by Barry Paris
Partly due to dehydration in the Congo, she had a severe case of kidney stones. Her mother and husband immediately flew to be with her—Ella from London and Mel from Venezuela, where he’d been scouting Green Mansions locations. In an effort to avoid surgery, the doctors prescribed drugs and ordered bed rest. Filming continued around her until the treatment achieved its results—successfully—without requiring an operation.
“Someone said that kidney ailments are even more painful than childbirth,” said Audrey at the time. “Now I’m perfectly prepared to have a dozen children.” 24
Zinnemann shielded her from the bombardment he was getting from Warner production chief Steve Trilling, who thought Audrey was dogging her recovery and who kept cracking the whip for work to resume—in the same Roman studio where Ben-Hur was being shot on an adjacent sound stage.am At any rate, by April, Hepburn was back on the Nun’s Story set in good shape.
The film’s most shocking scenes take place in a grim, Marat-Sade type of insane asylum in Belgium—groaning women in cells and bathtubs, shot in semi-documentary fashion. There, Sister Luke is nearly killed when she disobeys orders and opens the cell of a patient who yanks her inside and attacks her. It’s a fierce struggle, and Audrey was only recently over a debilitating illness. “We’d provided a double for that fight,” Zinnemann says, “but she wouldn’t hear of it.”25 Hepburn insisted on playing the scene herself and took instruction from the double in how to wrestle without tearing a ligament—in full nun’s robes. The credible violence of that sequence is riveting.
Credibility was important to Zinnemann in every way, particularly in his visual aspirations for the film:
“I dearly wanted to shoot the European parts in black and white and then, when Sister Luke arrives in the Belgian Congo, to burst out into all the hot, vivid, stirring colors of Central Africa. Jack Warner vetoed it; he thought it was too tricky and too far ahead of [the] popular imagination.”26
The director’s consolation was Austrian cinematographer Franz Planer, who had photographed Audrey in Roman Holiday and whose style was perfectly suited to the somber formality of The Nun’s Story. Planer’s splendid ethnographic footage of Congo village life much enhanced the production.
Zinnemann had lost the black-and-white visual battle, but he would win a major audio victory. There was great internal studio dispute over composer Franz Waxman’s score:What I didn’t know was that Waxman had a strong dislike of the Catholic Church. When we listened to his music it sounded like the background for the dungeons of The Count of Monte Cristo. I decided not to use very much of it. Franz was outraged and complained to Jack Warner. The wrangle centered on my wish to have absolute silence at the end of the film as the nun changes into her civilian clothes and walks out of the convent door....
“Why don’t you want music at the end?” Warner asked. I answered, “Why do you want music at the end?” “Because every Warner Brothers picture has music at the end,” replied Jack. I said, “If you have festive music you are saying to the audience, ‘Warner Brothers congratulates the nun on quitting the convent.’ If the music is heavy, the audience will be depressed; I don’t see how you can win.” Audrey was allowed to make her exit in silence.27
In that chilling final scene, which contains not a word of dialogue, Luke removes her robes, a buzzer pops open a door, and she leaves the convent without ceremony or farewell of any kind. She is being cast out literally, and through the open door, the camera tracks her slow trek down a brick lane and the moment’s hesitation before she makes a right turn. It is a sad, stark, beautiful downer of an ending, devoid of any false hope.
The ending was silent, but Warner music executive Rudy Fehr, who accompanied Audrey to the first sneak preview of The Nun’s Story in San Francisco, remembers the overall resolution of the sound-of-music controversy a bit differently:Franz Waxman had researched Bach and Handel and recorded a beautiful score. At the preview, little did he know that 80 percent of the music was out of the picture. He was furious. We had a meeting at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with Steve Sterling, who represented Jack Warner, and Franz was shaking. He said, “I protest! I’ve never been treated so badly. I worked so hard on this!” Then all of a sudden, the head of the publicity department walks in with the preview cards, where people write down their reactions. He went right up to Franz and said, “Franzie, where was the fucking music?” [Later,] Jack Warner said, “Rudy, I leave it in your hands. Put in what you think is right.” I put all but 15 percent of it back in. A beautiful score.28
Indeed, the stark, melancholy Waxman music merged with all the other elements of Nun’s Story to perfect effect, and chief among those elements was Audrey Hepburn. During six months of shooting, she seemed to be living out her selfless role whether the cameras were rolling or not. Once, when water finally arrived after the cast was stranded for hours in the broiling sun, she poured out cupfuls for thirty natives, leaving none for herself. But not everyone was favorably impressed.
“It’s that princess bit again—be a shining example to the populace,” said one observer on the set. “Having chosen her noble role, [she] plays it to the hilt, as any superb actress should. Yet her determination to carry it off—even to the extent of suffering unnecessary personal pain—causes one to wonder why she does it.”29 Audrey’s explanation was disarmingly honest: “I’m afraid that my strenuous advance preparation is part of my obsessive worry that I won’t be ready.”30
She was ready enough in the opinion of Marie-Louise Habets and Kathryn Hulme, who saw an uncut version that ran nearly four hours. “It was too overwhelming,” said Habets. “I’m never going to see it again because if I do I’m going to run right back to the convent.... I could just sit there and cry my eyes out, not with regret, but because of the beauty of it. It is a beautiful life, the religious life, if you ... can accept it without murmuring all the time.”31
It was said that no matter how outwardly serene a nun might be, her soul remained a battleground until she died. The Nun’s Story chronicled such a battle with restraint and compassion. American Film called it “among the most transcendent of films.” 32 Britain’s Films & Filming cited the “wisdom” of Audrey’s performance as “more profound than that of any other character Hepburn has played.”33 The story of Sister Luke was “not a crisis of faith, but a crisis of worthiness,” said Zinnemann, who marveled at “the fine, firm line of development” of Audrey’s portrayal. He compared her favorably with that other beautiful, fragile actress he loved, Grace Kelly—the strength of Hepburn’s self-possession versus the weakness of Kelly’s self-doubt.
“I think Audrey was much more comfortable with Sister Luke than with other parts,” says Rob Wolders. “It was the story of a woman who investigated life, who was constantly on a search, as Audrey was.” It was not about “a woman who wants to be herself,” said critic Stephen Whitty, but about “a woman who wants to be a saint. Whether she’s holy, or wholly neurotic, is up to you.”34
Her husband was her biggest fan. Mel Ferrer is still awed, today, at the way she accomplished it “with very little of her face showing ... by showing so little.” 35 She had no big-name leading man or high-fashion designers to help her out, and precious few speeches. With her hands and body hidden for most of the film, she had to rely almost entirely on her eyes. “Large and luminous, they become a window to her doubt,” wrote Whitty. “They draw us so completely into her world, and to her character, that her self-torture becomes wrenching.”
The increasingly dark circles under those eyes seemed etched by pain, not makeup, so much so that it’s a shock at the end when Sister Luke becomes Gabrielle again, removing her habit to reveal her hair for the first time since the story began—but not quite enough of a shock, in the director’s opinion:
“In retrospect I can see this is where I slipped up. When Audrey takes off her nun’s habit, the passage of seventeen years is not clearly enough suggested. [There is] hardly a strand of gray hair when she shakes it free from the confining wim
ple.”36
Zinnemann was being polite: Such an important detail had not, in fact, slipped his mind. He had wanted her hair to be streaked with more gray, but Audrey opposed the idea—and won.
The studio was jittery about the picture’s release for a plethora of reasons and not at all certain of its success. “To say that Warners were not entirely happy with the film would be an understatement,” said Zinnemann. “They thought it would flop. Well, they said, maybe Audrey [would bring] some people in.”37
She did, indeed. Nun’s Story opened at Radio City Music Hall on July 18, 1959, and made more money for Warners than any of its previous films. It cost $3.5 million and grossed more than $6 million then—and much more since. Hepburn was named Best Actress of 1959 by the New York Film Critics and its British equivalent. “Her performance will forever silence those who have thought her less an actress than a symbol of the sophisticated child/woman,”11 said Films in Review. “Her portrayal of Sister Luke is one of the great performances of the screen.”38
Nun’s Story won none of the eight Oscars for which it was nominated. Audrey was a candidate for Best Actress (her third nomination in six pictures) as was Katharine Hepburn for Suddenly Last Summer-rival nominees for the first time. Both Hepburns lost to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top, and MGM’s epic Ben-Hur swept away the competition in virtually every other category.
