Audrey Hepburn (29 page)

Mayerling
was Mel and Audrey's last joint appearance, and on the basis of its failure, Paramount would reject several other proposed Hepburn-Ferrer team productions, including Thomas Wolfe's
Look Homeward, Angel
and Jean Anouilh's
The Lark.

It was finally dawning on Audrey—and more grudgingly on Mel—“that they were not destined to be the next Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh,” says Sheridan Morley. The public would accept them separately as a leading lady and a downbeat character actor, but not collectively. “From now on, Ferrer began to think of himself as the producer/director rather than costar of the partnership.”
¹¹⁵

So what could, or would, the leading lady take on next? The month of
Mayerling's
release, she had been voted “Girl of the Year” by Britain's
Picturegoer Film Annual.
New York's Cholly Knickerbocker named her one of the ten most fascinating women in the world, and the New York Dress Institute put her on its best-dressed list. As the accolades poured in, it was increasingly clear that they had more to do with her “look” than with her acting. However beloved by fashion photographers and designers, Audrey was still unusually difficult to cast in films.

She and Mel pondered that dilemma, after
Mayerling,
on a skiing trip to St. Moritz and then in Spain and Mexico, where she accompanied Mel for the making of
The Sun Also Rises,
costarring Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn. The Mexican location shoot was charged with electricity. By one account, Ava Gardner had just ended her affair with screenwriter Peter Viertel, losing him to Joan Fontaine, who in turn soon lost him to Deborah Kerr, on top of which there was great tension between Flynn and Power due to their alleged prior affair—all of which Audrey and Ava ignored by shopping and sightseeing together constantly.

“Total bullshit,” says Peter Viertel. “Joan Fontaine was in the future, and my affair with Gardner—which wasn't really an affair—was playing nurse to her when she was pissed DURING the
Sun Also Rises
shooting. Audrey and Mel kept very much to themselves, and so did Ava. I never knew of any ‘affair' between Errol and Ty—and I very much doubt it.”

The truth is more interesting than the fiction. “My first draft of the
[Sun]
script was a hundred percent better than the final one,” says Viertel. “Fred Zinnemann said he'd do it. He wanted Audrey for Lady Brett and he sent her the script, but she said she didn't want to play ‘a nymphomaniac.' In fact, even though she sleeps with everybody, the character is not a nymphomaniac, but Audrey felt she had an image to keep up. She wouldn't have been right for Lady Brett—but she would have been interesting.”
¹¹⁶

When shooting of the Hemingway film was completed (under Henry King‘s, not Fred Zinnemann's, direction), the Ferrers went to California for some studio story conferences and a visit with Mel's children in Santa Barbara before returning to Switzerland. Audrey was hugely relieved to be back home: She was expecting a baby. But it was those story conferences in Hollywood that would soon give birth—to twins.

 

 

“I'M TERRIBLY SORRY that I won't be able to do
The Diary of Anne Frank,”
she told a reporter—disingenuously—around this time. “It will come at the same time as
The Nun's Story,
so it will be impossible.”
¹¹⁷

Robert (
Tea and Sympathy)
Anderson had long been working on a script for The Nun's Story, which was the subject of one of those story conferences Mel and Audrey attended in California. The second dealt with another book-to-film project, but of a highly allegorical nature. Both would come to fruition. The question was which to make first. Having played mostly ingenues and Cinderellas to date, Hepburn decided it was time to prove herself as a serious dramatic actress in a part that submerged her own sunny personality beneath a much deeper set of emotions. The role of Sister Luke, which she signed to play in December 1957, would offer the greatest screen challenge of her life.

Toward the end of the fifties, Audrey Hepburn was a “glorious anachronism,” a member of a cinematic aristocracy whose appeal was on the wane. Her leading men had mostly been over fifty, and their ages had been considered no detriment to her. “She was courted on screen by nearly every hunky Hollywood relic,” said Richard Corliss, “until, in
The Nun's Story,
only God could be her best beau.”
¹¹⁸

CHAPTER 5

“Marilyn [Monroe] was my first choice to play Holly Golightly. I thought she would be perfect. Holly had to have something touching about her ... unfinished. [But] Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey.”

-TRUMAN CAPOTE

 

 

 

F
ROM NYMPH TO NUN, SAID THE WAGS.
¹
MAKING
THE NUN'S STORY
was a daring decision both for Audrey Hepburn and for Warner Brothers in the year 1958. The narrative seemed better suited to documentary than to big-feature treatment. Moreover, the complex spiritual problems of its heroine were sure to disturb the Roman Catholic Church and many of the faithful. Some ecclesiastical officials charged that Hulme's novel exaggerated and sensationalized such aspects of convent life as flagellation and that its “negative” ending reflected pejoratively on all nuns.

Two things were essential to pulling the film off: a director of great finesse, and the presence of Hepburn. She was the only major star with sufficiently credible “purity,” untainted by any scandalous behavior on- or offscreen.

Director Fred Zinnemann
(High Noon, From Here To Eternity, Oklahoma!)
would provide the finesse. The book had been sent to him by Gary Cooper, “who thought I might find it interesting. He was right. Unhappily, my enthusiasm was not shared by any of the studios.... But when Audrey said she wanted to do it the studios suddenly became intensely interested.”
²
The only other candidate, Zinnemann revealed, had been Ingrid Bergman—but she failed the purity test.

Reports that Hepburn had hesitated due to the lack of a part for Mel Ferrer were false. Ferrer, in fact, had read
The Nun's Story
first and recommended it with enthusiasm. “I particularly admired Fred Zinnemann,” he recalls, “and urged Audrey to play the nun, which changed the direction of her creative life.”
³
Forever criticized, Mel never got credit for this instance—among others—of his positive career advice. His attitude was all the more generous considering that her casting in
Nun's
Story complicated his own ambitious project with her,
Green Mansions.
The schedule was so tight that Audrey would have no break between two demanding productions in tropical locales, for which she was now taking an assortment of twelve shots against a host of diseases.

The previous great “Catholic film”—
The Song of Bernadette,
fifteen years earlier—had been uplifting and devoid of controversy. Kathryn C. Hulme's Nun's Story, on the other hand, was a bestselling novel that treated its religious material with respect but also with severe realism and a sad ending.

It was the true story of Belgian nun Marie-Louise Habets (“Sister Luke”), whose devotion is ever at war with her vow of obedience. She is sent to work as a nurse in the Belgian Congo, where her inner struggle unfolds through a series of medical crises and an intense relationship with the surgeon she serves. The backdrop is World War II and her moral dilemma is compounded by the question of whether to assist the Resistance after her father is killed by the Nazis.

The film, like the book, had to work simultaneously on multiple levels—dramatic, spiritual, political—with a disturbing relevance to Hepburn's own war experience. Author and subject had met in 1945 at a UNRRA camp for displaced persons in Germany. One day, Hulme remarked on the long hours Habets spent at her nursing work. “You're a saint, Marie-Lou,” she said, to which Habets reacted with great upset. “I was a nun once,” she later confided to Hulme, “but a nun who failed her vows.”

The two women became soul mates as well as housemates. Habets came to the United States in 1951, moved in with Hulme and worked in a Santa Fe Railroad hospital in Los Angeles, caring for Navajo track walkers, brakemen and porters.
Nun's
Story had sold three million copies and been translated into twelve languages by the time film production began, when Zinnemann arranged for Audrey to meet the real-life Sister Luke at Hulme's home near Los Angeles.

“She didn't really want to meet me,” Habets later said. “She felt the story was too much of my private life. She just sat there and looked at me and didn't ask any questions.”
⁴

On subsequent visits, Hepburn got less tongue-tied and ended up working so closely with Hulme and Habets that people referred to them collectively as “The 3-H Club.” Audrey consulted the ex-nun on every detail of her character—from the proper donning of a habit to the correct kissing of a crucifix. Habets also familiarized her with an operating room and helped demystify the world of microscopes and Bunsen burners in a medical laboratory.

The presence of Hepburn allayed Jack Warner's fears but not necessarily those of the Catholic church. She was not, after all, a Catholic herself, and the church was still sufficiently powerful in 1958 to hold up a multimillion-dollar production over a single line of dialogue, as Zinnemann recalled:

Zinnemann also needed to secure permission for Audrey to do more “homework”—and for the company to shoot—inside an actual nunnery. The bishop of Bruges had refused permission to film at Habets's own Sisters of Charity convent in Ghent, but Warner agents negotiated the use of a similar French convent belonging to the Sisters of the Oblates d'Assomption, at Froyennes—in exchange for some hard, Hollywood cash. The mother superior also agreed to let Audrey stay there briefly for observation purposes.

Casting, by then, had been completed. Audrey had hinted that Ferrer could play Dr. Fortunati, says Warren Harris, but “Zinnemann pretended not to hear.”
⁶
Several other candidates, including Yves Montand, declined the part on the grounds that it was too small. Zinnemann settled wisely on Australian actor Peter Finch, whose name and fee were smaller. Dame Edith Evans was perfectly cast as Mother Emmanuel, Sister Luke's mother general in Belgium. Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Mildred Dunnock and Beatrice Straight would play the other key roles among the nuns.

Never before or after were the logistics of a film—far-flung locations in France, Italy and the Congo—so difficult for Audrey. From Day One, she fretted that delays in
Nun's Story's
shooting schedule would run into Mel's start-up date for
Green Mansions,
and she couldn't get a straight answer out of the studio. With the clock ticking, Zinnemann sent a red-flag cable to Warners: “We are courting disaster if Audrey left unaware of finishing date much longer. Will decline all responsibility for picture unless Audrey fully aware of true situation. Find myself increasingly unable to cope with endless uncertainty.”

Matters were complicated by various sublime and ridiculous snags. It was reported that Hepburn insisted a bidet be airmailed to her in Rome and thence to Africa. (She denied it: “How and where would you hook it up?”) What she wanted much more than a bidet was her dog Famous: The Italians were willing to fudge their quarantine rules, but the Congolese were not. Cables flew back and forth among officials on three continents, until Famous finally got his canine visa. Audrey hugged and kissed and fussed over him, and took him everywhere. Once when a car nearly ran over him, “she went crazy, screaming and crying,” recalls costar (and later film-biographer par excellence) Patricia Bosworth. “After her outburst, she locked herself in her dressing room until she had herself under control.”
⁷
Fred Zinnemann thought the dog was an obvious child-substitute.

Actress Rosalie Crutchley, who played Sister Eleanor, remembered a chat she and Hepburn had after Crutchley's young son and daughter visited the studio. “How fortunate you are,” Audrey said wistfully. “I do terribly want to have a child—more than anything else in the world. How have you managed to have children
and
maintain a career?” Crutchley's reply was rather brusk: “unlike you, I am not a globe-trotting film star.”
⁸

The real globe-trotting for
Nun's Scory
had not yet begun. The “studio” was not in Hollywood but in Rome, where most of the interior photography would be done. In the Cinecittà Studios' Experimental Center, set wizard Alexander Trauner designed an historically correct convent and chapel and perfect replicas of an early Michelangelo “Pieta” and other statues in Bruges. One advantage to filming in Rome related to obtaining the many other nuns required for
Nun's Story,
as Zinnemann explained: