by Barry Paris
“Because she was so famous, so well-behaved and such an icon,” says McDowall, “she was ripe for the fall.”83
Eliza was an extremely difficult role because of the Big Transition midway: Most actresses pulled off either the guttersnipe or the transformed goddess, rarely both. Audrey was not terribly convincing—even to herself—as the flower girl. She had been cast primarily for the transformation, and she executed it deftly. “From ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,’ she takes off,” said Jeremy Brett. “No one can touch her from there on.”
In retrospect, music director Previn thinks My Fair Lady is not so much a movie as a stage show preserved in amber:
“I personally don’t think it’s very wonderful. I think it’s endless. It has very little impetus. It doesn’t get going often enough. By the time Lerner and Loewe got through telling us how to approach it, it had more traditions than The Ring at Bayreuth. ‘Is it okay if we play this eighth note shorter?’ Jesus, it’s a musical. Everybody treated it like it was the Key to the Absolute. It was over-reverential, and I think it shows.”84
Even so, it was one of the ten all-time biggest moneymakers in film history, grossing more than $33 million.
“This picture is one we must all remember,” Hepburn had said to Beaton, and it was—if for the wrong reasons. For Audrey personally, it was in many ways the zenith and, simultaneously, the nadir of her career.
DURING My Fair Lady production, all had not been well between the Ferrers, and crew members had reported hearing the sound of quarrels emanating from Audrey’s dressing room.85 “Her relationship with Mel is not all that easy, but she loves him,” wrote Cecil Beaton in his journal at the time. “Her success is astonishing, and [yet] it comes second always to her private life, and the infinite trouble and finesse she manages in that strike me as being extraordinary.”
Ferrer had not endeared himself to Audrey’s My Fair Lady colleagues in general. “I didn’t like Mel very much on those few occasions when he visited the studio,” said Mona Washbourne, who played Higgins’s housekeeper. “He was always rather condescending and patronizing towards me, probably because I played a small part and he thought that was a bit infra dig. I think he was wildly jealous of Audrey.”86
To pacify Mel and enable him to be near Audrey during My Fair Lady, Warners paid him twice his usual fee to play a small role in Sex and the Single Girl, which was filming concurrently just a soundstage away from his wife, under that old rogue Richard (Paris When It Siles) Quine. No lesser light than Joseph (Catch-22) Heller had cowritten the script—based unrecognizably on Helen Gurley Brown’s hit book—about an ace reporter (Tony Curtis) who sets out to expose a famous sex researcher (Natalie Wood). Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall were the unlikely comic support. Wood is supposed to join Mel Ferrer for more research, but in the end she declares, “I don’t want to be a single girl!” and happily abandons her career to marry Curtis. Mel was actually quite good, but the film wasn’t, and few of the reviews even bothered to mention him.
Both Ferrers were more than ready to leave Hollywood. The professional and physical strains of the previous six months had been enormous, with reverberations that carried over into their private lives and seriously disrupted their relationship. “My Fair Lady was an ordeal,” Audrey would say, “and when it was over, I nearly broke down from the exhaustion.”87
She longed to rest; but she longed, even more, to preserve her marriage and now, shortly after returning to Switzerland, she undertook a monumental effort to that end: In the next eight months, instead of taking it easy at home, she made sixteen trips throughout Europe with Mel on his film shoots, rarely letting him out of her sight—in the hope of curtailing his interest, or at least the persistent rumors of his interest, in other women.
Ferrer’s most important film project at that time was El Greco, shooting in Toledo, Madrid and Rome for 20th Century-Fox. He played the title role, and she spoke of it with glowing—if premature—optimism:
“It’s a wonderful vehicle, and I am praying it turns out the way Mel hopes it to be. Apart from being the man I love, Mel is also one of the most talented actors in the world and I am immensely proud of him.... I thought if I went along, I could somehow help. I could try to make the beds comfortable, to disinfect the bath, and to make them cook something palatable.... I’m sure that any wife would have done the same.”88
El Greco, a respectable but largely ignored movie, was never released in the United States. But Mrs. Ferrer’s devotion to Mr. Ferrer’s comfort and career was as ceaseless in Europe as in Hollywood. There, according to André Previn:
“When you’d go over to her house, she would end up running one of Mel’s movies. It was kind of sad. She had small parties, always exquisitely done, amazing cooking from the Italian ingredients she brought over with her. It was the only time I had a truly amazing pizza—thin as a Kleenex!