Zinnemann later proposed a flippant alternate title: “I Kicked My Habit.” But Audrey always maintained a respectful tone about the film. At the moment, she was issuing carefully phrased denials to reports that she was converting to Roman Catholicism. “I have been educated in the Protestant faith and shall remain Protestant even though I have great respect for those who profess the Catholic faith,” she told the (highly disappointed) Italian news agency Italia.39
Sister Luke in Nun’s Story was the subliminal genesis of a real-life role she would play in Africa three decades later. “After looking inside an insane asylum, visiting a leper colony, talking to missionary workers, and watching operations, I felt very enriched,” she said. “I developed a new kind of inner peacefulness. A calmness. Things that once seemed so important weren’t important any longer.”40
SHE WOULD NEED all the inner peace and external energy she could muster for the next project, which came so fast on the heels of Nun’s Story that it ended up in front of it: Green Mansions-either the great disaster or the “lost masterpiece” of the Ferrers’ joint efforts in film.
Zinnemann very much wanted to work with Audrey again. He offered her the lead in a proposed movie of James Michener’s epic Hawaii.an41 But in June, before the Nun’s Story set was cold, she and Mel flew from Rome to Hollywood for their “leftover” commitment from Funny Face: For loaning out that musical property and certain key artists to Paramount, MGM was owed an Audrey Hepburn picture—with Mel Ferrer as director.
It was one of the shrewdest bargains the Ferrers ever struck. Though his three previous efforts had not been hits, Mel still longed for success as a director. But the vehicle he chose had some inherent rust: a turn-of-the-century utopian novel by W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. It was the tragic romance of Rima, mysterious “bird girl” of the South American forest, and the adventurer who invades her world.
When Ferrer first read it at Princeton, it made a profound impression on him. For years he had dreamed of turning it into a film, more so since marrying Audrey, who conformed to his own and Hudson’s vision: Rima was the feminine symbol of innocence, a victim of male greed and lust. She was much like Ondine, only from the jungle instead of the sea—a delicate Tarzana. But she faced a long, hard journey from the page to the screen.
RKO had bought the screen rights to Green Mansions a quarter century earlier, hoping to ape the success of King Kong. Dolores Del Rio was to star, but the plan fell through and the rights were acquired by MGM in 1945 for a proposed musical version starring Yma Sumac. In 1953, Alan Jay Lerner was asked to prepare a Green Mansions script as a vehicle for Liz Taylor, to be directed by Vincente Minnelli, but it never materialized.
The film that did materialize, in 1959, opens with an unusual advance thank-you to the governments of British Guiana and Venezuela, where Mel and a unit of thirty spent several months filming background exteriors while Audrey finished Nun’s Story. Ferrer and his crew traveled 25,000 miles through pristine fog forests—and shipped back 250 tons of props, plants, tree-bark canoes, blowguns, and live snakes.
Totally enchanted, Ferrer wanted to shoot all the exteriors in those green and misty mansions of South America, but had to settle for Hollywood, where art director Preston Ames recreated an Indian village on twenty-five MGM studio acres. The reason was partly budgetary and partly due to Audrey’s health: Just after tough duty on Nun’s Story in Africa, it was too soon to hustle her straight back into the jungle on an even more remote continent.
Screenwriter Dorothy (Pal Joey) Kingsley stuck close to the novel: Abel (Anthony Perkins) escapes into the interior from the Caracas revolution in which his family has just been massacred. Ignoring his Indian guides, he enters a “forbidden” village with revenge and gold-lust in his heart. There, Chief Runi (Sessue Hayakawa) and brave Kua-ko (Henry Silva) test Abel’s courage, as he tests theirs by nearly talking them to death in a language they don’t understand. (An ongoing linguistic suspension of disbelief is required by this film. No accent is like any other; all, of course, are speaking the lingua franca of Hollywoodese.)
Abel regards the Indians with fine racist contempt: “However friendly they might be towards one of a superior race, there was always in their relations with him a low cunning.” But one day in the forest, he hears “a low strain of exquisite bird-melody, wonderfully pure,” unlike any sound he has ever heard. He spies a girl—“small, in figure slim, with delicate hands and feet.”
