Audrey Hepburn (26 page)

Astaire's role was inspired by Avedon; the other inspiration was Diana Vreeland, colorful editor of
Harper's Bazaar
and
Vogue.
She served as the model for Maggie Prescott, manic editor of
Quality
magazine in the movie. That part was tailored to the larger-than-life talents of cabaret star Kay Thompson, who would be making her film debut in
Funny Face.
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Interior shooting commenced at Paramount in Hollywood in April 1956 and continued there for three months, followed by a month on location in Paris, and Audrey and Mel managed to stay together the whole time. In California, they rented director Anatole Litvak's Malibu beach house; in Paris, where Mel was finishing up the Renoir film, they stayed at the Hotel Raphael.

“Home is wherever Mel and I create it, wherever our work takes us—Paris, California, before that Italy, and next Mexico,” she said.
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“We move our home with us, like snails.”

The press made much of the extravagance of their traveling and baggage arrangements—upwards of fifty pieces of luggage sometimes being necessary to create the Ferrers' homes-away-from-home in various rented villas and luxury hotels.

“Like an exiled member of royalty,” said one report, “she takes with her, wherever she goes, trunks packed with her own candelabra, flat silver, books, records, pictures. She also takes many objects in her favorite color of white: table and bed linen, two hand-knit blankets, sets of china, vases, and her tiny Limoges ashtrays and cigarette boxes.“
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It was claimed that she hand-labeled every piece herself and kept a loose-leaf inventory with her at all times, so that she could find (and repack) everything in the same order. The source of that habit was allegedly her mother, who—like other Euro-aristocrats with multiple residences—had traveled that way in her heyday.

Ella, nowadays, was still based in London but often visited her daughter and made several trips to Paris during the shooting of
Funny Face.
(Friends felt Audrey was still emotionally dependent on her, but financially, “Her mother was completely dependent on Audrey,” says Ferrer.
⁵⁶
The Paris sequences involved virtually all of the city's major landmarks—the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Paris Opera, Notre Dame, Arc de Triomphe. Audrey and Mel threw a memorable dinner-dance party one night for the cast and crew. Ingrid Bergman was one of their guests, and so was Audrey's favorite
Photoplay
reporter, Mary Jones, at a restaurant with a fabulously romantic view of Montmarte.

Romance was Jones's relentless theme with Hepburn that night. Could Audrey remember the moment her friendship with Mel turned into love? Audrey could not. “After a while,” she said, “we both just took it for granted that we would marry.... I was never engaged—just married.”

That didn't sound so romantic, but she was being honest. One aspect of her attraction to Mel was of special importance now, she said: She had been ignorant of jazz and had learned its fine points from him. Their portable phonograph and records were always part of those fifty pieces of baggage.

“I like jazz best now,” she said. “It makes me want to move. But I was stiff as a poker as a jazz dancer, always off beat on the simplest syncopation. That was all gradually broken down. I'm so lucky to be married to Mel Ferrer, who is such
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good dancer and adores jazz.”
⁵⁷

It was more than private enjoyment. She was now paired up with Fred Astaire in a major musical—one in which she was called upon to perform a lengthy jazz number and other dances, with and without him. She was determined not to be unprepared. For two months in Europe, before shooting, she put on her size 8AA (high metatarsal) slippers and went back to the barre, taking up practice with Paris Opera ballet dance master Lucien Legrand. “When I don't dance,” she said at the time, “I always get fat in the wrong places. Most of all, I get hippy.”
⁵⁸

On
Sabrina,
she had worked with stage and film choreographer Eugene Loring and was delighted that he was choreographing
Funny Face
as well. “He's familiar with all my limitations,” she said, though the only limitations Loring ever cited for her were “modesty and legs a bit too long.”
⁵⁹
Forty years later, Leonard Gershe remembers watching Audrey rehearse:

“I never saw anyone work so hard. She was tireless in learning both the songs and the dances. It wasn't like Cyd Charisse or Ginger Rogers, who did it all the time. Roger Edens would say, ‘Audrey, take tomorrow off. You've been working sixteen hours a day.' She'd say, ‘No, I'll be here at nine.' And then she'd be there at eight.” It was partly her desire to meet Astaire's standards, “but it had mostly to do with wanting to be good.”
⁶⁰

Funny Face's
choreography was credited to Loring and Astaire, with “song staging” by Donen.
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Loring devised her most important numbers, deftly incorporating her mannerisms and elfin sense of comedy. But Hepburn's main inspiration was Astaire—once she survived their introduction. The morning they met at the studio in Hollywood, Audrey was “so shaken that I threw up my breakfast,” she wrote in her introduction to Stephen Silverman's biography of Stanley Donen.
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“I was absolutely terrified, but Fred said, ‘Honey, just follow me, I'll take care of everything.' And he did.”
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Before rehearsing their first number he suggested, “Come on, let's have a little go together,” and they took a few delirious, anxiety-reducing spins.
⁶³

Astaire had had his own bouts with anxiety years earlier, related to this very vehicle. In 1928, he and sister, Adele, won raves for the stage show of
Funny Face,
and Paramount gave them a tryout for a proposed film version. That screen test produced an immortal, famous-last-words studio verdict on Fred: “Can't act, can't sing, balding, can dance a little.”

The original unmade
Funny Face
film was to have been shot in May 1929—the month Audrey Hepburn was born. Astaire gallantly told a reporter it was worth the twenty-seven-year wait: “This could be the last and only opportunity I'd have to work with the great and lovely Audrey, and I was not missing it.”
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The opening dance sequence in
Funny Face
was the famous “Think Pink” fashion number (“Banish the black, burn the blue, bury the beige! Think pink! And that includes the kitchen sink!”). Despite the bevy of top dancers and models in it, including Suzy Parker and Sunny Harnett, this razzle-dazzle routine belonged entirely to Kay Thompson, who utilizes it to start stealing the show early. (Movie audiences at the time often burst into applause at the end of it.)

Audrey's first dance is a downbeat contrast. Astaire, Thompson and crew find Embryo Concepts, the perfect “sinister bookstore” in Greenwich Village, where Audrey as “Jo” works. Donen gives her a brilliant entrance: a ladder is shoved aside and hurtles along a row of bookshelves with the terrified Jo on top. Her passion is the esoteric philosophy of “empathicalism,” not frivolous fashions. She tries to throw them out, but they ignore her protests, tear up the place for their shoot, and then leave her alone in alphabetical disorder. In the wreckage, she sings Gershwin's “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” filmed exquisitely from high angles in semi-darkness, and performs a dance built around a single prop: a yellow-and-orange straw hat, the sole dab of color amid all the brown and black. At its end, forlorn little Jo tosses the hat aside and climbs back up the ladder—where she started—to begin replacing a thousand books.

It is the loveliest and most intimate musical moment in any film she ever made. But it is not her most taxing. That comes after she's transported to Paris, in a smoke-filled existential dive on the Left Bank—a send-up of Sartre's Café de Flore.

“I feel like expressing myself,” says Jo, in defiance of Astaire. What she expresses, in a routine called “Basal Metabolism,” is a satire of avant-garde inter-pretive dance—a sort of jitterbug-jazz ballet with cardiovascular contortions. Audrey slithers wildly about, clad entirely in black and but for Donen's brilliant touch of white socks. She is supported by two men who manage to keep smoking their cigarettes even standing on their heads. “I'd never done anything so jazzy before,” she said. “I'd never even
listened
to that kind of beat.”

Astaire had his own shining solo moment in “Let's Kiss and Make Up,” a courtship dance performed in a lamplighted courtyard for the benefit of Audrey on her balcony. Midway, he turns it into a Spanish bullfighter's display—a dazzling tour de force for a fifty-seven-year-old who has lost none of his stuff.

But the grand finale—“He Loves and She Loves,” an overly gauzy wedding number filmed outdoors near Chantilly—was more final than grand.

“It had been raining for weeks and weeks,” Donen told Warren Harris, “but finally we went out to shoot on this little island, which was not much more than a strip of grass between two streams. The grass was ankle deep in bog. Audrey had on white satin dancing shoes made in Paris, very expensive. She had about nine pairs standing by because they kept getting black in the mud. Fred got very crotchety and said to me, ‘I can't dance in that. Fix it.' ... How? ... He said, ‘I don't care! Put down a wood floor and paint it green.' Everyone was tense until Audrey suddenly quipped, ‘Here I've been waiting twenty years to dance with Fred Astaire, and what do I get? Mud in my eye!”'
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Though always humble about her own dancing (“I had a very slender kind of technique”), she had held her own, however worried she may have been about comparisons with Astaire's great partners of the past. Leslie Caron, when asked for her opinion of Hepburn as a dancer, replies with the graceful sidestep equivalent of a
jeté:
“You're asking me a tough one there. I thought uppermost she was a delightful romantic comedienne. I will be a little more silent on her dancing. But it doesn't matter. Whatever she did was so delightful that one was happy to watch her.”
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The appeal of Hepburn's dancing varies greatly, according to taste. “Where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron have energy,” wrote Sheridan Morley, “Astaire and Hepburn have class and subtlety.... If only she had managed to make
Gigi
for the screen a couple of years later, but by then she was otherwise engaged, and her role went by default to Caron.”
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The most sharp-eyed assessment comes from dance writer Caroline Latham:

“Hepburn's long legs and slim body make her a good match for Astaire's own elongation. Watching them, one is struck by their shared quality of benign remoteness. Each seems enclosed by some personal bubble of space and air, a visible separateness. Rather than lovers, they seem when they dance to be brother and sister, twin halves of a whole from some classic myth.”
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Much like Fred and Adele.

 

 

ALMOST LOST in the dance shuffle of
Funny Face
was the fact that Audrey was under equal pressure to sing—and to sing well enough for a recording. Donen would refer to her “thin little voice,” which she went to great pains to improve. An intense round of vocal coaching was in store for her at the Paramount soundstages in Hollywood before her taping sessions: daily rehearsals for nearly four weeks. “I was quite nervous about it, never having recorded before,” she said.

Even Kay Thompson was called in to help. She had coached Judy Garland, among other MGM singer-actress stars, and now coached Audrey, urging her to employ a parlando style of speech-song and to concentrate on the lyrics. Astaire helped, too, during the vocal-track recording of their “'S'Wonderful” duet. The third time through, Donen recalled, “she made a mistake and Fred jumped in and did something wrong on purpose. He said, ‘Oh, I'm sorry. I've ruined it. Can we do it again?'” Audrey gratefully believed it was his fault instead of hers.
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In the end, her “childlike yet trained voice contributes a great deal to the film's sentiment,” said Donen. “Here is someone who is actually paying attention to the words.” Critics agreed on the “intimate, lyrical and genuinely af fecting” qualities of her singing.
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Hepburn, Donen and Avedon—jointly and separately—were praised for the picture's great photographic success, from the stylish dazzle of its opening credits through the magnificent Technicolor vistas of Paris, captured with high-contrast clarity by Paramount's new Vista-Vision process.
Funny Face
was a glorification (and spoof) of fashion photography, and its most striking visuals were the freeze-frame montages, frozen first in a negative or color-separated image, then in a positive one.

The process was the talk of both dance and photography circles: When a shot is “frozen” on the screen, the same frame is printed over and over for the desired length, but with a drastic loss in clarity. To get around that, Donen put a two-way mirror over the lens. The movie camera shot
through
the mirror while Avedon focused on the mirror, and the lab later matched the still photo with the film frame.
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Avedon's fashion photos were a kind of “frozen dance,” and Donen wanted the fashion sequences of
Funny Face
to have the same choreographic quality.
⁷²

Singled out above all was the scene in which Hepburn—in Givenchy gown, with “Winged Victory” behind her—runs briskly down an enormous staircase in the Louvre, snapped all the way by Astaire in a series of freeze frames. How she managed it was semi-miraculous, she recalled: