Audrey Hepburn (42 page)

Her good friend Doris Brynner, wife of Yul, dissents. One of very few visitors allowed on the set, she denies Audrey was upset. “She
had
to be dubbed,” says Brynner. “All that high soprano singing—how could she have done it? She never had any intention of singing.”
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But nobody else remembers it that way.

On hearing the bad news from Cukor, she said, “Oh!”, and walked off the set. All the weeks of coaching, practicing and matching were down the drain: Virtually all her songs would be dubbed. The next day, she came back and apologized to everyone for her “wicked” behavior, saying she understood it had to be. “That was her idea of being very wicked,” says Marni Nixon.
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“I'D DONE the show for so long in the theatre with Julie that
any
new leading lady was going to be a problem,” said Rex Harrison. “Audrey also had to weather a great deal of adverse press publicity about how much she was being paid, for most of the press had sided with Julie, and had wanted Julie to get the part. Audrey is a very sensitive person, and could not fail to feel all this. It quickly leaked to the press that she was being dubbed [and] wasn't ‘really' singing the part she'd wrested from Julie and for which she was being so highly paid.”
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The sympathetic tone contained a certain amount of crocodile tears. Harrison, in fact, was in no mood to accommodate his “new” Eliza after discovering that, at $250,000, his salary was only a quarter of hers. In his opinion, it was
he
who had been responsible for the stage (and potential film) success of
My Fair Lady,
and he was incensed by the inequity. Even Cukor was getting more than himself ($300,000). Though he was hostile to Audrey at first, their relationship gradually warmed as he realized that her difficulties would enable him to dominate the film.
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Harrison's “outward self-assurance was only a cover-up for an even greater self-assurance underneath,” said Previn. “There seemed to be only two ways to approach any problem: his way and the wrong way.... When Rex heard I had been engaged by Warners to serve as musical director, he flew into a rage. ‘I won't have it, I don't want him,' he hissed at Alan Lerner. ‘For the entire run of the play, both on Broadway and in London, we had Franz Allers conducting the orchestra. Franz knows exactly how I sing and how I speak, my cadences and my rhythms. There's no one like Franz, that's who I want, that's who we must get.' ...

“Alan persuaded Rex to try—‘just try'—recording a number with me. [If] it didn't work out, Rex could go to Jack Warner and have me replaced with Franz. [So] we scheduled the recording of ‘Let a Woman in Your Life.' It went perfectly.... Rex had no problems, the orchestra and I had no problems, and the song was finished ahead of schedule. That night, Alan called Rex from New York: ‘How did it go? Did you get any of it finished?' Rex interrupted him, ‘Yes, yes, dear boy, it was terrific. I get along fine with André, and he followed my singing without the slightest trouble. In fact, he was certainly better than that Germanic son of a bitch we used to have in the pit!' ”
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Previn today smiles at the recollection before delivering his final verdict: “Rex Harrison, who gave one of the most transcendental performances ever, was—and I don't say this lightly—the most appalling human being I ever worked with. He was charming and funny and a great raconteur but, Jesus Christ, what he did to people. Rex didn't like Audrey very much. He was mean
about
her, not to her. That was very much more his style.”

He wanted Julie Andrews?

“No, he didn't want
anybody.
He felt whatever fuss was made about Audrey or Julie was pointless, because nobody was interested in the girl. They were only interested in
him.”
³⁹

Others with firsthand experience confirm that appraisal. “I'd known Rex since I was twelve,” says Roddy McDowall, who costarred with him on the New York stage and in two films,
Midnight Lace
(1960) and the calamitous
Cleopatra
(1963). “He was emotionally unstable, like a wanton child. You always had to approach him with a firehose. He was an exquisitely impeccable actor but a basic hysteric—and unconscionable to his fellow actors.”

