by Barry Paris
MELCHOR GASTON FERRER was born a dozen years before Audrey Hepburn, in Elberon, New Jersey, on August 25, 1917, and spent most of his early life in New York City. His father, Dr. José Ferrer, a prominent Cuban-Spanish surgeon at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, died when Mel was four. His mother was Irene O’Donohue, whose family was socially important in Manhattan and Newport.
“She was a Gibson-girl type, spoilt, arrogant, opinionated and tactless,” says Joseph J. O‘Donohue IV, who was her grandnephew and godson. The cousins were great friends, and when Mel once ran away from home, it was to Joe’s big summer home near Newport that he fled. “He stayed about a week before returning to the fold,” O’Donohue recalls. “In those days Mel wrote very agreeable poetry, surreptitiously, which he let me read.”73
Upon graduation from Canterbury Preparatory School in 1935, Mel entered Princeton, where he immersed himself in theater and, in his sophomore year, won an award for best original play. In the summers, he stage-managed at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, and played the lead in Our Town there. When a Princeton friend tried to convince Mrs. Ferrer of her son’s talent, she replied haughtily that writing and theater were out of the question “for one of Mel’s breeding.”74
After two years, Mel left Princeton and spent a year in Taxco, Mexico, struggling to write a novel but ending up instead with a successful children’s book, Tito’s Hats, published by Doubleday Doran, which sold out its edition of 20,000. Thus encouraged, he took a job at Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the hope of making it as a professional writer.
“I drove a bookwagon all over New England for the first few months and then got promoted to editing,” Ferrer recalls. While there, he was fascinated by a collection of New England graveyard epitaphs that had been assembled by Robert E. Pike. He took all the photos and chalked all the inscriptions and epitaphs himself, compiling them—uncredited—for the whimsical Stephen Daye book, Granite Laughter and Marble Tears, in 1938.
The previous year, he had married Frances Pilchard, an artist-sculptress he met at Princeton. But it was soon clear that he couldn’t support a family as an editor. At that late date in the Depression, the theater was hardly a more secure occupation—but it was the one he’d always wanted and would now pursue in earnest. As a result, “his money was cut off and he had a hard time of it,” says Joseph O’Donohue, who had provided crucial assistance by introducing him to actor Clifton Webb.
“When Fran and I lost our first child,” Mel recalls, “I took a long weekend off, went to New York and landed in a Shubert musical You’ll Never Know with music by Cole Porter,” starring Webb and Libby Holman. It was his first Broadway job—and first ever as a hoofer. Webb advised him to acquire “the rudiments of the dance before opening night,” says Ferrer, and taught him “a few basic steps as a tap dancer so I could keep the job.”75
One critic called Mel “the only Social Registerite chorus boy,” which did not amuse his mother. “Mrs. Ferrer removed Mel’s listing in the S.R.,” says O’Donohue, who always respected him for not giving a hoot. “I was fond of Mel and still am.”76
The Porter show brought more dance work in the Marc Connelly musical, Everywhere I Roam (1938). Next came Mel’s acting debut in Cue for Passion (1940) with Otto Preminger, recently returned to New York as an actor—in some disgrace—from his rocky first stint as a director in Hollywood. And then came disaster.
“Toward the end of the Cue for Passion run, I contracted polio,” Ferrer recalls. “No doctor—of the many I consulted—diagnosed it correctly, and I lost the use of my right arm and shoulder. Not until two years later, after I had gone into radio (which required only one hand), did I meet the remarkable Sister Kenny. She finally explained that I had been crippled by polio. And she helped me restore the use of my arm and right side.”77
His recuperation was slow and painful, but Ferrer was never a man to give up. He had divorced Pilchard, by whom he had a son and a daughter, and married Barbara Tripp, by whom he had another son and daughter. Soon, he would divorce Tripp and remarry Pilchard! During that period of marital confusion, radio work took him to Longview, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas, before he got back to where he wanted to be—New York—in 1943.
