Before agreeing to participate in the definitive account of Audrey Hepburn, once one of the world’s highest-grossing movie stars, her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer told himself that there were already more than a thousand books about the subject. “Aside from biographies, comic books, cookbooks, fictionalized sketches, and illustrated style guides, there are fashion books with compilations of her many magazine covers and the hats she wore,” says the film producer and philanthropist. To the actor, he added, a biography “would have seemed like nonsense, and she would have rejected the idea with a grimace and said it was the last thing the world needed. But the truth is that she never anticipated the insatiable appetite across the world for her personality.” As custodian of her image, name, and identity since Hepburn passed away in 1993, Ferrer says he has witnessed an astounding development: “the crystallization of her memory into icon and legend, not only internationally but from the generation before mine and, from there, to subsequent generations of 20-somethings and teenagers.”
Appreciating that Hepburn remains on the altars of generation after generation thanks to millions of children and young people—“a fitting tribute to the sort of pied piper she became during her legendary work as a UNICEF ambassador,” he says—Ferrer conceived of Intimate Audrey, her only official biography, written with British author Wendy Holden. “I liked the idea that this manuscript could be, above all, the one that is placed at the top of the pile, the same as a history book, to ensure that there will always be an authoritative account, narrated in part by herself, with words taken from hitherto unpublished letters,” the foreword notes. Vanity Fair spoke with Ferrer about his efforts to capture his mother.
Vanity Fair: The opening pages of the book note that your mother often referred to the last stage of her life, the years she was a UNICEF ambassador, as her second and most important career of all.
That’s right. In the five years she devoted to it, 80% of the trips she made were to places that had had war or were in the middle of a conflict, such as Vietnam, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea. This book had to contain the important things. Talking about her films didn’t make sense, because everybody knows them and besides, there is little drama in them. She was a very humble and simple person who got up early in the morning and went to work. She was on time for shoots and didn’t drink while she was shooting, so there was little drama in that part of her life. The legend is made up of true things; otherwise, it makes no sense. The goal is for people to understand that it is possible to be successful by being a humble and good person. You don’t need to misbehave to get there.
Where did she get this need to try to heal the world? Did it also have something to do with the fact that she grew up in a noble family that has always been dedicated to charity?
Yes, of course. In the end it’s a mixture of things. There is a family and cultural component, something that is passed on from one generation to the next. I myself am passing it on to my children, with whom I have traveled and done projects. My daughter Emma, for example, has worked for UNICEF and UNHCR. But in my mother’s case, it also counts that she lost something that you and I can consider commonplace: the freedom to cross the street, to be able to say what you think. Something that, on the other hand, is becoming more and more complicated today.
When World War II broke out, Audrey was studying at a school in England, but her mother thought she would be safer in Holland, her homeland, and shipped her off to Amsterdam.
That’s right. Holland was neutral when the war started, and no one thought it would end up being invaded by the Nazis.
So she almost died, of starvation.
Yes. That last winter there was nothing to eat. There came a time when there were only glasses of water. That’s why I put that scene in the book, when I talk about the trip to Somalia. [The author refers here to how the chapters start with a theatrical text that recreates crucial events in the life of the actor that influenced her development, character, and decisions.] After creating the structure of the book, we decided to dress it up in this way to make it interesting and more digestible. We live in a world where everything is very visual. All the kids are in front of their phones and watching movies on the computer, so I thought that would help the reader get emotionally into the scene, help them imagine.
That episode you mentioned left her immune system damaged for life, although over the years she managed to improve her resistance by living a healthy lifestyle.
Yes, but that robbed her of her dream of being a dancer. After a while [studying thanks to a scholarship with the Ballet Rambert in London], Madame Marie Rambert told her that she had a fantastic technique (“you can teach here or you can also be a second dancer”), but that the war had caused her to lose years of training and muscle development, and that she would never become a prima ballerina. That’s when she decided to take the first street to the left, because there was nothing, no time to stop and think “I’m going to do this or that.” Also, she had great confidence in Marie Rambert and, although she felt that in a way she robbed her of her dream, she also felt that she gave her the opportunity to achieve another dream of equal value. That’s one of the first lessons she learned: you don’t have to get carried away by the river, but you don’t have to swim against the current either.
She experienced another major disappointment some time earlier, at the age of six, when her father abandoned the family. Later, when she was already famous, she managed to find him in Dublin. Did they manage to bring them closer together?
I think that what happened in that meeting was the crystallization of a desire, the desire to love the father she remembered from when she was a child. But when my mother saw him entering the hotel in Dublin where they met, she wondered in the first few seconds if she liked that person and if she could trust him, and the answer was no. She understood that the man was a man who she could not trust. That’s when she understood that the man was emotionally handicapped and that there was nothing to build there. They continued talking for a couple of hours, about this and that, but there was no contact and nothing from him. However, she helped him financially until the end of his life, because she thought it was only fair. My mother always liked to do the right thing. But that left a mark, of course.
In fact, she says she lived in desperate need of affection.
Yes. That emotional lack brought her a desire to not be abandoned.
What went wrong in the case of her marriage to Mel Ferrer?
My father, Mel Ferrer, was the second manager of her career, because they worked very closely with each other and together they made very important decisions that led to that amazing result. When you work all day long with someone for 15 years, that’s the equivalent of 45 years of a normal marriage. On the other hand, my father was a very educated and intelligent man, but also a neurotic perfectionist and a complicated person, so day-to-day life with him was not easy. He had had a difficult childhood, with a troubled mother who was institutionalized at the end of her life and who disinherited him because he decided to be an actor. He had to start from scratch, he had to build a career on his own. That also generated a lot of uncertainty and fear of not being able to count on the next meal. In addition, I think he also felt anger and frustration about how his career was going. In a way he was the main ingredient in my mother’s success, but she was the one getting paid a million dollars a movie, not him. Even so, my father continued to work and accept what he was offered because he wanted to contribute to the family, to the marriage and to his children, because he already had four children from two previous relationships. to his children's economy, because he already had four children from two previous relationships.
Audrey was not much happier with her second husband, the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, with whom she settled in Rome and with whom she had Luca.
That marriage lasted three or four years, but in Italy at that time you could not get divorced until at least five years had passed. She wanted to stay in Rome with Luca in mind, so that he could continue to see his father. For me he was a wonderful stepfather, he was young and fun, so we played together, we did naval battles, he taught me to play chess. But when he drank alcohol, he lost his self-control a little bit.
She was eventually consumed by his infidelities.
Totally. When she tried to explain to him how she felt and that the situation was unlivable, Andrea stopped being a husband and became a doctor and gaslit her. I thought a lot about including this topic of the infidelities she suffered, because she was very jealous in her private life and when you go through something like that you even feel ashamed, but I wanted to tell the world that it can happen to anyone. Imagine, if it happened to a woman like her, who is a symbol of beauty and love, that kind of thing has nothing to do either with love or with sex. I once wrote an article on the subject where I said that you should not only choose a partner with your eyes, but also with your heart, your head, your stomach. In the end, what you have inside is what attracts a person of value.
I was unaware of the fact that you ended up in a boarding school in Switzerland after your stepfather arrived home one day with a gash on his head, saying that he had been the victim of a kidnapping attempt.
Yes, at that time there were many kidnappings in Italy. Eventually we found out that it had nothing to do with a kidnapping attempt, but with a jealous husband who sent two guys to beat him up. But I missed four years with my family because of that. [In the mid-’70s, Ferrer attended a Swiss boarding school, where he completed his baccalaureate in French.]
Is it true that when she started dating Rob Wolders, her last partner, Audrey told her family that she had finally found a good man she could trust?
Yes. In her third relationship she found peace, beauty, and affection. My mother was able to trust him and in that sense theirs was a good relationship.
Rob was by her side on every trip with UNICEF. Did he also think that the intensity of her humanitarian work would eventually take its toll?
We all saw it. Our family always got together at Christmas, and still does, and even then we told her that we felt she was tired. But you have to understand that the type of disease she had, a pseudomyxoma peritonei [a rare cancer that liquefies the bowel], is a slow-growing type of cancer [and in her case, it started as a tumor in her appendix]. But you can put a lot of reasons on the list, starting with all the emotional pain she had and all those vaccinations she took to do those trips, which weakened her immune system.
The doctors didn’t give her much hope after giving her that diagnosis. Did she ever think she could survive the cancer?
In early November [1992] she had an investigative endoscopy. When they saw what was there, they told her and said they could offer her chemotherapy treatment. She underwent a first treatment [with the same drug that had been given to patients since the 1960s] with no progress. The first cycle went well, but within days she again suffered strangulation of part of her bowel. The doctors opened up again and saw that there was nothing to be done. They told us, “take her home and give her a big hug.” I had to tell her at that moment, and the truth is that she took it very philosophically. She said she already knew. On December 20, we were already in Switzerland, and a month later, on January 20, my mother was no longer with us.
How did you go through your grief and did you have to do therapy to cope with it?
No. I did the therapy sitting next to her every night. Sometimes science doesn’t offer you a solution or a way to fix things. The best it can do is offer you the gift of saying, “Look, you have this time, so use it the best you can.” And so we did that as a family. That was my therapy, our family therapy consisted of being by her side, talking to her and living through that as these things are lived through in every family. The goal of this book was to take this woman, whose legend is taking her a little bit to the sky, as if she were a balloon, and bring her back down to earth, give her roots and let the world understand that she was a person who lived a real life, with its complications, and who, in spite of that, left this wonderful legacy, with this great dream for all of us to achieve inclusion and help the weakest groups, children and women. This is it.
Originally published in Vanity Fair España.
