Audrey Hepburn (19 page)

Lili
(1953) was the unpretentious little musical in which Audrey had seen and loved the thirty-five-year-old Ferrer at his sexiest. It was directed and choreographed by Charles Walters, based on a Paul Gallico story. In its title role was Audrey's only real screen “rival,” Leslie Caron.
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At its outset, orphan Caron arrives, forlorn, in a little French village. A carnival has just arrived, and she encounters the lame, unfriendly puppeteer Paul (Ferrer). “He's always angry,” Jean-Pierre Aumont tells her, “—a disagreeable man.” Aumont, in real life, was a Free French war hero (whose wife Maria Montez had recently died under mysterious circumstances in her bathtub). Here he is “Marcus le Magnifique,” a magician with a sexy sidekick, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Paul's puppets (their voices all truly Ferrer's) are his alter egos: Carrot Top, the nice guy; Reynardo, the Fox; Golo, a villain; Marguerite, the diva-forerunner of Miss Piggy. Through them, unhappy Paul talks unhappy Lili out of suicide. Together, they sing the lovely “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” theme song—without dubbing—that became popular throughout the world.
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Caron is thoroughly enchanting in her fantasy dance sequences, trading places (and slinky red-sequinned dresses) with Gabor.
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In the final number, the puppets come to life for a cross between “Yellow Brick Road” in
The Wizard of Oz
and the great Caron-Kelly dream ballet of
An American in Paris.
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The result is a naive, charming romance, with Ferrer at his most appealing—Au—drey told him she saw it three times.

“Mel is a very complex person,” says Leslie Caron, guardedly. “On the one hand, he was very generous and very paternal to Audrey and to me when we worked on
Lili.
On the other hand....”
⁸⁷

She trails off and declines to finish the sentence.

Charles Higham calls Ferrer a man of too many parts—“adept in so many fields that no single achievement placed him quite in the first class”—fragmented by the range of his own abilities, and thus volatile and high-strung. “He lacked the warmth, sheer animalism, and brute force” to cross the great divide between leading man and star. “He did not provoke sexual longings in millions of women; he did not evoke fantasies.”

Except in Audrey Hepburn. She had fallen in love with the sensitive, soulful character in
Lili
and projected it onto him in real life. She also loved his voice, and the way he jokingly signed his name—“Mellifluous.” Clearly, her notion of Mel Ferrer was romanticized from the start.

 

 

AUDREY WAS evoking similar fantasies in her own adoring fans, who clamored for scraps of information about her. Her publicist, scrambling for a few new factoids, sent her a questionnaire and hastily released her answers when he got them:

“Still finds it exciting to buy food....

“Has a large collection of long-playing records—from classics, Broadway musicals, to hot jazz. Believes one of the greatest things about the U.S. is the long-playing record....
⁸⁸

“Speaks seven languages in faultless diction, lives in a New York apartment-hotel with her mother....

“Likes rain....”
⁸⁹

Favorite films? She listed her own
Lavender Hill Mob, Les Enfants du Paradis
—and
Lili.
Asked for her opinion of TV and radio, she responded, “I miss the audiences. ”
⁹⁰

“TV” was not a pleasant set of initials for Paramount, which like all big studios, was beset with antitrust suits and the devastating competition of the new medium. Paramount had again tried unsuccessfully to buy out Audrey's Associated British Pictures contract and was now paying even more for her services. But since its other “major” female players were Arlene Dahl, Rhonda Fleming, Polly Bergen, Rosemary Clooney and Dorothy Malone, there was no choice but to be grateful to have Audrey, whatever her cost, for top projects.
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The top project at hand, in September 1953, was a Samuel Taylor stage hit known in Britain as
Sabrina Fair,
shortened to
Sabrina
in America to avoid confusion with
Vanity Fair.
Audrey had recently seen it on Broadway, starring Margaret Sullavan and Joseph Cotten, and asked Paramount to buy it as a vehicle for her. The studio did so, agreeing to pay her all of $15,000.

“It's the second big film,” said Audrey, “which will prove if I was really worthy of the first.”

Sabrina
was Cinderella redux: a chauffeur's daughter becomes a sophisticate. She loves both sons of her father's employer, despite Dad's warning that “Nobody poor has ever been called democratic for marrying somebody rich.” Director Billy Wilder—after
Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard
and
Stalag 17—
would complete his Paramount contract with this film.

Sabrina
was filmed on location at the Glen Cove, Long Island, estate of Paramount chairman Barney Balaban in just nine weeks, between September and November 1953, plus a few trips to Hollywood for retakes. William Holden played the younger brother. The role of the debonair older brother had been rejected by Cary Grant. It was accepted by Humphrey Bogart, who had spent most of his career at Warner Brothers but was now finishing up his own three-picture contract with Paramount.

Bogart's hectic schedule that year included
Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny
and
The Barefoot Contessa.
When shooting began on frothy
Sabrina,
he had just finished playing Captain Queeg in
Caine Mutiny
and seemed to carry over Queeg's paranoia. Bogart “was in totally unfamiliar territory,” said Wilder, “and very uncomfortable.” He had “the occupational insecurity of most actors,” said Lauren Bacall, the last of his four wives. “He was never sure when he would work again.”
⁹²

Bogart's insecurities were aggravated by Wilder's jocular comment to a reporter that the reason Bogart, not Holden, wound up with Audrey in the end was “because Bogart gets $300,000 a picture and Holden gets $125,000.” Despite (or because of) that, Bogart fussed and worried. “I'm gonna get fucked,” he told a friend. “Billy's going to throw it to his buddy Holden.”
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Holden (real name: William Franklin Beedle, Jr.) was thirty-five and at the peak of his career, having just starred in two of Wilder's greatest pictures—
Sunset Boulevard
and
Stalag
17. He and Bogart had fallen out years earlier while making
Invisible Stripes
(1939). Nowadays, Bogart referred to him as “Smiling Jim,” mocked his bleached-blond look in
Sabrina,
and called him a “dumb prick” to the press. Bogey had a special loathing for Holden's macho display of rolling Gaulois cigarettes with one hand. Audrey smoked English Gold Flakes—in a long, filtered holder—and Bogart smoked heavily, as well. The air quality on the set was as woeful as the interpersonal relationships.

