Audrey Hepburn (44 page)

Harrison later called the ceremony “very embarrassing.” Warners' publicity department “spent a lot of time and effort trying to keep Julie and myself apart—at least in front of the photographers,” he said. “It was awful—a make-believe scandal created entirely by the press and the PR.”
⁷⁷

Harrison had won over stiff competition—Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton for
Becket,
Anthony Quinn for
Zorba the Greek
, and Peter Sellers for
Dr. Strangelove
—all of whom perhaps deserved it more.
My Fair Lady
swept a total of eight awards. Most important was Best Picture, Warners' first since
Casablanca,
and Jack Warner's first as a producer.
^ax
The picture's overall success was enough to let Audrey say, if not too convincingly, “This evening made up for everything.”
⁷⁸

She'd done well to keep a stiff upper lip and survive the night with aplomb. But unwittingly, she capped it off with the worst faux pas of her public life—a lapse of protocol for which she herself was less to blame than the Oscar show's writers.

“I had been told that Audrey Hepburn would bestow the honor in my place and I couldn't wait to hear all the nice things she said about me,” recalled Patricia Neal. “... But suddenly she was handing Rex Harrison his award, and she hadn't said a thing about me. It had to be a mistake. I pounded on the table with my good hand. ‘God! God! Me! Not me!'”
⁷⁹

Neal and Hepburn had gotten along well on
Breakfast at Tiffany's.
“She was a fantastic woman, really,” says Neal today. “But I was so angry that she didn't say, ‘I'm here in her place.' I couldn't say the words. I could only stick out my tongue.“
⁸⁰

Hepburn's failure to mention Neal caused yet another mini-scandal. “Audrey snubs ailing star,” said the headlines. Neal's author husband Roald Dahl was thoroughly outraged on his wife's behalf. When reporters confronted Audrey at Kennedy airport on her way back to Paris, she was mortified by her oversight and ran immediately to phone Neal and apologize. Dahl answered and responded harshly: “I told her to bugger off,” he said.
⁸¹

Neal, as time went by, was more magnanimous. “The incident at the Academy Awards occurred under enormous pressure and has long since been forgotten,” she would later say. “Audrey sent me a fabulous porcelain rose, which was very good of her. I guess it just didn't occur to her that night. I suppose she was distracted. One never knows how these things happen.”
⁸²

She had felt a powerful need to prove Warners right in giving her the role, and, despite all the handicaps, many thought she succeeded. Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times
, for one, said she was “dazzlingly beautiful and comic.” But the kudos were outnumbered by brickbats. Audrey's Eliza—dream role of the decade—was doomed by the much-publicized grievances of Julie Andrews, Marni Nixon and Patricia Neal. Hepburn had always been treated gently and respectfully by the press before. Now, the combined negative fallout from
My Fair Lady
left her stunned.

“The circus aspect of the profession demands that things be made into an ‘occasion,'” says Roddy McDowall. “
My Fair Lady was
like
Catch-22
and
Waterworld
—a victim of enormous, injudicious advance hype. It had been ‘the time' to do in Mike Nichols and Kevin Costner then, and
My Fair Lady,
by virtue of the peculiar circumstances, was Audrey's ‘time.'”

Had Julie Andrews been unavailable or indisposed, Hepburn's casting as Eliza would not have raised a stir. But Andrews was alive and well and beatified by public sympathy after Warner took “her” role away. Audrey was punished first for not being Julie and later, ironically, for the very reason Rex Harrison was much praised: the inability to sing!

“Because she was so famous, so well-behaved and such an icon,” says McDowall, “she was ripe for the fall.”
⁸³

Eliza was an extremely difficult role because of the Big Transition midway: Most actresses pulled off either the guttersnipe or the transformed goddess, rarely both. Audrey was not terribly convincing—even to herself—as the flower girl. She had been cast primarily for the transformation, and she executed it deftly. “From ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,' she takes off,” said Jeremy Brett. “No one can touch her from there on.”

In retrospect, music director Previn thinks My Fair Lady is not so much a movie as a stage show preserved in amber:

“I personally don't think it's very wonderful. I think it's endless. It has very little impetus. It doesn't get going often enough. By the time Lerner and Loewe got through telling us how to approach it, it had more traditions than
The Ring
at Bayreuth. ‘Is it okay if we play this eighth note shorter?' Jesus, it's a
musical.
Everybody treated it like it was the Key to the Absolute. It was over-reverential, and I think it shows.”
⁸⁴

Even so, it was one of the ten all-time biggest moneymakers in film history, grossing more than $33 million.

“This picture is one we must all remember,” Hepburn had said to Beaton, and it was—if for the wrong reasons. For Audrey personally, it was in many ways the zenith and, simultaneously, the nadir of her career.

 

 

DURING
My Fair Lady
production, all had not been well between the Ferrers, and crew members had reported hearing the sound of quarrels emanating from Audrey's dressing room.
⁸⁵
“Her relationship with Mel is not all that easy, but she loves him,” wrote Cecil Beaton in his journal at the time. “Her success is astonishing, and [yet] it comes second always to her private life, and the infinite trouble and finesse she manages in that strike me as being extraordinary.”

