Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  “What author ever expects to see one of his brain-children appear suddenly in the flesh?” she would later add. “Not I, and yet, here it was. This unknown young woman was my own thoroughly French Gigi come alive!”61

  Colette thought the girl might be fifteen or sixteen—far younger than her twenty-two years—and summoned a crew member to enquire about her. “She’s here with her mother, the Baroness van Heemstra,” the man reported. Ella, it turned out, knew Colette’s novel well and was thrilled by the idea of Audrey in its title role.

  Anita Loos was in New York with Paulette Goddard, getting ready to leave for a vacation in Paris, but after Colette’s letter arrived, they arranged for a stopover first in London. There, at the Savoy, Colette’s discovery paid them a visit:

  “The girl came in, dressed in a simple white shirtwaist and skirt, but Paulette and I were bowled over by her unusual type of beauty. After talking for a moment, we arranged an audition for her to read for Gilbert the following day. But after she left, Paulette said to me, ‘There’s got to be something wrong with that girl!’ I asked, ‘What?’ ‘Anyone who looks like that would have been discovered before she was ten years old.’

  “There was nothing wrong, except the strange fact that perfection is almost impossible for the ordinary eye to see.... She had been in full view of the London public for two years, [but] it had taken Colette to see Audrey Hepburn.”

  When Miller heard her read for the part, he was unimpressed. But such was Colette’s insistence that he engaged her anyway and called on his old friend Cathleen Nesbitt for help. Nesbitt, a veteran character actress (formerly a leading lady and lover of Rupert Brooke), agreed to critique Audrey’s delivery. Audrey did a reading. Nesbitt couldn’t hear her. Serious coaching was in order, and Nesbitt told Miller she’d provide it if the girl would come regularly to her country home outside New York City.

  No one was more aware of her deficiencies than Audrey. “I’m sorry, Madame, but it is impossible,” she told Colette the day they met. “I wouldn’t be able to, because I can’t act.”

  Valentina Cortesa had told her something might come out of Monte Carlo Baby, and it did. “Fortuna!” Cortesa called it.62 And now, while Audrey waited for Miller and ABC pictures to sort out the business arrangements, more fortuna was on the way.

  RURITANIAN PRINCESS visits foreign country, eludes her guardians, goes madcap for twenty-four hours, falls in love with American journalist, returns to her senses in bittersweet ending.

  Dalton Trumbo and Ian McLellan Hunter had come up with that screenplay idea in the mid-forties and sold it to Frank Capra, who wanted but failed to make it at Paramount with Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant. William Wyler read it in 1951 and told Paramount he’d do it, but only if he could shoot on location in Rome. The studio agreed, Capra released the property to Wyler, and casting for Roman Holiday began. Everything hinged on the princess.

  Wyler’s first idea was Jean Simmons, but Howard Hughes—who owned her contract—refused to make her available. The search continued on two continents through July 1951, when Paramount’s London production chief Richard Mealand wrote the home office: “I have another candidate for Roman Holiday—Audrey Hepburn. I was struck by her playing of a bit-part in Laughter in Paradise.”

  At the time, said Audrey, “I had no idea of who William Wyler was [and] no sense of what Mr. Wyler could do for my career. I had no sense, period. I was awfully new, and awfully young, and thrilled just to be going out on auditions and meeting people who seemed to like me.”63

  She was busy enough trying to prepare for Gigi, and it boggled her mind to think of making a movie—before, during or even after. But if Paramount of Hollywood wanted her to do a screen test, she could hardly refuse. Upon returning to London from Monte Carlo, just prior to leaving for America, she acquiesced to Mealand’s hasty arrangements.

  “I wanted a girl without an American accent to play the princess, someone you could believe was brought up a princess,” Wyler recalled.64 He was in London and “sort of picked out a few girls but didn’t want to stay and do the tests,” said Audrey. “So he put Thorold Dickinson in charge of testing me because I’d worked with him in Secret People, and he understood me.”65

  Her Roman Holiday test took place at Pinewood Studios in London, September 18, 1951, under Dickinson’s direction. “We did some scenes out of the script,” he said, but “Paramount also wanted to see what Audrey was actually like not acting a part, so I did an interview with her. We loaded a thousand feet of film into a camera and every foot of it went on this conversation. She talked about her experiences in the war, the Allied raid on Arnhem, and hiding out in a cellar. A deeply moving thing.”66

  All of which was a prelude to the real test: In order to assess the spontaneous Audrey, Wyler had instructed Dickinson to keep the film rolling when she thought she was finished. After a scene in which the princess flings herself onto her bed, Audrey was told she could relax and leave. But she stayed put.

  “I didn’t hear anybody say ‘Cut!’” she said. “Only one man here has the right to say ‘Cut’ [and] I won’t move until I hear him.”

  “Cut!” said Dickinson. But the camera kept rolling as Audrey sat up in her royal bed, stretched sexily, clasped her hands around her knees, smiled and asked how she’d done.

  Lionel Murton, who played the Gregory Peck part for the purposes of the audition, was also smiling. “This little doe-eyed charmer is a very smart cookie,” he thought to himself. “She knows perfectly well that the camera is still running—and is giving it the works.”

  The test results were flown to Rome, where Wyler found them irresistible: “First, she played the scene from the script, then you heard someone yell ‘Cut!’ but the take continued. She jumped up in bed and asked, ‘How was it? Was I any good?’ She saw that everybody was so quiet and the lights were still on. Suddenly, she realized the camera was still running and we got that reaction, too.... She had everything I was looking for—charm, innocence and talent. She also was very funny. She was absolutely enchanting, and we said, ‘That’s the girl!’”67

  The studio fired off a cable to Mealand: “Exercise the option on this lady. The test is certainly one of the best ever made in Hollywood, New York or London.” Even Don Hartman, Paramount’s tough-as-nails production chief, was impressed: “We were fascinated,” he said. “It’s no credit to anyone that we signed her immediately.”68 Mealand now received a routine follow-up telegram: “Ask Hepburn if okay [to] change her last name to avoid conflict [with] Katharine Hepburn.” The answer was not routine: Audrey politely but emphatically refused; if Paramount wanted her, they’d have to take her name, too.n

  “I tried to explain to all of them that I wasn’t ready to do a lead,” said Audrey,“but they didn’t agree, and I certainly wasn’t going to argue with them.”69

  For Gigi, she would be getting $500 a week, from which she would have to pay her own living expenses in New York. The Roman Holiday offer was $12,500 with an option for a second picture at $25,000. Paramount wanted a seven-year contract, but she balked at such length and—with a little help from her fiancé—negotiated a shrewder deal. James Hanson is modest about it. “The only contribution I made,” he says, was to help her get around her long-term obligations to ABC. As an old friend of Jack Dunfee and Lew Wasserman of MCA, “I was able to put in my two cents’ worth to improve on her contract with Paramount.”

  The final result was a two-year movie deal with a clause allowing her to act in stage plays as well. With Hanson’s help, she also fought and won the battle with Paramount for permission to do television work, too, if and when she chose.

  “Heaven help me live up to all this,” she wrote Richard Mealand in London. 70

  So she was in—signed up to do Roman Holiday after the run of Gigi, regardless of how long that might be. It was a big risk for Paramount. The play could have run for years, and Gregory Peck had been signed only for a very narrow window of shooting time the following summer of 1952. Cautiously,
in view of those uncertainties, the studio decided to hold off a bit on announcing her contract. Everything now depended on Gigi: if it worked, Paramount would have a star; if it flopped, they’d have an unknown London failure on their hands.71

  The pressure was on, personally and professionally. Gigi rehearsals began in October 1951. In late September, Gilbert Miller sent her a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary. For the first time on any momentous occasion in her life, her mother would not be with her: Ella couldn’t leave her apartment manager’s job in London. James Hanson, kind as always, promised to fly both Ella and himself to New York for Gigi’s opening.

  The press had the Hanson-Hepburn relationship thoroughly confused at this point: One magazine, for example, in a big feature called “Audrey, the New Hepburn,” ran their photos with the caption: “They were married last month.” For that matter, Hanson himself was a bit confused. Throughout all her amazing career breaks of the last eighteen months, their mutual affection remained strong—if anything, it had grown stronger. He’d been supportive in every way, and Audrey had been grateful and reliant on his support. But she seemed less willing than ever to fix a firm wedding date, and though they never argued about it, Hanson was privately upset at the ongoing delay.

  Audrey was upset, too, but not about that. During the leisurely eighteen-day crossing to America—her first and last such leisure for many years—it crossed her mind that, at twenty-two, she was the first girl signed simultaneously to star in a Broadway play and a Hollywood film without ever having set foot in either place—and with virtually no experience in either medium.

  CHAPTER 3

  Stardom Beyond Belief (1951-1954)

  “I think sex is overrated.”

  —AUDREY HEPBURN

  IN THE WEE HOURS OF OCTOBER 3, 1951, BROADWAY PUBLICIST Arthur Cantor dispatched an “Urgent” release to the New York newspapers and wire services: “New British actress named Hepburn arriving this morning at Pier 90 to appear in Broadway play. She is a great find. Suggest you send reporters and photographers.”

  The response was much like that which greeted Greta Garbo at the same location in 1925. “Without benefit of telepathy,” wrote Martin Abramson for Cosmopolitan, “every editor who received the communique impaled it on a spike reserved to useless trivia, and Miss Hepburn arrived in New York harbor to be greeted by a crashing yawn. The anxious Mr. Cantor scurried around the dock, found one ship-news reporter with time on his hands, and begged him to ask the new arrival a few questions. ‘Nah,’ the reporter told him. ‘I’d rather go have a cup of coffee.”’1

  Morton Gottlieb, general manager of the Gigi company, was the only other person there, and even he went grudgingly:

  “I had to get up at six in the morning to make the boat and I’d been working most of the night. I was bleary-eyed. I had a splitting headache, the weather was nasty.... Even Lady Godiva on her horse would have made a negative impression on me. Yet when I saw this girl standing on the dock, tired out from her trip, wearing only a plain two-piece suit, I said to myself, ‘Ye gods, this is Garbo, this is Bergman!’”2

  Audrey recalled that “the first thing I saw when I came to America was the Statue of Liberty. The second—Richard Avedon.” She was stretching the facts, but only by a little. Gottlieb took her straight from the dock to a photo studio where, “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.”3 Avedon was then working for Bazaar, which wanted first crack at any new and noteworthy face.

  From Avedon, she was taken to modest accommodations ($125 a week) at the Blackstone Hotel on East Fifty-eighth Street and given just enough time to check in and change clothes before being whisked off to a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, where she cheered happily in complete ignorance of what was going on.4

  She got a restrained reception the next day in Gilbert Miller’s lavish Rockefeller Center suite, where the producer was not pleased to find her appearance changed from London.

  She had gained fifteen pounds on the ship and when Miller saw her, “He was appalled,” said Anita Loos. “He had engaged a sprite who had suddenly turned into a dumpling. Gilbert, as a gourmand, couldn’t believe that his Gigi could ever get down to weight. Rehearsals began, with Gilbert regarding his ingenue’s weight with a skeptical eye. But Mortie [Gottlieb] put her on a diet of steak tartare at Dinty Moore’s, next door to our Forty-sixth Street theater. Her pounds slowly began to melt.”5

  Not so slowly, in fact. She shed all fifteen pounds in two weeks, and was soon looking emaciated. Miller now wanted the pendulum to swing back, and called in his wife Kitty for help: “I want you to come over and watch a rehearsal with little Audrey,” he told her. “She seems to conk out in the afternoon.” Kitty went, watched and then took her by the hand, saying, “You’re going to have a good square meal and don’t let me hear any of this dieting nonsense! How about a fat, juicy steak?”6

  Audrey never tried—or needed—to lose weight again.

  Miller had his thin Gigi back, but still no director. He wanted Raymond Rouleau, a forty-seven-year-old Belgian who had recently staged the successful French version of A Streetcar Named Desire-but who spoke no English. Loos volunteered a solution: If Miller could persuade Rouleau to come to America, she would facilitate by translating her adaptation into French. Loos, Hepburn, Cathleen Nesbitt and most of the rest of the Gigi cast were fluent in French. Rouleau agreed and was soon in New York.

