Couture, pearls and a Breakfast at Tiffany’s script
Footsteps and the purposeful thrum of air conditioners are the loudest sounds in Christie’s Park Royal warehouse on the day of a recent visit. Beyond two leopard-print chaises longues and a phalanx of vacant plinths and pedestals is Adrian Hume-Sayer, director of private collections at the auctioneer’s, busying himself with Audrey Hepburn’s trove.
Most of it remains packed away, arrayed on tidy shelves or on scores of velvet hangers. One rolling cart heaves with straw bags, carefully coiled belts and individually bagged pieces of jewellery. Nothing has been photographed. “We’ve had tremendous trouble getting mannequins for the clothes because she was absolutely tiny — I mean, sub-zero,” he says.
The auction, which will take place at Christie’s in September, includes a selection of Hepburn’s clothing, accessories, film memorabilia and photography that she left to her sons, Sean Ferrer and Luca Dotti. The collection shows the personal, domestic side of a woman whose impeccable taste had as its corollary a lack of interest in material wealth for its own sake.
“She was just innately elegant in every aspect of her life. It permeates everything she touched,” Hume-Sayer says.
“I think the sale will deepen the public vision of Audrey, and shed new light on her thought processes,” he continues. “These items let us see behind the scenes of the life of Audrey Hepburn, which is a pretty amazing thing.”
The star of Roman Holiday, Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s didn’t invent the little black dress (that distinction belongs to Coco Chanel), but she wore it better than anyone has before or since. And the ballet pump and the polo neck and the cigarette pant.
Born in Brussels in 1929, to a Dutch baroness and a British businessman, Hepburn moved between Belgium, England and the Netherlands during her childhood.
Although she spent the Second World War in the Netherlands (her mother having made the grave miscalculation that it would remain safe and neutral through the conflict, as it had in the First World War), in 1948 she returned to London to study at the Ballet Rambert.
When Marie Rambert gently told Hepburn that she would never make it as a prima ballerina, Hepburn turned to acting, initially in West End chorus lines. It was during a shoot for a small film in Monaco that Colette, the French author, spotted Hepburn on set and, enraptured, declared that this girl and no other must star in her Broadway production of Gigi.
The rest is silver-screen legend. Along with an awards collection that included an Emmy and a bestactress Golden Globe, Oscar and Tony (she remains one of only 12 people ever to accomplish the EGOT), she also received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her work as a Unicef Goodwill Ambassador.
Yet behind the glamour and those enormous sunglasses was a woman who endured more pain and privation than her public could possibly imagine. During the war, the Nazis executed her uncle, imprisoned one of her half-brothers in a labour camp and sent the other into hiding.
Hepburn raised funds for the Dutch Resistance through silent dance performances (”The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end,” she said), and she reportedly acted as a courier for antiNazi organisations. Like many Dutch citizens, she was forced to grind tulip bulbs to make flour for bread during the Hunger Winter of 1944.
The resulting malnutrition gave her 20in waist; it also caused anaemia, jaundice, asthma and other acute afflictions throughout her life. And the woman who longed far more for a large, stable family than for film stardom endured two divorces and four miscarriages — and kept smiling.
“Underneath the fragility and the beauty and the enchanting smile, she was really quite a tough cookie,” says Meredith Etherington-Smith, creative consultant on the forthcoming auction.
Hepburn’s appeal was elusive. “Her facial features show character rather than prettiness,” Cecil Beaton wrote in his analysis of Hepburn in Vogue’s November 1954 issue. “She is like a portrait by Modigliani where the various distortions are not only interesting in themselves but make a completely satisfying composite. [She] gives every indication of being the most interesting public embodiment of our new feminine ideal.”
Where Marilyn had curves and smoulder, Audrey had straight lines and gamine charm. The garments she favoured — Breton tops, the classic trench, pencil skirts — were unassuming and minimal enough that they wouldn’t look out of place in wardrobes in 2017.
“Her look has gone on being wonderfully popular because, first of all, she had a radiance about her, and second, it’s essentially very modern and pared down,” explains Etherington-Smith.
“She found a look that worked for her and stuck to it all her life,” says Sean Ferrer, her son with her first husband, the actor Mel Ferrer. “She often said that she dressed more like an English gentleman, in terms of adopting a system, than a woman.
“When you’re not always trying to break new ground or change your look, chances of catastrophe are reduced to a minimum.” She ordered all her jackets from a men’s tailor in Rome and bought multiple versions of favourite pieces, remaining loyal to designers she loved for a lifetime.
Hepburn met the couturier Hubert de Givenchy in the summer of 1953, when the producers of Sabrina (in which she plays a chauffeur’s daughter who entrances Humphrey Bogart) sent her to his atelier to select pieces that would convey her character’s new-found sophistication.
The actress and the couturier struck up a fast friendship. She wore a floral Givenchy dress to collect her Best Actress award at the 1954 Academy Awards, and from the time she filmed fashion-world romp Funny Face in 1957, Hepburn’s contracts included a non-negotiable clause stipulating that Givenchy must design her costumes. She also wore Givenchy for her second wedding and all her most important events thereafter.
“I wouldn’t want you to miss this,” Hume-Sayer says, withdrawing from a garment bag a black satin Givenchy Couture cocktail dress with a feathered V-neckline and hem, dating from 1968. “In terms of little black dresses, this is the ultimate.”
