Audition (91 page)

Suffice it to say Hepburn’s opinions on the balancing act of marriage, career, and children stayed with me. She was so certain in private and in our interviews, I can repeat them almost verbatim to this day.

“It’s impossible,” she told me. “If I were a man, I would not marry a woman with a career and I’d torture myself as a mother. Supposing little Johnny or little Katie had the mumps, and I had an opening night. I really would want to strangle the children. I’d be thinking to myself, ‘God, I’ve got to get in the mood and what’s the matter with them—get out of my way.’”

She made a gesture of pushing the kids away, and in her distinctive, wobbly voice, also a result of “the shakes,” went on to give her solution to the confusing gender roles that had befallen men and the growing number of working women. “I put on pants fifty years ago and declared a sort of middle road. I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man.” “How?” I asked her. “Well, I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to,” she replied. “I’ve made enough money to support myself, and I ain’t afraid of being alone.”

For a woman who wasn’t afraid of being alone, she had an awful lot of men in her life. She had even been married once, very briefly, when she was young, and had affairs with her agent, Leland Hayward, and the billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes before settling down to a twenty-seven-year love affair with Spencer Tracy. They never married. They couldn’t. Tracy, her costar in nine films, was already married, a Catholic, and the father of two children, one of whom was deaf. But, she said, “We were as good as married.”

Tracy died of heart failure in 1967, just two weeks after completing his last film with Hepburn,
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
She found him lying on her kitchen floor and immediately called his wife, Louise. It was the first time the two women had talked, and when Mrs. Tracy and her children arrived to make the funeral arrangements, the first time they met. Hepburn didn’t attend the funeral out of respect for Tracy’s family. “I was not his wife,” she told me in a quiet voice. Instead, she said, she drove by the funeral to watch the crowds gathering to honor him. She never watched
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
“The memories,” she said, “were too painful.”

For all her tough talk about the impossibility of marriage, family, and career, there were photographs of Spencer Tracy all over her house, along with a portrait of him and some paintings he had done himself. Theirs was a true love story, with or without children and the legal trappings of marriage. When she died in 2003 at the age of ninety-six, the lights of Broadway were dimmed in tribute. In my case I treasure every memory of our interviews and the small, private dinners we shared. “Thank you for the champagne and the chocolates,” she wrote me after one such dinner. “I certainly needed my fix.”

Hepburn left me an odd inheritance. In one of our interviews—I did the last when she was eighty-four—I asked why she thought she had become so much of a legend, and she said that she had become a “sort of thing.” “What sort of thing?” I asked, to which she replied, “I’m like a tree.” She said this very quickly but I picked up on it and asked, “What kind of tree are you?” She replied, “I hope I’m not an elm, with Dutch Elm diseases or a weeping willow dropping all its leaves.” Instead, she chose to be an oak tree. “I saw one recently in the woods, a white oak, strong and great like that,” and she stretched out her arms in imitation. A terrific moment. Except, to this day, I am ridiculed for asking her what kind of tree she wanted to be. Doesn’t matter that she introduced the whole thing; I am stuck with it. Johnny Carson was just one of the people who wouldn’t let the tree issue go, so when he heckled me about it during an interview some years later, I finally broke down and asked him what kind of tree
he’d
like to be. “A tumbleweed,” he replied.

Audrey Hepburn also affected my life, even though she was totally different from the great Kate. Unlike the older, no-nonsense Hepburn, Audrey was fragile and vulnerable. She was so enchanting and beautiful playing a princess in her first American film,
Roman Holiday
, in 1953, for which she won the Academy Award. Thin as a rail, she dressed in Givenchy, not pants, and became every young woman’s idol, including mine. I cut my hair like hers, short with bangs, wore little sleeveless black dresses copied from Givenchy originals, and used gobs of eyeliner to try to make my eyes as wide and dramatic as hers. Few people tried to imitate Katharine Hepburn’s angular, high-cheekbone look, but for a while we were a nation of Audrey Hepburn wannabes. I daresay, in the 1950s and 1960s, every man—and every woman—was a little bit in love with Audrey Hepburn.