If Holden and Bogart did not get along, Holden and Hepburn certainly did—so much so that it may have constituted an affair. Holden was married to actress Brenda Marshall (real name: Ardis Gaines) but was notoriously promiscuous and had an odd habit of bringing women home to meet his wife.
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Audrey was infinitely more prim and proper. Back in California after the Long Island shooting, she lived alone in a modest two-room apartment ($120 a month) on Wilshire Boulevard. There, she said, her biggest joy was “to unlock my door and find the new record that the store down the street delivered during the afternoon. I get into old, soft, comfy clothes and then I play the new music while I cook.” She boasted of having over a hundred records—from Brahms and Beethoven to “a mess of good jazz like Benny Goodman, Mel Powell and Jerry Mulligan.”
⁹⁵

In those days, Holden and Audrey were often seen at fancy restaurants, after which they would repair to her apartment. But Audrey's most intimate friends doubt she ever went to bed with Holden, and her journalist acquaintance Henry Gris claims she had “very little sexual drive” in general.
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All such opinions, of course, were speculative: Did she really love Holden? Was she expecting him to get a divorce?
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And what about Mel Ferrer? But there was no doubt that Holden passionately adored
her:
“She was the love of my life,” he later declared.

Audrey, for her part, was at least infatuated with the warm, demonstrative side of Holden's personality—when it was not submerged in alcohol. Holden's biographer Bob Thomas quoted her as saying she and Bill could “make beautiful babies together.”

Baby-making was, in the end, the issue. Compounding Holden's obsession with sex was a secret he eventually had to tell Audrey: A few years before, at his wife's insistence after the birth of their second son, he had undergone an irreversible vasectomy. When Audrey learned of it, she dropped all thought of marriage. Her deepest desire—even above career—was to be a mother.

Another Audrey—Billy Wilder's wife—knew the score long before. The Wilders and Holdens were friends, and Audrey Wilder recalls a down-to-earth talk she had with Holden's wife: “Brenda said, ‘The doctor told me I can't have any more children, so I had Bill have a vasectomy.' I said, ‘Why didn't you have your tubes tied? The minute you do that to a guy, he's going to try to screw everybody.”'
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Holden was already trying—though he claimed to exempt his leading ladies: “I just don't want anything in a relationship with an actress to be misunderstood at the time,” he told Donald Zec, the biographer of Sophia Loren, with whom Holden starred in
The Key
(1958). “You have to work with them terribly intimately, particularly in the love scenes, and unless you play it neutral you may have a situation on your hands. I've had that difficulty with Jennifer Jones, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak.”

Zec observed that such a problem was better than being held prisoner by the Viet Cong. But Holden continued:

“In all the relationships I've had with leading ladies, I found that the less involved I was with them, the better. [Two or three of them] I absolutely adored ... and if they had ever been willing to change their way of life and say ‘I'll go with you,' it would have been fine. But we never stepped over the boundaries. So after all these years we have the same kind of respect for each other that we had in the beginning. I'll tell you, it's worth a lot more to me than a piece of ass.”
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Holden's satyriasis was matched by his compulsion to talk about it. Even in reference to the greatest screen beauties, he could never discuss women in less than batches of half a dozen. At the moment, in the wake of his vasectomy confession, he was distraught about Audrey's reaction and rejection of him. “I was really in love with Audrey but she wouldn't marry me,” he said. When
Sabrina
shooting ended, he set out on a 'round-the-world publicity tour with a private plan of action that was typical:

“I was determined to wipe Audrey out of my mind by screwing a woman in every country I visited. My plan succeeded, though sometimes with difficulty. When I was in Bangkok, I was with a Thai girl in a boat in one of the klongs [canals]. I guess we got too animated, because the boat tipped over and I fell into the filthy water. Back at the hotel I poured alcohol in my ears because I was afraid I'd become infected with the plague.” He poured alcohol into more than just his ears, and, “When I got back to Hollywood, I went to Audrey's dressing-room and told her what I had done. You know what she said? ‘Oh, Bill!' That's all. ‘Oh, Bill!' Just as though I were some naughty boy.”
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SABRINA
was supposed to be a romantic comedy, but there were more dramatic than comic moments on the set, and no romance between Humphrey Bogart and anyone. Everyone said Bogart hated Holden. Some said Bogart also hated Audrey—for her inability to do a scene in less than ten takes, and for “conspiring with Holden against him because she was giving Holden a tumble.”
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Audrey never spoke negatively about any of her leading men. The closest she came was, “I was rather terrified of Humphrey Bogart—and he knew it. [But] if he didn't like me, he certainly never showed it.”
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She later told Rob Wolders “how reasonable Bogart was with her, a little rougher with other people around—but a jovial roughness.” Bogart himself once paid her a rare if backhanded compliment: “You take the Monroes and the Terry Moores, and you know just what you're going to get every time. With Audrey it's kind of unpredictable. She's like a good tennis player—she varies her shots.”
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