Audrey Hepburn (32 page)

Professional viewers were amazed at the way the camera followed Audrey around—and how it rendered her face:
Green Mansions
and
Ben-Hur
were the first two movies to be filmed in Panavision, a new wide-screen process devised to one-up CinemaScope, Todd-AO and VistaVision. Hepburn had disliked the way CinemaScope exaggerated her angular features. Panavision fixed that by means of an anamorphic lens, and soon outpaced CinemaScope as the industry's standard. Its inventor, Robert E. Gottschalk, recalled the excitement at the first rushes: “The people in the projection room—Audrey and Mel among them—all broke out in spontaneous applause.”
⁴⁴
Gottschalk, ever after, would credit Audrey's “square face” for Panavision's success.

Many had predicted trouble on the set between Mr. and Mrs. Ferrer, working together as director and star for the first time. But Audrey's sheer professionalism disappointed the naysayers. It was lights-out at ten, said a friend, “and more frequently than not she is in bed by eighty-thirty or nine p.m. reading until her ten o'clock curfew”—
Dr
.
Zhivago,
at the time. She also made it clear that she “knew her place” from the start.

“Mel won't have any trouble with me,” she said. “I like being directed. I don't know what to do myself. Of course, there are certain things on the set that I have an instinct about. What I do worry about is that I might hesitate to suggest something because I wouldn't want him to think that I'm interfering. Any contribution of mine would be minimal, but sometimes one does think of something, you know.”
⁴⁵

It sounds painfully servile now, but it was how she truly felt then. Throughout the making of the film, she was as conscientious a wife at the studio as she was at home, according to photographer Bob Willoughby, who shot her at both places: “If the prop man forgot to bring Mel his morning orange juice, she brought it herself. In the afternoon she'd bring him tea and cookies. I think she's the wife of every man's dreams.”
⁴⁶

Some members of the crew were so unhappy with Ferrer's direction that they threatened to walk off the set. Audrey, on the other hand, “often did things she knew were wrong just because he told her to,” says Willoughby. “No matter how idiotic the directions that Mel would give her, while all the other people on the set were rolling their eyes, she would carry them out perfectly, beautifully, without a hint of disagreement, in an effort to help him save face.”
⁴⁷

One friend said her desire to win admiration from her husband was part of her desire to win admiration from
everyone;
she was too good to be true: “Someday she'll prove it by finally revealing herself to be like the rest of the human race, both good and bad. When she does, there may be an explosion, but she'll be a lot happier than she is now.”
⁴⁸

Maybe, maybe not. In any event, she certainly won admiration from her choreographer. Mel hired brilliant Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to create the score for
Green Mansions
and the great Katherine Dunham to stage its dances—and to coach Audrey.

“I taught her a number of things to help her get into the atmosphere,” recalls Dunham. “She had such a wonderful sense of her body and movement. Technique is a way of life—it's holistic—and she was a holistic person. That film allowed her to have a lot of exposure in a natural setting, and she fit into it practically without direction. I remember feeling that I'd love to have had her as a dancer to handle.”
⁴⁹

Dunham's main choreographic task in the film involved a rite-of-passage ceremony with Henry Silva and the other “Indian” men: Silva's chest is covered with honey and he must wear a “vest” of stinging bees to prove his manliness. That sado-masochistic ritual ends with one of Dunham's most orgiastic male dances—a kind of aboriginal, aberrational bachelor party.

“It was a very exotic film for its day,” she says today. “I wasn't terribly happy with the director, but it was none of my business. As in other films that I did, the director seemed to feel competitive about the dance sequences because they were out of his control to some extent. It happened also on
The Bible:
I thought John Huston and I were in agreement about things, but somehow, a lot of the dance was left out.”

