by Barry Paris
“Speaks seven languages in faultless diction, lives in a New York apartment-hotel with her mother....
“Likes rain....”89
Favorite films? She listed her own Lavender Hill Mob, Les Enfants du Paradis —and Lili. Asked for her opinion of TV and radio, she responded, “I miss the audiences. ”90
“TV” was not a pleasant set of initials for Paramount, which like all big studios, was beset with antitrust suits and the devastating competition of the new medium. Paramount had again tried unsuccessfully to buy out Audrey’s Associated British Pictures contract and was now paying even more for her services. But since its other “major” female players were Arlene Dahl, Rhonda Fleming, Polly Bergen, Rosemary Clooney and Dorothy Malone, there was no choice but to be grateful to have Audrey, whatever her cost, for top projects.91
The top project at hand, in September 1953, was a Samuel Taylor stage hit known in Britain as Sabrina Fair, shortened to Sabrina in America to avoid confusion with Vanity Fair. Audrey had recently seen it on Broadway, starring Margaret Sullavan and Joseph Cotten, and asked Paramount to buy it as a vehicle for her. The studio did so, agreeing to pay her all of $15,000.
“It’s the second big film,” said Audrey, “which will prove if I was really worthy of the first.”
Sabrina was Cinderella redux: a chauffeur’s daughter becomes a sophisticate. She loves both sons of her father’s employer, despite Dad’s warning that “Nobody poor has ever been called democratic for marrying somebody rich.” Director Billy Wilder—after Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17—would complete his Paramount contract with this film.
Sabrina was filmed on location at the Glen Cove, Long Island, estate of Paramount chairman Barney Balaban in just nine weeks, between September and November 1953, plus a few trips to Hollywood for retakes. William Holden played the younger brother. The role of the debonair older brother had been rejected by Cary Grant. It was accepted by Humphrey Bogart, who had spent most of his career at Warner Brothers but was now finishing up his own three-picture contract with Paramount.
Bogart’s hectic schedule that year included Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny and The Barefoot Contessa. When shooting began on frothy Sabrina, he had just finished playing Captain Queeg in Caine Mutiny and seemed to carry over Queeg’s paranoia. Bogart “was in totally unfamiliar territory,” said Wilder, “and very uncomfortable.” He had “the occupational insecurity of most actors,” said Lauren Bacall, the last of his four wives. “He was never sure when he would work again.”92
Bogart’s insecurities were aggravated by Wilder’s jocular comment to a reporter that the reason Bogart, not Holden, wound up with Audrey in the end was “because Bogart gets $300,000 a picture and Holden gets $125,000.” Despite (or because of) that, Bogart fussed and worried. “I’m gonna get fucked,” he told a friend. “Billy’s going to throw it to his buddy Holden.”93
Holden (real name: William Franklin Beedle, Jr.) was thirty-five and at the peak of his career, having just starred in two of Wilder’s greatest pictures— Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. He and Bogart had fallen out years earlier while making Invisible Stripes (1939). Nowadays, Bogart referred to him as “Smiling Jim,” mocked his bleached-blond look in Sabrina, and called him a “dumb prick” to the press. Bogey had a special loathing for Holden’s macho display of rolling Gaulois cigarettes with one hand. Audrey smoked English Gold Flakes—in a long, filtered holder—and Bogart smoked heavily, as well. The air quality on the set was as woeful as the interpersonal relationships.
If Holden and Bogart did not get along, Holden and Hepburn certainly did—so much so that it may have constituted an affair. Holden was married to actress Brenda Marshall (real name: Ardis Gaines) but was notoriously promiscuous and had an odd habit of bringing women home to meet his wife.94
Audrey was infinitely more prim and proper. Back in California after the Long Island shooting, she lived alone in a modest two-room apartment ($120 a month) on Wilshire Boulevard. There, she said, her biggest joy was “to unlock my door and find the new record that the store down the street delivered during the afternoon. I get into old, soft, comfy clothes and then I play the new music while I cook.” She boasted of having over a hundred records—from Brahms and Beethoven to “a mess of good jazz like Benny Goodman, Mel Powell and Jerry Mulligan.”95
In those days, Holden and Audrey were often seen at fancy restaurants, after which they would repair to her apartment. But Audrey’s most intimate friends doubt she ever went to bed with Holden, and her journalist acquaintance Henry Gris claims she had “very little sexual drive” in general.96 All such opinions, of course, were speculative: Did she really love Holden? Was she expecting him to get a divorce?z And what about Mel Ferrer? But there was no doubt that Holden passionately adored her: “She was the love of my life,” he later declared.
