Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Many had predicted trouble on the set between Mr. and Mrs. Ferrer, working together as director and star for the first time. But Audrey’s sheer professionalism disappointed the naysayers. It was lights-out at ten, said a friend, “and more frequently than not she is in bed by eighty-thirty or nine p.m. reading until her ten o’clock curfew”—Dr. Zhivago, at the time. She also made it clear that she “knew her place” from the start.

  “Mel won’t have any trouble with me,” she said. “I like being directed. I don’t know what to do myself. Of course, there are certain things on the set that I have an instinct about. What I do worry about is that I might hesitate to suggest something because I wouldn’t want him to think that I’m interfering. Any contribution of mine would be minimal, but sometimes one does think of something, you know.”45

  It sounds painfully servile now, but it was how she truly felt then. Throughout the making of the film, she was as conscientious a wife at the studio as she was at home, according to photographer Bob Willoughby, who shot her at both places: “If the prop man forgot to bring Mel his morning orange juice, she brought it herself. In the afternoon she’d bring him tea and cookies. I think she’s the wife of every man’s dreams.”46

  Some members of the crew were so unhappy with Ferrer’s direction that they threatened to walk off the set. Audrey, on the other hand, “often did things she knew were wrong just because he told her to,” says Willoughby. “No matter how idiotic the directions that Mel would give her, while all the other people on the set were rolling their eyes, she would carry them out perfectly, beautifully, without a hint of disagreement, in an effort to help him save face.”47

  One friend said her desire to win admiration from her husband was part of her desire to win admiration from everyone; she was too good to be true: “Someday she’ll prove it by finally revealing herself to be like the rest of the human race, both good and bad. When she does, there may be an explosion, but she’ll be a lot happier than she is now.”48

  Maybe, maybe not. In any event, she certainly won admiration from her choreographer. Mel hired brilliant Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to create the score for Green Mansions and the great Katherine Dunham to stage its dances—and to coach Audrey.

  “I taught her a number of things to help her get into the atmosphere,” recalls Dunham. “She had such a wonderful sense of her body and movement. Technique is a way of life—it’s holistic—and she was a holistic person. That film allowed her to have a lot of exposure in a natural setting, and she fit into it practically without direction. I remember feeling that I’d love to have had her as a dancer to handle.”49

  Dunham’s main choreographic task in the film involved a rite-of-passage ceremony with Henry Silva and the other “Indian” men: Silva’s chest is covered with honey and he must wear a “vest” of stinging bees to prove his manliness. That sado-masochistic ritual ends with one of Dunham’s most orgiastic male dances—a kind of aboriginal, aberrational bachelor party.

  “It was a very exotic film for its day,” she says today. “I wasn’t terribly happy with the director, but it was none of my business. As in other films that I did, the director seemed to feel competitive about the dance sequences because they were out of his control to some extent. It happened also on The Bible: I thought John Huston and I were in agreement about things, but somehow, a lot of the dance was left out.”

  Dunham thought Hepburn had a hard time working under Ferrer: “I felt that he was not terribly sympathetic to her.” But Audrey herself declared otherwise : “Before we began, many friends asked me how such an artistically touchy situation would turn out.... I can say it was pleasantly uncomplicated. I found that being directed by Mel was as natural as brushing my teeth.”50

  She also professed delight with Anthony Perkins as her leading man—the first of her film career to be close to her own age (he was three years younger). Perkins was one of Hollywood’s rising new male stars in the wake of his fine performances in Friendly Persuasion (1956) and Fear Strikes Out (1957). Forced to sing “The Song of Green Mansions” (accompanying himself on the guitar), he did well enough. But his sexual ambivalence—on—and offscreen—did not make for passionate celluloid. Perkins was too quirky and high-strung—as if anticipating Norman Bates in Psycho the next year—to be a convincing lover opposite such an ethereal sprite as Hepburn.

  How did it feel to have her husband tell another man how to make love to her?

