by Barry Paris
Anticipation was heightened by an extraordinary amount of pre-opening publicity and the “vibration” that something theatrically important was in the works. New York World Telegram and Sun interviewer Norton Mockridge went so far as to predict that “within a few weeks, or months at most, Miss Hepburn’s elfin features and gamine hair-do will be known and acclaimed throughout the country. Her hair, snipped short and scraggly, is virtually a mess. But most people, who see it for the first time, sigh and say something like: ‘How breathlessly enchanting.’”
Mockridge further observed, during his luncheon meeting with her, that she “is always hungry. And after being starved for years for a taste of fresh meat, she eats almost nothing else over here. ‘Look,’ she’ll say to a waitress. ‘The tenderloin steak, please, but very rare. You know what I mean? Raw rare. With the blood in it. Dripping. Very rare. Almost raw.’ ... Some of the meat Audrey eats is rare enough to have walked into the restaurant five minutes before.” In between bites, she expressed her own high state of anticipation:
“Right now, I am living only for the opening night of Gigi. It’s my whole life. There is nothing else. I live or die. [The cards] are on the table, and we don’t know if there is an ace among them.”13
Previews started November 8, 1951, at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, where Rouleau kept her prisoner for the forty-eight hours before the opening, still trying to cajole the right moves from her.14 Miller wanted to fire her again, restrained only by the lack of a replacement. He hated her first-night performance, telling Loos after the show that he would either fold it or find another Gigi, but he was persuaded to hold off at least until he saw the morning reviews.
They were raves.
“The acting find of the year,” declared one critic. “She gives a wonderfully buoyant performance which establishes her as an actress of the first rank,” wrote Henry P. Murdoch in the Inquirer. There were more raves in New Haven, where the show had its three final trial runs.
On to New York, where Audrey discovered another young imported actor with the jitters back at the Blackstone. In that amazing Broadway season of 1951—52, no fewer than forty-four new plays and nine new musicals were premiering. One of them was called Nina, starring Gloria Swanson and David Niven and set to open within a week of Gigi, with which it was often confused.
“Audrey and I shook with fear as our opening nights on Broadway grew inexorably nearer,” Niven recalled. “We met when a body crashed down from the eighteenth floor and bounced off Audrey’s windowsill on its way to the ground. Anyway, she rushed into our room and we later discovered that some poor man had committed suicide.”15
It seemed a fairly bad omen.
“I’m frightened,” she told a reporter, with excessive candor, a few days before the opening. “I have no stage training whatever. Why, others spend their lives at it before they get anywhere.... I’ll have to act by intuition until I learn.”16
The out-of-town success had not much calmed either the star or the producer. “Everybody still worked on poor Audrey,” Loos remembered. “Cathleen Nesbitt helped ... Gilbert stepped in and hindered. By opening night we were all on tenterhooks.” To make matters worse that November 24 evening, Audrey had acquired a bad cold. Backstage, someone in the cast got a hold of the Fulton’s Gigi Playbill and read aloud: “In the event of an air-raid alarm, remain in your seats and obey the instructions of the management. Signed, Arthur H. Wallander, Director of Civil Defense.” After a glum silence, he deadpanned, “They’ve got to have some way of making people stay for the second act.”
The second act was the problem, all right, and it went none too smoothly. “On the final scene rested the whole reason for the play being a play,” Audrey recalled, “and right at the climax I forgot my lines and everything stopped. A whole speech was missed out. But I managed to pull round and last out until the final curtain.”17
As she left the stage after her last bow, stage manager Dick Bender told her, “I don’t know how you’re going to get inside your dressing room. It’s full of flowers.”18 It was also full of celebrities, including Marlene Dietrich and Helen Hayes (for whom the Fulton Theatre would later be renamed), many comparing her with Maude Adams and suggesting she was the new Peter Pan. But as always, everything hinged on “The Seven Butchers of Broadway”—Anita Loos’s term of endearment for the all-powerful newspaper critics. In a split decision, the majority of them gave low marks to the play but kudos to Audrey.
