Audrey Hepburn (37 page)

“Audrey could be very, very critical of herself on screen,” Richard Quine recalled. “She just hated the way that she and Bill Holden looked, which wasn't necessarily Claude Renoir's fault, but I had no option but to discharge him. Of course, firing a Renoir is tantamount to treason in France, so the unions raised hell and threatened to go out on strike.”
¹⁰⁶

The lady got her way on that point. But her well-grounded fears on the subject of Holden were not so easily dismissed or resolved. “The day I arrived at Orly Airport to make
Paris When It Si
les,”
Holden told his friend Ryan O'Neal, “I could hear my footsteps echoing against the walls of the transit corridor, just like a condemned man walking the last mile. I realized I had to face Audrey again, and that I had to deal with my drinking, and I didn't think I could handle either situation.”
¹⁰⁷

He was right. Holden's casting opposite Hepburn was doomed from the start. He was tormented by being with her again, and by his own worsening inadequacies. Drinking more heavily than ever, he often arrived drunk on the set, flirting with dismissal. Axelrod remembered the night Holden climbed a tree by a wall leading up to Audrey's room. Like Rapunzel, she came to her window and leaned out, whereupon Holden kissed her—and then slipped and plunged from the tree, landing atop a parked car below. His wife Ardis—“bitter and frustrated,” said Audrey Wilder—arrived on the scene and harangued him, to no effect. The coup de grace in Paris was his purchase of a new Ferrari that he promptly drove into a wall, further delaying the picture.

In the dubious
Paris When It Si
les
script, Holden was a screenwriter who can't get his story right and keeps trying to reinvent it with the secretarial and romantic assistance of Audrey, who helps act out his fantasies. Director Quine was striving for a frothy kind of Cary Grant comedy, but Holden wasn't up to it, and Hepburn seemed embarrassed most of the time.

The delays were costing a fortune and Paramount threatened to shut down the production by the time Quine finally persuaded Holden to enter the Château de Garche, an alcoholic recovery hospital, to dry out. He then imported a new guest star—Tony Curtis—who provides his own candid account:

In the end, several of the film's few funny moments belonged to Curtis as a hip Hollywood heartthrob who keeps appearing when least expected. He's a spoofed-up version of Curtis himself—a cool cat in tight pants, tossing off sixties jargon: “Like, bon jour, baby! Groovy! But I'm gonna have to split.” Thanks to Tony, the picture kept rolling, and so did the meter.

Poor Quine was besieged on all fronts.
^ar
He had a male star who couldn't stay sober and a female star who was racked by insecurities. Audrey these days had renewed an old obsession about her crooked front tooth and spoke constantly of having it fixed. Quine loved the singularity of the thing and threatened “to absolutely maim her if she changed that tooth.”
¹⁰⁹

In addition to Curtis, Quine was calling in every other “star chit” he had in an effort to salvage a very moribund affair. Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward agreed to make cameo appearances, against their better judgment. Coward's ego needed the gig more than Dietrich's, as his 1962 diary entries suggest:

Hepburn didn't share his enchantment. “She really hated it,” says her nephew Michael Quarles van Ufford, Ian's son, who visited her then on the
Si
les
set. “She had to get up at four, the limousine would come and fetch her around six, and she would come back at eight at night, exhausted. She'd say, ‘All this was for five minutes of filming today.' ”
¹¹¹

When finally completed, wildly overbudget, Paramount recognized it as a dud and shelved it for two years. It did not improve with age and got a disastrous reception when finally released in 1964 (two years
after
Hepburn's subsequent film).

“Axelrod's dialogue and Holden's gift for comedy amply deserve each other,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann. “Noel Coward is briefly on hand at his most repellent.” Hollis Alpert in
Saturday Review
called it “a dreadfully expensive display of bad taste.” Judith Crist checked in with,
“Paris When
It
Si
les?
Strictly Hollywood when it fizzles.”

More ridicule was in store as a result of the on-screen credit, “Miss Hepburn's wardrobe and perfume by Hubert de Givenchy.” The fragrance was L'Interdit, created for her by Givenchy in 1957. Hepburn chronicler Warren Harris observed it was “the first time since the 1960
Scent of Mystery
(produced in the Smell-O-Vision process) that a movie left itself wide open for critical branding as a stinker.”

 

 

IF NOTHING ELSE, the embarrassment of such reviews was postponed for a couple of years. A more immediate embarrassment for Audrey was her fraying relationship with Mel. Ferrer was still working on
The Fall of the Roman Empire
in Madrid, where he was often seen out and about with such ladies as “the vivacious” Duchess of Quintanilla. The gossip columnists had plenty to work with: Hepburn was carrying on with Holden again, they said, “in retaliation.” Audrey was furious about the reports and—quite rare for her—lashed out publicly at the writer “who started all that talk while Mr. Holden and I were making
Paris When It Si
les.
The only thing that really happened was that Bill cracked up his expensive Ferrari one day and came around on crutches. And all I did was ‘mother' him a little. Anyway, I'm glad that Capucine is now getting all the publicity.”
¹¹²

Mel took it all in stride, stiffly preserving his dignity and exhibiting no special jealousy—which annoyed Audrey even more. In his view, they had survived a variety of marital strains, and would survive the current ones. But the separation and tensions between them were taking a greater toll on Audrey, who now relayed to him her feeling that they should consider divorce. Shocked into action, Mel flew home to talk things over, and the rift was patched up—for the moment.