by Barry Paris
NOT FOR NOTHING was Famous on “doggie downers”—tranquilizers to calm him down in general, but especially around automobiles and on canine social visits. “She was ga-ga over that dog,” remembers Billy Wilder. “She was ga-ga over all the dogs that she had, and she always had one.”
“Yippy, yappy, jumpy ones,” adds Audrey Wilder. “One day she brought Famous over to see my little female named ‘Fifty.’ She was much smaller than Famous—same breed, same year, a Yorkie. We had the same lady breeder in Paris, and she named them with the same letter of the alphabet each year. Audrey said, ‘Famous is absolutely perfectly behaved.’ So he came into our little apartment, took one look at Fifty, and peed on every single chair. She went crazy—‘Oh, my God, what are you doing?’ I put him out in our backyard, but Famous was strong. He pushed open that gate. I looked out and he was taking Fifty up and down Wilshire Boulevard, smelling all the bushes.”102
The Ferrers were then renting a place on Sunset Boulevard, and not long after his visit with Fifty, Famous escaped and ran into the street. Before he could be recaptured, he was hit by a car, to the horror of Audrey, who heard a commotion and ran out to find his mangled body stopping traffic.
Her devastation filled her with an even deeper aversion to Los Angeles, from which she was always looking to escape. She now took herself and Sean to Paris, where Mel presented her with the only thing that might dry her tears—a new Yorkshire terrier named Assam of Assam, who looked a lot like Famous and gradually came to replace him in her affection.
Mel would be in France for many months, working on The Longest Day (1962), one of the last great World War II epics—Darryl F. Zanuck’s $15 million rendering of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Ferrer, as Major General Robert Haines, shared billing with most of the major male film stars of the day: John Wayne, Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Sal Mineo, Jeffrey Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Eddie Albert, Robert Wagner and Kurt Jurgens.
In view of Audrey’s skittishness about violent World War II films, she was not with him steadily and spent most of her time with Sean in Bürgenstock. Mostly, she wanted to relax after her two tiring, closely-spaced films of the previous year. She was less keen than ever on rushing into a new picture, but, as always, others were keen on her behalf.
“You have all the qualities of Peter Pan,” Fred Astaire had sung to her in Funny Face. Others thought so, too, including George Cukor, who wanted to make a Peter Pan with Audrey in the sixties. “Reliable reports” now claimed Audrey had agreed to appear opposite Peter Sellers as Captain Hook and Hayley Mills as Wendy. But there were legal problems on both sides of the Atlantic—with the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, which owned the rights to the play, and with the Walt Disney company, whose 1953 cartoon version was still in release. Much as she wanted to assay the role, it was not in the cards.
Another report had it that Hitchcock was ready to forgive her for backing out on him previously and to cast her in his next frightful outing The Birds. But Audrey was averse to having her eyes pecked out, and the role went to Tippi Hedren.
From now on, Hepburn the mother was less inclined to make films in general, and when she did so, her decision was based as much on convenience and logistics as on the merits of the script. The proposed director and costars were important, of course, but the necessity for a tight shooting schedule and a European location were even more important. And if the location happened to be Paris, it was much easier to get her to say yes.
Those circumstances now dovetailed with the fact that her Paramount contract expired at the end of 1962 and she still owed the studio one more picture. So, by coincidence, did William Holden. Production head Martin Racklin, cognizant of the two stars’ mutual fondness, hit on the solution of teaming them in a to-be-announced script by George Axelrod, who recalls:
“I got a call one day from Paramount saying, ‘We have a problem here—we have Audrey and Bill Holden under old contracts and they both want to shoot in Paris next summer. Do you have something?’” He pauses for effect, then poses the rhetorical question: “What would you have said?”103
Thus was Axelrod, still basking in the success of his Tiffany’s screenplay, tapped to provide his magic touch again. Borrowing a phrase from Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris,” he called the script Paris When It Siles. He borrowed the story, as well, from Julien Duvivier’s La Fête à Henriette (Holiday for Henrietta), a 1952 film starring Hildegard Knef. Paramount wanted Blake Edwards to direct, but he had prior commitments and recommended his close friend Richard Quine, who had directed Holden in The World of Suie Wong and knew how to control Holden’s heavy drinking—or so he thought.
