Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Paramount production chief Don Hartman was cautious. “There is no evidence that Audrey is a full star yet,” he said a few days after the ceremony. “The question which has to be answered is: ‘Can she hold up a picture on her own?’ Audrey has been called a star after Roman Holiday, and she has certainly had a lot of publicity. But we haven’t tested yet whether the Hepburn name by itself, above a film title, will fill cinemas.”142

  It was a candid, pragmatic statement. But Audrey was even more candid. Mel once read her a list of adjectives that had been applied to her Ondine performance—words like “coltish,” “gazelle-like” and “otherworldly.”

  “What they mean is tall and skinny,” she replied.

  Her eyes had been described as “lake-haunted,” he told her.

  “Maybe I need some sleep,” she said.

  Beauty experts hailed her innovative “bat-wing” eyebrows.

  “I wish I had the courage to tell them that I just don’t pluck them,” she remarked. 143

  Exactly three days after the Oscars, before the shock had worn off, came yet another stunning prize: the Antoinette Perry (“Tony”) award for best stage actress in Ondine. There were no announced “nominees” for the Tonys until 1956, but Hepburn had been chosen over Deborah Kerr in Tea and Sympathy, Geraldine Page in The Immoralist, and Margaret Sullavan in Sabrina Fair. Only one other actress had ever managed to win an Oscar and a Tony in the same year—Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba and The Time of the Cuckoo.ac

  “How will I ever live up to them?” she told a throng of reporters. “It’s like being given something when you’re a child—something too big for you that you must grow into.”

  Now and in the future, she would keep her distance from the social whirl of both the British and the American film-theater worlds—to concentrate on her work, she said: “Acting doesn’t come easy to me. I put a tremendous amount of effort into every morsel that comes out.”144 One of her non-fans complained: “This training thing is a pose. She’s made it—why doesn’t she relax and have fun? ”145

  A year after her arrival in America—just six years from her start in the chorus of a London musical—she was at the top. At twenty-four, she had vaulted into the public heart and was generating more excitement than Marilyn Monroe. It was unbelievable. It was nerve-wracking. It might suddenly disappear at any time.

  “I believe in fixing a goal for myself and not being diverted in any way from pursuing that goal,” she said the night she won her Roman Holiday Oscar. “I can’t allow this award or all this public acclaim to turn my head or induce me to ease up.”

  A veteran Hollywood producer summed her up a bit ominously: “She charts each day’s schedule like a timetable so there will be no wasted minutes or wasted energies. She operates more like an engineer with a slide rule than a young, single girl turned loose in this emotional world of show business.”146

  CHAPTER 4

  Ruling the World (1954-1957)

  “A woman looks good either in clothes or out of clothes, never both.”

  —MARLENE DIETRICH

  AUDREY HEPBURN WAS AN UNLIKELY FASHION REVOLUTIONARY. “I never thought I was pretty,” she told Ralph Lauren years later. She felt too skinny, too flat, too tall. Her insecurities kept her from seeing her beauty, but she instinctively knew the value of her looks. She said she used to be so self-conscious about the unevenness of her front teeth that she tried not to smile. Yet during Roman Holiday, she declined the studio’s offer to cap her teeth. Nor would she let them pluck her heavy eyebrows.1

  William Wyler, early in Roman Holiday shooting, looked at her and said, “I think you should wear some falsies, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Audrey looked back and said, “I am!”2

  The last word belonged, as always, to Billy Wilder: “If that girl had tits, she could rule the world.”

  She would rule it anyway, in their absence. Photoplay called her “flat-chested, slim-hipped and altogether un-Marilyn Monroeish”—a stringbean, in Hollywood. But she would march straight into the bosom boom and pioneer a look of her own. “You have to look at yourself objectively,” she advised her fans. “Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don’t try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.”3

  Hepburn’s vital statistics were the same from age twenty-three to the end of her life: 32-20-35.ad Givenchy says she never altered more than a centimeter in forty years. Anita Loos observed that her hat size (21) was bigger than her waist—“the slimmest since the Civil War,” said Edith Head. “You could get a dog collar around it.” (A prankster friend once actually used Audrey’s belt as a collar for her St. Bernard—and it fit perfectly!)4

  Head told Charles Higham that Hepburn understood fashion better than any actress except Marlene Dietrich. “Like Dietrich, Audrey’s fittings became the ten-hour not the ten-minute variety. She knew exactly how she wanted to look or what worked best for her, yet she was never arrogant or demanding. She had an adorable sweetness that made you feel like a mother getting her only daughter ready for her prom.”