Audrey, for her part, was at least infatuated with the warm, demonstrative side of Holden’s personality—when it was not submerged in alcohol. Holden’s biographer Bob Thomas quoted her as saying she and Bill could “make beautiful babies together.”
Baby-making was, in the end, the issue. Compounding Holden’s obsession with sex was a secret he eventually had to tell Audrey: A few years before, at his wife’s insistence after the birth of their second son, he had undergone an irreversible vasectomy. When Audrey learned of it, she dropped all thought of marriage. Her deepest desire—even above career—was to be a mother.
Another Audrey—Billy Wilder’s wife—knew the score long before. The Wilders and Holdens were friends, and Audrey Wilder recalls a down-to-earth talk she had with Holden’s wife: “Brenda said, ‘The doctor told me I can’t have any more children, so I had Bill have a vasectomy.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you have your tubes tied? The minute you do that to a guy, he’s going to try to screw everybody.”’97
Holden was already trying—though he claimed to exempt his leading ladies: “I just don’t want anything in a relationship with an actress to be misunderstood at the time,” he told Donald Zec, the biographer of Sophia Loren, with whom Holden starred in The Key (1958). “You have to work with them terribly intimately, particularly in the love scenes, and unless you play it neutral you may have a situation on your hands. I’ve had that difficulty with Jennifer Jones, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak.”
Zec observed that such a problem was better than being held prisoner by the Viet Cong. But Holden continued:
“In all the relationships I’ve had with leading ladies, I found that the less involved I was with them, the better. [Two or three of them] I absolutely adored ... and if they had ever been willing to change their way of life and say ‘I’ll go with you,’ it would have been fine. But we never stepped over the boundaries. So after all these years we have the same kind of respect for each other that we had in the beginning. I’ll tell you, it’s worth a lot more to me than a piece of ass.”98
Holden’s satyriasis was matched by his compulsion to talk about it. Even in reference to the greatest screen beauties, he could never discuss women in less than batches of half a dozen. At the moment, in the wake of his vasectomy confession, he was distraught about Audrey’s reaction and rejection of him. “I was really in love with Audrey but she wouldn’t marry me,” he said. When Sabrina shooting ended, he set out on a ’round-the-world publicity tour with a private plan of action that was typical:
“I was determined to wipe Audrey out of my mind by screwing a woman in every country I visited. My plan succeeded, though sometimes with difficulty. When I was in Bangkok, I was with a Thai girl in a boat in one of the klongs [canals]. I guess we got too animated, because the boat tipped over and I fell into the filthy water. Back at the hotel I poured alcohol in my ears because I was afraid I’d become infected with the plague.” He poured alcohol into more than just his ears, and, “When I got back to Hollywood, I went to Audrey’s dressing-room and told her what I had done. You know what she said? ‘Oh, Bill!’ That’s all. ‘Oh, Bill!’ Just as though I were
some naughty boy.”99
SABRINA was supposed to be a romantic comedy, but there were more dramatic than comic moments on the set, and no romance between Humphrey Bogart and anyone. Everyone said Bogart hated Holden. Some said Bogart also hated Audrey—for her inability to do a scene in less than ten takes, and for “conspiring with Holden against him because she was giving Holden a tumble.”100
Audrey never spoke negatively about any of her leading men. The closest she came was, “I was rather terrified of Humphrey Bogart—and he knew it. [But] if he didn’t like me, he certainly never showed it.”101 She later told Rob Wolders “how reasonable Bogart was with her, a little rougher with other people around—but a jovial roughness.” Bogart himself once paid her a rare if backhanded compliment: “You take the Monroes and the Terry Moores, and you know just what you’re going to get every time. With Audrey it’s kind of unpredictable. She’s like a good tennis player—she varies her shots.”102
The final authorities on the subject are the redoubtable Billy and Audrey Wilder, jointly interviewed at their Wilshire Boulevard home in 1995.
