Audrey Hepburn (20 page)

The final authorities on the subject are the redoubtable Billy and Audrey Wilder, jointly interviewed at their Wilshire Boulevard home in 1995.

“He did not hate Hepburn,” says Wilder. “Nobody could hate Hepburn. He did not hate Holden. He hated
me!
Why? Because he knew that I wanted to have Cary Grant but I couldn't get him. Bogart did me a favor [by taking the role]. Holden I had made pictures with before, and Holden fell in love with Hepburn, so that was kind of a nice cozy arrangement. But Bogart we got at the last minute, and so I did not know what to do with him.”

One of many sources of tension was the script:

“It was written for Cary Grant and we had to rewrite a lot. One time, I handed him a new page and he looked at it and said, ‘You must be kidding. Who wrote that, your five-year-old daughter?' He said it loud, for the gallery of electricians and everybody. But they were all my pals. He didn't get a laugh.”
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But the worst problem between Bogart and Wilder stemmed from a social faux pas. One day after shooting, Wilder invited Holden, Hepburn and several others over for drinks—either consciously or unconsciously excluding Bogart. “At the time,” says Audrey Wilder, “I said to Billy, ‘You can't do that. He's a big star. You can't have Audrey and Bill and not ask Bogart. He's going to be furious.' And he was.” She turns to her husband and adds, “You just didn't get it. I did right away.”

Billy shrugs and pleads nolo contendere: “I got it, but it was too late.”

In fact, Bogart was often left out of the after-hours fraternizing, simply because he wasn't much fun to have around. Feeling ostracized and offended, he became even more irritable—and downright offensive to Wilder. “Kraut bastard” and “that Nazi” and various anti-Semitic epithets were said to be his pet terms for Wilder. But the Wilders say they don't remember it.

“Billy
is
a kraut,” says Audrey Wilder with a laugh. “Anyway, a kraut isn't a Jew. Neither is a Nazi.”

Says Billy: “He hated me so much—everything, my German accent—but ultimately, when he got sick and was lying there in his house, dying of cancer [in 1957], I went up to him and he was wonderful. We didn't say, ‘Let's make up' or anything like that, but he was absolutely wonderful. He completely changed.”

Mrs. Wilder elaborates on the last Mrs. Bogart's theme: “Bogart was insecure. They're all insecure about something. He was insecure about Billy's love for Audrey and Bill Holden.”
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There was no doubt about the Wilder-Hepburn love affair—as real and as sweetly platonic as that of any director for any actress in Hollywood history. Says Billy Wilder today:

The most famous of all Billy Wilder statements about Hepburn was made midway in
Sabrina
shooting: “This girl, singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past.”
¹⁰⁶
Henceforth, he later added, “The director will not have to invent shots where the girl leans way forward for a glass of Scotch and soda.”

Life magazine called her “the director's joy” and quoted Wilder's comment that, “She gives the distinct impression that she can spell schizophrenia.”
¹⁰⁷
She was so diligent that—with Wilder's approval—she insisted on doing her own singing. The
Sabrina
script called for her to croon a few verses of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in English and the pretty “La Vie en Rose” in French. She often spent two hours a day with a vocal coach. “I had to,” she said. “I had no voice at all. It was terribly monotonous, shrill and inflexible.”
¹⁰⁸
But Sabrina's breathy little singing voice would be perfect, and very much her own.

In Hollywood, Wilder gave her a fancy green chrome-and-aluminum bicycle, on which she careened back and forth across the Paramount lot thereafter. In New York, he hovered around her—uncharacteristically—even off the set, as on the October day in 1953 when
New York Herald
reporter Otis Guernsey interviewed her in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel.

“May I present the female Mickey Mantle?” said Wilder to the writer, with a light pat on Audrey's head, adding that, like the Yankee switch-hitter, “She can do anything.” But when the talk turned to stardom, he said, “Shhh! Don't wake my Sleeping Beauty. She doesn't know how big a star she really is.”
¹⁰⁹

Her rapport with Wilder was lasting, and so was her relationship with the two great designers who worked with her on
Sabrina.
Edith Head's costumes for
Roman Holiday
would soon win an Oscar. She and Audrey had enjoyed each other throughout that production, often shopping and dining together. (Head marveled at Hepburn's ability to consume five chocolate eclairs at a time, or a jumbo banana nut sundae.) Naturally enough, Head had been re-hired for
Sabrina.
But early on, Wilder made a daring move: Audrey's high-fashion costumes would be designed by the young Parisian couturier Hubert de Givenchy. Edith Head's work would be limited to the “Cinderella clothes” before the transformation. With abject apologies to Edith, Audrey now flew to Paris.
¹¹⁰

At twenty-six, Givenchy—a devotee of Cristobal Balenciaga—was already challenging Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent to inherit the fashion throne of Chanel and Lanvin. Givenchy's designs reflected his love of classic Greek lines. His wealthy family, owners of the Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry factories, had recently financed the opening of his salon on Avenue Georges Cinq, where he and Audrey met in the summer of 1953 and a legendary association began.

“One day,” Givenchy recalled, “someone told me that ‘Miss Hepburn' was coming to Paris to select some clothes [for her new film]. At that time, I had never heard of Audrey Hepburn. I only knew of Katharine Hepburn. Of course, I was very happy to receive Katharine Hepburn.” When the confusion was cleared up upon her arrival, he tried to hide his disappointment. “My first impression of her was that she was like a very fragile animal. She had such beautiful eyes and she was so skinny, so thin.... an adorable young girl with large hazel eyes. She was wearing a sweater, straight slacks and flats; she was charming.”
¹¹¹
But however charmed, he was a busy man, as he recounted to Warren Harris:

Audrey's angular figure was perfectly suited to the austere, geometric simplicity of Givenchy's lines and to his preference for black, off-whites and subdued pastels. She loved what she saw and flew back to Hollywood with a portfolio of Givenchy sketches that Edith Head was now asked to execute. According to folklore, Head was furious. The Wilders deny it.

