Audrey Hepburn’s Happiest Moment

The baby cried, and as his father, Mel Ferrer, reached over to comfort him, he curled a tiny hand around his father’s finger and held on to it. The baby’s mother, Audrey Hepburn, looked on tenderly as she, her mother Baroness Ella Van Heinstra (directly behind Audrey) and close family friends watched Sean Ferrer, the Ferrers’ first child, baptized in the lovely Burgenstock, Switzerland, chapel. The godparents were Audrey’s brother and Mel’s sister and the ceremony, a family affair, was performed by Pastor Endiguer, who had married Audrey and Mel five years before. This rare and lovely picture—and those on the following pages were taken by their friend, famed Richard Avedon, and Photoplay is pleased to present them here, right from Mel’s and Audrey’s own family album.

After the ceremony, the baby, carried in the protective arms of his Italian nurse, is followed by the radiant parents and their friends to the Ferrers’ Swiss cottage. Mel tenderly thanked Audrey for the joy of having a son, and the day erased the deep pain of the previous year, when Audrey lost their expected child.

“He looks like you,” Mel tells Audrey, but she insists, “He is more like you.” To us, she says: “We are a united family. We will always be together.”

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE APRIL 1961