Hepburn respectfully explained to Givenchy that she was in pre-production for the movie Sabrina, a story which involved a young girl’s metamorphosis, after a two-year stint in Paris to attend cooking school, from a plain, pubescent servant’s daughter into a knowing, soignée siren. Though Hepburn didn’t mention it, Givenchy could easily have guessed that until this moment she had (as she told Vogue’s Paris-bureau chief Susan Train years later) “never even seen an haute couture dress, much less worn one.” (She claimed on another occasion that before she met Givenchy she had been wearing homemade clothes.) Though from the start Hepburn had favored Givenchy, who was then, as she told Train, “the newest, youngest, most exciting couturier,” Segonzac had initially tried to steer Hepburn to Balenciaga—but no one had had the temerity to disturb the reclusive master so close to collection time.
Captivated as he was by his unexpected caller, Givenchy demurred, explaining to Hepburn that it would be impossible to help her. “I told Audrey that I had very few workers and I needed all my hands to help me with my next collection, which I had to show very soon. But she insisted, ‘Please, please, there must be something I can try on.’” Givenchy finally relented, proposing that she try on some of the samples that were still hanging about the atelier from the previous season’s collection, spring/summer ’53.
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Hepburn began by putting on what she later described as “that jazzy suit”—an Oxford-gray wool-ottoman tailleur with a cinch-waisted, double-breasted scoop-necked jacket and a slim, calf-length vented skirt. The sample, which the model Colette Cerf had worn in the show, fit nearly perfectly, Givenchy remembers. “They both had the same thin waistline.” Hepburn finished off the suit with the hat with which it had originally been presented, a saucy miniature turban of pleated pearl-gray chiffon, concocted by Givenchy’s in-house milliner. “The change from the little girl who arrived that morning was unbelievable,” Givenchy says. “The way she moved in the suit, she was so happy. She said that it was exactly what she wanted for the movie. She gave a life to the clothes—she had a way of installing herself in them that I have seen in no one else since, except maybe the model Dalma. The suit just adapted to her. Something magic happened. Suddenly she felt good—you could feel her excitement, her joy.”
Audrey next selected a white strapless ball gown, down whose svelte sides and back a detachable train cascaded, culminating in a spray of black ruffles. Above the ankles and as slim as a string bean in front, it was confected of organdy and embroidered with flowers of black silk thread and jet beads on the bodice, skirt, and train. Dreda Mele, who had previously borrowed the sample and worn it to a ball, grows ecstatic at the memory of her first sight of Hepburn in the snowdrift-white dance dress: “She was something unreal—a fairy tale!” Givenchy agrees: “It gave her a very flattering line, especially pretty when she turned to move or dance.”
Hepburn’s final choice was a black cocktail dress, fashioned from a ribbed cotton piqué woven by the venerable fabric house Abraham. Fastened by a tiny bow at each shoulder, the dress also buttoned down its deep V back before flaring out below the fitted waist into a full, flirtatious ballerina-length skirt. Its most dramatic features, however, were its deeply carved armholes and shallow, razor-sharp horizontal neckline. “What used to be called a décolleté bateau,” Givenchy says. “Afterward it was called the décolleté Sabrina.” Audrey loved this neckline, he says, because it hid her “skinny collarbone but emphasized her very good shoulders”—which were as broad and powerful as the rest of her was narrow and fragile.
Though Givenchy had not shown the black cocktail dress with a hat, Hepburn found a medieval-looking toque in his atelier that perfectly suited her face, the ensemble, and the requirements of the story. As snug as a bathing cap and paved with rhinestones, it covered most of her ears and, due to the serried peaks projecting from its circumference, gave her the illusion of wearing a storybook crown. Givenchy says, “Audrey always added a twist, something piquant, amusing, to the clothes. Though of course I advised her, she knew precisely what she wanted. She knew herself very well—for example, which is her good profile and which is her bad. She was very professional. No detail ever escaped her. Billy Wilder approved of everything she chose, and so I gave them the samples to use for the movie. Billy’s only concern was that the clothes adapt to the form of her face—they had to all correspond to the visage.”
