Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (4 page)

THE PRODUCT

No one was quite sure how Audrey would fit. Just look at the movie stars around her. From man to wife and boy to girl, they were cut from the same benumbingly conformist mold. And each and every one of them was a product made to order.

Working at full speed, the Hollywood studios cast their stars from an amalgamated mold of cultural, political, and financial factors, which, when mixed in the right proportions, could hit the zeitgeist's bull's-eye with profitable regularity. Sure, some of them may look to us, the paying audience, like a beautiful, magical accident fresh off the bus from Wherever, PA, but in fact, beauty, as has been proven many times over, has very little to do with stardom (if it did, we'd still be talking about the most beautiful movie stars of all time, but the names Loretta Young and Hedy Lamarr rarely come up).

Movie stars were built, not born, and their parents were not their mothers and fathers, but the legions of writers, directors, costumers, and most of all, studio heads, who saw to it that their personae—their screen personalities—fit the particular needs of their place and time. That was a good way to sell tickets.

Paramount, Universal, Fox, Columbia, and MGM were companies after all, and though they were capable of making the greatest movies in the whole world, refining their aesthetic was not their objective. Like every other industry, the picture business endeavored to minimize its losses by making a science
of its gains, and that meant if something worked, they did it again. And again. It also meant that if something worked for someone else, they stole it, renamed it, and turned it loose. If Fox was making a mint off Marilyn Monroe, then Columbia needed their own (enter Kim Novak), just as they needed a Cary Grant, or Katharine Hepburn, or any other
x
that = a lot of $. That was the formula, and since the beginning of Hollywood, the studio star machines used it to turn out stars like power plants churn out power, solving for
x
again and again until Archie Leach became Cary Grant and Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe.

But why Cary Grant? Why Marilyn Monroe? Why did they become stars and not the hundreds of other actors who were nipped and tucked and primped and plucked only to board Greyhounds back to sunny Wherever? Was it “star quality” that made the special people special? Was it “It'”? Was it “That thing”? No: it wasn't magic. Like the stars themselves, magic was all construct, a precious commodity manufactured by Hollywood PR to up the value of its product, something they wanted the woman of the 1950s—indeed the paying people of any decade—to believe about the marvelous show folks of the silver screen.

The real reason certain actors become stars and others do not is regrettably not so glamorous. True, there is often something exceptional in attendance—be it Fred Astaire's feet or Judy Garland's voice or Audrey's face—but the crude reality of supply and demand contends that great talent, no matter how awesome, must be a salable commodity marketable to its era, as desirable to its audience as the new Philco Seventeener or the myth of Soviet takeover were to theirs. To foster that
desirability, studios manufactured stars to suit the fears and fantasies of the day, giving faces to paradigm shifts, and therefore historical consequence to their chosen personae.

And so it has always been. Since the era of Hollywood's first stars, American moviegoers have been devouring a steady dosage of self-image. Whether it's man or woman, boy or girl, the screen holds up mirrors to its audience, reflecting the shoulds and should-nots of family, love, war, and gender—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, but always with an eye on sex. And in the fifties, if you were a woman, too much of it was wrong, and too little of it was honorable. You were either a slut or a saint.

DORIS AND MARILYN

For women in the movies, there existed an extreme dialectic. On one end, there was Doris Day, and on the other, Marilyn Monroe.

Doris Day was one of the saints. Take her in
Lover Come Back
. Sparring with Rock Hudson, a successful ad executive who uses any means necessary to get what he wants (even sex!), she says, defiantly, “
I
don't use sex to land an account!” “When do you use it?” he asks. Her reply: “I don't.”
Lover Come Back,
like
Pillow Talk
and every other Doris Day–Rock Hudson pairing, is a sex comedy without the sex, a story of how the sturdy all-American guy fights hard to get into Doris's cold, cold bed. She's always appalled, always shocked, huffing and puffing herself out of his arms, and never for a moment wanting so much as a kiss unless there's a legal agreement of marriage to go along with it. (Oscar Levant famously said, “I knew
Doris Day before she was a virgin.”) Toward the end of
Lover Come Back,
when Doris and Rock wake up together in a motel bed, she endures a requisite moment of absolute panic.
Did they?!?! Could they?!?!
The poor thing nearly explodes. “It's all right,” Hudson reassures her. “You're my wife.” Phew. Apparently they got so drunk the night before, she doesn't remember that they also got married. Doris, duped, is so enraged, that she has the marriage annulled immediately, but there's still a problem—a very 1950s problem—that she can't reverse; that is, sex, and having had it with a man who is no longer her husband. Well, as it turns out she's pregnant (birth control still to come), and is on her way to deliver the baby when, thank God, Rock arrives at the hospital, his lessons learned, in time to marry her before she has the kid.

