by Barry Paris
In general, the critics were less effusive about Audrey’s second outing. Films in Review said she was “fey and gaminish” and “costumed to emphasize her lack of what are technically known as secondary sexual characteristics.” Time’s love affair with her in Roman Holiday seemed to be over: “Actress Hepburn’s appeal, it becomes clearer with every appearance, is largely to the imagination; the less acting she does, the more people can imagine her doing, and wisely she does very little in Sabrina.”
The meanest pan came from Clayton Cole in the British magazine Films and Filming: “Sabrina is the prick that bursts the fair bubble that was Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Surely the vogue for asexuality can go no further than this weird hybrid with butchered hair. Of course none of this would really matter if the charm and grace were sincere, but I am afraid that she is letting her calculation show.”
Cole dismissed Bogart brutally as “a frail, lisping old man.”22 But the only ballot box that counted was at the box-office, where the fans’ mandate was clear: Sabrina was the No. 3 top money-making film of 1954.ae
AFTER HONEYMOONING in Italy, Audrey and Mel returned to Bürgenstock, where her happiness about Sabrina’s success was soon dwarfed by a greater ecstasy: She was pregnant.
She so longed for a child and was now “infanticipating” with great excitement. Discussions of the baby occupied them in November on their way to Holland for Audrey’s first visit “home” since achieving movie fame. She had been invited by the League of Dutch Military War Invalids for a five-day fund-raising tour and to receive an award for her efforts during the war. But the sensation she created was rather too great. At a department store in Amsterdam, where Mel accompanied her to sign photographs for the benefit of war victims, thousands of teenagers stormed the place, breaking showcases and wreaking havoc in an effort to get close to her. Police had to be called in to control the mob.
The following month, just before the 1955 New Year, they rented a furnished flat in London near Marble Arch, while Mel filmed Oh Rosalinda! there. Ella had found the place, which was just a few minutes from her own flat in Mayfair. Audrey enjoyed the proximity to and reunion with her mother. Mel, less so. In any case, it marked the start of their firm policy to schedule their professional lives to be never, or rarely, apart.
Oh Rosalinda!, under Michael Powell’s direction at Elstree, was a non-musical version of Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus, and there was some tension during its making. By one account, when Audrey dropped by the set to watch Mel at work, he refused to let her appear in any publicity photos, not wanting to share the limelight. Asked about that, Ferrer says, “I never refused to allow Audrey to do anything. She always had very precise ideas about what she did and did not want to do.”23
Other allegations soon made the rounds concerning Ferrer’s dominance of her and Audrey’s insistence on only accepting films in which he would costar with her. She supposedly turned down the “perfect” role of Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan—the part that would make Jean Seberg famous—when Preminger refused to cast Ferrer as the Dauphin. But Ferrer denies it:
“Saint Joan was not a project which appealed to Audrey. Her agent, Kurt Frings, was a chum of Otto Preminger and he wanted Audrey to do it, [but she] decided otherwise. There was never any question of my playing the Dauphin—it would have been totally wrong casting.”24
Their own pet film project was Ondine, which they championed at every opportunity in England. Mel wanted Associated British to do the project as part of Audrey’s commitment to them, but ABC declined on the theory that watersprites were death at the box office. He then pushed for MGM to make Ondine in the States, with Charlton Heston in the role of the knight, but the Giraudoux estate would not approve.
“We spoke often of trying to film Ondine,” says Ferrer, “but it was such a tenuous, gossamer work that we were advised against it as a motion picture.” Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked, he admits, “although I would have loved to have seen Audrey’s mesmerizing performance preserved on film.”25
Her affairs were in some turmoil then. She was inundated with offers, but Associated British was contesting her Paramount contract. Mel helped crucially by proposing that Audrey hire the aggressive Kurt Frings as her new agent and by arranging for veteran Henry Rogers to take charge of her publicity. “We all had a difficult and complicated time steering a way through the exigencies of two long term contracts [ABC and Paramount] signed by Audrey before I met her,” says Ferrer. “Kurt became a devoted and fanatical defender of her interests.”26
Frings bore assorted grudges against the studios and was said to enjoy gouging them by turning his star clients into freelancers and getting them bigger fees plus a percentage. A former boxer, he was colorful and smart—and Audrey liked him a lot. Frings and his screenwriter-wife, Ketti, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the play of Look Homeward, Angel, were now among the Ferrers’ few close friends in Hollywood, along with Gregory Peck.27
Speaking of whom ... Peck and Hepburn had just been voted the world’s most popular film stars of 1954 in the Foreign Press Association’s poll of fifty countries. Soon after, in February 1955, Audrey received her second Oscar nomination, for Sabrina. She lost to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl (who should have lost to Judy Garland for A Star Is Born).