Ferrer had not endeared himself to Audrey's
My Fair Lady
colleagues in general. “I didn't like Mel very much on those few occasions when he visited the studio,” said Mona Washbourne, who played Higgins's housekeeper. “He was always rather condescending and patronizing towards me, probably because I played a small part and he thought that was a bit infra dig. I think he was wildly jealous of Audrey.”
⁸⁶

To pacify Mel and enable him to be near Audrey during My Fair Lady, Warners paid him twice his usual fee to play a small role in Sex
and the Single
Girl, which was filming concurrently just a soundstage away from his wife, under that old rogue Richard
(Paris When It Si
les
) Quine. No lesser light than Joseph
(Catch-22)
Heller had cowritten the script—based unrecognizably on Helen Gurley Brown's hit book—about an ace reporter (Tony Curtis) who sets out to expose a famous sex researcher (Natalie Wood). Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall were the unlikely comic support. Wood is supposed to join Mel Ferrer for more research, but in the end she declares, “I don't want to be a single girl!” and happily abandons her career to marry Curtis. Mel was actually quite good, but the film wasn't, and few of the reviews even bothered to mention him.

Both Ferrers were more than ready to leave Hollywood. The professional and physical strains of the previous six months had been enormous, with reverberations that carried over into their private lives and seriously disrupted their relationship.
“My Fair Lady
was an ordeal,” Audrey would say, “and when it was over, I nearly broke down from the exhaustion.”
⁸⁷

She longed to rest; but she longed, even more, to preserve her marriage and now, shortly after returning to Switzerland, she undertook a monumental effort to that end: In the next eight months, instead of taking it easy at home, she made sixteen trips throughout Europe with Mel on his film shoots, rarely letting him out of her sight—in the hope of curtailing his interest, or at least the persistent rumors of his interest, in other women.

Ferrer's most important film project at that time was
El Greco,
shooting in Toledo, Madrid and Rome for 20th Century-Fox. He played the title role, and she spoke of it with glowing—if premature—optimism:

“It's a wonderful vehicle, and I am praying it turns out the way Mel hopes it to be. Apart from being the man I love, Mel is also one of the most talented actors in the world and I am immensely proud of him.... I thought if I went along, I could somehow help. I could try to make the beds comfortable, to disinfect the bath, and to make them cook something palatable.... I'm sure that any wife would have done the same.”
⁸⁸

El Greco,
a respectable but largely ignored movie, was never released in the United States. But Mrs. Ferrer's devotion to Mr. Ferrer's comfort and career was as ceaseless in Europe as in Hollywood. There, according to André Previn:

“When you'd go over to her house, she would end up running one of Mel's movies. It was kind of sad. She had small parties, always exquisitely done, amazing cooking from the Italian ingredients she brought over with her. It was the only time I had a truly amazing pizza—thin as a Kleenex!

“She would sometimes play the piano at the house, nothing formal, but she liked good music and had a reasonable record collection. That extraordinary mystique of hers made you think she lived on rose petals and listened to nothing but Mozart, but it wasn't true. She was quite funny and ribald. She could tell a dirty joke. She played charades with a great sense of fun and vulgarity, and she could be quite bitchy.

“Alan Lerner was married to a French girl at the time—I don't know which number, maybe number seven—a very hard piece of work. She came on the set one day when I was talking to Audrey and flounced over, dressed in the most peculiar clothes. Everything matched. She went on and on and then said, ‘Oh, I must fly and meet Alan for lunch!' and walked away. Audrey looked after her, turned to me and said, ‘I'll bet you didn't know that even Dior makes dogs.' I thought, wow! So she was not beyond that.”
⁸⁹

Audrey's own image and sense of fashion were rather subtler, to say the least, and much more powerful for being so. In the sixties as in the fifties—and again without her quite realizing it—she virtually
defined
the feminine vogues of the decade, at least thus far. Her film and fashion image, as before, still derived largely from that “ideal” figure, which continued to be admired by millions, even if it wasn't to everyone's taste and even if some people joked about it.

“If I wanted to look at bones, I could always have my foot X-rayed,” said one producer—evidently one of the few who wasn't enthralled with her.
⁹⁰
“Standing next to Audrey Hepburn makes you hope against hurricanes,” said
McCall's
reporter Art Seidenbaum, who watched her on the set of
My Fair Lady.
“She is that thin.... Structurally, she has all the curves of a piece of melba toast—viewed from the side.”
⁹¹
But even Seidenbaum immediately went on to acknowledge that Hepburn was to
haute couture
“what Bardot is to bath towels.”

Audrey's legendary slender build was integral to her physical image and fashion impact—the sine qua non, perhaps—but, alone, would never have brought her such massive celebrity: It was her personality that touched and intrigued people, and not just her vulnerable sweetness. Reticence and discretion were the other key ingredients of the Audrey Formula, more than ever after the stings of
My Fair Lady.

“I have a great sense of privacy,” she said. “Writers have to have an angle. If you say less than what you might tell your husband or your doctor, then you're ‘mysterious.' ... Basically, I don't enjoy the one-sided talk about myself. I don't enjoy the process of cross-examination; I find it absolutely sapping. [I've] been made mistrustful by being burned.”

A cynic on the
My Fair Lady
set had joked, “Somewhere beneath that even-tempered exterior is an unadulterated ax murderess. It's a wonderful mask. You could be around her six months and still not know her.” It was a European mask. “I've never lived in America, always in Europe,” she said in 1964. “I'm still a British subject.” Her favorite recent film was the emotional
Sundays and Cybele,
in keeping with her past favorites,
Waterloo Bridge
and
Camille,
all of which made her cry. And what of her current popularity? The thirty-five-year-old Hepburn laughed and said, “I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has.”
⁹²

Throughout the sixties, Hepburn was second only to Jacqueline Kennedy in the degree of flattery-by-imitation she inspired. “Watch this suit—the squareness, the uncompromising flatness on the body,” said a typical
Vogue
caption beneath a Hepburn photo spread in November 1964. “It's the most important piece of Givenchy tailoring this season.”
⁹³
Women followed her every sartorial move, while men reacted to her much like André Previn: