Audrey Hepburn (10 page)
Authors: Barry Paris
One who disagreed from firsthand experience was her fellow dancer Ronald Hynde, who had come to the Rambert studio the previous year at age fifteen: “She was this very pretty, strange Dutch girl who suddenly arrived at the Rambert schoolâslight accent, beautiful face, everyone's idea of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but with something different about her. I used to partner her in exercises, and she had a tiny waist. She was tallish, but one was never aware he was behind a giant when supporting her.”
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But Audrey thought otherwise. And to her real or imagined problem of height was added one of weight. In London, she said, “I went on an eating binge. I would eat anything in sight and in any quantity. I'd empty out a jam jar with a spoon. I was crazy about everything I could lay my hands on when the food started appearing. I became quite tubby and put on twenty pounds.”
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Some remembered her then as a “balloonlike teenager” who, with the determination that became her trademark, acquired a gazelle-like frame in two months. Soon enoughâtoo soon and more than enoughâshe lost thirty pounds by ruthlessly eliminating all starches and sweets from her diet. “You have to look at yourself objectively,” she would say, “as if you were some kind of tool, and then decide exactly what you must do.”
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Her assessment of her own tools was severe. She made few new friends and concentrated totally on dance until the need for money led her to moonlight, on weekends and holidays, as a model for several commercial photographers who were beguiled by her unique, pixieish face. One of them snapped that face and put it in a thousand British drugstores, advertising the benefits of Lacto-Calamine complexion lotion.
These initial forays into English modeling reinforced her awareness of fashion and lifelong resolveâif not compulsionâto find the designs and colors that showed her to best advantage. Black and white and muted colors such as beige and pink “tend to make my eyes and hair seem darker,” she felt, “whereas bright colors overpower me and wash me out.” Low-heeled shoes, to deemphasize her height, were always a must.
Many other aspiring performers, men as well as women, were dabbling in fashion photography then. One of them was the future James Bond, Roger Moore, whom Audrey enlisted in her UNICEF work four decades later: “We modeled together about 455 years ago in London,” Moore would say, “when Audrey was very young and I was middle-aged in the late forties.”
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A job was a job. Anything to pick up a few extra pounds.
AUDREY AT TWENTY had the increasingly sinking feeling that she was not destined to become a solo ballerina. Aside from the other issues, she still needed five more years of training even to qualify for a corps de ballet position. “I couldn't afford to put in all those years to end up earning five pounds a week, which was the going rate then,” she said.
Rambert now told her, gently but firmly, that she had neither the physique nor the talent to make it as a classical dancer. Yet soon after, when a recruiter from a government-sponsored company visited Rambert's studio in search of dancers for a South American tour, Audrey was offered a position. She might have viewed that as evidence that Rambert 's verdict was wrong. She was badly in need of money. But Audrey declined the tour, with her customary realism, and pondered the alternatives.
A dancers' casting call had just been announced for the London version of High
Button Shoes,
the American hit musical with Jule Styne music and Jerome Robbins choreography to be recreated intact by British producer Archie Thomson. Highlight of the show was Robbins's comic “Mack Sennett Ballet,” a Keystone Kops chase in black-and-white makeup, simulating a silent movie, that called for unusual virtuosity on the part of the dancers.
Button Shoes,
the American hit musical with Jule Styne music and Jerome Robbins choreography to be recreated intact by British producer Archie Thomson. Highlight of the show was Robbins's comic “Mack Sennett Ballet,” a Keystone Kops chase in black-and-white makeup, simulating a silent movie, that called for unusual virtuosity on the part of the dancers.
Audrey was one of a
thousand
who tried out for the chorus line andâto her own amazementâone of ten who got the job, at eight pounds ten shillings ($35) a week. Her fellow bathing beauties included sixteen-year-old Alma Cogan, the future “Miss Show Business” of England, and Kay Kendall, the future wife of Rex Harrisonâboth of whom she would befriend, and both of whom would die of cancer in their early thirties. “I was stiff as a poker as a jazz dancer,” she said, “always off beat on the simplest syncopation.... Going into a musical was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
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thousand
who tried out for the chorus line andâto her own amazementâone of ten who got the job, at eight pounds ten shillings ($35) a week. Her fellow bathing beauties included sixteen-year-old Alma Cogan, the future “Miss Show Business” of England, and Kay Kendall, the future wife of Rex Harrisonâboth of whom she would befriend, and both of whom would die of cancer in their early thirties. “I was stiff as a poker as a jazz dancer,” she said, “always off beat on the simplest syncopation.... Going into a musical was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
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The show opened at London's Hippodrome on December 22, 1948, for a 291-performance run. Audrey never forgot her one and only lineâthe first she ever spoke on a professional stage:
“Lou Parker, the star, stood in the middle and I went tearing across holding another girl by her hand and said, âHave they all gone?' Believe me, I was nervous every single night. I used to repeat it to myself over and over before going on.”
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The show's featured male dancer was Nickolas Dana, who today recalls the beautiful seventeen-minute pas de deux, choreographed by Robbins for Dana and a girl who often missed rehearsal and required a stand-in:
“Once the boy picked up the girl, she didn't touch the floor until the end of it. Just gorgeous. Audrey was the prettiest girl in the show, and one day I asked her to try it and she went up like a feather. I recommended she be the understudy and from then on, she was. I thought she was a beautiful dancer.”
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Dana also has a vivid recollection of Audrey's offstage wardrobe at the time: “She had one skirt, one blouse, one pair of shoes, and a beret, but she had fourteen scarves. What she did with them week by week, you wouldn't believe. She'd wear the little beret on the back of her head, on one side, on the other sideâor fold it in two and make it look very strange. She had the gift, the flair of how to dress.”
Dana's agents, Dorothy McAusland and Olive Bridges, were always on the lookout for new talent, and when Dana told them about Audrey, “They came to see the show and called me a couple days later and said, âThere's not very much talent. She's a nice little dancer, but nothing spectacular.'”
Talent was in the eye of the beholder, of course, and perhaps also in the beholder's gender. In early 1949, London impresario Cecil Landeau came to see
High Button Shoes
and left thinking that nice little dancer worth capturing. Nobody liked the overbearing Landeau, but he was powerful in the West End and currently preparing a lavish new revue of Ziegfeld proportions.
High Button Shoes
and left thinking that nice little dancer worth capturing. Nobody liked the overbearing Landeau, but he was powerful in the West End and currently preparing a lavish new revue of Ziegfeld proportions.
Sauce
Tartare
was a song-and-dance extravaganza with twenty-seven comic sketches and musical episodes satirizing different nationalities in a mock travelogue. Landeau claimed to have travelled 14,000 miles to find the perfect international cast. His coup was singer Muriel Smith, the black American star of Broadway's
Carmen Jones.
The British members of cast were top-notch, too: Renee Houston, Jack Melford, Audrey's friend Alma Coganâand Audrey herself among the five chorus hoofers.
Tartare
was a song-and-dance extravaganza with twenty-seven comic sketches and musical episodes satirizing different nationalities in a mock travelogue. Landeau claimed to have travelled 14,000 miles to find the perfect international cast. His coup was singer Muriel Smith, the black American star of Broadway's
Carmen Jones.
The British members of cast were top-notch, too: Renee Houston, Jack Melford, Audrey's friend Alma Coganâand Audrey herself among the five chorus hoofers.
Produced and directed by Landeau,
Sauce Tartare
opened to raves on May 18, 1949, and enjoyed a healthy run of 433 performances at the Cambridge Theatre. Even before that sauce grew cold, Landeau was stirring up a fresh one, Sauce
Piquante,
which likewise opened at the Cambridge, on April 27, 1950, and likewise starred Muriel Smith. This time the cast was mostly British and included some of the country's hottest entertainers. Chief among them was female impersonator Douglas Byng, whose rendition of “I'm One of the Queens of England” always brought down the house. Moira Lister did a riotously funny burlesque of Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Sauce Tartare
opened to raves on May 18, 1949, and enjoyed a healthy run of 433 performances at the Cambridge Theatre. Even before that sauce grew cold, Landeau was stirring up a fresh one, Sauce
Piquante,
which likewise opened at the Cambridge, on April 27, 1950, and likewise starred Muriel Smith. This time the cast was mostly British and included some of the country's hottest entertainers. Chief among them was female impersonator Douglas Byng, whose rendition of “I'm One of the Queens of England” always brought down the house. Moira Lister did a riotously funny burlesque of Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Audrey was back, tooâwith bigger bits and bigger paycheck, raised by Landeau to a downright affluent fifteen pounds a week. One of her jobs was to walk across the stage in a skimpy French-maid outfit, holding up the title card for each new skit. Though she was cast primarily as a dancer, Landeau upgraded her role and she figured in several comedy sketches, much to the annoyance of her peers.
“I can't stand it!” complained the big-busted dancer Aud Johanssen. “I've got the best tits on stage, and yet they're all staring at a girl who hasn't got
any.
»
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any.
»
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One of the show's most popular performers was Bob Monkhouse, soon to become the BBC's first contract comedian and later a writer for Bob Hope and Jack Benny. Monkhouse and Hepburn became friends, though he disagreed with Nick Dana's assessment of her dance skill, as he told biographer Ian Woodward:
The standard of dancing in
Sauce Piquante
was ... superior, but Audrey's was the poorest.... If she'd been a good dancer, the other girls would not have minded so much.... They all loved her offstage, but hated her on, because they knew that even if she jumped up and down, the audience would still be attracted to her. What Audrey had in
Sauce Piquante,
and what has sustained her through [her] career, was an enormous, exaggerated feeling of “I'm helplessâI need you.” When people sense this, they respond to it immediately, perhaps not realising why they're doing so. Audrey had it in abundance.... Everybody in the audience thought, “I want to look after little Audrey.” She seemed to be too pretty, too unaware of the dangers.
