Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Audrey, too, found it difficult to work with Peppard, who was then considered a potential new James Dean. Peppard’s reliance on Lee Strasberg’s version of “The Method” was the opposite of Hepburn’s technique—which was no method at all. But in the end, Peppard’s significance was minimal. Of far greater impact was a song by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini that won the Oscar that year and inspired ninety-seven subsequent recordings.

  “Without Audrey, there‘d’ve been no ‘Moon River,’” Mancini told documentarist Gene Feldman. “It was one of the hardest songs I ever had to write, because I couldn’t figure out what this lady would be singing up there on the fire escape. Would she sing a pop tune? Would she sing something with a blues thing in it? It took me almost a month to figure it out.... Without Audrey there would have been no ‘huckleberry friend.’ She sang that song with an honesty and such a dedication to the words. She knew what she was doing. She knew what the words were.”87

  “Moon River,” Mancini said, was written to explain that Holly was really just a yearning country girl: “One night after dinner, it hit me that it should be very, very simple ... a ‘sophisticated country song.’ You can play it all on the white keys. You can throw the black keys away and still play it, which is a trick that I wasn’t aware of—it just happened.”

  Mancini’s wife Ginny recalls that he “agonized over it for a long time and wanted it to be true to the scene and appropriate for the character. So although it took him a month to figure it out, once he knew where he was going, it only took maybe twenty minutes. He had listened any number of times to her version of ‘How Long Has This Been Going On’ [in Funny Face] and knew she could handle anything within that range.”88

  Asked later if the song’s astounding popularity surprised him, Mancini said, “It was the kind of a song that had [success] written all over it, but Johnny Mercer didn’t think so. When we were in recording and Audrey sang it with the guitar, Johnny said, ‘Boy, that’s pretty, but let’s get on to something that’s going to make some money here!”’

  Its first recording was by black singer Jerry Butler. “Andy Williams grabbed it only because he was asked to do the Academy Awards that year,” said Mancini. “Columbia Records knew the song and picture were successful, got geared up and put ‘Moon River’ as title of the album. Tuesday [after the Monday Oscars], it was all over the country and became number one in a matter of weeks.”

  In a fabulous career of film compositions, “Moon River” was Mancini’s biggest hit—“the one that will go down in history as a true folk song,” says his wife. “It gets to the heart of the matter and touches people all over the world. It’s a haunting melody, plus Johnny’s lyrics—that phrase, ‘huckleberry friend.’ I never look at a full moon on the water anywhere that I don’t see a moon river.” But amazingly enough, “Moon River” nearly ended up on the cutting-room floor.

  “We previewed the movie in San Francisco and went to a nearby hotel to discuss [the] very good audience reaction,” Mancini recalled. “We all deferred to Paramount’s new president, who paced the room puffing a cigar and whose first utterance was, ‘Well, I can tell you one thing, we can get rid of that song.’ Audrey shot right up out of her chair and said, ‘Over my dead body!’ Mel had to put his hand on her arm to restrain her. That’s the closest I ever saw her come to losing control.”89

  As in Funny Face, Hepburn’s singing voice in Tiffany’s was intimate, evocative and affecting. Its delicate, breathy quality was perfect for the ballad at hand, though technically a weakness that would plague her down the line. But for now, “Moon River” was the song, and Holly the role, through which she became and remained a huckleberry friend to millions.

  There are dissenters, of course. “While it may be the archetypical Audrey Hepburn film,” says Frank Thompson, “it’s nowhere near her best. Blake Edwards’s notion of life in the early sixties is stunningly unauthentic—his idea of a swinging party animal is Martin Balsam.”90 Critic Herbert Feinstein at the time dared to compare Hepburn’s latest film with that of Brigitte Bardot, La Véerité: Two gorgeous girls, Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn, trot down the run-way of life as Beat anti-heroines. Hepburn [is] violently, pathologically miscast as [Holly]. Blake Edwards has learned a lot—too much—from his television series Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky. He has allowed her to eke out a ballad, “Moon River,” shot in a phony, oblique angle down an East Side fire escape. And he has encouraged her worst tendencies [to be] charming....

  Here we have two crashing beauties, two personalities of around 30 who have been great at playing themselves for a decade, who now have been convinced by their agents and other film cognoscenti that they can act. Worse, the two have convinced themselves and presently aim for art....

  Why is it deeply sad to see two accomplished screen personalities essay the Beat girl? ... Dominique and Holly lie undulating on their night and day beds, lunging after man after man, really from fantasy to fantasy, dragging along their never comforting, never to be comforted, bodies. After a time, nobody wants them. Nobody gets them. There is no need: they get themselves.91

  Audrey’s own initial misgivings about the role, actually, were quite similar to Feinstein’s. “Holly,” she told Kurt Frings, “is so contrary to me. She frightens me. This part called for an extroverted character. I am an introvert.”92 But Frings had convinced her that it was the role she needed precisely because it was so out of character. “When Audrey saw the finished print,” he said, “she made no bones about being proud of herself. She said to me, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done, because it was the hardest.’ ”93

  Years later, she made a rare statement of self-approval to Rob Wolders when they watched Tiffany’s one night on TV: “She liked the bit when they come out of the shop wearing the animal masks. She laughed at it and said, ‘That’s rather good!”’

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s in film form was Truman Capote’s greatest commercial success, but he couldn’t stand it: “The book was really rather bitter.... The film became a mawkish valentine to New York City and Holly and, as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly. It bore as much resemblance to my work as the Rockettes do to Ulanova.”94

  He always missed Monroe in the role, but most did not. In the novella, Holly says she’s “only had eleven lovers—not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen.” One could believe that of Monroe, but never of Hepburn. When asked about it, Audrey said, “I don’t think Holly really has known as many men as she pretends. It’s just a jazzy facade she creates, because basically she’s a small-town girl who’s out of her depth.”

  Audrey from backwater Texas? Not likely. But she took a Monroe role and successfully invested it with her own image—“as svelte as Jackie Kennedy,” said critic Michael Sragow. Holly and “Moon River” seemed an integral part of that short-lived Camelot, even as Hepburn’s sanitized hooker presented a whole new, minxlike concept of the cinematic slut. The obverse was a mind-boggling impossibility: Marilyn Monroe as Sister Luke?95

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s did well, if not spectacularly, at the domestic box of fice ($4 million) and better abroad ($6 million). In France, it was called Diamants sur Canapé—Diamonds on Toast. Hepburn was nominated for best actress but lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women. Of Tiffany’s nominations, only Mancini’s score and song came away with Oscars.aq

  But women around the world would be quoting Holly’s famous put-down line (“Quel beast!”), in an Audrey Hepburn cadence, for years. And there was one other sociological result of the film: Animal-rescue leagues and pet stores everywhere reported an unprecedented demand for orange cats.

  FRIENDSHIP IN the film world is different from that in other occupational spheres—intense to the point of symbiosis during a production, only to terminate abruptly with the conclusion of shooting. Everyone in the film industry who worked with Audrey found her friendly, but very few came away from her with a real friendship. Among those few was beautiful Deborah Kerr, whose delicacy
and vulnerability (in person and in persona) were much like Audrey’s. They lived near each other in Switzerland, and their real-life relationship was strong—if difficult to describe.

  “To the world it might not have seemed that constant or deep an association,” says Deborah Kerr today, “but we became very close, even though we didn’t see each other much. I couldn’t say, ‘She was my best friend in my whole life.’ Yet in a way, perhaps she was.” Kerr and screenwriter Peter Viertel were married on July 23, 1960, and Audrey’s gift to Deborah is still fresh in her mind:

  “It was a complete outfit from Givenchy. It had its panics because it was sent from Paris to Klosters and hadn’t yet arrived on the morning of the wedding. I recall it vividly—cyclamen pink—a fantastic present. It was so Audrey, the thoughtfulness of it. That sums up our relationship. really.”

