Audrey

I remember reading Cary Grant’s or Gregory Peck’s (I can't remember which) recollections of working with Audrey Hepburn, what a doll she was, how lovely and ladylike, and that she ate nothing on the set except an apple. One a day, every day. I have an image in my mind of the Audrey on the set of Roman Holiday sitting in a white directors chair eating a pale green apple, delicately. This was presented, by both the actor and the interviewer who wrote the article, as a sign of her refinement, her good breeding. Audrey was such a demure lady with such impeccable manners as demonstrated by the fact that she was never seen eating anything but a perfect piece of fruit, a very contained fruit, nothing too messy, and only one piece, enough to show that she was human, but not enough to doubt she was a lady. At no point did anyone even consider the possibility that she may have been consciously starving herself, that even the original waif might have had to struggle to maintain her ballerina frame, that the quintessential gamine might have battled with flesh, that even Audrey was an anorexic.

I think many of us love Audrey Hepburn because she is the woman we aspire to be: part girl, part grown-up, part angel. It isn’t even physical, except that it is precisely the way her corporeal self is unimportant which makes me love her, want to be her. She is beautiful in precisely the non-aggressive way that every brainy girl who hasn’t come to terms with the realities of having a woman’s body wants to be-beauty as a mere extension of the internal reality. The body is immaterial for it is just the perfect package for her perfect soul.

Let’s talk about the personality, the soul. In every movie, Audrey plays the good girl, the sweet, intelligent girl who will perform her duty at all costs, who may have her fun, but only in a safe and respectable manner. The danger she poses is to herself. Even when she played characters who committed less than honorable acts, we understood that these acts were not reflections of her true nature, we understood that the bad things she did hurt her more than anyone else.

She was never the femme fatale or black widow, she was the girl next door who went away for awhile and came back sophisticated, but remained down to earth. She was never dangerous because she lacked sex. No man would presume to use her cheaply and discard her, but then, no man feared her either. When she kissed it was for love. No amount of smirks could turn her into a sex object, no amount of winks could render her into a dirty joke. She didn’t have the body for it. She lacked breasts and hips, she was all angles and eyebrows.

So Audrey appeals to girls like me, girls who would prefer to live in our minds without these difficult bodies to tie us down to the earth, without this flesh to demean us, girls who still use the term girl to describe themselves after they have passed twenty-five. We want to be noble, loved for our souls, and then discovered to be beautiful as an afterthought. Or rather, seen as beautiful by everyone, but have it understood that the physical is a mere reflection of the ethereal self. We want to be loved completely.

As a younger girl, I understood intuitively that the Ritas and Marilyns of the world were viewed as packages waiting to be opened and then discarded, the bodies and hair overwhelmed the senses and therefore perceived as being all the women had to offer. So I wanted to be Audrey with all my heart and mind. But my body failed to comply. I developed breasts and hips with a tiny waist, my body became the perfect hourglass. People looked at my body and failed to see my soul. I came to believe that all it would take to set free my soul would be to lose the additions which puberty granted, to lose the inherent sexuality my body carried, and then others could see my reality, see me for who I was. So I tried to adopt Audrey’s eating regimen (mind you it was before I had heard of her eating habits) I sought nourishment from ideas to replace what I perceived to be the treachery of food. I had wished to be reduced to nothing, to cast off this body which had so failed me.

However, such thoughts can only last for a short period of time, eventually I grew beyond my fears, eventually I changed. I began to accept this body, I began to accept myself, and I attempted to integrate the outside with the inside.

But I still look at Audrey with wonder. She achieved what I could not.