Audrey Hepburn (30 page)

“As it was understood that real nuns were not to be photographed, we needed to find extras for the large complicated ceremonial scenes of walking in procession, kneeling, bowing and prostrating themselves—all more or less on cue; these women had to have special training. In the end, twenty dancers were borrowed from the ballet corps of the Rome Opera and were drilled by two Dominican nuns, one of them a university professor.”

Zinnemann took scrupulous care to see that all convent rituals were accurately rendered—literally “choreographed,” with the help of those dancers, in the chapel scenes.

“For the nuns' close-ups,” he said, “faces of great character and personality were needed. We found them mostly among the embassies and the Roman ‘black' aristocracy: a lot of principessas and contessas would turn up in their Rolls-Royces or Mercedes at five a.m. Dressed as nuns they looked marvelous.”

As of two weeks before shooting began, all the on-screen nuns were ordered to stay out of the sun, and makeup supervisor Alberto de Rossi emphasized the paleness of their skin and lips. His wife Grazia, again serving as Audrey's hairdresser, was cleverly engaged to play the nun who cuts off Sister Luke's hair at the beginning of her novitiate. (Contrary to legend, the hair she lops off is not Audrey's own, but a wig.)
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Otherwise, Zinnemann chose not to cast many Roman Catholics in the film. “It seemed important to keep an objective approach to the work, without the emotional involvement a faithful believer would bring to it,” he said, and none of the leads relied on religion to create their roles. Most fascinating was Edith Evans's approach to her part. She told Zinnemann she took the character of the Reverend Mother from a single sentence in the book: “Her back never touched the back of the chair in which she was sitting.” Evans held herself absolutely straight to show the gap between the chair's back and her own, and built her whole character from that one physical trait.
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Audrey, by contrast, was building her character from the inside out. She began a regimen of simple, convent-type meals and a policy of not looking at herself in mirrors, which were forbidden to real-life nuns. When a makeup man turned on a phonograph one day during a break in shooting, she asked him to turn it off as “Sister Luke wouldn't be allowed to listen to it.” The inward essence concerned her deeply. “There's a man in the Congo I want to see, if I possibly can,” she told a reporter just before leaving Rome for Africa. “Albert Schweitzer.”
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ON JANUARY 23, 1958, Hepburn, Zinnemann, Finch and company flew to the Belgian Congo in high spirits. In that pre-jet age, it took fourteen hours to get to Stanleyville, their headquarters for the next two months. Once they arrived, said Zinnemann, “Except for the occasional snakes in unexpected places, such as under breakfast tables, we lived quite comfortably in the Sabena Guest House on food flown in from Brussels twice a week.”
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What would Mel eat in her absence? Audrey—dutiful wife as well as dutiful actress—had not failed to take care of that. Before leaving for Africa, she had written out daily menus for the cook to prepare for him—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even midnight snacks—during the months she would be away.
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Audrey's own needs and demands were few. Other than the dog, “The only thing she requested in the Congo was an air conditioner,” says Zinnemann. “It was promptly sent from the studio in Burbank but did not seem to do much good. On closer inspection it turned out to be a humidifier.”
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Audrey recalled that “in the Congo, a cool day was 100, and the weather was often 130. [But] I didn't swelter in my nun's habit.... Actually, all that covering keeps the heat out.”
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Perhaps being thin also made the heat less oppressive for her than for others; Dame Peggy was out for two days with heat stroke. In any case, Zinnemann said he had “never seen anyone more disciplined, more gracious or more dedicated to her work than Audrey. There was no ego.... There was the greatest consideration for her coworkers.” She was taking on the characteristics of an actual nun—albeit Hollywood-style.

“Our ‘nuns' carried make-up cases and smoked cigarettes between setups,” said Zinnemann. “The blacks who came to watch the shooting could not believe their eyes. Then someone said, ‘Of course, these are American nuns.' And the blacks said, ‘Ah, yes, now we understand.'”
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Highlight of the filming was the four days they spent with the celebrated British missionary Dr. Stanley Browne, shooting a sequence in his leper colony on an island in the middle of the Congo river. “Naturally,” said Zinnemann, “we asked [Dr. Browne] about the risks involved. ‘You have less risk of getting leprosy here than catching a cold in the New York subway,' he said. After we had finished shooting he added, ‘Of course you have to understand that the incubation period for leprosy is seventeen years.”' Dr. Browne was using the new sulfone drugs to stop the spread of, though not cure, leprosy. “Each year they were able to release a small number of people who were declared safe and were returned to their villages after a most moving ceremony which ended with everyone singing an anthem in their own language: English, French, Lingala and Swahili.”
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The tune to which they all sang their own words was the “Ode to Joy” of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and when Audrey heard it, she wept.

Equally dramatic was the planned sequence in which three men are caught in quicksand on the banks of a raging river during a rainstorm. People along the water's edge were to watch in horror as the men disappeared under the mud, Zinnemann recalled:

It was the $40,000 scene-that-was-never-shot. But of greater concern was the worsening political situation in the Congo, which was coming to the end of nearly a century of bitter Belgian colonialism. Racial tensions were palpable in Stanleyville, where a postal clerk named Patrice Lumumba would soon become premier—and soon after be murdered.

“There was a curfew for the blacks, who were not allowed in the European area after sunset,” Zinnemann recalled. “[One year later,] the Belgians would be driven out [and] very many of these extraordinary people were dead—killed in the revolution.”
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Exterior filming in the Congo was completed early in March 1958, but equally tricky were the interior sexual subtleties of the story—namely, the relationship between Sister Luke and the atheist doctor for whom she works. “He's a genius—also a bachelor and an unbeliever,” she is warned in advance. “Don't ever think for an instant that your habit will protect you.”

There could be no hint of a physical affair between the doctor and the nun, but Zinnemann felt Finch had the sex appeal to make audiences feel a powerful attraction anyway. Soon enough, there were rumors of a Hepburn-Finch affair—as there were rumors of an affair between Finch and every actress he ever worked with, including Vivien Leigh in
Elephant Walk.
Confirmed, rather than rumored, were his heavy drinking habits, cultivated from an early age in Australia. Audrey's piety, in and out of her role, had nothing in common with Finch's wild, womanizing ways—but made for a perfect complement to him on screen.

“His public image was no myth,” said Yolande Finch, his second wife. “He was a piss-pot and a hell-raiser, but he was also a happy drunk, a gigglebum and very, very good company.”
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Typical of Finch's attachments was one formed on the Sabena airliner en route to the Congo: He was suddenly afflicted by a fear of flying to rival Erica Jong's, finding relief only in close contact with a beautiful, six-foot Belgian stewardess named Lucienne Van Loop.
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She was regularly assigned to that flight, and they saw a lot of each other during
Nun's Story
shooting. Finch said the reason for her frequent visits was “dental treatment,” although Stanleyville was not known to be a mecca of dentistry. Audrey, in one of her rare and charming off-color remarks, observed that, “If she keeps up at the present rate, she'll be giving her Finchy a very gummy smile.”
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Finch, however, was always respectful of Hepburn. A certain Magistra monkey, on the other hand, was not. It was supposed to be Sister Luke's beloved pet, but it gave Audrey a nasty bite on the right arm. Otherwise, location injuries were minimal.

Audrey's serious medical trouble happened not in Africa but after the company returned to Italy for the conclusion of the marathon 132-day shoot. One midnight at the Hotel Hassler in Rome, she began to feel excruciating back pains, accompanied by vomiting and a urinary obstruction. Stoic as ever, she refused to call anyone she knew for help, not even Zinnemann and his wife, who were on the floor below. “We learned of her illness only the next morning,” said Mrs. Zinnemann. “She had telephoned the hotel doctor rather than disturb our sleep.”
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Partly due to dehydration in the Congo, she had a severe case of kidney stones. Her mother and husband immediately flew to be with her—Ella from London and Mel from Venezuela, where he'd been scouting
Green Mansions
locations. In an effort to avoid surgery, the doctors prescribed drugs and ordered bed rest. Filming continued around her until the treatment achieved its results—successfully—without requiring an operation.

“Someone said that kidney ailments are even more painful than childbirth,” said Audrey at the time. “Now I'm perfectly prepared to have a dozen children.”
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Zinnemann shielded her from the bombardment he was getting from Warner production chief Steve Trilling, who thought Audrey was dogging her recovery and who kept cracking the whip for work to resume—in the same Roman studio where
Ben-Hur
was being shot on an adjacent sound stage.
^am
At any rate, by April, Hepburn was back on the
Nun's Story
set in good shape.

The film's most shocking scenes take place in a grim, Marat-Sade type of insane asylum in Belgium—groaning women in cells and bathtubs, shot in semi-documentary fashion. There, Sister Luke is nearly killed when she disobeys orders and opens the cell of a patient who yanks her inside and attacks her. It's a fierce struggle, and Audrey was only recently over a debilitating illness. “We'd provided a double for that fight,” Zinnemann says, “but she wouldn't hear of it.”
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Hepburn insisted on playing the scene herself and took instruction from the double in how to wrestle without tearing a ligament—in full nun's robes. The credible violence of that sequence is riveting.

Credibility was important to Zinnemann in every way, particularly in his visual aspirations for the film:

“I dearly wanted to shoot the European parts in black and white and then, when Sister Luke arrives in the Belgian Congo, to burst out into all the hot, vivid, stirring colors of Central Africa. Jack Warner vetoed it; he thought it was too tricky and too far ahead of [the] popular imagination.”
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The director's consolation was Austrian cinematographer Franz Planer, who had photographed Audrey in
Roman Holiday
and whose style was perfectly suited to the somber formality of The
Nun's Story.
Planer's splendid ethnographic footage of Congo village life much enhanced the production.

Zinnemann had lost the black-and-white visual battle, but he would win a major audio victory. There was great internal studio dispute over composer Franz Waxman's score:

In that chilling final scene, which contains not a word of dialogue, Luke removes her robes, a buzzer pops open a door, and she leaves the convent without ceremony or farewell of any kind. She is being cast out literally, and through the open door, the camera tracks her slow trek down a brick lane and the moment's hesitation before she makes a right turn. It is a sad, stark, beautiful downer of an ending, devoid of any false hope.

The ending was silent, but Warner music executive Rudy Fehr, who accompanied Audrey to the first sneak preview of
The Nun's Story
in San Francisco, remembers the overall resolution of the sound-of-music controversy a bit differently: