Audrey Hepburn (28 page)

The old cowboy's career had been in decline since High Noon (1952) but was recently revived by William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion (1956), which was still filling movie houses as
Love in the Afternoon
was getting under way. He would have to shed several decades to avoid looking like a child molester.

“I don't know why Coop was cast,” says Audrey Wilder. “Billy wanted the all-American kind of guy. But if you read the book, you see that Audrey shouldn't have played
her
part, either. She was supposed to be a virgin whose father ran an army post, and all the men were crazy about her and lied about her, so when she goes off with this guy, he's horrified to find out she's never had any experience. But Audrey by nature and her innocent persona made him seem like a dirty old man. When she says she's been with twenty-five guys—you don't believe her for a minute. Brigitte Bardot could say it and you'd believe it.“
⁹⁸

Many were disturbed by that, but Hepburn and Cooper were not among them. Shooting took place at the Studios de Boulogne and on location around Paris, and—by comparison with the tension on Wilder's
Sabrina
set—the atmosphere on this one was blissful. Audrey loved Cooper and the week it took to shoot a romantic picnic scene with him in the woods of Landru. She liked mastering the finger movements for the cello part in Haydn's Symphony No. 88, which she had to “perform” in one scene.
⁹⁹

She also enjoyed the man who played her father—and who almost stole the picture from her—Maurice Chevalier. That old charmer won her heart with a telegram on the first day of shooting: “How proud I would be, and full of love I would be, if I really had a daughter like you.” Later, when he learned that her mother was a fan and an autograph collector, he sent Ella a photo inscribed, “To Audrey's
real
mother from her
reel
father.”

Not everyone was so bowled over by Chevalier: Audrey Wilder said his only topic of conversation was himself and that “if the conversation veered away from him, his eyes turned to glass.”

The other Audrey and her mobile domestic gear were back at the Hotel Raphael. (The Wilders had been there, too, but checked out after a few days in protest against the bartender's inability to make a proper martini.) Mel was filming
The Vintage
with Pier Angeli in the south of France, and on the weekends Audrey joined him in Nice or St. Tropez. On one of those visits, Ferrer gave her a Yorkshire terrier puppy, soon named “Famous,” who turned out to be the most beloved gift of her life.

In Paris, the Ferrers and the Wilders, along with Cooper, Diamond, et al., often met after work for drinks or dinner, where Mel kept a close eye on his girl—to the point of being a drag. At one such soiree, Audrey Wilder told Charles Higham, Ferrer reminded Audrey that she had to leave early the next day for the London premiere of
War and Peace
and that they had to arrange tickets for some mutual friends. Fortified by a few more cocktails than usual, she replied loudly, “What a crock of shit about the tickets!” Everyone was astonished. Mel was furious. “You're leaving here now,” he said, and they did.
¹⁰⁰

Another negative report surfaced from unit publicist Herb Sterne concerning her insistence on seeing and approving all publicity photos. The photographers had been forbidden to shoot her at too low an angle because that would accentuate her nostrils, which she felt were too large. Sterne was amazed by “her obsession with her own face.”
¹⁰¹
Her fussiness in general seems to have left the
Love in the Afternoon
crew less fond of her than their
Funny Face
counterparts.

In addition, there were problems with Gary Cooper. It took him a full day—and many flubs—to complete the five-minute scene in which Ariane is ready to storm out of his life but can't find her shoe. “Somebody wake up Coop!” ordered Wilder before the umpteenth take. He had the further difficulty of teaching Cooper some routine ballroom steps for one scene. No mean dancer himself, Wilder took personal charge of the lessons—and ended up shaking his head over “Old Hopalong Nijinsky.”
¹⁰²

Cooper, unlike Humphrey Bogart, was a good sport about such cracks, and by and large,
Love in the Afternoon
was a happy picture. Wilder enjoyed trying to get a rise out of prim Audrey by telling her that the film's theme song, “Fascination,” had been the musical accompaniment to his own loss of virginity.

