Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (3 page)

Colette took her hand, and together, they moved into the hotel foyer. There she told Audrey that she intended to cable her producer and writer in New York and tell them that they should call off their search, that she had found her Gigi, and though they wouldn't have heard of her, they were to fly to London and meet her at once.

Audrey listened to it all, but was not quick to respond.

Finally, she spoke. “I can't” is what she famously said. “The truth is, I'm not equipped to play a leading role. I've never spoken onstage.” Then she added, “I'm a dancer.”

“Yes, yes, you are that,” Colette returned. “You are a dancer because you have worked hard at it, and you will now work hard at acting, too.”

Months later, Audrey was at the Savoy Hotel in London to meet with the play's writer, Anita Loos, and Gilbert Miller, its producer. She told them what she had told Colette, that she was not an actress, and that playing Gigi would be impossible for her. Miller nearly buckled under the weight of her protestations, but Loos wouldn't leave it at that. Though Audrey stood before her a wholly inexperienced girl, wearing, somewhat gawkily, an oversized shirtwaist and flat shoes, the author of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
knew she had spotted something
special. With Audrey's gender-redefining interpretation of Holly Golightly still ten years off, Loos had the keen sense—a sense so many flappers like her once had—to note the tides changing a generation in advance. Audrey Hepburn, she said sometime later, had “everything that is important in a female.” She would be proven right in the years to come.

But it would take Audrey a long time to get there. Since she was a little girl, what Audrey had really wanted to be was a ballerina. But her body was wrong, and she was left with no choice but to join a music hall chorus where she was spotted and rushed into films. From there, it was bigger parts in bigger films, and she soon saw that her dream of getting married to James Hanson, like her dream of dancing, had to be put on ice. Now if she took
Gigi,
it would have to be put off again. But Audrey's star was stronger than she was. At the urging of all who were close to her, she reluctantly accepted the part of Gigi. Colette, Audrey maintained, was wrong.

THE CIGARETTE GIRL

Sitting at his desk, fretting over the dreary state of
Roman Holiday,
the impossible-to-cast production they were trying to cobble together at Paramount, Richard Mealand, the studio's man in London, recalled a brief scene in a film called
Laughter in Paradise
. It was the summer of 1951.

Of the picture's regrettable ninety minutes, a certain twenty-two seconds stood out. In it, a distinguished-looking sort of gentleman, sitting alone at a bar, is interrupted by a soft and knowing “Hello!” He looks up. The cigarette girl, a twenty-one-year-old waif called Audrey something, is standing over him.

“Want a ciggie?” she asks with an open smile.

“Hello, sweetie,” he chuckles. “No, I'll be smoking cigars from now on. But what about a date later on this evening? I feel like celebrating.”

She smiles again, but guilelessly, as if the word
date
were never mentioned.

The man gets up. “Well,” he says, putting his hand on her shoulder, “I don't want that old goat in the telephone box to see us talking.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Well, don't think me mad,” he says, sitting again, “but just for the moment I'm not allowed to talk to women.”

The smile fades. She looks down. “Don't I count as a woman?”

She was adorable. It was worth a shot, Mealand thought, but would the studio go for it? They had Gregory Peck, and they wanted a name, a name just as big, for the part of Princess Ann, one like Elizabeth Taylor or Jean Simmons. But their schedules had not aligned. Both were unavailable.

The studio was desperate when Mealand wrote Hollywood about the young actress he saw in
Laughter in Paradise
.

THE TEST

On September 18, 1951, just before she was to begin rehearsals for
Gigi
in New York, Audrey was led into a soundstage at England's Pinewood Studios for a screen test.

To see if Audrey Hepburn the person was like Audrey Hepburn the actress, and genuinely had that combination of naïveté and worldliness he wanted, William Wyler, director
of
Roman Holiday,
secretly instructed his cameraman to keep the camera rolling after her scene had ended.

“Cut!”

Audrey bolted up in bed. “How was it?” she asked. “Was I any good?”

There was no response, only silence, and she heard the clicking whir of the camera. Oh, she realized, I've been tricked.
They're still shooting
. Her embarrassment turned to laughter and her heart burst open. She shone then a forthright humility so pure and a joy so pervasive, the crew could see in her a certain royalty of spirit, if not real royalty itself. And yet, when she spoke, it was without the stiffness or pretentious solemnity that afflicts those too accustomed to the spotlight. Her voice had a natural-sounding richness, and as it reached the end of her sentences, it expanded like an afternoon getting warmer, or a heart beating faster.

She got the part.

However, schedules would have to be rearranged. Because Audrey was obliged to begin rehearsing
Gigi
for Broadway, Paramount was forced to put
Roman Holiday
on hold until the show's run was complete.

MRS. JAMES HANSON, DEFERRED

To Audrey's utter astonishment—not to mention the astonishment of the entire company of
Gigi
—she opened on Broadway to good reviews.
Times
critic Brooks Atkinson praised her “charm, honesty and talent,” and Walter Kerr, her “candid innocence and tomboy intelligence.” But it was from Gilbert Miller himself that Audrey received her best publicity. He
ordered the Fulton Theater marquee be changed from “
Gigi
” to “Audrey Hepburn in
Gigi.
”

Audrey sighed when she saw it. “Oh dear,” she said, “and I've still got to learn how to act.”

Audrey's run of
Gigi
ended in June of 1952, and without a moment to lose she flew to Rome to begin
Roman Holiday
. Once again, she told James they would have to postpone their plans to marry. There was too much work. Now they would do it in September, after shooting was complete.

THE ELECTRIC LIGHT

James could only wait. He would appear during the production to steal a walk with his fiancée between setups—that is, if she could spare the time—but on the whole, he was relegated to the sidelines and passed the hours trying not to think about what was becoming more and more obvious to him and everyone else (though they said nothing). Audrey was disappearing from him. Not that James wasn't prepared—this was just the kind of thing he had heard film people talk about—but he had never understood it until he got to Rome. It wasn't coldness, it was necessity; show business folk were just a different animal. Perhaps the species shouldn't intermingle.

James had time. He played cards with Gregory Peck and strolled from café to café and chatted with those who recognized him as Audrey's fiancé. Later, he'd wait for her at their apartment on the Via Boncompagni. She'd be delayed and he'd wait. Making films, he saw, was so much about waiting. Waiting for the light. Waiting for the location. Waiting for the stars.
It seems they did more waiting than anything else. How could they stand it?

He would sometimes stroll to the set to watch a few takes, or conduct a bit of business, or meet Audrey for lunch. But when he did, she was clearly someplace else. Her mind was on work, the stunning sensation of starring in a big movie, and though she was careful how to frame it, the surprising generosity of Gregory Peck. He knew Audrey was scared to be in front of the camera. Take after tiring take, her emotions would harden and break away from her. She'd get stiff. When the lines came out naturally, it seemed like an accident, like Audrey wasn't the one doing it, and she'd look up to Wyler's face for reassurance, for anything, and he would offer a word of support. But then, a few minutes later, they'd be doing the scene again, and then again. By midday, Audrey's reserve would be nearing depletion.

“What is it?” James asked.

“I'm not like an electric light,” she muttered. “I'm incapable of switching my feelings on and off.”

He might not have known she was talking about acting.

“Miss Hepburn?”

She looked up. It was an Italian boy sent to bring her back to the set. Apologizing to her fiancé, Audrey went with him.

James would have to wait.

THE ENCHANTING UNKNOWN

Back at Paramount, the early footage of
Roman Holiday
was a sensation. Everyone agreed there was something enchanted about the Hepburn girl, something new and wonderful, though
it was difficult to say exactly what. Audrey was beautiful, but not the
most
beautiful. She was talented, but she wasn't brilliant. The paradox was consuming. All across the studio, people were sneaking away from work just to try to steal a peek at the dailies. Directors wrapped early, writers' offices shut down, and soundstages were covertly vacated, all for a shot at a glimpse of a hit. Only the publicity department stayed at their desks. They were already talking Oscar.