She was about to turn sixty when I interviewed her in Mexico in 1989. By then she’d been married twice, first to actor Mel Ferrer, then to an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and for the last nine years she’d been living happily with Robert Wolders, a Dutch actor and the widower of a much older actress, Merle Oberon. Hepburn had two grown sons, one from each marriage, and was still lovely, still enchanting. She was also unflappable. During the interview a bird flying overhead relieved itself, splattering on her perfectly pristine white dress, and she couldn’t have cared less.

Audrey Hepburn had her own answer to the dilemma of combining work, a husband, and children. Her solution? “I quit movies to stay with my children,” she said. “I couldn’t take the stress of being away from my sons. I missed them too much. I became emotionally unhappy.”

It was a difficult decision for the actress, who made twenty movies and earned four more Academy Award nominations after that Oscar for
Roman Holiday.
“I was miserable both ways,” she said. “I have the greatest admiration for women who have a career, who can take care of the husband and take care of their children. But I couldn’t.” Hepburn felt she could do three jobs at once: make a movie, shop, and cook. And that was it. “I cannot deal with too many emotions,” she said.

I asked her if looking back, she regretted giving up her career. “Oh, Lord, no,” she said. “Had I done it the other way around, I’d be miserable today. If I just had movies to look back on and not have known my boys.”

For years Audrey had been a special ambassador for UNICEF. She was tireless in her efforts to make life better for impoverished children. She had just returned from tours of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala when we met for our interview. “I have this extraordinary thing that’s happened to me,” she said. “To be able to express my need to help children and to take care of them in some way.”

Audrey Hepburn died much too young, at the age of sixty-three, in 1993, at her home in Switzerland. The cause was cancer. But she lives on in her films—forever radiant and the fantasy of every young woman watching a rerun of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade
, or
Funny Face.

So here were these three very smart women also with very different approaches to the balance of family life and career.

Where did this leave me? I used to say you could have a great marriage and a great career (notice I use the word “career,” not “job”) or a great marriage and great children or a great career and great children, but you couldn’t have all three at the same time. I have changed my mind. Today there are many husbands who care deeply about having a strong relationship with their children and will help with their care. They’ll even help with the housekeeping. And there are companies like ABC that let women work part-time or do job sharing. On
The View
some of our working mothers bring their children in, breast-feed when they need to, and do their jobs well. Do women need more help? Day-care centers at work, more flexible hours? Sure. But things have improved so much that I do think these days you can have marriage, career, and children. But make no mistake about it, it is not easy. I was never able to do it.

The ability to take a tragic situation and turn it into optimism and purpose is rare. There’s no better example than a man you’ve probably never heard of. (I include him even though he is not a celebrity.) Over the years people have often asked me who, among the countless interviews I’ve done, is the most memorable. If I’m thinking historically, I say Anwar Sadat. But if I’m thinking on a human level, the answer is Robert Smithdas, whom I first interviewed more than thirty years ago on the
Today
show and again, in 1998, for
20/20.

Robert Smithdas is a teacher and a poet. He is also totally blind and profoundly deaf. I remember his putting his thumb on my lips and his fingers on my vocal cords during our first interview. Lord knows how, but he was able to understand what I was saying. I was absolutely flabbergasted.

Smithdas had graduated from college at the top of his class, the first deaf and blind person to do so since Helen Keller. He then earned a master’s degree from New York University, the first graduate degree ever, anywhere, for a deaf and blind student. In the years since I first interviewed him, he had married and was teaching other blind and deaf people at the Helen Keller National Center on Long Island. At his side, also teaching, was his wife, Michelle. She, too, was blind and deaf.