Sauce Piquante
was ... superior, but Audrey's was the poorest.... If she'd been a good dancer, the other girls would not have minded so much.... They all loved her offstage, but hated her on, because they knew that even if she jumped up and down, the audience would still be attracted to her. What Audrey had in
Sauce Piquante,
and what has sustained her through [her] career, was an enormous, exaggerated feeling of “I'm helplessâI need you.” When people sense this, they respond to it immediately, perhaps not realising why they're doing so. Audrey had it in abundance.... Everybody in the audience thought, “I want to look after little Audrey.” She seemed to be too pretty, too unaware of the dangers.
It was quite extraordinary. [That] impish grin seemed to go from one ear-hole to the other. She looked incredibly radiant because, at that time, it was uncontrolled. The lips actually turned inside-out and the eyes went sort of potty, like a Walt Disney character. It was so lovely, one stepped back a pace. She later learned to tone it down a bit.
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Monkhouse remembered that during their first conversation, in rehearsals, she had said: “I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!” Animals were a running theme. One night during the run, when Muriel Smith showed up with a bedraggled cat she had just rescued off the street, Audrey immediately adopted the thing.
“We called the cat Tomorrow, at Audrey's suggestion,” says Monkhouse. “It was rather a rude joke, stemming from the fact that [it was] a male cat that had been castrated, and you know what they say about tomorrow never coming.”
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But for the most part, she tended to keep her distance from the other performers, and the insecurity they perceived in her was real. “In musicals,” she said, “I was the tense, rigid girl trained for ballet who had to watch everyone else to find out what to do.”
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Nobody was quite sure if she was a dancer, an actress or a modelâincluding Audrey herself.
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Nobody was quite sure if she was a dancer, an actress or a modelâincluding Audrey herself.
Fashion photographer Anthony Beauchamp had seen and admired her in the first of the
Sauces
at a time when the magazines he worked for were looking for “a new face.” He went backstage after the show and asked to photograph her. She said she was flattered but couldn't afford his fee. Beauchamp assured her there would be no charge. “I kept looking again and again at the startling eyes which were never still,” he said. When his pictures appeared in British
Vogue,
her unusual wide-eyed “look” produced a nice stirâand another modeling job with British press agents Frederic Mullally and Suzanne Warner.
Sauces
at a time when the magazines he worked for were looking for “a new face.” He went backstage after the show and asked to photograph her. She said she was flattered but couldn't afford his fee. Beauchamp assured her there would be no charge. “I kept looking again and again at the startling eyes which were never still,” he said. When his pictures appeared in British
Vogue,
her unusual wide-eyed “look” produced a nice stirâand another modeling job with British press agents Frederic Mullally and Suzanne Warner.
“The sweater was doing nothing for Audrey,” said Warner, “and Audrey was doing near as nothing for the sweater.” Invoking the eleventh commandment of fashion (“What God's forgotten, we stuff with cotton”), they coaxed her into shooting in falsies. Others might speak of her “splendid emaciation,” but she didn't find it so splendid. “I'd like to be not so flat-chested,” she said. “I was too thin and I had no bosom to speak of. Add [it] up, and a girl can feel terribly self-conscious.”
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There was no reason to feel that way in the opinion of Marcel le Bon, a handsome young French crooner who had several featured spots in
Sauce Piquante
and dreamed of becoming the next Maurice Chevalier. Early in the production, he and Audrey began dating and fell madly, if briefly, in love. By the final weeks of the show's run, le Bon was leaving roses in her dressing room nightly and had become the first serious boyfriend of her life. Backstage gossip was much livened by rumors of a marriage.
Sauce Piquante
and dreamed of becoming the next Maurice Chevalier. Early in the production, he and Audrey began dating and fell madly, if briefly, in love. By the final weeks of the show's run, le Bon was leaving roses in her dressing room nightly and had become the first serious boyfriend of her life. Backstage gossip was much livened by rumors of a marriage.
When Landeau heard of it, he was furious, claiming to have inserted a “no-marriage” clause in Audrey's contract. Reports that he was threatening to sue her if she married le Bon appeared in the tabloids. She also had to endure the wrath of her mother, who believed Marcel was plotting to cash in on Audrey's greater talent.
In fact, le Bon was more her pal than her paramour, but it didn't seem so at the time. Landeau's testy mood was related to the fact that his show was sinking, despite good notices, and would soon closeâin June 1950âafter just sixty-seven performances. He lost 20,000 pounds and found himself in bankruptcy court. For the moment, he was staving off that disaster by cannibalizing some sketches from
Sauce Piquante
into a shorter revue called
Summer Nights
for Ciro's, one of the most chic nightclubs in London. Moonlighting there was financially welcome but exhausting, Audrey later told Dominick Dunne:
Sauce Piquante
into a shorter revue called
Summer Nights
for Ciro's, one of the most chic nightclubs in London. Moonlighting there was financially welcome but exhausting, Audrey later told Dominick Dunne:
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