“The delightful Miss Hepburn obviously is not an experienced actress,” said Richard Watts, Jr., in the Post. “But her quality is so winning and so right that she is the success of the evening. [She] is as fresh and frisky as a puppy out of a tub. She brings a candid innocence and a tomboy intelligence to a part that might have gone sticky.”
Walter Kerr, writing for both the Herald-Tribune and Commonweal, doled out the brickbats first. Anita Loos, in his opinion, “has no style at all. She follows the Colette outline patiently and perfunctorily.” Director Rouleau “is a belligerent stylist” who “comes close to dashing the play’s brains out.” But Audrey Hepburn was “a young actress of great charm ... who pulls the whole thing into focus.... Instead of shifting styles with her colleagues, she manages to wrap them all into a simple, coherent, and delectable pattern of her own, and this is a major achievement for a fledgling performer.”19
In The New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs confessed that “I, for one, was quite disappointed when ... a purer kind of love intruded itself into the proceedings and the young couple decided to get married. [But] Audrey Hepburn, who has never acted in New York before, is nearly perfect as Gigi.”20
Newsweek’s dry conclusion was that “Nothing, really, happens on the stage of the Fulton Theatre except a gradual rapprochement between Michael Evans and Audrey Hepburn (no relation to Katharine).”21
The Theatre Arts critic, however, was especially rough on Audrey: “[Rouleau] has propelled her into such a jumping over furniture and such a breathless sprinting about the premises as would better suit a trained dog act. The girl’s personal acting qualifications leave me much in doubt.... She acts innocence in accordance with the script’s demands, but she never for a moment is successful in suggesting it.”22
A private pan came from Noel Coward to his diary: “Went to Gigi—an orgy of overacting.... Audrey Hepburn inexperienced and rather too noisy, and the whole thing badly directed.”23 He was more diplomatic to her face. “Noel Coward came backstage to tell me something he found wrong with my performance,” she said, “and I was terribly flattered.”24
By and large, however, the collective assessment concurred with the December 10 Life headline, “Audrey Is a Hit”: “The only trouble was that the authors and producer had set their sights too low. They had once thought of making Gigi a musical but were convinced that they would never find anyone who could sing and dance and also act the difficult role. It happens that Audrey can dance and sing as well as act. Broadway hopes to see her sooner or later in a triple-threat role in the style of Gertrude Lawrence.”25
Funny they should mention that. When Gigi was still in its embryonic stage, composer-lyricist Frank Loesser (Where’s Charley?, Guys and Dolls) had asked Gilbert Miller to consider coproducing it as a musical. Miller rejected the idea instantly, and Lerner and Loewe would later prove him wrong. Now, several performances into the run, Lawrence herself came backstage after the show to tell Audrey that if her own life were ever filmed, she would want Hepburn in the role.26p
Hepburn was surprised and truly modest about her success and generous as always in dispensing the credit for it.
“I find out more about the part all the time,” she told a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. “Dick Bender is the person I rely on completely. He’s our stage manager, a wonderful person. I have to have a master I can go to and ask if my sums are correct. He keeps close watch on the show, since the director isn’t around anymore and he’ll say, ‘This was good,’ or ‘You’re starting to miss out there.’ He’ll say
, ‘It’s strange, but for two nights you didn’t do this, and it was so attractive before, but you’re not doing it now.’”27
But she was not too humble to savor the day they moved her name from below to above the title—in hghts—on the Fulton’s marquee. Photographers snapped away as Miller held the ladder while Audrey climbed and lifted up the “A.” (The other twelve letters were already in place.) Yet she gave the news-men only the most self-deprecating little quote when she climbed down: “Oh dear, and I’ve still got to learn how to act.”28
Little known, in the wake of her “triumph,” is that she not only continued coaching with Nesbitt but now renewed her dance instruction—at the Tarassova School of Ballet on West Fifty-fourth Street. It was run by Mme. Olga Tarassova and her eccentric husband, Vladimir Bell, whom Audrey knew three years earlier when Tarassova was located in Amsterdam.29 In Saturday Review, Audrey sang the virtues and importance of dance to an actor:[Dancers] do a lot of technical things out of good habit. When we relax we never get sloppy. In my case that’s because when my ballet teacher, Madame Rambert, would catch us folding our arms or slouching our shoulders she’d give us a good rap across the knuckles with a stick.... Dancers learn to feel when their posture is not graceful....
Our director, Raymond Rouleau, used to be very amused at the way I stood with my toes pointing out and my legs stiff whenever I’d lean down to pick something up. [She jumps up and demonstrates the bending action.] I wasn’t conscious of doing it. It just came automatically.
I’m halfway between a dancer and an actress. I’ve got to learn. Ballet is the most completely exhausting thing I have ever done. But if I hadn’t been used to pushing myself that hard, I could never have managed the tremendous amount of work necessary to learn in three weeks how to play a leading role in my first real acting job.30
She was smart enough to know it and honest enough to say it. Though she was frequently mentioned as a contender for the Best Actress Tony Award, it was won by Julie Harris for I Am a Camera. Audrey was not disappointed.
Neither was Colette. Across the ocean, she congratulated herself and sent her discovery an autographed photo inscribed, For Audrey Hepburn, a treasure which I found on the sands.31 Ah, how Colette adored her. But there is no confirmation of the report that, when Colette died three years later, she left her personal jewels to Audrey. She didn’t adore her quite that much.
ACROSS THE same ocean, James Hanson also adored Audrey and was also congratulating himself. During his three-day surprise visit to New York for the Gigi premiere, she had accepted his diamond ring and they had formalized their engagement.
“I didn’t know he was coming over,” said Audrey to a nosy reporter. “I left the theater a few hours before the opening performance to get into a car and there he was. Actually, we have been informally engaged for some time. There is nothing definite about a wedding date as yet.”32
Both restrained and strained, the reply suggests she might not have appreciated the unexpected distraction of her fiancé just before the most important and frightening night of her professional life. But she confirmed the marriage, if not the date, and an announcement appeared almost immediately in The London Times’ “Forthcoming Marriages” on December 4, 1951:Mr. J. E. Hanson and Miss A. Hepburn: The engagement is announced between James, son of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanson, of Norwood Grange, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and Audrey Hepburn, daughter of Baroness Ella van Heemstra, of 65, South Audley Street, London, W.1.
Subsequent updates said the wedding was scheduled for spring 1952, between the end of the Gigi run and the start of Roman Holiday shooting in Italy. Bridesmaids names were given out, and it was suggested that, after Roman Holiday, Mr. and Mrs. Hanson would take up residence in Huddersfield. That came as a shock to Ella—but was never really the couple’s intention. They were too cosmopolitan by then, and Hanson was more often in his New York or Toronto office than in Britain.
“Our engagement and affair had mainly to do with New York,” Hanson recalls. “I worked there and had a flat in New York and was able to spend a lot of time with her when she was in Gigi.
“The great thing about Audrey was her international ability. She spoke many different languages. Once I went with her to see my parents, who had an apartment in the Ritz Tower at Fifty-seventh and Park when they were in America. We were going up in the lift with two women. You know how older women sometimes look down their nose at a young beauty? Well, they were talking in Dutch about her, assuming that nobody else in the world, let alone in the elevator, would speak Dutch. Audrey looked at me and gave me a wink. We didn’t say a word to each other, but just before we got out, she rattled a stream of Dutch at me as if I was just as much a native speaker as she. They had been talking about her in a rather bitchy way, and they were in shock as we got out. She was very amusing and very good at that sort of thing.”33
Hanson’s own internationalism was useful to Audrey. He introduced her to his lawyer Abraham Bienstock in New York, who helped improve upon her contract arrangements. He suggested that she avoid making films in England or the United States, if possible, in favor of other countries where the tax rates weren’t nearly so high. When Audrey called him in Canada, much perplexed about the need to convert and merge her ABC option with the option Paramount had on her, Hanson rang up his friend Lew Wasserman in Beverly Hills and arranged to organize it along beneficial lines. From then on—long before she became one of his major clients—Wasserman took a personal interest in her.
