by Barry Paris
AUDREY’S FILM ROLES to date were small, and so were the films. Now, for the first time, she was about to play a major supporting role in a major movie by a major British filmmaker.
Director Thorold Dickinson had seen “the girl with the eyes” in Sauce Piquante and tucked her away in his mind. A former supervising editor at Ealing Studios, he was a significant figure in British cinema. His brilliant Gaslight (1940) was made four years before the Ingrid Bergman version and was far better. His most recent picture, Queen of Spades (1949), was a tour de force for Edith Evans and both a critical and commercial success.
Dickinson and producer Sidney Cole were now readying Secret People, a downbeat melodrama of prewar political intrigue. It was the furthest thing in the world from ABC’s fluffy comedies. The screenplay, written by Dickinson and novelist Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth), was the tale of Maria Brent, living in London in 1937 with her little sister Nora—a very young and very beautiful ballet student. They are exiles from an unnamed foreign country, where their pacifist father is murdered. Maria abandons his ideals and turns violent revolutionary—but with deep guilt and a desperate desire to protect the innocent Nora.
Secret People’s broad, political scope was the talk of British film circles—so much so that a young film intern decided to chronicle it from start to finish. The result was a full-length book, Making a Film: The Story of “Secret People, ”by Lindsay Anderson, who would become an important director himself in the sixties. Anderson’s behind-the-scenes account makes it clear that casting went down to the wire. Both Maria and her radical boyfriend Louis had to have believable accents, but the budget ruled out the major English-speaking Europeans in Hollywood.
The eventual choices were two talented but little-known Italians, Valentina Cortesa and Serge Reggiani—a Paul Muni lookalike. But the perfect Nora still eluded them. “An actress would have to be found who could dance, or a dancer who could act,” said Anderson, whose journal for October 30, 1950, reads: Interview with Audrey Hepburn, possible Nora. With [Cortesa and Reggiani as] the leads, the height of potential cast members begins to assume importance. Neither of them is tall, so to a certain extent the rest of the cast must be scaled to them. This applies particularly to Nora—a slight discouragement to Audrey Hepburn. From now on all actors interviewed are sternly measured against the office wall.
On November 10, the cameras turned for the first time on Secret People— still without a Nora, even as composer Roberto Gerhard finished the elaborate ballet music to which Nora would dance in the most violent, climactic scene. In all his films, said Dickinson, he liked to have at least one sequence “of pure and unmistakable cinema,” and Nora’s ballet was going to be it.
Various candidates for Nora had been rejected. Valentina Cortesa was now responsible for the breakthrough.
“There were four girls that did the test,” says Cortesa today, “and I saw at the barre this beautiful little thing, like a little deer, with this long neck and those big eyes. She looks at me and says, ‘Do you think I have a chance?’ I was so touched that I went to the director and said, ‘Listen, if you really love me, I would like to have as the sister that little girl.’ They said, ‘We were going to look at some others.’ I said, ‘No, I beg you—I want her.”’46 In the follow-up test, Cortesa further assisted by suggesting Audrey remove her shoes and by playing the scene herself on tiptoe, to minimize their height difference.
Hepburn got the role of Nora on February 26, 1951, and art imitated life in almost all of her scenes. She’s the ingenue of ingenues, a gay wisp of a girl always rushing to or from an audition. Her barre exercises are those of her Rambert days, her dance form is marvelous, and her dialogue with Charles Goldner (as Anselmo, the landlord) might have been taken from her life:ANSELMO: Now you are British. You feel different, Nora?
NORA: I’ll say! No more labour permits! ... I might get some cabaret work in the autumn.
ANSELMO: Cabaret work? What for?
NORA: (calling back as she jumps on a bus) Money! For more classes! For more cabaret work!
