Audrey Hepburn (12 page)

The Hanson family's transport business, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, had thrived for a hundred years. But in 1948, the Labour government nationalized all railways, airlines, trucking and shipping companies, and Hanson found himself out of a job. At that point, he bought a trucking firm in Canada, shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic thereafter.
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During that time, he did not neglect romance, as one of the all-time authorities on that subject—Zsa Zsa Gabor—confirms:

“Audrey and I started together in London. She was a beautiful Dutch girl, engaged to James Hanson. I was making my first movie,
Moulin Rouge.
His partner Gordon White was chasing me, and Jimmy was chasing her. They were
dahling-such
a handsome couple. Jimmy was not only rich, but charming.”
⁴⁴

Audrey thought so, too. “Jimmy,” for his part, observed his girl closely and remembers her as “not particularly strong” but largely recovered from her postwar debility. He debunks the claims that she suffered from any kind of anorexia at the time.

“She had dancer's legs and a dancer's upper body, which is often wasted because of the perspiration from all that practicing,” says Hanson. “I would have thought that she might have difficulty with her health in the future. But she was an extremely healthy young girl then, apart from the fact that like many dancers, she looked as if she should be built up a bit. Yet she ate well and enjoyed her food. She could eat like a horse! Any problem that developed certainly wasn't evident then.”

One evident problem, however, was her mother. Though impressed with Hanson's social and financial status, Ella was reportedly horrified at the thought of Audrey's marriage and exile to the Yorkshire boondocks, just when her career was at the takeoff point. Such, at least, was the story repeated in most later books and articles about Audrey—but quite untrue.

“I liked Ella very much,” Hanson insists. “It was certainly not true that my relationship with her was poor. She was always very encouraging about me with Audrey. She felt the age difference—about six years—was right and that somebody in a solid business was right for somebody on the artistic side. She would be marrying somebody with his feet on the ground, not in show business, with all its uncertainties. We talked about it many times. We'd already worked that out: Audrey was going to make one movie a year with the option to do a play whenever she wanted to—pretty much the pattern Audrey followed anyway. That was partially because she wanted to have a life also as my wife.

“We were a very happy ‘family' in the two years we were together. I spent a good deal of time with Ella. She thought we were well suited. She had no reservations about my being in business and Audrey being an actress. Ella was not fond of show business people. I did a lot for her, as I would a future mother-in-law. I tried to develop a relationship, and it worked.”
⁴⁵

Audrey often described her mother as “a lady of very strict Victorian standards.” But Dutch Victorian was different from British Victorian, and on the subject of sex, at least, her liberal attitude astonished Hanson a year or so later in Rome.

“I must have been twenty-nine or thirty at the time,” he recalls. “It was the first time in my life I had ever slept in the same bed as my fiancée—with her mother bringing the breakfast in. That was something I had never experienced. There was always a rather furtive dashing back to your room. But Ella was completely different. I remember her bringing the breakfast into that room. She was a very earthy woman.”

 

 

AUDREY'S FILM ROLES to date were small, and so were the films. Now, for the first time, she was about to play a major supporting role in a major movie by a major British filmmaker.

Director Thorold Dickinson had seen “the girl with the eyes” in Sauce
Piquante
and tucked her away in his mind. A former supervising editor at Ealing Studios, he was a significant figure in British cinema. His brilliant
Gaslight
(1940) was made four years before the Ingrid Bergman version and was far better. His most recent picture,
Queen of Spades
(1949), was a tour de force for Edith Evans and both a critical and commercial success.

Dickinson and producer Sidney Cole were now readying
Secret People,
a downbeat melodrama of prewar political intrigue. It was the furthest thing in the world from ABC's fluffy comedies. The screenplay, written by Dickinson and novelist Joyce Cary
(The Horse's Mouth),
was the tale of Maria Brent, living in London in 1937 with her little sister Nora—a very young and very beautiful ballet student. They are exiles from an unnamed foreign country, where their pacifist father is murdered. Maria abandons his ideals and turns violent revolutionary—but with deep guilt and a desperate desire to protect the innocent Nora.

Secret People's
broad, political scope was the talk of British film circles—so much so that a young film intern decided to chronicle it from start to finish. The result was a full-length book,
Making a Film: The Story of “Secret People
, ”by Lindsay Anderson, who would become an important director himself in the sixties. Anderson's behind-the-scenes account makes it clear that casting went down to the wire. Both Maria and her radical boyfriend Louis had to have believable accents, but the budget ruled out the major English-speaking Europeans in Hollywood.

The eventual choices were two talented but little-known Italians, Valentina Cortesa and Serge Reggiani—a Paul Muni lookalike. But the perfect Nora still eluded them. “An actress would have to be found who could dance, or a dancer who could act,” said Anderson, whose journal for October 30, 1950, reads:

On November 10, the cameras turned for the first time on
Secret People—
still without a Nora, even as composer Roberto Gerhard finished the elaborate ballet music to which Nora would dance in the most violent, climactic scene. In all his films, said Dickinson, he liked to have at least one sequence “of pure and unmistakable cinema,” and Nora's ballet was going to be it.

Various candidates for Nora had been rejected. Valentina Cortesa was now responsible for the breakthrough.

“There were four girls that did the test,” says Cortesa today, “and I saw at the barre this beautiful little thing, like a little deer, with this long neck and those big eyes. She looks at me and says, ‘Do you think I have a chance?' I was so touched that I went to the director and said, ‘Listen, if you really love me, I would like to have as the sister that little girl.' They said, ‘We were going to look at some others.' I said, ‘No, I beg you—I want her.”'
⁴⁶
In the follow-up test, Cortesa further assisted by suggesting Audrey remove her shoes and by playing the scene herself on tiptoe, to minimize their height difference.

Hepburn got the role of Nora on February 26, 1951, and art imitated life in almost all of her scenes. She's the ingenue of ingenues, a gay wisp of a girl always rushing to or from an audition. Her barre exercises are those of her Rambert days, her dance form is marvelous, and her dialogue with Charles Goldner (as Anselmo, the landlord) might have been taken from her life:

The big challenge, aside from nine grueling days filming the ballet sequence, was her greatest dramatic moment in the film—in fact, the first tragic scene she had ever played: an emotional encounter with her sister after a terrorist bomb produces mayhem and death at the party where Nora has just finished dancing. The scene and its graphic dialogue unnerved her, bringing back nightmares from Arnhem. “I just can't seem to say it,” she told Dickinson. “Don't bother about how you're going to say it,” he advised. “Just think of the experience that lies behind the words. During the war, perhaps you saw something like that.... Get the feeling right, and the words will look after themselves.”

While the stand-ins were being lit, Audrey went off by herself to a corner. “By the time we come to the take,” wrote Anderson, “the words have become spontaneous and heartfelt and tears come naturally to her eyes.”

With Valentina Cortesa, Audrey developed a warm, big-and-little sister relationship off the set as well as on. “We used to go out in London at night, all dressed up,” Cortesa recalls. “Once we went to a very chic restaurant and both of us smoked a cigar. Like little idiots, we smoked a cigar and laughed. Well, why not? I adored her.”
⁴⁷

But by mid-March, Cortesa was greatly agitated. For one thing, she was secretly pregnant by actor Richard Basehart, whose current visit to the set was creating much tension. (A few weeks later, they would marry.) Besides that, she was annoyed and besieged constantly by publicity requests. One day in the presence of Anderson and Hepburn, Cortesa unloaded:

“We must be allowed to have our own lives. In Hollywood it is terrible; they expect you to be their slave; you have to be ready to do anything for them, at any time, not just when you're making a picture.” She shuddered and turned to Audrey: “Think hard before you sign a long-term contract. Liberty is the most wonderful thing of all.”

At this embryonic stage, Audrey was thus alerted to the danger of overexposure and the contempt bred of familiarity. That very week she was booked for a photo session at South Downs, feeding ducks and paddling in the village pond, followed by some “breast skyline” pictures for a cover story in
Illustrated
—too much publicity before her “serious” work had even been seen by the public. “They'll get sick of it,” she fretted. “I'd much rather wait until I have [more] to show.”

By its final reel,
Secret People
becomes a metaphor for the Cold War. Maria, threatened by both sides (“You wouldn't want anything to happen to Nora, would you?”), breaks down and turns state's evidence. It is then Scotland Yard's turn to manipulate her until her final confrontation with Louis, in which she is stabbed to death and the sobbing Nora is led away.

The rough cut of
Secret People
ran almost two hours, twenty minutes of which were chopped before its premiere in November of 1951. Cortesa's underplayed performance was acclaimed, and photographer Gordon Dines praised for his moody, high-contrast lighting in the postwar neo-realist style. The film's gritty feel and restraint were remarked. But all in all, the critical response to
Secret People
did not fulfill Dickinson's hopes.

Variety called the script “hackneyed” but said Hepburn “combines beauty with skill” in the fine ballet scenes.
^48
l
Indeed, forty-five years later,
Secret People
provides our last glimpse of her as a young, working dancer.
⁴⁹

Though her part was small, Hepburn received above-the-title credit, just below Cortesa and Reggiani—“which reflected how pleased we were with her performance,” said producer Cole. Dickinson, convinced of her star potential, tried hard to persuade Ealing to sign her up, but in vain. She would soon go the way of Cary Grant, James Mason, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Boris Karloff, Deborah Kerr, David Niven and a host of others lost by England to Hollywood.
⁵⁰

But first, she would be temporarily lost to France.

 

 

IN THE MIDDLE of
Secret People
production, while she was still very much “an unknown,” Audrey's new agent Kenneth Harper went to director Terence Young in London and told him she was someone special and to be reckoned with.

“From the moment she came into my office, I realized he was right,” recalled Young, shortly before his death in 1994. “But she was the last person in the world I needed for the role of a tough Lapland woman in the wilds of Norway, who had to move around all day on skis. I told her she was completely wrong for the picture
[Valley of the Eagles]
and said, ‘I bet you can't even ski.' Her reply was, ‘But I can learn.' She was utterly enchanting and she stayed on in my office talking for half an hour. I told her I'd certainly remember her for something else. I even added that I thought she was going to make it, and I hoped one day
she
would remember
me,
and get me to direct.”
^51
m

Around the same time, writer-editor Alfred Shaughnessy—later a cocreator of the
Upstairs, Downstairs
PBS-TV series—suggested her for a comedy film called
Brandy for
the Parson. Shaughnessy gave her a copy of the screenplay, which she soon returned with a mischievous smile. “Lovely,” she said, “but I couldn't play Scene 42. The censor wouldn't allow it.” He grabbed his “thoroughly wholesome” script, turned to Scene 42 and read: “Petronilla is awake, dressed in Bill's pyjamas.
She is peeing out of the porthole.
”
⁵²
A crucial “r” had been omitted.

In April, while still filming
Secret People,
Audrey had received a call from Harper saying he had an offer for her to play in a film with bandleader Ray Ventura, who was also its producer. The part was small but the money was good, she would get to wear a Dior dress, and—best of all—the picture would be shot in Monte Carlo, which meant a month in the sun.