Audrey Hepburn (40 page)

Ferrer was in France at the Cannes Film Festival, and Audrey immediately placed a call to him there but had to hang on the line for half an hour until he could be located. By the time he got to the phone, she was in tears. When she told him her news, he asked why she was crying. “Because it's such an important day and we are hundreds of miles apart,” she replied.
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Eliza Doolittle was one of the greatest stage roles of all time. She was created by George Bernard Shaw, whose favorite subject was women—far more sane and loving than men, he believed and best asserted in the title,
Man and Superman.
Of his many influential plays,
Pygmalion
was the greatest success. In the Greek myth, that sculptor detests women for their wicked ways and vows to remain a bachelor but makes the fatal mistake of carving a statue which is so beautiful that—when Aphrodite brings it to life—he falls in love. Ovid treated the same subject in his
Metamorphoses,
as did several Elizabethan writers and eventually, in 1871, Sir William Gilbert. His play
Pygmalion and Galatea
was seen and much admired by the fifteen-year-old Shaw.

It took forty years and the inspiration of Mrs. Patrick Campbell for Shaw to produce his own Pygmalion—a fussy phonetics professor named Henry Higgins. His Galatea was the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle—“perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older.” “It would be better if I was twenty-five years younger,” Mrs. Campbell wrote Shaw, “but thanks for thinking I can be your pretty slut.” She was forty-nine when she created the role on the London and New York stages in 1914.

It was a sensation from the start. Audiences gasped at the end of Eliza's first scene with Freddy. “Are you walking across the park, Miss Doolittle?” he asks. “Walk!” she exclaims, “Not bloody likely!” If not the first, it was the most celebrated utterance of that word on the London stage to date.

Subsequent Elizas included Lynn Fontanne in the 1926 Broadway revival, Wendy Hiller (opposite Leslie Howard) in the 1938 British film version, and Gertrude Lawrence in the Broadway production of 1946. Inevitably, it was a candidate for musical treatment—which it repeatedly defied. “Dick Rodgers and I worked on it for over a year, and we gave it up,” said Oscar Hammerstein in the early fifties. “It can't be done.”
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Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe took their first crack at it around 1952. “It seemed one drawing-room comedy which just resisted expansion,” said Lerner, who worked on it for six months but then set it aside. When it finally started to gel a few years later, not everyone was impressed. Mary Martin and her agent were among the first to hear what was then
My Fair Li
a,
after which the agent told Lerner, “You boys have lost your talent.” The boys kept working but, as late as the show's opening in New Haven, still hadn't settled on a title....
Lady Li
a, My Lady Li
a, Come to the Ball, Fanfaroon?

The nod finally went to
My Fair Lady,
a pun on the cockney pronunciation of “Mayfair lady.” On March 15, 1956, with Julie Andrews as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins, it opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and stayed there for an astounding 2,717 performances, the longest run of any musical to that time. It won every award and became the biggest hit in musical theater history, ultimately produced in eleven languages and twenty-one countries.

A fierce bidding war for screen rights was eventually won by Warner Brothers: at $5.5 million plus 50 percent of gross revenues above $20 million, it was the most expensive stage-to-film deal ever made in Hollywood.
^as
With a budget of $17 million, it would also be the most costly Warners movie ever.

My Fair Lady
was the last great Broadway musical to receive lavish screen treatment. It was Jack Warner's extravagant swan song—his last production at Warner Brothers. Everything about it would be on a grand scale, starting with the casting. Warner wanted nothing but top-of-the-line stars in the leads, and he knew exactly which three he wanted most: Cary Grant as Higgins, James Cagney as Doolittle and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.

Normally, if a great studio mogul set his sights on certain stars and the stars were available, that was it. No other input was needed. But neither Warner nor the industry reckoned on the unprecedented kibitzing of a group whose casting preferences were rarely heard or heeded: the public. Many of those thirty-two million owners of the original cast album were staunch fans of—and clamoring for—Julie Andrews. One of the staunchest was Alan Lerner who, after seeing her in
The Boy Friend,
had selected Andrews for the Broadway role and was now 100 percent behind casting her in the film. But Lerner had no contractual say in the matter.

Warner was criticized ever after for not giving Andrews the part, but he discussed it with her at least once by phone. “I'd love to do it,” she reportedly told him. “When do we start?” Warner asked when she could come out for a screen test, to which Andrews replied, “Screen test? You've seen me do the part and you know I can do a good job.” He said, “Miss Andrews, you're only known in London and New York. You've never made a movie and I'm investing a lot of money in this. I have to be sure you photograph and project well. Films are a different medium.” But Andrews refused. Thenceforth, after Warner let it be known that he would hire a film actress, show-biz columnists around the country took up the standard, lamenting and lobbying for Julie.

