Audrey Hepburn (16 page)

Hanson's own internationalism was useful to Audrey. He introduced her to his lawyer Abraham Bienstock in New York, who helped improve upon her contract arrangements. He suggested that she avoid making films in England or the United States, if possible, in favor of other countries where the tax rates weren't nearly so high. When Audrey called him in Canada, much perplexed about the need to convert and merge her ABC option with the option Paramount had on her, Hanson rang up his friend Lew Wasserman in Beverly Hills and arranged to organize it along beneficial lines. From then on—long before she became one of his major clients—Wasserman took a personal interest in her.

“The only advice I was able to give her was financial,” says Hanson. “It was just a natural thing that, with my knowledge, I could do. By knowing the people that I did here and in the U.S., I was able to make personal contact for her with them. That possibly helped to advance her career in a very small way.”

Was there a plan for him to become her business manager?

“That was never the thought. Obviously, if you marry a successful businessman, it might come up. But I was careful not to interfere. I only planned to run my own career.”
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All was well, in Hanson's view, but a certain “if and when” hesitation was detectable in Audrey. “When I marry James, I want to give up at least a year to just being a wife to him,” she told her journalist friend Radie Harris. “James is being wonderfully understanding about it. He knows it would be impossible for me to give up my career completely. I just can't. I've worked too long to achieve something. And so many people have helped me along the way, I don't want to let them down.”
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An ominous report said she had removed the framed picture of Hanson from her dressing-table at the Fulton. Asked why, she replied, “So many people whom I hardly know asked me what was his name and when were we going to be married, that I simply had to put the picture into a drawer. My private life is my own.”
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Her professional life was not. Paramount was champing at the bit to get started on
Roman Holiday
and had given Miller a $50,000 incentive to release her from
Gigi
at the end of May, though she was still committed to do the road-show tour that fall. Thus on May 31—after a short but wildly successful run of 217 performances—
Gigi
closed in New York.

Shortly before, while
Gigi
was still on the boards, Hollywood costume czarina Edith Head met with Audrey for a preliminary discussion of her
Roman Holiday
wardrobe, and a warm friendship between them began. Head later told Charles Higham:

“She would laugh and curl up on the floor (which she always preferred to a chair) and tuck her legs under her like an adorable, naive, utterly innocent schoolgirl, and then she would say, with a sweetness that cut like a knife to the heart of the problem, ‘I don't think the princess [in Roman Holiday] would be quite so shrewd, Edith, darling, as to use that particular décolletage!' and I would think, ‘Oh, my God, if she doesn't get to the top I'll eat Hedda Hopper's hats.'”

Her personality dazzled or melted everyone. She could just as easily conduct a conversation with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as with visiting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. A friend summed it up: “It broke my heart. Just the look of that girl. It's one of those magic things.”
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SOMETHING WAS happening on a grander scale, and “the look of that girl” was making it happen. It had to do with the changing standards of beauty and with film and fashion overall, but perhaps most with the era itself.

“I remember the fifties as a time of renewal and of regained security,” Audrey would later write. “There was a rebirth of opportunity, vitality and enthusiasm ... a return to laughter and gaiety—the world was functioning again. Above all there was a wonderful quality of hope, born from relief and gratitude for those greatest of all luxuries—freedom and peace.”
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It was this brave new world that Audrey was somehow coming to epitomize, and in which she would set the pace. Nobody looked like her before the war, Cecil Beaton had written in
Vogue,
but now there were “thousands of imitations [and] the woods are full of emaciated young ladies with rat-nibbled hair and moon-pale faces.”
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When she was young, Audrey said later, “I wanted to be a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. I didn't do either.”
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Instead of some “cross,” Hepburn and her look were original. To embryonic feminist Molly Haskell, she was “alert, full of the ardor of an explorer, with nothing of the lassitude or languor of such voluptuous and earthbound sex goddesses as Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren or ... the overeager Monroe. The qualities that made her more desirable to us were precisely those that made her less desirable to masses of red-blooded American men.”
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More about those physical qualities and the fashion phenomenon they inspired later. For now, suffice to say that she was unique among her contemporaries in refusing to pose for cheesecake photos, and that her private view was both unusual and refreshingly simple. “I think sex is overrated,” she said.
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ROMAN HOLIDAY
would be shot entirely “around” Audrey. Filming was to begin in Italy in June 1952, after
Gigi
closed in New York. She and Hanson were to be married in the interlude, but as it turned out, there
was
no interlude, and the wedding had to be postponed. Paramount's schedule was so tight that she was required to go straight from the closing night of
Gigi
to Rome.

The film she was about to make was Cinderella in reverse. Some say it derived from an old Ferenc Molnar story. Others insist it was inspired by a telephoto-lens shot of Princess Margaret in a swimsuit on Capri. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, working under the pseudonym of “John Dighton,” with Ian McLellan Hunter.

