Audrey Hepburn (48 page)

 

 

DONEN CALLS
Two for the Road
the first Audrey Hepburn movie to deal with the
aftermath
rather than the initial euphoria of falling in love. Essential to its success was her comic timing which, in the director's opinion, measured up nicely to Raphael's sharp dialogue (and helped earn him an Oscar nomination for it).

“When we married you were a disorganized, egotistical failure,” Joanna tells Mark. “Now you are a disorganized, egotistical success.”

Two for the Road
ended with a shocking, two-word exchange between the two stars—shocking, at least, for an Audrey Hepburn film, and the closest thing to profanity in any of her films:

“Bitch!” says he.

“Bastard!” she replies.

As the insecure, egotistical architect, Finney had more difficulty than Hepburn, and his one-dimensional performance was somewhat grating. “Albie really can't bear playing a man with pleasant charm,” said Donen. “He wants to play something more startling. He doesn't like to come in and win you with his pleasant ways.”
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Eleanor Bron, William Daniels and Gabrielle Middleton (the horrid daughter) nearly stole the film in their several hilarious episodes as the travel-companions-from-hell.

Many felt it was Audrey's best performance in years, and some even said it was the best in her entire career. One of the film's biggest fans is Audrey Wilder:

“I was crazy about
Two for the Road
and thought she really let her defenses down in it. That was a real person. She let herself be seen in not the best light—the bathing suit and all. Actresses all try to protect themselves usually. That's the nature of the beast. But she's really real in that.”
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Films and Filming
hailed it as “a combination of American expertise and European cool,” adding that it would not have been nearly so convincing if Hepburn's role had been played by the more overtly sexual Julie Christie or Jeanne Moreau.

Two for the Road
did moderately well at the box ofnce—better in Europe than in America, where it was handled as a kind of “art film,” just beyond mainstream appeal. But it was influential in changing the way Hollywood would treat the subject of marriage, and certain film historians still consider it “a veritable textbook on editing.”

Donen's next film, the brilliant Faust-parody
Bedazzled
(1967), would employ a much sharper satirical touch. His personal judgment of
Two for the Road
is that it was “a good movie, but I don't think it should have been as sweet as it was.”

 

 

“AUDREY CARED for Finney a great deal,” says Robert Wolders today. “He represented a whole new freedom and closeness for her. It was the beginning of a new period of her life.”

But given that the Ferrers were still trying to work out their marriage, the reports of her activities with Finney caused Mel concern. Audrey, for her part, was concerned about Mel and a fifteen-year-old Spanish dancer named Marisol.

Marisol had captivated both Ferrers a year or so earlier at a party given by the Duchess of Alba in Madrid. With fiery eyes and voluptuous breasts, Marisol thrilled that gathering with her remarkable singing and dancing. Soon after, Mel and Audrey began to plan a movie around her,
Cabriola.
Mel's story and screenplay were accepted by Columbia as a vehicle for Marisol and Spain's great bullfighter, Angel Peralta. The picture would be made primarily for the Spanish and South American markets.

Mel would direct.

Audrey took it upon herself to take Marisol to Alexandre of Paris, who restyled the girl's hair under Hepburn's supervision. During and after
Cabriola,
rumors of Ferrer's “affair” with Marisol abounded. With much weariness, Ferrer today denies it: “There was no romantic involvement; it was common knowledge that Marisol was involved with the Spanish producer of the film. Audrey and our son Sean were with me as we went from location to location in Madrid and Andalucia.”
³³

Marital difficulties notwithstanding, he and Audrey decided to build a villa on the Spanish Riviera near Marbella. The Peter Viertels lived there, too, and often visited, Deborah Kerr recalls:

“It was a charming house, very simple, and of course everything was white. Wherever they went, everything was white. I always thought that was—not strange, but so indicative of her: Everything had to be white. The car was white. Even the baby was dressed in white.”
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At the end of
Cabriola
filming, “We decided to stay on at the Marbella Club and have a little holiday with Sean,” Mel recalls. “Audrey had brought a stack of unread scripts with her, and while she and Sean went for a stroll on the beach I tried to unwind by going through them.” One of them came from Kay Brown, a friend of Mel's who had found Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind
in galley form and persuaded David O. Selznick to read it.

“The play Kay submitted was Frederick Knott's
Wait Until Dark
,
”
says Ferrer. “When Audrey returned from her walk, I took Sean back to the beach and she read the play. We called Kurt Frings in California and set a deal that afternoon.”
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KNOTT WAS the author of
Dial M for Murder,
and—thanks to Kay Brown—Mel read his
Wait Until Dark
even before it opened on Broadway. He immediately pegged it as a tour de force for his wife—by far the most vulnerable of all the vulnerable roles she had played to date, or ever would: a blind girl terrorized in her Greenwich Village apartment by three vicious criminals.
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“Wait Until Dark
was a pivotal moment in Audrey's career,” Ferrer contends. “She went from an ingenue to a leading woman in it, and it was one of the best films she ever made.” Warners paid $1 million for the screen rights and provided Audrey with an exceptional supporting cast: Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Jack Weston, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and child-prodigy Julie Herrod. Mel was the producer and quickly signed up Britain's Terence Young for his Hollywood debut as director.

Young's very first film, it may be recalled, was the powerful war documentary
Men
of
Arnhem
(1944), which Audrey revered. More recent and spectacular were his three wildly popular James Bond pictures,
Dr. No, From Russia with Love
and
Thunderball.
Young was the man who had rejected Audrey for a part when she was a total unknown but predicted she would “make it” and asked her to let him direct a future film of hers one day. She now did so. Warners was nervous about his reputation for heavy gambling and habitually going overbudget. But he was the firm choice of both Ferrers, and they would have their way.

Young had wanted either George C. Scott or Rod Steiger to play the main villain who tries to kill Audrey, but both of them declined to take such an unsympathetic part and the role went to Alan Arkin—recently Oscar-nominated for his own debut in
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
(1966). “Arkin may not have had the brutal, cold menace that Scott could have delivered,” said Young, “but he gave it all sorts of new dimensions—the total lack of feeling and that memorable quality of evil.”
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Audrey, meanwhile, did her homework. She studied first with a doctor in Lausanne whose specialty was teaching the blind and then in New York, where Mel had secured the cooperation of the Lighthouse Institute for the Blind to prepare her further for the role. She observed the behavior and movements of the sightless there and learned how to read Braille.

“Audrey and I both had lessons as blind people,” recalled Young just before his death in 1995, “but Audrey was miles faster than I. She was quickly able to find her way, blindfolded, around the Lighthouse rooms and corridors. She mastered the routine of filling a kettle, lighting the gas, boiling the water, putting tea in the teapot and pouring it without spilling a drop. When it was my turn, every natural disaster took place.”
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She learned to differentiate textures with her fingertips, to judge people's distance by a sound, to tell by the tapping of her cane whether she was walking on tile, wood or stone, and to put on makeup without a mirror. It was a profound experience, and one of the people who led her through it was college student Karen Goldstein, blind from the age of six.

“Karen came to the Warner Studios and was to run through the movements of the scenes so that Audrey could then copy her,” said Young. “She picked up a lot from Karen—dialing a phone, judging the height and eyes of someone with whom she was speaking so that conversation was natural—all from the sound and direction of the voice. After a few days, she decided to work on her own. But being Audrey, she went to Jack Warner and persuaded him to pay Karen her full salary for the rest of the twelve-week schedule.”
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Filming of
Wait Until Dark
began in New York City in early 1967. Mayor John Lindsay helpfully agreed to block off traffic in the Village for the ten-day shoot, as thousands of gawkers crowded the barricades for a glimpse of Audrey. Interiors were shot at Warners' Burbank studio, where technicians who had worked with Audrey on
My Fair Lady
thought she now looked tired and gaunt. For the second time in a row, her friend Hubert was passed over. “She went somewhere like Saks and bought her meager two costumes off the peg,” Young remembered. “We settled on the most ordinary ones—she was blind and the colors weren't important. Givenchy was obviously not for this particular epic.”
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When production chief Walter MacEwen saw the rushes, he thought Audrey's expressive eyes belied blindness. Contact lenses irritated her, but she agreed to them in certain close-ups when she could not avoid reacting with her eyes. “I ran picture after picture to see previous attempts of other actors playing blind and I never saw anybody nearly as good,” said Young. “She was able to focus in the far distance, and to keep the focus so that even if she was talking to someone very near, her eyes would not refocus on that person.”
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Young debunked the reports that MacEwen and Jack Warner were furious about Mel and Audrey's expenses: “Mel was an exceptionally efficient producer. Kurt Frings would have certainly got all of that worked out in her contract. He told me, with awe, that after
[The Nun's Story]
she returned several thousand dollars to the studio because she hadn't needed so much for her expenses. That had to be a unique occasion in the history of the cinema.”
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Unique, too, was the formal English tea break taken daily at the stroke of four on the
Wait Until Dark
set. The ceremony was very elaborate. Audrey adhered rigidly to the rule of one spoonful of tea for each guest and one for the pot, with a steeping period of precisely ten minutes. Terence Young related how it came about:

“Thanks to Audrey, we shot on European hours,” said Richard Crenna. “We came into the studio at eleven a.m. for makeup, never took lunch, and went home at seven. [At the four p.m. break] all the actors tried to outdo each other and put on a bigger and better tea. It got to a point where you just walked past the table and you gained ten pounds—except Audrey.”
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In fact, she lost fifteen pounds during
Wait Until Dark.
The gossip columnists blamed it on her marital problems, but Young thought otherwise: “It was one of the most rigorous roles Audrey ever played. She worked herself so hard that you could see the pounds rolling off her each day.”
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The final result was worth it:
Wait Until Dark
is a virtually perfect thriller—from the first to the last time Hepburn leaves her door unlocked. Charles Lang's moody lighting heightens the suspense at every turn. Audrey's frantic lightbulb-breaking scene became a classic, but no more than her deadly struggle with the psychopathic Arkin and his final, terrifying leap at her in the eerie light of the refrigerator.
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By today's standards, the film was just mildly violent (brass knuckles, verbal abuse and a knife or two are the only weapons) but extraordinarily sadistic since the tormented victim was sightless. To test public reaction, worried studio executives held a sneak preview—at which the audience shrieked repeatedly in that uniquely cinematic, disturbingly neurotic, commercially fantastic combination of horror and delight.