The elegant fair lady

ENCHANTMENT: THE LIFE OF AUDREY HEPBURN

By Donald Spoto

Harmony, $25.95, 368 pages

REVIEWED BY MURIEL DOBBIN

There are those who still remember how Audrey Hepburn single-handedly took a rather trivial movie, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” to a memorable level when she simply took off her huge sunglasses to reveal huge eyes gazing into the display window of the famous jewelry store at dawn as she munched a pastry on her way home from an all-night party. It was also the film in which she sang “Moon River,” the Henry Mancini song that was retained only because Hepburn warned it would be thrown out “over my dead body” in response to the objections of a Paramount producer.

She worried that the role of Holly Golightly called for an extrovert, and she saw herself as an introvert. Yet that gentle, melancholy melody strangely captured the complicated woman who sang it. Talented, elegant and possessed of immense charm, her meteoric rise in the theater and in films apparently never made her happy, according to this biography.

She spun through a series of romantic involvements with men like William Holden, Ben Gazzara and Albert Finney as well as two bad marriages, yet she never achieved the comfort of a loving family that eluded her from childhood. With the balance and style that characterize his portrayals of the flawed and the famous, Mr. Spoto has produced a biography as restrained as his subject, whom he treats with compassion, yet without idealizing her.

As he put it, succinctly, Hepburn “inhabited gentility as if it were a role … She was apparently in all situations entirely herself and that self was neither inhibited nor intemperate. It amused her to know so many regarded her as without desire or passion, just as some people wrongly believed so slim a woman must have an eating disorder.”

Mr. Spoto tracks Hepburn’s ghosts to a childhood in which she was abandoned by her father and grew up with a rather distant mother, the Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra, in the dangerous and difficult world of Holland in World War II.

As a teenager, she volunteered to aid the Dutch resistance, once charming a suspicious German patrol with a gift of wild flowers, and almost died from starvation as food supplies diminished and she became too weak to climb the stairs to her room.

However, the trials and losses of her childhood lingered, as Hepburn seemed to spend much of her life on a quest for what she lost when the father she idolized rejected her. By the time she tracked him down, it was too late. It made it all the more poignant that her most lengthy relationship was her marriage to Mel Ferrer, who possessed little of the warmth she sought in a man.

Mr. Spoto noted her 40-year friendship with French designer Hubert Givenchy, who invented the fragrance “L’Interdit” for her and who said of her:

“She always knew what she wanted and what she was aiming for. She was a very precise person and a consummate professional. She was never late and she never threw tantrums … She did not behave like a spoilt star.”

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