Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

Many reviews, as that of Films in Review, praised Hepburn’s rendering of Natasha: “She dominates an epic picture by refusing to distort her character to the epic mould, letting her ... very littleness in the face of history captivate us by its humanity contrasted with the inhumanity of war. She incarnates all that is worth fighting for.”

  Audrey had acted well—and looked perfect—in a part that was neither well written nor well directed. In the end, she was defeated not by Mel Ferrer but by King Vidor and Henry Fonda.af

  THEN AND LATER, people said Ferrer dictated her career in totalitarian fashion, forcing her to reject good roles if there was no choice role for himself. Then and later, Audrey denied it. There was certainly no truth, for instance, to the claims that Audrey lost roles in The Diary of Anne Frank and the musical Gigi because Mel insisted on parts for himself. But it was quite true that they didn’t like to be apart, which had considerable influence on the film work they did accept.

  Toward the end of War and Peace shooting, she and Mel experienced their first separation since getting married. His scenes had been finished before hers, and he had flown to France to star with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais in Jean Renoir’s Elena and Her Men [also called Paris Does Strange Things].

  “We tried our best not to be separated by work,” says Mel, but the Renoir film was important. “Audrey and I both adored Ingrid.... We agreed it was something not to be missed, and she subsequently joined me in Paris.”40

  In an April 1956 Photoplay story headlined “My Husband Doesn’t Run Me,” Audrey sang the same tune in an interview with Mary Worthington Jones: “Mel and I both value our careers immensely. We’d be very foolish and irresponsible if we didn’t. [But] if we ever said, ‘Oh, just this once, what does it matter if we’re separated for a few short months,’ then the once becomes twice—without realizing it, we might have let material success ruin two lives.... If I were asked to take a step which might jeopardize my marriage, I would delve deep down into my heart to discover why I must do this.”41

  In particular, she was incensed by an article calling their relationship “a kind of master-to-slave one, with Mel directing her life, using her career as a stepping stone for his own.”42 In general, she was very touchy about the “Svengali” stories:How can people say Mel makes all my decisions, that he decides what I am going to play, and with whom, and where! It so infuriates me. I know how scrupulously correct he is, and how he loathes to give an opinion unless I ask for it. This is because we want so badly to keep our careers separate. We don’t want to interfere with each other....

  I’ve been fending for myself since I was thirteen and thinking very carefully about a lot of important problems, and I don’t think I’ve made many bad decisions. I’m very proud of that, about my ability to think for myself, and no one, not even my husband, whom I adore, can persuade me to do something against my own judgment.43

  Before that interview was over—and in many others—she again had to debunk the charge that Mel got his War and Peace role because of her. She was “indignant,” said Jones, and sprang from her chair, pacing up and down as she answered:

  “He was asked to play Prince Andrei long before I was even approached—as a matter of fact, before we were even married.... After it was decided, Mel and I were thrilled at the thought of being in the same picture together. But from that moment on, we were put on the defensive. Imagine! Two married people, in the same profession, whose interests and careers are parallel, having to give excuses for playing in the same film together!”44

  The ever-candid Bernard Schwartz—better known as Tony Curtis—was not an intimate friend of the Ferrers but knew them (and Hollywood) well enough to have his own sharp take on their dynamic. “You couldn’t get near her unless he was taken care of somehow,” says Curtis. “In the early years of that marriage, she had no confidantes. There was nobody around. The only one she could rely on was Mel, who wasn’t a bad guy, but the view that came from him was certainly self serving.”45

  Variations on the “Mel as villain” theme occupied many fan magazines and newspapers, even in England, where it took cartoon form in the London Evening Standard. “Mel had an enormous influence over her in the early days,” said director Fred Zinnemann.46 But that was different from “using” her. Professionally, her stardom outshined his, which privately produced strain. Despite her protestations, she often did try to suppress her own will to conform to his wishes. Mel felt he was trying to do the same. Some thought they were trying too hard.

  “She was absolutely charming,” recalls actor Theodore Bikel, who met them while filming The Vintage (1957) with Mel in France, “—fun and bright and international, just a delight to be with. Mel was decent and workmanlike, but he was a bit of a stick and she was the life of the party. She was very solicitous of him. It seemed that she was taking care of him a lot.”47

  Working together as much as possible was the only way they saw to combine marriage with two film careers. Baroness Ella van Heemstra was among those who harbored dark suspicions that Ferrer was subordinating her daughter’s budding career to his own. But there is no evidence that he ever did so. In the long run, the “togetherness dilemma” would impair his career more than hers.

  PEOPLE IN the industry remained skeptical. In fall of 1955, Audrey received producer Hal Wallis and writer Tennessee Williams in Switzerland to discuss the film version of Summer and Smoke. There, said Wallis, servants brought in a platter containing a single enormous fish—no soup, side dishes or dessert. “Audrey, dainty as a Dresden figure in a Givenchy original, consumed a large portion of the sea beast with great relish,” said Wallis, who was not pleased with the meal or the subsequent negotiations. They broke down, he claimed, because she wanted Givenchy to design the spinster teacher’s wardrobe and because she—not Ferrer—insisted Mel be her leading man. (The roles eventually went to Geraldine Page and Laurence Harvey.)48

  So what would her next film project be?

  She was deluged with script offers, including two dozen from Associated British—all of which she declined. From Paramount she now received an intriguing offer to star in the William Wyler film of Edmond Rostand’s L‘Aiglon. It was an extraordinary part, created on stage by Sarah Bernhardt, as the tubercular son of Napoleon and Empress Marie Louise. Hepburn would have made a fascinating boy and wanted to play it. Premature reports that she would make L’Aiglon praised her “courage” for taking on a male role.49 But like Garbo’s longed-for transsexual roles in Hamlet and The Picture of Dorian Gray, Audrey’s did not materialize. It was too unorthodox for 1956; Paramount never made the film.

  She also failed to materialize opposite James Mason in the title role of Jane Eyre, which 20th Century-Fox offered her around the same time. Mason objected to her casting from the start: “Audrey Hepburn just happened to be the most beautiful woman in movies. A head-turner. The whole point about Jane was that no one noticed her when she came into a room or left it.”

  When Audrey’s participation fell through, so did the film.

  Among other films she rejected were Joseph Mankiewicz’s proposed Twelfth Night and Mark Robson’s The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, whose lead was then snapped up by Ingrid Bergman. There was also talk of Billy Wilder’s Ariane.

  But the winner was Funny Face.

  IT WAS A fantasy come true: Audrey’s first film musical, dancing and singing with Fred Astaire in the rain, far from Spain—namely, on the Seine. That dream deal involved a lot of horse-trading and was finally achieved by two elemental things: Audrey wanted Fred, and Fred wanted Audrey.

  Astaire had just made Daddy Long Legs with Leslie Caron. Once again, to retain his appeal to young moviegoers, he would have to be cast opposite a younger woman. Who better than Audrey Hepburn—youth personified?

  Astaire was exactly thirty years older than Audrey—fifty—seven to her twenty-seven-almost old enough to be her granddaddy long legs. The Hepburn role was originally earmarked for Carol Haney, a recent stage hit in Pajama Game, but MGM concluded she wasn�
��t “big” enough for a major film and was about to shelve the picture, when screenwriter Leonard Gershe suggested Hepburn. “Kurt Frings, who had not read the script, sent it over to her in Paris because we had to have an answer right away,” Gershe recalls. “When he read it, he was furious. ‘How could you send this trivial musical to Audrey Hepburn? Are you crazy?’”

  But she was in dire need of something light after War and Peace. “Audrey usually takes about three days to read and consider a script,” said Mel. “This one she finished in two hours. She burst into the room where I was working and cried, ‘This is it! I don’t sing well enough, but, oh, if I can only do this with Fred Astaire!’ ”50

  She told Frings, “I’m crazy about it,” and she was cast. “Without Audrey,” says Gershe, “Fred would not have been strong enough alone to have gotten the studio to do it then. But Audrey could have anything she wanted. She was the hottest thing.”51

  She was hot enough to drive a hard bargain, too: $150,000, plus generous expenses for a posh Parisian hotel suite and the right to retain most of her Givenchy wardrobe.

  More important than the dancing, at this stage, was the music, on which Gershe and producer-arranger Roger Edens were collaborating. Edens had begun as a pit piano player for George Gershwin and later become a Hollywood producer by way of Easter Parade (with Astaire) and other MGM musicals. In his opinion, Gershwin’s original 1928 score for Funny Face was too theatrical. New songs would be written by Gershe and himself, though the bulk of it would still consist of the great Gershwin standards.ag

  In order to get the Gershwin songs and title, MGM bought the rights to Funny Face from Warner Brothers, promptly discarding its dubious libretto about a jewel heist in Atlantic City. MGM now owned the songs, but Paramount owned Audrey and Fred Astaire.

  What followed was a classic case of Hollywood wheeling and dealing: Edens, Gershe and director Stanley Donen were now sold by MGM—along with the Gershwin songs—to Paramount. “By the time we’d bought the rights of Funny Face and made all the deals,” said Donen, “it had cost a million dollars—and that was before a single foot of the film was even shot.”52

  Gershe’s original story, Wedding Bells, replaced the old script, and he was amazed by how well Ira Gershwin’s lyrics suited the new characters and the casting of Audrey. Ella van Heemstra—with whom he was forming a close friendship—thought so, too. “I read the script when it was sent to Audrey in Paris,” she told Gershe, “and I could hardly believe it had been written by someone who didn’t know her. Every facet of her is there. I mean to say it is Audrey.“53

  It was Cinderella again—but in the high-fashion milieux: The top photographer and editor of a trend-setting magazine are desperate to find a sensational new “discovery.” Audrey, of course, is the beatnik clerk-cum-fashion-plate they discover. The tale was loosely based on the life of photographer Richard Avedon and his search for a model embodying elegance and intelligence. Once he finds her, he trains and falls in love with her—not unlike Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

  In real life, Avedon had found, trained, and married model Evelyn Franklin in 1951. He and Gershe had become close friends when they were serving in the Merchant Marine and, even then, had spoken of applying slick magazine photo techniques to a big film musical. Soon enough, Donen and Avedon would be spending half the night working out details of the next day’s shooting.

  Astaire’s role was inspired by Avedon; the other inspiration was Diana Vreeland, colorful editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. She served as the model for Maggie Prescott, manic editor of Quality magazine in the movie. That part was tailored to the larger-than-life talents of cabaret star Kay Thompson, who would be making her film debut in Funny Face.ah

  Interior shooting commenced at Paramount in Hollywood in April 1956 and continued there for three months, followed by a month on location in Paris, and Audrey and Mel managed to stay together the whole time. In California, they rented director Anatole Litvak’s Malibu beach house; in Paris, where Mel was finishing up the Renoir film, they stayed at the Hotel Raphael.

  “Home is wherever Mel and I create it, wherever our work takes us—Paris, California, before that Italy, and next Mexico,” she said.54 “We move our home with us, like snails.”

  The press made much of the extravagance of their traveling and baggage arrangements—upwards of fifty pieces of luggage sometimes being necessary to create the Ferrers’ homes-away-from-home in various rented villas and luxury hotels.

  “Like an exiled member of royalty,” said one report, “she takes with her, wherever she goes, trunks packed with her own candelabra, flat silver, books, records, pictures. She also takes many objects in her favorite color of white: table and bed linen, two hand-knit blankets, sets of china, vases, and her tiny Limoges ashtrays and cigarette boxes.“55 It was claimed that she hand-labeled every piece herself and kept a loose-leaf inventory with her at all times, so that she could find (and repack) everything in the same order. The source of that habit was allegedly her mother, who—like other Euro-aristocrats with multiple residences—had traveled that way in her heyday.

  Ella, nowadays, was still based in London but often visited her daughter and made several trips to Paris during the shooting of Funny Face. (Friends felt Audrey was still emotionally dependent on her, but financially, “Her mother was completely dependent on Audrey,” says Ferrer.56 The Paris sequences involved virtually all of the city’s major landmarks—the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Paris Opera, Notre Dame, Arc de Triomphe. Audrey and Mel threw a memorable dinner-dance party one night for the cast and crew. Ingrid Bergman was one of their guests, and so was Audrey’s favorite Photoplay reporter, Mary Jones, at a restaurant with a fabulously romantic view of Montmarte.

  Romance was Jones’s relentless theme with Hepburn that night. Could Audrey remember the moment her friendship with Mel turned into love? Audrey could not. “After a while,” she said, “we both just took it for granted that we would marry.... I was never engaged—just married.”

  That didn’t sound so romantic, but she was being honest. One aspect of her attraction to Mel was of special importance now, she said: She had been ignorant of jazz and had learned its fine points from him. Their portable phonograph and records were always part of those fifty pieces of baggage.

  “I like jazz best now,” she said. “It makes me want to move. But I was stiff as a poker as a jazz dancer, always off beat on the simplest syncopation. That was all gradually broken down. I’m so lucky to be married to Mel Ferrer, who is such a good dancer and adores jazz.”57

  It was more than private enjoyment. She was now paired up with Fred Astaire in a major musical—one in which she was called upon to perform a lengthy jazz number and other dances, with and without him. She was determined not to be unprepared. For two months in Europe, before shooting, she put on her size 8AA (high metatarsal) slippers and went back to the barre, taking up practice with Paris Opera ballet dance master Lucien Legrand. “When I don’t dance,” she said at the time, “I always get fat in the wrong places. Most of all, I get hippy.”58

  On Sabrina, she had worked with stage and film choreographer Eugene Loring and was delighted that he was choreographing Funny Face as well. “He’s familiar with all my limitations,” she said, though the only limitations Loring ever cited for her were “modesty and legs a bit too long.”59 Forty years later, Leonard Gershe remembers watching Audrey rehearse:

  “I never saw anyone work so hard. She was tireless in learning both the songs and the dances. It wasn’t like Cyd Charisse or Ginger Rogers, who did it all the time. Roger Edens would say, ‘Audrey, take tomorrow off. You’ve been working sixteen hours a day.’ She’d say, ‘No, I’ll be here at nine.’ And then she’d be there at eight.” It was partly her desire to meet Astaire’s standards, “but it had mostly to do with wanting to be good.”60

  Funny Face’s choreography was credited to Loring and Astaire, with “song staging” by Donen.ai Loring devised her most important numbers, deftly incorporating her m
annerisms and elfin sense of comedy. But Hepburn’s main inspiration was Astaire—once she survived their introduction. The morning they met at the studio in Hollywood, Audrey was “so shaken that I threw up my breakfast,” she wrote in her introduction to Stephen Silverman’s biography of Stanley Donen.61 “I was absolutely terrified, but Fred said, ‘Honey, just follow me, I’ll take care of everything.’ And he did.”62 Before rehearsing their first number he suggested, “Come on, let’s have a little go together,” and they took a few delirious, anxiety-reducing spins.63

  Astaire had had his own bouts with anxiety years earlier, related to this very vehicle. In 1928, he and sister, Adele, won raves for the stage show of Funny Face, and Paramount gave them a tryout for a proposed film version. That screen test produced an immortal, famous-last-words studio verdict on Fred: “Can’t act, can’t sing, balding, can dance a little.”

  The original unmade Funny Face film was to have been shot in May 1929—the month Audrey Hepburn was born. Astaire gallantly told a reporter it was worth the twenty-seven-year wait: “This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey, and I was not missing it.”64

  The opening dance sequence in Funny Face was the famous “Think Pink” fashion number (“Banish the black, burn the blue, bury the beige! Think pink! And that includes the kitchen sink!”). Despite the bevy of top dancers and models in it, including Suzy Parker and Sunny Harnett, this razzle-dazzle routine belonged entirely to Kay Thompson, who utilizes it to start stealing the show early. (Movie audiences at the time often burst into applause at the end of it.)

  Audrey’s first dance is a downbeat contrast. Astaire, Thompson and crew find Embryo Concepts, the perfect “sinister bookstore” in Greenwich Village, where Audrey as “Jo” works. Donen gives her a brilliant entrance: a ladder is shoved aside and hurtles along a row of bookshelves with the terrified Jo on top. Her passion is the esoteric philosophy of “empathicalism,” not frivolous fashions. She tries to throw them out, but they ignore her protests, tear up the place for their shoot, and then leave her alone in alphabetical disorder. In the wreckage, she sings Gershwin’s “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” filmed exquisitely from high angles in semi-darkness, and performs a dance built around a single prop: a yellow-and-orange straw hat, the sole dab of color amid all the brown and black. At its end, forlorn little Jo tosses the hat aside and climbs back up the ladder—where she started—to begin replacing a thousand books.