She is Rima the Bird Girl, a jungle princess who thwarts the native hunters by roaming the woods to warn the animals. The resentful Indians plot to kill her and enlist Abel’s help. But he reconsiders when she saves him from a poisonous snakebite and takes him to the hut where she lives with her grandfather (Lee J. Cobb). There, she nurses his body and libido back to health. Rima is always near, yet elusive. Whenever Abel touches her, she becomes silent and constrained. He is intrigued by the idea that she might be one of an undiscovered race. Theirs is an innocent love, like that of Peleas and Melisande.
But when Abel mentions the precipitous mountains of Riolama, Rima is afire: “That is the place I am seeking!” It was the home of her dead mother, and she begs to be taken there. Her grandfather begs not to be taken: “Have mercy on me! It is so far—and I am old and should meet my death!” But Rima needs him as a guide and forces him, in a ferocious speech:
“Would he die—old grandfather? Then we could cover him up with palm leaves in the forest and leave him.... Shall you die? Not until you have shown me the way to Riolama.... Then you may die, and ... the children and the grandchildren and cousins and friends of all the animals you have slain and fed on shall know that you are dead and be glad at your death.”
Hepburn lacks true ferocity but looks great through all the perils and hardships and shrunken heads on the way to Riolama. Scampering about in her bare feet, she manages to keep her single forest frock clean and pressed the whole time. This is surely the lowest costume budget for a Hepburn film ever.
At Riolama, Abel steals a kiss from her unconscious lips, thus ending her illusions by opening her heart to love. But however much he might love her, he can never fully understand her. She goes off alone and is tracked down by her Indian enemies and chased into a tree—which the natives set aflame. It is an apotheosis and martyrdom like Joan of Arc’s: Director Ferrer elevates her, once and for all, from princess to goddess.
Depending on one’s mind set, this was either a beautiful morality tale or the most bizarre, idealized malarkey. Mel thought the former. Audrey not only agreed with him but also “lived” the part of the pantheistic nature girl. Animal lover
that she was, her favorite costar was the dappled fawn that accompanies Rima everywhere. But fawns are temperamental and nervous. Producer Edmund Grainger conferred with Clarence Brown, director of The Yearling, who said the only way to handle one was for the actress to adopt it right after birth and raise it as her own baby. Soon enough it would believe Audrey to be its mother.
MGM duly bought a four-week-old fawn at Jungleland, a children’s outdoor zoo in Los Angeles. When it arrived, with its huge eyes and skinny legs, everyone thought it looked remarkably like Audrey. From then on, everywhere that Audrey went, the fawn was sure to go—including the supermarket and beauty parlor. It had to be bottle-fed every two hours, and Audrey often had to interrupt a scene or a conference to rush off and give a bottle of warmed goat’s milk to “Ip”—so named by Audrey because of the “ip ip” sounds he made when hungry.
Ip and Famous, her Yorkshire terrier, soon formed a working partnership: Ip would take the laces out of shoes and give Famous the leather to chew on. Ip also had a fondness for electrical cords, and to keep him from electrocuting himself, Mel and Audrey had to disconnect all their lamps.42
“For two and a half months it lived in our house,” said Mel (see photo 27). “It ate its bowl of pabulum with us in the dining room, and at night it slept in our bathroom. It got so it actually thought Audrey was its mother; professional animal trainers were amazed at the way it followed her around.”43
Professional viewers were amazed at the way the camera followed Audrey around—and how it rendered her face: Green Mansions and Ben-Hur were the first two movies to be filmed in Panavision, a new wide-screen process devised to one-up CinemaScope, Todd-AO and VistaVision. Hepburn had disliked the way CinemaScope exaggerated her angular features. Panavision fixed that by means of an anamorphic lens, and soon outpaced CinemaScope as the industry’s standard. Its inventor, Robert E. Gottschalk, recalled the excitement at the first rushes: “The people in the projection room—Audrey and Mel among them—all broke out in spontaneous applause.”44 Gottschalk, ever after, would credit Audrey’s “square face” for Panavision’s success.