In 1958, Audrey Hepburn was shooting Green Mansions, playing a woman in the Venezuelan jungle who is followed everywhere by a little fawn. In order to bond with Pippin the fawn (Hepburn called her Ip), she was encouraged to care for her, feeding her milk from a baby bottle. “I don’t have any children of my own,” she told a reporter on set, “but I’m learning a lot from Ip.” She took the deer to parties, and slept in bed with her.
In his book Remembering Audrey, the photographer Bob Willoughby, who followed Hepburn for years, including on this trip to the supermarket, wrote: “Beverly Hills habitués are fairly blasé about what they see, but Audrey being followed around town by this lovely creature stopped everyone in their tracks.” When the film wrapped, she was devastated to give the fawn back; a year later she had a miscarriage. To try and lift her out of depression, her husband tracked down Ip, then, much to the disappointment of her Yorkshire terrier Mr Famous, took her in as a pet. And then she had a baby.
It was her second son, Luca Dotti, who wrote Audrey at Home, a cookbook that detailed her favourite recipes, many of which she’d collected as cardboard recipe tabs from Elle magazine. “Her absolute favourite,” Dotti told People magazine, “was spaghetti with tomato sauce. She could live on that alone.” Every morning around 4am, she’d eat a madeleine for breakfast, and every evening she’d eat chocolate, which she believed, “banished sadness”.
Growing up in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Hepburn had seen people die of starvation. She came close herself, surviving by eating nettles and tulip bulbs, and drinking water to fill her stomach. She told her son about a moment towards the end of the war, when a soldier approached her with the gift of seven chocolate bars, which she ate all at once. For her, “That moment remained the most vivid memory of the joy of liberation.”
Despite rumours of eating disorders, food was the key, her son insists, to her pleasure, and comfort. On one of their last trips together, a holiday in Jamaica, they were shocked at the weight of her smallest case. Inside, she had packed only spaghetti.
