by Ed Sikov
Wilder and Taylor turned in a preliminary draft in early July, but by that point their collaboration was in deep trouble. Taylor found it impossible to stomach Billy’s insistent revisions. With his play running on Broadway to great acclaim and a healthy box office, Taylor was shocked that Wilder saw the need to scrap so much of it. One day Taylor decided he’d had enough, and suddenly Billy found himself writing alone—never one of his favorite pastimes. He needed a new writing partner, as Walter Neff would say, but quick. He found him in Ernest Lehman. One morning, Lehman later reported, he was in his office at MGM working on his own original script (that would eventually be made as Sweet Smell of Success, a dazzlingly vicious movie). That afternoon he was at Paramount, having been summoned by a frantic call from Billy.
Sabrina was scheduled to begin shooting at the end of September on location at an estate on Long Island Sound. Paramount’s location scouts probably didn’t have much trouble gaining access to the perfect place they found in Mamaroneck; it belonged to Barney Balaban, the head of the studio. When the scouts went looking for a good swimming pool, they found one with almost the same degree of access in Billy’s old friend William Paley’s yard. Billy left Los Angeles for New York on September 22, taking the Super Chief to Chicago and the Century the rest of the way. He moved into a suite at the St. Regis, as did Lehman, the Bogarts, the Holdens, and Hepburn. It may have been the only time during the production that everyone got along.
Sabrina’s troubles began right away. High winds coming off the Sound disrupted the shooting, though cinematographer Charles Lang took a magnificent shot of Bogart and Hepburn, in silhouette, as they stand by the water at dusk. Problems continued as location shooting progressed. Transparencies (to be used as backgrounds for process shots) taken at the Glen Cove railway station for the pivotal scene in which Sabrina returns from Paris and David Larrabee doesn’t recognize her, proved insufficient and unconvincing, and Billy was irritated. “It was my original intention to shoot it at the Fox lot where they have a perfect small station standing. I was talked out of it.” He urged Paramount to approve reshooting the scene. “We simply must sell the girl’s transition. She must look delicious reappearing on Long Island. We must also play Holden’s approach gayer and more spirited.” Later, in Los Angeles, the scene was reshot.
Workmanlike but tense, the company soon returned to Los Angeles, where the production of Sabrina resumed on October 6. Billy shot scenes every day and wrote new ones with Lehman every night. Often they found themselves composing in a frenzy. Gofers picked up new pages from a bleary Lehman early in the morning after these all-night sessions and rushed them over to Hepburn, who studied the new dialogue in her car on the way to the studio. Billy didn’t sleep much. Lehman was stressed. Wilder himself began to suffer health problems, primarily backaches. At times, he found that he had nothing to shoot because the missing scene hadn’t been written yet. “We’ll do retakes,” Billy would snap.
Paramount’s Don Hartman was nervous about Hepburn’s bony neck and told Charles Lang to be especially aware of it. Bogart didn’t much like Hepburn. Holden drank. So did Bogart. Then there was the issue of Audrey’s wardrobe. As Hepburn’s biographer Alexander Walker notes, Sabrina returns from a two-year course at a Parisian cooking school with a trunk full of Givenchy originals, which have clearly not come with her chef’s diploma: “More likely [they] come by courtesy of a fellow pupil, an elderly baron who is taking a refresher course in getting soufflés to rise.” In any case, some accounts say that it was Hepburn’s idea to dress Sabrina in Givenchy. Others say it was actually Audrey Wilder who’d discovered Givenchy during one of her Paris shopping sprees and called his glorious designs to her husband’s attention. (Billy has often remarked proudly of his wife’s extravagance and taste.) Whether Hepburn was really concerned about offending Edith Head, with whom she had worked well on Roman Holiday, is unclear. What is certain is that Head was told—by Billy himself, it’s said—that the Oscar winner’s contribution to Sabrina would consist only of what Vanity Fair’s Amy Fine Collins calls “a pre-Paris ragamuffin frock and two insignificant sportswear ensembles.”
The costuming crisis began in June. Sabrina’s production memos reveal that it was indeed Billy’s idea to have Hepburn buy herself some fashionable clothes in Paris—particularly what one memo colorfully describes as “a particularly Frenchy-looking suit.” Some “extreme French hats” were also on the shopping list. Paramount’s front office had one key concern. It was not which haute couture designer Audrey selected, nor was it a matter of soothing the feelings of Edith Head. Paramount executives were adamant: these gowns would have to be purchased by Audrey Hepburn for her own private wardrobe because the studio did not want to pay any customs fees. In addition, Paramount was concerned about the credits. If Hepburn wore her own clothes Paramount needn’t worry about citing the dressmaker.
Givenchy was not the first choice either of Audrey Hepburn or Paramount Pictures. Cristόbal Balenciaga had the bigger name, and it was to him that they first turned. Moreover, at this point the studio frankly assumed that Edith Head would perform significant alterations on anything Hepburn chose. Balenciaga, however, quickly gave way to Givenchy. One tale is that Balenciaga simply didn’t know who Audrey Hepburn was. The maestro had been delighted when his staff told him that Miss Hepburn was requesting his services, but when he discovered that it wasn’t Katharine but some other Hepburn—a far lesser Hepburn in those days—he turned her down flat. Dismissed by the king, Audrey settled on the crown prince in the form of the younger and less-established Givenchy. On the other hand, Givenchy himself tells the same story about thinking that Katharine Hepburn was paying a call, so perhaps Balenciaga’s refusal is fiction. However the relationship transpired, Hepburn and Givenchy together developed an inimitably elegant look for Sabrina, one that served Hepburn herself extraordinarily well for the rest of her life.
A memo records the fact that Audrey insisted on one particular Givenchy gown. Wilder and Edith Head approved it, and Hepburn bought it for the royal sum of $560. It was a black cocktail dress with a high neck, and when the movie hit the screens the following year it rocked the fashion world by ushering in what was to become known as “the Sabrina neckline.” Edith Head won her Oscar for it, even though it was pure Givenchy. Like Paramount’s front office, the designer noticed Hepburn’s anorexic collarbones; the “Sabrina neckline” covers the collar but reveals the throat. Audrey also picked out a strapless gown in white organdy, with black silk embroidery and an immense train that flowed out from the sides. When she wears it in the film, Audrey looks like a finely crafted butterfly on its way to an elfin ball. She also chose a tailored gray wool suit, which she herself topped with a turban.
Clad in Givenchy, Audrey Hepburn was even more breathtakingly lovely than she had been in Roman Holiday. When David Larrabee (Holden) screeches his car to a halt in front of the Long Island train station, having seen a splendidly chic fawn as if in a mirage, you not only know exactly what he’s stopping for—you feel it.
Hepburn knew only half-consciously what she was doing when she starved herself. Billy, on the other hand, gave his full approval for Givenchy’s designs on Hepburn’s tiny body knowing exactly what they meant: Sabrina would be the perfect understatement in a world of 1950s excess. With her skinny-boy’s body, Audrey Hepburn was appearing on the scene in the midst of the most breast-obsessed period in modern history. Billy knew that world already had its Marilyn Monroes and Jane Russells; what it didn’t have was a waif. In Sabrina, her pencillike legs would be highlighted with stretch pants. Her Modigliani neck wouldn’t be covered up with turtles and cowls. And her tiny breasts were left well enough alone. During the production of Roman Holiday Edith Head came right out and told Audrey to face facts: “You should wear falsies.” Billy saw things differently.
If the production of Sabrina had been as airy and delightful as Hepburn’s wardrobe, the film itself might play better. But the shoot was an extended nightmare, the first truly disa
strous production Billy directed. Almost everyone blames Bogart.
First he started doing malicious imitations of Audrey’s precious accent—British kissed by someone who first spoke French. When Wilder tried to intervene, Bogart cleverly began mimicking Billy. At least once he asked somebody to translate Billy’s remarks into English.
Bogart was surprised and then infuriated by all the close-ups of Hepburn—shots taken over Bogart’s own aging shoulder, his back to the camera. Bogie was a fine actor, but Billy knew that most people would prefer to see Audrey’s sweet face than Bogart’s craggy one. Bogie was a tough guy, but he was still a movie star, and the young beauty threatened him. He turned sullen.
The lack of a completed script did not work to Billy’s favor this time. It continued to keep the front office off guard, and it still lent a certain immediacy to the production, but this immediacy was a little too immediate. Even Billy was thrown off by his own spontaneity. One day well into production, Wilder told Doane Harrison to get some electricians to think up some sort of complicated lighting effect for the next scene. “Get them to do something that will take some time,” he said. Harrison was baffled. “What for?” he asked. “We haven’t got the dialogue written yet,” Billy said.
Bogart, meanwhile, was requesting—and receiving—a glass of scotch every day at five or five-thirty, whereupon he grew even meaner and more surly. When Billy began inviting Hepburn, Holden, and Lehman back to his own office for a drink after work, he pointedly excluded Bogart, who became resentful. “Bogart gave me some bad times,” Billy later said, “but he was a needler anyway, and somehow he got the idea that Bill Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and I were in cahoots against him. Bill at one point was ready to kill him. Eventually we smoothed it out and everything worked out well.”
No, it didn’t. One day Bogart was offended that only Holden and Hepburn got revised script pages and he walked off the set in a rage. On another day, Bogart did receive new dialogue and promptly asked Billy if he had any kids. Yes, Billy said, a thirteen-year-old daughter. “Did she write this?” Bogie asked.
Holden and Hepburn, meanwhile, were falling in love. Their offscreen romance might have given Sabrina the kind of ineffable, unscriptable charge of To Have and Have Not, or Woman of the Year; you can actually see Bogart fall for Bacall, Tracy for Hepburn. When Ernest Lehman walked into Holden’s dressing room one day and found Hepburn and Holden looking deep into each other’s eyes, he knew that “something profound was happening between them.” Unfortunately, the “something” defied the plot of the film they were making. It also served to fuel Bogart’s alienation. Hepburn was supposed to stop loving Holden and fall for Bogart, but Audrey and Bill’s love for each other—and their growing disgust with Bogart—got in the way.
Anyway, as far as Bogie was concerned, Hepburn wasn’t worth his trouble. Clifton Webb ran into Bogart on the Paramount lot one day and asked him, “How do you like working with that dream girl?” “She’s okay,” Bogie replied, “if you like to do thirty-six takes.”
Then Bogart called Holden “a dumb prick.” Holden is said to have gotten so angry that he lunged at his costar and had to be physically restrained by Billy. Bogart called Billy a “kraut bastard Nazi son of a bitch.” Billy finally snapped and said either: “I look at you, Bogey, and beneath the surface of an apparent shit I see the face of a real shit.” (Or, more elaborately: “I examine your face, Bogie; I look at the valleys, the crevices, and the pits of your ugly face, and I know that somewhere underneath the sickening face of a shit is a real shit.”) Even in a rage Wilder knew how to compose a good line.
In the press, Bogart called Billy “the kind of Prussian German with a riding crop.” He complained that while he was making the movie he didn’t even know who got the girl at the end. This was an exaggeration, but only slightly. Holden needed to be freed up quickly so he could do The Bridges at Toko-Ri, so Wilder wrote and shot the concluding board meeting scene between Holden and Bogart to enable Holden to depart the production. This meant, however, that Wilder and Lehman wrote Holden out of the story before they resolved the love relationship between Hepburn and Bogart. The least convincing aspect of Sabrina is Linus’s attraction to Sabrina and her full return of his all-but-nonexistent love. Then again, that the film works on any level is a small miracle.
Then Bogart told a reporter that Sabrina was “a crock of shit.”
Toward the end of the production, Lehman collapsed in exhaustion, crying uncontrollably. For the first time in his life (but not the last), Billy Wilder successfully hurled a man into a nervous breakdown. Having achieved this degree of intimacy with his writing partner, Wilder was horrified. He instantly dropped the raging torrent of put-downs and all the driving pressure, put his arm around his friend and cowriter, and told him not to worry about a thing; Ernie should just go home and take a well-deserved rest. Lehman’s doctor ordered him to bed for two weeks. A few days later, the physician paid a house call. He pronounced his patient in good health, then said, “You can tell Mr. Wilder to come out now,” at which point Billy burst out of the closet looking very pleased with himself. He’d stopped by to go over some script details and jumped into hiding when he heard the doctor at the front door.
The production of Sabrina closed on December 5, 1953, eleven days behind schedule, Wilder and Lehman having rewritten scenes until the very end of the shoot. Its final price tag: $2,238,813.19. After the final take, Billy looked up in the sky and screamed “Fuck you” at God.
His nervous breakdown notwithstanding, Lehman appears to have stood up better than most of Wilder’s other writing partners to the ongoing barrage of slurs. What got Lehman’s goat was Wilder’s insistence on dominating Lehman’s tastes as well as his prose: “Billy has to take over your whole life. You don’t just collaborate on a script with him. He has to change what you wear and what you eat.” Still, the slurs stung. Lehman told of an extended fight Billy picked when Lehman refused to go along with one of Billy’s ideas. Wilder suggested, insisted, demanded, that Sabrina have sex with Linus at the end of the scene in Linus’s office in which she fixes the omelette. They’d have to do it in a covert way, of course, but Lehman couldn’t countenance it in any form. Hepburn seemed too pure to him, and he was convinced that audiences would be outraged at any suggestion of sex. Billy went wild. He flew into a violent fury and ripped into Lehman with a torrent of invectives. As usual, he hit his friend where he thought it would hurt the most. As Lehman described it, Wilder spewed “all kinds of names—eunuch, fag, didn’t know women, hated sex, was afraid of women, in this vile and vicious manner he has when he’s insulting you.” Lehman, who was securely married to a charming woman named Jacqueline, wasn’t thrown by Billy’s abuse. He still wouldn’t budge, and Billy gave it up.
Sabrina didn’t open until the following August. The trades loved it, as did most critics and, more crucially, most audiences; Sabrina was a commercial hit. Paramount shrewdly capitalized on the fact that the film boasted a total of four Oscar winners—Bogart for The African Queen, Hepburn for Roman Holiday, Holden for Stalag 17, and even Billy himself for The Lost Weekend. The director, finally, was getting to be a kind of star. The studio was hedging its bets in one regard, however. One of the posters Paramount designed for Sabrina features a picture of Audrey Hepburn looking over her shoulder. Her head is anatomically correct, but the rest of her body has been drastically retouched to provide her with the huge Monroe-esque rear end the marketing department apparently thought she needed to sell the film.
Sabrina is minor Wilder—gracious and elegant at times, pleasingly vulgar at others, but never entirely satisfying. After Stalag 17, Billy clearly wanted to do a Lubitsch-like romance set in a rarefied world of New York money, and to a limited extent he succeeded. The script is both sharper and funnier than Taylor’s dull, talky play. Just as he did with Stalag 17, Billy tightened the structure, beefed up the central characterizations, and scrapped almost all the dialogue, writing more rhythmically and colorfully than the playwright. The
film’s musical score, adapted and composed by Billy’s old friend Frederick Hollander, is delightful, and Charles Lang’s cinematography is cheerfully elegant, as finely buffed as his Ace in the Hole photography is gritty. Hepburn is enchanting, Holden unusually cocky and buoyant, and Bogart ranges from serviceable to awful. When he utters a line like “Oh, you look lovely, Sabrina,” Hollywood’s greatest tough guy sounds ridiculous.
Despite its failures, Sabrina contains a few unforgettable moments nonetheless, chief among them the spectacular first shot of Sabrina as she sits in a tree peering through the branches, a full moon shining behind her in extravagant size, light glancing off the leaves as she poignantly watches the love of her life dancing with some silly, giggling debutante. When David hurries through the woods to meet the girl for a tryst in the indoor tennis court, Sabrina jumps out of the tree and surprises him. “Sabrina! I thought I heard somebody,” he says. “No, it’s nobody,” she says, though she waits until after he leaves before saying it, at which point Hollander shifts smoothly into “Isn’t It Romantic?” as David swaggers into the indoor tennis court to enjoy yet another in a string of meaningless lays.
An essentially wordless sequence follows. David and the giggler do have a few lines, but they’re immaterial compared to the silent seduction of gesture and symbol Wilder orchestrates on their behalf. They stand on opposite sides of the tennis net. With a practiced gait, David strolls toward the post holding up the net, just as he’s evidently done hundreds of times before, then bats the net-tightening lever with a loud, ugly jolt. It spins, the net slackens, and he steps over it. Sabrina, watching him from the window and understanding completely what she sees, turns away and cries, the camera staying on her as she walks away, miserable and alone. This is practically the first time Billy Wilder wrote and directed a seduction scene from a woman’s point of view—or, more precisely, a girl’s—and, for once, it’s neither smirking nor grotesque but, instead, disappointing, plain, and sad.