Dunham thought Hepburn had a hard time working under Ferrer: “I felt that he was not terribly sympathetic to her.” But Audrey herself declared otherwise : “Before we began, many friends asked me how such an artistically touchy situation would turn out.... I can say it was pleasantly uncomplicated. I found that being directed by Mel was as natural as brushing my teeth.”
⁵⁰

She also professed delight with Anthony Perkins as her leading man—the first of her film career to be close to her own age (he was three years younger). Perkins was one of Hollywood's rising new male stars in the wake of his fine performances in
Friendly Persuasion
(1956) and Fear
Strikes Out
(1957). Forced to sing “The Song of Green Mansions” (accompanying himself on the guitar), he did well enough. But his sexual ambivalence—on—and offscreen—did not make for passionate celluloid. Perkins was too quirky and high-strung—as if anticipating Norman Bates in
Psycho
the next year—to be a convincing lover opposite such an ethereal sprite as Hepburn.

How did it feel to have her husband tell another man how to make love to her?

“Uninhibited,” said Audrey. “For the first time in my career, I've lost my shyness.... Love scenes have always been difficult for me. But with Mel directing and leading Tony and me through the emotional passages, everything's fallen into place.”
⁵¹
Indeed, regardless of the film's ultimate success or failure, only under Mel's direct view could she feel free enough to let herself go and attempt a “new,” sexier Audrey Hepburn.

Green Mansions
was completed in November 1958 and premiered at Radio City Music Hall in Easter Week of 1959—before
Nun's Story,
which had wrapped much earlier but was not released until July. Much to the Ferrers' distress,
Mansions
did not pan out with either the critics or the public—and Mel . got the blame.

“If Miss Hepburn won't change husbands, or directors,” said one critic who particularly hated the color photography of Joseph Ruttenberg, “she at least owes it to her public to change her brand of toothpaste. In Ferrer's fiasco, she looks as if she had been given an overdose of chlorophyll.... The whole thing has an appalling greenish patina that makes it look as if it had been filmed in a decaying parsley patch.”
⁵²

Variety
said it was “likely to confuse those who haven't read the book and irritate those who have.”
Cue
thought it “a mawkishly absurd burlesque of a jungle
alfresco
romance.”

But a significant minority was favorable. “Hepburn's doe-like grace probably comes closer to a real-life Rima than we have any reason to expect,” wrote Arthur Knight in
Saturday Review.
British critic Simon Brett was positively rhapsodic, ranking it as something of a lost masterpiece:

“It is remarkable that it came to be made at all in the year Hollywood produced
I Want to Live, The Big Country
and
Gigi.
[Ferrer has] a control, of space and of movement in space, and a taut skill in telling the story in terms of action with the minimum of dialogue. Audrey Hepburn is Rima in the same way that she was Ondine.” Brett felt it marked the end of the first phase of her career: “Rima was her most complete, indeed an almost abstract, symbol of innocence, and in a sense her last.”
⁵³

The “maligned masterpiece” view, however, is disputed by Audrey's later friend and Lincoln Center Film Society director Wendy Keys: “It was obviously a gesture to please Mel Ferrer, and she put all the effort into it that she put into everything. But
Green Mansions
does nothing to make me believe he had a sense of anything as a director. It's a miserable piece of work.”
⁵⁴

Green Mansions
failed to recoup its $3 million investment and put an end to the professional teaming of Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer once and for all. In a way, it was fortunate to have been eclipsed quickly by the much better and more ballyhooed
Nun's Story,
whose delayed release by Warners helped limit the damage. But
Mansions'
failure was a bitter blow to Mel—the last nail in his coffin as a director-producer. He never directed another Hollywood film.

For all that and the lumps he took, Ferrer is gracious about it today: “Directing Audrey was a delight. It was more a matter of trying to present Audrey at her grave and touching best than directing her. She knew what she felt. Revealing it was my job. Perhaps I did not do it well. But Rima remains alive for me, and the film was a creative effort we were all glad we tried.”
⁵⁵

 

 

MEL WAS ALWAYS keenly interested in his wife's personal as well as professional welfare. Her extreme slimness was a career asset but also a concern: Though generally healthy, she was ten or fifteen pounds underweight and tired easily—not for lack of nutrition, she insisted. She ate what she wished and did not preserve her figure by dieting, said Audrey.

Yet with food, as all else, she practiced strict discipline and in a sense dieted every day of her life. It would later be claimed that she suffered from anorexia or bulimia (see Chapter 9, pp. 303-4), but Mel Ferrer categorically denies it:

“Audrey never had an eating disorder. She was always very careful about her diet, did not drink alcohol except an occasional glass of wine with dinner, and avoided desserts. She chose her diet as a dancer would: plenty of protein and lots of vegetables and salads. She ate sparingly and rarely splurged. But we did have a yearly feast of caviar in a baked potato.”
⁵⁶

When cooking for guests, she could turn out such gourmet treats as egg in aspic, rolled stuffed veal or a Dutch apple torte. But her private diet was indeed simple, as the press's obsessive coverage of her at the time confirms. “She always eats the same breakfast,” reported
Good Housekeeping
in 1959, going on to itemize “two boiled eggs, one piece of seven-grain whole-wheat toast from a health-food store, and three or four cups of coffee laced with hot milk. Her lunch consists of cottage cheese and fruit salad or of yoghurt with raw vegetables. For dinner, she has meat and several cooked vegetables.”
⁵⁷

Five years of near-starvation in Holland left her with a passion for sweets that she still had to fight. “I have seen her resist the most tempting dessert to guard against one inch more on her extraordinary size eight,” said her friend Radie Harris.
⁵⁸
Said Audrey herself: “I'm glad I like sweet things—I expect I'd be tubercular if I didn't. But if I ate all I wanted, it just wouldn't do. I'm getting better. Now if I get a box of good chocolates, it will last awhile, maybe for two hours. I used to eat them all without stopping until every last one was gone.... I guess it's a basic form of insecurity.”
⁵⁹

There was clearly a deep ambivalence in her attitude toward food, stemming from her childhood. “When you have had the strength to survive starvation,” she would say, “you never again send back a steak simply because it's under-done.”

These days, under Mel's watchful eye, Audrey's life was as prudent and safe as possible, though he could not insulate her from every danger. After years of reluctance, she now decided to learn how to drive. But soon after getting her license, she crashed into a parked car containing actress-dancer Joan Lora, twenty-two, who suffered neck and back injuries and sued her for $45,000. Reports that Audrey had been drinking or driving on the wrong side of the road were false and, in the end, Lora was awarded just a tenth of what she asked—$4,500. But Audrey was bitterly upset and vowed never to get behind the wheel of a car again.

A much worse accident was in the offing.

 

 

THE UNFORGIVEN
was Audrey Hepburn's first and last Western—and one of the darkest and most peculiar of all time. It was a product of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions (an independent company co-owned by actor Burt Lancaster, producer Harold Hecht and writer James Hill), which had a growing reputation for bold, socially relevant pictures. Their
Marty,
a few years before, had swept the Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay.

The Unforgiven,
under John Huston's direction, was expected to be in that league. It concerned the deep, mindless prejudice against Indians in frontier Texas, and Huston wanted to make a major statement. This was, after all, the early heyday of the American civil-rights movement. But United Artists and Burt Lancaster just wanted a box-office hit.

“I thought I saw in [Ben] Maddow's script the potential for a more serious—and better—film than either he or Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had originally contemplated,” said Huston. “I wanted to turn it into the story of racial intolerance in a frontier town, a comment on the real nature of community ‘morality.' [But] what they wanted was what I had unfortunately signed on to make in the first place—a swashbuckler.... This difference of intention did not become an issue until we were very close to shooting time, and quite mistakenly I agreed to stick it out, thus violating my own conviction that a picture-maker should undertake nothing but what he believes in.... From that moment, the entire picture turned sour. Everything went to hell.”
⁶⁰

Huston never confirmed or denied the claim that he took on
The Unforgiven
to fill the time while Arthur Miller polished up the script for his next (and more important) film,
The Misfits.
In any case,
The Unforgiven
had a huge budget for a Western—nearly $6 million. Three hundred thousand dollars alone went into the construction of an 1860 pioneer sod home replica that might have cost $150 originally. Audrey's salary was $200,000, and not everyone thought she deserved it. “She is not an actress, she is a model, with her stiff meager body and her blank face full of good bone structure,” wrote Dwight MacDonald at the time. “She has the model's narcissism, not the actress' introversion.”