Wilder's humor was best employed, of course, in the film itself—which occasionally crossed the line between romantic comedy and bedroom farce. Wilder's best black-comedic touches belong to Lise Bourdin as a lady who keeps beating and chastising her dog for offenses it never commits.

Hepburn was filmed to perfection by William Mellor
(A
Place in the Sun). The final “farewell” scene, with Cooper scooping her up into a moving train in fine cowboy fashion, is a classic. But audiences and critics alike had trouble accepting The Age Gap. Despite the aid of gauzy filters, Cooper still looked old enough to be her father, which made the plot look more like a tawdry affair than a romance. It was “among the bleakest, most melancholy of comedies,” said American Film. “Cooper's face is often in silhouette, making it appear that Hepburn has fallen in love with a shadow. Which, in essence, she has.”
¹⁰³

To thwart charges of bad taste and bad morals, a voice-over was added at the end, assuring viewers that they were headed for the altar. Even so, in Spain several scenes were censored, and in France its name reverted to
Ariane
because the American title was considered too suggestive.
¹⁰⁴

Audrey at the time made a spirited defense against the claim that her leading men were too old: “The charge is particularly unfair to Coop,” she told a
New York World Telegram
reporter. “In
Love in the Afternoon
he's not trying to fool anyone. He's supposed to be a man of fifty. That's the whole point of the story. As for Fred Astaire, who cares how old he is? He's Fred Astaire! If anyone doesn't like it, he can go jump in the lake.”
^105
al

Later, however, she gave up the fight and said—not so facetiously—that
Love in the Afternoon
might have been more credible if Cooper and Chevalier had switched roles.

WHEN SHE finished shooting the Wilder film in late fall 1956, Audrey left Europe to spend the Christmas holiday at La Quinta, a desert resort near Palm Springs, with Mel and his children, Pepa and Mark. There—and subsequently—she reverted again to wifely mode: “If a room isn't gay it can be awfully depressing and a male begins to sulk,” she said. “I try to keep our trunks tabulated so I will never have to ask myself again, ‘Now where did I pack Mel's patent leather pumps?'”
¹⁰⁶

Meanwhile, she was turning down such film offers as Jean Negulesco's
A Certain Smile
and George Stevens's
The Diary of Anne Frank.
She had read Het
Achterhuis
[The Secret Annex, retitled The Diary of Anne Frank] in 1947 in its Dutch galley form, and “it destroyed me,” she said. “There were floods of tears. I became hysterical.” Audrey was one of the first pilgrims to the Amsterdam building on Prinsengracht where the Franks had hidden. But Anne's story was too much Audrey's own, and the memories—having survived the occupation in which Anne perished—made it impossible for her, despite great pressure that was brought to bear on her. At the request of George Stevens, Anne's father, Otto Frank, traveled to Biirgenstock from his home in Zurich to try to persuade Audrey to take the role.

“He came to lunch and stayed to dinner,” she recalled. “We had the most wonderful day.... He came with his new wife, who had lost her husband and her children [in the Holocaust]. They both had the numbers on their arms. He was a beautiful-looking man, very fine, a sort of transparent face, very sensitive. Incapable of talking about Anne without extreme feeling. I had to ask him nothing because he had a need to talk about it. He struck me [as] somebody who'd been purged by fire. There was something so spiritual about his face. He had been there and back.”
¹⁰⁷

Audrey kept a snapshot of the occasion for good luck in her own little Everyman Library edition of
The Diary.
“I read it again when George sent it to me—and had to go to bed for the day,” she said. Later, she added other reasons for declining: “I didn't want to exploit her life and her death to my advantage—to get another salary, to be perhaps praised in a movie.”
¹⁰⁸
A practical problem was cited by her friend Doris Brynner: “She was too old. She knew she couldn't play a fifteen-year-old.”
¹⁰⁹

Young Millie Perkins played it instead, quite well, in what turned out to be an excellent picture. Years later, Larry King asked Hepburn if, upon reflection, she thought she might have been the perfect Anne. “No,” she replied, “but then I'm not much of an actress.... I could not have suffered through that again without destroying myself.”
¹¹⁰

Perhaps for similar reasons, she also declined Paramount's offer to star in a non-musical biography of Maria von Trapp, whose life story would soon become The Sound of Music on Broadway. But there would be other nuns in Audrey's future, and for the moment, everything else was swept away in favor of the chance to costar with her husband.

In November 1957, the Ferrers attended the twenty-second annual New York Film Critics Awards at Sardi's, where the agenda was film but the talk was of television—and how to compete with it. The winners that night seemed to confirm the success of the new big-screen devices:
Around the World in 80 Days
(shot in Todd-AO) was chosen best film. The best actor and actress awards went to Kirk Douglas for
Lust for Life
and Ingrid Bergman for
Anastasia
—both lush CinemaScope productions.

During NBC radio's live broadcast of that event, commentator Ben Grauer provided the play-by-play: “... There's a little kiss from Ingrid Bergman to Audrey Hepburn...and a man who's close by Audrey's side. Come here, Mrs. Ferrer! Mel, hello. Mel Ferrer—formerly of NBC.”

“Still
with NBC,” Mel corrected. “We're working for them right now.”

Film stars who made television movies were rare in those days, and viewed as slightly traitorous by Hollywood. Some were even subject to reprisals by the studios, but Audrey Hepburn was “too big” for anything like that to occur. Thus, she and Mel had agreed to do
Mayerling
for NBC-TV-the most lavish made-for-television spectacular up to that time.

It would be a ninety-minute
Producers' Showcase
color extravaganza—a kind of counterattack to the recent spate of movie epics—with a $620,000 budget, a cast of 107, fabulous costumes and sets. For Audrey, the financial arrangements were as appealing as the choice of her costar: She would get $150,000 for three weeks' work, one of rehearsal and two of indoor taping at the NBC studios on Sixth Avenue in New York City—where the Ferrers arrived on New Year's Day of 1957.

The author of the project at hand was the same Claude Anet who had written
Ariane.
But
Mayerling
was no light comedy. It was the true story of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, who in 1889 fell in love with a seventeen-year-old commoner named Maria Vetsera and, rather than give her up, made a mutual suicide pact. Its director was Anatole Litvak, who knew the territory well: He had made the successful 1936 French version starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux. But this time, he had an unusual problem with his leads:

“When Audrey plays Maria, speaking to the prince, she is also Audrey speaking to her husband,” Litvak
told Life
magazine in mid-production. “It is very dif ficult to get Mel to treat her roughly. I had to work with him to get him to do it.”
¹¹¹

Ferrer himself confirms the accuracy of that—if not of a second Litvak statement: “I had a lot of trouble getting them to turn on the heat. Audrey seemed to have a better rapport with that Yorkshire terrier of hers.”
¹¹²

It always took months between the filming and the release of a movie, but—in good television fashion—
Mayerling
was aired on February 4, 1957, just two weeks after the conclusion of production. Reportedly, it garnered the largest audience of any Producers' Showcase program since Peter Pan two years earlier. But a big audience was not necessarily a happy audience—and the word “flop” was heard more than a little.

“A more pallid or elementary version of
Mayerling
would be difficult to imagine,” opined
The New York Times.
¹¹³
“The lovers seem more fated to bore each other to death than to end their illicit alliance in a murder-suicide pact,” said TV critic John Crosby.
¹¹⁴
As usual, Hepburn was praised for her beauty, delicacy and poignant vulnerability. Most of the brickbats were reserved for Ferrer as insufficiently dashing or romantic. Even in Europe, where the production was released theatrically, there was no critical or box-office excitement.