by Barry Paris
-TRUMAN CAPOTE
FROM NYMPH TO NUN, SAID THE WAGS.1 MAKING THE NUN’S STORY was a daring decision both for Audrey Hepburn and for Warner Brothers in the year 1958. The narrative seemed better suited to documentary than to big-feature treatment. Moreover, the complex spiritual problems of its heroine were sure to disturb the Roman Catholic Church and many of the faithful. Some ecclesiastical officials charged that Hulme’s novel exaggerated and sensationalized such aspects of convent life as flagellation and that its “negative” ending reflected pejoratively on all nuns.
Two things were essential to pulling the film off: a director of great finesse, and the presence of Hepburn. She was the only major star with sufficiently credible “purity,” untainted by any scandalous behavior on- or offscreen.
Director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here To Eternity, Oklahoma!) would provide the finesse. The book had been sent to him by Gary Cooper, “who thought I might find it interesting. He was right. Unhappily, my enthusiasm was not shared by any of the studios.... But when Audrey said she wanted to do it the studios suddenly became intensely interested.”2 The only other candidate, Zinnemann revealed, had been Ingrid Bergman—but she failed the purity test.
Reports that Hepburn had hesitated due to the lack of a part for Mel Ferrer were false. Ferrer, in fact, had read The Nun’s Story first and recommended it with enthusiasm. “I particularly admired Fred Zinnemann,” he recalls, “and urged Audrey to play the nun, which changed the direction of her creative life.”3 Forever criticized, Mel never got credit for this instance—among others—of his positive career advice. His attitude was all the more generous considering that her casting in Nun’s Story complicated his own ambitious project with her, Green Mansions. The schedule was so tight that Audrey would have no break between two demanding productions in tropical locales, for which she was now taking an assortment of twelve shots against a host of diseases.
The previous great “Catholic film”—The Song of Bernadette, fifteen years earlier—had been uplifting and devoid of controversy. Kathryn C. Hulme’s Nun’s Story, on the other hand, was a bestselling novel that treated its religious material with respect but also with severe realism and a sad ending.
It was the true story of Belgian nun Marie-Louise Habets (“Sister Luke”), whose devotion is ever at war with her vow of obedience. She is sent to work as a nurse in the Belgian Congo, where her inner struggle unfolds through a series of medical crises and an intense relationship with the surgeon she serves. The backdrop is World War II and her moral dilemma is compounded by the question of whether to assist the Resistance after her father is killed by the Nazis.
The film, like the book, had to work simultaneously on multiple levels—dramatic, spiritual, political—with a disturbing relevance to Hepburn’s own war experience. Author and subject had met in 1945 at a UNRRA camp for displaced persons in Germany. One day, Hulme remarked on the long hours Habets spent at her nursing work. “You’re a saint, Marie-Lou,” she said, to which Habets reacted with great upset. “I was a nun once,” she later confided to Hulme, “but a nun who failed her vows.”
The two women became soul mates as well as housemates. Habets came to the United States in 1951, moved in with Hulme and worked in a Santa Fe Railroad hospital in Los Angeles, caring for Navajo track walkers, brakemen and porters. Nun’s Story had sold three million copies and been translated into twelve languages by the time film production began, when Zinnemann arranged for Audrey to meet the real-life Sister Luke at Hulme’s home near Los Angeles.
“She didn’t really want to meet me,” Habets later said. “She felt the story was too much of my private life. She just sat there and looked at me and didn’t ask any questions.”4
On subsequent visits, Hepburn got less tongue-tied and ended up working so closely with Hulme and Habets that people referred to them collectively as “The 3-H Club.” Audrey consulted the ex-nun on every detail of her character—from the proper donning of a habit to the correct kissing of a crucifix. Habets also familiarized her with an operating room and helped demystify the world of microscopes and Bunsen burners in a medical laboratory.
The presence of Hepburn allayed Jack Warner’s fears but not necessarily those of the Catholic church. She was not, after all, a Catholic herself, and the church was still sufficiently powerful in 1958 to hold up a multimillion-dollar production over a single line of dialogue, as Zinnemann recalled:Two things about the project worried them. One was the fact that a professed nun would leave her order after seventeen years—it was not good for recruiting, as one Monsignor put it. The other problem was that we might be tempted to exploit the implicit attraction between the nun and the worldly, cynical, charming Dr. Fortunati....