Roman Holiday
was a bit reminiscent of Capra's
It Happened One Night,
with a big difference in tone: It was no screwball comedy of the thirties, but a sentimental escape of the fifties, unlike such other “realistic” new films as
A Place in the Sun.
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Director William Wyler's brilliant credits included
Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver
and
The Best Years of Our Lives.
Paramount had approved his request to make it on location for self-serving reasons : It could be financed with “frozen” lira earned in (but not removable from) Italy. For economy's sake, Wyler agreed to shoot
Roman Holiday
in black and white, “and by the time I'd realized my error it was too late to get enough color stock over to Italy,” he said.
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“He was the classiest filmmaker that ever lived,” says his friend Billy Wilder, who was determined not to cry during
Best Years of Our Lives
but did so throughout. “And I'm not a pushover. I laugh at Hamlet. There was a finesse in that guy that you would never expect, sitting across from him at a card table.”
^q

With
Roman Holiday,
Wyler first had to finesse Gregory Peck, a major star at thirty-six, thanks to his performances in
The Keys of the Kingdom
(1945),
The Yearling
(1946) and
Gentleman's Agreement
(1947)-all of which had earned him Oscar nominations.

“When he told me that an unknown girl, a little dancer from London, was going to play the princess, I said, ‘Well, Willy, no one has better judgment than you, but have you seen her on film?'” Peck recalls. “He said, ‘Let me show you something.'”
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Wyler showed Audrey's screen test to Peck, who had read the
Roman
Holiday script and realized now, more than ever, that “it was not going to be about me, it was about the princess.” On that basis, he rejected it. But Wyler knew just what button to push. “You surprise me, Greg,” he said. “If you didn't like the story, okay, but because somebody's part is a little better than yours, that's no reason to turn down a film. I didn't think you were the kind of actor who measures the size of the roles.“
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Peck capitulated. Moreover, he phoned his agent George Chasin to say, “The real star of this picture is Audrey Hepburn. [Tell] the studio I want Audrey Hepburn to be billed on the same line.”
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It was an unusually generous gesture, and the Paramount executives were initially much opposed. But soon enough, says Peck, “We all knew that this was going to be an important star and we began to talk off-camera about the chance that she might win an Academy Award in her first film.”
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Audrey knew no such thing. “Willie was a great, famous director when I met him,” she said, “but I didn't really know much about directors [and I was] not really aware of his importance.”
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Neither Hepburn nor Wyler was aware of the hazards of filming in Rome: The noise was incessant, the summer heat was intense, and the logistics of clearing the crowded streets for shooting were a nightmare. Bribes were paid all around but provided no insurance against political violence: Fascists and Communists battled in the streets, as if the Christian Democrats' election victory in May had never happened. At one point, five bundles of explosives were discovered under a bridge over the Tiber River, where filming was about to take place.

Wyler, undaunted, adhered to his perfectionist ways and made countless takes of each scene—modified only by the hordes of Roman gawkers who were always on hand, as Gregory Peck recalled:

The single most famous scene in
Roman Holiday
is the one in which Peck and Hepburn dare each other to stick a hand inside the mouth of an ancient Roman cave dragon: To get a spontaneous reaction, Peck resorted to an old vaudeville trick—drawing his hand up into his cuff so that it looked severed. Unforewarned, Audrey reacted perfectly, with a shriek. “It was the only scene Wyler ever did in one take,” she said.
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Peck recalls “a girl who was good at everything except shedding tears—wacky and funny, a very lovable girl who was always making faces and doing backflips and clowning around. But when it came to a poignant scene, she couldn't find that within herself; she just couldn't find the right kind of emotion.”
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He was referring to one of the most touching final scenes in which the princess must leave the journalist and return to royal imprisonment.

“I don't know how to say goodbye,” she says. “I can't think of any words.”

“Don't try,” he replies, as the music swells.

It seemed straightforward, but “I had no idea how to come by those tears,” Audrey recalled. “The night was getting longer and longer, and Willy was waiting. Out of the blue, he came over and gave me hell. ‘We can't stay here all night. Can't you cry, for God's sake?' He'd never spoken to me like that, ever, during the picture. He'd been so nice and gentle. I broke into such sobs and he shot the scene and that was it. Afterwards he said, ‘I'm sorry, but I had to get you to do it somehow.'”
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Years later, when a BBC interviewer asked how much she had learned from Wyler, Audrey replied, “I'd say almost everything. His attitude was that only simplicity and the truth count. It has to come from the inside. You can't fake it. That is something I long remembered.”

Then and thereafter, Audrey did not watch the rushes, but Wyler did: “She was every eager young girl who has ever come to Rome for the first time and I, crusty veteran that I was, felt tears in my eyes watching her. Audrey was the spirit of youth—and I knew that very soon the entire world would fall in love with her, as all of us on the picture did.”
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Gregory Peck was first among them. “It was my good luck,” he said, “during that wonderful summer in Rome, to be the first of her screen fellows, to hold out my hand, and help her keep her balance as she did her spins and pirouettes. Those months [were] probably the happiest experience I ever had making movies.”
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Peck, her screen lover, was friendly with James Hanson, her offscreen lover, who was present and accounted for on the
Roman Holiday
set. “I was able to spend time with her in the flat that the company found for her and her mother on the Via Boncompagni,” says Hanson. “They would do shots of Audrey, and Greg would be in a trailer waiting to do his stuff. He and I would go into the Caffé Greco on the Via Condotti and play gin rummy for hours. I enjoyed being there, encouraging her and watching her. We were going to be married as soon as Roman Holiday was finished. All the plans were made.”
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