  AFTER FINISHING the Tiffany’s location work in New York, Audrey had gone to California to do the bulk of interior shooting in the studio. She and Mel rented a house in Coldwater Canyon, where—to her great relief—they were joined by Sean and Sean’s nanny for Christmas. Living there without her baby would have been unendurable. The older she got, the less she liked Hollywood, where her only close friends were Connie and Jerry Wald and, to some extent, the Pecks and the Wilders.96

  Kurt Frings had tried to foster a friendship between Audrey and his other great star-client, Elizabeth Taylor, who had returned to Los Angeles to convalesce from a near-fatal bout with pneumonia in England. Taylor was then married to crooner Eddie Fisher, whose career was then on the skids as a result of public outrage for his dumping of the much-loved Debbie Reynolds to marry Liz. Mel helped Eddie pick and prepare material for his “comeback” nightclub act at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

  The Ferrers and the Fishers saw a lot of each other in those days, perhaps partly because of a common dilemma between the men: fabulously beautiful wives whose success outshone their own. They had been together at the previous year’s Oscar ceremony, when Taylor was a sympathy winner for the inferior Butterfield 8, and the women remained fond of each other for life.

  Just after New Year’s, on January 8, 1961, Audrey delivered a lovely original poem titled, “What is a Gary Cooper?”, at a Friars Club testimonial dinner in Hollywood for her old costar, whose terminal illness was not widely known. Cooper died of cancer, at sixty, the following May.

  Otherwise, Hepburn rarely appeared in public or spoke to the press. But one day toward the end of Tiffany’s retakes on the Paramount lot, a reporter cornered her and asked what role she most wanted to play next. “That’s easy to answer,” she said. “I’d do anything to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.”

  IT WAS A BIT premature to be thinking about Eliza but never too soon to ponder the next film, even though she preferred her temporary retirement. For as long as possible, she held off a decision, accompanying Mel now and then to his own shootings in France and Yugoslavia, but turning down all offers for herself, reportedly including A Taste of Honey and In the Cool of the Day. But soon enough, instead, she accepted one of the most controversial roles of her career.

  Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, that playwright’s first major success, enjoyed a 601-performance Broadway run in 1934. It was loosely based on Scotsman William Roughhead’s story Bad Company, about two Edinburgh teachers accused of lesbianism in 1810 by a student whose grandmother spreads the gossip and ruins the school. In Hellman’s drama, Martha discovers her love for Karen only after the slander. In a final monologue, she cries, “I’m guilty! I’ve ruined your life, and I’ve ruined my own. I feel so damn sick and dirty I just can’t stand it anymore.” A scene of the play that never appeared on film makes clear that she commits suicide because she really is a lesbian: It is not the lie that destroys her, but the awful truth.97

  The play’s first film rendering was the 1936 These Three, directed by William Wyler, starring Merle Oberon as Karen and Miriam Hopkins as Martha. Lesbianism being a taboo subject, the story was turned into a heterosexual triangle in which the one woman was accused of being in love with the other’s fiance. Hellman’s basic theme—that a lie had the power to destroy people’s lives—survived, but any mention of her “lesbian play” was forbidden by the censors. Said Variety: “It is verboten to ballyhoo the original source.”

  Oberon and Hopkins both turned in fine performances in These Three, and so did Joel McCrea. But the film was stolen by fabulous Bonita Granville as evil little Mary. Just thirteen at the time, she won an Oscar nomination for her trouble—long before Patty McCormack’s similar work in The Bad Seed.

  Exactly twenty-five years later, many were stunned by the news that Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine would star in a remake. The new version, like the original, would be directed by William Wyler, who wanted Oberon and Hopkins to return in the supporting roles of Mary’s grandmother and Martha’s aunt. Hopkins said yes. Oberon said no, and Fay Bainter took the grandmother’s part. Hellman began work on the new script but soon dropped out due to the terminal illness of her beloved Dashiell Hammett. She was replaced by John Michael Hayes, a Hitchcock favorite (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief), who worked hard to restore the lesbian angle and update the picture to the 1960s.

  “When we made the picture the last time,” said Wyler, “what we put out was a watered version. We couldn’t put it on the way we wanted to because the public wasn’t ready for that sort of thing yet. Now, they are.”98

  Wyler had initially toyed with the intriguing combination of Doris Day and Katharine Hepburn for his leads. In settling on the younger Hepburn and MacLaine, he cast two women who were both perceived more as comediennes than tragic heroines. To say the least, it was casting against type, especially for Audrey: The idea of lesbianism ran counter to her image in every way. “The reason I chose Audrey is that she is so clean and wholesome,” said Wyler. “I don’t want bosoms in this.” He had directed her great debut hit, Roman Holiday. “We are in [such] close communication we hardly have to talk,” said Audrey. “I know when he feels it’s wrong.” She trusted him implicitly to guide her in breaking this new and possibly dangerous ground.

  Wyler and Otto Preminger were then engaged in a bitter battle within the industry. Censorship of scenes such as the Tony Curtis-Laurence Olivier bath sequence in Spartacus prompted protests from producers and directors in Hollywood that they could not compete with foreign films that dealt openly with homosexuality. In the summer of 1961, the Mirisch Company, co-producers of Children’s Hour, attacked the ban against “sex perversion” on screen. In September, Preminger announced he would shoot the Allen Drury novel Advise and Consent with its homosexual episodes intact. On October 3, 1961, the Motion Picture Association caved in and announced a change in its Code: “In keeping with the culture, the mores and the values of our time, homosexuality and other sexual aberrations may now be treated with care, discretion and restraint.”

  In the early sixties, says Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet, homosexuality was “the dirty secret exposed at the end of the last reel,” most often a false accusation against a heterosexual character. The Children’s Hour was the first film to receive an MPAA Code seal after the sexual rules were changed—but with bland results. Shirley MacLaine laid the blame on Wyler:In the play, scenes were developed so that you could see Martha falling in love with Karen [but Wyler] thought they’d be too much for Middle America to take. I thought he was wrong, and I told him so, and Audrey was right behind me. But he was the director, and there was nothing we could do. Even so, I conceived my part as though those scenes were still there. I didn’t want it to suddenly just hit her when the child tells the lie that maybe she could really be a lesbian.... Lillian had written a slow examination of one woman’s personal growth in the area of falling in love with another woman. But Willie Wyler didn’t want that.99

  Audrey was even more nervous than usual, insisting that both Sean and Famous be with her on the set every day. She and MacLaine had gone into the picture with great enthusiasm and confidence in
a director they adored. But both were disappointed by the many nuances of their characters’ relationship that ended up on the cutting-room floor. Wyler, almost up to the picture’s release, wanted to tack on a semi-happy ending suggesting that, after MacLaine’s suicide, Hepburn and Garner get together.

  Despite all its compromises, Children’s Hour was attacked for “condoning lesbianism, albeit surreptitiously,” even by such normally enlightened publications as Films in Review: “There is an explicit scene which asserts that those who choose to practice lesbianism are not destroyed by it—a claim disproved by the number of lesbians who become insane or commit suicide.”100

  Young Karen Balkin as Mary did not measure up to Granville in These Three, though Miriam Hopkins was wonderful and Fay Bainter as the grandmother superb in this, her last role, for which she received an Oscar nomination. But the film suffered from the uninspired performance of James Garner, star of TV’s Maverick series and distinctly out of place here.

  Time even attacked Audrey for giving “her standard, frail, indomitable characterization, which is to say that her eyes watered constantly (frailty) and her chin is forever cantilevered forward (indomitability).” MacLaine’s notices were better. A more versatile actress than Hepburn, she turned her climactic confrontation scene with Bainter and her final breakdown into a powerfully emotional tour-de-force.

  Children’s Hour was nominated for five Oscars, all of which it lost. But they had dared to do it. A consolation for Hepburn lay in the personal experience with her costar—and vice versa:

  “I had plenty of qualms about Audrey when we met for the first rehearsal,” said MacLaine, “but from then on, working with her was one big kick.... Audrey and I decided we’d throw a party for the cast and the crew when the picture was finished. We went all out, had it catered by Romanoff‘s—nothing but the best. In the middle of the party, Audrey sidled up to me, jabbed me with her elbow and said, out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Hey, Shirl-Girl, whattaya think the bruise is gonna be for this bash?’ ”101