“The only advice I was able to give her was financial,” says Hanson. “It was just a natural thing that, with my knowledge, I could do. By knowing the people that I did here and in the U.S., I was able to make personal contact for her with them. That possibly helped to advance her career in a very small way.”
Was there a plan for him to become her business manager?
“That was never the thought. Obviously, if you marry a successful businessman, it might come up. But I was careful not to interfere. I only planned to run my own career.”34
All was well, in Hanson’s view, but a certain “if and when” hesitation was detectable in Audrey. “When I marry James, I want to give up at least a year to just being a wife to him,” she told her journalist friend Radie Harris. “James is being wonderfully understanding about it. He knows it would be impossible for me to give up my career completely. I just can’t. I’ve worked too long to achieve something. And so many people have helped me along the way, I don’t want to let them down.”35
An ominous report said she had removed the framed picture of Hanson from her dressing-table at the Fulton. Asked why, she replied, “So many people whom I hardly know asked me what was his name and when were we going to be married, that I simply had to put the picture into a drawer. My private life is my own.”36
Her professional life was not. Paramount was champing at the bit to get started on Roman Holiday and had given Miller a $50,000 incentive to release her from Gigi at the end of May, though she was still committed to do the road-show tour that fall. Thus on May 31—after a short but wildly successful run of 217 performances—Gigi closed in New York.
Shortly before, while Gigi was still on the boards, Hollywood costume czarina Edith Head met with Audrey for a preliminary discussion of her Roman Holiday wardrobe, and a warm friendship between them began. Head later told Charles Higham:
“She would laugh and curl up on the floor (which she always preferred to a chair) and tuck her legs under her like an adorable, naive, utterly innocent schoolgirl, and then she would say, with a sweetness that cut like a knife to the heart of the problem, ‘I don’t think the princess [in Roman Holiday] would be quite so shrewd, Edith, darling, as to use that particular décolletage!’ and I would think, ‘Oh, my God, if she doesn’t get to the top I’ll eat Hedda Hopper’s hats.’”
Her personality dazzled or melted everyone. She could just as easily conduct a conversation with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as with visiting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. A friend summed
it up: “It broke my heart. Just the look of that girl. It’s one of those magic things.”37
SOMETHING WAS happening on a grander scale, and “the look of that girl” was making it happen. It had to do with the changing standards of beauty and with film and fashion overall, but perhaps most with the era itself.
“I remember the fifties as a time of renewal and of regained security,” Audrey would later write. “There was a rebirth of opportunity, vitality and enthusiasm ... a return to laughter and gaiety—the world was functioning again. Above all there was a wonderful quality of hope, born from relief and gratitude for those greatest of all luxuries—freedom and peace.”38
It was this brave new world that Audrey was somehow coming to epitomize, and in which she would set the pace. Nobody looked like her before the war, Cecil Beaton had written in Vogue, but now there were “thousands of imitations [and] the woods are full of emaciated young ladies with rat-nibbled hair and moon-pale faces.”39 When she was young, Audrey said later, “I wanted to be a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. I didn’t do either.”40
Instead of some “cross,” Hepburn and her look were original. To embryonic feminist Molly Haskell, she was “alert, full of the ardor of an explorer, with nothing of the lassitude or languor of such voluptuous and earthbound sex goddesses as Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren or ... the overeager Monroe. The qualities that made her more desirable to us were precisely those that made her less desirable to masses of red-blooded American men.”41
More about those physical qualities and the fashion phenomenon they inspired later. For now, suffice to say that she was unique among her contemporaries in refusing to pose for cheesecake photos, and that her private view was both unusual and refreshingly simple. “I think sex is overrated,” she said.42