Audrey Hepburn: an inside look at the life of the movie legend
The stylish legacy of film legend Audrey Hepburn goes under the hammer, Emily Cronin reports.
Footsteps and the purposeful thrum of air-conditioners are the loudest sounds in Christie’s Park Royal, London, warehouse. Beyond two leopard-print chaises longues and a phalanx of vacant plinths and pedestals is Adrian Hume-Sayer, Private Collections Director at the auction house, busying himself with Audrey Hepburn’s trove.
Most of it remains packed away, arrayed on shelves or 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 took place at Christie’s in September, included a selection of clothing, accessories, film memorabilia and photography Audrey 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,” Adrian says. “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 iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel), but Audrey wore it better than anyone has before or since. And the ballet pump and the polo neck and the cigarette pant.
Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1929, to a Dutch Baroness and a British businessman, Audrey moved between Belgium, England and the Netherlands during her childhood. Although she spent World War II in the Netherlands, in 1948, she returned to London to study at the Ballet Rambert. When Marie Rambert gently told Hepburn she’d never make it as a prima ballerina, Audrey turned to acting, initially in West End chorus lines.
It was during a shoot for a film in Monaco that Colette, the French author, spotted Audrey on set and declared this girl and no other must star in the Broadway production of Gigi. The rest is silverscreen legend. Along with an awards collection that included an Emmy and a Best Actress Golden Globe, Oscar and Tony, she also received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Yet behind the glamour and enormous sunglasses was a woman who endured pain and privation. During the war, the Nazis executed her uncle, imprisoned one of her half-brothers in a labour camp and sent the other into hiding. Audrey 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 reportedly acted as a courier for anti-Nazi organisations. Like many Dutch citizens, she was forced to grind tulip bulbs to make flour during the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. The resulting malnutrition gave her a
50cm waist – it also caused anaemia, jaundice, asthma and other acute afflictions throughout her life. And the woman who longed for a large, stable family more than for stardom endured two divorces and a number of miscarriages, and kept smiling. “Underneath the fragility, the beauty and enchanting smile, she was quite a tough cookie,” says Meredith Etherington-Smith, creative consultant on the auction.
Audrey’s appeal was elusive. “Her facial features show character rather than prettiness,” Cecil Beaton wrote in his analysis of Audrey in Vogue’s November 1954 issue. “[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 coat, pencil skirts – were unassuming and wouldn’t look out of place in wardrobes in 2017. “Her look has gone on being popular because she had a radiance about her and it’s essentially very modern and pared down,” explains Adrian.
“She found a look that worked for her and stuck to it all her life,” says Sean Ferrer, her son with first husband, actor Mel Ferrer. “She often said 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.” Audrey 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.
Audrey met couturier Hubert de Givenchy in 1953, when the producers of Sabrina (in which she plays a chauffeur’s daughter who entrances William Holden and 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, Audrey’s contracts included a clause stipulating Givenchy must design her costumes. She wore a dress by the designer for her second wedding and for all her more important events thereafter.
The auction also included an ice-blue cloqué satin dress by Givenchy that Audrey 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,” Adrian 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 Valentino Couture coat dress. The latter dates from her Rome years, after she’d divorced Mel Ferrer and was enjoying “a rather smart life” in the Italian city. “Givenchy was very expensive [and] she paid for everything,” Adrian says. “She asked one of her Roman friends whether there was someone in Rome. Valentino was 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 Audrey’s multi-level jewellery case, its velvet-lined interior just waiting to welcome a triple-strand pearl necklace. “Some of these things are quite humble, but they give you
this tangible link with her, which has this indefinable magic,” Adrian says.
The highlight of the sale wasn’t a dress or a gem, but Audrey’s working script for 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The role of Holly Golightly was considered so racy that Audrey nearly didn’t accept it, and the Paramount Pictures publicity department took pains to distance their star from her character. “If there’s one fact of life Audrey Hepburn is certain of, adamant about, irrevocably committed to, it’s the fact her married life, husband and baby come first and ahead of her career,” read one press release, 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.”
Audrey’s personal copy of the script bears notes scrawled in her favourite teal ink. “The scripts give you an idea of how hard she worked,” Adrian says. “It wasn’t all looking fabulous.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s represented a breakthrough and a break away from the naïve, princessy roles Audrey had inhabited until then. It’s also the film even those with only the most glancing awareness of Audrey will have seen and the bedrock for her 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,” Adrian says. “She wipes the floor with everyone.”
There is another party outfit from the same film – the curtain Holly transformed into a gown. In a triptych of Paramount publicity photographs, Hepburn-as-Holly is the focal point in a mad, swirling party scene, her mien changing with each exposure.
The selections from Audrey’s personal archive represented in the auction include artist prints (some with personal dedications) from Cecil Beaton, Breakfast at Tiffany’s on-set photographer Bud Fraker and Steven Meisel. Other items include ballet pumps, and a gold snuff box, a gift from co-star Rex Harrison, upon 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 rotary-dial phones from La Paisible, her home of 30 years in Tolochenaz, Switzerland.
“These are all items that were part of her life, part of her career, which she kept because they were connected with experiences, friends, movies,” says
Luca Dotti, Audrey’s son with second husband Andrea Dotti. “She was a straightforward person with 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 from the Christie’s auction, though for Luca, the item he treasures most is decidedly modest: the flower basket his mother 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 good and useful,” he says. He thinks of her whenever he uses her basket in his Tuscan garden.
Preparing the sale has been emotional for the brothers and neither planned to attend the auction, but they’ll always have the films. While both recall renting a projector for screenings at La Paisible, the Audrey Hepburn canon is far more accessible for their own children. Luca recently introduced his two daughters, aged five and seven, to Funny Face. “It’s nice to watch these movies with them and see how they react,” he says. “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.”