“She was one of the great dames of all time,” Audrey Wilder says. “There's no real truth to that. Maybe she was hurt a little but—” Billy interrupts:

“Did you know that Edith Head won the most Oscars, with the exception of Walt Disney? Even when he had nothing to do with the picture, it was always ‘Walt Disney, the producer,' and he got the Oscar. The same with Cedric Gibbons, who was listed on every MGM picture as the set designer, whether he did it or not. It was in his contract. The same with Edith Head.”

Audrey Wilder recalls her excitement the day Hepburn brought Givenchy's sketches and left them at the house for Billy. “I saw one and took it over to my mother, who was a fantastic seamstress and worked in the studios,” says Aud Wilder. “She ripped it off right away, and I wore it one night a few days later. Billy said, ‘That's not fair! The picture isn't even out!”'
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Everyone went gaga over Givenchy's designs, and Hepburn went gaga over Givenchy. She found him the epitome of cultivation and
politesse.
“He's my great love,” she would say. “He made the first dresses I ever wore from a good fashion house. I consider him one of my best and most important friends.”
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Toward the end of shooting on Long Island, a humorous moment helped relieve the tension of the dueling designers and leading men. The visiting king and queen of Greece wished to see the set. Wilder borrowed two thrones from the Bob Hope film
Monsieur Beaucaire
and set them up at the top of some stairs, with a red carpet leading up to them. As the embarrassed royal couple was being led to their thrones, an electrician shouted, “Hey, Queen, where were you last night when I needed you to fill a straight?”

Audrey would call Sabrina “a dreamer who lived a fairy tale, and she was a
romantic,
an incorrigible romantic, which I am.” Otis Guernsey in the
New York Herald
pegged the young star's forte: “Fairy tales are her natural element.”
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Enter Prince Charming.

 

 

MEL FERRER, once called that “nerve in perpetual motion,” had not only fallen in love with Audrey but had been pondering how to advance her career—and his own. The answer came to him in the form of a prewar French play he now discovered.

Jean Giraudoux's
Ondine
had been a great success when first performed in Paris in 1939 and his status as France's preeminent dramatist secured by
The Madwoman of Chaillot,
which not only dazzled Europe but won the New York Drama Critics' Award as best foreign play of the 1949-50 Broadway season.

Ondine,
based on an early nineteenth-century German fairy tale, was later turned into two operas, symphonic works by Debussy and Ravel, and—in 1958—Frederick Ashton's definitive ballet for Margot Fonteyn. It was a fable of man's inability to comprehend and need to destroy innocence. The mythological “undine” is a water sprite who can only acquire a soul by marrying a mortal. In Giraudoux's play, the knight she chooses is unfaithful and—by virtue of a sacred pact—he must die and she must return to the water, never to remember him. The knight charges that she “adored him beyond endurance.” Ondine's view is whimsical. “So it takes twenty minutes to catch a man,” she muses when he proposes. “It takes longer than that to catch a bass.”

When Ferrer sent Hepburn the script, she loved both the play and the obvious casting. She told him she'd do it and instructed her MCA agent Kay Brown to approach the Playwrights Company, which jumped at the chance to land her: She was offered a minimum guarantee of $2,500 per week against a percentage of the box office, a big improvement on her $500 a week salary for
Gigi.
She secured Mel as her costar and—in appreciation of his suggesting the idea—insisted not only on sharing cobilling but also on splitting her percentage with him.

“If this isn't love,” said her friend Radie Harris of the arrangement, “what is?”
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When the word got out, she was deluged with questions about the nature of the role.

“It's a wonderful part,” she told an interviewer, “the kind I feel would be good for me. As opposed to
Gigi,
which was a comedy, and
Roman Holiday,
which is a light comedy, too, this is a very serious dramatic part, and an unusual one.”
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It was the closest she would ever get to Peter Pan—the role everyone wanted her to play—a combination of Ariel and Miranda.

In her two-week “vacation” between the end of
Sabrina
and the start of
Ondine
rehearsals, she packed up and moved to New York, where her mother would arrive three days later. “I want everything to be perfect,” she said. “I've ordered tickets for all the new plays, and I'm going to lay it on real thick—New York, that is. I want mother to love it as much as I do. I plan to spoil her as she's never been before!”
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She accomplished that in and around her reunion with Ferrer and their rapidly intensifying relationship. Soon after
Ondine
rehearsals began, she and Mel began living together in Greenwich Village, and Frances Ferrer once again consulted her lawyers. Mel was said to believe he and Audrey could become the next Olivier and Leigh, or Lunt and Fontanne.

There was coincidence and irony in that: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne had scored a great triumph in Giraudoux's
Amphitryon
38 in 1937. Before he died in 1944, the playwright reportedly “entrusted” the English debut of
Ondine
to them, and they had since tried (and failed) to persuade Olivier and Leigh to do it.
¹¹⁹
Beyond that, in London the previous year, Radie Harris had taken Audrey to see Fontanne and Lunt in Noel Coward's
Quadrille,
“and when I took her to the dressing room to meet them,” said Harris, “she was like a wide-eyed child meeting Santa Claus for the first time.”
¹²⁰
Now, to Audrey's joy, Lunt accepted the Playwrights Company's offer to direct
Ondine.