Sean would tell me what it took out of Audrey—seeing all those starving children around the globe. She would be holding them, talking with them, Sean said, and the next day when she returned, most of them would have died. It was Audrey’s last return to the pain and devastation she had seen in Europe, growing up while the Second World War raged around her—some final debt she perhaps felt she had to pay for all the privileges of the world she had been given, and which so many were not. As a child she had seen what it meant to have nothing. Her mother had kept her alive through it all, and Audrey kept her mother with her always; she died not many years before Audrey.
I spoke with and saw Audrey periodically over the dozen years between the release of They All Laughed and her death. Because of a couple of candid photos taken on the set of Audrey sitting on my lap, or of us hugging each other warmly, a rumor started toward the end of shooting that Audrey and I had become an item. The truth is that since Audrey was quietly dating Robert Wolders and I was trying to keep quiet my relationship with Dorothy Stratten, it was expedient for Audrey and me not to issue any kind of denial. Over the years she never ruled out all chances that we might work together again, but certainly she didn’t encourage it, always being too busy with her sons and UNICEF. It was soon after she returned from one of those tours—to war-and famine-torn Somalia—that she was diagnosed with cancer.
She had come to visit me shortly after Dorothy was killed. I still had not been out of my house and Audrey brought flowers and herself. We sat in the kitchen and talked for a couple of hours over coffee. She was extraordinarily dear about Dorothy, who had been in such awe of Hepburn that she could barely say more than good-bye at the movie’s farewell party for Audrey (she was finished shooting a month before the rest of us). On her visits to Los Angeles, Audrey always included me, though we crossed each other in the air a number of times. I asked her to do Noël Coward’s Private Lives with me on Broadway. She thought that might be fun but it was too late for her; she couldn’t take that much time away from her younger son. Nor would she take him out of school. We spoke of doing a movie together based on Coward’s Hay Fever—a delightfully wicked show-business-family comedy—an idea she rather liked for a while. We talked of her doing it with Michael Caine as her husband, both philandering; talked to Michael, too. Audrey and I had several conversations about this play, but somehow we never could settle on a time to do it.
Personally, she had loved Noël Coward, and from all reports he had been mad about her, too. When Audrey and I talked about perhaps doing a remake of his play Blithe Spirit, she surprised me by saying that the part she really would rather play in that show was not the lovely ghost-of-a-wife lead, but rather Madame Arcati, the eccentric fortune-telling, bicycle-riding supporting character immortalized in the 1945 David Lean screen version by Margaret Rutherford—a far cry in type from Audrey Hepburn. What attracted her to that offbeat role? Probably that no one had ever seen her in a part like that, she answered, but she saw herself in it quite clearly.
A couple of years later, I proposed that she play the leading role of an English character actress having an affair with a younger actor and jealous of his affections, in Michael Frayn’s hit stage farce, Noises Off (which I was filming for Disney and Spielberg’s Amblin). After reading the script, Audrey called, somewhat suspicious, to ask why I had offered her that role. I said I thought she could be funny in it, even though she’d certainly never played anything like it. She said she couldn’t see herself doing it at all, and wondered if I had perhaps noted some sort of parallel between her and the part which led me to offer it. (Hadn’t there always been before? she only implied.) No, I said, it was simply that since the role of the aging eccentric in Blithe Spirit was certainly a stretch for her, why not a theatrical diva in a slapstick comedy? It was all in good fun. She declined, politely, I think somehow still suspecting my motives. When Sean saw the film he generously said it was the only mistake The Mutti had made. But probably Audrey was right—the public could not accept her in a role so distant from the persona she had always represented.
I often told her she had so many people in the world who loved her on the screen, who missed her presence there—surely they counted for something in her equations, but her UNICEF duties outweighed all other concerns for Audrey. She always remained her own person. Although she certainly publicized Givenchy’s designs through the years, she didn’t dress in that high style in her daily life. She wore blue jeans, silk shirts—the cuffs always unbuttoned (because it was “more comfortable that way”)—boots and pea jackets. When we came to picking out a wardrobe for our picture, I just went through her things and chose the most typical, then we doubled them all. Everything she wore in the movie was exactly like the clothes (except for public events) she wore in real life.
One of my favorite memories of Audrey happened after Sean’s first wedding ceremony. The reception was held at a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom, and many of her Hollywood friends were invited, among them James Stewart, who came with his lovely wife Gloria. At one point, to initiate dancing into the festivities, Sean and his bride had their wedding dance, and were joined by mother Audrey, her partner for this being Jimmy Stewart. Both tall and casually graceful, they danced close together for one long dance. This haunting, strangely moving image—Audrey never worked with Stewart but they were old friends—could stand as a symbol for all the lost movies of Audrey Hepburn, the ones she never made because she chose not to, and then ran out of time.
In Greek myth—among the most ancient of Western religious histories—you would have to compare Audrey to Hestia, goddess of the hearth, for whom the family home was her main concern and, by extension, every home. Significantly, Hestia was the first expendable goddess; when the later Olympian religion was first revised, she was not considered essential, and was forced to relinquish her seat to Dionysus, god of the vine. We can measure by the “man’s world” Audrey saw—from above, in Hollywood; from below, in the Third World countries she toured—what a terrible mistake that was.
