Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  It is the loveliest and most intimate musical moment in any film she ever made. But it is not her most taxing. That comes after she’s transported to Paris, in a smoke-filled existential dive on the Left Bank—a send-up of Sartre’s Café de Flore.

  “I feel like expressing myself,” says Jo, in defiance of Astaire. What she expresses, in a routine called “Basal Metabolism,” is a satire of avant-garde inter-pretive dance—a sort of jitterbug-jazz ballet with cardiovascular contortions. Audrey slithers wildly about, clad entirely in black and but for Donen’s brilliant touch of white socks. She is supported by two men who manage to keep smoking their cigarettes even standing on their heads. “I’d never done anything so jazzy before,” she said. “I’d never even listened to that kind of beat.”

  Astaire had his own shining solo moment in “Let’s Kiss and Make Up,” a courtship dance performed in a lamplighted courtyard for the benefit of Audrey on her balcony. Midway, he turns it into a Spanish bullfighter’s display—a dazzling tour de force for a fifty-seven-year-old who has lost none of his stuff.

  But the grand finale—“He Loves and She Loves,” an overly gauzy wedding number filmed outdoors near Chantilly—was more final than grand.

  “It had been raining for weeks and weeks,” Donen told Warren Harris, “but finally we went out to shoot on this little island, which was not much more than a strip of grass between two streams. The grass was ankle deep in bog. Audrey had on white satin dancing shoes made in Paris, very expensive. She had about nine pairs standing by because they kept getting black in the mud. Fred got very crotchety and said to me, ‘I can’t dance in that. Fix it.’ ... How? ... He said, ‘I don’t care! Put down a wood floor and paint it green.’ Everyone was tense until Audrey suddenly quipped, ‘Here I’ve been waiting twenty years to dance with Fred Astaire, and what do I get? Mud in my eye!”’65

  Though always humble about her own dancing (“I had a very slender kind of technique”), she had held her own, however worried she may have been about comparisons with Astaire’s great partners of the past. Leslie Caron, when asked for her opinion of Hepburn as a dancer, replies with the graceful sidestep equivalent of a jeté: “You’re asking me a tough one there. I thought uppermost she was a delightful romantic comedienne. I will be a little more silent on her dancing. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever she did was so delightful that one was happy to watch her.”66

  The appeal of Hepburn’s dancing varies greatly, according to taste. “Where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron have energy,” wrote Sheridan Morley, “Astaire and Hepburn have class and subtlety.... If only she had managed to make Gigi for the screen a couple of years later, but by then she was otherwise engaged, and her role went by default to Caron.”67aj The most sharp-eyed assessment comes from dance writer Caroline Latham:

  “Hepburn’s long legs and slim body make her a good match for Astaire’s own elongation. Watching them, one is struck by their shared quality of benign remoteness. Each seems enclosed by some personal bubble of space and air, a visible separateness. Rather than lovers, they seem when they dance to be brother and sister, twin halves of a whole from some classic myth.”68

  Much like Fred and Adele.

  ALMOST LOST in the dance shuffle of Funny Face was the fact that Audrey was under equal pressure to sing—and to sing well enough for a recording. Donen would refer to her “thin little voice,” which she went to great pains to improve. An intense round of vocal coaching was in store for her at the Paramount soundstages in Hollywood before her taping sessions: daily rehearsals for nearly four weeks. “I was quite nervous about it, never having recorded before,” she said.

  Even Kay Thompson was called in to help. She had coached Judy Garland, among other MGM singer-actress stars, and now coached Audrey, urging her to employ a parlando style of speech-song and to concentrate on the lyrics. Astaire helped, too, during the vocal-track recording of their “’S’Wonderful” duet. The third time through, Donen recalled, “she made a mistake and Fred jumped in and did something wrong on purpose. He said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve ruined it. Can we do it again?’” Audrey gratefully believed it was his fault instead of hers.69

  In the end, her “childlike yet trained voice contributes a great deal to the film’s sentiment,” said Donen. “Here is someone who is actually paying attention to the words.” Critics agreed on the “intimate, lyrical and genuinely af fecting” qualities of her singing.70

  Hepburn, Donen and Avedon—jointly and separately—were praised for the picture’s great photographic success, from the stylish dazzle of its opening credits through the magnificent Technicolor vistas of Paris, captured with high-contrast clarity by Paramount’s new Vista-Vision process. Funny Face was a glorification (and spoof) of fashion photography, and its most striking visuals were the freeze-frame montages, frozen first in a negative or color-separated image, then in a positive one.

  The process was the talk of both dance and photography circles: When a shot is “frozen” on the screen, the same frame is printed over and over for the desired length, but with a drastic loss in clarity. To get around that, Donen put a two-way mirror over the lens. The movie camera shot through the mirror while Avedon focused on the mirror, and the lab later matched the still photo with the film frame.71 Avedon’s fashion photos were a kind of “frozen dance,” and Donen wanted the fashion sequences of Funny Face to have the same choreographic quality.72

  Singled out above all was the scene in which Hepburn—in Givenchy gown, with “Winged Victory” behind her—runs briskly down an enormous staircase in the Louvre, snapped all the way by Astaire in a series of freeze frames. How she managed it was semi-miraculous, she recalled:

  “I think that was just good luck. I did it once and didn’t break my leg. Lynn Fontanne once said to me, ‘My dear, whenever you walk downstairs, never look down and don’t hold your skirt.’ So everything you try to do to save your life, you’re not allowed to do. You just hope to God you don’t trip.”73

  In Funny Face, said Janet Maslin, Audrey became what she would forever be best: “a perfectly balanced mixture of intelligence and froth.”74

  Less complimentary things were said about Fred Astaire. The Harvard Lampoon named Funny Face one of the Ten Worst Films of 1957 and gave Astaire the award for “Most Appalling Example of the Inadequacy of Our Present Social Security Program.” Among others who disliked the film, albeit more tactfully, is composer-conductor André Previn:

  “It rubbed me the wrong way. I loved Audrey, but I thought the Kay Thompson business was hard to take, and the beatnik thing is so dated. Audrey and Fred by the edge of the river—you can’t get any better than that. But it was just too chic. I didn’t think it had any muscle in it. It made me a little edgy. It was all so precious.”75

  Funny Face, at $3 million, wasn’t horribly expensive to make. But it was the first of Hepburn’s American films not to be among the top ten moneymakers of its year. Its retro-raves, however, are legion. American Film put it “among the most lushly gorgeous Technicolor films ever produced.”76 Douglas McVay in The Musical Film called it “arguably the most pictorially ravishing of all American pictures.” Rex Reed hailed it as “the best fashion show ever recorded on film,” and Stanley Donen drew a final, further conclusion: “Audrey was always more about fashion than movies or acting.”77

  IN THE FASHION REALM, Givenchy was her indisputable guide. As Avedon was to give Funny Face the photographic look of Vogue, it was preordained that Givenchy would provide the actual high-fashion wardrobe, and that he and Audrey would spend countless hours together in the fittings.

  From now on, her contracts contained a standard clause stipulating that Givenchy would design her film clothes, while his designs for her private use propelled her onto every best-dressed list in the world. “His are the only clothes in which I am myself,” she said in 1956, full devoted by then to his spare, simple lines and dominant blacks and whites. Like his mentor Balenciaga, Givenchy heralded the minimalist designs of the sixties. Women who admir
ed “The Hepburn Look” now flocked to his salon, and his sales soared, while the personal bond between him and Audrey became ever more intense.

  “I depend on Givenchy in the same way that American women depend on their psychiatrists,” she said. “There are few people I love more. He is the single person I know with the greatest integrity.”