  “Uninhibited,” said Audrey. “For the first time in my career, I’ve lost my shyness.... Love scenes have always been difficult for me. But with Mel directing and leading Tony and me through the emotional passages, everything’s fallen into place.”51 Indeed, regardless of the film’s ultimate success or failure, only under Mel’s direct view could she feel free enough to let herself go and attempt a “new,” sexier Audrey Hepburn.

  Green Mansions was completed in November 1958 and premiered at Radio City Music Hall in Easter Week of 1959—before Nun’s Story, which had wrapped much earlier but was not released until July. Much to the Ferrers’ distress, Mansions did not pan out with either the critics or the public—and Mel . got the blame.

  “If Miss Hepburn won’t change husbands, or directors,” said one critic who particularly hated the color photography of Joseph Ruttenberg, “she at least owes it to her public to change her brand of toothpaste. In Ferrer’s fiasco, she looks as if she had been given an overdose of chlorophyll.... The whole thing has an appalling greenish patina that makes it look as if it had been filmed in a decaying parsley patch.”52

  Variety said it was “likely to confuse those who haven’t read the book and irritate those who have.” Cue thought it “a mawkishly absurd burlesque of a jungle alfresco romance.”

  But a significant minority was favorable. “Hepburn’s doe-like grace probably comes closer to a real-life Rima than we have any reason to expect,” wrote Arthur Knight in Saturday Review. British critic Simon Brett was positively rhapsodic, ranking it as something of a lost masterpiece:

  “It is remarkable that it came to be made at all in the year Hollywood produced I Want to Live, The Big Country and Gigi. [Ferrer has] a control, of space and of movement in space, and a taut skill in telling the story in terms of action with the minimum of dialogue. Audrey Hepburn is Rima in the same way that she was Ondine.” Brett felt it marked the end of the first phase of her career: “Rima was her most complete, indeed an almost abstract, symbol of innocence, and in a sense her last.”53

  The “maligned masterpiece” view, however, is disputed by Audrey’s later friend and Lincoln Center Film Society director Wendy Keys: “It was obviously a gesture to please Mel Ferrer, and she put all the effort into it that she put into everything. But Green Mansions does nothing to make me believe he had a sense of anything as a director. It’s a miserable piece of work.”54

  Green Mansions failed to recoup its $3 million investment and put an end to the professional teaming of Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer once and for all. In a way, it was fortunate to have been eclipsed quickly by the much better and more ballyhooed Nun’s Story, whose delayed release by Warners helped limit the damage. But Mansions’ failure was a bitter blow to Mel—the last nail in his coffin as a director-producer. He never directed another Hollywood film.

  For all that and the lumps he took, Ferrer is gracious about it today: “Directing Audrey was a delight. It was more a matter of trying to present Audrey at her grave and touching best than directing her. She knew what she felt. Revealing it was my job. Perhaps I did not do it well. But Rima remains alive for me, and the film was a creative effort we were all glad we tried.”55

  MEL WAS ALWAYS keenly interested in his wife’s personal as well as professional welfare. Her extreme slimness was a career asset but also a concern: Though generally healthy, she was ten or fifteen pounds underweight and tired easily—not for lack of nutrition, she insisted. She ate what she wished and did not preserve her figure by dieting, said Audrey.

  Yet with food, as all
else, she practiced strict discipline and in a sense dieted every day of her life. It would later be claimed that she suffered from anorexia or bulimia (see Chapter 9, pp. 303-4), but Mel Ferrer categorically denies it:

  “Audrey never had an eating disorder. She was always very careful about her diet, did not drink alcohol except an occasional glass of wine with dinner, and avoided desserts. She chose her diet as a dancer would: plenty of protein and lots of vegetables and salads. She ate sparingly and rarely splurged. But we did have a yearly feast of caviar in a baked potato.”56

  When cooking for guests, she could turn out such gourmet treats as egg in aspic, rolled stuffed veal or a Dutch apple torte. But her private diet was indeed simple, as the press’s obsessive coverage of her at the time confirms. “She always eats the same breakfast,” reported Good Housekeeping in 1959, going on to itemize “two boiled eggs, one piece of seven-grain whole-wheat toast from a health-food store, and three or four cups of coffee laced with hot milk. Her lunch consists of cottage cheese and fruit salad or of yoghurt with raw vegetables. For dinner, she has meat and several cooked vegetables.”57