As an artist, Audrey Hepburn also was an inspiration to artistry—all those writers and directors outdoing each other to capture the essential Audrey—like Brigit, the ancient Irish goddess of healing, patroness of poetry and childbirth, known today by Catholics as Saint Brigit. Robert Graves noted (in his The White Goddess): “In parts of Britain Saint Brigit retained her character of Muse until the Puritan Revolution, her healing being exercised largely through poetic incantation …” So it was no leap at all for Ben Gazzara to call Audrey a saint—Saint Audrey seems quite appropriate to me—for in her life and work she was born to show the world that true grace and innocence, human kindness and hope, still can exist on earth.
Audrey Hepburn is a mythical princess in her first starring role in pictures, Roman Holiday (1953), directed by William Wyler, and co-starring Gregory Peck; she became an international star overnight.
Born Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, May 4, 1929, Brussels, Belgium; died January 20, 1993, Tolochenaz, Switzerland.
Selected starring features (with director):
1953: Roman Holiday (William Wyler)
1954: Sabrina (Billy Wilder)
1956: War and Peace (King Vidor)
1957: Funny Face (Stanley Donen); Love in the Afternoon (Wilder)
1959: The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinnemann)
1960: The Unforgiven (John Huston)
1961: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards); The Children’s Hour (Wyler)
1963: Charade (Donen)
1964: My Fair Lady (George Cukor)
1966: How to Steal a Million (Wyler)
1967: Two for the Road (Donen); Wait Until Dark (Terence Young)
1976: Robin and Marian (Richard Lester)
1981: They All Laughed (P.B.)
23
SIDNEY POITIER
Sidney Poitier was to the movies what Jackie Robinson was to baseball. Poitier broke the color line in leading men. He was the first black star in American films, and for many
years, from the fifties through the seventies, he was also the only major one. What kind of enormous burden and responsibility must that have been for Poitier? Incalculable. When I worked with him in the second half of the nineties, I got some sense of the weight he had carried by then for nearly fifty years—ever since Joseph L. Mankiewicz cast him in his first movie role for No Way Out (1950). I can recall the striking impression he made on me in that picture, which I first saw at age eleven or twelve. Suddenly, there he was in the second-lead role of a doctor—his white surgical cloak emphasizing the rich blackness of his skin—and about the best-looking man on any screen. Richard Widmark plays the lead heavy, a racist who gets shot and must depend on Poitier to save his life. As a big Widmark fan at the time, I nevertheless remember being not only enormously impressed by Poitier, but wondering where he had come from (the Bahamas, it turned out—his parents were tomato farmers), and curious to see him again.
After that kind of start—even though the film was not a popular one—you’d think Poitier would never be out of work again. The fact is, over the next four years, he appeared only in three little pictures, the most ambitious an awkward if well-intentioned adaptation of Alan Paton’s beautiful novel of Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country (1952). Now, of course, Poitier was always quite choosy about his roles, so he probably could have worked more, but there were certain parts Sidney would not do. His first (and only) agent, Martin Baum, told me that Sidney had desperately needed money when director Phil Karlson offered him a small but memorable role of a father whose child has been killed in crossfire in The Phenix City Story (1955). Poitier turned down the job; he told Baum he refused to play a victim. Later in his career, again when he could have used some popular roles, Poitier rejected both Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994), thus effectively making Morgan Freeman’s career. Sidney had not wanted to be shown being servile, nor did he think being a convict set a good example.
Sidney Poitier as Porgy in the George Gershwin–Ira Gershwin–DuBose Heyward classic Porgy and Bess (1959), directed by Otto Preminger, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and co-starring Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Pearl Bailey.
In any event, it wasn’t until 1955 that Poitier appeared in a hit picture, when Richard Brooks’ The Blackboard Jungle became an unexpected runaway success. Sidney played a high school senior. He was thirty. Over the next three years, he was starred in six pictures, and nominated as the Academy’s Best Actor for one of them, Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), in which he played an escaped convict handcuffed to racist Tony Curtis. It was the first time in the Academy’s by then thirty-year history of awards that a nonwhite had been nominated in that category. The year before, he had played Clark Gable’s illegitimate son in Raoul Walsh’s Band of Angels (1957). Mythologically speaking, for Gable, “the King” of American movies, to have a gorgeous black bastard child is potent, and echoes down the years with reverberations.
That same year he had been co-starred in Edge of the City (1957) with another young East Coast actor, Greek-American John Cassavetes. He and Sidney became lifelong friends, and Cassavetes kept after Poitier to play Hamlet on stage or screen. Sidney said he didn’t have the nerve, but John kept badgering him for years, right up to his premature death in 1989. After Poitier’s nomination for The Defiant Ones, there is no question that, had he been white, his career would have gone into orbit. It did not. He was next seen as Porgy—almost inevitable casting—in Otto Preminger’s movie version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1959), his songs sung by Robert McFerrin, an accomplished singer. After two forgettable little pictures, he made his debut as a star on Broadway in the popular family drama, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. I saw him in the original New York production as well as the movie that came out in 1961, which by no means carried the impact Poitier had had on the stage. His performance had great stature and Sidney proved as magnetic and mythic at a distance as he was in close-up. (It was particularly because of his work in this production that Cassavetes kept after him to do Hamlet.) Two years later, Poitier won the Best Actor Oscar, the first of his color to do so, for his performance in the successful comedy-drama Lilies of the Field (1963).
It wasn’t until four years and five pictures later, however, that Poitier had another hit, though this time, in 1967, he struck with a vengeance, having three extremely popular movies released in the same calendar year: as a Northern cop in the Southern thriller, Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night; as a teacher in a London school filled with white delinquents, To Sir, with Love; and, the coup de grâce for American integration, as the fiancée of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter in Stanley Kramer’s social comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. That sort of peak would be difficult to equal, and Poitier never did, but you only need to climb Mt. Everest once. And because of Sidney, black movie stars have now become not only accepted but expected. The debt owed to him is immense.
Sidney Poitier as a doctor who saves a racist’s life, his first movie role, in No Way Out (1950), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Richard Widmark, a good friend of Sidney’s since then.
Over the next eight years, Poitier acted in at least one picture a year—two of them sequels to In the Heat of the Night—and began to direct some of his vehicles. (Married to his second wife, Joanna Shimkus, since 1976, he famously has six daughters; his autobiography, The Life, for which he had no ghost writer, appeared in 1980.) After A Piece of the Action (1977), he did not appear on the screen for a decade, directing four pictures instead, one of them the deservedly smash hit Richard Pryor–Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy (1980). Eight years later, he returned to acting with a couple of films, notably Little Nikita (1988) with River Phoenix, whom he adored and vice versa. They would work together again in Sneakers (1992), where Poitier kept pulling focus from the others in the all-star cast (he looked more like a leading man than co-star Robert Redford). That same year, Poitier became the first black recipient of the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nevertheless, he did not make another picture until four years later, when he produced and starred in To Sir, with Love II, a sequel to his 1967 success, made for Columbia TriStar as a CBS TV-movie. I was hired to direct, with casting in New York, and in Chicago, where the story was set and mostly shot. We went to London and filmed some exteriors there for the opening sequence. I spent the better part of two months with Sidney, often in tense situations and shooting very quickly. We did the whole thing in twenty-four days, plus a few days of rehearsal, during which we discovered to our dismay that the script needed a quick rewrite. Poitier was always responsible, professional, prepared, on time, open-minded, approachable. We would disagree occasionally. He was very quick to want to replace an actor I would have given more of a chance to, but Sidney was not only the producer and the star, it was a sequel to his hit; we replaced the actor. At times he wouldn’t budge an inch on certain speeches in the script that I thought were too long, and tended generally to go for more words than I would normally prefer. But he acted everything so well that ultimately it didn’t really matter so much about the extra verbiage. He also knew the rhythm that worked for him as an actor, and I couldn’t really argue with him over that, since it had worked for nearly half a century.
As an actor, on the set, he was very attentive and not temperamental at all. My main direction to him, other than in staging the scenes, was to whisper in his ear that the take he had just done was terrific but could he pick up the pace a little, talk a bit faster, put the speech together more, take out the pauses—my comments were always on this kind of point—and he always, each and every single time, did as I asked. Never seemed even mildly annoyed or exasperated with the sameness of the direction. But he knew we only had about ninety minutes of television time and that it was better to pick up the speed and get more into the picture than to have to cut things out later. As it was, we came in perfectly, with no scenes removed. Having also been a director for years, Poitier
might have had to stifle the desire to decide the shots or the action; though he occasionally made staging suggestions which involved him, he never tried to second-guess me with the actors or with my camerawork. He certainly had the power to, but Sidney never once threw that around.
Yet I knew some of what I did made him quite nervous. Generally, I prefer not to cut unless it’s necessary, therefore carrying scenes in one piece wherever possible or appropriate—and not filming any covering shots—to all of which I could feel Sidney’s resistance. He would have preferred a more conventional, in some ways easier, approach, mainly because he was reluctant (as he said a few times) to have only one basic option on a given sequence. He would ask me, What if you want to cut later and have nothing to cut to? I said, I never had yet. Despite his personal anxiety over this method of working, he did not refuse or make it difficult for me, which, again, he easily could have.
This became all the more remarkable when, toward the end of filming, he finally blurted out that he did not like the kind of shots I loved—what he referred to as “walk-and-talk”—the camera pulling backward in front, or to the side, of the actors as they walk and talk. We were doing one of these and as I was explaining it, he said, with a tiny smile, “Yeah, I know—a walk-and-talk—I hate those.” I exclaimed that he’d never told me that before. “It’s OK, I’ll do it,” he said, “I just hate them because they’re harder.” Then he laughed a little. This helped me realize that at least some of his worry about filming whole scenes in one piece was simply over his perhaps not being able to do the shot well enough, remember all his lines. Of course, he was always right on, usually the first, second, or third take being the best one.
Who the Hell's in It Page 52