Audrey Hepburn (14 page)

“I didn't hear anybody say ‘Cut!'” she said. “Only one man here has the right to say ‘Cut' [and] I won't move until I hear him.”

“Cut!” said Dickinson. But the camera kept rolling as Audrey sat up in her royal bed, stretched sexily, clasped her hands around her knees, smiled and asked how she'd done.

Lionel Murton, who played the Gregory Peck part for the purposes of the audition, was also smiling. “This little doe-eyed charmer is a very smart cookie,” he thought to himself. “She knows perfectly well that the camera is still running—and is giving it the works.”

The test results were flown to Rome, where Wyler found them irresistible: “First, she played the scene from the script, then you heard someone yell ‘Cut!' but the take continued. She jumped up in bed and asked, ‘How was it? Was I any good?' She saw that everybody was so quiet and the lights were still on. Suddenly, she realized the camera was still running and we got that reaction, too.... She had everything I was looking for—charm, innocence and talent. She also was very funny. She was absolutely enchanting, and we said, ‘That's the girl!'”
⁶⁷

The studio fired off a cable to Mealand: “Exercise the option on this lady. The test is certainly one of the best ever made in Hollywood, New York or London.” Even Don Hartman, Paramount's tough-as-nails production chief, was impressed: “We were fascinated,” he said. “It's no credit to anyone that we signed her immediately.”
⁶⁸
Mealand now received a routine follow-up telegram: “Ask Hepburn if okay [to] change her last name to avoid conflict [with] Katharine Hepburn.” The answer was not routine: Audrey politely but emphatically refused; if Paramount wanted her, they'd have to take her name, too.
ⁿ

“I tried to explain to all of them that I wasn't ready to do a lead,” said Audrey,“but they didn't agree, and I certainly wasn't going to argue with them.”
⁶⁹

For Gigi, she would be getting $500 a week, from which she would have to pay her own living expenses in New York. The Roman Holiday offer was $12,500 with an option for a second picture at $25,000. Paramount wanted a seven-year contract, but she balked at such length and—with a little help from her fiancé—negotiated a shrewder deal. James Hanson is modest about it. “The only contribution I made,” he says, was to help her get around her long-term obligations to ABC. As an old friend of Jack Dunfee and Lew Wasserman of MCA, “I was able to put in my two cents' worth to improve on her contract with Paramount.”

The final result was a two-year movie deal with a clause allowing her to act in stage plays as well. With Hanson's help, she also fought and won the battle with Paramount for permission to do television work, too, if and when she chose.

“Heaven help me live up to all this,” she wrote Richard Mealand in London.
⁷⁰

So she was in—signed up to do
Roman Holiday
after the run of
Gigi,
regardless of how long that might be. It was a big risk for Paramount. The play could have run for years, and Gregory Peck had been signed only for a very narrow window of shooting time the following summer of 1952. Cautiously, in view of those uncertainties, the studio decided to hold off a bit on announcing her contract. Everything now depended on
Gigi:
if it worked, Paramount would have a star; if it flopped, they'd have an unknown London failure on their hands.
⁷¹

The pressure was on, personally and professionally.
Gigi
rehearsals began in October 1951. In late September, Gilbert Miller sent her a first-class ticket on the
Queen Mary.
For the first time on any momentous occasion in her life, her mother would not be with her: Ella couldn't leave her apartment manager's job in London. James Hanson, kind as always, promised to fly both Ella and himself to New York for
Gigi's
opening.

The press had the Hanson-Hepburn relationship thoroughly confused at this point: One magazine, for example, in a big feature called “Audrey, the New Hepburn,” ran their photos with the caption: “They were married last month.” For that matter, Hanson himself was a bit confused. Throughout all her amazing career breaks of the last eighteen months, their mutual affection remained strong—if anything, it had grown stronger. He'd been supportive in every way, and Audrey had been grateful and reliant on his support. But she seemed less willing than ever to fix a firm wedding date, and though they never argued about it, Hanson was privately upset at the ongoing delay.

Audrey was upset, too, but not about that. During the leisurely eighteen-day crossing to America—her first and last such leisure for many years—it crossed her mind that, at twenty-two, she was the first girl signed simultaneously to star in a Broadway play and a Hollywood film without ever having set foot in either place—and with virtually no experience in either medium.

CHAPTER 3

“I think sex is overrated.”

—AUDREY HEPBURN

 

 

 

I
N THE WEE HOURS OF OCTOBER 3, 1951, BROADWAY PUBLICIST Arthur Cantor dispatched an “Urgent” release to the New York newspapers and wire services: “New British actress named Hepburn arriving this morning at Pier 90 to appear in Broadway play. She is a great find. Suggest you send reporters and photographers.”

