In 1958, Audrey Hepburn starred in her husband’s directorial debut, “Green Mansions.” It was on set that she was given a baby deer that would become her most iconic companion.
Green Mansions was an IOU from MGM Studios, which had promised Hepburn’s then-husband Mel Ferrer that he could direct a movie with Hepburn as the star. Instead of writing his own script, Ferrer hired screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley to adapt the bizarre, utopian turn-of-the-century novel by W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest.
It’s about a mysterious South American jungle princess, Rima the Bird Girl, and a Venezuelan man, Abel (played by Anthony Perkins in the film), who are fleeing political violence. After Abel gets bitten by a snake, he falls in love with Rima when she nurses him back to health.
According to Hepburn biographer Barry Paris, Ferrer had been obsessed with the novel since he read it at Princeton, and saw Hepburn as his real-life Rima: “a feminine symbol of innocence, a victim of male greed and lust.”
While Hepburn finished work on the movie The Nun’s Story, Ferrer and his crew traveled to British Guiana and Venezuela to collect intel for filming. They decided against filming on location, mostly because The Nun’s Story was shot in Africa and they didn’t want to send Hepburn abroad again. Instead, they shipped back 250 tons of props, plants, tree-bark canoes, blowguns, and live snakes so they could recreate the jungle at MGM.
Most importantly, Hepburn’s character needed a fawn to be her loyal sidekick. However, the only way to get such an animal to be trusting enough was to have Hepburn raise it from infancy so the deer would think the actress was its mother.
At Ferrer’s request, MGM bought a four-week-old fawn from a local zoo and gave it to Hepburn. She called the animal Pippin, nicknamed Ip after the sound it made when it was hungry, and immediately adapted to her motherly duties.
The frail, doe-eyed Ip had to be bottle-fed every two hours as it grew and developed teeth, and Hepburn would often interrupt a scene or rush off from meetings to tend to her pet. She and Ferrer took Ip home to live in their house, where they built a custom bathtub for it to sleep in.
“For two and a half months it lived at our house,” Ferrer recounted. “It ate its bowl of pabulum with us in the dining room, and at night it slept in our bathroom. It got so that it actually thought Audrey was its mother; professional animal trainers were amazed at the way it followed her around.”
“I’ve fallen in love with her,” Hepburn told a California newspaper. “Lord knows what I’ll do when the picture is over and they take her away.”
During the filming of Green Mansions, the paparazzi shot iconic photographs of Hepburn out and about with Ip. The fawn would follow her around the local supermarket, cuddle on her chest to sleep, and stroll with her, unleashed, around Beverly Hills. Ip even echoed her owner physically — slender, elegant, and innocent.
Ferrer and Hepburn already had a Yorkshire Terrier, Mr. Famous, who eventually warmed up to Ip. According to Paris’s account, Ip would take the laces out of Ferrer’s shoes and give Mr. Famous the leather so he could chew on it. Ip also loved electrical cords, so Hepburn had to unplug every lamp in the house. The actress even carried plastic knitting needles in her purse to give to Ip as a chew toy so the fawn, sitting in Hepburn’s lap, could happily gnaw away while the star gave interviews.
Hepburn was known to be calm and motherly by nature, but still, the bond that developed between actress and fawn astonished even those who knew her.
Ferrer and Hepburn’s maid got used to seeing the fawn sleep on Hepburn’s stomach and would shake her head and smile as the lookalikes napped. Ip would run to Hepburn’s side when the actress called and lick her face wet with kisses.
As if Hepburn wasn’t already the epitome of wholesome, feminine goodness, she had turned herself into a real-life Disney princess by making this delicate animal fall under her spell.
“Ip is a European deer,” Hepburn told the same California newspaper. “When she is full-grown, she will stand only four feet high, and she’ll be pure white. Fortunately, Ip is a wonderful actress. In all our scenes she behaves beautifully — never more than two takes and most of the time she comes through the very first time. I don’t have any children of my own, but I’m learning a lot from Ip.”
Hepburn went on to tell the reporter how, after a day on set, she and her husband, along with Mr. Famous and Ip, would pile into Ferrer’s two-seat sports car and head home. “Mel drives, Famous sits between us, and Ip falls asleep in my lap,” she explained.
Literally no one in the world could pull this off except for Audrey Hepburn. And what better Hollywood tale to highlight given the theme of this May issue — a legendary beauty and her surprising, celebrated pet!