  As dramatized by Anita Loos—in both languages—Gigi is a two-act play set in the Paris of 1900. Gilberte—Gigi for short—is the gawky adolescent daughter of a mediocre soprano at the Opera Comique. They come from a long line of grandes cocottes, in whose footsteps Gigi is expected to follow. Luck has provided them with a new and fabulously wealthy young man-about-town to whom Gigi’s grandmother Madame Alvarez (Josephine Brown), and Aunt Alicia (Cathleen Nesbitt) are the “consultant bawds.”7 But high-spirited Gigi is more interested in her schoolwork, despite the relentless efforts of her grandma and aunt to interest her in the lucrative tricks of the cocotte trade:MME. ALVAREZ: You see, my Gigi, lessons can give a girl ideas of a career. And a career is the ruination of any woman.... How often must I tell you to keep your knees together when you’re sitting on a stool? ...

  GIGI: But I’ve got my drawers on, Grandma.

  MME. ALVAREZ: Drawers are one thing, and decency is another. It’s all in the point of view....

  GIGI: ... With my skirts so short I always have to remember to bend my knees in the shape of a Z, on account of my you-know-what.

  MME. ALVAREZ: (shocked to the heart) Gigi! Where did you ever hear such language? ...

  GIGI: But what do you call it, then?

  MME. ALVAREZ: (a pause) Nothing! It has no name.... Can’t you keep your legs together? When you stand like that, the river Seine could flow between them....

  GIGI: (studies a gem) Mmmmmm—a—topaz!

  ALICIA: A topaz! A topaz, among my jewels!

  GIGI: I’m sorry, Aunty ...

  ALICIA: It’s a jonquil diamond, you little barbarian. (holds ring closer to Gigi) Study it closely for color, or you’ll wind up your career with topazes.... You must learn never to accept a second-rate jewel, even from a king. [Men] are not as intelligent as we are. So it’s only good manners to play the fool for them.8

  All the “arrangements” are explained to her, but at the moment of truth, Gigi balks. The moral: It pays to say no.

  The role wasn’t simple. A subtle sophistication was required to portray innocence, and Hepburn lacked it. She tended to scamper about frantically, either shout or whisper her lines, and exhaust rather than pace herself. “She didn’t have much idea of phrasing,” said Nesbitt. “She had no idea how to project, and she would come bounding onto the stage like a gazelle.”9

  After five days of rehearsals, said Gottlieb, “Miller fired her. By the next morning, he realized it
was too late to replace her, so he gave her another chance, and then he fired her again a few days later. This went on up to opening night. Poor Audrey was on the verge of a nervous collapse. They were working her eighteen hours a day, sneaking into the theater at night because Gilbert didn’t want to pay the union technicians overtime.”10o

  Years later, in a letter to biographer Charles Higham, Raymond Rouleau’s widow attributed the problem to extracurricular activities, and the solution to her husband:She was acting extremely badly, totally failing to understand the meaning of the text, going out late at night and arriving very tired at the theater in the mornings. [Raymond] on the eighth day took Audrey aside and told her quite firmly that she must improve, or else. She must work with more dedication, obtain enough sleep, eat properly, devote herself to the text and, in a word, become properly professional, or he would decline all responsibility for her future.... He was very severe with her....

  From that moment, she progressed steadily and became better and better every day, using every bit of advice Raymond had given her, as though he had been in charge of a childbirth.... When Raymond was inspired by an artist, he became a magician. 11

  Perhaps so—but Rouleau had some crucial assistance from Cathleen Nesbitt, who was once again enlisted by Miller. The veteran Nesbitt, who first played New York in works by Shaw and Yeats in 1911, would celebrate her sixty-third birthday on Gigi’s opening night. She agreed to take Audrey to her country place on weekends for additional coaching on vocal projection, among other things. Progress was rocky. Even with rehearsal audiences, Audrey kept pushing too hard. “I didn’t get my laugh,” she would lament after a scene. “What did I do wrong?” But Nesbitt had confidence because “she had that rare thing—audience authority, the thing that makes everybody look at you when you are on stage.”12