Holden lived in Switzerland near Lausanne, where he was pursuing a fitful affair with French actress Capucine, a former high-fashion model and one of the great beauties of Europe. Born Germaine Lefebvre, she had fashioned her solo stage name on the French word for “nasturtium” and would play a role in Holden’s and Hepburn’s lives up to the tragic end of her own.
Holden agreed to Paris When It Siles. It remained only to convince Audrey. Quine made the pilgrimage to Bürgenstock, where he found her jittery about several things. For one thing, Ferrer was preparing to leave for an extended shoot in Madrid, where he featured in yet another all-star epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire, with Sophia Loren, Alec Guinness and James Mason. But Audrey was most jittery about reuniting with Holden, who was said to be still wildly in love with her. In the end, Quine overcame her qualms with the lure of Paris and of the lavish expense-account perquisites she would enjoy.
Filming of Paris When It Siles began in July 1962 at Studios de Boulogne in Paris, with a bad omen right off the bat. Just after she left for France, Audrey’s Bürgenstock chalet was burgled. The main items taken seemed to be her Roman Holiday Oscar and her underwear. The former was soon recovered in the nearby woods; the latter was never seen—at least by Audrey—again. The thief was a twenty-two-year-old science student named Jean-Claude Thouroude, who turned himself in and told the judge he was motivated by his passion for Audrey and the hope that he’d get to meet her at his trial. She stayed away in a proper huff. He got a fine and a suspended sentence from the avuncular magistrate, who opined, “Love is not a crime!,,104 All over Europe, people were amused by the outcome—the Ferrers not among them.
(It wasn’t the first or the last bizarre crime involving Audrey. The previous year, a thief in Australia broke into the Paramount Pictures vault in Sydney, ignored hundreds of more valuable films, and made off only with War and Peace, Funny Face, Sabrina and Roman Holiday. “It looks as though whoever stole the films had a wild crush on Audrey Hepburn,” speculated a Paramount spokesman, by way of the obvious.)105
Meanwhile on the set, there was some unanticipated sizzling over the choice of cinematographer. Audrey watched the first rushes and loathed what she considered the unflattering results by cameraman Claude Renoir, nephew of the great director Jean. She insisted he be replaced by Charles Lang.
“Audrey could be very, very critical of herself on screen,” Richard Quine recalled. “She just hated the way that she and Bill Holden looked, which wasn’t necessarily Claude Renoir’s fault, but I had no option but to discharge him. Of course, firing a Renoir is tantamount to treason in France, so the unions raised hell and threatened to go out on strike.”106
The lady got her way on that point. But her well-grounded fears on the subject of Holden were not so easily dismissed or resolved. “The day I arrived at Orly Airport to make Paris When It Siles,” Holden told his friend Ryan O’Neal, “I could hear my footsteps echoing against the walls of the transit corridor, just like a condemned man walking the last mile. I realized I had to face Audrey again, and that I had to deal with my drinking, and I didn’t think I could handle either situation.”107
He was right. Holden’s casting opposite Hepburn was doomed from the start. He was tormented by being with her again, and by his own worsening inadequacies. Drinking more
heavily than ever, he often arrived drunk on the set, flirting with dismissal. Axelrod remembered the night Holden climbed a tree by a wall leading up to Audrey’s room. Like Rapunzel, she came to her window and leaned out, whereupon Holden kissed her—and then slipped and plunged from the tree, landing atop a parked car below. His wife Ardis—“bitter and frustrated,” said Audrey Wilder—arrived on the scene and harangued him, to no effect. The coup de grace in Paris was his purchase of a new Ferrari that he promptly drove into a wall, further delaying the picture.
In the dubious Paris When It Siles script, Holden was a screenwriter who can’t get his story right and keeps trying to reinvent it with the secretarial and romantic assistance of Audrey, who helps act out his fantasies. Director Quine was striving for a frothy kind of Cary Grant comedy, but Holden wasn’t up to it, and Hepburn seemed embarrassed most of the time.
