by Barry Paris
The catalyst of the blowup was Cukor’s order, in mid-production, restricting Beaton’s access to photograph Audrey on the set. Beaton fumed; his monumental vanity was easily wounded. He had a keen sense of Hepburn’s importance as a fashion icon of the mid-century, and of his own importance in packaging and marketing her. By this time, he had taken more than a thousand pictures of her in My Fair Lady costumes for lavish photo spreads that he sold to virtually all the major American and British magazines. Those pieces had generated tremendous advance publicity for the film and tremendous fees for himself. But he had a voracious appetite for more.at
“The reason George got so angry at him is because Cecil stored every person and experience in his life to exploit then or later,” says Roddy McDowall, who knew both men well and observed them with a sharp eye. “He used people, and he was profligate.” Greed headed the list of Beaton’s character defects and offended Cukor’s private and professional scruples. Two thousand photos to date? Enough was enough! Publishing intimate details of his sexual encounters with Greta Garbo? Unconscionable! Yet Cecil could boast of such affronts.After hearing him do so once during the 1959 New York run of Look After Lulu (designed by Beaton, costarring McDowall), Roddy asked, “‘Cecil, you’d sell your grandmother’s fingernails, wouldn’t you?’ His reply was, ‘Of course I would, dear.’ He didn’t see it as betrayal.”
But Cukor did. He felt that Beaton had become a kind of monster, shamelessly abusing his well-paid position to make lucrative side deals; and that his intrusive presence on the set was distracting Audrey. “Cecil was Talleyrand, full of art and craft,” says McDowall, “whereas George was a very just man-but if you did him dirt, he was unforgiving.”53
Once Cukor came to believe that Beaton was taking advantage of him, the tension between them increased and so did the director’s restrictions. During a set break in October, Beaton asked Audrey to pose and she agreed. But as soon as they began, assistant director Buck Hall informed Cecil, “Mr. Cukor doesn’t want you to take pictures of Audrey while they are fixing the lights.” Then when? he asked. “Mr. Cukor does not want you to photograph her on the set during any of her working days,” said Hall. “All her days are working days,” Beaton snapped. Looking very pained, Audrey said, “I can’t be in the middle of this.”54
By November, Beaton was having as much trouble capturing her with his palette as with his camera, and she was having troubles, too: “Audrey has no spare time to pose for a painting, so I suggested that [she] sit during her lunch interval. A great effort to slash paint on canvas while she ate her salad and talked of the sad things that happened to her over the weekend. Her son had been ill with a temperature of 103 degrees, the canary had flown away, and somebody had stolen from her mobile dressing-room a bag with her diamond wedding ring in it.... My painting just passable under the circumstances.”55
On November 18, Mel called Beaton to say that “Audrey was completely depleted and was taking three days off to sleep and rest, and be treated by a doctor.”56 She returned to work on the blackest day in twentieth-century American history.
“We were filming the part where Eliza returns to Covent Garden with Freddy,” recalled Jeremy Brett, when someone rushed up to their carriage with word that President John F. Kennedy had been murdered. “We sat in the carriage with the blinds down, holding each other and crying on stage seven at Warner Brothers.”57 George Cukor was too distraught to make the announcement. When no one else would do it, Audrey stoically volunteered.
For millions, America’s innocence and idealism died with Kennedy on November 22, 1963. For Hepburn and her colleagues, it was the day the joy went out of My Fair Lady once and for all.
Shooting finished a few days before Christmas. Beaton bid a fond farewell to Audrey a week earlier: “They were shooting the scene where Eliza returns to Covent Garden Market after the row with Higgins ... the sort of scene Audrey can do to perfection. She is at her best when portraying sweet sympathy and compassion.... I crossed the cobblestones towards Audrey. She had put a Shetland shawl around her shoulders, and looked forlorn.”58
MARNI NIXON remembers watching Hepburn the actress at work, “listening and carefully taking all their directions and then, after they were through, doing it exactly the way she wanted. Everybody around the room said, ‘Oh, isn’t she wonderful, she took what I said to heart.’ But to me, all she did was thread it through herself. She was just placating everybody.”59
A legendary characterization of Hepburn is attributed to Dory Previn: “Audrey has a whim of iron.” Hollywood folklore is a marvelous but often erroneous thing.
“The ‘whim of iron’ statement is wonderful,” says Dory’s ex-husband André, “but it was said by director Robert Mulligan—and not about Audrey but about Natalie Wood. Of course, it’s true that what Audrey wanted, she got. The fact that she beguiled you into giving it to her, as opposed to bullying you like Joan Crawford, doesn’t make much difference.
“One time on the set she went to Cukor and said, ‘George, darling, could I possibly leave a little early after lunch?’ She came up with some extraordinary reason and asked so circuitously. George said, ‘Listen, honey, you’re a big star. You want to fucking get out of here? Just say so.’ She thought it was terribly funny. She always got what she wanted.”60
Except—on My Fair Lady—what she wanted most. Before, during and after, she was never convinced that, except for a few high notes, she could not have sung the whole score.61
“There’s a lot of her in ‘Just You Wait, ’Enry ‘Iggins,”’ says Previn. “Every time it was humanly feasible, I would cut her in to the finished track. In ‘Loverly,’ there were a couple of things, and off and on in ‘Show Me.’ We used as much of her as we could. I used more than they were aware of at the time. But I couldn’t get away with too much.”62
In the final product, perhaps 10 percent of Eliza’s singing, at most, was Hepburn’s. When some publications claimed Audrey had sung “almost half” of the role, Nixon’s husband issued an indignant denial, at which point Cukor lost patience and replied, “The whole thing is a great bore to me. It is mischievous and unattractive to make a Federal case out of it.”63
Thirty years later, the evidence suggests that at the top level there was never any question about dubbing Hepburn’s voice and that it was duplicity all along to let her think she would sing it herself. Testimony to that effect comes from Rudy Fehr, the executive in charge of post-production music and sound editing at Warner Brothers. Hepburn was allowed to make “a couple of tracks for her own satisfaction,” says Fehr—essentially just to humor her—but as for any serious intention to use her voice, “Never. Nobody ever said anything about that, and I was with Jack Warner all the time.”64
Asked if in fact they were just leading her on, Previn replies, “Very likely. But ‘they’ did not include anybody on such a low level as me. ‘They’ was probably Jack Warner and Rudy and some other executives, maybe George. We went through the same charade with Leslie Caron on Gigi. She was absolutely sure she was going to do it, and they knew bloody well she couldn’t. Since she and I were close friends, they gave me the unenviable duty of saying, ‘Leslie, you’re not going to do it.’ ”65
“That was a disappointment,” Caron reflects. “I tried to do a recording, but my voice was not trained and the studio unfortunately didn’t take care of training me.”66au
Lost in the My Fair Lady dubbing shuffle was Jeremy Brett. “I know exactly how Audrey felt because the same thing happened to me,” he said. “When I arrived on the set, I found to my horror that someone else [Bill Shirley] had sung my song [‘On the Street Where You Live’].67 What Audrey really had to contend with was the ghost of Julie Andrews.”68
She was still contending with that ghost as late as 1991 on Larry King Live: “I did think the part of Eliza was right for me,” she said, “but it was Julie Andrews’s, so I had sort of an aching heart about that.” When King asked her who did the singing, she replied—disingenuously or not�
�“I’ve forgotten her name, a lovely girl,” and then added with a touch of real or mock irritation, “I sang a bit of it, Larry!”69
THE LONG-AWAITED, $17-million My Fair Lady—nearly three hours in length—was released with great fanfare in October 1964. Audrey agreed to a heavy round of promotional appearances, attending premieres in ten cities on four separate trips to America.
The dubbing controversy would not go away. At the New York opening, she looked constrained but put the best face on it for the press: “I took singing lessons from a New York vocal coach and pre-recorded all of Eliza’s songs,” she said, ”but the final result is a blend.70 I must say, I take my hat off to the marvelous people in Hollywood who twiddle all the knobs and who can make one voice out of two.“71
The critics did not let up. “Although miming to a canned voice has long been a tradition of film musicals, I still find the sight of a beautiful dummy singing someone else’s head off rather less than enthralling,” wrote Philip Oakes in the London Sunday Telegraph.
“With Marni Nixon doing the singing,” wrote Hedda Hopper, “Audrey Hepburn gives only half a performance.” Others criticized not so much the dubbing itself as the fact that Nixon received no screen credit for it and the implication that Warner Brothers was trying to hide the truth.av “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Jack Warner replied. “We’ve been doing it for years. We even dubbed Rin-Tin Tin.”aw
Even so, Hepburn received praise from many quarters. But when the thirty-seventh annual Oscar nominees were announced in February 1965, My Fair Lady’s twelve nominations did not include one for Best Actress, and the news was treated as a scandal. “JULIE ANDREWS CHOSEN, AUDREY HEPBURN OMITTED,” said the page one Los Angeles Times headline. Variety was blunt about the reason why: “Hepburn did the acting, but Marni Nixon subbed for her in the singing department and that’s what undoubtedly led to her erasure.”
Warner called it “outrageous” and took it as a personal affront. In typically quirky fashion, he thought it was due to the quality of Nixon’s singing and released a statement saying, “The next time we have some star-dubbing to do, we’ll hire Maria Callas.” Julie Andrews, when tracked down by the press, said, “I think Audrey should have been nominated. I’m very sorry she wasn’t.” Rex Harrison said the same. Katharine Hepburn sent her a telegram saying, “Don’t worry about not being nominated. Some day you’ll get another one for a part that doesn’t rate.”72
Audrey was in Spain when word of the Oscar snub reached her, and immediately attributed it to the dubbing.
“The trouble was, Marni blabbed all over town that she was going to more or less ‘save’ the movie,” says André Previn. “George Cukor, who along with all of us worshipped Audrey, got very angry. He said, ‘Listen, you’re getting a lot of money for this and you’re going to get a lot of money from the recording. Why don’t you shut up about it?’ Marni got a little too much mileage out of the publicity. Audrey is the only one who never said anything negative about her. That was beneath Audrey.“73
Nixon denies and bristles at the “blabbing” charge, as well as the subsequent reports that she was “blacklisted” for revealing her dubbing of Hepburn in My Fair Lady:
“I was upset that people thought Audrey didn’t get nominated because I did the dubbing and [that] I was purposefully trying to push that knowledge out.... I did say that during the filming of The King and I, the PR department threatened that I would ‘never work in this town again’ if I let anyone know. But that was King and I. My Fair Lady was the last film dubbing job I did, but not because I was ‘prevented’—only because that era was over and pictures like that weren’t being made anymore.”74
In fact, the main source of information about the dubbing of Hepburn was not Nixon but, rather, the aggrieved friends of Julie Andrews. No one particularly cared when Nixon dubbed Deborah Kerr or Natalie Wood; but they cared when she dubbed Hepburn, considering it insult to the injury of depriving Andrews of her rightful role. In any case, the beneficiary of the dubbing fracas was Julie Andrews, now the highly favored Oscar nominee for her performance in the saccharine Mary Poppins.
The ordeal, for Audrey, wasn’t over. She was now faced with the Awards night itself—to go or not? If she didn’t, Warner and Cukor would be upset and everyone would accuse her of bad sportsmanship. The decision was soon made for her: By tradition, Patricia Neal, the previous year’s Best Actress winner for Hud, should hand out the current year’s Best Actor award. But Neal was still recovering from a devastating stroke, and Hepburn was asked by the Academy to stand in for her. Under those circumstances, there was no way she could decline.
Cukor, the front-runner for Best Director, was her escort on the night of April 5 in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and he won as expected—his first Oscar victory in five nominations over the decades. In his acceptance speech, he thanked “Miss Audrey Hepburn, whose magic makes it so easy for us to win these awards.” Most of the other My Fair Lady winners did the same in the course of the evening.
All night long, the TV cameras took every opportunity to scrutinize and juxtapose the faces of Hepburn and Andrews, building up the “tension” over Best Actress. It was won by Andrews, who thereby achieved the instant (and lasting) film success that Warner believed she could never attain. After accepting the statuette from Sidney Poitier, Andrews delivered the most acerbic remark of the night: “My thanks to Mr. Jack L. Warner, who made all this possible.”75
Her mellower assessment came later. “I’ll never know to this day whether it was sentiment that won it for me or whether the performance in Poppins really did,” she said in 1993, adding with a smile, “I think it was the sentiment, myself.” 76
Andrews’s triumph and Hepburn’s humiliation were now complete, it seemed. For Audrey, at least the worst was over. Next up was the Best Actor award, and she got a warm “consolation” reception when she stepped out radiantly—in gorgeous Givenchy gown—to present it. The name in the envelope was Rex Harrison’s, and she read it out beaming with real joy, kissing him repeatedly when he reached the stage to take Oscar from her hands. Harrison seemed as pleased by Hepburn’s pleasure as by the award itself. In his thank-you, he said, “I should actually divide the statue in half ” to share it with her, ending diplomatically with, “I admire both my fair ladies.”
Harrison later called the ceremony “very embarrassing.” Warners’ publicity department “spent a lot of time and effort trying to keep Julie and myself apart—at least in front of the photographers,” he said. “It was awful—a make-believe scandal created entirely by the press and the PR.”77
Harrison had won over stiff competition—Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton for Becket, Anthony Quinn for Zorba the Greek, and Peter Sellers for Dr. Strangelove—all of whom perhaps deserved it more. My Fair Lady swept a total of eight awards. Most important was Best Picture, Warners’ first since Casablanca, and Jack Warner’s first as a producer.ax The picture’s overall success was enough to let Audrey say, if not too convincingly, “This evening made up for everything.”78
She’d done well to keep a stiff upper lip and survive the night with aplomb. But unwittingly, she capped it off with the worst faux pas of her public life—a lapse of protocol for which she herself was less to blame than the Oscar show’s writers.
“I had been told that Audrey Hepburn would bestow the honor in my place and I couldn’t wait to hear all the nice things she said about me,” recalled Patricia Neal. “... But suddenly she was handing Rex Harrison his award, and she hadn’t said a thing about me. It had to be a mistake. I pounded on the table with my good hand. ‘God! God! Me! Not me!’”79
Neal and Hepburn had gotten along well on Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “She was a fantastic woman, really,” says Neal today. “But I was so angry that she didn’t say, ‘I’m here in her place.’ I couldn’t say the words. I could only stick out my tongue.“80
Hepburn’s failure to mention Neal caused yet another mini-scandal. “Audrey snubs ailing star,�
�� said the headlines. Neal’s author husband Roald Dahl was thoroughly outraged on his wife’s behalf. When reporters confronted Audrey at Kennedy airport on her way back to Paris, she was mortified by her oversight and ran immediately to phone Neal and apologize. Dahl answered and responded harshly: “I told her to bugger off,” he said.81
Neal, as time went by, was more magnanimous. “The incident at the Academy Awards occurred under enormous pressure and has long since been forgotten,” she would later say. “Audrey sent me a fabulous porcelain rose, which was very good of her. I guess it just didn’t occur to her that night. I suppose she was distracted. One never knows how these things happen.”82
She had felt a powerful need to prove Warners right in giving her the role, and, despite all the handicaps, many thought she succeeded. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, for one, said she was “dazzlingly beautiful and comic.” But the kudos were outnumbered by brickbats. Audrey’s Eliza—dream role of the decade—was doomed by the much-publicized grievances of Julie Andrews, Marni Nixon and Patricia Neal. Hepburn had always been treated gently and respectfully by the press before. Now, the combined negative fallout from My Fair Lady left her stunned.
“The circus aspect of the profession demands that things be made into an ‘occasion,’” says Roddy McDowall. “My Fair Lady was like Catch-22 and Waterworld—a victim of enormous, injudicious advance hype. It had been ‘the time’ to do in Mike Nichols and Kevin Costner then, and My Fair Lady, by virtue of the peculiar circumstances, was Audrey’s ‘time.’”
Had Julie Andrews been unavailable or indisposed, Hepburn’s casting as Eliza would not have raised a stir. But Andrews was alive and well and beatified by public sympathy after Warner took “her” role away. Audrey was punished first for not being Julie and later, ironically, for the very reason Rex Harrison was much praised: the inability to sing!