🙏🕊️🔔 Audrey Hepburn and the Miracle of the Ave Maria Bell 🙏🕊️🔔

Most Gorgeous Man,

In the sacred texts I found where Willa Cather was writing of here at the end of her existence in form (1947), of here in Avignon in her Hard Punishments. Truman Capote had copied her from the beginning of his ‘career’ in the 1940s (with “Miriam” in 1945), and of course was still living on that, doing it in his final years, too, emulating [self-immolation to be like her] in his Answered Prayers. She didn’t finish it, for a reason that is beautiful, showing her path, and she had it mostly destroyed upon her passing, and so Truman made a public spectacle of doing the exact same thing, among all the details of her identity which held in store the divine and now shows herself in wonderfully mysterious harbingers. These are the miracles I can see now unfolding to the open light. I only write that to talk about that this was the darkness that entered into Audrey Hepburn’s existence, and what she did about it. I am concerned that she had to feel that darkness from Truman, but even through that she was always deeply compelled to, without confrontation or adulation, with only deep peace and love, to take a stand in her deliberate deeply-rooted-in-character actions and in her priceless, timeless work. But that that evil nature remained just merely circumspect publicly when she brought it out so outrageously gorgeously that comes out now is one of the miracles. She may have even suffered that in her withdrawal from public life, not speaking the dark cause, and choosing to pour that overflowing love and devotion into being a mother to her two beautiful sons and then to the children of the forgotten worlds. It is her eternal voice coming through. Her statements on this so timely now are intensely apt and powerful. That she can speak it now is one of the downpours.

Here in the sacred text is one of the first beatific miracles that unfolded in 1951 upon Audrey’s arrival from here in the South of France across the ocean by boat to New York City for “Gigi” on Broadway and that glorious lighted creation of her radiance and joy hand-in-hand with her deep driving force of her life’s work of redoubtable integrity highlighted first for all the world to see in Roman Holiday--and bringing her back here to Rome in all its glory and miracles waiting here, even now, most especially even now, even for Audrey and Willa, and not to mention, for me as I discover its true life and always expanding radiance.

And Audrey’s arrival to Rome is where Willa’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop importantly begins and wherein those “beginning of momentous things” in Santa Fe, where I stepped into your world on miracles, is now opened by reopening these divine works, including Audrey’s re-seeing in this vision all that she did and what she opens.

The alignments of the numinous and alive cosmos at that moment in 1951 were a spiritual flush, a Neptune Pluto sextile, just as they are in this moment (in tellingly different houses) in a remarkable display of bringing it all out in cosmic power illuminated in humans, as through Audrey’s sons and their families who are so strongly still that truth and powerful grace and eloquent beauty. Neptune was then in Libra and Pluto in Leo, the spiritual and vision in justice; the deep change in the house of humor and the what we value as regal--all expressions of Audrey. This particular sextile is a lovely and deeply spiritually Divine expression, and that helps to see into this moment in how she and Hubert Givenchy made their heavenly connection, too, his guiding hand on how to express her spirit and dress her that would stand out across the ages in loveliness and grace, that singular “affinité naturelle” of that cosmic connection between them that speaks forever.

I can feel their presences alive with it in bonds and joy as it happens now. They are my radiant guides (I share with so many others touched by this). (I have not gone to Paris yet since I have arrived, but the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre now feels like an old friend, and oh the stories we would tell--remember when I walked up those stairs 22 years ago?! I just had a feeling of what lay in the offing . . . on the cusp!) It feels outstanding to be now in the midst of these origins of auspicious messages. Did these scribes who copied them down for eternal keep ever imagine the path it would continue to take as I sit here in these hallowed halls uncovering the shadows? What light work of knights just as they uncovered the Madeleine here whose life has been in protected housing of safe-keeping! And that we did not then hear her . . . But as foretold by the friars whose care she was in, will speak from the heavenly aura, the scent of the Garden and the sprout on her tongue of it beginning anew! I hope you are reading this in your kitchen over coffee this morning, a new day begun. It is such intimacy to know your hands will hold the very letter that I write as if it is me that you hold after all these many long years. (I hold it close to me for this reason and touch it with my lips before I send it to find you in California.) The miracles unfold . . .

Here is how the wondrous between Willa and Audrey occurred in 1951. It happened with the very literature, the writing of miracles (because Willa was writing from the eternal voice, just as Audrey was operating from her truest self). France’s own beloved French authoress, Colette, who created intrepid French gamines, saw the ultimate one come to life before her. It was here on the French shore when she was shocked to see her Gigi appear in real life--for Audrey appeared right before her, still unknown but on the set of her beginning here, already larger-than-life than movies and always destined to be, a brighter beam that illuminated the institutions. And so Colette was certain that Audrey go to New York City as her Gigi (the stage play written by the first female screenwriter, Anita Loos--this fabulous female writing!). Audrey was just twenty-two when she arrived by ship to NYC and it was destiny that she should first see the French sculpture of Goddess of Liberté, that immense female expression of the illuminating light of triumph for humanity from Paris and the French and American Revolutions overlooking the bay, and then for Audrey to have to immediately appear at the waiting doorway of Richard Avedon’s photography studio there in NYC. It was one of those first ‘affinity matches’ that would change the power of photography itself. In the near coming years Audrey and Richard would soon make the magical Funny Face together that begins with a scene in an intellectual quaint book shop set there in Greenwich Village right where Willa Cather had been a magazine editor at the turn of the century (coming out of the Gilded Age and into the age of corruption and human degradation in commercialism) and where she would set and write her story, “Coming, Aphrodite!” Willa was driven to live and to write the very real, the deepest she could go, and in 1912 she left being an editor, sold her story “The Bohemian Girl” (Audrey’s father had Bohemian heritage), and left for a trip to the Southwest of America for the first time where she would discover an immense realization in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What I know of the feeling in Santa Fe where I have lived nearby all these decades--that city of ’Holy Faith’--is how it steps outside the pressurized zone of what humans believe and enforce onto each other, into the truly real and elemental truths of bodily identity. It is an automatic spiritual ‘earthbound’ experience that knows itself to reach into the great beyond but is truly arrived into the body and this existence, and the sense of freedom and ease that naturally brings and at home with the elemental. I will tell you more about that in a moment in the unraveling of these signs.

I don’t know that anyone would have guessed that Audrey was arriving as the very alive and vibrant speaking voice of the Madeleine come to life there in the South of France when Colette saw her. If it wasn’t at first her appearance there on the Provençal shore to Colette that foretold this, it was very soon to come that she was the very voice of the ringing Angelus, the very Annunciation--the Ave Maria Bell. This Annunciation Bell is very quite different from a denunciation, as when Mary Magdalene was not allowed to speak after the crucifixion in Jerusalem. You see, Mary Magdalene, on her arrival there at Marseilles, and also by boat coming for life and safety from the threatening slander in Jerusalem, came to these beautiful shores of bucolic Provençal life, a true Garden of the bursting abundance of life where she would be able to tell what had happened to Jesus and how she saw him in the flesh as divine. Human thought and violence was certainly blocking that in other cultures.

It was many hundreds of years later in the Medieval time, like my chateau here, that the Madeleine’s body was exhumed on the 10th of December 1279 at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. And here it is written about in 1050 that when they first had opened the tomb “a wonderful smell of perfume filled the air” and “there was a green sprout growing from her tongue.” But the friar who opened the tomb in 1279 and was writing it all down was astonished beyond this to find that her jaw bone was missing and had been purposefully taken! Can you imagine that that is essentially what was happening to Willa? And then to come to find out what she actually spoke but could not say. Well, that ‘ability to speak,’ the Madeleine’s jaw bone, had been taken to the Vatican to St. John’s Lateran Basilica, and given to the voice of the Pope!

And overlooking this from the cliff of the rock, Willa’s novel, Death Comes, begins to tell of what awaits in the Southwest of America from that point and that it must come from France as it would bring humanity and culture instead as a religion, the beauty and acculturation and texture and abundance, heritage, celebration, and ultimate care of life itself, the living. (That is a very different venture than wanting to horde the eternal ‘word’ or even the art of it into renown, profit, ownership, imposed doctrine, control, and punishment.) This is the glory arrived in, in France itself--how to truly care for and take care of this ‘one and precious life’ on Earth.

And so when Audrey arrived in New York City this ever-living art of Willa’s had already been written (1927) and was alive in this girl coming from Europe. And so Richard Avedon felt the same way, that this enlivening spirit suddenly brought radiance to everything and the inspiration he felt was only expressible in trying to get that gorgeous face and aura of blooming flowers to the camera and suddenly NYC was alive with her, the whole city bloomed anew. In Meghan Friedlander’s writing on Audrey she describes her as saying,

“Before I knew it, I was in front of Avedon’s cameras, lights flashing, music going, Richard snapping away a mile a minute, darting from one angle to the other like a hummingbird, everywhere at once, weaving his spell.”

This bird around the flower and fountain would come true in so many ways! (And especially blooming from Greenwich Village in their collaborative Funny Face). Meghan beautifully continues,

“draped in an off-the shoulder buttercup yellow gown by Ceil Chapman, a twenty-two-year-old Audrey is perched on a ladder in front of a blooming yellow mimosa tree. The fanciful photo by Avedon was featured in Harper’s Bazaar 1952 April issue. It was Audrey’s first appearance inside the brilliant pages of the highly regarded fashion magazine.”

This was that extra dimension of the love of life that had arrived. Audrey was its light and caretaker, a very different kind of careful, resplendent embrace of life. The institutions paled in comparison. Richard Avedon was also friends with Truman Capote by that time, as Truman had first been published in Harper’s using Willa’s words. And this set the course of Audrey coming to speak of Willa’s works in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1960, less than a decade later. But there was a miracle still yet to unveil itself about Audrey’s arrival.

For when Willa wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop there is a moment when he returns to Santa Fe after getting the formal papers of him now in charge of the diocese (from the place of the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe) that the bishop, upon right before waking the next morning he hears the Angelus bell ringing and he doesn’t exactly know where he is yet, but the sound of the bell transports him back to Rome, and he is suddenly reminded of the only other time he was transported in such a way, right back to here, back to the South of France, the place of the arrival of Mary Magdalene: And now it is the magical turn of time that Willa wrote exactly one hundred years ago (as she was writing it in 1925):

“Once before he had been carried out of the body thus to a place far away. It had happened in a street in New Orleans [a French city, of course]. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey-sweet perfume: mimosa—but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France.”

That bell is the ringing of the Madeleine’s voice and the moment of the divine Anunciation, and there it was carrying him to the perfume of the blooming yellow mimosa, just as Audrey would arrive on the shores of New York City, and he was transported back from where she came. And that is how we know her voice is the Ave Maria bell.

But there is a little more to the sounding of the bell. 

It is now exactly 100 years from 1925 when Willa took her picture from Saint Francis Street in Santa Fe, the spot of her realization on that first trip in 1912, and 1925 was the year she wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald before returning to that spot knowing what she was going to write about the feminine, and in that moment also inspired by what now sounds like a description of Audrey: 

“I suppose everyone who has ever been swept away by personal charm tries in some way to express his wonder that the effect is so much greater than the cause--and in the end we all fall back on an old device and write about the effect and not the lovely creature who produced it. After all, the only thing one can tell about beauty, is just how hard one was hit by it. Isn’t that so?” 

And right there at the San Miguel Mission in 1925 was that Annunciation Bell from 1356. Right inside the chapel . . .

Willa tells in her narrative the story of how that bell “was pledged to St. Joseph in the wars with the Moors, and that the people of some besieged city brought all their plate and silver and gold ornaments and threw them in with the baser metals. There is certainly a good deal of silver in the bell, nothing else would account for its tone.”

And this is much like how the Madeleine’s jaw was saved from the marauders: “Mary Magdalene’s jaw bone had been sent to Rome after a previous excavation of her tomb and before the Saracen invasion of 710 AD, when all important relics in France were hidden. In Rome, Mary Magdalene’s jaw bone had been venerated for centuries. With the news of the 1279 discovery, Pope Boniface VIII returned the jaw bone to St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume and on April 6, 1295 it was reunited with the skull of Mary Magdalene”--here to Provençe.

Coming full circle, it could speak, and that is what Audrey beautifully did.

Right here at Marseille, a place Willa references in her “Coming, Aphrodite!” and arrival by boat, there is a sculpture on the shore of Jesus washed ashore, barely alive, and of Saint Veronica realizing his true identity in the veil, or the shroud that she holds. But as we know of eternal literature, that too is the story of Odysseus, his identity unknown, washing ashore at Ithaca (or America), and the very careful recognition scenes of his true identity, of which Penelope knows him to be divine, and her weaving, her writing, the ‘shroud’ she ‘writes’ proves it so. She had no doubt of whether he was dead or alive--but no one would listen to her, thus her, too, inability to speak it. And it is in Willa’s story, too, that there is “missed identity” in the couple that meets there in Greenwich Village (after he has traveled to Marseilles to learn his identity and art) right on Washington Square Park, with Eden Bower and Don Hedger. And that is the site that would become the place of both Annunciation and Denunciation with Audrey, for that is the actual first setting of Breakfast at Tiffany’s from Willa’s stories, and Audrey knew it to be so. Her humorous tone on such a matter still resonates, perhaps even still more audible now.

That bell that Willa saw is still in New Mexico, in Santa Fe. It is in the San Miguel Chapel off the Plaza on the Old Santa Fe Trail. It is the oldest church in all of the United States, right by the oldest home, and in the oldest capital city. Right across the street is this little sweet, quaint restaurant named “The Pink Adobe.” The first night I ever visited Santa Fe, back in 2008, I went on my very last date with a human man there, way back then in 2008, and never since. (I will not speak here of our spiritual existences or of the wondrous times I had with my Bichon and my tiny Yorkie, those who gave me the ability to write and to speak. But I will also not assuage that that was an ending and a beginning in coming to understand and real life began.) It was a very odd night that night in February in Santa Fe and at that moment I had no idea about the importance of the chapel and bell right across the little narrow historic street and what I would come to know there. But to be alone at that moment I later walked back over to the chapel. I saw what Willa saw, but did not yet know what was coming. My path was headed to you back the road from Santa Fe to coming to fall in love with you in Greenwich Village, the exact road Willa had taken in 1912 to sounding the awakening bell.