Audrey Hepburn (23 page)

And a wonderful idea: Hayes and Hepburn in a great stage vehicle to showcase them both. But Audrey Hepburn would never return to the theater again.

 

 

AT THAT POINT, it was all she could do to rally from the edge of a nervous breakdown. And it was Mel Ferrer for whom she rallied. In August, for his thirty-seventh birthday, Audrey sent him a platinum Rolex watch engraved, “Mad About the Boy.” (They were both avid Noel Coward fans.) He flew to Switzerland and formally proposed, and she formally accepted—over Ella's objection.

During
Ondine,
she was asked where she wanted to “settle down” permanently. “That's hard to answer,” she replied, “because one changes all the time. What strikes me most about America is the gaiety and the speed and the vitality. If I had my choice, and if I had the money, I'd have an apartment in London, an apartment in New York, and someplace in the country—providing, of course, I could travel a lot and go to Paris and Rome a great deal! But of course, the day I marry a man I'm very much in love with, and he lives in Timbuktu, that's where I'll live.”
¹⁶

It would be Switzerland, not Timbuktu.

On September 24, 1954, Audrey and Mel Ferrer were married in a civil ceremony at Buochs, on the shores of Lake of Lucerne, in the parlor of the local mayor's house. The next day they repeated their vows at a religious ceremony in a thirteenth-century Protestant chapel below the mountain at Bürgenstock, presided over by Pastor Maurice Eindiguer. She wore a Pierre Balmain white organdie robe, a small crown of white roses, and white gloves. Among the twenty-five guests were Mel's children Pepa and Mark and his sister Terry; London Paramount chief Richard Mealand; and Sir Neville Bland, a friend of Ella's and former British ambassador to Holland. Best man Gregory Peck had to cancel due to his film schedule and was replaced by Fritz Frey. Freddie Heineken was an usher. James Hanson was invited but sent regrets.

For the rest of her life, Audrey would call Switzerland home. Bürgenstock was a town where doctors still made house calls and people took care of sick neighbors. “There is no place in the world where I feel so much at peace,” she would say. “It's my very private stomping ground. I've become one of these people. We're loyal to each other.”

After a four-day honeymoon near Bürgenstock, she and Mel enjoyed a week together in the Italian vineyard country near Cinecittà, where he was filming
La Madre.
“We were pursued by five carloads of photographers when we arrived in Rome,” Mel recalled. “I had rented us a delightful farmhouse outside of Rome.... We had to establish a cordon of security around the farm, so that she could continue to rest while I went off each day to the studio. It was a beautiful and peaceful spot.”
¹⁷

There, while Mel completed his picture, they billed and cooed and awaited the release of
Sabrina.

 

 

SABRINA'S
amorous exposition unfolds beneath a fake Long Island moon with the Rodgers and Hart theme, “Isn't It Romantic” endlessly driven home in the background.

“That song is repeated in every Paramount picture because it was totally owned by Paramount,” Billy Wilder explains. “It was first composed for
Love Me Tonight
(1932), the Mamoulian picture with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. There was no ASCAP, so they bought it from Rodgers and Hart and used it forever.”
¹⁸

It even plays as Sabrina (Hepburn) is contemplating suicide over David (Holden) and writing a farewell note to her father: “Don't have David at the funeral. He probably wouldn't even cry.”

Sabrina is shipped off to France, where she tries to forget David while attending a Parisian academy of cuisine. The cooking school provides the film's funniest, most “Wilderesque” sequences, thanks to Marcel Hillaire as the chief chef. His lecture-demonstrations are a comic tour de force:

They all do so in unison—Sabrina most clumsily.

Back on Long Island, Humphrey Bogart as David's diligent elder brother, Linus, dictates a letter to his playboy sibling over a state-of-the-art 1954 car phone:

Their crotchety, frothing-at-the-mouth father (Walter Hampden) sneaks cigars and martinis behind their mother's back and fulminates about David's prior marriages, including “that Twyman girl—her family fifty years on the social register, and she has the audacity to wear on her wedding dress, not a corsage but a Stevenson button!” It was one of the script's many good political jokes nowadays lost on most viewers.

Sabrina returns from Paris transformed into a sophisticate—the birth of Hepburn's partnership with Givenchy. David fails to recognize her in her chic new suit. But he invites her to a party that evening, where she wears another fabulous Givenchy creation—a white organdy strapless sheath with a sweeping, floor-length overskirt, open in front, giving the impression that she has wings from the waist down!

In the hasty twist ending, Audrey gets her man—not flashy Holden, but stuffy Bogart, who undergoes a transformation. “Look at me,” he says, “—Joe College with a touch of arthritis.” Their age difference is huge, but Hepburn's magic eyes lure us into suspending disbelief, as they would often be called upon to do in her future films.

Opinion differed sharply over Bogart's long-in-the-tooth character. Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times
thought his performance “one of the most surprising and affecting he has ever done.”
¹⁹
A later critic, on the other hand, declared, “Every time Bogie pitches the woo, you feel like calling the cops.”
²⁰

Britons were offended by “the Wilder vulgarity,” as when Holden sits on a pair of wineglasses. “The subsequent scenes, where the affected region is constantly being prodded and kicked by hearty fellow characters, firmly overstep the narrow dividing line between slapstick and viciousness,” wrote reviewer (later director) Karel Reisz.
²¹
But American audiences loved the running gag of Holden's injured rear-end, especially the absurd plastic hammock with “trap door” in the middle, helpfully devised by the older brother for the younger's recuperation.

In general, the critics were less effusive about Audrey's second outing.
Films in Review
said she was “fey and gaminish” and “costumed to emphasize her lack of what are technically known as secondary sexual characteristics.”
Time's
love affair with her in
Roman Holiday
seemed to be over: “Actress Hepburn's appeal, it becomes clearer with every appearance, is largely to the imagination; the less acting she does, the more people can imagine her doing, and wisely she does very little in
Sabrina.”

The meanest pan came from Clayton Cole in the British magazine
Films and Filming:
“Sabrina is the prick that bursts the fair bubble that was Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday.
Surely the vogue for asexuality can go no further than this weird hybrid with butchered hair. Of course none of this would really matter if the charm and grace were sincere, but I am afraid that she is letting her calculation show.”

Cole dismissed Bogart brutally as “a frail, lisping old man.”
²²
But the only ballot box that counted was at the box-office, where the fans' mandate was clear:
Sabrina
was the No. 3 top money-making film of 1954.
^ae

AFTER HONEYMOONING in Italy, Audrey and Mel returned to Bürgenstock, where her happiness about
Sabrina's
success was soon dwarfed by a greater ecstasy: She was pregnant.

She so longed for a child and was now “infanticipating” with great excitement. Discussions of the baby occupied them in November on their way to Holland for Audrey's first visit “home” since achieving movie fame. She had been invited by the League of Dutch Military War Invalids for a five-day fund-raising tour and to receive an award for her efforts during the war. But the sensation she created was rather too great. At a department store in Amsterdam, where Mel accompanied her to sign photographs for the benefit of war victims, thousands of teenagers stormed the place, breaking showcases and wreaking havoc in an effort to get close to her. Police had to be called in to control the mob.

The following month, just before the 1955 New Year, they rented a furnished flat in London near Marble Arch, while Mel filmed
Oh Rosalinda!
there. Ella had found the place, which was just a few minutes from her own flat in Mayfair. Audrey enjoyed the proximity to and reunion with her mother. Mel, less so. In any case, it marked the start of their firm policy to schedule their professional lives to be never, or rarely, apart.

Oh Rosalinda!,
under Michael Powell's direction at Elstree, was a non-musical version of Johann Strauss's
Fledermaus,
and there was some tension during its making. By one account, when Audrey dropped by the set to watch Mel at work, he refused to let her appear in any publicity photos, not wanting to share the limelight. Asked about that, Ferrer says, “I never refused to allow Audrey to do anything. She always had very precise ideas about what she did and did not want to do.”
²³

Other allegations soon made the rounds concerning Ferrer's dominance of her and Audrey's insistence on only accepting films in which he would costar with her. She supposedly turned down the “perfect” role of Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger's
Saint Joan
—the part that would make Jean Seberg famous—when Preminger refused to cast Ferrer as the Dauphin. But Ferrer denies it:

“Saint Joan
was not a project which appealed to Audrey. Her agent, Kurt Frings, was a chum of Otto Preminger and he wanted Audrey to do it, [but she] decided otherwise. There was never any question of my playing the Dauphin—it would have been totally wrong casting.”
²⁴

Their own pet film project was
Ondine,
which they championed at every opportunity in England. Mel wanted Associated British to do the project as part of Audrey's commitment to them, but ABC declined on the theory that watersprites were death at the box office. He then pushed for MGM to make
Ondine
in the States, with Charlton Heston in the role of the knight, but the Giraudoux estate would not approve.

“We spoke often of trying to film
Ondine,”
says Ferrer, “but it was such a tenuous, gossamer work that we were advised against it as a motion picture.” Perhaps it wouldn't have worked, he admits, “although I would have loved to have seen Audrey's mesmerizing performance preserved on film.”
²⁵

Her affairs were in some turmoil then. She was inundated with offers, but Associated British was contesting her Paramount contract. Mel helped crucially by proposing that Audrey hire the aggressive Kurt Frings as her new agent and by arranging for veteran Henry Rogers to take charge of her publicity. “We all had a difficult and complicated time steering a way through the exigencies of two long term contracts [ABC and Paramount] signed by Audrey before I met her,” says Ferrer. “Kurt became a devoted and fanatical defender of her interests.”
²⁶

Frings bore assorted grudges against the studios and was said to enjoy gouging them by turning his star clients into freelancers and getting them bigger fees plus a percentage. A former boxer, he was colorful and smart—and Audrey liked him a lot. Frings and his screenwriter-wife, Ketti, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the play of
Look Homeward, Angel,
were now among the Ferrers' few close friends in Hollywood, along with Gregory Peck.
²⁷

Speaking of whom ... Peck and Hepburn had just been voted the world's most popular film stars of 1954 in the Foreign Press Association's poll of fifty countries. Soon after, in February 1955, Audrey received her second Oscar nomination, for
Sabrina.
She lost to Grace Kelly for
The Country Girl
(who should have lost to Judy Garland for
A
Star Is Born).