But this is Hollywood, and every “Good” has a “Bad.” If marriage was deep in the heart of the fifties heroine, what was in the heart of the fifties villainess? The answer: sex without marriage. Gentlemen may marry brunettes, but Marilyn Monroe was living proof that they preferred blondes, and not always the smartest or most willful blondes, in fact, the dumber and more childlike the better. Joining her were the likes of Kim Novak, Mamie Van Doren, and Jayne Mansfield, who helped turn ladies into girls and girls into Barbies (Barbie herself was born in 1959) and revealed in the process the adolescent boy lurking latent within the American adult male. And why not? When the nation represses its sex drive, it should come as no surprise that deep within every daddy is a teenage boy just burning to brush up against anything. But of course he can't. This is the age of look but don't touch. If you're a mom, it's worse; you're not even allowed to look. And if you're
a daughter, like Sandra Dee, or Debbie Reynolds in
Tammy and the Bachelor,
you can touch, but it should only be a kiss—your first kiss—and also your last. Keep in mind: once you've gone all the way, you can never come back. Ever.

So remember, American girls: be good. You're princesses.

BIRTH OF THE COOL

But princesses come in all shapes and sizes. With Audrey, in whose face and gait Colette saw the whole history of girlhood,
Roman Holiday
becomes about discovering the world, and not, as was true of Audrey's predecessors, about attracting a man. As Princess Ann, Audrey says she wants only “to do just whatever I like the whole day long…to sit at a sidewalk café and look in shop windows, walk in the rain, have fun, and maybe some excitement.”

The baby boom produced a fresh batch of American youngsters—teenagers they were called—and they were suddenly coming of age. But until
Roman Holiday,
it was hard for them to see themselves in the movies. What Audrey offered—namely to the girls—was a glimpse of someone who lived by her own code of interests, not her mother's, and who did so with a wholesome independence of spirit.

Wholesome
and
independent. AC Lyles saw the value in this combination, one so appealing, it seemed Audrey's reach might even extend beyond the teenage girl. Men could fall in love with her, that was no surprise, but significantly (unlike Marilyn), she didn't antagonize their wives in the process. Mothers would be happy if their sons brought Audreys home—and so too would their daughters.

How did Audrey do it? With a haircut.

It's Princess Ann's first and only day in Rome, and she wants to change the way she looks. How much does she get cut? So much that the barber is scandalized. Never in all his career, we are led to believe, has he ever heard of hair so short on a girl so pretty. “Are you sure, miss?” asks the barber. “I'm quite sure, thank you.” “All off?” “All off.”

The barber does as he's told, and by the end of it, Audrey looks so utterly changed that he surprises the both of them by asking her out. But this is not an ugly duckling transformation—one of those scenes where the girl removes her glasses and she becomes a babe—this is a transformation from Ann's conformist self (a girl with traditionally long, traditionally “feminine” hair), to Ann's
true
self. That is why the barber calls her new do “cool.” The idea is that he appreciates it, not lusts after it, and the distinction denotes a notable change in the feminine ideal, from the fifties young lady who matures by falling in love and becoming wifelike, to the early sixties girl who matures by cultivating a fashion sense so unique, it could only be hers and hers alone.

Voilà. In this era of stark conservatism, Audrey managed to make different okay. Better than okay: she made it good, and she was able to rally her troops with a visual dialect only they could understand, like an underground spy leaving coded messages for her emissaries. Often without knowing it, mothers and daughters of the 1950s saw in
Roman Holiday
a star who spoke directly to them, politely pointing the way out without ever having to wave a flag. “Audrey had it in her to be the sugar coating on a bad-tasting pill,” Lyles said. “She made everything palatable.” Now that's antiestablishment with a smile.

Princess Ann walks early 1960s, but she definitely talks mid-1950s. Yes, she yearns for more, and based upon her brave new personality and look she might even get a hand on it, but as
Roman Holiday
draws to its bittersweet end, it becomes clear that no matter how unique the individual (or haircut), duty must eclipse freedom. A fifties princess was still castle-bound.

It wasn't just the movie that kept Audrey's provocative allure in check; the press was only too eager to lend a hand. Published in time for
Roman Holiday
, the article “H.R.H Audrey Hepburn” showed a demure Audrey, white gloves pressed sweetly to her chin. The idea was to further the notion of Hepburn, an elegant thing, pure of word and deed, and bred to continental perfection. Included in the piece was the following:

AC Lyles made sure a very modern Audrey was packaged in a very fifties way.

MRS. JAMES HANSON, DEFERRED, AGAIN

Production on
Roman Holiday
came to a close, and Audrey's plans to marry were thwarted again. She had to begin the American road tour of
Gigi
. There would be no honeymoon, no week of afternoons to lie about as Mr. and Mrs. Hanson, just listening to records, eating and sleeping. Worse still, there would be no children, and no family. At least not now, while she was on the road. And so, rather than struggle forward, Audrey and James solemnly acquiesced, believing, even if what they were doing didn't feel right, doing as they should was the way of the world. And in a single snap, Audrey's dream of family, her one unyielding dream, was boxed up and shelved.

By December of 1952, their engagement was off for good.

Audrey was single again. All over the media, she made her good intentions clear. She was a dear to the press, a girl who wanted to find a husband, become a mother, and then, finally, be what she was raised to be: a housewife. She only smoked six Gold Flake cigarettes a day, and restricted her lunches to milk, fruit, cottage cheese, and sometimes yogurt. See? She was just the girl American daughters were supposed to be. Best of all, there wasn't a drop of sex on her.

Boy, were they wrong.

1953-1955

ONE HOT SPURT

There was a time when George Axelrod, the would-be screenwriter of
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
didn't have to fight so hard to have sex—in his work. But these days, it was tougher to pull it off. TV was the problem. When he wrote for radio, George could get away with a lot of sex comedy because no one could actually see it, and if he were smart and judicious, most of them wouldn't even catch it, but if they did, it didn't matter because it was all live, and once they said it no one could undo it. TV sex was touchier, but the pay was better, which is why George Axelrod, before arriving at his day job writing gags for the small screen, dutifully worked every morning for an hour between eight and nine on a play called
The Seven Year Itch
. Onstage, where there were no sponsors, George knew
his dialogue could be as frank and funny as he could possibly make it. There was no dumbing down or sanitizing on Broadway, so if he wanted to go against everyone's better principles and say the truth, George just might smash the myth that sex and laughter don't go together.

The Seven Year Itch
came out of George in one hot spurt—fifteen hours, he said, between Easter Sunday and Fourth of July—and from there, onto the desk of a producer friend of his. By September of '52—around the time
Roman Holiday
wrapped—
Itch
was in rehearsals at the Fulton Theater, where it opened two months later to blow the lid off the seventh commandment (Thou Shalt Not Commit etc.).
The New Yorker
wrote,

Axelrod hit big, he hit early, and he did it the way he wanted to—in full view of the hopeful audience.

Only a few months later, George was sitting in his kitchen when he got the call from Billy Wilder.

It was like getting a call from God, he said later.

George's agent, the wily Irving Lazar—called “Swifty” because that's how fast he made deals—had set the movie up at Fox, and Billy was ready to get to work.
The Seven Year Itch,
Wilder told him, was just his kind of material; funny, bitter,
hot, and unapologetically impolite. George had been told this many times, but hearing it from his idol was like seeing it on a marquee shining forty feet in the air. The next morning, he was on a plane to L.A.

