by Barry Paris
Audrey would call Sabrina “a dreamer who lived a fairy tale, and she was a romantic, an incorrigible romantic, which I am.” Otis Guernsey in the New York Herald pegged the young star’s forte: “Fairy tales are her natural element.” 115
Enter Prince Charming.
MEL FERRER, once called that “nerve in perpetual motion,” had not only fallen in love with Audrey but had been pondering how to advance her career—and his own. The answer came to him in the form of a prewar French play he now discovered.
Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine had been a great success when first performed in Paris in 1939 and his status as France’s preeminent dramatist secured by The Madwoman of Chaillot, which not only dazzled Europe but won the New York Drama Critics’ Award as best foreign play of the 1949-50 Broadway season.
Ondine, based on an early nineteenth-century German fairy tale, was later turned into two operas, symphonic works by Debussy and Ravel, and—in 1958—Frederick Ashton’s definitive ballet for Margot Fonteyn. It was a fable of man’s inability to comprehend and need to destroy innocence. The mythological “undine” is a water sprite who can only acquire a soul by marrying a mortal. In Giraudoux’s play, the knight she chooses is unfaithful and—by virtue of a sacred pact—he must die and she must return to the water, never to remember him. The knight charges that she “adored him beyond endurance.” Ondine’s view is whimsical. “So it takes twenty minutes to catch a man,” she muses when he proposes. “It takes longer than that to catch a bass.”
When Ferrer sent Hepburn the script, she loved both the play and the obvious casting. She told him she’d do it and instructed her MCA agent Kay Brown to approach the Playwrights Company, which jumped at the chance to land her: She was offered a minimum guarantee of $2,500 per week against a percentage of the box office, a big improvement on her $500 a week salary for Gigi. She secured Mel as her costar and—in appreciation of his suggesting the idea—insisted not only on sharing cobilling but also on splitting her percentage with him.
“If this isn’t love,” said her friend Radie Harris of the arrangement, “what is?”116
When the word got out, she was deluged with questions about the nature of the role.
“It’s a wonderful part,” she told an interviewer, “the kind I feel would be good for me. As opposed to Gigi, which was a comedy, and Roman Holiday, which is a light comedy, too, this is a very serious dramatic part, and an unusual one.”117 It was the closest she would ever get to Peter Pan—the role everyone wanted her to play—a combination of Ariel and Miranda.
In her two-week “vacation” between the end of Sabrina and the start of Ondine rehearsals, she packed up and moved to New York, where her mother would arrive three days later. “I want everything to be perfect,” she said. “I’ve ordered tickets for all the new plays, and I’m going to lay it on real thick—New York, that is. I want mother to love it as much as I do. I plan to spoil her as she’s never been before!”118
She accomplished that in and around her reunion with Ferrer and their rapidly intensifying relationship. Soon after Ondine rehearsals began, she and Mel began living together in Greenwich Village, and Frances Ferrer once again consulted her lawyers. Mel was said to believe he and Audrey could become the next Olivier and Leigh, or Lunt and Fontanne.
There was coincidence and irony in that: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne had scored a great triumph in Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 in 1937. Before he died in 1944, the playwright reportedly “entrusted” the English debut of Ondine to them, and they had since tried (and failed) to persuade Olivier and Leigh to do it.119 Beyond that, in London the previous year, Radie Harris had taken Audrey to see Fontanne and Lunt in Noel Coward’s Quadrille, “and when I took her to the dressing room to meet them,” said Harris, “she was like a wide-eyed child meeting Santa Claus for the first time.”120 Now, to Audrey’s joy, Lunt accepted the Playwrights Company’s offer to direct Ondine.
In addition to Hepburn and Ferrer, Ondine’s cast included Marian Seldes, whose initial problem was similar to Givenchy’s. When she auditioned for Princess Bertha, Ondine ’s haughty rival for the knight, all Seldes knew was her agent’s description of the part: “It’s the heavy in a play with Hepburn.”
“I thought he meant Katharine Hepburn,” says Seldes. “But when I worked with Audrey in Ondine, she behaved in such a way that my admiration for her was on a par with what I felt for my early idols. I expected so little, I got so much.... I loved watching her rehearse and act. How beautiful [she made] other people feel! That was her magic on and off the screen. [And] how obediently she followed Mr. Lunt’s suggestions.”
That was more than could be said for Ferrer.
“The gossip in the company was that since she had fallen in love with Mel Ferrer, he was giving her different directions after the rehearsals,” says Seldes. “I did not believe it.... He did not respond to direction as Audrey did, was ungracious to the older man in front of the company at times, but the production of Ondine had been largely Mel’s idea and it would have been ridiculous for him to sabotage it by redirecting Audrey.
“Lynn Fontanne came to many rehearsals to watch her husband direct.... Occasionally [Lunt] would show Mel how to play part of a scene and step into his place. He would become Hans, the knight who loved the water nymph Ondine, and for a few moments I would be acting with this marvel. Afterward he would mutter to Mel, ‘I am doing this badly, of course.’ By that time Mel’s attention would have wandered....121
“Mel was in a difficult position. Lunt made a much greater connection with Audrey and the others. Because Mel was somewhat cool, distracted, he didn’t really work on the part from his inner self. At the time I thought he was rude, but looking back, perhaps he felt a little out of his depth in Ondine waters.”122
The Playwrights Company had engaged him with an ulterior motive. “We bought Hepburn and the price was Ferrer,” said a staff member. “It turned out to be much too expensive.”123 There was tension from the first day of rehearsal: Ferrer thought Lunt’s direction dull and resented Fontanne’s presence. He reportedly asked for revisions in the play to expand his own role, but Robert Sherwood refused to alter a word, even when it was suggested that Ferrer might quit and take Audrey with him.
Inevitably, Hepburn was drawn into the fray. One night after rehearsals, she showed up unexpectedly at Sherwood’s apartment, upset and fearful of the show’s failure. She and Mel were to be married, she told him, and she could hardly remain neutral in the conflict. She offered to withdraw from the production, but Sherwood reassured her, and she agreed to stay on.124
Less serious but vexing up to the last minute was the matter of Audrey’s hair: Lunt felt it should be blond, since Ondine was a creature of the washed-out, watery deep. Just before previews opened in Boston, she gave in, allowed her hair to be bleached—and quickly regretted it. She then had its real color restored and switched to a blond wig. But the wig felt “stiff and hot and horrible,” she said. The eventual solution was to tint her hair with gold dust each night and wash it out after every show.
Her costumes were built by the great Valentina Schlee, designer for Fontanne in Idiot’s Delight, Norma Shearer and the Duchess of Windsor. Audrey spent days in Valentina’s East Sixty-seventh Street studio, standing six hours at a time to supervise the sewing of her costume, which consisted of fishnet and a few strategically placed leaves—censorable on anyone but Audrey, whose innate decorum gave even the scantiest outfit an almost Quakerish propriety.
All trials and tribulations were vindicated when Ondine premiered—with incidental music by Virgil Thomson—on February 18, 1954, at the Forty-sixth Street Theater in New York.
“Hepburn moves with the fleet freedom that testifies to her ballet training, and she speaks with a voice of strange and vibrant beauty,” said Variety. “Largely because of her personal incandescence ... , Ondine is a resounding hit.”