The sale also includes an ice-blue cloqué satin dress by Givenchy that Hepburn wore in 1966 for a photo shoot promoting Two for the Road,a film about a squabbling husband and wife on a road trip. And a much humbler red, fuzzy-cuffed cardigan from a Givenchy boutique. “Apparently she wore this a tremendous amount to award ceremonies,” Hume-Sayer says, “for comfort and to keep warm on the way in.”
There are pieces by other designers — a Burberry trench coat, an Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche suit with crystal buttons, a cream Valentino Couture coat dress. The last dates from her Rome years, after she had divorced Ferrer and was enjoying “a rather smart life” in the Italian city.
“You know, Givenchy was very expensive, and she always paid for everything,” Etherington-Smith says. “She asked one of her Roman friends whether there was someone in Rome. Valentino was just starting out and she went to him.”
In contrast to so much couture is the costume jewellery. There are pearl necklaces, Kenneth Jay Lane crystal earrings and some bold 1980s costume pieces from Saint Laurent — no Tiffany in sight.
To house a selection of these fancies a buyer might also snap up Hepburn’s multi-level jewellery case, its velvetlined interior just waiting to welcome a triple-strand pearl necklace. “Some of these things are quite humble items, but they give you this tangible link with her, which has this indefinable magic,” Hume-Sayer says.
The highlight of the sale isn’t a dress or a gem, but a text: Hepburn’s working script for 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The role of Holly Golightly was considered so racy that Hepburn nearly didn’t accept it, and the Paramount Pictures publicity department took pains to distance their star from her character.
“If there is one fact of life that Audrey Hepburn is dead certain of, adamant about, irrevocably committed to, it’s the fact that her married life, her husband and her baby, come first and far ahead of her career,” read one press release from November 1960, which went on to characterise Holly Golightly as “a New York play girl, café society type, whose constancy is highly suspect.
“This unusual role for Miss Hepburn brought up the subject of career women vs wives — and Audrey made it tersely clear that she is by no means living her part.”
Hepburn’s personal copy of the script starts on page 93 (the pages arranged in order of shooting) and many of the multicoloured pages bear notes scrawled in her favourite teal ink. Some of the annotations are copied-out lines; others are underlined for emphasis. “The scripts give you an idea of how very hard she worked,” Etherington-Smith says. “It wasn’t all just coming on to set looking fabulous.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s represented a breakthrough and a break away from the naive, princessy roles Hepburn had inhabited until then. It is also the film that even those with only the most glancing awareness of Hepburn will have seen, and the bedrock for her future incarnation as a style icon.
“There’s a party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and all the women are in outrageous hats and brocade dresses, and in the middle of it, like a good deed in a naughty world, there’s Audrey in a sleeveless black dress,” Etherington-Smith says. “She just wipes the floor with everyone.”
There is another party outfit from the same film — the curtain that Holly transformed into a dashingly draped gown. In a triptych of Paramount publicity photographs, Hepburn-as-Holly is the focal point in a mad, swirling smudge of a party scene, her mien changing with each exposure.
The selections from Hepburn’s personal photography archive represented in the auction include artist prints (some with personal dedications) from Beaton, Breakfast at Tiffany’s on-set photographer Bud Fraker and Steven Meisel.
Other items include a rainbow of ballet pumps, and a compact gold snuff box, a gift from Rex Harrison upon the completion of filming for My Fair Lady. Its inscription reads, “To Eliza Doolittle/From Henry Higgins.”
There are more prosaic lots as well, including the hat stands and rotarydial phones from La Paisible, her home of 30 years in Tolochenaz, Switzerland. Every piece practically fizzes with the magic of its past ownership. “In a way this is the opposite of the Elizabeth Taylor auction [at Christie’s in December 2011], where the things had intrinsic value because the auction was mostly Bulgari jewellery,” Ferrer says. “Here, the emotional value is greater than the intrinsic value.”
“These are all items that were part of her life, part of her career, which she kept because they were connected with living experiences, friends, movies,” says Luca Dotti, Hepburn’s son with second husband Andrea Dotti. “She was a straightforward person with very simple goals. During her life she was amazed, from the start of her career to the very end, about the ongoing public interest.” She died, aged 63, in 1993.
Her sons held back their mother’s awards, important pieces of furniture and family photographs, though for Dotti, at least, the item of his mother’s he treasures most is decidedly more modest: the flower basket she used to carry roses and fruit in from her garden at La Paisible.
“It connects me to my mother and my childhood in Switzerland, and it’s also something that is good and useful,” he says. He thinks of her whenever he uses her basket to carry in tomatoes, aubergines, onions and salad leaves from his Tuscan garden.
Preparing the sale has been emotional for the brothers, and neither plans to attend the auction. But they’ll always have the films. While Ferrer and Dotti both recall renting a projector for screenings at La Paisible, for their children, the Hepburn canon is far more accessible. Dotti recently introduced his two daughters, aged five and seven, to Funny Face.
“It’s nice to watch these movies again with them and see how they react,” he says. “Because, of course, they never met their grandmother, but on the other hand, their grandmother is almost everywhere — on posters, on mugs and on T-shirts. They see her almost every day.”