Audrey Hepburn (36 page)

Audrey was even more nervous than usual, insisting that both Sean and Famous be with her on the set every day. She and MacLaine had gone into the picture with great enthusiasm and confidence in a director they adored. But both were disappointed by the many nuances of their characters' relationship that ended up on the cutting-room floor. Wyler, almost up to the picture's release, wanted to tack on a semi-happy ending suggesting that, after MacLaine's suicide, Hepburn and Garner get together.

Despite all its compromises,
Children's Hour
was attacked for “condoning lesbianism, albeit surreptitiously,” even by such normally enlightened publications as
Films in Review:
“There is an explicit scene which asserts that those who choose to practice lesbianism are not destroyed by it—a claim disproved by the number of lesbians who become insane or commit suicide.”
¹⁰⁰

Young Karen Balkin as Mary did not measure up to Granville in
These Three,
though Miriam Hopkins was wonderful and Fay Bainter as the grandmother superb in this, her last role, for which she received an Oscar nomination. But the film suffered from the uninspired performance of James Garner, star of TV's
Maverick
series and distinctly out of place here.

Time
even attacked Audrey for giving “her standard, frail, indomitable characterization, which is to say that her eyes watered constantly (frailty) and her chin is forever cantilevered forward (indomitability).” MacLaine's notices were better. A more versatile actress than Hepburn, she turned her climactic confrontation scene with Bainter and her final breakdown into a powerfully emotional tour-de-force.

Children's Hour
was nominated for five Oscars, all of which it lost. But they had dared to do it. A consolation for Hepburn lay in the personal experience with her costar—and vice versa:

“I had plenty of qualms about Audrey when we met for the first rehearsal,” said MacLaine, “but from then on, working with her was one big kick.... Audrey and I decided we'd throw a party for the cast and the crew when the picture was finished. We went all out, had it catered by Romanoff‘s—nothing but the best. In the middle of the party, Audrey sidled up to me, jabbed me with her elbow and said, out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Hey, Shirl-Girl, whattaya think the bruise is gonna be for this bash?' ”
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NOT FOR NOTHING was Famous on “doggie downers”—tranquilizers to calm him down in general, but especially around automobiles and on canine social visits. “She was ga-ga over that dog,” remembers Billy Wilder. “She was ga-ga over all the dogs that she had, and she always had one.”

“Yippy, yappy, jumpy ones,” adds Audrey Wilder. “One day she brought Famous over to see my little female named ‘Fifty.' She was much smaller than Famous—same breed, same year, a Yorkie. We had the same lady breeder in Paris, and she named them with the same letter of the alphabet each year. Audrey said, ‘Famous is absolutely perfectly behaved.' So he came into our little apartment, took one look at Fifty, and peed on every single chair. She went crazy—‘Oh, my God, what are you doing?' I put him out in our backyard, but Famous was strong. He pushed open that gate. I looked out and he was taking Fifty up and down Wilshire Boulevard, smelling all the bushes.”
¹⁰²

The Ferrers were then renting a place on Sunset Boulevard, and not long after his visit with Fifty, Famous escaped and ran into the street. Before he could be recaptured, he was hit by a car, to the horror of Audrey, who heard a commotion and ran out to find his mangled body stopping traffic.

Her devastation filled her with an even deeper aversion to Los Angeles, from which she was always looking to escape. She now took herself and Sean to Paris, where Mel presented her with the only thing that might dry her tears—a new Yorkshire terrier named Assam of Assam, who looked a lot like Famous and gradually came to replace him in her affection.

Mel would be in France for many months, working on
The Longest Day
(1962), one of the last great World War II epics—Darryl F. Zanuck's $15 million rendering of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Ferrer, as Major General Robert Haines, shared billing with most of the major male film stars of the day: John Wayne, Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Sal Mineo, Jeffrey Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Eddie Albert, Robert Wagner and Kurt Jurgens.

In view of Audrey's skittishness about violent World War II films, she was not with him steadily and spent most of her time with Sean in Bürgenstock. Mostly, she wanted to relax after her two tiring, closely-spaced films of the previous year. She was less keen than ever on rushing into a new picture, but, as always, others were keen on her behalf.

“You have all the qualities of Peter Pan,” Fred Astaire had sung to her in Funny Face. Others thought so, too, including George Cukor, who wanted to make a
Peter Pan
with Audrey in the sixties. “Reliable reports” now claimed Audrey had agreed to appear opposite Peter Sellers as Captain Hook and Hayley Mills as Wendy. But there were legal problems on both sides of the Atlantic—with the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, which owned the rights to the play, and with the Walt Disney company, whose 1953 cartoon version was still in release. Much as she wanted to assay the role, it was not in the cards.

Another report had it that Hitchcock was ready to forgive her for backing out on him previously and to cast her in his next frightful outing
The Birds.
But Audrey was averse to having her eyes pecked out, and the role went to Tippi Hedren.

From now on, Hepburn
the mother
was less inclined to make films in general, and when she did so, her decision was based as much on convenience and logistics as on the merits of the script. The proposed director and costars were important, of course, but the necessity for a tight shooting schedule and a European location were even more important. And if the location happened to be Paris, it was much easier to get her to say yes.

Those circumstances now dovetailed with the fact that her Paramount contract expired at the end of 1962 and she still owed the studio one more picture. So, by coincidence, did William Holden. Production head Martin Racklin, cognizant of the two stars' mutual fondness, hit on the solution of teaming them in a to-be-announced script by George Axelrod, who recalls:

“I got a call one day from Paramount saying, ‘We have a problem here—we have Audrey and Bill Holden under old contracts and they both want to shoot in Paris next summer. Do you have something?'” He pauses for effect, then poses the rhetorical question: “What would you have said?”
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Thus was Axelrod, still basking in the success of his
Tiffany's
screenplay, tapped to provide his magic touch again. Borrowing a phrase from Cole Porter's “I Love Paris,” he called the script
Paris When It Si
les.
He borrowed the story, as well, from Julien Duvivier's
La Fête à Henriette (Holiday for Henrietta),
a 1952 film starring Hildegard Knef. Paramount wanted Blake Edwards to direct, but he had prior commitments and recommended his close friend Richard Quine, who had directed Holden in The World of
Su
ie Wong
and knew how to control Holden's heavy drinking—or so he thought.

Holden lived in Switzerland near Lausanne, where he was pursuing a fitful affair with French actress Capucine, a former high-fashion model and one of the great beauties of Europe. Born Germaine Lefebvre, she had fashioned her solo stage name on the French word for “nasturtium” and would play a role in Holden's and Hepburn's lives up to the tragic end of her own.

Holden agreed to
Paris When It Si
les.
It remained only to convince Audrey. Quine made the pilgrimage to Bürgenstock, where he found her jittery about several things. For one thing, Ferrer was preparing to leave for an extended shoot in Madrid, where he featured in yet another all-star epic,
The Fall of the Roman Empire,
with Sophia Loren, Alec Guinness and James Mason. But Audrey was most jittery about reuniting with Holden, who was said to be still wildly in love with her. In the end, Quine overcame her qualms with the lure of Paris and of the lavish expense-account perquisites she would enjoy.

Filming of
Paris When
It
Si
les
began in July 1962 at Studios de Boulogne in Paris, with a bad omen right off the bat. Just after she left for France, Audrey's Bürgenstock chalet was burgled. The main items taken seemed to be her
Roman Holiday
Oscar and her underwear. The former was soon recovered in the nearby woods; the latter was never seen—at least by Audrey—again. The thief was a twenty-two-year-old science student named Jean-Claude Thouroude, who turned himself in and told the judge he was motivated by his passion for Audrey and the hope that he'd get to meet her at his trial. She stayed away in a proper huff. He got a fine and a suspended sentence from the avuncular magistrate, who opined, “Love is not a crime!,,
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All over Europe, people were amused by the outcome—the Ferrers not among them.

(It wasn't the first or the last bizarre crime involving Audrey. The previous year, a thief in Australia broke into the Paramount Pictures vault in Sydney, ignored hundreds of more valuable films, and made off only with
War and Peace, Funny Face, Sabrina
and
Roman Holiday.
“It looks as though whoever stole the films had a wild crush on Audrey Hepburn,” speculated a Paramount spokesman, by way of the obvious.)
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Meanwhile on the set, there was some unanticipated sizzling over the choice of cinematographer. Audrey watched the first rushes and loathed what she considered the unflattering results by cameraman Claude Renoir, nephew of the great director Jean. She insisted he be replaced by Charles Lang.