The big challenge, aside from nine grueling days filming the ballet sequence, was her greatest dramatic moment in the film—in fact, the first tragic scene she had ever played: an emotional encounter with her sister after a terrorist bomb produces mayhem and death at the party where Nora has just finished dancing. The scene and its graphic dialogue unnerved her, bringing back nightmares from Arnhem. “I just can’t seem to say it,” she told Dickinson. “Don’t bother about how you’re going to say it,” he advised. “Just think of the experience that lies behind the words. During the war, perhaps you saw something like that.... Get the feeling right, and the words will look after themselves.”
While the stand-ins were being lit, Audrey went off by herself to a corner. “By the time we come to the take,” wrote Anderson, “the words have become spontaneous and heartfelt and tears come naturally to her eyes.”
With Valentina Cortesa, Audrey developed a warm, big-and-little sister relationship off the set as well as on. “We used to go out in London at night, all dressed up,” Cortesa recalls. “Once we went to a very chic restaurant and both of us smoked a cigar. Like little idiots, we smoked a cigar and laughed. Well, why not? I adored her.”47
But by mid-March, Cortesa was greatly agitated. For one thing, she was secretly pregnant by actor Richard Basehart, whose current visit to the set was creating much tension. (A few weeks later, they would marry.) Besides that, she was annoyed and besieged constantly by publicity requests. One day in the presence of Anderson and Hepburn, Cortesa unloaded:
“We must be allowed to have our own lives. In Hollywood it is terrible; they expect you to be their slave; you have to be ready to do anything for them, at any time, not just when you’re making a picture.” She shuddered and turned to Audrey: “Think hard before you sign a long-term contract. Liberty is the most wonderful thing of all.”
At this embryonic stage, Audrey was thus alerted to the danger of overexposure and the contempt bred of familiarity. That very week she was booked for a photo session at South Downs, feeding ducks and paddling in the village pond, followed by some “breast skyline” pictures for a cover story in Illustrated —too much publicity before her “serious” work had even been seen by the public. “They’ll get sick of it,” she fretted. “I’d much rather wait until I have [more] to show.”
By its final reel, Secret People becomes a metaphor for the Cold War. Maria, threatened by both sides (“You wouldn’t want anything to happen to Nora, would you?”), breaks down and turns state’s evidence. It is then Scotland Yard’s turn to manipulate her until her final confrontation with Louis, in which she is stabbed to death and the sobbing Nora is led away.
The rough cut of Secret People ran almost two hours, twenty minutes of which were chopped before its premiere in November of 1951. Cortesa’s underplayed performance was acclaimed, and photographer Gordon Dines praised for his moody, high-contrast lighting in the postwar neo-realist style. The film’s gritty feel and restraint were remarked. But all in all, the critical response to Secret People did not fulfill Dickinson’s hopes.
Variety called the script “hackneyed” but said Hepburn “combines beauty with skill” in the fine ballet scenes.48l Indeed, forty-five years later, Secret People provides our last glimpse of her as a young, working dancer.49
Though her part was small, Hepburn received above-the-title credit, just below Cortesa and Reggiani—“which reflected how pleased we were with her performance,” said producer Cole. Dickinson, convinced of her star potential, tried hard to persuade Ealing to sign her up, but in vain. She would soon go the way of Cary Grant, James Mason, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Boris Karloff, Deborah Kerr, David Niven and a host of others lost by England to Hollywood.50
But first, she would be temporarily lost to France.
IN THE MIDDLE of Secret People production, while she was still very much “an unknown,” Audrey’s new agent Kenneth Harper went to director Terence Young i
n London and told him she was someone special and to be reckoned with.
“From the moment she came into my office, I realized he was right,” recalled Young, shortly before his death in 1994. “But she was the last person in the world I needed for the role of a tough Lapland woman in the wilds of Norway, who had to move around all day on skis. I told her she was completely wrong for the picture [Valley of the Eagles] and said, ‘I bet you can’t even ski.’ Her reply was, ‘But I can learn.’ She was utterly enchanting and she stayed on in my office talking for half an hour. I told her I’d certainly remember her for something else. I even added that I thought she was going to make it, and I hoped one day she would remember me, and get me to direct.”51m
Around the same time, writer-editor Alfred Shaughnessy—later a cocreator of the Upstairs, Downstairs PBS-TV series—suggested her for a comedy film called Brandy for the Parson. Shaughnessy gave her a copy of the screenplay, which she soon returned with a mischievous smile. “Lovely,” she said, “but I couldn’t play Scene 42. The censor wouldn’t allow it.” He grabbed his “thoroughly wholesome” script, turned to Scene 42 and read: “Petronilla is awake, dressed in Bill’s pyjamas. She is peeing out of the porthole.”52 A crucial “r” had been omitted.
In April, while still filming Secret People, Audrey had received a call from Harper saying he had an offer for her to play in a film with bandleader Ray Ventura, who was also its producer. The part was small but the money was good, she would get to wear a Dior dress, and—best of all—the picture would be shot in Monte Carlo, which meant a month in the sun.
Audrey went immediately to Valentina Cortesa, asking whether she should take it. Cortesa’s response was unhesitant, as always: “I said, ‘Listen, if the cast is number one, if the director is number one, even if the part is not number one—do it. Maybe something else comes out of it.”’53
Nous irons à Monte Carlo [We Go to Monte Carlo] was a sequel to Ventura’s mildly successful Nous irons à Paris (1949). Audrey was cast as much for her bilingual fluency as for her charms: The film would be made both in French and English (with the snappier title Monte Carlo Baby). It was a series of skits loosely—very loosely—connected by the musical appearances of Ventura and his band. Audrey played a movie star chasing after her missing baby.
Compared with her serious role in Secret People, it was absurd. Her misgivings were compounded by a report that the jazz musician who would be her leading man was a notorious womanizer. She mentioned that to Nick Dana, her High Burton Shoes pal, who replied, “It’s true, but Frenchmen are usually not as good as their words.” At that point, says Dana, “She looked at me and smiled and said, ‘What do you think I should do?’ I said, ‘What did they offer you?’ She told me. I said, ‘Ask for fifty pounds more.’ She went back and said, ‘If I have to work with this man, I need more money.’ And she got it.”
Three days before departure, she showed up at Dana’s apartment in the St. John’s Wood section of London with an announcement: “I feel like I should look different if I’m going to do a French movie.”
Dana, who had a few salon skills of his own, reflects on that moment with delight at his home in Rochester, New York, and is not too modest to deny credit for what happened next:
“I said, ‘You have the kind of face that needs a gamine haircut. I would almost take the ends of your eyebrows off so that you have a quizzical look. You have the kind of face for it—a pixie face. Let’s make it a pixie.’ So we did the eyebrows and I gave her a gamine cut. It was that simple.”54
Thorold Dickinson was accommodating, too, moving up her dialogue post-synching session for Secret People to May 28, since she had to leave for France that very evening.
“Everything significant in my life has happened gloriously and unexpectedly—like the trip to Monte Carlo tomorrow,” she told writer Radie Harris the previous night. “I’ve always longed to go to the French Riviera, but I could never afford it.”
A day later, she was installed at the Hotel de Paris, the most splendid Belle Epoque structure on the Riviera, and ready to start shooting Monte Carlo Baby under the direction of Jean Boyer. Boyer, one of France’s most prolific directors, was a master of mass-audience fluff. His next assignment would be to direct Brigitte Bardot in her first film, Crazy for Love (1952). His current stars were less titillating: The biggest name in Monte Carlo Baby was sad-faced comic Jules Munshin. He was supported—not hugely—by Cara Williams, Michelle Farmer (Gloria Swanson’s daughter) and John van Dreelen. Audrey would appear in the film for a total of twelve minutes.
Monte Carlo was released in France and England in 1952, and poorly received. There was no interest in American distribution until May 1954, after Hepburn had become famous, when producer Collyer Young and his wife Ida Lupino bought the U.S. rights and exhibited Monte Carlo Baby in a few art houses, where confused American audiences could not understand why such a big new star was appearing in such a small part.55 The New York Times called it “as witless a film exercise as ever was spewed from an ingenuous camera.” Audrey’s role of the film star? “She made this film before she became one in reality. It is rather astonishing how she stands out in that seared desert of mediocrity.”56
THE HOLLYWOOD “star search” was typically full of sound and fury, most often signifying nothing other than publicity. The more dignified theater world usually disdained it—with the exception of Gigi. It was the last fiction work of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873—1954), written during the Nazi occupation of Paris. When published in 1945, it was just the sort of escapist fare Europeans wanted to read, and a huge hit. In 1948, it was made into a pleasant French film starring Danièle Delorme, which in turn led to the idea of a stage version.
But Colette’s New York agent was having trouble trying to sell Gigi as a Broadway play: The first dramatization by a French playwright called for nineteen sets and a cast of thirty-eight-much too much. The agent now asked Anita Loos (of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fame) to streamline it, and she duly produced a version with just eight actors and four sets. But there were other obstacles.
“First of all,” said Loos, “the stage rights were acquired by Gilbert Miller, who hadn’t the least intention of producing Gigi. Gilbert’s main interest in life was to be an international playboy. At the same time, he didn’t want some other producer to acquire a likely property, so he followed his usual custom: paid me an advance of a thousand dollars, tossed my script into the lower drawer of his desk, and went merrily off to Europe.”57
Miller was a powerful theatrical czar on both sides of the Atlantic. Victoria Regina, What Price Glory? and The Cocktail Party were among his hits, and he was a millionaire long before marrying the additional fortune of heiress Kitty Bache. He had his own airline, bank, estates in four countries, and was hugely fat. In London, he and Kitty lived royally in their Savoy suite overlooking the Thames.58 He was there now, laying plans to produce both Cleopatra plays—the Shakespeare and the Shaw—with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
Before leaving New York, Miller had asked an ambitious young assistant named Morton Gottlieb to look after his affairs. Gottlieb found Loos’s manuscript and took it upon himself to put it into production. Miller returned, furious to learn that Gigi had been announced in the trade papers.
“Gilbert then thought of one more chance to ditch the production,” said Loos. “Colette herself might possibly come to his aid by turning down my adaptation.” Miller sent Loos to the ancient Palais Royale apartment in Paris where Colette had long been bed-ridden with arthritis. “I presently realized that Colette’s mind was wandering,” said Loos, “and her gaze was directed toward my feet.... ‘Where did you buy those adorable shoes?’ she asked. From that moment on we hit it off.”59
Loos came away with Colette’s approval of her Gigi script. That delighted Gottlieb as much as it annoyed Miller, who was now obligated to move forward—but there was still no Gigi:With Miss Loos I combed the roster of Equity for a young American actress who could meet the requirements—wi
thout result. We must have seen at least two hundred girls in New York. For a time we considered the Italian actress Pier Angeli, but her accent seemed too high a hurdle to surmount. Briefly we pondered the potential of Leslie Caron, but Miss Caron was too French.60
They were about to compromise “on a none-too-pristine Hollywood starlet,” said Loos, when a telegram arrived from Colette via her husband Maurice Goudeket in Monte Carlo, where they regularly spent their summers as guests of Prince Rainier at the Hotel de Paris: “Don’t cast your Gigi until you receive my letter.” The letter that followed told a remarkable tale:
Colette, seventy-eight, was being propelled through the hotel lobby—sipping a liqueur and resplendent in her red corkscrew curls—when her wheelchair was blocked by a group of actors, technicians and their film equipment. The chair got tangled in some wires, and director Jean Boyer was cross about the interruption. But he fell respectfully silent when he recognized Colette, and shooting was halted while he went over to pay his respects. During that interaction and the time it took to get her chair sorted out, Colette studied the activity with her usual curiosity. Several cast members came up to meet her, but her attention was drawn to one who did not: A girl in the background, oblivious to Colette, was taking advantage of the unplanned break to frolic with two of the musicians off to the side. She was dancing around them in playful fashion; she seemed graceful and awkward at the same time; she was extremely pretty. The old author’s eyes narrowed. Suddenly she announced, “Voilà! There is my Gigi!”