The delays were costing a fortune and Paramount threatened to shut down the production by the time Quine finally persuaded Holden to enter the Château de Garche, an alcoholic recovery hospital, to dry out. He then imported a new guest star—Tony Curtis—who provides his own candid account: The joke for years after that, when anybody asked how to account for a budget increase, was, “Charge it off to the profits of Paris When It Siles.” I was in London when I got a call from Dick Quine: Bill Holden’s liver was really in bad shape. He’d gone out drinking in Paris, and now he couldn’t work. It was going to take him a week to recover. Paramount told Quine, “You don’t shoot, we shut down.”
So Dick said, “Tony, please come and do three or four days. They’ll let us run if you’ll do that.” I said okay and flew to Paris, and they put me up at the George Cinq and gave me some cash. Axelrod and Quine frantically wrote a couple of new scenes, and I worked with Audrey. I did about five or six days, and then finally Holden came back to work. They just needed to fill that time. They had to come up with something, and what they came up with was me. 108
In the end, several of the film’s few funny moments belonged to Curtis as a hip Hollywood heartthrob who keeps appearing when least expected. He’s a spoofed-up version of Curtis himself—a cool cat in tight pants, tossing off sixties jargon: “Like, bon jour, baby! Groovy! But I’m gonna have to split.” Thanks to Tony, the picture kept rolling, and so did the meter.
Poor Quine was besieged on all fronts.ar He had a male star who couldn’t stay sober and a female star who was racked by insecurities. Audrey these days had renewed an old obsession about her crooked front tooth and spoke constantly of having it fixed. Quine loved the singularity of the thing and threatened “to absolutely maim her if she changed that tooth.”109
In addition to Curtis, Quine was calling in every other “star chit” he had in an effort to salvage a very moribund affair. Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward agreed to make cameo appearances, against their better judgment. Coward’s ego needed the gig more than Dietrich’s, as his 1962 diary entries suggest:September 25: George Axelrod rang me up and asked me to play a small ... part in the movie he is doing with Audrey Hepburn and Bill Holden. He hurried the script to me and the scene is effective although tiny, but I am being paid $10,000 and all luxe expenses, and so I said yes. I think it will be rather fun. The part is that of a Hungarian movie producer (Alex Korda?) dressed in a Roman toga at a fancy dress party. I shall enjoy doing the accent....
October 1: George A said that they did not want me to play the part with an accent but to be super Noel Coward. This rather threw me; [but] it worked like a charm and I have never had such a fuss made.... Audrey H, unquestionably the nicest and most talented girl in the business, deluged me with praise and roses. Bill Holden, off the bottle and looking 15 years younger, absolutely charming to work with. We exchanged confidences and bottles of eau de cologne in the interminable waits.... George showed me about half of the rough-cut; it really is funny and Audrey and Bill are enchanting. So is Tony Curtis and so, apparently, am I.110
Hepburn didn’t share his enchantment. “She really hated it,” says her nephew Michael Quarles van Ufford, Ian’s son, who visited her then on the Siles set. “She had to get up at four, the limousine would come and fetch her around six, and she would come back at eight at night, exhausted. She’d say, ‘All this was for five minutes of filming today.’ ”111
When finally completed, wildly overbudget, Paramount recognized it as a dud and shelved it for two years. It did not improve with age and got a disastrous reception when finally released in 1964 (two years after Hepburn’s subsequent film).
“Axelrod’s dialogue and Holden’s gift for comedy amply deserve each other,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann. “Noel Coward is briefly on hand at his most repellent.” Hollis Alpert in Saturday Review called it “a dreadfully expensive display of bad taste.” Judith Crist checked in with, “Paris When It Siles? Strictly Hollywood when it fizzles.”
More ridicule was in store as a result of the on-screen credit, “Miss Hepburn’s wardrobe and perfume by Hubert de Givenchy.” The fragrance was L’Interdit, created for her by Givenchy in 1957. Hepburn chronicler Warren Harris observed it was “the first time since the 1960 Scent of Mystery (produced in the Smell-O-Vision process) that a movie left itself wide open for critical branding as a stinker.”
