, which had Audrey in her skinny black pants from “Funny Face” dancing to AC/DC’s “Back In Black.” (Proceeds to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund.)

– Christie’s December auction of the Givenchy “little black dress” that Hepburn wore as Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. It sold for more than $900,000, the highest price ever for a movie costume. (Proceeds to the City of Joy charity for poor children in India. “There are tears in my eyes,” said Dominic Lapierre, founder of the charity. “I am absolutely dumbfounded to believe that a piece of cloth which belonged to such a magical actress will now enable me to buy bricks and cement to put the most destitute children in the world into schools.”)

– Katie Couric’s Holly Golightly party at Tiffany’s. This past Sunday, the CBS news anchor donned a Holly-style frock and long black gloves and threw herself a 50th birthday party at Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship store. (Proceeds to the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance.)

– “The Audrey Hepburn Treasures”, a new biography and “scrapbook” of family mementos. (Proceeds to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund.)

All these are testimony to Hepburn’s twin legacies: her eternal, effortless chic in movies and her later, to her more important, career as an ambassador and consciousness-raiser for UNICEF. She often spoke of her lifelong craving for affection and her need to give it. She knew both privilege and want, as a baroness’ daughter who nearly starved in the Netherlands during the German occupation in World War II. You can see why Hepburn essentially retired from movies at 38 to care for her two sons, and why the starving children of Africa and Asia were kin to her. The photos of Audrey with the Somalian children show a woman nearly as thin as they. It’s anorexia as empathy — as if she didn’t want to embarrass the starving children she met by looking too well-fed.

She was one of a kind, inimitable and irreplaceable, as is proved by the actresses who tried to replace her. A TV remake of “Roman Holiday” starred Catherine Oxenberg, a Yugoslav princess, and lineal descendant of Catherine the Great of Russia. Julia Ormond had Audrey’s role in a “Sabrina” remake; Thandie Newton took her part in “The Trouble With Charlie”, a very distant approximation of “Charade”. And Jessica Love Hewitt starred seven years ago in “The Audrey Hepburn Story”. All were put in the shade by Audrey’s ghost. Who’d dare? Why bother?

SWAN PRINCESS

Maybe one reason she was so lovely was that she didn’t think she was. Voted the “most beautiful woman of all time” by the readers of New Women last year, Audrey had no high opinion of herself, her looks, her performance skills. Perhaps she got that from her mother Ella, who could lavish or, more often, withhold love.

You dip into the first plasticene packet in “The Audrey Hepburn Treasures” and find a photo of a three-month-old child. On the back Ella has inscribed: “This is Audrey but in reality she is 1000 times sweeter and more lovely.” Yet Ella, who said she “grew up wanting to be more than anything else English, slim and an actress,” seemed miffed that Audrey got all that, and more. She rarely showed pleasure in her daughter’s success. She came backstage after Audrey’s Broadway triumph in “Gigi” in 1951 and said, “You’ve done very well, my dear, considering that you have no talent.” (A few years later Ella appears briefly as a sidewalk cafe patron in “Funny Face”.) Audrey’s son Sean Hepburn Ferrer called his mom “a star who couldn’t see her own light.” Could that be because her mother’s jealousy obscured the view?

In movies, too, she was too rich for some people’s taste, and too thin. Men might call her “the thin girl” in Love in the Afternoon) or “the bird girl” (Green Mansions) or funny face. Funny face? C’est a rire. She looked great in basic black, whether as the existential rag doll of Fred Astaire or the bride of Christ in The Nun’s Story. Indeed, in her transformation movies – Sabrina and Funny Face and My Fair Lady – she always looked more gorgeous in Phase One (mousy) than Phase Two (elegant), more ravishing with her hair down than up, with her dress casual than couture.

Anyway, the camera loved her natural glamour: the doe eyes, the perfection and intelligence of her mouth. And she trusted the camera to capture the subtle shades of delight or disapproval – passion rendered with delicacy. In Sabrina she must spend most of her time hiding her true feelings from two men who can’t decide if they love her. The whole enchanting performance, like so many that would follow, is a private conversation between Hepburn and her 35mm confidante.

Hepburn women were often women apart, like the Green Mansions Bird Girl, quarantined in her aviary. Race was the improbable barrier in The Unforgiven, where she got a great tan to play Burt Lancaster’s “l’il red-hide Injun,” the pretty pelt in a sociological showdown.

THE DAUGHTER-LOVER

The more common hurdle for a Hepburn heroine was age. Time and again, Hollywood accented her gamine charm by teaming her with male stars who could have been her father. Half of her first dozen leading men were 20 to 30 years older than she: Humphrey Bogart (54 to her 25) in Sabrina, Henry Fonda (51 to her 26) in War and Peace), Astaire (58 to her 28) in Funny Face, Gary Cooper (56 to her 28) in Love in the Afternoon, Cary Grant (59 to her 34) in Charade, Rex Harrison (56 to her 35) in My Fair Lady.

Perhaps the men who directed her in this period (and all but four of them were over 50) determined that her age was no hurdle at all for Hepburn – that a connoisseur’s maturity was needed to appreciate her unique vintage. She was courted on screen by nearly every hunky Hollywood relic until, in The Nun’s Story, only God could be her best beau.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s set Hepburn on her 60s Hollywood course. Holly Golightly, small-town Southern girl turned Manhattan trickster, was the naughty American cousin of Eliza Doolittle, Cockney flower girl turned Mayfair Lady. Holly was also the prototype for the Hepburn women in Charade, Paris When It Sizzle and How to Steal a Million: kooks in capers. And she prepared audiences for the ground-level anxieties that Hepburn characters endured in The Children’s Hour, Two for the Road and Wait Until Dark.

Now she was co-starring with men her own age, or at least her own generation. George Peppard, in “Tiffany’s”, and James Garner, in “The Children’s Hour”, were a year older. Peter O’Toole, in “How to Steal a Million”, was three years younger, and “Two for the Road”‘s Albert Finney seven years her junior – and the first Audrey co-star who seemed ready to treat her as a sex object. Yet to find someone whose roguish masculinity complemented her ethereal femininity, she would have to come out of retirement in 1976 for Sean Connery and Robin and Marian.

She made a few more film appearances, the last one indelible: as Richard Dreyfuss’ adviser from Heaven in Always. It was a visitation from the guardian angel of our finest instincts.

FAIR LADY

For most of her life she managed to evade tabloid crossfire that signifies modern celebrity. The reign of Hepburn was mainly on the screen. She married an actor, Mel Ferrer, then she married a doctor; she had two sons, both attending her when she died. People near her said she was not treated well by her men until she found Robert Wolders, her companion for her last, most difficult decade.

And always she took seriously the responsibility of being Audrey Hepburn. Greeting her admirers at a Museum of Modern Art tribute in 1990, she she was elegant, direct, indulgent to the attention paid her. Like the reporters lined up to meet Princess Ann, we felt privileged to be in her regal presence. Serene Majesty: it was what she was and what she possessed.

“Radiance is the word,” Joe Ferrer, a Time editor of the 80s and 90s who is Mel’s nephew, wrote to me in an email just after Hepburn’s death. “As a person, too. Though I don’t think I saw her more than once after the divorce, she maintained a warm and sturdy bond with my mother. She was an exceptional person, kind, caring, involved and strong. She was someone you wished you could be like – a person who, so far as I could see, was even better than she appeared to be.”

In great acting, we see the soul of the character through the craft of the performer. In a great star, we see the personality of the performer through the veil of the character. The actor disappears, the star displays. Hepburn did both. She always illuminated the parts she played; those young women won a unique allure because she played them. But she was also, and utterly, herself. What a gift to the earth that was, from the movies’ last and best lady.

In Paul Rudnick’s wonderful new play “Regrets Only”, the dress designer played by George Grizzard enunciates the difference between style and fashion. “Fashion is for followers,” he says. “Style you create for yourself.” Audrey Hepburn created, embodied, her own fabulous style. Here’s hoping it never goes out of fashion.