  Long after, Givenchy recalls, “She told me something so touching that I will always remember it. She said, ‘When I wear a white blouse or little suit that you create for me, I have the feeling of being protected by that blouse or suit—and this protection is very important to me.”’78

  Givenchy was humble. “All the responsibility for the way Audrey looked is hers,” he says. “She made the selections. I [just] helped her.”79 Clothes made the woman, but even her most beloved designers said she made herself—and perhaps them, too. Ralph Lauren, whose designs she often wore in later years, says, “She did more for the designer than the designer did for her.”80

  Leslie Caron believes Hepburn was the first great fashion example of “less is more”:

  “Simplicity was her trademark. She had the originality never to wear any jewelry, and this at the time of double rows of pearls, little earrings, lots of ‘little’ everything.... And then suddenly she would appear at a premiere wearing earrings that reached all the way down to her shoulders. Really daring!”81

  In the anything-goes era of makeup and beauty today, it is hard to grasp how revolutionary Hepburn’s look in the fifties really was. It represented “the feminine edge of androgyny,” says designer Isaac Mizrahi—“the wonderful things about women that are not just tits or ass ... the other side of Marilyn Monroe. [Her] sexiness enters through your heart not through your groin.” Mizrahi says her erotic fashion appeal was epitomized by the hooded parka, black turtleneck and tight black pants she wore in Funny Face—“the perfect American look.”82

  Yet she wasn’t American, and both she and her films had a different impact abroad. “For me,” said Elizabeth Wilson in Britain’s Sight and Sound, “her charm lay not in the androgyny of simple hair and a boyish figure, but in a style that seemed the embodiment of sophisticated, existential Europe as opposed to the overripe artificiality of Hollywood.”83 On both sides of the Atlantic, her look in Funny Face was a kind of quantum leap.

  “Audrey was the first actress to play a fashion model on screen who really could have been one off screen,” says Lenny Gershe. “It was always a joke when someone like Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own [1950] or Ava Gardner played a model—women who would never have made the cover of Vogue because they were too voluptuous. Today it’s different. Now they’re all bizarre—not Harper’s Bazaar, just bizarre. For high fashion in the fifties, you had to be skinny. You had to look like Audrey Hepburn or Dovima or Suzy Parker. But Audrey was the first one to do it on screen. The audience bought that she could be this creature.”84

  Some thought Funny Face had changed her personality as well as her image, making her more confident and solid. Others attributed that not to the movie but to marriage—as if she had finally made the passage from girl to woman. “Two years ago,” said a friend, “she was a pixie. ”You didn’t know but what she’d suddenly climb a tree or hurdle a hedge or just vanish in a spiral of smoke. Now you’re reasonably sure she’ll eat a ham sandwich and go to a ball game, or whatever.“85

  Her husband could certainly be sure of her devotion. One illustration concerned those fifty pieces of luggage with which they traveled: She almost always supervised the packing herself, but once when someone else did it for them, Mel was unable to locate his cuff links upon their arrival. Audrey ransacked six trunks before finding them and, in servile fashion, laid the blame on herself: “I didn’t think this was fair to Mel. I considered it my responsibility not to let it happen again.”86

  Despite all dire predictions, her marriage had confounded the critics. She and Mel appeared to enjoy working together as well as being together. Prior to their wedding, her happiness seemed exclusively centered on her work. “I don’t think now that I was a whole woman then,” she said. “No woman is, without love.... I’m not alone anymore. Don’t make that sound pathetic. I never minded being alone. But I’d mind it now.”87

  The Ferrers’ union had no greater admirer than Sophia Loren, who rented a neighboring chalet in Burgenstock and knew them there from 1957 during her own “convulsive marriage situation” with Carlo Ponti. “When the law in Italy was persecuting Carlo and me as criminals guilty of bigamy,” recalls Loren today, “the marriage of Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer seemed to me like a dream—far away and unreachable.... In those days, she was so happy, she inspired my dream [of the same].”88

  Audrey’s view of marriage was traditional to the point of subservience, as paradigmatic of the “good” fifties woman as her look and fashion statements were not.

  “He is a protective husband, and I like it,” she said. “Most women do.... It’s so nice being a wife and having your husband take over your worries for you. American women have a tendency to take over too much, and in that way they miss out on a lot of fun that their European sisters have.”89

  That seemed to contradict her professed love of independent decision-making—and perhaps to suggest she was still trying get a firm handle on her lingering anxieties:I have often thought of myself as quite ugly. In fact, I used to have quite a complex about it. To be frank, I’ve often been depressed and deeply disappointed in myself. You can even say that I hated myself at certain periods. I was too fat, or maybe too tall, or just plain too ugly. I couldn’t seem to handle any of my problems or cope with people I met. If you want to get psychological, you can say my definiteness stems from underlying feelings of insecurity and inferiority. I couldn’t conquer these feelings by acting indecisive. I found the only way to get the better of them was ... by adopting a forceful, concentrated drive.90

  “Getting psychological” about her might begin with two quotations, the first from Audrey:

  “My greatest asset is my discontent.”

  The second from an anonymous friend of hers:

  “Discontent is her greatest personal liability.”91

  In career terms, she said, “Sometimes I think the more successful you become the less secure you feel. [Originally,] I didn’t have the drive because I had the luxury of not needing it. After Roman Holiday, the offers came in. It was not in my nature to be terribly ambitious or driven because I didn’t have the confidence. My confidence came and went with each movie; once I’d finished one, I didn’t know if I’d ever work again.”92

  Chief among her weapons for combatting that insecurity was her intense power of concentration. “In talking about herself—or any subject from artichokes to zebras—she takes up one point at a time, never skips or flashes back,” said a Cosmopolitan reporter. “When she reads, she reads; when she fits, she fits; when she talks clothes, she talks clothes; when she sits under a drier, she simply sits and dries. ‘She is the only actress I’ve ever had who doesn’t gab, read, knit, wriggle, pick her teeth, or eat a lettuce and tomato sandwich,’ says her hairdresser.” 93

  Equally remarked upon were her gentility and courtesy. She was both the delight and the despair of her publicists—“our nicest and most difficult client,” said one of them. “She has politely turned down more than ninety percent of the publicity ideas we’ve dreamed up for her.”

  The normally bland Good Housekeeping, for one, was a little suspicious: “Can anybody really be so noble, so thoughtful, so perennially ‘good’”?94 She seemed a little too cool and aloof.

  “Today I’m having lunch in my dressing room alone,” she told a reporter around this time. “I usually do. Being alone, I recharge my batteries. Anyway, I thought I was being a good girl, giving my all to the picture this way. But then one of the columnists—one I thought I got along with—wrote, ‘What goes with snooty Audrey Hepburn, not eating in the commissary.’ So now do I have to begin eating in the commissary just to pacify this columnist? I’m afraid it woul
d be cowardly of me. He’s committed me to a course of action.”95

  Her comments to and about the press were getting sharper, and she was letting some of her hostilities out. She was asked, “If Mel wished it, would you forsake your career?”

  “If you’ll forgive me,” she replied coldly, “it’s not a fair question.”96

  She had an outburst now and then, but few doubted her tenderness and warmth. One day during Funny Face, the cast and crew were having a press luncheon on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower when a little French girl, one of the extras, burst into tears from fear of the popping flashbulbs and klieg lights that were blinding her. The empathetic young woman who got up to dry her tears and comfort her was Audrey.

  She had become a grown-up version of that little girl:

  “Now and then it staggers you. So many people pointing cameras, especially in Europe. Now and then, you find yourself out of your depth. The questions—all the way from what do I think of love or how does it feel to be a star, to enormous ones, even political, with as many prongs as a pitchfork. Here I am, an innocent little actress trying to do a job, and it seems that my opinion on policy in the Middle East is worth something. I don’t say I don’t have an opinion, but I doubt its worth.”97