by Sam Wasson
So he listened as she described the story of Billy Wilder’s new film, which would star Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, and her, of course, in the title role, and how Edith Head was designing the secondary costumes, but that she was sent on a mission from Paramount to purchase only the voguest—and with her own money—for her very own collection, which she would wear for certain scenes—
“Okay,” he said, “okay,” and led her inside with the proviso that he had not the time to create something new, but she was welcome to peruse the previous season’s collection. If she found anything that interested her, Givenchy said, she could have it.
Audrey happily agreed and with her signature effervescence, she went straight to work. To those who looked on, she betrayed no sign of the uneasiness she might have felt at having to make such an expensive and indeed perspicacious decision. Although she had experience as a dressmaker—wartime rationing had forced it upon her—here, in the summer of 1953, Audrey was hardly a fashion expert. As countless pre-Givenchy photographs attest, she undoubtedly knew what looked good on her, but when it came to la mode, the girl was naïf. At the time she sailed into 8 Rue Alfred de Vigny, it’s likely she hadn’t owned a single piece of haute couture.
Offscreen, Audrey favored skirts, but more often wore slacks (they were more practical, she said). She liked short heels on her shoes (her feet, she knew, were big), and always, wherever and whenever she could manage them, the coziest sweaters imaginable. In short, simplicity set the pace for her wardrobe, as did physical comfort. It sounds obvious (who wouldn’t want to be comfortable?), but in this era of straps and bands and pointed bras, the directive was closer to no pain, no gain.
And so, without any aesthetic agenda, willful resistance to the times, or urge to do anything other than what she thought was right for her, Audrey Hepburn set into motion a kind of polite rebellion. As the imposing Hubert de Givenchy looked on, she selected a slim suit of gray wool, which she wore with a lighter chiffon turban; a long white gown of embroidered organdy; and finally, a black cocktail dress held up by two tiny bows at both ends of a wide and narrow neckline (once called a décolleté bateau, soon to be renamed décolleté Sabrina). With a long V-shaped back culminating in a strip of buttons, the dress featured a snug bodice offset by a ballerina-shaped skirt, and unusually spacious armholes that didn’t conceal Audrey’s tiny shoulders. Neither, for that matter, did its narrow neckline conceal the collarbones Edith Head had so painstakingly camouflaged in Roman Holiday, or the Civil War–sized waistline she attempted to overcome with a long skirt. So artfully did the dress embrace—and even celebrate—Audrey’s so-called faults, that when beheld by audiences of 1954, it communicated not just Sabrina’s transformation and Audrey’s burgeoning influence as a style icon, but the new schismatic potential of what being a woman could mean.
Audrey would become the muse Givenchy had been waiting for; and he, the Pygmalion she needed to bring her to life. Their working relationship would grow over the course of the next five years before reaching its high point in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but by then, Audrey and Hubert would be like a needle and thread, symbiotic to the point of total congruity.
MEL
Audrey’s life had shot up to full speed, stretching her time and tired body in all directions at once. Where she once moved laterally, working ceaselessly from one day to the next, she was now pushed upward by the very new tasks of growing her star in America and abroad. There were press junkets, studio directives, and temporary accommodations. There were planned introductions, faceless names, and nameless admirers. Merely floating was a thing of the past. Now Audrey flew. Looking below her, behind her, she could glimpse traces of her home in Arnhem, her first meeting with Colette, Gigi, and in the distance, James Hanson. They dropped away from her in copper flourishes, like rusted pennies down a well.
In London that summer of 1953, Audrey met the actor-director Mel Ferrer. It was Gregory Peck who introduced them. He had thrown a party in Audrey’s honor at his flat in Grosvenor Square. The occasion was the British premiere of Roman Holiday.
Audrey was not yet the celebrity she was about to become, but with all of the magazine covers and the buzz about her debut, it was obviously only a matter of time. The night of the party, all eyes were on her.