Sabrina’s sole Oscar winner was—Edith Head for costumes. The real credit belonged to Givenchy, who was much too polite to register a protest. Audrey phoned him in Paris to apologize, but he told her “not to worry because Sabrina had brought me more new clients than I could handle. But Audrey was still upset, and she made a promise to me that in the future she would make sure that it never happened again. And she kept her promise.”28
Life for Audrey seemed glorious, until a miscarriage intruded into it that March. She and Mel grieved privately. Publicly, she was perched at the top—which was a kind of trap. In the accepted career-tracking of the day, she could never again take a supporting role and now faced the need to “top” herself with every new film. Her next role had to be something big, sweeping and serious.
WHEN DINO DE LAURENTIIS deserted the Fascists and was hiding out on the isle of Capri during World War II, he had a total of two books to while away the time: The Odyssey and War and Peace. The former inspired his later movie Ulysses—which was but a “finger exercise,” he said, for the latter.29
Tolstoy’s two-thousand-page manuscript, written between 1863 and 1869, conjured three hundred characters with a panoramic backdrop of Russia and the Napoleonic wars. It was arguably the greatest of all novels. One critic called it “a combination of everything ever written by anyone.” No film version of War and Peace had ever been made, though some of the greatest names in film history had plotted to do so over the years—D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim and Irving Thalberg among them.
Now, all of a sudden, everybody wanted to do War and Peace at once. It was a time of epics and new widescreen techniques to make motion pictures more competitive with television. Aside from De Laurentiis, Mike Todd said he had a Robert Anderson screenplay of the Tolstoy novel to be filmed in his new Todd-AO 65 mm process in May 1955. David O. Selznick boasted a Ben Hecht script that would start shooting in June 1955. MGM was said to have a War and Peace set for August 1955.30
The book’s central figure is Natasha Rostov—“a dark-eyed girl full of life, with a wide mouth, slender bare arms ... , her shoulders thin, her bosom undefined,” wrote Tolstoy. “Such was Natasha with her wonder, her delight, her shyness.”31 He might have had Audrey Hepburn in mind. All the film producers now did, and so did the actress herself. She could powerfully identify with an adolescent whose life is turned upside down by war and who ages quickly through three terrible years of conflict.
Todd seemed to lead the pack by getting Fred Zinnemann’s agreement to direct. “Mike’s suggestion that Audrey Hepburn should play the part of Natasha made things even more exciting,” said Zinnemann. “Unfortunately, Dino De Laurentiis thought so too. [Todd] was shatt
ered; his heart was set on that picture. He had been courting Marshal Tito, and already two Yugoslav cavalry divisions had been earmarked to work with us.”32
De Laurentiis, for reasons of practicality and national pride, thought the Italian army more photogenic—and easier to hire. Two smart moves made him the War and Peace sweepstakes winner: his teaming with producer Carlo Ponti (future husband of Sophia Loren) and his hiring of Mel Ferrer to play Prince Andrei. That cinched the signing of Audrey Hepburn for $350,000 (three and a half times Mel’s $100,000 salary) and $500 a week expenses. The prospect of being and working together in such a monumental, prestigious project thrilled them both, and the remaining details were quickly sorted out: De Laurentiis struck loan-out deals with Paramount (in exchange for U.S. distribution rights) and Associated British (for U.K. distribution).
The director of an epic such as this had to be someone of vast experience. De Laurentiis chose King Vidor, craftsman of such silent classics as The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928) and, in the sound era, of Duel in the Sun (1947)—but little since. Vidor was near the end of a distinguished career and would make only one more film. His tendency to oversimplify complex stories and to indulge in sentimentality had increased with age, yet he seemed a safe enough choice.
Vidor was hired not only to direct but to write, and he now performed the astounding feat of condensing Tolstoy’s million and a half words into a shooting script in one month. Needless to say, it took many liberties. “Tolstoy took two hundred fifty pages to tell readers that there was a feeling between [Natasha and Pierre],” said De Laurentiis. “We got it over in one scene in the horse corral at the beginning of the picture.”33 Such solutions had their drawbacks, and the screenplay repairs would end up engaging eight writers for most of a year. Among them was novelist Irwin Shaw, who later denied that he asked to be removed from the credits—but seemed relieved not to be listed.
The casting of Pierre was one of the biggest problems. Prince Andrei—whom Natasha loves wildly—is not the most important male figure in War and Peace. Its masculine soul and true hero is Pierre Bezukhov, her bastard half-brother. Audrey and Mel originally wanted Gregory Peck for the role, but he was engaged. Their next (and best) choice was Peter Ustinov, who was turned down by De Laurentiis for lacking a big enough “name.” Marlon Brando was among others under consideration, but they finally settled on Henry Fonda.
In spring of 1955, the Ferrers went to Italy and reoccupied the charming house in Albano, twenty miles outside Rome, where they had spent their honeymoon. One of their visitors was Jeremy Brett, who was playing Natasha’s younger brother.
“When I arrived at their house,” recalled Brett, shortly before his death in 1995, “Mel met me and under his right arm popped a little girl with no makeup who looked about sixteen years old—an exquisitely delicate, porcelain doll. I was spellbound. I remember swimming with them and banging my head on the side of the pool because I was so busy looking at her.”34
The Ferrers loved that pool, whose water gushed forth from an antique carved stone head in the center. But there was precious little time to swim in it, once War and Peace began shooting on July 4. Ten-hour days were the norm, and they were lucky to get home by eight p.m. for dinner. Due to the miscarriage and her frailty in general, Audrey was at pains to keep up her weight and Ferrer was the imperious liaison for all her needs.
“Mel is like a manager with her as well as a husband,” said cinematographer Jack (The African Queen) Cardiff, who was annoyed by Ferrer’s incessant solicitude: “Is the car ready for Miss Hepburn?” ... “The costume is wrong for Miss Hepburn.” ... “It is too hot (or too cold) for Miss Hepburn.”35
Audrey called Natasha the toughest role she ever did, yet she executed it with her unique toughness. “I did War and Peace in velvets and furs in August,” she recalled. “In the hunting scene where I’m in the velvet and a high hat, the family was plodding across a big field in the blazing Roman sunshine and, all of the sudden, my horse fainted out from under me. They quickly got me out of the saddle so I didn’t end up being rolled over. So when they say I’m strong as a horse, I am. I’m stronger! I didn’t faint. The horse did.”36
Her toughness included an insistence on the behind-the-scenes artists she trusted. She demanded the husband-and-wife team of Alberto and Grazia de Rossi for her makeup and hair, and kept them through her career. “She had such beautiful bone structure that her features did not need a lot of work,” said Alberto, who also served Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor. “She had a strong jawline, which in a sense I reversed by emphasizing her temples. She had thick eyebrows that always needed to be thinned out. Every picture we made together, I tried to reduce them a bit more than the time before, but without going to extremes. She had the kind of face that needed eyebrows.”37 When someone once said she had the most beautiful eyes in the world, Audrey replied: “Oh, no—the most beautiful eye makeup perhaps—but all the credit belongs to Alberto.” Indeed, some credit de Rossi as most responsible for the “Hepburn look.”
Audrey also paid tireless attention to costume details—having studied books on early nineteenth-century fashion—and she annoyed De Laurentiis’s costumers by flying in Givenchy from Paris to give his ex officio approval of everything. She could stand three hours at a time until a pleat or petticoat was adjusted to her satisfaction. In the end, she wrestled through twenty-four costume changes and ten different hairdos, supervising most of them herself down to the final hairpin.
