Audrey Hepburn was known for her elegance on screen, but behind the scenes, a terrifying scare built on a lie in 1975 sent her into full protective mode over her family.
Hepburn's elder son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, recounts the incident in his new book, Intimate Audrey: An Authorized Biography, co-written with Wendy Holden. Ferrer, now 66, recalls having lunch with his mother when her second husband, Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, burst into the room bleeding from his head. Dotti told them four masked men had jumped him outside his medical practice and tried to force him into a waiting car. He said he escaped by fighting back and crawling under a parked car until security guards intervened.
The story left Hepburn "trembling with fear," according to Ferrer, who described his mother as "traumatized" by the scare, especially given the wave of real kidnappings sweeping the region at the time. In an interview from that period, Hepburn spoke candidly about her fear, saying, "It is a very anguishing period. They're even kidnapping tourists for fifty dollars apiece, ransacking apartments and breaking into cars... the joy of Rome was to walk around the streets at night. Not anymore. The whole world has changed."
The next day, Hepburn gave her son a choice: stay in Rome under constant bodyguard protection, or move to a boarding school in Switzerland for a more "secure environment," with more personal freedom but far less time with her. When she admitted the boarding school option would put her more at ease, Ferrer agreed to go, despite his heartbreak.
It wasn't until years later that the truth came out: there was never any kidnapping attempt at all. According to Ferrer, an enraged husband had discovered that Dotti was having an affair with his wife, and sent the masked men to assault him as retaliation, not to kidnap him. "So it was a direct consequence of my stepfather's infidelity that I was sent away from my mother and lose four years of family life," Ferrer wrote. "That was something I found terribly difficult to forgive."
Hepburn and Dotti were married from 1969 to 1982. She was previously married to actor Mel Ferrer, Sean's father, from 1954 to 1968.
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