All film companies approaching the Catholic Church for assistance are [assigned] someone—often a Dominican priest—to work with them. The Dominican Order ... is strong on dogma and not particularly flexible. In our case they were extremely thorough in scrutinizing our shooting script. They went through it line by line and objected, for instance, to a speech by Edith Evans: “The life of a nun is a life against nature.” Our advisers said, “You mustn’t say that. You have to say, ‘... a life above nature....”’ More than two hours were spent in discussion of that one word. We went back and forth without making progress until a Jesuit friend ... said, “Why can’t you say, ‘in many ways, it’s a life against nature’?” and so, with the Jesuitical addition of “in many ways,” into the screenplay it went.5
Zinnemann also needed to secure permission for Audrey to do more “homework”—and for the company to shoot—inside an actual nunnery. The bishop of Bruges had refused permission to film at Habets’s own Sisters of Charity convent in Ghent, but Warner agents negotiated the use of a similar French convent belonging to the Sisters of the Oblates d’Assomption, at Froyennes—in exchange for some hard, Hollywood cash. The mother superior also agreed to let Audrey stay there briefly for observation purposes.
Casting, by then, had been completed. Audrey had hinted that Ferrer could play Dr. Fortunati, says Warren Harris, but “Zinnemann pretended not to hear.”6 Several other candidates, including Yves Montand, declined the part on the grounds that it was too small. Zinnemann settled wisely on Australian actor Peter Finch, whose name and fee were smaller. Dame Edith Evans was perfectly cast as Mother Emmanuel, Sister Luke’s mother general in Belgium. Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Mildred Dunnock and Beatrice Straight would play the other key roles among the nuns.
Never before or after were the logistics of a film—far-flung locations in France, Italy and the Congo—so difficult for Audrey. From Day One, she fretted that delays in Nun’s Story’s shooting schedule would run into Mel’s start-up date for Green Mansions, and she couldn’t get a straight answer out of the studio. With the clock ticking, Zinnemann sent a red-flag cable to Warners: “We are courting disaster if Audrey left unaware of finishing date much longer. Will decline all responsibility for picture unless Audrey fully aware of true situation. Find myself increasingly unable to cope with endless uncertainty.”
Matters were complicated by various sublime and ridiculous snags. It was reported that Hepburn insisted a bidet be airmailed to her in Rome and thence to Africa. (She denied it: “How and where would you hook it up?”) What she wanted much more than a bidet was her dog Famous: The Italians were willing to fudge their quarantine rules, but the Congolese were not. Cables flew back and forth among officials on three continents, until Famous finally got his canine visa. Audrey hugged and kissed and fussed over him, and took him everywhere. Once when a car nearly ran over him, “she went crazy, screaming and crying,” recalls costar (and later film-biographer par excellence) Patricia Bosworth. “After her outburst, she locked herself in her dressing room until she had herself under control.”7 Fred Zinnemann thought the dog was an obvious child-substitute.
Actress Rosalie Crutchley, who played Sister Eleanor, remembered a chat she and Hepburn had after Crutchley’s young son and daughter visited the studio. “How for
tunate you are,” Audrey said wistfully. “I do terribly want to have a child—more than anything else in the world. How have you managed to have children and maintain a career?” Crutchley’s reply was rather brusk: “unlike you, I am not a globe-trotting film star.”8
The real globe-trotting for Nun’s Scory had not yet begun. The “studio” was not in Hollywood but in Rome, where most of the interior photography would be done. In the Cinecittà Studios’ Experimental Center, set wizard Alexander Trauner designed an historically correct convent and chapel and perfect replicas of an early Michelangelo “Pieta” and other statues in Bruges. One advantage to filming in Rome related to obtaining the many other nuns required for Nun’s Story, as Zinnemann explained:
“As it was understood that real nuns were not to be photographed, we needed to find extras for the large complicated ceremonial scenes of walking in procession, kneeling, bowing and prostrating themselves—all more or less on cue; these women had to have special training. In the end, twenty dancers were borrowed from the ballet corps of the Rome Opera and were drilled by two Dominican nuns, one of them a university professor.”
Zinnemann took scrupulous care to see that all convent rituals were accurately rendered—literally “choreographed,” with the help of those dancers, in the chapel scenes.
“For the nuns’ close-ups,” he said, “faces of great character and personality were needed. We found them mostly among the embassies and the Roman ‘black’ aristocracy: a lot of principessas and contessas would turn up in their Rolls-Royces or Mercedes at five a.m. Dressed as nuns they looked marvelous.”
As of two weeks before shooting began, all the on-screen nuns were ordered to stay out of the sun, and makeup supervisor Alberto de Rossi emphasized the paleness of their skin and lips. His wife Grazia, again serving as Audrey’s hairdresser, was cleverly engaged to play the nun who cuts off Sister Luke’s hair at the beginning of her novitiate. (Contrary to legend, the hair she lops off is not Audrey’s own, but a wig.)9
Otherwise, Zinnemann chose not to cast many Roman Catholics in the film. “It seemed important to keep an objective approach to the work, without the emotional involvement a faithful believer would bring to it,” he said, and none of the leads relied on religion to create their roles. Most fascinating was Edith Evans’s approach to her part. She told Zinnemann she took the character of the Reverend Mother from a single sentence in the book: “Her back never touched the back of the chair in which she was sitting.” Evans held herself absolutely straight to show the gap between the chair’s back and her own, and built her whole character from that one physical trait.10
Audrey, by contrast, was building her character from the inside out. She began a regimen of simple, convent-type meals and a policy of not looking at herself in mirrors, which were forbidden to real-life nuns. When a makeup man turned on a phonograph one day during a break in shooting, she asked him to turn it off as “Sister Luke wouldn’t be allowed to listen to it.” The inward essence concerned her deeply. “There’s a man in the Congo I want to see, if I possibly can,” she told a reporter just before leaving Rome for Africa. “Albert Schweitzer.” 11
ON JANUARY 23, 1958, Hepburn, Zinnemann, Finch and company flew to the Belgian Congo in high spirits. In that pre-jet age, it took fourteen hours to get to Stanleyville, their headquarters for the next two months. Once they arrived, said Zinnemann, “Except for the occasional snakes in unexpected places, such as under breakfast tables, we lived quite comfortably in the Sabena Guest House on food flown in from Brussels twice a week.”12
What would Mel eat in her absence? Audrey—dutiful wife as well as dutiful actress—had not failed to take care of that. Before leaving for Africa, she had written out daily menus for the cook to prepare for him—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even midnight snacks—during the months she would be away.13
Audrey’s own needs and demands were few. Other than the dog, “The only thing she requested in the Congo was an air conditioner,” says Zinnemann. “It was promptly sent from the studio in Burbank but did not seem to do much good. On closer inspection it turned out to be a humidifier.”14
Audrey recalled that “in the Congo, a cool day was 100, and the weather was often 130. [But] I didn’t swelter in my nun’s habit.... Actually, all that covering keeps the heat out.”15 Perhaps being thin also made the heat less oppressive for her than for others; Dame Peggy was out for two days with heat stroke. In any case, Zinnemann said he had “never seen anyone more disciplined, more gracious or more dedicated to her work than Audrey. There was no ego.... There was the greatest consideration for her coworkers.” She was taking on the characteristics of an actual nun—albeit Hollywood-style.
“Our ‘nuns’ carried make-up cases and smoked cigarettes between setups,” said Zinnemann. “The blacks who came to watch the shooting could not believe their eyes. Then someone said, ‘Of course, these are American nuns.’ And the blacks said, ‘Ah, yes, now we understand.’” 16
Highlight of the filming was the four days they spent with the celebrated British missionary Dr. Stanley Browne, shooting a sequence in his leper colony on an island in the middle of the Congo river. “Naturally,” said Zinnemann, “we asked [Dr. Browne] about the risks involved. ‘You have less risk of getting leprosy here than catching a cold in the New York subway,’ he said. After we had finished shooting he added, ‘Of course you have to understand that the incubation period for leprosy is seventeen years.”’ Dr. Browne was using the new sulfone drugs to stop the spread of, though not cure, leprosy. “Each year they were able to release a small number of people who were declared safe and were returned to their villages after a most moving ceremony which ended with everyone singing an anthem in their own language: English, French, Lingala and Swahili.”17 The tune to which they all sang their own words was the “Ode to Joy” of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and when Audrey heard it, she wept.
Equally dramatic was the planned sequence in which three men are caught in quicksand on the banks of a raging river during a rainstorm. People along the water’s edge were to watch in horror as the men disappeared under the mud, Zinnemann recalled:A good river was soon found, but the set—with three built-in lifts to show the men slowly sinking out of sight—would cost $40,000. In 1958 this was a staggering sum; Jack Warner wouldn’t hear of giving his okay. Finally, [producer Henry Blanke] had to fly with me all the way from the Congo to Hollywood, in order to persuade Warner of the enormous excitement of this scene....
On the day before shooting, we rehearsed the entire sequence, complete with lifts, wind machines and rainbirds. It all worked to perfection. But during the night the river fell by two feet; all the chicken-wire and cement holding together the “quicksand” was glaringly exposed.18
It was the $40,000 scene-that-was-never-shot. But of greater concern was the worsening political situation in the Congo, which was coming to the end of nearly a century of bitter Belgian colonialism. Racial tensions were palpable in Stanleyville, where a postal clerk named Patrice Lumumba would soon become premier—and soon after be murdered.
“There was a curfew for the blacks, who were not allowed in the European area after sunset,” Zinnemann recalled. “[One year later,] the Belgians would be driven out [and] very many of these extraordinary people were dead—killed in the revolution.”19
Exterior filming in the Congo was completed early in March 1958, but equally tricky were the interior sexual subtleties of the story—namely, the relationship between Sister Luke and the atheist doctor for whom she works. “He’s a genius—also a bachelor and an unbeliever,” she is warned in advance. “Don’t ever think for an instant that your habit will protect you.”
There could be no hint of a physical affair between the doctor and the nun, but Zinnemann felt Finch had the sex appeal to make audiences feel a powerful attraction anyway. Soon enough, there were rumors of a Hepburn-Finch affair—as there were rumors of an affair between Finch and every actress he ever worked with, including Vivien Leigh in Elephant Walk
. Confirmed, rather than rumored, were his heavy drinking habits, cultivated from an early age in Australia. Audrey’s piety, in and out of her role, had nothing in common with Finch’s wild, womanizing ways—but made for a perfect complement to him on screen.
“His public image was no myth,” said Yolande Finch, his second wife. “He was a piss-pot and a hell-raiser, but he was also a happy drunk, a gigglebum and very, very good company.”20
Typical of Finch’s attachments was one formed on the Sabena airliner en route to the Congo: He was suddenly afflicted by a fear of flying to rival Erica Jong’s, finding relief only in close contact with a beautiful, six-foot Belgian stewardess named Lucienne Van Loop.21 She was regularly assigned to that flight, and they saw a lot of each other during Nun’s Story shooting. Finch said the reason for her frequent visits was “dental treatment,” although Stanleyville was not known to be a mecca of dentistry. Audrey, in one of her rare and charming off-color remarks, observed that, “If she keeps up at the present rate, she’ll be giving her Finchy a very gummy smile.”22
Finch, however, was always respectful of Hepburn. A certain Magistra monkey, on the other hand, was not. It was supposed to be Sister Luke’s beloved pet, but it gave Audrey a nasty bite on the right arm. Otherwise, location injuries were minimal.
Audrey’s serious medical trouble happened not in Africa but after the company returned to Italy for the conclusion of the marathon 132-day shoot. One midnight at the Hotel Hassler in Rome, she began to feel excruciating back pains, accompanied by vomiting and a urinary obstruction. Stoic as ever, she refused to call anyone she knew for help, not even Zinnemann and his wife, who were on the floor below. “We learned of her illness only the next morning,” said Mrs. Zinnemann. “She had telephoned the hotel doctor rather than disturb our sleep.”23