De Laurentiis had his own staggering problems. It took fabulous bribes and cajolery finally to muster the 15,000 Italian soldiers to play French and Russian troops in the battles of Borodino and Austerlitz. Ten thousand of them—be—lieved to be an all-time record—appeared in one scene. (The buttons alone, for their uniforms, kept ninety tailors busy for months in a Swiss factory.) Some 8,000 horses and 3,000 cannons peppered the battlefields, and the many accidents required De Laurentiis to hire sixty-four doctors, dress them up as soldiers, and sprinkle them among the combatants to provide first aid.
Moscow of 1812, complete with its onion-domed churches and towers, was painstakingly reconstructed on the Tiber River, and, in the intense July heat, snow scenes were created by wind machines blowing cornflakes dipped in gypsum. Audrey spoke of standing on a hill, watching the production assistants go about with torches, setting fire to “Moscow” in De Laurentiis’s attempt to outdo Selznick’s burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.
The gargantuan production required all forty-eight acres and nine soundstages of Rome’s massive Cinecittà studios—a fully equipped city in itself. The Ferrers drove there daily from their rented farmhouse and found it, compared to the Hollywood counterparts, a happy and stimulating place. Audrey enjoyed joining the crew for lunch and watching their consumption of large quantities of wine and pasta during breaks.
But the strain was enormous. Scenes of war and carnage by day gave her nightmares by night. Moreover, she hated having to film her scenes out of sequence. Roman Holiday and Sabrina had been shot chronologically. In War and Peace, she was a naive teenager one day and a grief-stricken adult the next. She was also distracted by the many visitors De Laurentiis allowed on the set and later complained about it in a Photoplay interview:Can you imagine doing a play, and someone during one of the acts says, “Just a moment, please,” and you stop? A stranger wanders on the stage, you shake hands, and then you all sit down and you chat. Then after a while he leaves, and you are expected to go on with the play exactly as if nothing had happened.... I forced a smile on my face and muttered a few polite words, because I knew it was expected of me. But the scene was finished as far as I was concerned. The mood had disappeared....
There are actors, much better actors than I, who can cope with such a situation and not let it disturb them. But I just can’t.... There was a time when I even had a complex working in front of my fellow actors. But I’m getting better; I’m learning. I hadn’t much choice. I had about half the Italian Army watching me.38
> She could hardly say so on the record, but the main object of her pique was all-powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who turned up in Rome during War and Peace shooting, installed herself in a luxury suite at the Excelsior Hotel, demanded access to Audrey—and got it. Not surprisingly, Audrey was much relieved when the filming of War and Peace finally came to an end. Now it was in the hands of King Vidor and his editors. All that remained, for her and Mel, was the verdict.
THE VERDICT, in a nutshell, was that War and Peace was “the least Russian movie ever made.”39 And for once it couldn’t be blamed on Hollywood. The picture was quintessentially Italian, despite the odd international cast: Herbert Lom as Napoleon, Oscar Homolka as General Kutuzov, Jeremy Brett as Natasha’s brother Nikolai, Vittorio Gassman as Anatole, Anita Ekberg as Helene, May Britt as Sonya and John Mills as Platon.
Worst by far was Henry Fonda—the lanky Yankee whose accent clashed jarringly with Hepburn’s soft, pleasant Euro-timbre. Not for a moment is he believable as sensitive Pierre. Mel Ferrer, by contrast, conveys noble dignity throughout, especially in the gorgeous ball scene. But his dramatic deathbed reunion with Natasha lacks much impact, and his dying seems to go on and on.
So does the film. The Manchester Guardian said it had “length without depth”—at three hours and twenty-eight minutes, just twelve minutes short of Gone With the Wind. It had cost a whopping $6 million, but that was less than half of its $13-million rival, The Ten Commandments, which grossed three times as much at the box office. War and Peace premiered August 21, 1956, in a year of “spectacles” that pitted it not only against Moses but also Around the World in 80 Days and Giant.