As Paramount's chief publicity man, what AC Lyles needed to do was ensure that Audrey would be as popular outside the gates of Paramount as she was within. He'd have to make sure they got her to the right audience. But what was the market? Who was the audience of 1953?

THE MARKET

It was the 1950s, and the entire country, it seemed, was on vacation. But who could blame it? The six years of World War II had been pure horror, separating man from wife and limb from torso. The task now was to forget, or at least deny. Anything to take the edge off. Anything to keep everything at bay. Booze helped, and so did psychoanalysis, but tranquilizers were best. If you could get it, chlorpromazine cleared the mind like Clorox bleached the sink. (And so what if it made the mouth a little dry? The doctors said it was okay.) In those postwar years, the anxiety-relief industry hit an unprecedented high, growing ever higher through the decade as the Bolsheviks grew ever closer. But fifties America was well armed. Everyone could stop worrying and love the bomb, because for every Russian vodka there was a perfect tonic.

Marriage was one such tonic. In 1951, when Audrey was off shooting
Monte Carlo Baby,
one-third of the nation's nineteen-year-old girls had found husbands, and those husbands, many of them veterans racked with battle fatigue, had taken too long to get home. Now that they had, their brides were pulled out of the workforce and sent back to the kitchen where they were meant to be—or afraid to become anything other than—mothers and wives. To keep the order, gender lines, formerly blurred, had to be reinstated and the American woman found herself alone at the sink, wondering how it all happened. Why did getting what she'd wished for suddenly feel so wrong?

Thank God for popular entertainment, which gave her something to look at all day. It reminded her that she was doing the right thing to sit and sip and wait, and that being perfect was, as she suspected, absolutely perfect. Consider, for instance, the brand-new Alligator White Philco Seventeener TV she kept in the kitchen. The little box fit just about anywhere and weighed next to nothing, so she was able to carry it into the dining room for
Father Knows Best,
bring it right back into the den for
Ed Sullivan,
and then take it with her into the bathroom for a nice long soak and a moment alone with a fresh pack of Chesterfields.

She listened to the man on TV talk about a senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy and his defense of our perfect union against communist subversion, and asked herself all the while if she understood everything he was saying. She decided instead not to worry and turned the channel to
Ozzie and Harriet.
He'll be home soon enough, she thought, and he'll explain everything.

If he was delayed—and he often was—she could open up
Modern Screen
magazine and read all about the real-life marriages of Hollywood stars like Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh: “In 1954, a close friend relates, ‘Janet made the greatest sacrifice she had ever made. She relinquished the career that had taken so many years to build' for Tony's sake. On New Year's Eve, 1959, Janet summed up her feelings. ‘Scout's honor, Tony,' she whispered. ‘I resolve not to forget all the wonderful ways God has blessed us.'” And under a photograph of Janet and Tony engaged in what appears to be serious conversation, the caption: “Sharing hopes and dreams with Tony, Janet learned that it is better to be wrong and happy sometimes, than to be right but alone and in tears.”

With an unprecedented degree of leisure time, and more media access than ever before, the fifties woman was the single most vulnerable woman in American history to the grasp of prefab wholesale thought, and by extension, to the men who made it. The message of conformity poured in through every opening from the outside, making it impossible for her to shut it out without shutting out the world. Banish the crazy, she discovered, and sit in silence, or sit in silence and go crazy. Either way, the unwanted voices of rebellion were quieted by the self-soothing mantras she learned from TV, print, and movies. They told her, through the likes of Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, and Debbie Reynolds, that happiness was right where she thought it was: at home. All along it was right there (“Have another drink, honey”); it was right there all along.

She was the market, and from his desk at Paramount, AC Lyles had his eye on her. He knew what she liked and what
she didn't like, but he couldn't be certain of what she'd make of Audrey.