“He did not hate Hepburn,” says Wilder. “Nobody could hate Hepburn. He did not hate Holden. He hated me! Why? Because he knew that I wanted to have Cary Grant but I couldn’t get him. Bogart did me a favor [by taking the role]. Holden I had made pictures with before, and Holden fell in love with Hepburn, so that was kind of a nice cozy arrangement. But Bogart we got at the last minute, and so I did not know what to do with him.”
One of many sources of tension was the script:
“It was written for Cary Grant and we had to rewrite a lot. One time, I handed him a new page and he looked at it and said, ‘You must be kidding. Who wrote that, your five-year-old daughter?’ He said it loud, for the gallery of electricians and everybody. But they were all my pals. He didn’t get a laugh.” 103
But the worst problem between Bogart and Wilder stemmed from a social faux pas. One day after shooting, Wilder invited Holden, Hepburn and several others over for drinks—either consciously or unconsciously excluding Bogart. “At the time,” says Audrey Wilder, “I said to Billy, ‘You can’t do that. He’s a big star. You can’t have Audrey and Bill and not ask Bogart. He’s going to be furious.’ And he was.” She turns to her husband and adds, “You just didn’t get it. I did right away.”
Billy shrugs and pleads nolo contendere: “I got it, but it was too late.”
In fact, Bogart was often left out of the after-hours fraternizing, simply because he wasn’t much fun to have around. Feeling ostracized and offended, he became even more irritable—and downright offensive to Wilder. “Kraut bastard” and “that Nazi” and various anti-Semitic epithets were said to be his pet terms for Wilder. But the Wilders say they don’t remember it.
“Billy is a kraut,” says Audrey Wilder with a laugh. “Anyway, a kraut isn’t a Jew. Neither is a Nazi.”
Says Billy: “He hated me so much—everything, my German accent—but ultimately, when he got sick and was lying there in his house, dying of cancer [in 1957], I went up to him and he was wonderful. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s make up’ or anything like that, but he was absolutely wonderful. He completely changed.”
Mrs. Wilder elaborates on the last Mrs. Bogart’s theme: “Bogart was insecure. They’re all insecure about something. He was insecure about Billy’s love for Audrey and Bill Holden.” 104
There was no doubt about the Wilder-Hepburn love affair—as real and as sweetly platonic as that of any director for any actress in Hollywood history. Says Billy Wilder today:The very first day, she came on the set prepared. She knew her lines. I did not have to squeeze it out of her. She was so gracious and graceful that everybody fell in love with her after five minutes. Everybody was in love with this girl, I included. My problem was that I am a guy who speaks in his sleep. I toss around and talk and talk.... But fortunately, my wife’s first name is Audrey as well.105
The most famous of all Billy Wilder statements about Hepburn was made midway in Sabrina shooting: “This girl, singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past.”106 Henceforth, he later added, “The director will not have to invent shots where the girl leans way forward for a glass of Scotch and soda.”
Life magazine called her “the director’s joy” and quoted Wilder’s comment that, “She gives the distinct impression that she can spell schizophrenia.”107 She was so diligent that—with Wilder’s approval—she insisted on doing her own singing. The Sabrina script called for her to croon a few verses of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in English and the pretty “La Vie en Rose” in French. She often spent two hours a day with a vocal coach. “I had to,” she said. “I had no voice at all. It was terribly monotonous, shrill and inflexible.”108 But Sabrina’s breathy little singing voice would be perfect, and very much her own.
In Hollywood, Wilder gave her a fancy green chrome-and-aluminum bicycle, on which she careened back and forth across the Paramount lot thereafter. In New York, he hovered around her—uncharacteristically—even off the set, as on the October day in 1953 when New York Herald reporter Otis Guernsey interviewed her in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel.