No one was following the controversy more closely than Audrey. “I understood the dismay of people who had seen Julie on Broadway,” she said later. “Julie made that role her own, and for that reason I didn't want to do the film when it was first offered. [But] I learned that if I turned it down, they would offer it to another movie actress [and] I thought I was entitled to do it as much as the third girl, so then I did accept.”
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Audrey herself never revealed the name of that “third girl,” of whom she was very fond: Elizabeth Taylor. (“Get me
My
Fair
Lady,”
Taylor allegedly commanded Eddie Fisher and Kurt Frings—as if either of them could.) But as soon as Audrey entered the race, she won it. Never before had Jack Warner felt obliged to justify a casting decision, but such was the outcry in this case that he publicly—and candidly—stated his explanation:

Audrey was Warner's idée fixe. Her name alone would ensure the film's success, he believed. The box-office difference between Andrews and Hepburn he calculated to be $5 million. A notoriously tightfisted man, he shocked Hollywood by agreeing to pay her $1 million for the role. Only three other stars belonged to the million-per-film club: Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. Frings arranged for seven annual installments of $142,957, to help Audrey with her taxes and to make the payout less draining on the studio's cash flow.

Warner faced rebellion on his choice of male lead, as well, but he at least kept that controversy from spilling over into the press. When director George Cukor approached Cary Grant about Higgins, Grant said, “There is only one man who should play this, and that's Rex. Any other actor would be a fool to try it.... Not only will I not play Higgins, if you don't put Rex Harrison in it, I won't go and see it.”
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Warner, amazingly, had also sounded out Rock Hudson on the role. At the opposite extreme, Cukor had spoken with Laurence Olivier and Peter O'Toole about it, but neither was available.

It was little known that Rex Harrison was actually the
fourth
choice for Higgins on stage (after Noel Coward, Michael Redgrave and George Sanders all turned it down). Nowadays, he was in England, in a comfortable position. He was not a man to get overly excited about behind-the-scenes casting maneuvers.

“I sat tight,” Harrison recalled. “One evening George Cukor telephoned on a crackly line from California and asked me to make a photographic test for the part. I laughed. ‘I'm not making any tests,' I told him. ‘If you want me to play the part, then I'll come.' As a joke, I then sent him some Polaroid photos which had been taken while we'd been fooling about on my boat, in which I appeared stark naked, holding, in one picture, a Chianti bottle in front of me, and in another, a strategically placed copy of the New Statesman. ‘You wanted a test,' I told him.... They saw that I was not as decrepit as they feared.”
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Harrison was in, and for more compelling criteria than his beefcake Polaroids. But Cagney was out. He took the opportunity to pay back Warner for past injustices and refused the role of Alfred Doolittle, which was then offered to Stanley Holloway, who accepted. So two of the three top stars would be the Broadway originators of the parts—their presence making Julie Andrews's absence even more noticeable.

Cukor had a nervous vibration. “The first time I talked to Audrey,” he said, “she called me overseas from Switzerland and told me she was working on her cockney. She tried it out on the phone for me. ‘Ao-ow-ow,' she said. I told her it sounded okay to me.... Actors always worry about the wrong thing.”
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THE OVERALL technical challenge of
My Fair Lady
could be summed up by the word “look,” and the specifics summed up by the word “Edwardian.” Edward VII reigned just nine years, from 1901 to 1910.
Pygmalion
and now
My Fair Lady
were set in that dynamic era of Cubism, the Suffragettes, and the fall of Oscar Wilde. But it was the English king's personal style—everything from his eating habits to his effete Bohemianism—that defined the day, above all in fashion and manners.
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Flamboyant designer-photographer Cecil Beaton (1904—1980) had created the dazzling costumes for the show's New York and London stage productions and was engaged to reprise those designs for the film. This time, he would design the sets, too. Alan Lerner said of Beaton that, “When you looked at him, it was difficult to know whether he designed the Edwardian era or the Edwardian era designed him.”
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Beaton and his ferocious ego were bursting with new energy. “It's a most exciting job, this,” he said, “and one that I would very much have hated anyone else to have done!”
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He was thrilled to be in charge of the whole of the visual production, and, in his compulsively kept diaries, left an almost minute-by-minute account of events, starting with the day in September 1962 when George Cukor tornadoed into his London house to research the period and to gloat that Audrey was “dying to do Eliza.”
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