by Barry Paris
—ANDRÉ PREVIN
IT WAS THE BEST OF ROLES, IT WAS THE WORST OF ROLES.... “You’ve got My Fair Lady!” shouted Kurt Frings triumphantly to Audrey Hepburn via long-distance telephone in Bürgenstock, where she had returned for some rest after Charade.1
It was the call she had been awaiting for months—or years or perhaps her whole life. “I had to share the magnificent news with somebody close to me,” she said. “Mel was away. But there was Mother upstairs, taking a shower. I banged on the bathroom door and screamed something unintelligible about the movie I was to star in and Mother came out soaking wet, wrapped in a towel, thinking the house was on fire.”2
Ferrer was in France at the Cannes Film Festival, and Audrey immediately placed a call to him there but had to hang on the line for half an hour until he could be located. By the time he got to the phone, she was in tears. When she told him her news, he asked why she was crying. “Because it’s such an important day and we are hundreds of miles apart,” she replied.3
Eliza Doolittle was one of the greatest stage roles of all time. She was created by George Bernard Shaw, whose favorite subject was women—far more sane and loving than men, he believed and best asserted in the title, Man and Superman. Of his many influential plays, Pygmalion was the greatest success. In the Greek myth, that sculptor detests women for their wicked ways and vows to remain a bachelor but makes the fatal mistake of carving a statue which is so beautiful that—when Aphrodite brings it to life—he falls in love. Ovid treated the same subject in his Metamorphoses, as did several Elizabethan writers and eventually, in 1871, Sir William Gilbert. His play Pygmalion and Galatea was seen and much admired by the fifteen-year-old Shaw.
It took forty years and the inspiration of Mrs. Patrick Campbell for Shaw to produce his own Pygmalion—a fussy phonetics professor named Henry Higgins. His Galatea was the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle—“perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older.” “It would be better if I was twenty-five years younger,” Mrs. Campbell wrote Shaw, “but thanks for thinking I can be your pretty slut.” She was forty-nine when she created the role on the London and New York stages in 1914.
It was a sensation from the start. Audiences gasped at the end of Eliza’s first scene with Freddy. “Are you walking across the park, Miss Doolittle?” he asks. “Walk!” she exclaims, “Not bloody likely!” If not the first, it was the most celebrated utterance of that word on the London stage to date.
Subsequent Elizas included Lynn Fontanne in the 1926 Broadway revival, Wendy Hiller (opposite Leslie Howard) in the 1938 British film version, and Gertrude Lawrence in the Broadway production of 1946. Inevitably, it was a candidate for musical treatment—which it repeatedly defied. “Dick Rodgers and I worked on it for over a year, and we gave it up,” said Oscar Hammerstein in the early fifties. “It can’t be done.”4
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe took their first crack at it around 1952. “It seemed one drawing-room comedy which just resisted expansion,” said Lerner, who worked on it for six months but then set it aside. When it finally started to gel a few years later, not everyone was impressed. Mary Martin and her agent were among the first to hear what was then My Fair Lia, after which the agent told Lerner, “You boys have lost your talent.” The boys kept working but, as late as the show’s opening in New Haven, still hadn’t settled on a title.... Lady Lia, My Lady Lia, Come to the Ball, Fanfaroon?
The nod finally went to My Fair Lady, a pun on the cockney pronunciation of “Mayfair lady.” On March 15, 1956, with Julie Andrews as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins, it opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and stayed there for an astounding 2,717 performances, the longest run of any musical to that time. It won every award and became the biggest hit in musical theater history, ultimately produced in eleven languages and twenty-one countries.
A fierce bidding war for screen rights was eventually won by Warner Brothers: at $5.5 million plus 50 percent of gross revenues above $20 million, it was the most expensive stage-to-film deal ever made in Hollywood.as With a budget of $17 million, it would also be the most costly Warners movie ever.
My Fair Lady was the last great Broadway musical to receive lavish screen treatment. It was Jack Warner’s extravagant swan song—his last production at Warner Brothers. Everything about it would be on a grand scale, starting with the casting. Warner wanted nothing but top-of-the-line stars in the leads, and he knew exactly which three he wanted most: Cary Grant as Higgins, James Cagney as Doolittle and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.
Normally, if a great studio mogul set his sights on certain stars and the stars were available, that was it. No other input was needed. But neither Warner nor the industry reckoned on the unprecedented kibitzing of a group whose casting preferences were rarely heard or heeded: the public. Many of those thirty-two million owners of the original cast album were staunch fans of—and clamoring for—Julie Andrews. One of the staunchest was Alan Lerner who, after seeing her in The Boy Friend, had selected Andrews for the Broadway role and was now 100 percent behind casting her in the film. But Lerner had no contractual say in the matter.
Warner was criticized ever after for not giving Andrews the part, but he discussed it with her at least once by phone. “I’d love to do it,” she reportedly told him. “When do we start?” Warner asked when she could come out for a screen test, to which Andrews replied, “Screen test? You’ve seen me do the part and you know I can do a good job.” He said, “Miss Andrews, you’re only known in London and New York. You’ve never made a movie and I’m investing a lot of money in this. I have to be sure you photograph and project well. Films are a different medium.” But Andrews refused. Thenceforth, after Warner let it be known that he would hire a film actress, show-biz columnists around the country took up the standard, lamenting and lobbying for Julie.
No one was following the controversy more closely than Audrey. “I understood the dismay of people who had seen Julie on Broadway,” she said later. “Julie made that role her own, and for that reason I didn’t want to do the film when it was first offered. [But] I learned that if I turned it down, they would offer it to another movie actress [and] I thought I was entitled to do it as much as the third girl, so then I did accept.”5
Audrey herself never revealed the name of that “third girl,” of whom she was very fond: Elizabeth Taylor. (“Get me My Fair Lady,” Taylor allegedly commanded Eddie Fisher and Kurt Frings—as if either of them could.) But as soon as Audrey entered the race, she won it. Never before had Jack Warner felt obliged to justify a casting decision, but such was the outcry in this case that he publicly—and candidly—stated his explanation:With all her charm and ability, Julie Andrews was just a Broadway name, known primarily to those who saw the musical. But in thousands of cities and towns throughout the United States and abroad, you can say “Audrey Hepburn” and people instantly know you’re talking about a beautiful and talented star. In my business, I have to know who brings people and their money to a theatre box-office. I knew Audrey Hepburn... had given exhibitors a big money shot in the arm with The Nun’s Story. For that picture, we gave her a guarantee of a quarter of a million dollars against ten per cent of the gross, and she came out with nearly one and a half million dollars—in other words, the film grossed $14 million, and that was remarkable.6
Audrey was Warner’s idée fixe. Her name alone would ensure the film’s success, he believed. The box-office difference between Andrews and Hepburn he calculated to be $5 million. A notoriously tightfisted man, he shocked Hollywood by agreeing to pay her $1 million for the role. Only three other stars belonged to the million-per-film club: Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. Frings arranged for seven annual installments of $142,957, to help Audrey with her taxes and to make the payout less draining on the studio’s cash flow.
Warner faced rebellion on his choice of male lead, as well, but he at least kept that controversy from spilling over into the press. When director George Cukor approached Cary Grant about Higgins, Grant said, “Ther
e is only one man who should play this, and that’s Rex. Any other actor would be a fool to try it.... Not only will I not play Higgins, if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it, I won’t go and see it.”7 Warner, amazingly, had also sounded out Rock Hudson on the role. At the opposite extreme, Cukor had spoken with Laurence Olivier and Peter O’Toole about it, but neither was available.
It was little known that Rex Harrison was actually the fourth choice for Higgins on stage (after Noel Coward, Michael Redgrave and George Sanders all turned it down). Nowadays, he was in England, in a comfortable position. He was not a man to get overly excited about behind-the-scenes casting maneuvers.
“I sat tight,” Harrison recalled. “One evening George Cukor telephoned on a crackly line from California and asked me to make a photographic test for the part. I laughed. ‘I’m not making any tests,’ I told him. ‘If you want me to play the part, then I’ll come.’ As a joke, I then sent him some Polaroid photos which had been taken while we’d been fooling about on my boat, in which I appeared stark naked, holding, in one picture, a Chianti bottle in front of me, and in another, a strategically placed copy of the New Statesman. ‘You wanted a test,’ I told him.... They saw that I was not as decrepit as they feared.”8
Harrison was in, and for more compelling criteria than his beefcake Polaroids. But Cagney was out. He took the opportunity to pay back Warner for past injustices and refused the role of Alfred Doolittle, which was then offered to Stanley Holloway, who accepted. So two of the three top stars would be the Broadway originators of the parts—their presence making Julie Andrews’s absence even more noticeable.
Cukor had a nervous vibration. “The first time I talked to Audrey,” he said, “she called me overseas from Switzerland and told me she was working on her cockney. She tried it out on the phone for me. ‘Ao-ow-ow,’ she said. I told her it sounded okay to me.... Actors always worry about the wrong thing.”9
THE OVERALL technical challenge of My Fair Lady could be summed up by the word “look,” and the specifics summed up by the word “Edwardian.” Edward VII reigned just nine years, from 1901 to 1910. Pygmalion and now My Fair Lady were set in that dynamic era of Cubism, the Suffragettes, and the fall of Oscar Wilde. But it was the English king’s personal style—everything from his eating habits to his effete Bohemianism—that defined the day, above all in fashion and manners.10
Flamboyant designer-photographer Cecil Beaton (1904—1980) had created the dazzling costumes for the show’s New York and London stage productions and was engaged to reprise those designs for the film. This time, he would design the sets, too. Alan Lerner said of Beaton that, “When you looked at him, it was difficult to know whether he designed the Edwardian era or the Edwardian era designed him.” 11
Beaton and his ferocious ego were bursting with new energy. “It’s a most exciting job, this,” he said, “and one that I would very much have hated anyone else to have done!”12 He was thrilled to be in charge of the whole of the visual production, and, in his compulsively kept diaries, left an almost minute-by-minute account of events, starting with the day in September 1962 when George Cukor tornadoed into his London house to research the period and to gloat that Audrey was “dying to do Eliza.”13
Beaton flew to Hollywood and started work in February 1963, months before Hepburn and the rest of the cast arrived. He and Cukor were getting along swimmingly, exploring every aspect of the picture together. Most of all, they discussed the quality and quantity of costumes to be made—one thousand! Some four hundred of them, all black and white, were required for the Ascot Gavotte and ball sequences alone. Each one would be lovingly re-created from museum sources with the attention given to a principal’s clothes.
Beaton took special care with the designs for Gladys Cooper as Higgins’s mother. “We have decided not to make Mrs. Higgins into the conventional Marx Brothers dowager,” he said, “but into an ‘original,’ a Fabian, an aesthetic intellectual.” He wrote his friend Lady Diana Cooper, asking what her mother, the late great Duchess of Rutland, would have worn at Ascot. Lady Diana’s reply was firm: “Certainly cream.”14
On May 16, 1963, Audrey and her family flew to Los Angeles and set up housekeeping in a large rented villa in Bel-Air. Beaton, like everyone else, was excited and energized by the leading lady’s arrival, as he recorded two days later:
“George, Alan and I went to pay a formal call on Audrey Hepburn Ferrer at tea time. Sean, her [three]-year-old son, was present, and it is obvious that this is the love affair of her life, and she of her son’s.” He could hardly wait ‘til after tea to show her his designs:She and Mel each sat with a book of sketches on their laps, and suddenly Mel held up a sketch of Eliza as the flower girl. “Look at that, Audrey! That’s got it all. That’s what it’s all about.” ... Audrey closed her eyes and smiled.... “Oh, it’s more than I thought it possibly could be. It’s too much!” Such genuine enthusiasm thrilled me.
[Later] Audrey and Mel came with me to Wardrobe where they gasped at the first things they saw.... The combination of Audrey and these exaggerated clothes created comic magic. She wanted to pose for photographs in every one of them. “I don’t want to play Eliza! She doesn’t have enough pretty clothes. I want to parade in all these.” And she did.... in a gay mood, making rubber faces, speaking in Eliza’s cockney accent, joking with all the adoring helpers.15
A few days later at the studio, a lilting voice invited him to, “Come on in and see my secrets.” It was Audrey in the Makeup Department. “Now, you see, I have no eyes!” she told Beaton. He didn’t agree: “Without the usual mascara and shadow, Audrey’s eyes are like those in Flemish painting and are even more appealing—young and sad. Yet it was extraordinary to see that it is simply by painting her eyes she has become a beauty in the modern sense. But having seen her without these aids, I will try to prevail upon her to do away with them in the earlier sequences for this will give an entirely new and authentic look—different from any we have seen before in her pictures. Her appearance without [eye makeup] will be a revolution and, let’s hope, the end of all those black-eyed zombies of the fashion magazines.”16
NIGHT AND DAY, all that mattered to Beaton was costumes and sets. But the director and studio executives were far more worried about Audrey’s songs and the recording process.
“When she began,” said Cukor in a mid-production interview, “it was an agony for that girl to sing. But she is not afraid to make an ass of herself. She has the courage to do it, do it wretchedly at first, but do it.”17
As a vote of confidence in Audrey’s singing ability, that faint praise seemed a bit damning. But she was indeed working extraordinarily hard on every facet of her performance, often spending twelve hours a day in rehearsals. In addition to memorizing lines and sitting endlessly for costume fittings, she attended Hermes Pan’s grueling dance rehearsals and took cockney lessons from UCLA phonetics professor Peter Ladefoged (“an American who probably knows London like I know Peking,” she remarked).18
Most of all, she was working on her voice, determined as she was to perform and record all of her own songs. Singing coach Susan Seton was imported from New York and led her through vocal lessons for five weeks, sometimes five or six hours a day. But there were rumors that the studio was casting about for a dubber.
Audrey had been nervously aware of it—and in a kind of denial—from early on, as Beaton’s diary entries of mid-May indicate: “After lunch, we accompanied [Lerner] to listen to a girl singing Eliza’s songs, in case Audrey’s voice proves to be too frail for one or two of the most operatic arias, and a few notes have to be dubbed.”19 Two days later, he wrote, “Suddenly Audrey asked, ‘Are you going to use my voice for songs at all?”’
Beaton’s analysis of the remark was upbeat to the point of delusional: “This was disarming and removed any awkwardness in approaching a difficult subject.... It was now easy to say that, quite probably, Audrey’s voice will be used for many of the songs, but certain notes might be interpolated from another voice.”
Nevertheless, he was superstitious, and it “worried me when she said, ‘This picture is one we must all remember. Wonderful talents, everyone right, everyone happy.’”20
Pre-recording now began, and on July 4 Audrey sang her first solo, shut up in a cubicle, while the orchestra played outside under André Previn. For Audrey, it was “an ordeal,” said Beaton, “but if her voice is not up to standard she will be the first to admit it. Previn may appear as sleepy as a tapir, but coaxes the best from everyone with his intelligence and patience.”21
Music director Previn was enthralled with Hepburn and did everything he could to help. He knew her musky mezzo voice was no finely trained instrument, but she had used it to good musical and emotional effect in Funny Face. The trouble now was that, since Rex Harrison was the master of parlando—a kind of half-spoken singing style—his Eliza had to trill like a bird.22
“Audrey’s voice was perfectly adequate for a living room,” Previn says. “If she got up around the piano with friends and sang, everybody would rightfully have said, ‘How charming!’ But this was the movie to end all movies, with six giant surround speakers. Even so, I was of the opinion that if you had bought Audrey Hepburn to play it, so she didn’t sing so hot—it wasn’t such a crime. But you can imagine how Lerner and Loewe felt—much more strongly than about Paint Your Wagon or Brigadoon. This was their statement for the ages.”23
Hollywood dubbing was time-honored but erratic. In Paint Your Wagon (1967), for instance, Jean Seberg couldn’t sing a note and had to have a substitute. It is claimed by some (and denied by others) that Lauren Bacall’s voice double in To Have and Have Not was young Andy Williams.24 Kitty Carlisle, a trained opera singer, had to sob loudly in Louis B. Mayer’s office before MGM would let her sing her own songs in Night at the Opera. Juanita Hall, the original Bloody Mary in South Pacific, was dubbed in the film version for reasons not even director Joshua Logan understood. And Previn is still incensed that Ava Gardner was not allowed to sing in Show Boat. “When you heard her do ‘Bill,’ she broke your heart,” he recalls. “But they couldn’t see it.”25