As the Sabrina schedule allowed Hepburn to linger a few days in Paris, Givenchy invited his sprightly new acquaintance to dinner at a “bistro existentialiste” on the Rue de Grenelle. “Immediately we had a great sympathy,” the couturier recalls. “She told me about the beginning of her love affair with [future husband] Mel Ferrer [the actor-director-producer], and said, ‘You are like my big brother.’” Before long Hepburn was calling him up “just to tell me how much she loved me—and then she’d say bye-bye and hang up. She remained from that time on absolutely, unbelievably loyal to me and everyone here at the house. The entire staff adored her, everyone had enormous respect for her—she became part of the family here. I have always considered her my sister.
“She was so disciplined, so organized, she never was once late for a fitting. When she needed things that I did not make—a sweater or maybe a trench coat—she’d take me shopping with her. Later, when she was married to Dr. [Andrea] Dotti [the psychiatrist] and living in Rome, sometimes she needed something immediately and would go to Valentino. But she’d call me up first and say, ‘Hubert, please don’t be furious with me!’ We never together had an argument. She never considered ours a business relationship. When I launched the fragrance L’Interdit with her face as the image she never asked for any percentage or any payment.” In fact, the actress’s confidence in Givenchy ran so deep she asked him later in life to be her légataire testamentaire, a mediator of her will. Recalls Dreda Mele, “The two of them were very alike—so rigorous, well organized, concentrated on their work—and behaving so well at every moment of life.”
For her part, Audrey, always ruthlessly self-critical and achingly vulnerable, found in Givenchy one of the few people in her life who could make her feel secure. In print, she referred to Givenchy as “a personality-maker” and a “psychiatrist,” and, chronically unsure of her acting abilities, she went so far as to maintain that Givenchy’s clothes made up for what she lacked in dramatic technique. “It was often an enormous help to know that I looked the part,” she explained. “Then the rest wasn’t so tough anymore. Givenchy’s lovely simple clothes [gave me] the feeling of being whoever I played.”
As the actress soon learned, her flawless Givenchy wardrobe was one of the few successfully resolved matters on the Sabrina set. Shooting was lagging months behind schedule. Ernest Lehman (brought in by the director from MGM to revise the screenplay when an exasperated Samuel Taylor bailed out) and Billy Wilder were staying up around the clock writing, or rewriting, the movie scene by scene. Some days the dialogue wasn’t ready when the actors arrived on the set. Wilder was suffering from severe back pain, which made him even feistier than usual. Holden was drinking far too much. And Humphrey Bogart—indignant at having been Wilder’s second choice to play Linus Larrabee (Cary Grant was unavailable), envious of William Holden’s easy camaraderie with the director (they had worked together on both Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard), and irritated to be playing opposite a novice starlet, who, he claimed, “could not do a line in less than 12 takes”—was relentlessly uncooperative. He taunted his adversaries with vicious imitations of Hepburn’s trilling, singsong voice and Wilder’s thick Austrian accent. He even went as far as to call Wilder, whose family members had been killed in concentration camps, a Nazi—and to tell a reporter that the whole movie was “a crock of shit.” In retribution, Bogart was barred from the daily ritual of sundown cocktails. Wilder managed to keep his cantankerous player in line with the perpetual threat that he and Lehman would rewrite the ending so that Holden got the girl. Avoiding
embroilment in these internecine squabbles, Hepburn bided her time learning the rules of baseball from Ernest Lehman (the World Series was on), or tooling around the set on a green bicycle (a gift from Wilder), dressed between takes in a cartoonish, candy-cane-striped top and trousers filched from her production of Gigi.
Lehman remembers that because of the frantic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants shooting and writing schedules one of the movie’s crucial scenes was nearly “written wrong.” Hepburn, as Sabrina, meets in her Parisian cooking class the kindly 74-year-old Baron Saint-Fontenelle, who takes her under his wing and into French society. He sympathizes extravagantly with her heart-rending crush on David Larrabee, proposes for her an elfin new haircut, and advises her on a cosmopolitan new wardrobe. Just before her homecoming, Sabrina writes from Paris to her chauffeur father back on Long Island, “You can meet me at the train—the 4:15. If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.” The movie then dissolves to the solitary figure of Sabrina pacing on a deserted railroad platform, devastatingly chic in her Givenchy suit and hat. On a long leash she walks a miniature poodle, its silver-gray fur tonally compatible with her ensemble. Then William Holden’s David Larrabee whizzes past in his Nash-Healey Sports roadster, screeching to a halt when his jaded playboy’s eyes light upon this dazzling apparition.
“We had a set made of the Glen Cove railroad station, and the scene was already halfway shot when I told Billy to stop everything—it had to be redone,” Lehman recalls. “I was so new to Hollywood I didn’t know you didn’t go straight up to a director and criticize everything he was doing! It’s hard to believe now, but until that moment Bill Holden was supposed to recognize Sabrina immediately as the chauffeur’s daughter.” Lehman’s epiphany, partly inspired by the sultry elegance of Hepburn in the Givenchy suit, was to make the object of Sabrina’s lifelong infatuation “think he’s picking up a strange, charming, and attractive woman. The scene needed a concept, a gimmick, a trick. Before, it didn’t have one.” The new situation gave Lehman license to “insert all the flirtatious dialogue with double entendres.” The reshooting took place on location in Glen Clove, where Paramount president Barney Balaban’s neo-Tudor estate had already provided the exteriors for the Larrabee mansion. “The clothes almost made the woman,” Lehman muses. “They were extremely helpful to the character, the mood, the movie. They made the transformation believable.”
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The movie’s next pivotal scene also turned on one of the Givenchy creations—the angelic white ball gown. “A lovely evening dress!” Sabrina exclaims to David Larrabee. “Yards of skirt and way off the shoulders!” This is the cue for the film’s great Cinderella moment, when Sabrina, finally a guest—not a lovesick, wistful outsider—at one of the Larrabees’ fabled parties, makes an enchanted entrance onto the millionaires’ lantern-lit terrace, leaving a trail of slack-jawed men in her wake. Charles, the prissy butler, breathlessly reports back to the kitchen, “You should see Sabrina! The prettiest girl, the prettiest dress, the best dancer! The belle of the ball! And such poise! As though she belonged up there!” The brunette Sabrina’s nemesis, David’s blonde fiancée, Elizabeth Tyson (played by Martha Hyer), appears at the dance dressed in an Edith Head gown that sets off Hepburn’s all the more brilliantly. As dark and fussy as Givenchy’s is pale and simple, it now seems dated—a fate that the French dress, by some miraculous legerdemain, manages to escape. Further, Hyer’s ample bustline, spilling out of her plunging black bodice, appears matronly beside Hepburn’s garçon manqué physique. No wonder Billy Wilder confidently quipped to a magazine, “This girl single-handedly could make bosoms a thing of the past!” Hyer also wears ostentatious earrings and a double-strand pearl choker, à la Barbara Bush, while Hepburn’s attenuated white throat is jewel-less, her ears ornamented only by modest pearl drops. Wilder gleefully recalled, “Here was this chauffeur’s daughter going to the ball and she looked more royal than all the other society people in New York!”
So resplendent was Hepburn in the glamorous Givenchy gown that when Wilder began to shoot the scene of her dancing with Bogart in the Larrabees’ indoor tennis court, bit by bit her fawnlike radiance burned into the actor’s dusky, rugged face. “Bogey complained that Wilder was getting only the back of his head,” Lehman says. “It was true—but it wasn’t planned that way in advance. You edit as you go.” Bogart said to his agent, Phil Gersh, “Look, this guy is shooting the back of my head, I don’t even have to put my hairpiece on; I’m not in this picture.” Explains Lehman, “What happened with that scene is that Billy Wilder fell in love with Audrey’s image onscreen.”
