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  • Questions That Do Not Go Away:Audrey Hepburn
  • Baron Wormser (bio)

There is a story. A princess comes to Rome. She is tired of being a princess. It is so terribly official and so terribly boring. It could turn a vibrant young woman into a mannequin. She escapes from her entourage and falls asleep, much like a princess, near the Coliseum. A journalist finds her there and allows her to spend the night at his place. Soon he recognizes who the woman sleeping in his apartment really is. The next day he and a crony take her around Rome. At last she feels free to gallivant—getting her hair cut, eating ice cream, and racing around on a motor scooter. The princess and the journalist fall in love that day but it is only a day. They must return to their lives and their obligations. And they do.

There is a story. A woman is about to divorce her husband. She returns to her home in Paris to find it bare, stripped of every possession. Furthermore, her husband is dead. He was tossed off a moving train. Happily or strangely or coincidentally or all the above, the woman has met a man who shows up and says he will her help her. Who is this man? He has many names. Meanwhile, the woman learns that her husband filched a fortune and that others believe she has that fortune. They are willing to kill to retrieve that fortune. But she doesn't know where it is. Over and over she protests that she doesn't know where it is. She isn't lying. She seems incapable of lying.

There is a story. Two filthy rich brothers live in a mansion on Long Island. They are so rich they have a chauffeur. The chauffeur has a daughter who recently returned from Paris. Everything important in the world of emotion emanates from Paris, not from Long Island. The [End Page 545] young woman is beautiful, scintillating, and full of the most marvelous life. Which brother will end up with her? But more to the point, is she interested in either of them? She has been to Paris. They are used to looking down, now they have to look up.

These are stories that comprise the plots of movies but they are the stuff of fairy tales too: fortunes, princesses, wishes, and mistaken identities. They could not have happened, but on the screen they do. That sense of impossibility coming true is the most delicious fabrication, for above all movies purvey romance. There must be something heady and swooning and yet difficult that informs falling in love. There must be something magical because love is magical. No one knows where it comes from or how long it will last or whether both people will feel it. Love is the last incalculable. Lust is boorish and sweaty; romance burns with a cool heat. It inspires wit. It fences with feelings. It is a prelude that may somehow become a full-blown, life-long symphony, every day shot through with deep kisses. Or it may fizzle into indifference or contempt or revulsion. The swelling, lyrical strings on the soundtrack only last so long. That, however, is the beauty of movies. They don't have to tell the whole story because no one really wants the whole story. People sit there in the dark to inhabit the part of the story where the princess wakes up or the treasure is found or the brothers weep for love. The whole story is tedious. That's why there are artists—to find the magic part of the story.

There are endless competing stories like the young girl who hid in an attic and confided her feelings to a diary. Like the princess or the young woman who returned from Paris, she was full of life. It was all wrong that she had to hide but there was no fairy tale within her story. Her story occurred in the bloody, shrieking maw of history. She was fifteen when she died. No one even knew how many were murdered nor could numbers have told what it was like to hold your...

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