IF NOTHING ELSE, the embarrassment of such reviews was postponed for a couple of years. A more immediate embarrassment for Audrey was her fraying relationship with Mel. Ferrer was still working on The Fall of the Roman Empire in Madrid, where he was often seen out and about with such ladies as “the vivacious” Duchess of Quintanilla. The gossip columnists had plenty to work with: Hepburn was carrying on with Holden again, they said, “in retaliation.” Audrey was furious about the reports and—quite rare for her—lashed out publicly at the writer “who started all that talk while Mr. Holden and I were making Paris When It Siles. The only thing that really happened was that Bill cracked up his expensive Ferrari one day and came around on crutches. And all I did was ‘mother’ him a little. Anyway, I’m glad that Capucine is now getting all the publicity.”112
Mel took it all in stride, stiffly preserving his dignity and exhibiting no special jealousy—which annoyed Audrey even more. In his view, they had survived a variety of marital strains, and would survive the current ones. But the separation and tensions between them were taking a greater toll on Audrey, who now relayed to him her feeling that they should consider divorce. Shocked into action, Mel flew home to talk things over, and the rift was patched up—for the moment.
Thirtysomething years later, the Wilders supply their own piquant view of Hepburn’s dilemma:
“I did not think Mel was the proper husband,” says Billy, “but then, who would have been the proper husband for her?”
It’s rhetorical but draws a reply from his wife.
“Well, Bill was a nice guy,” answers Audrey Wilder. “Bill would have been better—if he’d been sober.”113
THERE WAS A good reason why Audrey now suddenly extended her lease on the lovely old Bourbon chateau she was renting near Fontainebleu: A brand new Paris-based movie had materialized unexpectedly on the heels of Paris When It Siles—a picture that, for once, she didn’t have to be coaxed into but very much wanted to do. It was the best of two worlds for her—a Hitchcock-style thriller without Hitchcock—and filming began exactly one day after Siles shooting ended.
The delicious soufflé was called Charade—a romantic comedy-thriller caper and landmark of its style. Stanley Donen, one of Hepburn’s true favorites, would direct in their first reteaming since Funny Face. Best of all for Audrey and posterity, Cary Grant would star. She had never worked with him and longed to do so. The script was a both a send-up and celebration of the genre and the great Hitchcock-Grant collaborations of the past.
“I always wanted to make a movie like one of my favorites, North by North-west,” said Donen. “What I admired most was the wonderful story of the mistaken identity of the leading man. They mistook him for somebody who didn’t exist; he could never prove he wasn’t somebody who
wasn’t alive. I searched [for something with] the same idiom of adventure, suspense and humor.”114
What he found—and bought—was a short story, “The Unsuspecting Wife,” by Peter Stone and Marc Behn, published in Redbook. It was the tale of a beautiful widow who is hounded by a group of unsavory rogues looking for her dead husband’s hidden fortune. The structure and tone were full of smart dialogue, red herrings, single and double bluffs, and Parisian style.
“It was a wonderful piece of work,” says James Coburn, the superb character actor who gave one of his most wryly villainous performances in Charade. “Peter Stone knew Paris very well because he’d lived there as a writer on the Île de France, right by Notre Dame. Did you know that he wrote it specifically for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn?”115
A lot of people wrote a lot of things specifically for Grant and Hepburn. But getting them to do something—separately, let alone jointly—was another matter.
Audrey said yes quickly, but “Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called Man’s Favorite Sport? [and so he] said no to Charade,” Donen relates. “Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn’t pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn’t afford them or the picture. So I sold Charade to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks’s script and didn’t like it. So he called me and said he would like to do Charade.”116
The project involved a lot of anniversaries for Grant: Charade was his seventieth film, 1962 was his thirtieth year in the film business, Audrey would be precisely his fiftieth leading lady, and he was just one year shy of sixty. He had been spotted in 1933 by Mae West, who was then casting She Done Him Wrong and said, “If he can talk, I’ll take him.” Soon after, on celluloid, she gave him that legendary invitation, “Come up and see me sometime.”