by Barry Paris
Nowadays, he was nervous about his image and afraid that, opposite Audrey, he might look like a dirty old man. He and Donen had Stone change the dynamic to make Audrey the aggressor who finally wears him down, instead of the usual reverse. Their age difference was turned into a running joke. But privately, he still worried, as a vignette described by biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley illustrates:
“At time of Charade, Grant decided to stay not in a hotel but in Barbara Hutton’s Paris apartment, whose secretary Mona Eldridge recalled him walking down the long central hall with glass-fronted display cases with priceless antique figurines, jade, etc., not examining contents but glancing from left to right to observe his reflection in the mirrored cabinet doors, fussing over his hair, fretting over wrinkles.”117
Hepburn and Grant had never met, and Donen couldn’t wait to introduce them. He arranged for dinner at “some terribly smart bistro,” Audrey recalled, where she and Donen arrived first. When Grant came in, Audrey rose and said,
“I’m so nervous,” to which Grant replied, “Don’t be.... I’m thrilled to know you. Here, sit down.... Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.” Donen had ordered a bottle of red wine, and when Audrey put her head down, “she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary’s cream-colored suit,” the director recalls. “Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking.... It was a horrendous moment.”
Grant just “nonchalantly removed his jacket,” said Audrey, “and pretended, very convincingly, that the stain would simply go away.... I felt terrible and kept apologizing, but Cary was so dear about it. The next day he sent me a box of caviar with a little note telling me not to feel bad.”118
James Coburn, just in from Munich after finishing The Great Escape, was also meeting Grant for the first time. “Cary was in one of those little dressing-room things on the set,” Coburn recalls. “I said, ‘Hi.’ He said, ‘Come on in.’ We were talking about the script when Walter [Matthau] came by and said, ‘Hey, Jim, how are you? Did you ever see anybody do a better impression of Cary Grant than this guy?’ And then walked away. It was the only time I ever saw Cary Grant off balance.”119
A charade is a guessing game full of tricks, a pantomimed secret to be deciphered in bits and pieces. So is Charade, beginning with its spectacular credits—a wild geometric charade in themselves. The names wind in and out of psychedelic mazes, heralding the upcoming game of illusion, set around Paris’s most charming landmarks: Les Halles, Notre Dame, the Palais Royale, the Champs Elysées—all lushly photographed by Charles Lang, Jr.
But the opening scenes take place around the swimming pool of Mont d’Arbois in Megeve, Switzerland, playground of the Euro ski-and-jet set of which Audrey was an honorary member.
Charade’s trickery begins with the very first shot: Audrey as Reggie (stunningly dressed by Givenchy) is the picture of tranquility as she suns herself on the terrace. Ominously, a gun emerges from a gloved hand and aims straight at her head. The tension mounts, the trigger is squeezed, and—SPLAT!—Hepburn’s ear is full of water from a bratty child’s water pistol. It’s the first of many cunning, unnerving shifts from suspense to humor.
Suddenly, a man named Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) approaches Reggie, initiating a lickety-split repartee that stokes up the scene through the sparring of the stars:CG: Do we know each other?
AH: Why, do you think we’re going to?
CG: I don’t know, how would I know?
AH: Because I already know an awful lot of people and until one of them dies, I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.
CG: Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know.
AH: Quitter.
In things romantic, our sexy young widow is forceful. In things financial related to her murdered husband, Charles, she hasn’t a clue. Only slowly and painfully does she come to the realization that he was either a liar, a thief, a spy, or all three—and that his name wasn’t even Charles.
Non sequiturs pepper everyone’s discourse. As Hepburn and Grant walk along the Seine, mulling over the recent drowning of a thug named Scobie, she suddenly remarks, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be like him?” Grant, in surprise, asks, “Scobie?” “No, Gene Kelly,” she replies. “Remember when he danced down here by the river without a care in the world in An American in Paris?”
Down at the morgue, a drawer—presumably Charles’s—is rudely yanked out and then slammed shut from the corpse’s-eye-view inside. More macabre hilarity follows at Charles’s funeral. Aside from the sorrowful widow, his mourners number a total of four very suspicious-looking characters. Grief is low on their agenda. Each has his own Grand Guignol entrance, approaching the coffin to inspect the body—and to become a suspect:• Leopold Gideon (Ned Glass): chronic sneezer and milquetoast accountant.
• Tex (James Coburn): sticks mirror under the corpse’s nose, just to make sure.
• Herman (George Kennedy): has a steel claw instead of a right hand, and keeps a spare; sticks a hatpin deep into the corpse and, convinced by the lack of reaction, stomps out.
• Bartholomew (Walter Matthau): U.S. embassy official, master of lame jokes and slow delivery—“The last time I sent out a tie, only the spot came back.”
People get bumped off left and right, but in a rather quiet and civilized manner. Charade’s overall violence and villainy are of the stylized kind. “You can’t believe these guys could really do anything very bad,” says Coburn, “and yet they’re trying really hard and they’re getting killed for it.”
Of our four bad guys, Coburn has the most frightening scene of personal violence against Audrey. As maniacal Tex, he follows her to a garage where she makes the mistake of using a phone booth. He traps her when she tries to come out and subjects her to sadistic intimidation—lighting one match after another and tossing them on her clothes and in her face, all the while threatening worse to come. Cornered and hysterical, she cannot escape until he simply gets tired of monsterizing her.
“I felt really bad about burning Audrey,” recalls Coburn, with a gentleman’s lament in his voice. “It went against my nature. Of course, we had it down so it wouldn’t hurt her. She was wonderful in that. We didn’t discuss that scene beforehand at all, except the mechanics of how close we’d be, because you’re playing on her face with that flare going off.”
Coburn was enthralled with her, but it wasn’t until halfway through shooting that they sat down and talked, and she jolted him by asking, “Do you know how you got this role?”
Coburn said he didn’t.
“I saw you in The Magnificent Seven,” said Audrey, “and I told Stanley Donen—he’s our Tex!”
A third of a century later, Coburn still wonders, “How do you thank somebody for doing that? ‘Thanks, Baby.’ It was her suggestion. If it had been up to Stanley, he never would have hired me. He was a song-and-dance man. I don’t think Stanley ever gave me a direction. We secondary players were on our own out there. He didn’t really give us too much time. I got more help from Charlie Lang, the photographer.”120
But Donen gave plenty of time to Audrey, whom he cherished as a person and as an actress. They grew closer with each of their movies together. Audrey was fond of teasing him about his hopeless French, which, despite much moviemaking in France, he invariably butchered. On one trans-Atlantic flight to Paris together, she pointed to the NO SMOKING sign above their heads and reminded him, “See Stanley? No fuming!”
On New Year’s Eve 1963, the Ferrers held a dinner party at their rented chateau outside Paris for eight: Donen and his wife, Adele, Peter Stone and his wife, Mary, and Cary Grant and his twenty-five-year-old amour (and future wife) Dyan Cannon, who had flown to Paris to lick her wounds after the disastrous three-night stand of her Broadway play, The Fun Couple. It was formal and fancy. The servants wore white gloves while serving huge baked potatoes, into which the guests ladled sour cream and Russian caviar from a five-pound tin provided by Grant.
; “It was as glamorous an evening as one can imagine,” recalled Stone, “but it was truly boring. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Nobody there was boring. But it was just one of those terrible evenings where nobody ... was in great humor. Cary and Dyan were arguing a bit. Mel and Audrey were arguing a bit, and Stanley and Adele were arguing a bit. The only ones who remained happily married to each other were Mary and me.”121
But Cary Grant was Cary Grant, even on a bad day. As shooting progressed, James Coburn was ever more fascinated by Grant’s idiosyncrasies and firm views on everything from acting and fashion to the battle of the sexes:
“Cary Grant always did things three times. Every shot, every scene he would do big, small, and right in-between. He would find a dynamic that seemed to work, but he explored all the possibilities first. He was always looking for something.
“One night we were sitting around the pool in the Rothschilds’ hotel after work. The air was sparkling with little ice crystals. It was Cary’s fifty-ninth birthday, and we had just all come up from dinner. We started talking and suddenly he said he was a little nonplussed about Audrey’s film clothes: ‘She dresses like a kook!’ I said, ‘It’s Givenchy.’ He said, ‘Yes, but it’s too over-the-top. Too fashionable.’
“He was always looking for longevity in films. He always dressed right in the middle because he knew very early in his career that for a film to last, it can’t be too fashionable. Today, there’s no lasting fashion, no style, no nothing. It’s out the door, and on to video. So he was critical of Audrey’s clothes in that film, but never of Audrey—except that he thought she was much too young for him.”122
Audrey as the cool, unruffled Reggie in Charade thought otherwise. “You know what’s wrong with you?” she asks Grant as their romance builds, and answers herself: “Nothing.” Both of their performances were facilitated by Stone’s fine script, bubbling over with ironic twists and diabolical turns. Everyone in Charade lies constantly to everyone else and says “Trust me” all the while, right up to the suspenseful finale—a nighttime chase of Hepburn by Grant and Matthau in the shadowy colonnades of the Palais Royale. Trapped there, she’ll win or lose the game—and her life—by deciding which of two armed and dangerous liars might possibly be telling the truth.
HOLLYWOOD PUBLICIST-TO-THE-STARS Herb Sterne has a little light to shed, and a little cold water to throw, on the subject of Grant’s and Hepburn’s professional bliss during Charade:
“Cary wasn’t so particular about how he looked in a still, but he didn’t want Audrey to look as good as he did. Audrey didn’t want Cary to look as good as she did. So I said, ‘Let us have two sheets, so each star can kill a still and the other will not know which still they have killed.’ This went great until my secretary, who was busy kissing Audrey’s ass, sneaked out a print which Cary had killed and made sure it was published.”123
But aside from that minor bit of sabotage, there was hardly a ripple of discontent between the two stars, evidenced by the fact that Grant wanted to be reteamed with Audrey immediately in Father Goose, his next picture for which Peter Stone again wrote the script (and won an Oscar). Audrey demurred, and the part went to Leslie Caron, because her sights were now set on something much bigger. But for the rest of their lives, Grant and Hepburn traded valentines of mutual affection.
“Working with Cary is so easy,” said Audrey. “He does all the acting, and I just react.”124 Grant had touched her even more as a person than as a performer. Twenty-five years later, shortly after his death, she exhaled a long, dreamy sigh when asked about him and disclosed the kind of intimate details about their personal dynamic that she rarely shared in public:
“Cary—such a lovely souvenir in my life. Unlike some people might think, he was really a very reserved, very sensitive, very quiet person, very philosophical, rather mystic in some ways. And had enormous empathy for other people. He had me down flat the minute he met me. I mean, he knew what I was all about and whatever I was uptight about and was extremely helpful. Terribly helpful because I was quite inexperienced, really, when I worked with him.”125
The last part of the statement was quite untrue. She had made seventeen films before Charade and enjoyed major star status for a decade by then. But that’s how it—and Cary Grant—seemed in her mind. Later, she elaborated on his psychological insight:I think he understood me better than I did myself. He was observant and had a penetrating knowledge of people. He would talk often about relaxing and getting rid of one’s fears.... But he never preached. If he helped me, he did it without my knowing, and with a gentleness which made me lose my sense of being intimidated....
Cary was a vulnerable man, and he recognized my own vulnerability. We had that in common.... He said one thing very important to me one day when I was probably twitching and being nervous. We were sitting next to each other waiting for the next shot. He laid his hand on my two hands and said, “You’ve got to learn to like yourself a little more.” I’ve often thought about that.126
James Coburn agrees with Hepburn’s assessment but adds that Grant had one advantage over Audrey and all other vulnerable people in the world: “He had ‘Cary Grant’ to protect him!”127
Though he rarely saw Audrey thereafter, Coburn happily admits being “wild about her” and coming away from their association with a distinct perception about her sexuality.
“Audrey was something else,” Coburn reflects, “—a real lady, and there are so few of them. It had to do with her upbringing and those negative experiences in the war, which I think made her become rather secretive. On the film just before, Paris When It Siles, Bill Holden was having a strong romance with Capucine, who was also close to Audrey. But Audrey and Bill had a thing, too.... Underneath, Audrey was a very sexual creature, always secretive and goddesslike. It would take some kind of a godlike creature to bring her down—but she didn’t seem to be too unwilling. She was the gamine goddess.”128
ALL CHARADE had going for it was an exciting story, witty dialogue, the ideal cast, a top director, Parisian chic, and yet another Mancini-Mercer hit. Donen held his breath, hoping for a good reception, but Charade’s ecstatic reviews went beyond all his expectations.
“A Technicolored merry-go-round in which Grant, Hepburn and Paris never looked better,” raved Look. “An absolute delight,” said Newsweek. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it “probably the best American film” of the year.
Charade was popular with all segments of the public, but especially with that much-mocked subgroup known as philatelists, since a rare stamp figures as the key to its plot. The glorious and sorrowful mysteries of philately may seem absurd to those who don’t share the compulsion. But in 1963, Charade exalted and elevated stamp-collecting to the peak of its vogue.
It is arguably Stanley Donen’s best non-musical film but, ironically, many remember it most for its smooth, sexy title song. Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer had just won two best-song Oscars in a row, for “Moon River” and “The Days of Wine and Roses,” but the third time wasn’t a charm. “Charade” lost to “Call Me Irresponsible” from Papa’s Delicate Condition.
That minor disappointment was offset by its surprise bonanza at the box-office : Charade was Audrey’s biggest hit yet—and Donen’s biggest hit ever—breaking all records at Radio City in New York. It was the year’s fifth most profitable film, grossing $6.15 million and inspiring a flock of comic-thriller imitations with similar titles—Mirage, Caprice, Masquerade, Kaleidoscope, Blindfold—all of which lacked the charm of the original.
Among those who tried to imitate Donen’s magic formula was Donen himself in Arabesque (1966): “Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren asked me to find a movie for them,” he said. But that humorless duo turned out to be, in Donen biographer Joseph Caspar’s words, about “as exciting as Friday night in a Benedictine abbey.”129
Back in Hollywood, Grant’s delight with Charade was expressed in his comment to a reporter, “All I want for Christmas is another movie with Audrey Hepburn.“130 He didn’t really
need anything else: His share of Operation Petticoat (1959) had netted him about $3 million, and he would earn $4 million in percentages from his previous hit, That Touch of Mink (1962). With no pressing need to rush immediately into Father Goose production, Grant the good liberal took time off for some volunteerism in Washington, lending his name and support to Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s campaign to curb high school dropouts.
A typical newspaper advertisement for The Children’s
Hour (1962): Director William Wyler’s original title was
Infamous!.
“WHAT MADE THESE WOMEN DIFFERENT?
Did Nature play an ugly trick and endow them with emotions
contrary to those of normal young women?”
He was not the only one with New Frontier connections. More than once, President John F. Kennedy had phoned Audrey Hepburn to compliment her on a film and to say she was his favorite actress. On May 29, 1963, she reciprocated at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York by singing “Happy Birthday, dear Jack” at the President’s forty-sixth-and last—birthday party. Audrey’s pretty little rendition caused much less stir than that of the previous year’s serenader, Marilyn Monroe.
CHAPTER 6
Fair and Unfair Ladies (1963-1964)
“Did Rex Harrison want Julie Andrews instead of Hepburn? No. He didn’t want anybody. He felt whatever fuss was made about Audrey or Julie was pointless, because nobody was interested in the girl. They were only interested in him.”