“May I present the female Mickey Mantle?” said Wilder to the writer, with a light pat on Audrey’s head, adding that, like the Yankee switch-hitter, “She can do anything.” But when the talk turned to stardom, he said, “Shhh! Don’t wake my Sleeping Beauty. She doesn’t know how big a star she really is.”109
Her rapport with Wilder was lasting, and so was her relationship with the two great designers who worked with her on Sabrina. Edith Head’s costumes for Roman Holiday would soon win an Oscar. She and Audrey had enjoyed each other throughout that production, often shopping and dining together. (Head marveled at Hepburn’s ability to consume five chocolate eclairs at a time, or a jumbo banana nut sundae.) Naturally enough, Head had been re-hired for Sabrina. But early on, Wilder made a daring move: Audrey’s high-fashion costumes would be designed by the young Parisian couturier Hubert de Givenchy. Edith Head’s work would be limited to the “Cinderella clothes” before the transformation. With abject apologies to Edith, Audrey now flew to Paris.110
At twenty-six, Givenchy—a devotee of Cristobal Balenciaga—was already challenging Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent to inherit the fashion throne of Chanel and Lanvin. Givenchy’s designs reflected his love of classic Greek lines. His wealthy family, owners of the Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry factories, had recently financed the opening of his salon on Avenue Georges Cinq, where he and Audrey met in the summer of 1953 and a legendary association began.
“One day,” Givenchy recalled, “someone told me that ‘Miss Hepburn’ was coming to Paris to select some clothes [for her new film]. At that time, I had never heard of Audrey Hepburn. I only knew of Katharine Hepburn. Of course, I was very happy to receive Katharine Hepburn.” When the confusion was cleared up upon her arrival, he tried to hide his disappointment. “My first impression of her was that she was like a very fragile animal. She had such beautiful eyes and she was so skinny, so thin.... an adorable young girl with large hazel eyes. She was wearing a sweater, straight slacks and flats; she was charming.”111 But however charmed, he was a busy man, as he recounted to Warren Harris:I told her the truth: I was in the midst of putting together my next collection and didn’t have the time to spend with her. She insisted. For the sake of peace and quietude, I said she could choose anything she liked from my current collection. That satisfied her and she selected several.... She knew exactly what she wanted. She knew perfectly her visage and her body, their fine points and their faults. [Later] I tried to adapt my designs to her desires. She wanted a bare-shouldered evening dress modified to hide the hollows behind her collar bone. What I invented for her eventually became a style, so popular that I named it “décolleté Sabrina.”112
Audrey’s angular figure was perfectly suited to the austere, geometric simplicity of Givenchy’s lines and to his preference for black, off-whites and subdued pastels. She loved what she saw and
flew back to Hollywood with a portfolio of Givenchy sketches that Edith Head was now asked to execute. According to folklore, Head was furious. The Wilders deny it.
“She was one of the great dames of all time,” Audrey Wilder says. “There’s no real truth to that. Maybe she was hurt a little but—” Billy interrupts:
“Did you know that Edith Head won the most Oscars, with the exception of Walt Disney? Even when he had nothing to do with the picture, it was always ‘Walt Disney, the producer,’ and he got the Oscar. The same with Cedric Gibbons, who was listed on every MGM picture as the set designer, whether he did it or not. It was in his contract. The same with Edith Head.”
Audrey Wilder recalls her excitement the day Hepburn brought Givenchy’s sketches and left them at the house for Billy. “I saw one and took it over to my mother, who was a fantastic seamstress and worked in the studios,” says Aud Wilder. “She ripped it off right away, and I wore it one night a few days later. Billy said, ‘That’s not fair! The picture isn’t even out!”’113
Everyone went gaga over Givenchy’s designs, and Hepburn went gaga over Givenchy. She found him the epitome of cultivation and politesse. “He’s my great love,” she would say. “He made the first dresses I ever wore from a good fashion house. I consider him one of my best and most important friends.”114
Toward the end of shooting on Long Island, a humorous moment helped relieve the tension of the dueling designers and leading men. The visiting king and queen of Greece wished to see the set. Wilder borrowed two thrones from the Bob Hope film Monsieur Beaucaire and set them up at the top of some stairs, with a red carpet leading up to them. As the embarrassed royal couple was being led to their thrones, an electrician shouted, “Hey, Queen, where were you last night when I needed you to fill a straight?”