  Five years of near-starvation in Holland left her with a passion for sweets that she still had to fight. “I have seen her resist the most tempting dessert to guard against one inch more on her extraordinary size eight,” said her friend Radie Harris.58 Said Audrey herself: “I’m glad I like sweet things—I expect I’d be tubercular if I didn’t. But if I ate all I wanted, it just wouldn’t do. I’m getting better. Now if I get a box of good chocolates, it will last awhile, maybe for two hours. I used to eat them all without stopping until every last one was gone.... I guess it’s a basic form of insecurity.”59

  There was clearly a deep ambivalence in her attitude toward food, stemming from her childhood. “When you have had the strength to survive starvation,” she would say, “you never again send back a steak simply because it’s under-done.”

  These days, under Mel’s watchful eye, Audrey’s life was as prudent and safe as possible, though he could not insulate her from every danger. After years of reluctance, she now decided to learn how to drive. But soon after getting her license, she crashed into a parked car containing actress-dancer Joan Lora, twenty-two, who suffered neck and back injuries and sued her for $45,000. Reports that Audrey had been drinking or driving on the wrong side of the road were false and, in the end, Lora was awarded just a tenth of what she asked—$4,500. But Audrey was bitterly upset and vowed never to get behind the wheel of a car again.

  A much worse accident was in the offing.

  THE UNFORGIVEN was Audrey Hepburn’s first and last Western—and one of the darkest and most peculiar of all time. It was a product of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions (an independent company co-owned by actor Burt Lancaster, producer Harold Hecht and writer James Hill), which had a growing reputation for bold, socially relevant pictures. Their Marty, a few years before, had swept the Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay.

  The Unforgiven, under John Huston’s direction, was expected to be in that league. It concerned the deep, mindless prejudice against Indians in frontier Texas, and Huston wanted to make a major statement. This was, after all, the early heyday of the American civil-rights movement. But United Artists and Burt Lancaster just wanted a box-office hit.

  “I thought I saw in [Ben] Maddow’s script the potential for a more serious—and better—film than either he or Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had originally contemplated,” said Huston. “I wanted to turn it into the story of racial intolerance in a frontier town, a comment on the real nature of community ‘morality.’ [But] what they wanted was what I had unfortunately signed on to make in the first place—a swashbuckler.... This difference of intention did not become an issue until we were very close to shooting time, and quite mistakenly I agreed to stick it out, thus violating my own conviction that a picture-maker should undertake nothing but what he believes in.... From that moment, the entire picture turned sour. Everything went to hell.”60

  Huston never confirmed or denied the claim that he took on The Unforgiven to fill the time while Arthur Miller polished up the script for his next (and more important) film, The Misfits. In any case, The Unforgiven had a huge budget for a Western—nearly $6 million. Three hundred thousand dollars alone went into the construction of an 1860 pioneer sod home replica that might have cost $150 originally. Audrey’s salary was $200,000, and not everyone thought she deserved it. “She is not an actress, she is a model, with her stiff meager body and her blank face full of good bone structure,” wrote Dwight MacDonald at the time. “She has the model’s narcissism, not the actress’ introversion.”

  Her director disagreed. “She’s as good as the other Hepburn,” Huston declared. This was drama, not melodrama. Audrey’s role in The Unforgiven, in fact, represented a big departure from her previous princesses and saints: an adopted Indian girl entangled not only in the violence and racial nightmares of frontier Texas but, simultaneously, in an incestuous relationship with her brother (Lancaster).

  Since Texas no longer resembled itself in the 1860s, Huston decided to film in Durango, Mexico, which retained the primitive look of the early Lone Star panhandle. But at Durango’s Casablanca Hotel, where the cast was ensconced, there was some tension. Audrey got along with everybody, but Lillian Gish, playing her mother, developed an intense dislike for costar Audie Murphy. He was then under a serious charge of cattle rustling that required studio influence and the full manipulation of Murphy’s World War II hero status to overcome. He also nearly drowned one day in a boating accident on a nearby lake.

  Murphy had escaped disaster by inches. Audrey did not. On January 28, 1959, she attempted to ride bareback on a white stallion, aptly named Diablo and formerly owned by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Determined to do all her own riding in the film, she had firmly rejected the idea of a stand-in, despite her lack of equestrian experience. For hours, she practiced riding around a corral and did well enough for Huston to make some preliminary shots. Mel Ferrer takes up the account from there:

  “[As she was] cantering toward the cameras, they decided to retake the scene and stopped the cameras. A horseman was sent out to tell her to ride back slowly. Arabian stallions are very fiery animals. This one saw the other horse coming, stopped short and threw his head down. Audrey had nothing to hold on to and was pitched over the stallion’s head.”61

  She landed on her back, before the horrified eyes of the company, including Huston and Lancaster, who rushed toward her with three wranglers to get the horses under control. Before fainting, she had the presence of mind to joke to Lancaster, “I had to do something to get out of this hellhole.”62

  She was sure her back was broken but was far more concerned about her unborn baby—as yet a secret from the world—and about Mel’s reaction. He was doing promotional appearances in New York for Green Mansions and a guest shot on What’s My Line? When informed, he immediately flew to Durango, where he found her in capable hands at the local hospital but horribly afraid she might be paralyzed. “I’d hate to see her become another Susan Peters,” said Burt Lancaster, with some lack of tact—referring to the rising young film actress who was injured in a 1944 hunting accident and never walked again.63

  Mel sent for Dr. Howard Mendelson, Audrey’s Hollywood physician, who confirmed what the X rays showed: four broken vertebrae, torn muscles in her lower back, and a badly sprained foot. Dr. Mendelson arrived with none other than Marie-Louise Habets—the real-life Sister Luke—who took personal nursing charge of Audrey. “Sister Lou” persuaded her to return on an ambulance plane to California on February 2 and nursed her for the next month, tending to her injuries and salving her conscience for holding up production of the film.

  “In thirty years of experience, I never before had a patient like her,” said Habets. “She refused all narcotics and sedatives, and despite her pain she never once complained.”64

  Audrey bore her recuperation with regal stoicism indeed. She wrote more than one hundre
d thank-you notes to her well-wishers in the first two weeks alone, prompting journalist Eleanor Harris to elaborate on the theme of her need for admiration: “Throughout each day, she strives ... to be a shining example of good character and good manners.” One friend provided an illustrative account of visiting her in the hospital:She lay propped up in an immaculate bed in her immaculate bedroom.... She wore a snow-white Victorian high-necked nightgown. Her hair was pulled back mirror-smooth into a pony tail and tied with white ribbon to match the white ribbon on her beautifully groomed little Yorkshire terrier. Around the room stood white Limoges vases with white tulips and orchids.

  I noticed that whenever she smoked a cigarette, she stubbed it out in a tiny white ashtray, then put the butt into a wastebasket beside her bed, wiped out the ashtray with a Kleenex, and dropped that too into the basket. Then she replaced the clean ashtray on her bedside table near the framed pictures of her husband, her four stepchildren, and, believe it or not, the horse that threw her. That picture, in a white leather frame, had the front position!65

  Her attitude toward the stallion was typically benevolent. In her first phone conversation with Mel after the accident, she had said, ‘“Don’t get angry at the horse! It wasn’t the horse’s fault,”’ Ferrer recalled.66

  The doctors assured them there was no danger of paralysis. Though there was some hemorrhaging, the fractures were clean breaks, no surgery was needed and there was little to do but let the hemorrhages drain and the fractures heal. She would have to complete the final work on the picture in an orthopedic brace.

  She returned to Durango as she left it—on a stretcher—and was back on the set by March 10. Huston welcomed her with fireworks and a mariachi band, and together they reorchestrated her remaining scenes. There was no getting around the fact that, to match the shots made before the accident, she had to ride Diablo once more. But this time he was sedated, she was properly secured, and all went well.