Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Previn thought the system was screwy, but he was stuck with it. So was Audrey, and so was one of the most “unsung” singers of the era, Marni Nixon—Dubber to the Stars. Nixon had sung for Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) and An Affair To Remember (1957), and for Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961). She performed symphonic vocal repertoire as well, in concerts with André Previn and Leonard Bernstein.

  “I did a lot of different people’s voices in those days,” Nixon recalls. “It was something one did to subsidize one’s ‘real’ career. Audrey had been signed and everybody was upset Julie didn’t get it. People kept calling me and saying, ‘You’d be perfect—tell your agent to get you in!‘ But those things don’t come from agents. They come from the music director.”26

  Previn knew Nixon was “a much more serious singer than people realized. I first heard her do an evening of Ives songs that was absolutely remarkable. She also had this peculiar, chameleonlike quality: She could ’do’ everybody. You could hand her a piece of music and say, the first four bars are cockney, then it gets French—it made no difference, she could do it.”27

  Previn arranged for Marni to audition in Hollywood, telling her, “You’ll have a number, and they’re not to see you. We don’t want any other information except the voice.” She came, she sang and she got the job. What she did not get was a clear notion of whether she’d be singing all or only part of the songs. “I think Audrey knew ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ would probably be all me,” says Nixon, “but if anything else was decided, we didn’t know about it.” Exactly when Audrey learned of Nixon’s hiring is unclear, but it was a big blow to her self-confidence when she found out. So was the process itself, which Nixon describes:Sometimes I would rehearse with her directly and hear what she was trying to do with the songs. Eventually, we both went into the recording studio and recorded what we had planned to do. We knew in some numbers, she was going to start, and I was going to carry on.... I would record and then she would record her portion of those songs. She kept going back to re-record certain parts and would say, “I can do these measures better now. Put my voice in.”

  It was painful, almost pathetic. Audrey’s stepson Chris Ferrer remembered Audrey “coming home each day totally exhausted and discouraged because she was trying so hard to do it right, but she could tell that it was really not quite good enough.”28

  Did Hepburn ever turn to Nixon for vocal advice? Would she ever say, “How should I sing this?” Or, “Am I forcing?”

  “There was some of that,” says Nixon. “They wanted me to help her as much as possible. [But] I wasn’t sure that what I would have told her was any better than what Sue was telling her. It was a matter of me singing it with her accent, and then her imitating me. I was imitating her personality and trying to sing it as I thought she would have, then she would correct my pronunciation. It was really a technical thing. She had to have a lot of trust in me. The thrill I have is that I was able to pick up on her. I really felt fused with her.”

  But Audrey was the victim of a lot of false hope along the way. “They were all happy enough with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ so that she actually filmed that whole song to her track,” Nixon recalls. “But I was always doing the high notes for her, even in that. Later they decided it just wouldn’t match up. You couldn’t have one voice for one song and one voice for another. So they threw out her track, which was very discouraging to her. In ‘The Rain in Spain,’ it wasn’t clear how much would be me and how much would be her [until] the last minute. Lerner was there. It was his choice, not mine.”29

  Lerner was there, indeed—with some dubious brainstorms. He now summoned his music director with what he thought was a surefire solution to the Audrey vocal dilemma, as Previn recalls:

  “Lerner said, ‘She is extremely intelligent about herself. So I want you to record her with the full orchestra, make her a beautiful arrangement. And when she hears it back on those six surround speakers, she’ll say, Holy Jesus, and she won’t do it.’ I said, ‘Alan—’ He said, ‘Trust me, I know actresses.’ I said, ‘No, you marry actresses, but you don’t know them.’

  “Anyway, we did it and we played it back and it was not good and she said, ‘I love it.’ We were cooked. It didn’t sound bad, but you wanted it to sound good. It was the musical film of the decade—the last great operetta—you wanted it to be perfect.”30 Beaton recorded an uncomfortable moment in June when Audrey sang part of the score to the assembled company—“a mistake,” he said. “Audrey, seeing the brave smiles on everyone’s face, had the feeling she was drowning.”31

  Harper McKay, Previn’s assistant musical director, said one of his tasks was to help Audrey improve “despite the fact that the decision had already been made to have Marni dub her voice. Audrey dutifully worked on her vocalises for a half hour or so every morning, and the weeks went by.... Lerner, Previn or Cukor would drop by occasionally, listen to Audrey’s singing and compliment her extravagantly on how well she was sounding. Audrey, unfortunately, began to believe them.”