There, he was hired by NBC as a producer-director for some of its best radio programs: The Hit Parade, The Durante-Moore Comedy Hour, Mr. District Attorney and Dr. I.Q. He helped create NBC’s first jazz program and won a Peabody Award for The Eternal Light series he directed and produced for the Jewish Theological Seminary. And then came the call of the movies:
“Columbia Pictures approached me with an offer to come to Hollywood, do an apprenticeship as a dialogue director and then graduate to directing. It meant a big salary boost and preparation for what I thought would be my future—television.” He wanted to direct teleplays and felt films would provide good training. Instead, he became hooked forever on film.
One day early on, in Los Angeles, Columbia publicist Herb Sterne asked Mel if he wanted to be introduced to the director he most admired. “That,” says Ferrer, “is how I met D. W Griffith. We had Orange Blossoms with him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, his habitat. D. W. befriended me and I was lucky enough to sit next to him every Saturday night for the next few months while he screened his oldest and rarest prints for us.”78
Asked if it’s true that Orson Welles was his role model in those days, Ferrer replies that he considered Citizen Kane one of the ten best pictures ever made, and still does: “I admired Orson and I laughed at his jokes, which meant we became friends.”
Ferrer’s first shot at directing was a low-budget remake of Gene Stratton Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost (1945) in the Columbia “B” unit. On the last day of Limberlost shooting, he got a call from actor José Ferrer in New York.u José was directing a stage version of Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, a controversial novel about miscegenation and racial prejudice in the South, and was calling to offer Mel the lead in it. “I informed Joe—loftily—that I was directing my first film and that I intended to keep on that course,” says Ferrer, but he agreed to read the script—and loved it. “Naturally, I flew to New York a few days later and went straight into rehearsal.”
So much for Columbia. Strange Fruit turned out to be a wise career move, as a result of which Mel was offered several new Hollywood contracts. He chose the one from David O. Selznick, obtaining a delay in its starting date long enough for the two Ferrers to switch positions again. “I decided that Joe should become our American Olivier,” says Mel, “and I proposed he do Cyrano de Bergerac.... He said he would but he wanted me to direct, and I’m happy to say that José Ferrer’s Cyrano was the biggest step forward in his career. He became our flag-bearer.”
Back on the West Coast, Selznick gave Mel wide-ranging assignments as an actor, director and producer of screen tests. (No lesser legend than Joseph von Sternberg had shot Mel’s own first screen test for Selznick, and now Mel shot Patricia Neal’s initial test.) Selznick soon loaned him to John Ford as an assistant director on The Fugitive. “Ford was another of my idols,” says Ferrer, and “taught me a great deal.... A gruff, hidden, tortured and inspired director.”
These were Hollywood’s “glory days,” he recalls. By 1947, he, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy McGuire, Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck were all working successfully under Selznick. “But there was one definite void which each of us felt acutely,” Mel felt. “We had all come from the legitimate theatre and [hankered] for an audience. We wanted to start a summer theatre where we could get back ... with audiences, people who would laugh out loud, whom you could hear applaud, whose presence you could feel.”79
Gregory Peck, born and raised in La Jolla, made a brief reconnaisance trip there and came back with the report that the high school theater was available, and the local Kiwanis Club would help them build a list of subscribers. A budget was worked out: It would take $15,000 to open the doors for a nine-week season. Ferrer and Peck went to Selznick and left his office with a check fo
r $15,000. Selznick had a few shrewd reasons of his own for bankrolling the effort. His best performers were pining for live stage work in between films. This outlet would keep them happy and might also become a recruiting ground for future film talent.
The La Jolla Playhouse now began an ambitious season of ten shows a summer. Ferrer staged many himself and, in 1948, Norman Lloyd was also hired to direct. The group’s prestige increased steadily with such productions as The Cocktail Party with Patricia Neal, Vincent Price and Estelle Winwood; The Lady’s Not for Burning with Marsha Hunt; I Am a Camera and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ferrer recalls Summer and Smoke (1950) with special fondness: “Dorothy McGuire gave a moving performance and Tennessee came all the way from Florida to see it. He hugged me with tears in his eyes when the curtain came down and told me it was ‘the best production of mah play I ever had.”’
Personally, says Mel, “the biggest romp I had there was our version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Hurd Hatfield and I played opposite Jane Wyatt and Dorothy McGuire. Constance Collier played Lady Bracknell. Hysterical.”80 Eventually, he turned over the administrative reins to John Swope, McGuire’s photographer-husband, and a fund was established that led to a new facility for the La Jolla Playhouse, which continues to this day.
“Greg and I ran it for nine years,” Ferrer reflects, “and we never took a cent.”81
His management of the operation had been brilliant: By 1953, all of David O. Selznick’s initial loan had been repaid—a rare occurrence in Selznick’s professional life.
In those days, says Mel, “David was busy going broke, so all of us under contract were happy to do loan-outs so that he could make a little money.” Howard Hughes now called Selznick looking for a director to do three days of shooting for a new ending of a Preston Sturges film, Vendetta, and Mel got the nod. “It took me two years to execute Howard’s directives,” says Ferrer. “A long three days! During that time, we remade the entire film and Howard negotiated for and bought RKO. I was the first person he signed to a contract. [By that time,] David was bankrupt. He graciously gave me a release, and I went to work for Howard Hughes as a director, producer and midnight chum.”
Ferrer worked daily with his billionaire boss in the reorganization of RKO. When Hughes asked for suggestions for top executive posts, Mel proposed his friends, producer Jerry Wald and screenwriter Norman Krasna: “Once the studio had two such capable people at the helm, Howard promptly sold RKO to General Tire Company and betook himself to the desert and other remote outposts” to concentrate on his aircraft and oil interests.82 Mel, too, now departed RKO temporarily for something new and daring—something akin to Strange Fruit a few years before: The offer to make his film-acting debut—as a black man.
Lost Boundaries (1949), based on a Reader’s Digest article by William L. White, was the true story of a light-skinned Negro doctor who passed for white for twenty years in the little town of Keene, New Hampshire. Louis de Rochemont, creator of The March of Time newsreels, had bought the story and would turn it into one of the first important American racial films, starring a number of fine Negro stage performers, including Canada Lee. Ferrer was cast for his indeterminate ethnic swarthiness.
Under Alfred L. Werker’s clear-eyed direction, Boundaries treated its theme bluntly. The blacks in med school trade bleak jokes about their job chances. “If we can’t be doctors, we can always be Pullman car redcaps,” says one. Another recites the ruling verse of the day: “If you’re white you‘se all right,
If you’re brown you hang around,
If you’re black you stand back. ”
Ferrer’s character, Dr. Scott, is proud of his race and objects to “passing.” But he and his wife have a baby on the way and, desperate for a job, he gives in: “For one year of my life I’m gonna be white.” It stretches into half a lifetime.
Ferrer’s understated portrayal of the hero got glowing reviews, as did the film. “De Rochemont almost lost his home and his career—he had to mortgage his house to do it,” says Mel, “but he was vindicated. It was produced for $250,000, and in two years it grossed over $5 million.”83
Mel had done it out of conviction—and a total salary of $7,500. The film was screened at the White House for President Truman, who was influenced by it to initiate legislation permitting blacks to become officers in the U.S. Navy. Ferrer calls it “a ground-breaker and a ‘moving’ picture in every sense of the word, light-years ahead” of the other racial-theme movies that year, Intruder in the Dust, Home of the Brave and Pinky.
“I still consider it the best movie I was ever lucky enough to be in,” he says today. “I had never appeared on the screen before, only directed, so I could not be identified as being white or black. Career-wise, it was a huge risk. But the end result was spectacular and I cherish it.”84
It also fueled his personal interest and activity in the civil-rights movement—convictions soon shared and combined with the humanitarian concerns of Audrey Hepburn.
BACK AT RKO after that loan-out, Ferrer next directed Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan in a melodrama called The Secret Fury (1950). But with such positive reinforcement for his Lost Boundaries performance, he now wanted to concentrate on acting. His next role would be another stunning one—back at Columbia, on loan-out again—as a Mexican matador in The Brave Bulls (1951), directed with gritty realism by Robert Rossen.
“Rossen had just done All the King’s Men and had made an exciting prize-fighting picture before that, and I wanted very much to play the bullfighter,” says Ferrer. “Rossen’s response was that I was the first candidate he’d met who could fit his behind into the taleguilla [breeches]. I got the part.”85
The praise for Ferrer and the movie alike were lavish. Newsweek put The Brave Bulls “squarely alongside such milestones as Citizen Kane” and observed, “for his professional good, it is perhaps a pity that so superb a young actor should find his first great part in so superb a film; he is not in the film, he belongs to it, along with the dust and bells of Mexico.”86 Many thought Ferrer’s performance worthy of an Oscar, but he and the film fell victim to a radical past: Rossen once belonged to the Communist Party, and during Bulls filming in Mexico, the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt had heated up in Hollywood.
“I felt Bob had a good chance of winning the Academy Award for [the previous year’s] All the King’s Men,” says Mel, who persuaded Rossen to fly to Hollywood for the Oscars. “He felt sure that Harry Cohn would prevail against him but he went, reluctantly, [and] it won Best Picture. It was a triumph for Rossen. But Cohn got his revenge when Brave Bulls was released. In spite of outstanding notices, Cohn issued the edict that no funds would be available for promotion, ads or publicity. [So it was] a critical success, but a financial failure.”
Ferrer finished his much-loaned-out RKO contract by costarring with Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious (1952). At that point, MGM signed him up as an actor, using him first in the hit swashbuckler Scaramouche and then in one of the most successful “sleepers” in that studio’s history.
Lili (1953) was the unpretentious little musical in which Audrey had seen and loved the thirty-five-year-old Ferrer at his sexiest. It was directed and choreographed by Charles Walters, based on a Paul Gallico story. In its title role was Audrey’s only real screen “rival,” Leslie Caron.v At its outset, orphan Caron arrives, forlorn, in a little French village. A carnival has just arrived, and she encounters the lame, unfriendly puppeteer Paul (Ferrer). “He’s always angry,” Jean-Pierre Aumont tells her, “—a disagreeable man.” Aumont, in real life, was a Free French war hero (whose wife Maria Montez had recently died under mysterious circumstances in her bathtub). Here he is “Marcus le Magnifique,” a magician with a sexy sidekick, Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Paul’s puppets (their voices all truly Ferrer’s) are his alter egos: Carrot Top, the nice guy; Reynardo, the Fox; Golo, a villain; Marguerite, the diva-forerunner of Miss Piggy. Through them, unhappy Paul talks unhappy Lili ou
t of suicide. Together, they sing the lovely “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” theme song—without dubbing—that became popular throughout the world.w
Caron is thoroughly enchanting in her fantasy dance sequences, trading places (and slinky red-sequinned dresses) with Gabor.x In the final number, the puppets come to life for a cross between “Yellow Brick Road” in The Wizard of Oz and the great Caron-Kelly dream ballet of An American in Paris.y The result is a naive, charming romance, with Ferrer at his most appealing—Au—drey told him she saw it three times.
“Mel is a very complex person,” says Leslie Caron, guardedly. “On the one hand, he was very generous and very paternal to Audrey and to me when we worked on Lili. On the other hand....”87
She trails off and declines to finish the sentence.
Charles Higham calls Ferrer a man of too many parts—“adept in so many fields that no single achievement placed him quite in the first class”—fragmented by the range of his own abilities, and thus volatile and high-strung. “He lacked the warmth, sheer animalism, and brute force” to cross the great divide between leading man and star. “He did not provoke sexual longings in millions of women; he did not evoke fantasies.”
Except in Audrey Hepburn. She had fallen in love with the sensitive, soulful character in Lili and projected it onto him in real life. She also loved his voice, and the way he jokingly signed his name—“Mellifluous.” Clearly, her notion of Mel Ferrer was romanticized from the start.
AUDREY WAS evoking similar fantasies in her own adoring fans, who clamored for scraps of information about her. Her publicist, scrambling for a few new factoids, sent her a questionnaire and hastily released her answers when he got them:
“Still finds it exciting to buy food....
“Has a large collection of long-playing records—from classics, Broadway musicals, to hot jazz. Believes one of the greatest things about the U.S. is the long-playing record....88