Apparently, it was not just the celluloid likeness of Audrey Hepburn but also the flesh-and-blood girl herself who bewitched the men on the Sabrina set. William Holden, 11 years older than Hepburn and long married, became intoxicated with his co-star—who reciprocated in kind. Holden even took Hepburn home to meet his wife, Ardis, who had resigned herself to his infidelities in exchange for the dubious privilege of being Mrs. William Holden. The illicit couple became so transported by their mutual passion that they even discussed marriage—an idea Hepburn summarily rejected once she learned that her suitor had undergone an irreversible vasectomy. (This revelation freed her to resume her affair with Mel Ferrer, who would become not only her husband—the bride wore Givenchy—but her co-star, in the play Ondine and in her next movie, War and Peace.)
Hepburn wore the final Givenchy outfit—the eponymous cocktail dress—for the script’s Scene 104, which opens, “INT. LINUS’ OFFICE—(LATE AFTERNOON). Start on a figure spinning like a top.” Out of this furiously twirling black-and-silver spiral of stardust the scintillating Sabrina materializes, enthroned on Linus’s executive-suite swivel chair. Her little Givenchy princess hat is perched on her head, and her stem-like arms, sheathed in black gloves, stretch across his boardroom table. Aglow with expectation and as perky as the twin bows fastening her dress, she is, as the script demanded, “smartly groomed for a night on the town.” Linus will take her out to dinner at “the darkest corner table of the Colony,” then squire her to Broadway to see The Seven Year Itch (an in-joke—Wilder would direct the movie version a year later), and afterward lead her to the Persian Room for dancing. It is during these sequences and in this dress that Sabrina’s affections drift away from the roguish David and attach themselves instead to his more responsible older brother.
In a story that has such an ethereal atmosphere of make-believe, Givenchy’s real-life, up-to-the-minute dresses provided—as did the crisp, glossy cinematography—the firm rooting in the material world that the film needed. “I can’t think of any other picture before Sabrina that made use of clothes in the same way. It was a real breakthrough,” says Ernest Lehman. “The way Audrey looked in Sabrina had an effect on the roles she later played. It’s fair to say that if she had never gone to Paris she wouldn’t have had that role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Sabrina clothes fixed her image forever.”
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Hepburn invited Givenchy to come to California for a screening of Sabrina—his first trip to L.A.—and an introduction was made to Edith Head. “Then they showed the film—and my name was mentioned nowhere!” he says, still slightly stung at the memory. When the credits rolled, Head’s name appeared next to the words “Costume Supervision,” and that was it. “Imagine if I had received credit for Sabrina then, at the beginning of my career. It would have helped. But it doesn’t matter—a few years passed, and then everyone knew. Anyway, what could I do? I didn’t really care. I was so pleased to dress Miss Hepburn.”
Sabrina opened to surpassingly favorable reviews in America, particularly where Hepburn’s performance was concerned. In his column dated September 26, 1954, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it “a knockout . . . one of those smooth escapist films, which, when done with supreme sophistication, is one of the happies
t resources in Hollywood. . . . Audrey Hepburn, the magical young lady . . . flows beautifully into the character of the chauffeur’s lovely daughter.” Another paper’s reviewer noted that “the sight of Miss Hepburn, gazing out from the screen with a look of bewitching candor in her large and limpid eyes, is delectable indeed. . . . Sabrina [is] the plus chic of chicks.” And an early, sanguine prediction of “hearty b.o. [box office] possibilities” was more than borne out. Sabrina was such a success, in fact, that when Hepburn signed on for War and Peace agent Kurt Frings inflated her salary to the stratospheric sum of $350,000—a fee that established her as the highest-paid actress in the world.
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