“Ondine was worth writing, translating and producing just to place Miss Hepburn on stage,” wrote Eric Bentley i
n The New Republic. “It is not time to speak of a great actress, yet no one would doubt the possibility of greatness.” 125
Most critics cited her amazing leap—from a standing position into Ferrer’s lap—as one of the show’s most memorable moments.aa Her smash success in Roman Holiday, released just a fortnight earlier, made Ondine’s opening night even more the gala event of the season. “The box-office lines are a block long,” said Newsweek. “The reason is Audrey Hepburn.”126
James Hanson was sitting next to Baroness Ella van Heemstra on opening night. As with the Gigi premiere, he had flown over from London to surprise Audrey, even though he was no longer her fiancé. Neither Hanson nor the Baroness failed to notice the subtext at the end of that night’s performance: The audience cheered on and on, demanding a solo curtain call by Audrey. But with every bow, Mel appeared at her side. Finally, the house lights were turned on, and Mel held up his hand to hush the crowd for a speech—surely to acknowledge Audrey. “Instead,” said Radie Harris, “we heard a flowery expression of thanks to Alfred Lunt,” which most everyone knew to be insincere.127
After the premiere, Hanson disappeared and Mel accompanied Audrey and her mother to a supper party sponsored by the cultural attaché of the French Embassy. There, someone made the mistake of asking Lunt, “Did you learn anything from working with a movie star like Mel Ferrer?” Yes, he replied, “I learned that you cannot make a knight-errant out of a horse’s ass!”128 In New York theatrical circles, it was a mini-scandal that Ferrer would not let Audrey take her last curtain call alone. One critic called him “churlish” for not doing so. The late Eva Gabor was in that opening-night audience and remembered it vividly:I can still see this beautiful wisp of a girl come on stage and the whole audience gave a big sigh—‘Ahhh!’ She was incredibly beautiful, captivating. In the curtain call, she came out first but turned to the wings and waited till he came out, because it would have been a terrible letdown for him to come out alone, after her. I never forgot that look on her face: The audience went wild, applauded, screamed—but she would not turn until he came out. I don’t know of another actress who would have done that. She was in love with him.129
Most of the bouquets for Audrey came with thorns for Mel.
“Occasionally, during the times when Audrey Hepburn was absent from the stage of the Forty-sixth Street Theater, it occurred to me that Ondine had the makings of a quite majestic bore,” wrote Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker. “On each of her entrances, however, [Hepburn] set about creating a queer, personal miracle.... Her performance [is] a beautiful and astonishingly intelligent piece of work, and I don’t believe there is an actress in our theatre physically or mentally equipped to duplicate it.”
And Mel Ferrer?
“Reasonably attractive,” said Gibbs, “but I don’t believe he has quite the style, of either conduct or diction, that this difficult part demands. It is a heavy task to oppose the kind of acting Miss Hepburn is offering, and I can think, offhand, of nobody except perhaps Olivier and Gielgud who could manage it, and Mr. Ferrer is certainly neither of these men.”130
The harshest verdict was Lunt’s, in a private letter to Sherwood: “All the medals and praise in the world will never convince me that beautiful play comes off.... She jumps on his lap & he holds her like a potted palm—he sits beside her at the table & treats her like a tired waitress at Child’s.... If he played his scenes on top of her, you’d have the feeling he was laying a corner stone. Personally, I’d call the whole show a fucking failure.”131
Audrey was much praised—“too much indeed,” Commonweal dissented. “She is not yet a very accomplished actress [and] must learn to manipulate her voice with some of the grace and variety she brings to her body movements.”132
In “Nymph Mania,” the Ondine review in Saturday Review, the perceptive Henry Hewes said Audrey was giving “a performance and not a piece of acting. This is not to discredit Miss Hepburn [but] rather to clarify what it is that this clever youngster does.... Perhaps if she could join a repertory company, as Claire Bloom has, she would gradually acquire the acting skill to go with her performing talents. As it is, she is faced with being a star rather than becoming one.”133
A variation on that theme was Harold Clurman’s “Open Letter to Audrey Hepburn” in The Nation, which began by observing that the response to her Ondine performance was “as if everybody were asking for your telephone number”:[You are] a wonderful instrument with a soul of your own. But, said old Grandpa Ibsen, talent is not just a possession, it is a responsibility. You are at the beginning of your career; because this beginning is so dazzling you must not allow the beginning to become the end. You do not yet know how to transform the outward aspects of a characterization into an inner characterization....
You can learn to be a real actress if you do not let the racket, the publicity, the adulation rattle you away from yourself. Keep on acting, studying, working.... Play parts that are risky, parts that are difficult, and do not be afraid to fail! Above all, play on the stage.... Do not trust those who tell you that screen and stage acting are the same species or of equal artistic value.134
For Audrey, that was both a concrete and a cosmic issue of major importance. Just the day before Ondine opened, she had filled out a new questionnaire from her publicist:
Any special role you most wish to play?
“One day I would like to try the classics, yardsticks by which an actress’s technique and variety are measured.”
What is your greatest ambition as an actress?
“To some day be considered as good an actress and as faithful to her public as was Maude Adams or is Helen Hayes.... A stage and screen career each benefits from the other.”
Now, as if to confirm that, came the news that she had been nominated for an Academy Award for Roman Holiday.
“ONDINE AND GIGI were entirely different,” says actress Celeste Holm, who saw Audrey in both. “Gigi was an American version of a French farce. Ondine was almost a ballet. In both cases, she had something that couldn’t be manufactured. People who are very definite are more interesting than the paste-ups. The effects of the war, her dancer’s sense of communicating physically—all that carried through to her work. So many people in theater have no specific idea of what they’re communicating, just a vague idea of showing off. But not Audrey. The moment you saw her, you realized she was an artist.”135
Two Broadway hits and an Oscar nomination were proof of her spontaneous romance with the public, but still, “I wouldn’t say I’ve learned to act yet,” she said during Ondine. “Often I think I’ll never learn anything. Some of the things I do on stage depress me beyond measure.”136 Compounding that angst, she was emotionally drained—by Mel Ferrer as much as Ondine.
“It often happens that actors and actresses fall in love during a play that moves them deeply,” says Celeste Holm. “They think it’s the other person, but it’s really the play.”
Audrey and Mel really fell in love because of Ondine?
“I think so,” says Holm. “Look at Gary Merrill and Bette Davis—the same thing.”
While Ella was issuing statements that her daughter and Ferrer were not romantically involved, they were, in fact, seriously discussing marriage. And as those marital pressures mounted—pro and con, from Mel and her mother—so did the extravagant attention of the media, in anticipation of the Academy Awards. “Not since Garbo has a new actress been welcomed with such fervor and adulation,” declared Cosmopolitan.137
The Oscar ceremony of March 25, 1954, was a bicoastal affair, dually hosted by Donald O’Connor at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles and Fredric March at the NBC Century Theater in New York. When Audrey arrived breathless and very late at the latter place, a great shout of “Hepburn’s coming!” rose from the media area, and all the photographers rushed to the door.
“Hepburn, still wearing makeup of water nymph in Ondine, did the fastest dash I’ve ever seen,” wrote one reporter, “straight through the animal pack to a small room off
the inner lobby.” As she was rushing to change clothes, she ran into fellow nominee Deborah Kerr, just arrived—equally breathless—from her own Broadway hit, Tea and Sympathy. They wished each other luck and agreed Leslie Caron was going to win for Lili. 138
“Ladies predominantly blond this year,” continued the reporter, “hair drooping and matted, like seaweed.... Hepburn emerged. Vision of loveliness in white lace dress. Animal pack, momentarily bowled over by beauty, soon regained composure and screamed for pictures.”139 Audrey briefly obliged, then ducked into the theater just in time to join her agent, Jack Dunfee, and her imperturbable mother before the moment of truth.
From Here to Eternity dominated the awards, winning Best Film, Director (Fred Zinnemann), Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra), Supporting Actress (Donna Reed) and four other awards, tying the all-time Gone With the Wind record. The odds were in Deborah Kerr’s favor. But the Oscar went to Audrey. ab
“I was so surprised when they called my name that I didn’t know what to do,” she said the next day. “Mother and I wanted to celebrate, so we bought a bottle of champagne on the way home. It was warm—but it was the best champagne I ever tasted!”140
From then on, she regularly gave Ella credit for her achievement—seri—ously and humorously—at every chance: “My mother taught me to stand straight, sit erect, use discipline with wine and sweets, and to smoke only six cigarettes a day.”
Ella just as regularly demurred: “I can really take no credit for any talent that Audrey may have. If it’s real talent, it’s God-given. I might as well be proud of a blue sky, or the paintings in the Flemish exhibition at the Royal Academy.”
Neither of them knew how important the Oscar really was. “Having lived in England for some time,” Audrey said years afterward, “I wasn’t extremely familiar with the Academy Awards. I knew it was a coveted prize, but I didn’t realize until later what an honor it was to win it for the first time out.”141