From his place against the wall, Mel Ferrer watched Audrey’s eyes, silently imploring her to look up and see his. Once or twice he caught her trying not to be caught, and she opened up a smile that exploded the room. Describing it later, Ferrer would not be ashamed to say he loved her immediately, nor would he hesitate to admit he was well aware of his advantage; previously, at the urging of Gregory Peck, he had called Audrey at her mother’s. When Audrey picked up the phone, Mel could tell from her enthusiasm that she meant it when she said she loved him in Lili, though exactly how much, and in what way, neither of them had any idea.
Here, in person, she drank in the full bottle of him for the first time. He was a gruff and slender man in his middle thirties—over ten years older than she—and had that look she liked. He was direct, shining with stamina, and obviously unafraid of enjoying the attention he so clearly knew was his. Others saw arrogance in Mel, but at that moment Audrey only saw conviction; as someone who didn’t have it, she was quick to spot it in others.
In the low light, Mel and Audrey talked of Sabrina, which was to begin shooting in September, and of the possibility of doing a play together sometime soon. How fun that would be. They laughed and touched and said goodnight.
THE MOST SOPHISTICATED WOMAN AT THE GLEN COVE STATION
Well into production on Sabrina, with the clock ticking and the finish line fast approaching, Billy Wilder and Ernest Lehman were still bickering over the script, which remained, for the most part, unwritten. Cursing at each other into the night, the writers turned out drunken pages on through the morning as the actors arrived for makeup and the lights were put up around the set. There wasn’t a scene or line or story point too small to fight over—nothing escaped their attention—but there was no argument like the one that raged over Sabrina’s—and ultimately Audrey’s—celibacy.
“Billy wanted Bogie to sleep with Audrey Hepburn,” recalled Lehman. “I said we can’t do it, no dice, people don’t want that, particularly for Audrey Hepburn. She was just a slip of a girl…gentle and sweet. She had won the Academy Award for Roman Holiday. He was furious at me for insisting they don’t sleep with each other. I wouldn’t give in on this point.” Night after painful night, Lehman and Wilder seesawed through it, first trying the character one way (“What if she—no, never mind…”), and then another (“What if he…”), starting the night at Billy’s house, and ending it, broken down and crazy, on the pavement outside of the Beverly Hills Hotel at three o’clock in the morning. They were scheduled to shoot the scene at seven and the only words they had on the page were INTERIOR—LARRABEE OFFICE—NIGHT.
When 4:30 rolled around, they called it quits. Billy had his assistant director cancel Bogie and Audrey’s morning call, and Lehman’s doctor told them to take a vacation from rewrites. Two weeks prior, Lehman collapsed from overwork and before that, he even had a few hysterical weeping episodes. Far from improving, the doctor saw that Lehman was actually getting worse, and wrote him a prescription for fourteen days without Billy Wilder. But if Billy took time off every time someone told him he had to take time off, he wouldn’t have become Billy Wilder, which is why, days later, Billy and Ernie were back at it again, smoking and boozing and shouting at each other over whether or not Audrey Hepburn should be allowed to copulate when Dr. Spritzler arrived to pay a surprise visit on his patient. Shit. Wilder thought for a moment and then did what for the future writer of Some Like It Hot was the only natural thing to do: he leapt into the closet.
(While Billy’s in there, it should be known that the matter of Audrey’s virginity was not just about keeping her image clean, nor had it to do with any kind of prudishness on Lehman’s part, but rather, was born of a very real understanding that like
Big Brother, the Production Code Administration was watching them—them, George Axelrod, and everyone else in Hollywood. So Lehman and Wilder weren’t just up against each other in the brawl over Audrey’s sex life, they were up against the censors.)
In dead silence, Billy waited inside the closet while the doctor examined his patient. A few moments later, Lehman was declared back to normal.
“Well, Doc,” Lehman said, sitting up in bed, “then I guess I can tell Mr. Wilder to come out now.”
The door flew open and out came the greatest director in Hollywood with a lit cigarette in his hand. He tipped his hat and left.
In the end, Lehman won: Audrey and Bogie make an omelet, not love. Wilder would have to hold off a few years until the Production Code office loosened up before he could make his most challenging statements about sexual freedom, and in fact, so would Audrey have to wait for the right national temperature before she could do the same, quite marvelously, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But here in Sabrina, with the help of Hubert de Givenchy, they changed Audrey for good. The designer gave her a style, and the director made her an icon.
After Sabrina, Audrey was forever branded, on screen and off, a young woman who asserts her individuality through her taste—and that, in an age of big breasts in big brassieres, was an altogether novel spin on her sex. (“This girl,” Wilder once said, “singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past.”) On the surface, Sabrina is a girl who behaves exactly how girls were supposed to—as a Cinderella who longs only (and not carnally) for princes—but with the subversive power of glamour, she, Wilder, and Givenchy, smuggled in some new ideas from the women of the future. Key in that equation is the smuggling: were they to have been overt about it, Audrey would have been shut down by the censors, the critics, and the moviegoing public. Why she wasn’t—indeed why she thrived throughout the late fifties and early sixties—was due to the public’s understanding of Audrey as a good girl princess.
THE DREAM BEGINS
Only weeks after Sabrina premiered in September of 1954, Audrey married Mel Ferrer in Burgenstock, Switzerland. The ceremony was held in a tiny mountain chapel overlooking Lake Lucerne. Audrey wore a white robe of organdy and a halo of white roses.
Returning from their Italian honeymoon, the Ferrers discovered that they would be parents in only nine short months. The baby, Audrey said, “will be the greatest thing in my life, greater even than my success. Every woman knows what a baby means.”
At last, this was the happiness Audrey had longed for. Not the kind of happiness that went away, but the forever kind, the one that never stopped renewing every morning and every night.
OSCAR NIGHT
Sabrina was nominated for six Academy Awards. Two of them belonged to Billy Wilder for writing and directing, one of them to Audrey, and another to Edith Head for Best Costume Design.
Amazingly, Audrey and Billy lost. But Edith Head won.
After the envelope was opened and her name was read aloud, Edith ascended the stage at the Pantages Theater to collect her Oscar. Her acceptance speech was two words, neither of which was “Hubert” or “Givenchy.” They were only “Thank you.” It was her sixth Academy Award.
MRS. MEL FERRER
In March of 1955, Audrey miscarried. Brittle now, and frail, she took to her bed. There she battled a despair so ferocious, it seemed to the few who saw her that despite her soft smiles and reassuring air, she would never fully recover. Somehow, losing a child meant losing the chance to rewrite the wrongs of her own childhood. It was forsaking little Audrey, the tenuous dancing girl of war-torn Belgium. She kept the press from her grief.
What the public saw was presented through the sugary veil of virtue. In the years following, a blissfully happy Audrey could be seen in print throughout the world, praising the virtues of wifedom. Of her life before Mel, she said to Photoplay, “I don’t think I was a whole woman then. No woman is without love.” In a piece entitled, “Audrey’s Advice: Have Fun, Let Hubby Wear the Pants,” she confided, “He’s a protective husband, and I like it. Most women do…. It’s so nice being a wife and having your husband take over your worries for you.”
“She was in part attracted to Mel,” Audrey’s future companion, Robert Wolders, explained, “because he was like a father figure to her. Some people say that he misused her trust in him, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. If he decided which parts were and were not suitable to her, I think it was because she wanted him to. It’s true that he took over her life, but she wanted to be protected and she trusted Mel. In a sense, she did that with me as well.”
Audrey’s supplication was so well publicized, that Ferrer, who already had a reputation for being controlling, came to be known as a kind of Svengali. The article “My Husband Doesn’t Run Me” took dead aim at these rumors (“She’s known dictators in her early war-shadowed life. And you can take it from Audrey Hepburn—she didn’t marry one!”), but as countless Ferrer-Hepburn intimates would attest, the truth was a little different. To Hepburn biographer Warren Harris, Yul Brynner said, “Mel was jealous of her success and could not reconcile himself to the [fact that] she was much better than he in every way, so he took it out on her.” Harsh, yes, but Brynner’s observation matches the general consensus; Mel Ferrer lagged behind, and it hurt him. “Of course, it’s a problem,” he confessed, “when the wife outshines the husband as Audrey does me.”
