Audrey Hepburn (38 page)

Thirtysomething years later, the Wilders supply their own piquant view of Hepburn's dilemma:

“I did not think Mel was the proper husband,” says Billy, “but then, who would have been the proper husband for her?”

It's rhetorical but draws a reply from his wife.

“Well, Bill was a nice guy,” answers Audrey Wilder. “Bill would have been better—if he'd been sober.”
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THERE WAS A good reason why Audrey now suddenly extended her lease on the lovely old Bourbon chateau she was renting near Fontainebleu: A brand new Paris-based movie had materialized unexpectedly on the heels of
Paris When It Si
les
—a picture that, for once, she didn't have to be coaxed into but very much wanted to do. It was the best of two worlds for her—a Hitchcock-style thriller without Hitchcock—and filming began exactly one day after
Si
les
shooting ended.

The delicious soufflé was called
Charade—
a romantic comedy-thriller caper and landmark of its style. Stanley Donen, one of Hepburn's true favorites, would direct in their first reteaming since
Funny Face.
Best of all for Audrey and posterity, Cary Grant would star. She had never worked with him and longed to do so. The script was a both a send-up and celebration of the genre and the great Hitchcock-Grant collaborations of the past.

“I always wanted to make a movie like one of my favorites,
North by North-west,”
said Donen. “What I admired most was the wonderful story of the mistaken identity of the leading man. They mistook him for somebody who didn't exist; he could never prove he wasn't somebody who wasn't alive. I searched [for something with] the same idiom of adventure, suspense and humor.”
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What he found—and bought—was a short story, “The Unsuspecting Wife,” by Peter Stone and Marc Behn, published in
Redbook.
It was the tale of a beautiful widow who is hounded by a group of unsavory rogues looking for her dead husband's hidden fortune. The structure and tone were full of smart dialogue, red herrings, single and double bluffs, and Parisian style.

“It was a wonderful piece of work,” says James Coburn, the superb character actor who gave one of his most wryly villainous performances in
Charade.
“Peter Stone knew Paris very well because he'd lived there as a writer on the Île de France, right by Notre Dame. Did you know that he wrote it specifically for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn?”
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A lot of people wrote a lot of things specifically for Grant and Hepburn. But getting them to do something—separately, let alone jointly—was another matter.

Audrey said yes quickly, but “Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called
Man's Favorite
Sport? [and so he] said no to
Charade,”
Donen relates. “Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn't pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn't afford them or the picture. So I sold
Charade
to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks's script and didn't like it. So he called me and said he would like to do
Charade.”
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The project involved a lot of anniversaries for Grant:
Charade
was his seventieth film, 1962 was his thirtieth year in the film business, Audrey would be precisely his fiftieth leading lady, and he was just one year shy of sixty. He had been spotted in 1933 by Mae West, who was then casting
She Done Him Wrong
and said, “If he can talk, I'll take him.” Soon after, on celluloid, she gave him that legendary invitation, “Come up and see me sometime.”

Nowadays, he was nervous about his image and afraid that, opposite Audrey, he might look like a dirty old man. He and Donen had Stone change the dynamic to make Audrey the aggressor who finally wears
him
down, instead of the usual reverse. Their age difference was turned into a running joke. But privately, he still worried, as a vignette described by biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley illustrates:

“At time of
Charade,
Grant decided to stay not in a hotel but in Barbara Hutton's Paris apartment, whose secretary Mona Eldridge recalled him walking down the long central hall with glass-fronted display cases with priceless antique figurines, jade, etc., not examining contents but glancing from left to right to observe his reflection in the mirrored cabinet doors, fussing over his hair, fretting over wrinkles.”
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Hepburn and Grant had never met, and Donen couldn't wait to introduce them. He arranged for dinner at “some terribly smart bistro,” Audrey recalled, where she and Donen arrived first. When Grant came in, Audrey rose and said,

“I'm so nervous,” to which Grant replied, “Don't be.... I'm thrilled to know you. Here, sit down.... Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.” Donen had ordered a bottle of red wine, and when Audrey put her head down, “she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary's cream-colored suit,” the director recalls. “Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking.... It was a horrendous moment.”

Grant just “nonchalantly removed his jacket,” said Audrey, “and pretended, very convincingly, that the stain would simply go away.... I felt terrible and kept apologizing, but Cary was so dear about it. The next day he sent me a box of caviar with a little note telling me not to feel bad.”
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James Coburn, just in from Munich after finishing
The Great Escape,
was also meeting Grant for the first time. “Cary was in one of those little dressing-room things on the set,” Coburn recalls. “I said, ‘Hi.' He said, ‘Come on in.' We were talking about the script when Walter [Matthau] came by and said, ‘Hey, Jim, how are you? Did you ever see anybody do a better impression of Cary Grant than this guy?' And then walked away. It was the only time I ever saw Cary Grant off balance.”
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A charade is a guessing game full of tricks, a pantomimed secret to be deciphered in bits and pieces. So is
Charade,
beginning with its spectacular credits—a wild geometric charade in themselves. The names wind in and out of psychedelic mazes, heralding the upcoming game of illusion, set around Paris's most charming landmarks: Les Halles, Notre Dame, the Palais Royale, the Champs Elysées—all lushly photographed by Charles Lang, Jr.

But the opening scenes take place around the swimming pool of Mont d'Arbois in Megeve, Switzerland, playground of the Euro ski-and-jet set of which Audrey was an honorary member.

Charade's
trickery begins with the very first shot: Audrey as Reggie (stunningly dressed by Givenchy) is the picture of tranquility as she suns herself on the terrace. Ominously, a gun emerges from a gloved hand and aims straight at her head. The tension mounts, the trigger is squeezed, and—SPLAT!—Hepburn's ear is full of water from a bratty child's water pistol. It's the first of many cunning, unnerving shifts from suspense to humor.

Suddenly, a man named Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) approaches Reggie, initiating a lickety-split repartee that stokes up the scene through the sparring of the stars:

In things romantic, our sexy young widow is forceful. In things financial related to her murdered husband, Charles, she hasn't a clue. Only slowly and painfully does she come to the realization that he was either a liar, a thief, a spy, or all three—and that his name wasn't even Charles.

Non sequiturs pepper everyone's discourse. As Hepburn and Grant walk along the Seine, mulling over the recent drowning of a thug named Scobie, she suddenly remarks, “Wouldn't it be nice if we could be like him?” Grant, in surprise, asks, “Scobie?” “No, Gene Kelly,” she replies. “Remember when he danced down here by the river without a care in the world in
An American in Paris?”

Down at the morgue, a drawer—presumably Charles's—is rudely yanked out and then slammed shut from the
corpse's-eye-view
inside. More macabre hilarity follows at Charles's funeral. Aside from the sorrowful widow, his mourners number a total of four very suspicious-looking characters. Grief is low on their agenda. Each has his own Grand Guignol entrance, approaching the coffin to inspect the body—and to become a suspect:

People get bumped off left and right, but in a rather quiet and civilized manner. Charade's overall violence and villainy are of the stylized kind. “You can't believe these guys could really do anything very bad,” says Coburn, “and yet they're trying really hard and they're getting killed for it.”

Of our four bad guys, Coburn has the most frightening scene of personal violence against Audrey. As maniacal Tex, he follows her to a garage where she makes the mistake of using a phone booth. He traps her when she tries to come out and subjects her to sadistic intimidation—lighting one match after another and tossing them on her clothes and in her face, all the while threatening worse to come. Cornered and hysterical, she cannot escape until he simply gets tired of monsterizing her.

“I felt really bad about burning Audrey,” recalls Coburn, with a gentleman's lament in his voice. “It went against my nature. Of course, we had it down so it wouldn't hurt her. She was wonderful in that. We didn't discuss that scene beforehand at all, except the mechanics of how close we'd be, because you're playing on her face with that flare going off.”

Coburn was enthralled with her, but it wasn't until halfway through shooting that they sat down and talked, and she jolted him by asking, “Do you know how you got this role?”

Coburn said he didn't.

“I saw you in
The Magnificent Seven,”
said Audrey, “and I told Stanley Donen—he's our Tex!”

A third of a century later, Coburn still wonders, “How do you thank somebody for doing that? ‘Thanks, Baby.' It was her suggestion. If it had been up to Stanley, he never would have hired me. He was a song-and-dance man. I don't think Stanley ever gave me a direction. We secondary players were on our own out there. He didn't really give us too much time. I got more help from Charlie Lang, the photographer.”
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