In between writing at 20th Century Fox and eating at Warner Bros. (where Billy's favorite chef cooked Billy's favorite food), Wilder and Axelrod walked around Beverly Hills, shopping and talking, buying bow ties and gourmet snacks, and debating the impossible problem of how to translate Axelrod's sex comedy to the movies without ruffling the stuffed shirts of the Production Code Administration, whose code explicitly stated—and quite definitively—that “adultery must never be the subject of comedy or laughter.” At some point or another, every comedy writer in Hollywood had to deal with the PCA, and some, like Wilder, had even become quite successful at it. His films compromised without looking like compromises. From
Double Indemnity
to
Ace in the Hole,
they were masterpieces of bold innuendo and pushed—sometimes invisibly—every envelope to its breaking point. But
Itch
was different; it couldn't cut corners. It couldn't be invisible. If they weren't downstage center with the subject of adultery, there would be no movie. How could the principles of high-minded innuendo work themselves into that? Wilder had purchased hundreds of dollars' worth of bow ties by the time they figured it out.

At first, Axelrod had the idea that he and Wilder would submit the raciest draft they could. His hope was that they could buy themselves some negotiating power by overwhelming the censors, but Billy had been down this road before and assured George that it wouldn't work, especially on this picture, which as a piece of material, was already notorious. This
time, Billy explained, the Production Code Administration—also known as the Breen Office—was out to make an example of its power. They would not approve the final screenplay until
all
suggestions of the affair between Sherman and The Girl were eliminated.

There was only one way, then, to show it without showing it. They had to put it all in his head. Sherman will only
fantasize
about adultery. Neither Wilder nor Axelrod were happy with the idea, but there was no alternative. It was an itch they couldn't scratch. “The bulk of my sex-comedy career,” Axelrod said later, “was done with this enormous handicap: not being allowed to have any sex. I was trying to write these so-called sex comedies in the fifties when we had to deal with the Breen Office.”

A WAY TO WINK

Axelrod and Wilder put the script aside, and Billy got to work on another movie, a romantic comedy that would eventually be called
Sabrina
. Joining him were writers Ernest Lehman and Samuel Taylor, author of
Sabrina Fair,
the play they were adapting. They all worked long, unrelenting hours, and as they progressed, they found they hadn't progressed at all. Dissatisfied with Wilder's changes to his play, Taylor quit, leaving Lehman and Wilder alone together. Bad idea. Wilder, cranky on a good day, was having back problems that made him exasperating company. Lehman, a fragile fellow to begin with, was pushed to the brink, and teetered on the precipice of a full-blown nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, there were major script problems; namely, the issue of sex as it related to Sabrina,
who was to be played by the very chaste-seeming Audrey Hepburn. Wilder and Lehman went back and forth for months. Would she be having sex? Could she, under the regulations of the Production Code? If so, how would they show it?

With preproduction under way in the summer of 1953, they still didn't have an answer.

But Billy Wilder kept thinking. There must be a way to wink, a way to show without telling, to imply. If Sabrina Fairchild was going to make a truly credible transformation from regular Long Island girl to Parisian sophisticate—in other words, from purity to sexuality—she was going to have to have the clothing to show for it. She would need an evocative costume change. The censors couldn't get them for that, could they? Not if it was all done in the name of European good taste and elegance. Why, of course! They'd get an authentic Parisian designer to design Sabrina's authentic Parisian couture.

That's when the trouble began for Edith Head.

DOES EDITH HEAD GIVE GOOD COSTUME?

The news about the Parisian designer for
Sabrina
would have been shocking to Edith Head under any circumstances, but in light of her most recent Oscar for
Roman Holiday,
it was downright perverse. Didn't they know who they were dealing with? After Marilyn, Susan Hayward, and the other top stars, Ms. Head was undoubtedly the most powerful woman in town. They couldn't look their best without her.

Edith stayed up all night, got up early, and walked fast. She didn't like to wait, and she didn't like to keep anyone waiting.

“Good morning, Miss Head.”

“Morning.”

They all knew her. Joan Crawford wouldn't buy a pair of socks unless she cleared them. Bette Davis insisted on her for
All About Eve,
and Barbara Stanwyck flat out loved her. The whole town thought they were, well,
you know,
but that's what they said about every tough girl in pictures. Either she was frigid or she liked women. But Ms. Head was neither; she was just resilient, like a cockroach.

If they asked, she wore dark glasses, even inside, because she wanted to fade into the background, to give the actresses center stage in their fittings. But the truth was Edith was after inscrutability. There was mystique that way, and more power.