  She compensated for her height by making flats and ballet slippers an integral part of apparel; her daily uniform consisted of slacks or skirts with a blouse. But gradually, this “wistful child of the war era” turned into something else. Her 1952 publicity photos showed a girl largely removed from fashion, in toreador pants and men’s shirts tied at the waist—charming but not particularly chic.5 Sabrina and Givenchy brought the look that became legendary: From now on, her clothes are not only glamorous but deliberately emphasize the slender silhouette.

  Her beauty secrets—such as they were—were revealed in William Fields’s press release of December 29, 1953:

  Shade of powder?

  “None.”

  Lipstick?

  “Pale shades at all times.”6

  “She looks so pure,” said Audrey Wilder at the time. “She doesn’t wear jewels or hats or furs like the rest of us, and half the time her only makeup is around those huge eyes of hers. The result is that, through no fault of hers, she makes me feel fat and tacky. Also, I suddenly realize that I probably drink and smoke too much.”7

  Hepburn’s reasons for not indulging in luxuries had nothing to do with their expense. “Jewelry just doesn’t suit me,” she said, “and if I wear too much makeup, my face looks like a mask instead of me.... Put me in furs and jewels, and I look like something off a barrel organ.”8

  “Is Hollywood shifting its accent on sex?” asked Silver Screen after the release of Sabrina: “She’s changing Hollywood’s taste in girls. From the fullbosomed,sweater-filling type with more curves than the New York Central Railroad, to the lean, umbrella-shaped variety.” They were speaking, of course, of Audrey, and quoting her: ”I know I’m not very well built. I’m not very shapely and not very voluptuous.... It may be that the accent has gone off sex slightly and gone on to femininity.“9

  Newspapers in 1954 were reporting on “a new cult” around Audrey Hepburn. “Today,” said one, “it is no secret in the magazine world that a picture of the lady on a cover is like a Benzedrine pill to sales.”10 Vogue was calling her “today’s wonder-girl.... She has so captured the public imagination and the mood of the time that she has established a new standard of beauty, and every other face now approximates to the ‘Hepburn look.’ ... This slim little person, with the winged eyebrows and Nefertiti head and throat, is the world’s darling.” 11

  From now on, Vogue would record her every minute change of appearance. So would everyone, and every other publication in Europe and America, with any interest in fashion.

  PRIVATELY, the little fashion plate’s situation was less grand. “I have had no time to shop for ‘Audrey’ clothes,” she lamented. “I have two dinner dresses and slacks, and horrible gaps in between.”12 It illustrated the discrepancy between an international phenomenon and a real-life young woman. The roller coaster was exhilarating, but it was moving much too fast.


  Three months into the run of Ondine, she was suffering from exhaustion. She was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and was fifteen pounds underweight. Her doctors said she had to quit and get some rest, and she reluctantly followed their advice: Ondine closed on July 3, 1954, after 157 performances.

  “Audrey was worn out,” says Mel Ferrer. “She had been working nonstop since before Roman Holiday, supporting her mother and herself. Dancing in musicals and cabaret. Playing an occasional bit-part in films. From Roman Holiday she had jumped into Sabrina and then decided she wanted to do Ondine, in spite of her agents’ and Paramount’s objections....

  “I urged her to take a complete rest in Switzerland—most importantly [to] cure herself of a debilitating case of asthma. When we first saw each other in London she often had to stop and rest in the street as I walked her home. She had very raspy breathing and a deep-seated asthmatic condition.”13

  Mel felt the good Swiss air would help her overcome it. At the end of July, she flew to an Alpine resort in Gstaad, only to be greeted by a crowd of photographers and reporters. After a week of media imprisonment there, she fled to Burgenstock—a lavish mountaintop retreat overlooking Lake of Lucerne. The drive up was almost perpendicular, rising 3,000 feet in twenty minutes. The windows of her villa looked out onto the Alps, and she found both the views and the climate a tonic—unmolested at last.

  “I love to wake up in the early morning, throw open the shutters and drink in the sight of the tall mountain peaks and the lake down below,” she enthused.

  Going to Bürgenstock was one of the most significant decisions of her life. There, wrote Charles Higham, she luxuriated in a private kingdom created by the great Frey hotelier family, whose current scion Fritz became her close friend. He ruled over a mountain peninsula of five hundred acres—a former wilderness transformed into three hotels with golf course, beach, funicular railway, forested park, and staff of hundreds. In that regal resort, Audrey found her first real respite since leaving England for America nearly three years before.

  Forgotten, for the moment, were the complex business arrangements of her career. Paramount had once again tried to buy out her British contract—this time, for a cool million dollars, but Associated British refused. It was the highest-ever rejected Hollywood bid for a British star. Though still bound to ABC, Audrey subsequently agreed to a multiple-picture Paramount contract, with an optional year off between films for the theater.

  “My bosses at Paramount realize I am very sincere about the stage,” she said. “I feel I wouldn’t last long if I were to do pictures only. I have learned the little I know about acting from my stage work.”14

  There were discussions of her playing Juliet at Stratford-upon-Avon, but she was in no condition to do so. In August 1954, the New York Herald Tribune reported that she might be enticed to New York in the winter to play the title role in Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland, with Helen Hayes as Queen Elizabeth. Hayes, who had created the part of Mary in 1933, wanted to do the show again: “Suddenly, I thought of Audrey. She’d be the ideal Mary Stuart.” Perhaps recalling that Audrey had been ordered to rest, Hayes added, “It’s only for two weeks. I should think she could do it. That’s a wonderful part for a girl.”15

  And a wonderful idea: Hayes and Hepburn in a great stage vehicle to showcase them both. But Audrey Hepburn would never return to the theater again.

  AT THAT POINT, it was all she could do to rally from the edge of a nervous breakdown. And it was Mel Ferrer for whom she rallied. In August, for his thirty-seventh birthday, Audrey sent him a platinum Rolex watch engraved, “Mad About the Boy.” (They were both avid Noel Coward fans.) He flew to Switzerland and formally proposed, and she formally accepted—over Ella’s objection.

  During Ondine, she was asked where she wanted to “settle down” permanently. “That’s hard to answer,” she replied, “because one changes all the time. What strikes me most about America is the gaiety and the speed and the vitality. If I had my choice, and if I had the money, I’d have an apartment in London, an apartment in New York, and someplace in the country—providing, of course, I could travel a lot and go to Paris and Rome a great deal! But of course, the day I marry a man I’m very much in love with, and he lives in Timbuktu, that’s where I’ll live.”16

  It would be Switzerland, not Timbuktu.

  On September 24, 1954, Audrey and Mel Ferrer were married in a civil ceremony at Buochs, on the shores of Lake of Lucerne, in the parlor of the local mayor’s house. The next day they repeated their vows at a religious ceremony in a thirteenth-century Protestant chapel below the mountain at Bürgenstock, presided over by Pastor Maurice Eindiguer. She wore a Pierre Balmain white organdie robe, a small crown of white roses, and white gloves. Among the twenty-five guests were Mel’s children Pepa and Mark and his sister Terry; London Paramount chief Richard Mealand; and Sir Neville Bland, a friend of Ella’s and former British ambassador to Holland. Best man Gregory Peck had to cancel due to his film schedule and was replaced by Fritz Frey. Freddie Heineken was an usher. James Hanson was invited but sent regrets.

  For the rest of her life, Audrey would call Switzerland home. Bürgenstock was a town where doctors still made house calls and people took care of sick neighbors. “There is no place in the world where I feel so much at peace,” she would say. “It’s my very private stomping ground. I’ve become one of these people. We’re loyal to each other.”

  After a four-day honeymoon near Bürgenstock, she and Mel enjoyed a week together in the Italian vineyard country near Cinecittà, where he was filming La Madre. “We were pursued by five carloads of photographers when we arrived in Rome,” Mel recalled. “I had rented us a delightful farmhouse outside of Rome.... We had to establish a cordon of security around the farm, so that she could continue to rest while I went off each day to the studio. It was a beautiful and peaceful spot.”17

  There, while Mel completed his picture, they billed and cooed and awaited the release of Sabrina.

  SABRINA’S amorous exposition unfolds beneath a fake Long Island moon with the Rodgers and Hart theme, “Isn’t It Romantic” endlessly driven home in the background.

  “That song is repeated in every Paramount picture because it was totally owned by Paramount,” Billy Wilder explains. “It was first composed for Love Me Tonight (1932), the Mamoulian picture with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. There was no ASCAP, so they bought it from Rodgers and Hart and used it forever.”18

  It even plays as Sabrina (Hepburn) is contemplating suicide over David (Holden) and writing a farewell note to her father: “Don’t have David at the funeral. He probably wouldn’t even cry.”

  Sabrina is shipped off to France, where she tries to forget David while attending a Parisian academy of cuisine. The cooking school provides the film’s funniest, most “Wilderesque” sequences, thanks to Marcel Hillaire as the chief chef. His lecture-demonstrations are a comic tour de force:Today, we will learn the correct way how to crack an egg. Voila! Egg! Now, an egg is not a stone. It is not made of wood. It is a living thing. It has a heart. So when we crack it, we must not torment it. We must be merciful and execute it quickly—it is done with one hand. Kindly watch the wrist. Voilà! One, two, three, crack! You see? It is all in the wrist. Now, everybody—one, two, three crack your egg! One, two, three, crack your egg!

  They all do so in unison—Sabrina most clumsily.

  Back on Long Island, Humphrey Bogart as David’s diligent elder brother, Linus, dictates a letter to his playboy sibling over a state-of-the-art 1954 car phone:Interoffice memo, Linus Larabee to David Larabee. Dear David, this is to remind you that you are a junior partner of Larabee Industries. Our building is located at Thirty Broad Street, New York City. Your office is on the twenty-second floor. Our normal week is Monday through Friday. Our working day is nine to five. Should you find this inconvenient, you are free to retire under the Larabee Pension Plan.

  Their crotchety, frothing-at-the-mouth father (Walter Hampden) sneaks cigars and martinis behind thei
r mother’s back and fulminates about David’s prior marriages, including “that Twyman girl—her family fifty years on the social register, and she has the audacity to wear on her wedding dress, not a corsage but a Stevenson button!” It was one of the script’s many good political jokes nowadays lost on most viewers.

  Sabrina returns from Paris transformed into a sophisticate—the birth of Hepburn’s partnership with Givenchy. David fails to recognize her in her chic new suit. But he invites her to a party that evening, where she wears another fabulous Givenchy creation—a white organdy strapless sheath with a sweeping, floor-length overskirt, open in front, giving the impression that she has wings from the waist down!

  In the hasty twist ending, Audrey gets her man—not flashy Holden, but stuffy Bogart, who undergoes a transformation. “Look at me,” he says, “—Joe College with a touch of arthritis.” Their age difference is huge, but Hepburn’s magic eyes lure us into suspending disbelief, as they would often be called upon to do in her future films.

  Opinion differed sharply over Bogart’s long-in-the-tooth character. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times thought his performance “one of the most surprising and affecting he has ever done.”19 A later critic, on the other hand, declared, “Every time Bogie pitches the woo, you feel like calling the cops.”20

  Britons were offended by “the Wilder vulgarity,” as when Holden sits on a pair of wineglasses. “The subsequent scenes, where the affected region is constantly being prodded and kicked by hearty fellow characters, firmly overstep the narrow dividing line between slapstick and viciousness,” wrote reviewer (later director) Karel Reisz.21 But American audiences loved the running gag of Holden’s injured rear-end, especially the absurd plastic hammock with “trap door” in the middle, helpfully devised by the older brother for the younger’s recuperation.