If ever a person gets beset by frustration or poor-me self-pity, one day, even one hour, with Robert and Michelle Smithdas will cure all. In the course of our profile with the couple for
20/20
, we first went with them to church. Michelle had just had electrodes implanted in her inner ear and was thrilled to finally have some limited hearing; Bob felt the vibration of the choir simply by touching the pew. Later I went to their apartment, where Bob made us chicken cacciatore, even slicing the onions. He cooked on a gas stove, gauging the heat of the flame as expertly as any chef. He and Michelle could see nothing and hear little, but how rich their lives were and how independently they lived!

They communicated by “finger-spelling” into the palms of each other’s hands. Michelle, who also holds a master’s degree (Columbia University’s Teachers College), could tell if her husband was angry or upset if “he finger-spells too fast.” An interpreter from the Helen Keller Center finger-spelled my questions to the couple, and they answered me in their own voices. At home they each wore vibrating pagers to signal that the doorbell was ringing or to “find” each other in their apartment. They had some help from sighted friends, especially from one truly special woman named Linda Stillman. Mrs. Stillman had spent five years with Michelle while she was attending Columbia, finger-spelling the graduate school lectures for her and translating the necessary textbooks into braille. Can you imagine the task this was for both women? The patience each must have had? The enormous reward for both when Michelle received her master’s degree?

Michelle and Bob were both avid readers, especially Bob, who read about twenty braille magazines a month, ranging from
The Economist
to
Popular Mechanics
to
Martha Stewart Living.
And neither one complained about their disabilities. Michelle had had some sight and hearing as a child, but an illness and then an accident robbed her of both. Still, she told me, “I am rather happy with what I am able to do and for what I have. Especially for my husband.” Throughout our day together she was smiling and upbeat.

Bob, who had lost his sight and hearing at the age of four, admitted that he missed the ability to see his friends and especially to hear them. “Blindness takes you away from scenes, but deafness takes you away from people,” he said. “But at this stage in life, I am very used to being deaf-blind.”

When I left their house, I was humbled at what an open and optimistic mind can achieve, and brimming with admiration for them. I determined to remember, every day, how blessed I am. To anticipate your question, I don’t remember each day, but I should, and I try.

No one has lied to me more or touched me more than the late Richard Pryor. At our first interview in 1979, Richard said, “Are we going to end up liking each other?” I answered truthfully, “I don’t know.” Richard then said, “Oh good. I’m glad it’s still out there.”

If Robert and Michelle Smithdas are examples of people who have risen above the difficult circumstances of their lives, the brilliant actor and comedian Richard Pryor is my example of a man who took the enormous talent he was born with and destroyed it. He couldn’t help it, and his struggles affected me from the first time we met.

I did end up liking him. How could I not? He told me of his horrific childhood. He, a young boy, living in a house with his mother, who was a prostitute, listening to the moans and grunts of the lineup of men who came up to her room. He, trying to ignore the men rapping on the door to get in. He, a little older, sleeping with a girlfriend he liked, only to be told by his father that he had slept with the girl, too. So how could he possibly trust anyone, male or female?

At the time of this first interview, Richard was a huge star. He was appearing in the film
The Wiz
with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Almost every young comedian, black or white, wanted to be like him and follow his cutting-edge humor. I, too, was also taken by his brilliance and felt I could ask him anything. He wasn’t offended. He welcomed it.

M
E:
Are you totally off drugs?

R
ICHARD:
No. I love drugs. I really do. But I can’t do them a lot because it messes my life up and every time I get in trouble it’s because I end up drinking too much or snorting too much. But I like drugs. I like some cocaine every now and then.

Richard had a beautiful white girlfriend named Jennifer Lee living with him, and he spoke of their relationship as being “magic time.” I stupidly thought he was talking of his love for her. He was actually talking of their doing drugs together. Still, I liked Jennifer and she seemed to be genuinely devoted to him and to trust him. So did I.

That is why, when in 1980, Pryor set himself ablaze and then ran screaming through the streets of his Los Angeles neighborhood with more than half his body burned, I believed everything he told me. He had been rushed to the hospital and after a month or so of treatment, he sat down once more with me. He looked god-awful, emaciated and shaking, and although his face had not been burned, he could barely sit because his scarred body was still so painful.