Evidence of that was provided by their joint appearance in Jean Anouilh's The Fighting Cock on Broadway. “Rex was all wrong for the general because he just viscerally could not be a victim,” McDowall recalls. “Everything in him revolted against it. We had a great scene in which my character made a total ass of his character. It was imperative that he be humiliated in the second act so that he could be triumphant in the third. But he couldn't and wouldn't play it correctly. He was never where he was supposed to be, and I never knew what he would do next. He'd go downstage and mug and try to distract me—primi—tive tactics. It was his first Broadway appearance after
My Fair Lady,
and it ran for a month because of the advance sales. But it was agony.”
⁴⁰

The
My Fair Lady
film script closely resembled the one he performed exactly 2,717 times on stage. But he insisted that all his musical numbers be performed and shot live—an unheard-of practice in Hollywood—and, as usual, he got his way. Harrison claimed he never sang a number the same way twice; he scorned the lip-synch technique. Thus a microphone was set in his tie and a transmitter strapped to his leg, so that his singing could be recorded over and mixed with the pre-recorded music—a technical problem of such magnitude that two unions demanded extra pay for it.
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“It made it much easier for him,” says André Previn. “A lot of people said, ‘That son of a bitch!' But he had a point. I was in his corner. What it left me with was that insane delivery of his without any accompaniment except the piano, which was fed into his ear. So I had this madman with the up-and-down voice and I had to put on earphones and chase him with the orchestra. That was hard work. Which he never acknowledged.”
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PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY on
My Fair Lady
began August 13, 1963, and continued for four and a half months on the majority of Warners' twenty-six soundstages. Only Mel, Doris Brynner, and Hubert de Givenchy were allowed onto the closed set. In Garboesque fashion, Audrey could not tolerate anyone in “eyeline” range while she was in Eliza mode. “Seeing a strange face looming beyond the cameras dispels the mood I'm trying to set,” she said. “It throws me off balance.”
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Obligingly, Cukor set up a series of black baffles with peepholes, screening off the action from all but the minimum necessary technicians. “Cukor always closed his sets off for those big lady stars,” says Previn. “I don't think it was a device just for Audrey. He did it for Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Garbo before.”
⁴⁴

Her husband complained that “she wouldn't even let
me
visit her on the set while she was in that bedraggled flower-girl characterization. But even at her dirtiest, she sprayed herself with a $100-an-ounce perfume,
Joy.
‘I may look dirty,' she'd say, ‘but I aim to smell pretty.' ”
⁴⁵
Mel thought that was charming, but some thought it an indication of her subliminal unsuitability for the role.

Theodore Bikel, the film's sole surviving supporting star, thought Hepburn not just suitable but “the most enchanting figure that ever graced the screen.” As diplomat Zoltan Karpathy, Bikel's one big moment was the ball scene in which he dances with Eliza. But the real-life Bikel was none too light on his feet.

“I was terrified,” he recalls. “I said to George Cukor, ‘I want dancing lessons. There can't be the slightest danger that I step on this gorgeous creature's toes.' But she was easy as pie—gracious and collegial and lovely. A true aristocrat.”

Bikel's outstanding memory of the filming?

“Cukor asked me before we shot my first entrance, ‘How would Karpathy greet Professor Higgins?' I said, ‘Karpathy is a Hungarian, Mr. Cukor, and between the two of us, you're the Hungarian.' He said, ‘Yes, but you're the actor.' So I said, ‘All right, if you ask me, I would come in and kiss him on both cheeks.' And that's how it came about that I was the only male actor ever to make an entrance kissing Rex Harrison.”
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The grimmest moment of the ballroom shooting occurred when veteran character actor Henry Daniell, a close friend of Cukor's and brilliant featured player in
Camille,
among other Cukor films, suddenly keeled over dead on the set.

My Fair Lady
contained 165 scenes and seventeen musical numbers, each seeming to pose more difficulty than the one before. In a short early scene with just two lines of dialogue, for example, Higgins says to Pickering, “Shall we ask this baggage to sit down, or shall we throw her out the window?” Eliza yowls, “I won't be called a baggage when I've offered to pay like any lydee.” It took twelve takes before Cukor was satisfied. Tempers were growing short all around, Previn recalls:

“Marni, after many days of recording ..., became rather difficult and resistant to Alan Jay Lerner's instructions. To be fair, he gave six directions per syllable, so her reticence was not entirely unwarranted. But on this particular day, she took off the earphones, bridling, and snapped, ‘Are you aware, Mr. Lerner, that I have dubbed the voice for Deborah Kerr and Natalie Wood and dozens of others?' Alan's reply was prompt... ‘And are you aware, dear, that all those ladies dubbed your face?'”
⁴⁷

Audrey herself had outbursts of temperament unprecedented in her career. During one August rehearsal of “Loverly,” while dancing on the non-skid rubber cabbage leaves and mouthing the words to the song, she did the unthinkable: She stopped the scene twice herself, instead of letting director Cukor do so, stamping her feet in frustration and bursting into tears.
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On July 19, Beaton recorded:

It did not cheer him up to learn that the bill for the costumes he had made so far was $500,000.
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“Everyone's nerves are explosive,” said Audrey. “Everyone's on edge.”
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Even so, Beaton grew more and more impressed with her characterization. On August 21, he observed that the flower girl was no longer just “sweet little Audrey Hepburn, dressed as a cute cockney with a dab of dirt becomingly placed on her nose: this was a wraughty guttersnipe, full of fight and determination, a real ‘rotten cabbage leaf.' ...

“Every dawn Audrey has to have her hair covered with grease, then with a lot of brown Fuller's Earth. The effect is really dirty, and psychologically must be very depressing. Tiring, too: it takes another hour to wash out the dirt before going home. Audrey said she was beginning to warm up in her part, but was sad that on the first day's shooting she didn't get into the right groove; had been too strident, her eyes bugged.... ‘I see what it should be now that it's too late,' she laughed, wistfully.”
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GEORGE CUKOR, meanwhile, was having serious difficulties with Cecil Beaton. Through their mutual friend Greta Garbo, they had known each other for years but deeply mistrusted one another. After their initial “honeymoon” on the project, both of them came to regard Audrey as their personal property and began feuding over her. They were of clashing gay types—Cukor the closeted perfectionist, Beaton the extroverted egomaniac—and their struggle for control of Audrey and her affections escalated.

“George had a bungalow on the set,” recalls André Previn, “and almost every day, one or the other would go slamming out of the screen door saying something that ended in ‘cunt.' ”
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The catalyst of the blowup was Cukor's order, in mid-production, restricting Beaton's access to photograph Audrey on the set. Beaton fumed; his monumental vanity was easily wounded. He had a keen sense of Hepburn's importance as a fashion icon of the mid-century, and of his own importance in packaging and marketing her. By this time, he had taken more than a thousand pictures of her in
My Fair Lady
costumes for lavish photo spreads that he sold to virtually all the major American and British magazines. Those pieces had generated tremendous advance publicity for the film and tremendous fees for himself. But he had a voracious appetite for more.
^at

“The reason George got so angry at him is because Cecil stored every person and experience in his life to exploit then or later,” says Roddy McDowall, who knew both men well and observed them with a sharp eye. “He used people, and he was profligate.” Greed headed the list of Beaton's character defects and offended Cukor's private and professional scruples. Two thousand photos to date? Enough was enough! Publishing intimate details of his sexual encounters with Greta Garbo? Unconscionable! Yet Cecil could boast of such affronts.After hearing him do so once during the 1959 New York run of Look
After Lulu
(designed by Beaton, costarring McDowall), Roddy asked, “‘Cecil, you'd sell your grandmother's fingernails, wouldn't you?' His reply was, ‘Of course I would, dear.' He didn't see it as betrayal.”