Audrey Hepburn (25 page)

THE VERDICT, in a nutshell, was that
War and Peace
was “the least Russian movie ever made.”
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And for once it couldn't be blamed on Hollywood. The picture was quintessentially Italian, despite the odd international cast: Herbert Lom as Napoleon, Oscar Homolka as General Kutuzov, Jeremy Brett as Natasha's brother Nikolai, Vittorio Gassman as Anatole, Anita Ekberg as Helene, May Britt as Sonya and John Mills as Platon.

Worst by far was Henry Fonda—the lanky Yankee whose accent clashed jarringly with Hepburn's soft, pleasant Euro-timbre. Not for a moment is he believable as sensitive Pierre. Mel Ferrer, by contrast, conveys noble dignity throughout, especially in the gorgeous ball scene. But his dramatic deathbed reunion with Natasha lacks much impact, and his dying seems to go on and on.

So does the film.
The Manchester Guardian
said it had “length without depth”—at three hours and twenty-eight minutes, just twelve minutes short of
Gone With the Wind.
It had cost a whopping $6 million, but that was less than half of its $13-million rival,
The Ten Commandments,
which grossed three times as much at the box office.
War and Peace
premiered August 21, 1956, in a year of “spectacles” that pitted it not only against Moses but also
Around the World in 80 Days
and
Giant.

Many reviews, as that of
Films in Review,
praised Hepburn's rendering of Natasha: “She dominates an epic picture by refusing to distort her character to the epic mould, letting her ... very littleness in the face of history captivate us by its humanity contrasted with the inhumanity of war. She incarnates all that is worth fighting for.”

Audrey had acted well—and looked perfect—in a part that was neither well written nor well directed. In the end, she was defeated not by Mel Ferrer but by King Vidor and Henry Fonda.
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THEN AND LATER, people said Ferrer dictated her career in totalitarian fashion, forcing her to reject good roles if there was no choice role for himself. Then and later, Audrey denied it. There was certainly no truth, for instance, to the claims that Audrey lost roles in
The Diary of Anne Frank
and the musical
Gigi
because Mel insisted on parts for himself. But it was quite true that they didn't like to be apart, which had considerable influence on the film work they did accept.

Toward the end of
War and Peace
shooting, she and Mel experienced their first separation since getting married. His scenes had been finished before hers, and he had flown to France to star with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais in Jean Renoir's
Elena and Her Men
[also called
Paris Does Strange Things].

“We tried our best not to be separated by work,” says Mel, but the Renoir film was important. “Audrey and I both adored Ingrid.... We agreed it was something not to be missed, and she subsequently joined me in Paris.”
⁴⁰

In an April 1956
Photoplay
story headlined “My Husband Doesn't Run Me,” Audrey sang the same tune in an interview with Mary Worthington Jones: “Mel and I both value our careers immensely. We'd be very foolish and irresponsible if we didn't. [But] if we ever said, ‘Oh, just this once, what does it matter if we're separated for a few short months,' then the once becomes twice—without realizing it, we might have let material success ruin two lives.... If I were asked to take a step which might jeopardize my marriage, I would delve deep down into my heart to discover
why
I must do this.”
⁴¹

In particular, she was incensed by an article calling their relationship “a kind of master-to-slave one, with Mel directing her life, using her career as a stepping stone for his own.”
⁴²
In general, she was very touchy about the “Svengali” stories:

Before that interview was over—and in many others—she again had to debunk the charge that Mel got his
War and Peace
role because of her. She was “indignant,” said Jones, and sprang from her chair, pacing up and down as she answered:

“He was asked to play Prince Andrei long before I was even approached—as a matter of fact, before we were even married.... After it was decided, Mel and I were thrilled at the thought of being in the same picture together. But from that moment on, we were put on the defensive. Imagine! Two married people, in the same profession, whose interests and careers are parallel, having to give excuses for playing in the same film together!”
⁴⁴

The ever-candid Bernard Schwartz—better known as Tony Curtis—was not an intimate friend of the Ferrers but knew them (and Hollywood) well enough to have his own sharp take on their dynamic. “You couldn't get near her unless he was taken care of somehow,” says Curtis. “In the early years of that marriage, she had no confidantes. There was nobody around. The only one she could rely on was Mel, who wasn't a bad guy, but the view that came from him was certainly self serving.”
⁴⁵

Variations on the “Mel as villain” theme occupied many fan magazines and newspapers, even in England, where it took cartoon form in the London
Evening Standard.
“Mel had an enormous influence over her in the early days,” said director Fred Zinnemann.
⁴⁶
But that was different from “using” her. Professionally, her stardom outshined his, which privately produced strain. Despite her protestations, she often did try to suppress her own will to conform to his wishes. Mel felt he was trying to do the same. Some thought they were trying too hard.

“She was absolutely charming,” recalls actor Theodore Bikel, who met them while filming
The Vintage
(1957) with Mel in France, “—fun and bright and international, just a delight to be with. Mel was decent and workmanlike, but he was a bit of a stick and she was the life of the party. She was very solicitous of him. It seemed that she was taking care of
him
a lot.”
⁴⁷

Working together as much as possible was the only way they saw to combine marriage with two film careers. Baroness Ella van Heemstra was among those who harbored dark suspicions that Ferrer was subordinating her daughter's budding career to his own. But there is no evidence that he ever did so. In the long run, the “togetherness dilemma” would impair his career more than hers.

 

 

PEOPLE IN the industry remained skeptical. In fall of 1955, Audrey received producer Hal Wallis and writer Tennessee Williams in Switzerland to discuss the film version of
Summer and Smoke.
There, said Wallis, servants brought in a platter containing a single enormous fish—no soup, side dishes or dessert. “Audrey, dainty as a Dresden figure in a Givenchy original, consumed a large portion of the sea beast with great relish,” said Wallis, who was not pleased with the meal or the subsequent negotiations. They broke down, he claimed, because she wanted Givenchy to design the spinster teacher's wardrobe and because she—not Ferrer—insisted Mel be her leading man. (The roles eventually went to Geraldine Page and Laurence Harvey.)
⁴⁸

So what
would
her next film project be?

She was deluged with script offers, including two dozen from Associated British—all of which she declined. From Paramount she now received an intriguing offer to star in the William Wyler film of Edmond Rostand's
L‘Aiglon.
It was an extraordinary part, created on stage by Sarah Bernhardt, as the tubercular
son
of Napoleon and Empress Marie Louise. Hepburn would have made a fascinating boy and wanted to play it. Premature reports that she would make
L'Aiglon
praised her “courage” for taking on a male role.
⁴⁹
But like Garbo's longed-for transsexual roles in
Hamlet
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Audrey's did not materialize. It was too unorthodox for 1956; Paramount never made the film.

She also failed to materialize opposite James Mason in the title role of
Jane Eyre,
which 20th Century-Fox offered her around the same time. Mason objected to her casting from the start: “Audrey Hepburn just happened to be the most beautiful woman in movies. A head-turner. The whole point about Jane was that no one noticed her when she came into a room or left it.”

When Audrey's participation fell through, so did the film.

Among other films she rejected were Joseph Mankiewicz's proposed
Twelfth Night
and Mark Robson's
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness,
whose lead was then snapped up by Ingrid Bergman. There was also talk of Billy Wilder's
Ariane.

But the winner was
Funny Face.

 

 

IT WAS A fantasy come true: Audrey's first film musical, dancing and singing with Fred Astaire in the rain, far from Spain—namely, on the Seine. That dream deal involved a lot of horse-trading and was finally achieved by two elemental things: Audrey wanted Fred, and Fred wanted Audrey.

Astaire had just made
Daddy Long Legs
with Leslie Caron. Once again, to retain his appeal to young moviegoers, he would have to be cast opposite a younger woman. Who better than Audrey Hepburn—youth personified?

Astaire was exactly thirty years older than Audrey—fifty—seven to her twenty-seven-almost old enough to be her
granddaddy
long legs. The Hepburn role was originally earmarked for Carol Haney, a recent stage hit in
Pajama Game,
but MGM concluded she wasn't “big” enough for a major film and was about to shelve the picture, when screenwriter Leonard Gershe suggested Hepburn. “Kurt Frings, who had not read the script, sent it over to her in Paris because we had to have an answer right away,” Gershe recalls. “When he read it, he was furious. ‘How could you send this trivial musical to Audrey Hepburn? Are you crazy?'”

But she was in dire need of something light after
War and Peace.
“Audrey usually takes about three days to read and consider a script,” said Mel. “This one she finished in two hours. She burst into the room where I was working and cried, ‘This is it! I don't sing well enough, but, oh, if I can only do this with Fred Astaire!' ”
⁵⁰

She told Frings, “I'm crazy about it,” and she was cast. “Without Audrey,” says Gershe, “Fred would not have been strong enough alone to have gotten the studio to do it then. But Audrey could have anything she wanted. She was the hottest thing.”
⁵¹

She was hot enough to drive a hard bargain, too: $150,000, plus generous expenses for a posh Parisian hotel suite and the right to retain most of her Givenchy wardrobe.

More important than the dancing, at this stage, was the music, on which Gershe and producer-arranger Roger Edens were collaborating. Edens had begun as a pit piano player for George Gershwin and later become a Hollywood producer by way of
Easter Parade
(with Astaire) and other MGM musicals. In his opinion, Gershwin's original 1928 score for
Funny Face
was too theatrical. New songs would be written by Gershe and himself, though the bulk of it would still consist of the great Gershwin standards.
^ag

In order to get the Gershwin songs and title, MGM bought the rights to
Funny Face
from Warner Brothers, promptly discarding its dubious libretto about a jewel heist in Atlantic City. MGM now owned the songs, but Paramount owned Audrey and Fred Astaire.

What followed was a classic case of Hollywood wheeling and dealing: Edens, Gershe and director Stanley Donen were now sold by MGM—along with the Gershwin songs—to Paramount. “By the time we'd bought the rights of
Funny Face
and made all the deals,” said Donen, “it had cost a million dollars—and that was before a single foot of the film was even shot.”
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Gershe's original story,
Wedding Bells,
replaced the old script, and he was amazed by how well Ira Gershwin's lyrics suited the new characters and the casting of Audrey. Ella van Heemstra—with whom he was forming a close friendship—thought so, too. “I read the script when it was sent to Audrey in Paris,” she told Gershe, “and I could hardly believe it had been written by someone who didn't know her. Every facet of her is there. I mean to say it is Audrey.“
⁵³

It was Cinderella again—but in the high-fashion milieux: The top photographer and editor of a trend-setting magazine are desperate to find a sensational new “discovery.” Audrey, of course, is the beatnik clerk-cum-fashion-plate they discover. The tale was loosely based on the life of photographer Richard Avedon and his search for a model embodying elegance and intelligence. Once he finds her, he trains and falls in love with her—not unlike Henry Higgins in
My Fair Lady.

In real life, Avedon had found, trained, and married model Evelyn Franklin in 1951. He and Gershe had become close friends when they were serving in the Merchant Marine and, even then, had spoken of applying slick magazine photo techniques to a big film musical. Soon enough, Donen and Avedon would be spending half the night working out details of the next day's shooting.