3
SEEING IT
1955-1958
THE SWANS
Like every fiction, Holly Golightly was a composite of multiple nonfictions. She took her dreams of society from Truman’s own mother, her existential anxieties from Capote himself, but her personality, which seemed so intimately hers, would come from the tight-knit coterie of Manhattan divas Truman so flagrantly adored. He called them his swans.
For Capote, they were it: the most glamorous and often the most powerful girlfriends in town. Feasting on daiquiris at La Grenouille or Quo Vadis, or El Morocco or 21, or sunk in a back banquette at La Côte Basque, Truman and his swans could turn lunch into performance art. With one of their gem-covered hands wrapped around his, Capote and his confidante du jour would be seen—and overheard—lost in the titillating round of who’s heard what about who. (“Oh, Tru, you’re so bad! Now tell me exactly what she told you.” “Wellll…”) They included Oona O’Neill Chaplin, Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Marcus, and Gloria Guinness, who wore a ring so big she couldn’t fit a glove over her hand, and to the seedling Holly Golightly, they were the richest soil.
“I rarely asked anyone to my studio,” wrote Gloria Vanderbilt,
but Truman had wanted to see it, so one day I invited him there to meet my unexpected houseguest, Russell Hurd. He’d been a friend since childhood, with the looks of Charlton Heston and the wit of Noel Coward. Although Russell was gay, we had been in love with each other ever since the days when we tea danced at The Plaza…. What I didn’t know yet was that Truman had started weaving Russell into a story set in a brownstone very like mine, and that the heroine was a girl whose confidant was a man very like Russell. The girl in some ways was like me, in other ways like Carol Marcus, who was at that very moment on a plane from L.A. to New York, fleeing from her second marriage…with no place to land but my studio.
Gloria’s apartment, a four-story brownstone on Sixty-fifth between Fifth and Madison, was stocked with flowers, delicacies, and all the compulsory accoutrements of fashionable life on the Upper East Side—compliments of her beau, Frank Sinatra. It was there that Carol Marcus, single and heartbroken, met Truman Capote for the first time. Lucky for her, he had an ear for distress. “You have freed yourself,” Truman said to her. “I can see it all now. Your life is just beginning. Now why don’t you sleep with some of these rich men who always want to sleep with you? There would be nothing wrong with doing that, and it would solve a lot of your problems.”
When it came to heart pain, Capote was a master healer. One touch of his magic medicine, and he could make any woman into a friend
for life. Two touches, and they would become swans. In her memoir, Carol Marcus explained exactly how:
At 3:00 every morning that I was in New York, I would meet Truman Capote at a private club called the Gold Key Club on West Fifty-fifth Street. The lights were low and we would sit in big chairs in front of a fireplace and talk and talk…. One night, though, he began talking about something different. “I knew a girl once, she was nothing like you. In fact, she was almost a hooker, but I liked her a lot. She came from the South. I don’t know how she ended up, and I’ve always wanted to write about her. But I’d like to do her as you, I’d like to have the things that I know happened to her happen to you. I want you to stick around with me a little bit. I’m going to do you as Holly Golightly.” And every morning about 7:00, we left the Gold Key Club and walked to Fifth Avenue, where there was man with a cart of doughnuts. We’d buy some and then continue on toward Tiffany’s.
BEAUTIFUL BABE
Gloria and Carol and all the others went through the revolving door of Truman’s affection, but Babe Paley, beautiful Babe, had a door all to herself. As swan queen, there was hardly another human being more important to Truman, and as wife of Bill Paley, the broadcasting titan who made CBS, there was hardly a more important wife in the whole of New York.
Had she met Babe, Truman’s mother would have been proud of her son for reaching so high, for seeing so much of what she could only imagine. She died in 1954, a year before Babe and Capote met.
