Audrey Hepburn (17 page)

But once again the best-laid plans went awry. When Roman
Holiday
filming ended in September 1952, there was not even a hiatus let alone a wedding for Audrey, who had to go directly into the American road tour of Gigi. She returned to the United States, opened at the Nixon Theater in Pittsburgh on October 13, 1952, and continued for eight months, through Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Washington and Los Angeles. She was exhausted long before the tour was over and, according to Cathleen Nesbitt, under heavy pressure from her mother to break off the engagement. Midway during the tour, she announced it was over.

“When I couldn't find time to attend to the furnishing of our London flat, I suddenly knew I'd make a pretty bad wife,” she told Anita Loos. “I would forever have to be studying parts, fitting costumes and giving interviews. And what a humiliating spot to put a husband in ... making him stand by, holding my coat, while I signed autographs for the bobbie soxers!”
⁵⁷

Pestered endlessly by the media, she gave variations on that theme—some more diplomatic than others:

“I felt it would be unfair to James to marry him when I was also in love with my work.”

“It was a mutual decision and a very personal matter about which I have nothing more to say.”
⁵⁸

“The time will come when I can afford the luxury of a husband. Just now, I haven't got the time.”

“When I get married, I want to be
really
married.”
⁵⁹

Zsa Zsa Gabor says Ella wasn't the only one pressuring Audrey to get unengaged : “When she got the part in
Roman Holiday,
the studio advised her not to get married.”
⁶⁰
Indeed, Paramount and most film companies encouraged “romances” but generally opposed star marriages (especially to non-stars) in the belief that millions of lovestruck fans would be disappointed thereby.

Forty years later, Lord Hanson reflects on the breakup in his candid, magnanimous way:

If anyone, Audrey was the one with regrets. The amicable nature of their split was proven by the fact that they continued to see each other. In December, Hanson went to visit and spend Christmas with her in Chicago:

“I got the impression Audrey had reflected upon it and wanted to take it up again that Christmas. But I believed she had made the right decision and that it wouldn't be right to backtrack on it—not for any reasons of spite. You couldn't be spiteful about Audrey. She was just too delightful. She tried to make a reconciliation but by that time, I felt I could not go back. We spent a happy Christmas together in Chicago, after which we parted as good friends.”
^62
r

The subject of her romantic life remained a hot topic for many months, even after the
Gigi
road show came to a close, on May 16, 1953, in San Francisco. When no-nonsense columnist Dorothy Kilgallen asked her if she had always had “beaus buzzing around her,” Audrey replied, “Well, I'll say this. I've never wanted for one—not since I was seventeen, anyway.”
⁶³

They came in all shapes, sizes and ages. The day after she accepted a dinner invitation from sixty-two-year-old Groucho Marx, the newspapers wasted no time in speculating on their betrothal.

“Nonsense,” replied Groucho. “I don't want to be ungallant, but Audrey's too old and wrinkled for me.”

 

 

UNTIL NOW, nobody but the studio had seen
Roman Holiday.
When it finally opened, in August 1953, audiences and critics alike loved it. Mostly it was the doe-eyed little star they loved. In the opening sight gag, the princess's shoes are killing her during a royal reception; she kicks one of them off beneath her floor-length gown and then can't find it.

Audrey's performance captivated throughout. Irate about being a royal prisoner, the princess throws a tantrum and is given a tranquilizer—but sneaks out of the palace before it takes effect. Journalist Gregory Peck finds her snoozing in a public square and promises his editor a scoop. Peck and the film are aided by the beautiful cinematography of Franz Planer and the romantic background music of Georges Auric.
^s

But most of all, they were aided by the face and mesmerizing voice of Audrey Hepburn—a soft mezzo that turned soprano in excitement. And everyone was caught off-guard by the film's conclusion—perhaps the first romantic comedy with an unhappy ending. Molly Haskell called it a “heartbreaking moment of renunciation.”
⁶⁴

Roman Holiday
turned out to be strangely relevant to the moment. Nineteen fifty-three was a busy year for English royalty: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the “commoner” romance of her sister, Princess Margaret, had both received saturation news coverage. Paramount denied any connection but slyly exploited the similarities between Princess Anne's love for a reporter in the film and Princess Margaret's involvement with Captain Peter Townsend in real life. In publicity terms, there could have been no more fortuitous a coincidence.

The picture earned back a third of its production costs in Japan alone (where it is the no. I favorite foreign film of all time, ahead of
Gone With the Wind).
There and in Europe and America, Audrey and her “look” became the rage.

The trade papers were talking of a great new star, but the tabloids were talking scandal. The
New York Mirror
said Peck's wife Greta was “giving him the bounce because of his affection for the sylph-like nymph, a willowy boyish miss” named Hepburn.
⁶⁵
Audrey bristled: “I saw her coming out of Romanoff's the other day and she asked me to spend next Sunday swimming in the pool at her home. Does that sound like I'm a home-breaker?”
⁶⁶

There was, in fact, never any romance between Hepburn and Peck, whose marriage was dissolving before he and Audrey ever met. He would soon be divorced and, a year later, marry French journalist Veronique Passani, with whom he has remained.

But in truth, few cared about Gregory Peck these days. They cared about
Audrey Hepburn.
Young Senator John F. Kennedy was among many declaring Roman Holiday to be his favorite film and Hepburn his favorite actress. September 7, 1953, found her on the cover of
Time
magazine—never before occupied by an unknown star of a newly released film. Peck was temporarily left in the dust, but never resented it. Three decades later, returning from a trip to China, he gave her a grand cross-cultural tribute:

“When we climbed out of the airplane [in Beijing], to my amazement I saw about two hundred little Chinese Audrey Hepburns waiting at the airport.
Roman Holiday
was playing in China for the first time—thirty years after we made it—and attracting enormous crowds. Everywhere we went we saw little Audrey Hepburns with the bangs and the long skirts.”
⁶⁷

 

 

“SHE WAS A one-man woman, very loving,” says Lord James Hanson. “Once she gave up one man, it was then the next man. She didn't play the field.”
⁶⁸
To the disappointment of the tabloids, the “next man” was not Gregory Peck—but he was a close friend of Peck's. It was party time in London, where Audrey returned in July 1953 for the British opening of
Roman Holiday.
One of those fêtes was hosted by her mother, at Ella's South Audley Street flat, where Cecil Beaton met Audrey for the first time and that night recorded in his diary:

“[She has] a huge mouth, flat Mongolian features, heavily painted eyes, a coconut coiffure, long nails without varnish, a wonderfully lithe figure, and a long neck.... She appears to take her wholesale adulation with a pinch of salt, and gratitude rather than puffed-up pride.... Without any preliminaries, she cuts through to a basic understanding that makes people friends.” Beaton added that the other guests included American actor Mel Ferrer—“a charming, gangling man, [who] described A.H. to me as ‘the biggest thing to come down the turnpike.”'
⁶⁹

Ferrer's invitation had come through Gregory Peck, who was in London making
Night People
and had hosted his own party for Audrey in his Grosvenor Square flat. Ferrer was likewise in London at the moment, shooting MGM's
Knights of the Round Table
at Pinewood Studios.
^t
Mel was the twice-divorced father of four by then. But Peck wanted him to meet Audrey and gave him her phone number at Ella's.

“She answered herself and said, ‘This is Audrey,'” Ferrer remembers. “When I told her Greg had suggested I call, she answered very cheerily, ‘Oh, I loved you in
Lili
!”'
⁷⁰
That lovely musical, released just a few months before
Roman Holiday,
starred Ferrer as a lame carnival puppeteer and Leslie Caron as the orphan girl with whom he falls in love.

“My first impression of Audrey when we finally saw each other was how simple and direct she was,” says Ferrer today. “She was gentle, delicate and sensitive. But full of life and sparkle.“
⁷¹
The chemistry between them was instant.

Nearly six-foot-three in height, Mel was “gangly” indeed, as well as handsome, and his prospects for serious leading-man status and film stardom were on the rise. But he was not “just” an actor. He was also a stage and film director, producer and cofounder of the pioneering La Jolla Playhouse. Some thought of him—and he perhaps thought of himself—as the next Orson Welles.

Actor James Coburn first knew Ferrer at La Jolla, where Coburn and many other prominent young actors got their Actors Equity cards. A decade later, during a break on the set of
Charade,
Coburn and Audrey had an intimate discussion that was rare for both of them.

“She told me about first meeting and falling in love with Mel,” Coburn recalls, “and I asked, ‘What was the attraction?' She said, ‘The way he looked me in the eyes—the way he just penetrated me with his eyes.' That was the thing that really got her, she said.”
⁷²

 

 

MELCHOR GASTON FERRER was born a dozen years before Audrey Hepburn, in Elberon, New Jersey, on August 25, 1917, and spent most of his early life in New York City. His father, Dr. José Ferrer, a prominent Cuban-Spanish surgeon at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, died when Mel was four. His mother was Irene O'Donohue, whose family was socially important in Manhattan and Newport.

“She was a Gibson-girl type, spoilt, arrogant, opinionated and tactless,” says Joseph J. O‘Donohue IV, who was her grandnephew and godson. The cousins were great friends, and when Mel once ran away from home, it was to Joe's big summer home near Newport that he fled. “He stayed about a week before returning to the fold,” O'Donohue recalls. “In those days Mel wrote very agreeable poetry, surreptitiously, which he let me read.”
⁷³

Upon graduation from Canterbury Preparatory School in 1935, Mel entered Princeton, where he immersed himself in theater and, in his sophomore year, won an award for best original play. In the summers, he stage-managed at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, and played the lead in
Our Town
there. When a Princeton friend tried to convince Mrs. Ferrer of her son's talent, she replied haughtily that writing and theater were out of the question “for one of
^Mel
's breeding.”
⁷⁴

After two years, Mel left Princeton and spent a year in Taxco, Mexico, struggling to write a novel but ending up instead with a successful children's book,
Tito's Hats,
published by Doubleday Doran, which sold out its edition of 20,000. Thus encouraged, he took a job at Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the hope of making it as a professional writer.

“I drove a bookwagon all over New England for the first few months and then got promoted to editing,” Ferrer recalls. While there, he was fascinated by a collection of New England graveyard epitaphs that had been assembled by Robert E. Pike. He took all the photos and chalked all the inscriptions and epitaphs himself, compiling them—uncredited—for the whimsical Stephen Daye book,
Granite Laughter and Marble Tears,
in 1938.

The previous year, he had married Frances Pilchard, an artist-sculptress he met at Princeton. But it was soon clear that he couldn't support a family as an editor. At that late date in the Depression, the theater was hardly a more secure occupation—but it was the one he'd always wanted and would now pursue in earnest. As a result, “his money was cut off and he had a hard time of it,” says Joseph O'Donohue, who had provided crucial assistance by introducing him to actor Clifton Webb.