Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  For now. One day, her opinions on such matters would be worth a lot.

  AFTER FUNNY FACE, Audrey returned to Bürgenstock for four weeks’ rest before her happy reunion and second film with Billy Wilder, whose much-delayed Ariane finally began shooting in August 1956. Based on a popular novel by Claude Anet set in pre-Bolshevik Russia, the story had the ring of Gigi and Sabrina: sophisticated Don Juan falls for innocent young beauty.

  It was reworked by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond—the first of their legendary script collaborations—to make the playboy even more cynical and the girl even more naive: Ariane became the cellist-daughter of a private detective and would fall in love with the rich libertine being investigated by her father for marital infidelity. The mise-en-scène was shifted from Russia to Paris, and the title spiced up to Love in the Afternoon. But when the male lead was announced, wags said a better name might be Beauty and the Beast.ak

  Cary Grant had been Wilder’s first choice. He was almost always Wilder’s first choice, and always unavailable. This time, Grant demurred on the grounds that, at fifty-two, he was too old to romance twenty-seven-year-old Audrey Hepburn on screen. So the part went instead to an even older man—Gary Cooper, fifty-five.

  The old cowboy’s career had been in decline since High Noon (1952) but was recently revived by William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956), which was still filling movie houses as Love in the Afternoon was getting under way. He would have to shed several decades to avoid looking like a child molester.

  “I don’t know why Coop was cast,” says Audrey Wilder. “Billy wanted the all-American kind of guy. But if you read the book, you see that Audrey shouldn’t have played her part, either. She was supposed to be a virgin whose father ran an army post, and all the men were crazy about her and lied about her, so when she goes off with this guy, he’s horrified to find out she’s never had any experience. But Audrey by nature and her innocent persona made him seem like a dirty old man. When she says she’s been with twenty-five guys—you don’t believe her for a minute. Brigitte Bardot could say it and you’d believe it.“98

  Many were disturbed by that, but Hepburn and Cooper were not among them. Shooting took place at the Studios de Boulogne and on location around Paris, and—by comparison with the tension on Wilder’s Sabrina set—the atmosphere on this one was blissful. Audrey loved Cooper and the week it took to shoot a romantic picnic scene with him in the woods of Landru. She liked mastering the finger movements for the cello part in Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, which she had to “perform” in one scene.99

  She also enjoyed the man who played her father—and who almost stole the picture from her—Maurice Chevalier. That old charmer won her heart with a telegram on the first day of shooting: “How proud I would be, and full of love I would be, if I really had a daughter like you.” Later, when he learned that her mother was a fan and an autograph collector, he sent Ella a photo inscribed, “To Audrey’s real mother from her reel father.”

  Not everyone was so bowled over by Chevalier: Audrey Wilder said his only topic of conversation was himself and that “if the conversation veered away from him, his eyes turned to glass.”

  The other Audrey and her mobile domestic gear were back at the Hotel Raphael. (The Wilders had been there, too, but checked out after a few days in protest against the bartender’s inability to make a proper martini.) Mel was filming The Vintage with Pier Angeli in the south of France, and on the weekends Audrey joined him in Nice or St. Tropez. On one of those visits, Ferrer gave her a Yorkshire terrier puppy, soon named “Famous,” who turned out to be the most beloved gift of her life.

  In Paris, the Ferrers and the Wilders, along with Cooper, Diamond, et al., often met after work for drinks or dinner, where Mel kept a close eye on his girl—to the point of being a drag. At one such soiree, Audrey Wilder told Charles Higham, Ferrer reminded Audrey that she had to leave early the next day for the London premiere of War and Peace and that they had to arrange tickets for some mutual friends. Fortified by a few more cocktails than usual, she replied loudly, “What a crock of shit about the tickets!” Everyone was astonished. Mel was furious. “You’re leaving here now,” he said, and they did.100

  Another negative report surfaced from unit publicist Herb Sterne concerning her insistence on seeing and approving all publicity photos. The photographers had been forbidden to shoot her at too low an angle because that would accentuate her nostrils, which she felt were too large. Sterne was amazed by “her obsession with her own face.”101 Her fussiness in general seems to have left the Love in the Afternoon crew less fond of her than their Funny Face counterparts.

  In addition, there were problems with Gary Cooper. It took him a full day—and many flubs—to complete the five-minute scene in which Ariane is ready to storm out of his life but can’t find her shoe. “Somebody wake up Coop!” ordered Wilder before the umpteenth take. He had the further difficulty of teaching Cooper some routine ballroom steps for one scene. No mean dancer himself, Wilder took personal charge of the lessons—and ended up shaking his head over “Old Hopalong Nijinsky.”102

  Cooper, unlike Humphrey Bogart, was a good sport about such cracks, and by and large, Love in the Afternoon was a happy picture. Wilder enjoyed trying to get a rise out of prim Audrey by telling her that the film’s theme song, “Fascination,” had been the musical accompaniment to his own loss of virginity.

  Wilder’s humor was best employed, of course, in the film itself—which occasionally crossed the line between romantic comedy and bedroom farce. Wilder’s best black-comedic touches belong to Lise Bourdin as a lady who keeps beating and chastising her dog for offenses it never commits.

  Hepburn was filmed to perfection by William Mellor (A Place in the Sun). The final “farewell” scene, with Cooper scooping her up into a moving train in fine cowboy fashion, is a classic. But audiences and critics alike had trouble accepting The Age Gap. Despite the aid of gauzy filters, Cooper still looked old enough to be her father, which made the plot look more like a tawdry affair than a romance. It was “among the bleakest, most melancholy of comedies,” said American Film. “Cooper’s face is often in silhouette, making it appear that Hepburn has fallen in love with a shadow. Which, in essence, she has.”103

  To thwart charges of bad taste and bad morals, a voice-over was added at the end, assuring viewers that they were headed for the altar. Even so, in Spain several scenes were censored, and in France its name reverted to Ariane because the American title was considered too suggestive. 104

  Audrey at the time made a spirited defense against the claim that her leading men were too old: “The charge is particularly unfair to Coop,” she told a New York World Telegram reporter. “In Love in the Afternoon he’s not trying to fool anyone. He’s supposed to be a man of fifty. That’s the whole point of the story. As for Fred Astaire, who cares how old he is? He’s Fred Astaire! If anyone doesn’t like it, he can go jump in the lake.”105al

  Later, however, she gave up the fight and said—not so facetiously—that Love in the Afternoon might have been more credible if Cooper and Chevalier had switched roles.

  WHEN SHE finished shooting the Wilder film in late fall 1956, Audrey left Europe to spend the Christmas holiday at La Quinta, a desert resort near Palm Springs, with Mel and his children, Pepa and Mark. There—and subsequently—she reverted again to wifely mode: “If a room isn’t gay it can be awfully depressing and a male begins to sulk,” she said. “I try to keep our trunks tabulated so I will never have to ask myself again, ‘Now where did I pack Mel’s patent leather pumps?’”106

  Meanwhile, she was turning down such film offers as Jean Negulesco’s A Certain Smile and George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank. She had read Het Achterhuis [The Secret Annex, retitled The Diary of Anne Frank] in 1947 in its Dutch galley form, and “it destroyed me,” she said. “There were floods of tears. I became hysterical.” Audrey was one of the first pilgrims to the Amsterdam building on Prinsengracht where the Franks had hidden. But Anne’s story was
too much Audrey’s own, and the memories—having survived the occupation in which Anne perished—made it impossible for her, despite great pressure that was brought to bear on her. At the request of George Stevens, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, traveled to Biirgenstock from his home in Zurich to try to persuade Audrey to take the role.