  During the last day of rehearsal on the Covent Garden set, Audrey sang “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” herself, and the extras and crew broke into loud applause. Afterward, during a meeting to discuss the next day’s work, Audrey came in flushed with emotion. “Did you hear it?” she asked Cukor. “They actually applauded!”

  “Audrey,” Cukor said, “they thought it was you.”

  “George,” she said, “It was me,” and tears came to her eyes. The playback operator had mistakenly used her track instead of Marni Nixon’s. Cukor, Lerner and Previn hadn’t noticed.32

  From that point on, says Previn, “it became a passing-the-buck thing. Warner wouldn’t tell her. Lerner wouldn’t tell her. Loewe was never around at all. They came to me and I said, ‘Listen, fellas, I’m not the one to tell her.’ So finally Cukor had to go. She was very hurt because she felt that if she had taken Julie Andrews’s place and then couldn’t sing, it would reflect very badly on her. But she never said a word. I’m sure she had tears about it, but not so you’d know.”33

  Her good friend Doris Brynner, wife of Yul, dissents. One of very few visitors allowed on the set, she denies Audrey was upset. “She had to be dubbed,” says Brynner. “All that high soprano singing—how could she have done it? She never had any intention of singing.”34 But nobody else remembers it that way.

  On hearing the bad news from Cukor, she said, “Oh!”, and walked off the set. All the weeks of coaching, practicing and matching were down the drain: Virtually all her songs would be dubbed. The next day, she came back and apologized to everyone for her “wicked” behavior, saying she understood it had to be. “That was her idea of being very wicked,” says Marni Nixon.35

  “I’D DONE the show for so long in the theatre with Julie that any new leading lady was going to be a problem,” said Rex Harrison. “Audrey also had to weather a great deal of adverse press publicity about how much she was being paid, for most of the press had sided with Julie, and had wanted Julie to get the part. Audrey is a very sensitive person, and could not fail to feel all this. It quickly leaked to the press that she was being dubbed [and] wasn’t ‘really’ singing the part she’d wrested from Julie and for which she was being so highly paid.”36

  The sympathetic tone contained a certain amount of crocodile tears. Harrison, in fact, was in no mood to accommodate his “new” Eliza after discovering that, at $250,000, his salary was only a quarter of hers. In his opinion, it was he who had been responsible for the stage (and potential film) success of My Fair Lady, and he was incensed by the inequity. Even Cukor was getting more than himself ($300,000). Though he was hostile to Audrey at first, their relationship gradually warmed as he realized that her difficulties would enable him to dominate the film.37

  Harrison’s “outward self-assurance was only a cover-up for an even greater self-assurance underneath,” said Previn. “There seemed to be only two ways to approach any problem: his way and the wrong way.... When Rex heard I had been engag
ed by Warners to serve as musical director, he flew into a rage. ‘I won’t have it, I don’t want him,’ he hissed at Alan Lerner. ‘For the entire run of the play, both on Broadway and in London, we had Franz Allers conducting the orchestra. Franz knows exactly how I sing and how I speak, my cadences and my rhythms. There’s no one like Franz, that’s who I want, that’s who we must get.’ ...

  “Alan persuaded Rex to try—‘just try’—recording a number with me. [If] it didn’t work out, Rex could go to Jack Warner and have me replaced with Franz. [So] we scheduled the recording of ‘Let a Woman in Your Life.’ It went perfectly.... Rex had no problems, the orchestra and I had no problems, and the song was finished ahead of schedule. That night, Alan called Rex from New York: ‘How did it go? Did you get any of it finished?’ Rex interrupted him, ‘Yes, yes, dear boy, it was terrific. I get along fine with André, and he followed my singing without the slightest trouble. In fact, he was certainly better than that Germanic son of a bitch we used to have in the pit!’ ”38

  Previn today smiles at the recollection before delivering his final verdict: “Rex Harrison, who gave one of the most transcendental performances ever, was—and I don’t say this lightly—the most appalling human being I ever worked with. He was charming and funny and a great raconteur but, Jesus Christ, what he did to people. Rex didn’t like Audrey very much. He was mean about her, not to her. That was very much more his style.”

  He wanted Julie Andrews?

  “No, he didn’t want anybody. He felt whatever fuss was made about Audrey or Julie was pointless, because nobody was interested in the girl. They were only interested in him.”39

  Others with firsthand experience confirm that appraisal. “I’d known Rex since I was twelve,” says Roddy McDowall, who costarred with him on the New York stage and in two films, Midnight Lace (1960) and the calamitous Cleopatra (1963). “He was emotionally unstable, like a wanton child. You always had to approach him with a firehose. He was an exquisitely impeccable actor but a basic hysteric—and unconscionable to his fellow actors.”

  Evidence of that was provided by their joint appearance in Jean Anouilh’s The Fighting Cock on Broadway. “Rex was all wrong for the general because he just viscerally could not be a victim,” McDowall recalls. “Everything in him revolted against it. We had a great scene in which my character made a total ass of his character. It was imperative that he be humiliated in the second act so that he could be triumphant in the third. But he couldn’t and wouldn’t play it correctly. He was never where he was supposed to be, and I never knew what he would do next. He’d go downstage and mug and try to distract me—primi—tive tactics. It was his first Broadway appearance after My Fair Lady, and it ran for a month because of the advance sales. But it was agony.”40

  The My Fair Lady film script closely resembled the one he performed exactly 2,717 times on stage. But he insisted that all his musical numbers be performed and shot live—an unheard-of practice in Hollywood—and, as usual, he got his way. Harrison claimed he never sang a number the same way twice; he scorned the lip-synch technique. Thus a microphone was set in his tie and a transmitter strapped to his leg, so that his singing could be recorded over and mixed with the pre-recorded music—a technical problem of such magnitude that two unions demanded extra pay for it.41

  “It made it much easier for him,” says André Previn. “A lot of people said, ‘That son of a bitch!’ But he had a point. I was in his corner. What it left me with was that insane delivery of his without any accompaniment except the piano, which was fed into his ear. So I had this madman with the up-and-down voice and I had to put on earphones and chase him with the orchestra. That was hard work. Which he never acknowledged.”42

  PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY on My Fair Lady began August 13, 1963, and continued for four and a half months on the majority of Warners’ twenty-six soundstages. Only Mel, Doris Brynner, and Hubert de Givenchy were allowed onto the closed set. In Garboesque fashion, Audrey could not tolerate anyone in “eyeline” range while she was in Eliza mode. “Seeing a strange face looming beyond the cameras dispels the mood I’m trying to set,” she said. “It throws me off balance.”43

  Obligingly, Cukor set up a series of black baffles with peepholes, screening off the action from all but the minimum necessary technicians. “Cukor always closed his sets off for those big lady stars,” says Previn. “I don’t think it was a device just for Audrey. He did it for Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Garbo before.”44

  Her husband complained that “she wouldn’t even let me visit her on the set while she was in that bedraggled flower-girl characterization. But even at her dirtiest, she sprayed herself with a $100-an-ounce perfume, Joy. ‘I may look dirty,’ she’d say, ‘but I aim to smell pretty.’ ”45 Mel thought that was charming, but some thought it an indication of her subliminal unsuitability for the role.

  Theodore Bikel, the film’s sole surviving supporting star, thought Hepburn not just suitable but “the most enchanting figure that ever graced the screen.” As diplomat Zoltan Karpathy, Bikel’s one big moment was the ball scene in which he dances with Eliza. But the real-life Bikel was none too light on his feet.

  “I was terrified,” he recalls. “I said to George Cukor, ‘I want dancing lessons. There can’t be the slightest danger that I step on this gorgeous creature’s toes.’ But she was easy as pie—gracious and collegial and lovely. A true aristocrat.”

  Bikel’s outstanding memory of the filming?

  “Cukor asked me before we shot my first entrance, ‘How would Karpathy greet Professor Higgins?’ I said, ‘Karpathy is a Hungarian, Mr. Cukor, and between the two of us, you’re the Hungarian.’ He said, ‘Yes, but you’re the actor.’ So I said, ‘All right, if you ask me, I would come in and kiss him on both cheeks.’ And that’s how it came about that I was the only male actor ever to make an entrance kissing Rex Harrison.”46

  The grimmest moment of the ballroom shooting occurred when veteran character actor Henry Daniell, a close friend of Cukor’s and brilliant featured player in Camille, among other Cukor films, suddenly keeled over dead on the set.

  My Fair Lady contained 165 scenes and seventeen musical numbers, each seeming to pose more difficulty than the one before. In a short early scene with just two lines of dialogue, for example, Higgins says to Pickering, “Shall we ask this baggage to sit down, or shall we throw her out the window?” Eliza yowls, “I won’t be called a baggage when I’ve offered to pay like any lydee.” It took twelve takes before Cukor was satisfied. Tempers were growing short all around, Previn recalls:

  “Marni, after many days of recording ..., became rather difficult and resistant to Alan Jay Lerner’s instructions. To be fair, he gave six directions per syllable, so her reticence was not entirely unwarranted. But on this particular day, she took off the earphones, bridling, and snapped, ‘Are you aware, Mr. Lerner, that I have dubbed the voice for Deborah Kerr and Natalie Wood and dozens of others?’ Alan’s reply was prompt... ‘And are you aware, dear, that all those ladies dubbed your face?’”47

  Audrey herself had outbursts of temperament unprecedented in her career. During one August rehearsal of “Loverly,” while dancing on the non-skid rubber cabbage leaves and mouthing the words to the song, she did the unthinkable: She stopped the scene twice herself, instead of letting director Cukor do so, stamping her feet in frustration and bursting into tears.48

  On July 19, Beaton recorded:This past week has been a swine.... Audrey, George and I watched the latest tests. Deeply depressing.... Eliza’s Ascot dress gave me a nasty jolt; the poppies on her hat became orange. But who would have guessed that in the long shots the black-and-white striped lacings and bows would appear green and yellow? As for today’s attempt at glamour, Audrey’s elaborate cloak is not suitable, as I had expected: on the screen it looks as if it were made of a tarpaulin. Her Ball hairdress looks like a bird’s nest, while her makeup assumes the color of canned salmon.

  It did not cheer him up to learn that the bill for the costumes he ha
d made so far was $500,000.49 “Everyone’s nerves are explosive,” said Audrey. “Everyone’s on edge.”50

  Even so, Beaton grew more and more impressed with her characterization. On August 21, he observed that the flower girl was no longer just “sweet little Audrey Hepburn, dressed as a cute cockney with a dab of dirt becomingly placed on her nose: this was a wraughty guttersnipe, full of fight and determination, a real ‘rotten cabbage leaf.’ ...

  “Every dawn Audrey has to have her hair covered with grease, then with a lot of brown Fuller’s Earth. The effect is really dirty, and psychologically must be very depressing. Tiring, too: it takes another hour to wash out the dirt before going home. Audrey said she was beginning to warm up in her part, but was sad that on the first day’s shooting she didn’t get into the right groove; had been too strident, her eyes bugged.... ‘I see what it should be now that it’s too late,’ she laughed, wistfully.”51

  GEORGE CUKOR, meanwhile, was having serious difficulties with Cecil Beaton. Through their mutual friend Greta Garbo, they had known each other for years but deeply mistrusted one another. After their initial “honeymoon” on the project, both of them came to regard Audrey as their personal property and began feuding over her. They were of clashing gay types—Cukor the closeted perfectionist, Beaton the extroverted egomaniac—and their struggle for control of Audrey and her affections escalated.

  “George had a bungalow on the set,” recalls André Previn, “and almost every day, one or the other would go slamming out of the screen door saying something that ended in ‘cunt.’ ”52