Audrey Hepburn (21 page)

In addition to Hepburn and Ferrer,
Ondine's
cast included Marian Seldes, whose initial problem was similar to Givenchy's. When she auditioned for Princess Bertha, Ondine 's haughty rival for the knight, all Seldes knew was her agent's description of the part: “It's the heavy in a play with Hepburn.”

“I thought he meant
Katharine
Hepburn,” says Seldes. “But when I worked with Audrey in
Ondine,
she behaved in such a way that my admiration for her was on a par with what I felt for my early idols. I expected so little, I got so much.... I loved watching her rehearse and act. How beautiful [she made] other people feel! That was her magic on and off the screen. [And] how obediently she followed Mr. Lunt's suggestions.”

That was more than could be said for Ferrer.

“The gossip in the company was that since she had fallen in love with Mel Ferrer, he was giving her different directions after the rehearsals,” says Seldes. “I did not believe it.... He did not respond to direction as Audrey did, was ungracious to the older man in front of the company at times, but the production of
Ondine
had been largely Mel's idea and it would have been ridiculous for him to sabotage it by redirecting Audrey.

“Lynn Fontanne came to many rehearsals to watch her husband direct.... Occasionally [Lunt] would show Mel how to play part of a scene and step into his place. He would become Hans, the knight who loved the water nymph Ondine, and for a few moments I would be acting with this marvel. Afterward he would mutter to Mel, ‘I am doing this badly, of course.' By that time Mel's attention would have wandered....
¹²¹

“Mel was in a difficult position. Lunt made a much greater connection with Audrey and the others. Because Mel was somewhat cool, distracted, he didn't really work on the part from his inner self. At the time I thought he was rude, but looking back, perhaps he felt a little out of his depth in
Ondine
waters.”
¹²²

The Playwrights Company had engaged him with an ulterior motive. “We bought Hepburn and the price was Ferrer,” said a staff member. “It turned out to be much too expensive.”
¹²³
There was tension from the first day of rehearsal: Ferrer thought Lunt's direction dull and resented Fontanne's presence. He reportedly asked for revisions in the play to expand his own role, but Robert Sherwood refused to alter a word, even when it was suggested that Ferrer might quit and take Audrey with him.

Inevitably, Hepburn was drawn into the fray. One night after rehearsals, she showed up unexpectedly at Sherwood's apartment, upset and fearful of the show's failure. She and Mel were to be married, she told him, and she could hardly remain neutral in the conflict. She offered to withdraw from the production, but Sherwood reassured her, and she agreed to stay on.
¹²⁴

Less serious but vexing up to the last minute was the matter of Audrey's hair: Lunt felt it should be blond, since Ondine was a creature of the washed-out, watery deep. Just before previews opened in Boston, she gave in, allowed her hair to be bleached—and quickly regretted it. She then had its real color restored and switched to a blond wig. But the wig felt “stiff and hot and horrible,” she said. The eventual solution was to tint her hair with gold dust each night and wash it out after every show.

Her costumes were built by the great Valentina Schlee, designer for Fontanne in
Idiot's Delight,
Norma Shearer and the Duchess of Windsor. Audrey spent days in Valentina's East Sixty-seventh Street studio, standing six hours at a time to supervise the sewing of her costume, which consisted of fishnet and a few strategically placed leaves—censorable on anyone but Audrey, whose innate decorum gave even the scantiest outfit an almost Quakerish propriety.

All trials and tribulations were vindicated when
Ondine
premiered—with incidental music by Virgil Thomson—on February 18, 1954, at the Forty-sixth Street Theater in New York.

“Hepburn moves with the fleet freedom that testifies to her ballet training, and she speaks with a voice of strange and vibrant beauty,” said
Variety.
“Largely because of her personal incandescence ... ,
Ondine
is a resounding hit.”

“Ondine
was worth writing, translating and producing just to place Miss Hepburn on stage,” wrote Eric Bentley in
The New Republic.
“It is not time to speak of a great actress, yet no one would doubt the possibility of greatness.”
¹²⁵

Most critics cited her amazing leap—from a standing position into Ferrer's lap—as one of the show's most memorable moments.
^aa
Her smash success in
Roman Holiday,
released just a fortnight earlier, made
Ondine's
opening night even more the gala event of the season. “The box-office lines are a block long,” said
Newsweek.
“The reason is Audrey Hepburn.”
¹²⁶

James Hanson was sitting next to Baroness Ella van Heemstra on opening night. As with the
Gigi
premiere, he had flown over from London to surprise Audrey, even though he was no longer her fiancé. Neither Hanson nor the Baroness failed to notice the subtext at the end of that night's performance: The audience cheered on and on, demanding a solo curtain call by Audrey. But with every bow, Mel appeared at her side. Finally, the house lights were turned on, and Mel held up his hand to hush the crowd for a speech—surely to acknowledge Audrey. “Instead,” said Radie Harris, “we heard a flowery expression of thanks to Alfred Lunt,” which most everyone knew to be insincere.
¹²⁷

After the premiere, Hanson disappeared and Mel accompanied Audrey and her mother to a supper party sponsored by the cultural attaché of the French Embassy. There, someone made the mistake of asking Lunt, “Did you learn anything from working with a movie star like Mel Ferrer?” Yes, he replied, “I learned that you cannot make a knight-errant out of a horse's ass!”
¹²⁸
In New York theatrical circles, it was a mini-scandal that Ferrer would not let Audrey take her last curtain call alone. One critic called him “churlish” for not doing so. The late Eva Gabor was in that opening-night audience and remembered it vividly:

Most of the bouquets for Audrey came with thorns for Mel.

“Occasionally, during the times when Audrey Hepburn was absent from the stage of the Forty-sixth Street Theater, it occurred to me that Ondine had the makings of a quite majestic bore,” wrote Wolcott Gibbs in
The New Yorker.
“On each of her entrances, however, [Hepburn] set about creating a queer, personal miracle.... Her performance [is] a beautiful and astonishingly intelligent piece of work, and I don't believe there is an actress in our theatre physically or mentally equipped to duplicate it.”

And Mel Ferrer?

“Reasonably attractive,” said Gibbs, “but I don't believe he has quite the style, of either conduct or diction, that this difficult part demands. It is a heavy task to oppose the kind of acting Miss Hepburn is offering, and I can think, offhand, of nobody except perhaps Olivier and Gielgud who could manage it, and Mr. Ferrer is certainly neither of these men.”
¹³⁰

The harshest verdict was Lunt's, in a private letter to Sherwood: “All the medals and praise in the world will never convince me that beautiful play comes off.... She jumps on his lap & he holds her like a potted palm—he sits beside her at the table & treats her like a tired waitress at Child's.... If he played his scenes on top of her, you'd have the feeling he was laying a corner stone. Personally, I'd call the whole show a fucking failure.”
¹³¹

Audrey was much praised—“too much indeed,”
Commonweal
dissented. “She is not yet a very accomplished actress [and] must learn to manipulate her voice with some of the grace and variety she brings to her body movements.”
¹³²

In “Nymph Mania,” the
Ondine
review in
Saturday Review,
the perceptive Henry Hewes said Audrey was giving “a performance and not a piece of acting. This is not to discredit Miss Hepburn [but] rather to clarify what it is that this clever youngster does.... Perhaps if she could join a repertory company, as Claire Bloom has, she would gradually acquire the acting skill to go with her performing talents. As it is, she is faced with being a star rather than becoming one.”
¹³³

A variation on that theme was Harold Clurman's “Open Letter to Audrey Hepburn” in
The Nation,
which began by observing that the response to her
Ondine
performance was “as if everybody were asking for your telephone number”:

For Audrey, that was both a concrete and a cosmic issue of major importance. Just the day before
Ondine
opened, she had filled out a new questionnaire from her publicist:

Any special role you most wish to play?

“One day I would like to try the classics, yardsticks by which an actress's technique and variety are measured.”

What is your greatest ambition as an actress?

“To some day be considered as good an actress and as faithful to her public as was Maude Adams or is Helen Hayes.... A stage and screen career each benefits from the other.”

Now, as if to confirm that, came the news that she had been nominated for an Academy Award for
Roman Holiday.

 

 

“ONDINE
AND
GIGI
were entirely different,” says actress Celeste Holm, who saw Audrey in both.
“Gigi
was an American version of a French farce.
Ondine
was almost a ballet. In both cases, she had something that couldn't be manufactured. People who are very
definite
are more interesting than the paste-ups. The effects of the war, her dancer's sense of communicating physically—all that carried through to her work. So many people in theater have no specific idea of what they're communicating, just a vague idea of showing off. But not Audrey. The moment you saw her, you realized she was an artist.”
¹³⁵

Two Broadway hits and an Oscar nomination were proof of her spontaneous romance with the public, but still, “I wouldn't say I've learned to act yet,” she said during
Ondine.
“Often I think I'll never learn anything. Some of the things I do on stage depress me beyond measure.”
¹³⁶
Compounding that angst, she was emotionally drained—by Mel Ferrer as much as
Ondine.

“It often happens that actors and actresses fall in love during a play that moves them deeply,” says Celeste Holm. “They think it's the other person, but it's really the play.”

Audrey and Mel really fell in love because of
Ondine?

“I think so,” says Holm. “Look at Gary Merrill and Bette Davis—the same thing.”

While Ella was issuing statements that her daughter and Ferrer were not romantically involved, they were, in fact, seriously discussing marriage. And as those marital pressures mounted—pro and con, from Mel and her mother—so did the extravagant attention of the media, in anticipation of the Academy Awards. “Not since Garbo has a new actress been welcomed with such fervor and adulation,” declared
Cosmopolitan.
¹³⁷

The Oscar ceremony of March 25, 1954, was a bicoastal affair, dually hosted by Donald O'Connor at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles and Fredric March at the NBC Century Theater in New York. When Audrey arrived breathless and very late at the latter place, a great shout of “Hepburn's coming!” rose from the media area, and all the photographers rushed to the door.

“Hepburn, still wearing makeup of water nymph in
Ondine,
did the fastest dash I've ever seen,” wrote one reporter, “straight through the animal pack to a small room off the inner lobby.” As she was rushing to change clothes, she ran into fellow nominee Deborah Kerr, just arrived—equally breathless—from her own Broadway hit,
Tea and Sympathy.
They wished each other luck and agreed Leslie Caron was going to win for
Lili.
¹³⁸

“Ladies predominantly blond this year,” continued the reporter, “hair drooping and matted, like seaweed.... Hepburn emerged. Vision of loveliness in white lace dress. Animal pack, momentarily bowled over by beauty, soon regained composure and screamed for pictures.”
¹³⁹
Audrey briefly obliged, then ducked into the theater just in time to join her agent, Jack Dunfee, and her imperturbable mother before the moment of truth.