“She would sometimes play the piano at the house, nothing formal, but she liked good music and had a reasonable record collection. That extraordinary mystique of hers made you think she lived on rose petals and listened to nothing but Mozart, but it wasn’t true. She was quite funny and ribald. She could tell a dirty joke. She played charades with a great sense of fun and vulgarity, and she could be quite bitchy.
“Alan Lerner was married to a French girl at the time—I don’t know which number, maybe number seven—a very hard piece of work. She came on the set one day when I was talking to Audrey and flounced over, dressed in the most peculiar clothes. Everything matched. She went on and on and then said, ‘Oh, I must fly and meet Alan for lunch!’ and walked away. Audrey looked after her, turned to me and said, ‘I’ll bet you didn’t know that even Dior makes dogs.’ I thought, wow! So she was not beyond that.”89
Audrey’s own image and sense of fashion were rather subtler, to say the least, and much more powerful for being so. In the sixties as in the fifties—and again without her quite realizing it—she virtually defined the feminine vogues of the decade, at least thus far. Her film and fashion image, as before, still derived largely from that “ideal” figure, which continued to be admired by millions, even if it wasn’t to everyone’s taste and even if some people joked about it.
“If I wanted to look at bones, I could always have my foot X-rayed,” said one producer—evidently one of the few who wasn’t enthralled with her.90 “Standing next to Audrey Hepburn makes you hope against hurricanes,” said McCall’s reporter Art Seidenbaum, who watched her on the set of My Fair Lady. “She is that thin.... Structurally, she has all the curves of a piece of melba toast—viewed from the side.”91 But even Seidenbaum immediately went on to acknowledge that Hepburn was to haute couture “what Bardot is to bath towels.”
Audrey’s legendary slender build was integral to her physical image and fashion impact—the sine qua non, perhaps—but, alone, would never have brought her such massive celebrity: It was her personality that touched and intrigued people, and not just her vulnerable sweetness. Reticence and discretion were the other key ingredients of the Audrey Formula, more than ever after the stings of My Fair Lady.
“I have a great sense of privacy,” she said. “Writers have to have an angle. If you say less than what you might tell your husband or your doctor, then you’re ‘mysterious.’ ... Basically, I don’t enjoy the one-sided talk about myself. I don’t enjoy the process of cross-examination; I find it absolutely sapping. [I’ve] been made mistrustful by being burned.”
A cynic on the My Fair Lady set had joked, “Somewhere beneath that even-tempered exterior is an unadulterated ax murderess. It’s a wonderful mask. You could be around her six months and still not know her.” It was a European mask. “I’ve never lived in America, always in Europe,” she said in 1964. “I’m still a British subject.” Her favorite recent film was the emotional Sundays and Cybele, in keeping with her past favorites, Waterloo Bridge and Camille, all of which made her cry. And what of her current popularity? The thirty-five-year-old Hepburn laughed and said, “I’m amazed it’s la
sted as long as it has.”92
Throughout the sixties, Hepburn was second only to Jacqueline Kennedy in the degree of flattery-by-imitation she inspired. “Watch this suit—the squareness, the uncompromising flatness on the body,” said a typical Vogue caption beneath a Hepburn photo spread in November 1964. “It’s the most important piece of Givenchy tailoring this season.”93 Women followed her every sartorial move, while men reacted to her much like André Previn:
“Whether Audrey was in jeans and a bandanna or all dolled up for the Oscars—she was so beautiful that you couldn’t bear it. Audrey coming up and saying hello wilted strong men. Along with everybody, I would just drown in those eyes. I discussed this I suppose in a locker-room fashion with a few of my contemporaries, but there was almost never anything carnal in it. You wouldn’t look at her and say, ‘Boy, would I like to—’ She didn’t provoke that. My wife once said to me, ‘How close were you to Audrey?’ I said, ‘I was hopelessly in love with her.’ She said, ‘Good,’ because she knew it would never come to anything....
“Audrey knew how to handle flattery when it was not connected with a come-on. Once we were talking, and I kept looking at her until she said, ‘What’s the matter, what are you looking at?’ I said, ‘Audrey, you’re just so beautiful, I can’t stand it.’ She giggled and took my hand and said, ‘Come to dinner.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ It was wonderfully done.”94
Her vulnerability was no longer childlike—but still very much a part of her. During one My Fair Lady recording session, Previn recalls going up to her and saying, “Audrey, when I turn to cue you in, you look like you’ve been caught in a deer snare. Could you keep the terror out of your eyes? You look like a fawn that’s about to get shot.” At the end of filming, she presented him with a heavy, silver ceremonial baton from Mendelssohn’s day inscribed, To André, Love from a Fawn.
Hepburn’s friend John McCallum, the Australian actor, opined that “Sex starts in the eyes. A film close-up of an attractive woman’s face is far sexier than a close-up of naked breasts. There is an expression to the effect that men make love to women’s faces, and I think there is a good deal of truth in it.”
Audrey agreed, and once expressed her own opinion on the subject with a surprising lack of self-effacement: “Sex appeal is something that you feel deep down inside. It’s suggested rather than shown.... I’m not as well-stacked as Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, but there is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much appeal fully clothed, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.”95
Loren and Lollobrigida were hardly comparable to Hepburn. Leslie Caron was. Their gamine personas were similar, despite which, says Caron, no rivalry existed between them:
“I’m not somebody who’s jealous. I truly thought Audrey was magnificent, and I thought she had many qualities I lacked, and perhaps I had one or two she didn’t have. I thought she was so gorgeous, so elegant, so refined, and so adorable. But I thought perhaps I had more sense of drama than she had.”
In their twenties, Hepburn and Caron played many of the same parts, from Gigi to Ondine, but at this point, as actresses, they and their roles had totally diverged: Caron seemed to change. Hepburn seemed not to.
“It was partly a financial thing,” says Caron. “She wasn’t under contract. She was free. She earned a great deal more money than I and didn’t need to adapt so much to circumstances, whereas I really did have to go on working out of necessity—and I’m glad of it. I developed a sort of second career as a sometimes outrageous, frivolous, middle-aged woman, and sometimes the opposite type of modest, subservient woman, as when I played the wife of Lenin. I was forced to become more versatile.”96
There were reports that Hepburn had wanted the part of the pregnant French girl, superbly played by Caron in The L-Shaped Room (1963), but Caron says, “No, I don’t think that’s true.”
Audrey and her image didn’t need it.
THE ISSUES of Hepburn’s image and publicity were now causing problems with Mel and with her friend Henry Rogers. One of Hollywood’s top publicists, Rogers had met her during War and Peace and, in the years since, had guided and protected her and played a large role in molding the public view of her. Rogers, in his memoirs, recorded intimate impressions of both Ferrers:She never had the burning desire to ... remain a movie star, as do most actresses, but instead cared only for personal happiness, peace, love, her children, a husband whom she loved and who loved her. Rarely did I ever see her happy. It was no secret that her marriage with Mel was not a happy one. It seemed to me that she loved him more than he loved her, and it was frustrating for her not to have her love returned in kind. She had confided these feelings to me.... I always saw the sadness in her eyes....
She wanted to work less and spend more time [with Mel and Sean]. She was filled with love. Mel was filled with ambition, for his wife and for himself. [He] had pushed her into the relationship ... with me, and although we became close friends, she always bridled when I mentioned the need for an interview or a photo session.... I performed a constant balancing act between Mel’s insatiable desire for Audrey’s new publicity and her reluctance.97
The beginning of the end of the Hepburn-Rogers professional relationship came on a Sunday at the Ferrers’ home in Switzerland where Audrey, Mel and Henry engaged in a heated discussion of her career. At issue was the new Givenchy perfume, L’Interdit.
“Mel,” said Rogers, “resented the fact that she had given Givenchy her name and likeness to launch his first venture into the fragrance business. Vogue, Harper’s Baaar, Town and Country and other mags all over the world were carrying a magnificent portrait of Audrey, indicating that the fragrance had been created exclusively for her. Givenchy had built a multimillion-dollar business using Audrey—without compensating her.”
At Mel’s request, Rogers had stopped in Paris to meet with Givenchy’s brother Claude and discuss compensation for the use of Audrey’s likeness. Mel had said, “For Christ’s sake, Henry, she doesn’t even get a discount on the clothes he designs for her. As for the perfume, wouldn’t you think he would send her gallons of it as a gift? She buys it herself—retail!”
Rogers now told the Ferrers about his meeting in Paris and said the Givenchys were agreeable to some payment. But Audrey said, “Neither of you seems to understand. I don’t want anything from Hubert. I don’t need his money. He is my friend. If I have helped him build his perfume business, then that’s exactly what one friend should do for another.... Yes, I even want to walk into a drugstore and buy the perfume at the retail price.”
At that tense moment, according to Rogers, the doorbell rang and yet another crisis presented itself in the form of Favre Le Bret, director of the Cannes Film Festival, with whom Audrey, Mel and Rogers had been friendly for years. He had come to ask Audrey to attend the opening night of that year’s festival.
“Mel had asked me what I thought about it,” said Rogers. “I told him I was opposed, that there was no reason for Audrey to attend the opening ceremonies. She didn’t have a film that was being screened. She did not need or care about the publicity she would get out of it. [But] Mel kept insisting I talk to him.”
Audrey left the room. “I’m going upstairs to see Sean,” she said. “You fellows decide what to do.” Rogers told Le Bret there had to be a reason for Hepburn to attend—and soon came up with one himself. The festival, he proposed, should create a new annual award—“a special tribute to one person, an actor, an actress, a producer, or a director who has made an outstanding contribution to [film]. This year it could be Audrey.” Le Bret said he’d think about it. The next morning, Rogers’s hotel phone rang and the sobbing voice at the other end was Audrey’s.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is something wrong with Sean?”
“No, Henry, it’s you. You know how much I care about you—how much I value your friendship. I’m crying because I have decided that I don’t want you to represent me anymore.... I
just can’t stand any more of this. I just don’t like what is happening to me, and my life and my friends.... First you embarrassed me with Hubert, [and last night] Favre Le Bret told me you had tried to blackmail him, that you told him the only way I would go to the Cannes Film Festival would be if he gave me some kind of phony, trumped-up award. Henry, I don’t want you to work for me anymore. Will you still be my friend?”
Rogers was stunned. “Here was a lively, sensitive person, genuinely sobbing her heart out,” he said. “She really did not want to be involved in the complex world which is part and parcel of the motion picture industry—the intrigue, the deals, the negotiations that go on behind the scenes.” Of course they would remain friends, he told her, but “you must understand one thing. You have known me for many years. You know how I work. You know very well that I never tried to blackmail Le Bret. If he is stupid enough to interpret my proposal [that way], I never want anything to do with him again—and you shouldn’t either.”98
Hepburn and Rogers did remain friends. But the man who really instigated Rogers’s dealings with Le Bret and Givenchy was Mel Ferrer—and he took her dismissal of Rogers hard.
CHAPTER 7
Nights Off for Givenchy (1965-1967)
“I’m the only person alive who has attacked Audrey Hepburn, and in public. I’ve tried to make up for it with a series of heartwarming performances on public television.”
—ALAN ARKIN
DIRE PREDICTIONS OF THE FERRERS’ IMMINENT MARITAL COLLAPSE had been rife—and wrong—for a decade. The Givenchy and Le Bret flaps produced additional stress but did not prevent their agreement, with Sean’s future in mind, on the major decision to leave Bürgenstock.
Sean would recall her saying that not least of the reasons why his mother chose to live in Switzerland was because “it was a place where there would never be a war.” As a boy then (and long after), his term of endearment for her was Mutti, a German diminutive of mother.1 Audrey loved the pet name but not much else about that language and what it represented for her: Bürgenstock was in the heart of the German part of Switzerland, and the idea of her son attending a German school was repellent.