She had been costuming at Paramount since the 1920s, and as long as they kept renewing her contract, that's where she'd die. One day, she'd just keel over on her drafting board and they'd carry her over to the cemetery behind the lot and drop her in. But that would mean she'd have to take the night off.

Without her, they all knew Veronica Lake's neck would look too thin, Loretta Young's too long, and Claudette Colbert's too short. That's why they came to Edith—a single stitch, and she erased all the wrongs. And that's how she got her Academy Awards:
Roman Holiday
was her eighth nomination and fifth win.

She had worked especially hard on
Roman Holiday,
and ingeniously, camouflaging Audrey's many physical irregularities. The list of alterations seemed to go on forever: Edith broadened Audrey's shoulders wide enough to frame her face, she disguised Audrey's spindly neck with jewels and scarves whenever possible, she decided against sleeveless blouses for the
sake of Audrey's too-frail arms, and she selected an especially long dress to keep Audrey's gangly legs from the camera. Because it directed one's eye away from Audrey's problematic torso, the full skirt Edith designed helped a great deal to restore equanimity to the rest of the girl's frame, and with the slimmer belts Edith made especially, she could downplay Audrey's awkward waistline (the slimmest, she said, since the Civil War). Audrey, however, wanted thicker belts, and Ms. Head, despite her misgivings, dutifully consented.

Of course, if it were up to Edith, they would all be Grace Kellys. “She was Miss Head's favorite to dress,” said Rita Riggs, Head's former apprentice, “because she was the perfect 1950s beauty. She had the perfect waist, the perfect plucked eyebrows, and she fell right into the mold, the mold Audrey bluntly refused.”
Quel chassis:
not an architectural defect in sight.

Where other more exploitative designers would have seized upon Audrey's runway-friendly figure to showcase his or her own talents, Edith congratulated herself for doing what was right for the character. She was a costumer, after all, not a fashion designer. As always, there was shrewd reasoning to this: the more stylized an item of clothing, the faster it would date, and for Edith, who feared (rightfully) the day when her work would no longer be relevant in Hollywood, that was tantamount to the pink slip. Personal vision? Artistic innovation? Please. She knew pictures didn't need any more showmen—that's what the stars were for. What pictures needed were swift seamstresses who could touch up a hem between takes forty-three and forty-four at two in the morning after the director has walked off the set and everyone—including them—has been fired. Trends were for the kids.

So Wilder wanted them to buy what they could have had Edith make for free. It wasn't very nice, but then again, even Edith had to admit there was something of a precedent for shopping out of house. Just three years prior, Christian Dior had been commissioned to costume Marlene Dietrich for Hitchcock's
Stage Fright
. But because they were shooting in Europe and the designer was conveniently at hand, it made financial sense to Warner Bros. and it made their beloved Dietrich very happy. But the business with Audrey on
Sabrina
was another thing entirely; not only was she far from Dietrich in stature, but Wilder's production was based on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. That made Edith Head the obvious, fiscally reasonable choice.

Still, Wilder was convinced she was the wrong person for the job. If she was going to make the transformation convincing, Sabrina needed more than a knockoff. She needed a French fairy godmother. Or father.

THE MEMO

The timing couldn't have been better. If Audrey's schedule had her in Paris that summer, then what if she, not the studio, did the shopping and the shipping? Wilder posed the question to those who wrote the checks. Frank Caffey, Paramount's studio manager, was one such person. His memo to Russell Holman, a lawyer in Paramount's New York office, was the first in a detailed correspondence about exactly how, when, and where Audrey Hepburn was to shop for
Sabrina
. It begins the story of her evolution from movie star to fashion icon—a story that culminates seven years later with a little black dress. Caffey wrote:

Richard Mealand (who spotted Audrey in
Laughter in Paradise
years earlier) received the instructions, and added, “I suggest now, in view of Caffey's letter, that we ask Gladys de Segonzac [wife of Paramount's Paris head] to make some selections and let Audrey approve them and pick them up in
Paris…. Meanwhile, I can advise Gladys as to what's wanted and she can have adequate time, after the fashion openings, to find the right things, prepare sketches and send samples both to Audrey and Edith Head.” Holman saw the advantage to that. “Gladys de Segonzac,” he agreed, “being in the Paris couture business, knows clothes better than Hepburn.” Caffey took it from there: