«TExcept the Queen of England, few women have been as photographed and as few other celebrities have been written about.” Sean Hepburn Ferrer writes it in the book Audrey (Tea), the biography he dedicated to his mother Audrey Hepburn.
Definitive, in the author’s intentions, aware of the fact that there are more than a thousand books about this queen of Hollywood, whose image has appeared everywherefrom t-shirts to works of art. Chosen by the greatest directors, from Billy Wilder to George Cukor and Blake Edwards, paired with the most famous actors of those times, from Gregory Peck to Gary Cooper, from Cary Grant to Peter O’Tole, Audrey Hepburn marked an era with her bright smilethe grace of a never affected kindness and the warmth of a real transport towards others.
Between Oscar awards and humanitarian awards, among the rustle of Hubert de Ghivenchy’s luxurious clothes and the rose and vegetable garden of his house on Lake Geneva, Sean Ferrer draws an intimate portrait of his mother, reconnects the threads of an everyday life in which the diva who is not a diva at all keeps the Oscar as a bookend and takes him to buy books and socks.
Audrey Hepburn, the diva in search of a nest
A son, however, aware of his secret inner sadness. Audrey always seems to be looking for love, for the family nest, she invests all of herself in relationships even though both major stories will end badly: the one with the actor and producer Mel Ferrer, father of Sean, after 14 years of marriage; and the one with Andrea Dottithe Italian doctor who will betray her without hiding. A little girl who barely grew up during the Second World War, the war, so to speak, marks the beginning and the end for her.
During the years he lived in England and then returned to Hollandduring the hell of Arnhem, manages to eat little more than a few turnips and sees masses of miserable refugees passing by: «All this bears the marks on the character and on the way of reading the world, including the five years spent as a goodwill ambassador for Unicefwhere she cared for children who were victims of hunger and diseases caused by wars.”
Audrey Hepburn, 1954 St. Moritz, Switzerland. photo of Mel Ferrer from the family archive
In addition to the war, in the story of her mother’s youth, there is something that marks her forever, the abandonment at six years old by her father who, it seems, she searches for all her life, without ever receiving either gratitude or affection.
I think he lived in fear of rediscovering the feeling of abandonment, of falling into that hole caused by his father’s departure without explanation.
Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, Audrey’s mother, not only does not explain but hides the few letters from her father addressed to her daughter. A difficult and hypercritical mother…
But also brilliant, who supported her when she wanted to learn to dance and then to do theatre. She took it up to Roman Holiday (the film by William Wyler, 1953, which earned her the Oscar and marked the debut of two legends, hers and that of the Vespa, ed.), then passed the baton to my father Mel Ferrer who ran alongside her and became a sort of husband, producer, manager, someone who understood, because he lived it, the world of entertainment. He preserved her great talent, he had culture and good taste, and the films my mother made during their relationship, 17 in total, are almost all good.
The relationship ends, perhaps it drags on for a while but then Audrey notices the suffering of her son, her son Sean, and decides to end it…
My father was also a very tortured man. He had lost his father when he was young. The mother suffered from psychosis, a very beautiful woman, but totally crazy and therefore had no emotional bond with her children. He also disinherited my father because he considered the profession of an actor inappropriate and he had to start from scratch. He had many worries, his career was going well, but obviously he was always second fiddle next to my mother.
Audrey Hepburn with her son Sean. (Courtesy Sean Hepburn Ferrer)
Many funny episodes are told, many behind the scenes of famous films…
Like the friendship with Peter O’Toole: during the filming of How to steal a million dollars (by William Wyler, 1966, ed.) in the scene where they are locked in a closet they drove the director crazy because they couldn’t stop laughing. He made her mad, he was always very witty.
Or the Dior scarf episode…
What she found in the packages donated to the poor as she had become during the war: the joy of discovering a beautiful thing and wearing it. Maybe that’s why he loved scarves so much…
Audrey Hepburn. Photo: Courtesy Sean Hepburn Ferrer
Unhappy loves
His book is a sincere account of mild and complex episodes. At the bottom we can read the melancholic character of his mother. Perhaps the failure of the second marriage with the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti may also have contributed?
But no, I think that melancholy has always been there under the surface, especially linked to his father’s story. And we must be fair, Andrea was a wonderful stepfather for me, a companion to play with. He was a very funny and intelligent person.
But he cheated on her for a long time, even in a brazen way, with the paparazzi photographing him in sweet company and besieging her outside her house.
When he found himself in the position of having to explain the betrayals, he decided to become a doctor and try to approach the matter as a psychiatrist. He didn’t explain his behavior, he became cold and analytical, the dialogue was not between equals.
A little manipulative.
And that was the thing that destroyed my mother.
Is it difficult to open certain memory drawers?
The most difficult thing was talking about Andrea’s infidelity, the day she was racked with pain and took a drug to sleep. I tell the story of the episode in the book, but unfortunately this story was summarized incorrectly in the international preview that we gave to the Daily Mail: in a headline they wrote that she felt too ugly to get married and that she took the pills to commit suicide.
Audrey by Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden, TEA336 pages, €20
And it didn’t happen like that?
No, she was just tired, sad for sure. She suffered not so much from the end of the relationship but above all from the fact that he had cut the emotional connection and was acting as a psychiatrist within the marriage, a person who studies you instead of holding your hand.
In the book there are parts in prose and parts told like a screenplay. For example, Andrea’s discovery of his cheating occurs through a dialogue between Audrey and her maid Giovanna. Why did you introduce these scripted parts?
They have a visual effect, they throw you into the moment things happened and make you relive them. I think the story comes more to life, it’s like a bridge that takes you into a film even if you’re reading.
It seems that both of his mother’s companions suffered from her fame and greatness…
Maybe in my father’s case yes, because they were both in the entertainment business. But when my mother got married to Andrea she left everything to become Mrs. Dotti, she wanted to be a Roman housewife. He certainly had greater economic means than a university professor psychiatrist, and therefore gave him a very comfortable life. But I don’t know if this is the thing that may have weighed on him. I think Andrea wanted to get married with his head, but his legs didn’t follow.
Well, he married the most beautiful one anyway, didn’t he?
Yes, but what is the most beautiful at three in the morning? As they say, all cats are gray at night…
The diva Audrey
Professionally, what is the focus of your mother’s career?
I would say that his acting was based on the Actors Studio method before Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio existed, according to whose teachings the actor must identify with the person acting; she did it instinctively. For The story of a nun (by Fred Zinnemann, 1959, for which Hepburn won the Bafta, ed.) went to live with the nuns, getting up at four in the morning and praying in the freezing cold. For The eyes of the night (by Terence Young, 1967, nominated for an Oscar, ed. ), went to study the blind. She did this even when she played more romantic and light-hearted women.
We’re talking about Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961), an indelible film in the collective imagination?
I imagine it like a meringue, a bit like a milkshake: after half an hour, if you leave it, the bottom remains, because all the air has gone.
In what sense? Holly Golightly also became a female model. Some call it a turning point, when women began to lose their string of pearls along with their inhibitions.
This is the most interesting thing. The character was a creation of my mother who worked by subtraction. Initially, Marilyn Monroe was thought of as the protagonist, after all Truman Capote’s book followed her story, the girl who starts from the farm in the Midwest and reinvents herself in the big city. But it was all too obvious, with her there wouldn’t have been that gap that there was with Audrey. When they propose the script to her, my mother is pregnant with me, she is in bed with a broken back, assisted by the wonderful sister Lu, the real nun whose story is told in The story of a nun. They remained friends, this gives a sense of Audrey’s character. However, she begins to negotiate, especially with Blake Edwards.
What does he want?
He wants to elevate the role, make it somehow more universal. The book was written by a gay author, and perhaps Holly was also thought of as a lesbian: there are many elements to distill and sublimate to create a new character. Just as he chose the lines and purified Givenchy fashion for his needs, he also purifies this story while maintaining its essential lines. Breakfast at Tiffany’s in its own way it is a model of freedom, it was forty years ahead of television series such as Sex and the City and their message of female empowerment.
October 1, 1990: Audrey Hepburn, UNICEF goodwill ambassador, walks down a village path with children from the Vietnamese “Dao” tribe. She wears a traditional ethnic minority costume, given to her by the women of this village in northern Vietnam. (Photo by Peter Charlesworth/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In such a full life, one can only jump from one episode to another. The affinity that her mother felt with Anne Frank is striking: she too, during the war, had lived hidden in a cellar in Holland invaded by the Nazis. They offer her to play Anne, but she refuses: why?
She felt too close to her, she would have relived the horrors of that period and would never have been able to escape the comparison: she felt guilty for the awareness of having complained of hunger, in Velp, while Anne was dying of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. However, I think that the injustice suffered by Anne, deprived by hatred and war of everything she could have had in life, was at the origin of my mother’s desire to defend children who had no voice. And in fact, in the end, he made readings of the Diary as events for Unicef…
In recent years, those of her commitment as a Unicef ambassador, we have seen her almost drained by the impact of suffering in missions of which she tells many touching anecdotes. There is great strength in going and seeing the evil in the world.
See evil and not judge, try to, as she said, create a society where everyone takes responsibility. After all, my mother in one way or another gave her life for these causes and for 33 years I have been trying to carry on this desire of hers, this dream, but I see how it has crumbled. We knew that democracy was delicate, but it was all dismantled so easily that I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t “window dressing”. We are repeating ourselves, that gentleman in the United States is using the same techniques as the Nazi period: blaming those who come from outside and are different. If culture and memory are not used to make decisions on the shoulders of our ancestors, the same errors are perpetuated. As we know well, all humanitarian tragedies are caused by man’s wars. We need people of good will. Like my mother was.