  “He came to lunch and stayed to dinner,” she recalled. “We had the most wonderful day.... He came with his new wife, who had lost her husband and her children [in the Holocaust]. They both had the numbers on their arms. He was a beautiful-looking man, very fine, a sort of transparent face, very sensitive. Incapable of talking about Anne without extreme feeling. I had to ask him nothing because he had a need to talk about it. He struck me [as] somebody who’d been purged by fire. There was something so spiritual about his face. He had been there and back.”107

  Audrey kept a snapshot of the occasion for good luck in her own little Everyman Library edition of The Diary. “I read it again when George sent it to me—and had to go to bed for the day,” she said. Later, she added other reasons for declining: “I didn’t want to exploit her life and her death to my advantage—to get another salary, to be perhaps praised in a movie.”108 A practical problem was cited by her friend Doris Brynner: “She was too old. She knew she couldn’t play a fifteen-year-old.”109

  Young Millie Perkins played it instead, quite well, in what turned out to be an excellent picture. Years later, Larry King asked Hepburn if, upon reflection, she thought she might have been the perfect Anne. “No,” she replied, “but then I’m not much of an actress.... I could not have suffered through that again without destroying myself.”110

  Perhaps for similar reasons, she also declined Paramount’s offer to star in a non-musical biography of Maria von Trapp, whose life story would soon become The Sound of Music on Broadway. But there would be other nuns in Audrey’s future, and for the moment, everything else was swept away in favor of the chance to costar with her husband.

  In November 1957, the Ferrers attended the twenty-second annual New York Film Critics Awards at Sardi’s, where the agenda was film but the talk was of television—and how to compete with it. The winners that night seemed to confirm the success of the new big-screen devices: Around the World in 80 Days (shot in Todd-AO) was chosen best film. The best actor and actress awards went to Kirk Douglas for Lust for Life and Ingrid Bergman for Anastasia—both lush CinemaScope productions.

  During NBC radio’s live broadcast of that event, commentator Ben Grauer provided the play-by-play: “... There’s a little kiss from Ingrid Bergman to Audrey Hepburn...and a man who’s close by Audrey’s side. Come here, Mrs. Ferrer! Mel, hello. Mel Ferrer—formerly of NBC.”

  “Still with NBC,” Mel corrected. “We’re working for them right now.”

  Film stars who made television movies were rare in those days, and viewed as slightly traitorous by Hollywood. Some were even subject to reprisals by the studios, but Audrey Hepburn was “too big” for anything like that to occur. Thus, she and Mel had agreed to do Mayerling for NBC-TV-the most lavish made-for-television spectacular up to that time.

  It would be a ninety-minute Producers’ Showcase color extravaganza—a kind of counterattack to the recent spate of movie epics—with a $620,000 budget, a cast of 107, fabulous costumes and sets. For Audrey, the financial arrangements were as appealing as the choice of her costar: She would get $150,000 for three weeks’ work, one of rehearsal and two of indoor taping at the NBC studios on Sixth Avenue in New York City—where the Ferrers arrived on New Year’s Day of 1957.

  The author of the project at hand was the same Claude Anet who had written Ariane. But Mayerling was no light comedy. It was the true story of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, who in 1889 fell in love with a seventeen-year-old commoner named Maria Vetsera and, rather than give her up, made a mutual suicide pact. Its director was Anatole Litvak, who knew the territory well: He had made the successful 1936 French version starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux. But this time, he had an unusual problem with his leads:

  “When Audrey plays Maria, speaking to the prince, she is also Audrey speaking to her husband,” Litvak told Life magazine in mid-production. “It is very dif ficult to get Mel to treat her roughly. I had to work with him to get him to do it.”111

  Ferrer himself confirms the accuracy of that—if not of a second Litvak statement: “I had a lot of trouble getting them to turn on the heat. Audrey seemed to have a better rapport with that Yorkshire terrier of hers.”112

  It always took months between the filming and the release of a movie, but—in good television fashion—Mayerling was aired on February 4, 1957, just two weeks after the conclusion of production. Reportedly, it garnered the largest audience of any Producers’ Showcase program since Peter Pan two years earlier. But a big audience was not necessarily a happy audience—and the word “flop” was heard more than a little.

  “A more pallid or elementary version of Mayerling would be difficult to imagine,” opined The New York Times.113 “The lovers seem more fated to bore each other to death than to end their illicit alliance in a murder-suicide pact,” said TV critic John Crosby.114 As usual, Hepburn was praised for her beauty, delicacy and poignant vulnerability. Most of the brickbats were reserved for Ferrer as insufficiently dashing or romantic. Even in Europe, where the production was released theatrically, there was no critical or box-office excitement.

  Mayerling was Mel and Audrey’s last joint appearance, and on the basis of its failure, Paramount would reject several other proposed Hepburn-Ferrer team productions, including Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Jean Anouilh’s The Lark.

  It was finally dawning on Audrey—and more grudgingly on Mel—“that they were not destined to be the next Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh,” says Sheridan Morley. The public would accept them separately as a leading lady and a downbeat character actor, but not collectively. “From now on, Ferrer began to think of himself as the producer/director rather than costar of the partnership.” 115

  So what could, or would, the leading lady take on next? The month of Mayerling’s release, she had been voted “Girl of the Year” by Britain’s Picturegoer Film Annual. New York’s Cholly Knickerbocker named her one of the ten most fascinating women in the world, and the New York Dress Institute put her on its best-dressed list. As the accolades poured in, it was increasingly clear that they had more to do with her “look” than with her acting. However beloved by fashion photographers and designers, Audrey was still unusually difficult to cast in films.

  She and Mel pondered that dilemma, after Mayerling, on a skiing trip to St. Moritz and then in Spain and Mexico, where she accompanied Mel for the making of The Sun Also Rises, costarring Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn. The Mexican location shoot was charged with electricity. By one account, Ava Gardner had just ended her affair with screenwriter Peter Viertel, losing him to Joan Fontaine, who in turn soon lost him to Deborah Kerr, on top of which there was great tension between Flynn and Power due to their alleged prior affair—all of which Audrey and Ava ignored by shopping and sightseeing together constantly.

  “Total bullshit,” says Peter Viertel. “Joan Fontaine was in the future, and my affair with Gardner—which wasn’t really an affair—was playing nurse to her when she was pissed DURING the Sun Also Rises shooting. Audrey and Mel kept very much to themselves, and so did Ava. I never knew of any ‘affair’ between Errol and Ty—and I very much doubt it.”

  The truth is more interesting than the fiction. “My first draft of the [Sun] script was a hundred percent better than the final one,” says Viertel. “Fred Zinnemann said he’d do it. He wanted Audrey for Lady Brett and he sent her the script, but she said she didn’t want to play ‘a nymphomaniac.’ In fact, even though she sleeps with everybody, the character is not a nymphomaniac, but Audrey felt she had an image to keep up. She wouldn’t have been right for Lady Brett—but she would have been interesting.” 116

  When shooting of the Hemingway film was completed
(under Henry King‘s, not Fred Zinnemann’s, direction), the Ferrers went to California for some studio story conferences and a visit with Mel’s children in Santa Barbara before returning to Switzerland. Audrey was hugely relieved to be back home: She was expecting a baby. But it was those story conferences in Hollywood that would soon give birth—to twins.

  “I’M TERRIBLY SORRY that I won’t be able to do The Diary of Anne Frank,” she told a reporter—disingenuously—around this time. “It will come at the same time as The Nun’s Story, so it will be impossible.” 117

  Robert (Tea and Sympathy) Anderson had long been working on a script for The Nun’s Story, which was the subject of one of those story conferences Mel and Audrey attended in California. The second dealt with another book-to-film project, but of a highly allegorical nature. Both would come to fruition. The question was which to make first. Having played mostly ingenues and Cinderellas to date, Hepburn decided it was time to prove herself as a serious dramatic actress in a part that submerged her own sunny personality beneath a much deeper set of emotions. The role of Sister Luke, which she signed to play in December 1957, would offer the greatest screen challenge of her life.

  Toward the end of the fifties, Audrey Hepburn was a “glorious anachronism,” a member of a cinematic aristocracy whose appeal was on the wane. Her leading men had mostly been over fifty, and their ages had been considered no detriment to her. “She was courted on screen by nearly every hunky Hollywood relic,” said Richard Corliss, “until, in The Nun’s Story, only God could be her best beau.”118

  CHAPTER 5

  Huckleberry Friend (1958-1962)

  “Marilyn [Monroe] was my first choice to play Holly Golightly. I thought she would be perfect. Holly had to have something touching about her ... unfinished. [But] Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey.”