The response was much like that which greeted Greta Garbo at the same location in 1925. “Without benefit of telepathy,” wrote Martin Abramson for
Cosmopolitan,
“every editor who received the communique impaled it on a spike reserved to useless trivia, and Miss Hepburn arrived in New York harbor to be greeted by a crashing yawn. The anxious Mr. Cantor scurried around the dock, found one ship-news reporter with time on his hands, and begged him to ask the new arrival a few questions. ‘Nah,' the reporter told him. ‘I'd rather go have a cup of coffee.”'
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Morton Gottlieb, general manager of the
Gigi
company, was the only other person there, and
even he
went grudgingly:

“I had to get up at six in the morning to make the boat and I'd been working most of the night. I was bleary-eyed. I had a splitting headache, the weather was nasty.... Even Lady Godiva on her horse would have made a negative impression on me. Yet when I saw this girl standing on the dock, tired out from her trip, wearing only a plain two-piece suit, I said to myself, ‘Ye gods, this is Garbo, this is Bergman!'”
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Audrey recalled that “the first thing I saw when I came to America was the Statue of Liberty. The second—Richard Avedon.” She was stretching the facts, but only by a little. Gottlieb took her straight from the dock to a photo studio where, “before I knew it, I was in front of Avedon's cameras, lights flashing, music going, Richard snapping away a mile a minute, darting from one angle to the other like a hummingbird, everywhere at once, weaving his spell.”
³
Avedon was then working for
Bazaar,
which wanted first crack at any new and noteworthy face.

From Avedon, she was taken to modest accommodations ($125 a week) at the Blackstone Hotel on East Fifty-eighth Street and given just enough time to check in and change clothes before being whisked off to a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, where she cheered happily in complete ignorance of what was going on.
⁴

She got a restrained reception the next day in Gilbert Miller's lavish Rockefeller Center suite, where the producer was not pleased to find her appearance changed from London.

She had gained fifteen pounds on the ship and when Miller saw her, “He was appalled,” said Anita Loos. “He had engaged a sprite who had suddenly turned into a dumpling. Gilbert, as a gourmand, couldn't believe that his Gigi could ever get down to weight. Rehearsals began, with Gilbert regarding his ingenue's weight with a skeptical eye. But Mortie [Gottlieb] put her on a diet of steak tartare at Dinty Moore's, next door to our Forty-sixth Street theater. Her pounds slowly began to melt.”
⁵

Not so slowly, in fact. She shed all fifteen pounds in two weeks, and was soon looking emaciated. Miller now wanted the pendulum to swing back, and called in his wife Kitty for help: “I want you to come over and watch a rehearsal with little Audrey,” he told her. “She seems to conk out in the afternoon.” Kitty went, watched and then took her by the hand, saying, “You're going to have a good square meal and don't let me hear any of this dieting nonsense! How about a fat, juicy steak?”
⁶

Audrey never tried—or needed—to lose weight again.

Miller had his thin Gigi back, but still no director. He wanted Raymond Rouleau, a forty-seven-year-old Belgian who had recently staged the successful French version of
A Streetcar Named Desire-but
who spoke no English. Loos volunteered a solution: If Miller could persuade Rouleau to come to America, she would facilitate by translating her adaptation into French. Loos, Hepburn, Cathleen Nesbitt and most of the rest of the
Gigi
cast were fluent in French. Rouleau agreed and was soon in New York.

As dramatized by Anita Loos—in both languages—Gigi is a two-act play set in the Paris of 1900. Gilberte—Gigi for short—is the gawky adolescent daughter of a mediocre soprano at the Opera Comique. They come from a long line of grandes cocottes, in whose footsteps Gigi is expected to follow. Luck has provided them with a new and fabulously wealthy young man-about-town to whom Gigi's grandmother Madame Alvarez (Josephine Brown), and Aunt Alicia (Cathleen Nesbitt) are the “consultant bawds.”
⁷
But high-spirited Gigi is more interested in her schoolwork, despite the relentless efforts of her grandma and aunt to interest her in the lucrative tricks of the cocotte trade:

All the “arrangements” are explained to her, but at the moment of truth, Gigi balks. The moral: It pays to say no.

The role wasn't simple. A subtle sophistication was required to portray innocence, and Hepburn lacked it. She tended to scamper about frantically, either shout or whisper her lines, and exhaust rather than pace herself. “She didn't have much idea of phrasing,” said Nesbitt. “She had no idea how to project, and she would come bounding onto the stage like a gazelle.”
⁹

After five days of rehearsals, said Gottlieb, “Miller fired her. By the next morning, he realized it was too late to replace her, so he gave her another chance, and then he fired her again a few days later. This went on up to opening night. Poor Audrey was on the verge of a nervous collapse. They were working her eighteen hours a day, sneaking into the theater at night because Gilbert didn't want to pay the union technicians overtime.”
^10
o

Years later, in a letter to biographer Charles Higham, Raymond Rouleau's widow attributed the problem to extracurricular activities, and the solution to her husband:

Perhaps so—but Rouleau had some crucial assistance from Cathleen Nesbitt, who was once again enlisted by Miller. The veteran Nesbitt, who first played New York in works by Shaw and Yeats in 1911, would celebrate her sixty-third birthday on
Gigi's
opening night. She agreed to take Audrey to her country place on weekends for additional coaching on vocal projection, among other things. Progress was rocky. Even with rehearsal audiences, Audrey kept pushing too hard. “I didn't get my laugh,” she would lament after a scene. “What did I do wrong?” But Nesbitt had confidence because “she had that rare thing—audience authority, the thing that makes everybody look at you when you are on stage.”
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