CHAPTER 2
“I can’t stand it! I know I’ve got the best tits on stage, and yet they’re all staring at a girl who hasn’t got any.”
—AUD JOHANSSEN, chorine
LONG AFTERWARD, AUDREY WAS ASKED IF SHE FELT HER CAREER had been carried along by some predestined momentum. The romantic question got an unromantic reply. No, she said—simply “by the need to work.” She had a desire “to wear a tutu and dance at Covent Garden. That was my dream, but not a plan. I never thought I’d make it.”1
She later said she realized, even in Holland, that she was “a little too old” for the rigors of becoming a ballerina, and that any human or divine momentum nudging her toward London was “because I wanted very much to become a choreographer and Rambert was known for developing young choreographers. So I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn and a choreographer as well.”2 But London was on hold due to the cash shortage. She would stay put in the present for an interlude that heralded her art form of the future.
Elsewhere in Amsterdam in 1948, a pair of Dutch freelance filmmakers had a clever idea—on paper, at least. Director Charles Huguenot Van der Linden (1909-1987) and his associate Henry M. Josephson were making a low-budget travelogue about Holland for Britain’s Rank film company. With KLM “celebrity pilot” A. Viruly at the controls, they had flown over the country and, from the cockpit, shot scenes of the meadows, farmlands, Golden Age houses and modern Amsterdam below. They now concocted a thin story—for export—about a British cameraman who has seven days in which to learn Dutch. Some loose farce and as many pretty girls as they could find would be intercut with the landscape footage they already had in the can.
There are multiple versions of every legendary “discovery,” and Audrey’s case was no different. By one account, the two filmmakers came to Gaskell’s studio on their talent search and instantly agreed on “the tall, thin girl with the eyes.”3 Over the years, Van der Linden and Josephson squabbled about who saw her first. Most likely, she just showed up at their office under the watchful eye of her mother, who stated the obvious: Audrey needed work. Could they find some little role for her?
“I saw a dream coming into the room,” Van der Linden recalled. She was fetchingly dressed in a little print frock, gloves and hat, and he decided to do a screentest then and there. She was taken outside and directed to cross a street and walk toward the camera. She did so, stopping in close-up. A voice behind the camera asked if she wanted to be in a movie. She smiled a bit quizzically and nodded. That was it. Smitten by her fresh look, Van der Linden and Josephson offered her a job on the spot. They were amused—though Ella was not—by her response: “I am not an actress. You will regret it.”4
There would be no reason to regret Audrey, if many to lament the film. She played the KLM stewardess who welcomes cameraman “George” to Holland. That starring role went to Wam Heskes, a radio comedian better known as “Koes Koen”—a sort of Dutch Will Rogers—on his down-home broadcasts. This would be his screen debut as well as the stewardess’s.5
Van der Linden had been so pleased with Audrey’s little test that he recycled it, in thrifty Dutch fashion, to help establish the premise of his self-conscious film-within-a-film: Nederlands in Zeven Lessen (Dutch in Seven Lessons, or Dutch at the Double), “A G-B Instructional Production,” opens with George arriving in Amsterdam from England. He has only a week to make a film about Holland, and he keeps getting distracted by all the pretty Dutch girls—starting with Audrey, whom he spots on the street. In their exchange of pleasantries, we hear Hepburn’s first words on screen, spoken softly (and incongruously, to American ears) in that odd “foreign” language called Dutch.
That’s the test footage. It cuts sharply from Audrey the pedestrian to Audrey the flight attendant. Her character’s name? “Audrey.” She shows George around the Amsterdam airport, then glances at him coquettishly and says “Goodbye”—in English, for some reason—with a wry look in her almond eyes. “The drinks he had later with Audrey were his own personal business,” says the narrator, hinting at naughty doings.
A tedious train tour is followed by more aerial footage shot from KLM’s new state-of-the-art “PH-TAF” commercial craft, while the narrator relentlessly dispenses facts: “The Dutch live four hundred people to the square mile....” The conclusion is a cheesecake sailing sequence in swimsuits.
It was Dutch-British corn of the stalest kind. The premiere took place May 7, 1948, three days after Audrey turned nineteen. Dutch in Seven Lessons survives in both the seventy-nine-minute Dutch original and a mercifully truncated thirty-eight-minute English version. Audrey’s dialogue was of course cut out of the latter, and she was not mentioned by the reviewers of either. Most charitable was the Handelsblad’s critic, who called it “no masterpiece.”
Van der Linden had hoped to get in on the ground floor of the postwar Dutch movie industry and European coproductions. He also hoped to develop the talents of young Audrey, signing her up to a half-year contract with the intention of starting a new picture in six months. But when Dutchflopped on both sides of the channel, Van der Linden wasn’t able to raise the money.
By her own admission, having been isolated in Nazi-occupied Arnhem for so many years, she was still ignorant of (and largely disinterested in) the “real” film world of America, Britain and France. But however modestly, her screen career had begun—even though she herself was hardly aware of it.
SHE WAS more aware of modeling and more interested in the one or two beneficial results of her stint with Van der Linden: a part-time modeling job at Tonny Waagemans fashion salon in Amsterdam, and a chance to sit for artist Max Nauta, portraitist to the queen.6 Both engagements were prestigious, but neither produced any work in her field, which was dance. It was time to get serious and get to England, to partake of that Rambert scholarship. The pooled resources of Audrey and her mother were about one hundred pounds, sufficient to get them there and not much more.
They finally made the crossing in late 1948, but the London that greeted them was grim compared to Amsterdam, and so was the British economy, compared with the faster Dutch recovery. Ella was shocked to find that one and four-pence-worth of meat was the weekly ration per person. It was almost as bad as wartime. The déjà vu specter of hunger was worrisome again, as was Audrey’s health. She had arrived in one piece, “but I had no stamina.”7
Ella had hoped to unlock some funds left behind in 1939, but all attempts to get at her money failed.8 She and Audrey found no help from Ruston—nor did they find Ruston. In view of Ella’s pride and the fact that he was in great disrepute, she probably did not look hard for him. But Audrey did, in spite of her strong and lingering feelings of rejection:
“I never heard from him or knew anything about him during the war. But after the war, curiosity took over. I wanted to know where he was, whether he was still alive, and through the Red Cross I found out that he lived in Ireland. But it took me many years before I could write to him, before I could say, ‘I want to see you.”’9j
Ruston’s release from internment on the Isle of Man had been a long time coming and, by the time it was accomplished, he was ill, broke and unemployable. It was years before Audrey learned that he obtained sanctuary at a monastery in County Waterford, Ireland, where the Trappist abbot eventually helped him find a job with an insurance brokerage in Dublin.
Needing sanctuary of their own, Audrey and her mother spent their first few weeks with old friends in Kent before Ella got down to finding the series of humble jobs that would sustain them in London—a virtual repetition of her experience in Amsterdam: first, in a florist’s; next as a cook and beautician; then some interior decorating and door-to-door cosmetics peddling. But she soon found the “situation” they really needed—a job combined with a flat—managing a block of Mayfair apartments at 65 South Audley Street, off Park Lane. The neighborhood was elegant; their unpretentious walk-up was not. But Ella had extraordinary faith in her daughter’s future and a commitment to it that dwarfed all sacrifice. There was joy as well, Audrey recalled:
“My mother was delighted [to be] in London because we had a room together and could be together.... To be able to buy a pair of shoes when you wanted to, or to take a taxi when you wanted.... We always took undergrounds and buses [so] that if it rained we could afford a taxi or go to the movies.”10 With the memories of Arnhem still fresh, one counted one’s blessings and was thankful for such luxuries.
One was even more thankful for Marie Rambert (1888—1982), whose assistance and inspiration to Audrey were typical in the three generations of dancers she cultivated. To describe Rambert is to describe the history of British ballet. Agnes de Mille called her “Queen hornet, vixen mother.” By age sixty, when Audrey met her, she was legendary, her credentials dating to the days when she coached Nijinsky in The Rite of Spring. With Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton, Rambert had founded the companies that would evolve into the Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Ballet. Diaghilev himself came to watch her dynamic rehearsals.
In 1931, Rambert and her playwright husband, Ashley Dukes, opened The Ballet Club in a former church hall (vintage 1840) near Notting Hill Gate, part of which they would later rent to the famous Mercury Theatre. It was the first permanent ballet center in England—a theater, company and school—where the tiny production budgets went hand in hand with tiny salaries.
Rambert was ever short of money but ever generous. She not only gave Audrey a scholarship to study but also took her into her home, housing and feeding her there for six months. That arrangement was a lifesaver for Ella and Audrey both.
“They’d had a rotten time during the war,” recalls Rambert’s daughter Angela Dukes Ellis, “and mother took pity on them. My sister and I had already left home, and the enormous house in Camden Hill Gardens had plenty of spare rooms.
“When the war came, the ballet theater closed down, and after the war, it became difficult to run because the unions were much stronger and you had to pay West End fees. The theater only seated 120 people and was impossible commercially, so it was turned once again into a studio and run as the Rambert School of Ballet until 1979.”11
There, Audrey took her lessons in a drafty practice hall with a Dickensian coal fire and a battered upright piano, around the corner from Rambert’s house to which she returned in the early evening. Angela called around often to visit:
“My mother had no idea whatsoever about running a house, cooking, or anything like that. This wonderful woman Helen Welton was with her for forty years did all that for her. When I would pop in to see Helen, Audrey and her own mother would be sitting in the kitchen talking to her.... My mother had always complained about the size of my feet, but Audrey had the same as mine—size 7. I bought a marvelous pair of warm, fur-lined shoes from her, which we’d never seen in England. She had had them for the Dutch winters, and I had them for many years.”
Angela was struck by Audrey’s “lovely, elfin quality.” But Audrey was struggling with a variety of inferiority complexes beyond just her shoe size.
“My technique didn’t compare with that of the girls who had had five years of Sadler’s Wells teaching, paid for by their families, and who had always had good food and bomb shelters,” she later said, in a rare expression of resentment. 12 “I also sensed that I was very tall....”13
Her sense, put more bluntly on another occasion, was that “I was an Amazon, towering over the boys,” and she was tremendously self-conscious about it.14 “I tried everything to make it an asset. Instead of working on allegro—little small tight movements—I took extra courses in adagio, so I could use my long lines to advantage.”15
Ida de Jong, her petite colleague at Gaskell’s in Amsterdam, had been particularly aware of it: “Audrey’s big handicap for the ballet was her height. If I was sitting next to her, my head only reached up to her shoulders. Tall people have a hard time in ballet, because it’s very difficult to find a proper partner.”16
One who disagreed from firsthand experience was her fellow dancer Ronald Hynde, who had come to the Rambert studio the previous year at age fifteen: “She was this very pretty, strange Dutch girl who suddenly arrived at the Rambert school—slight accent, beautiful face, everyone’s idea of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but with something different about her. I used to partner her in exercises, and she had a tiny waist. She was tallish, but one was never aware he was behind a giant when supporting her.”17
But Audrey thought otherwise. And to her real or imagined problem of height was added one of weight. In London, she said, “I went on an eating binge. I would eat anything in sight and in any quantity. I’d empty out a jam jar with a spoon. I was crazy about everything I could lay my hands on when the food started appearing. I became quite tubby and put on twenty pounds.”18
Some remembered her then as a “balloonlike teenager” who, with the determination that became her trademark, acquired a gazelle-like frame in two months. Soon enough—too soon and more than enough—she lost thirty pounds by ruthlessly eliminating all starches and sweets from her diet. “You have to look at yourself objectively,” she would say, “as if you were some kind of tool, and then decide exactly what you must do.”19
Her assessment of her own tools was severe. She made few new friends and concentrated totally on dance until the need for money led her to moonlight, on weekends and holidays, as a model for several commercial photographers who were beguiled by her unique, pixieish face. One of them snapped that face and put it in a thousand British drugstores, advertising the benefits of Lacto-Calamine complexion lotion.
These initial forays into English modeling reinforced her awareness of fashion and lifelong resolve—if not compulsion—to find the designs and colors that showed her to best advantage. Black and white and muted colors such as beige and pink “tend to make my eyes and hair seem darker,” she felt, “whereas bright colors overpower me and wash me out.” Low-heeled shoes, to deemphasize her height, were always a must.
Many other aspiring performers, men as well as women, were dabbling in fashion photography then. One of them was the future James Bond, Roger Moore, whom Audrey enlisted in her UNICEF work four decades later: “We modeled together about 455 years ago in London,” Moore would say, “when Audrey was very young and I was middle-aged in the late forties.”20
A job was a job. Anything to pick up a few extra pounds.
AUDREY AT TWENTY had the increasingly sinking feeling that she was not destined to become a solo ballerina. Aside from the other issues, she still needed five more years of training even to qualify for a corps de ballet position. “I couldn’t afford to put in all those years to end up earning five pounds a week, which was the going rate then,” she said.
Rambert now told her, gently but firmly, that she had neither the physique nor the talent to make it as a classical dancer. Yet soon after, when a recruiter from a government-sponsored company visited Rambert’s studio in search of dancers for a South American tour, Audrey was offered a position. She might have viewed that as evidence that Rambert ’s verdict was wrong. She was badly in need of money. But Audrey declined the tour, with her customary realism, and pondered the alternatives.
A dancers’ casting call had just been announced for the London version of High Button Shoes, the American hit musical with Jule Styne music and Jerome Robbins choreography to be recreated intact by British producer Archie Thomson. Highlight of the show was Robbins’s comic “Mack Sennett Ballet,” a Keystone Kops chase in black-and-white makeup, simulating a silent movie, that called for unusual virtuosity on the part of the dancers.
Audrey was one of a thousand who tried out for the chorus line and—to her own amazement—one of ten who got the job, at eight pounds ten shillings ($35) a week. Her fellow bathing beauties included sixteen-year-old Alma Cogan, the future “Miss Show Business” of England, and Kay Kendall, the future wife of Rex Harrison—both of whom she would befriend, and both of whom would die of cancer in their early thirties. “I was stiff as a poker as a jazz dancer,” she said, “always off beat on the simplest syncopation.... Going into a musical was the best thing that could have happened to me.”21
The show opened at London’s Hippodrome on December 22, 1948, for a 291-performance run. Audrey never forgot her one and only line—the first she ever spoke on a professional stage:
“Lou Parker, the star, stood in the middle and I went tearing across holding another girl by her hand and said, ‘Have they all gone?’ Believe me, I was nervous every single night. I used to repeat it to myself over and over before going on.”22
The show’s featured male dancer was Nickolas Dana, who today recalls the beautiful seventeen-minute pas de deux, choreographed by Robbins for Dana and a girl who often missed rehearsal and required a stand-in:
“Once the boy picked up the girl, she didn’t touch the floor until the end of it. Just gorgeous. Audrey was the prettiest girl in the show, and one day I asked her to try it and she went up like a feather. I recommended she be the understudy and from then on, she was. I thought she was a beautiful dancer.”23
Dana also has a vivid recollection of Audrey’s offstage wardrobe at the time: “She had one skirt, one blouse, one pair of shoes, and a beret, but she had fourteen scarves. What she did with them week by week, you wouldn’t believe. She’d wear the little beret on the back of her head, on one side, on the other side—or fold it in two and make it look very strange. She had the gift, the flair of how to dress.”
Dana’s agents, Dorothy McAusland and Olive Bridges, were always on the lookout for new talent, and when Dana told them about Audrey, “They came to see the show and called me a couple days later and said, ‘There’s not very much talent. She’s a nice little dancer, but nothing spectacular.’”
Talent was in the eye of the beholder, of course, and perhaps also in the beholder’s gender. In early 1949, London impresario Cecil Landeau came to see High Button Shoes and left thinking that nice little dancer worth capturing. Nobody liked the overbearing Landeau, but he was powerful in the West End and currently preparing a lavish new revue of Ziegfeld proportions.
Sauce Tartare was a song-and-dance extravaganza with twenty-seven comic sketches and musical episodes satirizing different nationalities in a mock travelogue. Landeau claimed to have travelled 14,000 miles to find the perfect international cast. His coup was singer Muriel Smith, the black American star of Broadway’s Carmen Jones. The British members of cast were top-notch, too: Renee Houston, Jack Melford, Audrey’s friend Alma Cogan—and Audrey herself among the five chorus hoofers.
Produced and directed by Landeau, Sauce Tartare opened to raves on May 18, 1949, and enjoyed a healthy run of 433 performances at the Cambridge Theatre. Even before that sauce grew cold, Landeau was stirring up a fresh one, Sauce Piquante, which likewise opened at the Cambridge, on April 27, 1950, and likewise starred Muriel Smith. This time the cast was mostly British and included some of the country’s hottest entertainers. Chief among them was female impersonator Douglas Byng, whose rendition of “I’m One of the Queens of England” always brought down the house. Moira Lister did a riotously funny burlesque of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Audrey was back, too—with bigger bits and bigger paycheck, raised by Landeau to a downright affluent fifteen pounds a week. One of her jobs was to walk across the stage in a skimpy French-maid outfit, holding up the title card for each new skit. Though she was cast primarily as a dancer, Landeau upgraded her role and she figured in several comedy sketches, much to the annoyance of her peers.
“I can’t stand it!” complained the big-busted dancer Aud Johanssen. “I’ve got the best tits on stage, and yet they’re all staring at a girl who hasn’t got any.»24
One of the show’s most popular performers was Bob Monkhouse, soon to become the BBC’s first contract comedian and later a writer for Bob Hope and Jack Benny. Monkhouse and Hepburn became friends, though he disagreed with Nick Dana’s assessment of her dance skill, as he told biographer Ian Woodward:
The standard of dancing in Sauce Piquante was ... superior, but Audrey’s was the poorest.... If she’d been a good dancer, the other girls would not have minded so much.... They all loved her offstage, but hated her on, because they knew that even if she jumped up and down, the audience would still be attracted to her. What Audrey had in Sauce Piquante, and what has sustained her through [her] career, was an enormous, exaggerated feeling of “I’m helpless—I need you.” When people sense this, they respond to it immediately, perhaps not realising why they’re doing so. Audrey had it in abundance.... Everybody in the audience thought, “I want to look after little Audrey.” She seemed to be too pretty, too unaware of the dangers.
It was quite extraordinary. [That] impish grin seemed to go from one ear-hole to the other. She looked incredibly radiant because, at that time, it was uncontrolled. The lips actually turned inside-out and the eyes went sort of potty, like a Walt Disney character. It was so lovely, one stepped back a pace. She later learned to tone it down a bit.25
Monkhouse remembered that during their first conversation, in rehearsals, she had said: “I’m half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I’d be in a hell of a mess!” Animals were a running theme. One night during the run, when Muriel Smith showed up with a bedraggled cat she had just rescued off the street, Audrey immediately adopted the thing.
“We called the cat Tomorrow, at Audrey’s suggestion,” says Monkhouse. “It was rather a rude joke, stemming from the fact that [it was] a male cat that had been castrated, and you know what they say about tomorrow never coming.”26
But for the most part, she tended to keep her distance from the other performers, and the insecurity they perceived in her was real. “In musicals,” she said, “I was the tense, rigid girl trained for ballet who had to watch everyone else to find out what to do.”27Nobody was quite sure if she was a dancer, an actress or a model—including Audrey herself.
Fashion photographer Anthony Beauchamp had seen and admired her in the first of the Sauces at a time when the magazines he worked for were looking for “a new face.” He went backstage after the show and asked to photograph her. She said she was flattered but couldn’t afford his fee. Beauchamp assured her there would be no charge. “I kept looking again and again at the startling eyes which were never still,” he said. When his pictures appeared in British Vogue, her unusual wide-eyed “look” produced a nice stir—and another modeling job with British press agents Frederic Mullally and Suzanne Warner.
“The sweater was doing nothing for Audrey,” said Warner, “and Audrey was doing near as nothing for the sweater.” Invoking the eleventh commandment of fashion (“What God’s forgotten, we stuff with cotton”), they coaxed her into shooting in falsies. Others might speak of her “splendid emaciation,” but she didn’t find it so splendid. “I’d like to be not so flat-chested,” she said. “I was too thin and I had no bosom to speak of. Add [it] up, and a girl can feel terribly self-conscious.”28
There was no reason to feel that way in the opinion of Marcel le Bon, a handsome young French crooner who had several featured spots in Sauce Piquante and dreamed of becoming the next Maurice Chevalier. Early in the production, he and Audrey began dating and fell madly, if briefly, in love. By the final weeks of the show’s run, le Bon was leaving roses in her dressing room nightly and had become the first serious boyfriend of her life. Backstage gossip was much livened by rumors of a marriage.
When Landeau heard of it, he was furious, claiming to have inserted a “no-marriage” clause in Audrey’s contract. Reports that he was threatening to sue her if she married le Bon appeared in the tabloids. She also had to endure the wrath of her mother, who believed Marcel was plotting to cash in on Audrey’s greater talent.
In fact, le Bon was more her pal than her paramour, but it didn’t seem so at the time. Landeau’s testy mood was related to the fact that his show was sinking, despite good notices, and would soon close—in June 1950—after just sixty-seven performances. He lost 20,000 pounds and found himself in bankruptcy court. For the moment, he was staving off that disaster by cannibalizing some sketches from Sauce Piquante into a shorter revue called Summer Nights for Ciro’s, one of the most chic nightclubs in London. Moonlighting there was financially welcome but exhausting, Audrey later told Dominick Dunne:
“I did two shows at the same time, a musical revue at the Cambridge Theatre, twelve performances a week, and then we were all shipped to Ciro’s nightclub right after the show, and there we did a floor show.”29 She would finish up at Ciro’s around two a.m., walk home with some of the other girls through Piccadilly (“so lovely and safe then”), and sleep until noon. In the afternoons, she and Marcel and others from Sauce Piquante worked on a new cabaret act they were trying to concoct. As if that weren’t enough, she was also doing “a bit of TV” at the time though, unfortunately, none of her television work from that pre-videotape era has survived.30
The trade publications were now starting to take notice. In early 1950, Picturegoer called her “a heart-shattering young woman with a style of her own, no mean acting ability, and a photogenic capacity for making the newspaper pages.”31
Nudged as always by her mother, Audrey took steps to improve the raw skills that such press notices insisted she possessed. Earlier, when informed that people had trouble hearing her one and only line in High Button Shoes, she had taken a few singing lessons—not to learn how to sing, but how to speak. Shades of Eliza Doolittle. Soon after, in between the two Sauces, she enrolled in the Saturday morning movement classes of Betty and Philip Buchell, prominent London teacher-choreographers.
With Landeau’s financial help, she now graduated to elocution lessons with Felix Aylmer (1889-1979), a delightful old character actor who subsidized his modest income as a supporting actor in films and plays by taking a few pupils on the side—Vivien Leigh and Charles Laughton among them, and now Audrey.
She had seen precious few “serious” pictures in her life, but Laurence Olivier’s two great Shakespearean films, Henry V (1944, Aylmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury) and Hamlet (1948, Aylmer as Polonius) were among them. Having admired him in both, Audrey now drank in Aylmer’s instruction in diction and his techniques for “responsive stillness” to lure an audience into watching her even when she was doing nothing in a scene.
“He taught me to concentrate intelligently on what I was doing,” she said, “and made me aware that all actors need a ‘method’ of sorts to be even vaguely professional.”32
She was all the while performing two and sometimes three shows daily, one of which was attended by the actor and future director Richard Attenborough: “Everybody knew there was something totally remarkable about her [and] that sooner or later, she was going to become a major, major movie star.”33
The wisdom of hindsight may have been at work there, but Attenborough was not alone. Countless others claimed to have “discovered” Audrey during her brief cabaret stint. Stanley Holloway, who later played Alfred Doolittle to Audrey’s Eliza in My Fair Lady, mocked the many people “who have genuinely kidded themselves into believing that they were the first to recognise Audrey Hepburn’s potential radiant talent.”34 Britain’s Picturegoer magazine had the inside track in 1950:
“The fact that some people went night after night to see her in cabaret at Ciro’s was a good enough reason for Associated British to talk of signing her for the screen.”35
ROBERT LENNARD caught and liked her act at Ciro’s, if not night after night, at least once. Having entered the British film industry in 1930, Lennard was now casting director of Associated British Pictures Corporation (ABC). He had a sixth sense and a distinguished reputation for finding and signing up future stars. But the reputation of his studio was not so lustrous.
“ABC pictures were generally second features,” says Britain’s greatest film historian, Kevin Brownlow. “I can’t think of a major ABC film. In England, you went to the movies to see American pictures in those days. When you saw the credits and heard companies like Columbia or RKO, you got a buzz out of just the name. When you heard ABC, your heart sank.”36
Located in London, ABC was protected from its overwhelming Hollywood competition by a government requirement that exhibitors show at least one British film for every two American ones. The result was a plethora of generally dismal “quota quickies”—125 of them a year—most ending up as the lesser half of double features headed by Hollywood films.
Artistic virtues aside, those pictures were the bread-and-butter of Britain’s postwar film industry, of which Lennard was both an employee and a champion. Smitten by Audrey in the Ciro’s show, he arranged a meeting between her and Italian director Mario Zampi, who was in London preparing a new comedy for ABC called Laughter in Paradise. At the start of the war, Zampi had been arrested under Regulation 18b (like Joseph Hepburn-Ruston) for his alleged pro-fascist beliefs, but was soon released. He claimed to have seen Audrey in Sauce Piquante fourteen times and now offered her a major role in Laughter in Paradise. But she turned it down “for personal reasons,” apologizing that “I’ve just signed to do a short tour in a show. I can’t break the contract.”
The real reason was Marcel le Bon. He and Audrey and their Sauce pals had worked out a new cabaret act and were all set to take it on the road when, suddenly, the bookings fell through. Le Bon blamed himself and, in impulsive Gallic fashion, now abandoned Audrey and England both and boarded a ship for America.
Though upset by his departure, she was not really devastated and—now that her “personal reasons” had evaporated—rushed back to tell Zampi, “If the part’s still available, and you’re not too mad with me, I’d be thrilled to do it.” He wasn’t mad, but he had already given her role to Beatrice Campbell. “The only role not yet cast is a bit-part of a girl who sells cigarettes,” he said. “Do you want to do it?”
Yes, she did.
Laughter in Paradise was a major cut above ABC’s average “quota quickie.”
Its witty story, by Michael Pertwee and Jack Davies, has a dying eccentric (Hugh Griffith) leaving his heirs a fortune—on condition that they carry out the most embarrassing tasks: His sister (Fay Compton), who terrorizes her domestic help, must work as a servant for a month. His pompous nephew (Alastair Sim) must spend a month in jail and postpone his wedding to a female soldier. (“What am I to say to Commandant Bulthwaite and the girls?” she exclaims. “They’ve bought us a toast rack!”) His nephew (Guy Middleton), a shameless womanizer, must marry the first unattached woman he speaks to.
Audrey’s big scene—as a cigarette girl in short black dress and white apron—comes thirty minutes into the film. She wanders up to Middleton in a bar, flashes a dazzling smile and says, “Hello! Who wants a ciggy?” She has two more brief appearances in the film, which is a morality tale: The greedy heirs all perform their assignments, but it turns out Griffith was really flat broke, and none of them will get a penny.
Laughter in Paradise was one of the top-grossing British films of its year and—on the strength of “Who wants a ciggy?”—Audrey’s film career was launched. ABC offered her a seven-year contract but, for the time being, she preferred to keep her options open. Girls who signed long-term British contracts in those days rarely made it to stardom. A few, such as Natasha Parry and Honor Blackman, survived, but most—Carol Marsh, Susan Shaw, Joan Dowling, Patricia Plunkett, Jane Hylton, Patricia Dainton, Hazel Court—were never heard from again.37
So as a freelance rather than contract actress, Audrey went straight from Laughter in Paradise into production of One Wild Oat, an ABC comedy directed by Charles Saunders, based on a bedroom farce of the 1948 West End season. She had three days’ work playing a hotel receptionist, but most of her bits ended up on the cutting-room floor: It seems that Audrey was the “wild oat” and that the British censors objected to both the visual and verbal insinuations of her character.
Forty-five years later, director Saunders recalls One Wild Oat as “one of the nicest films I worked on, shot entirely in the studio in about three weeks.” He, too, had seen Audrey in Sauce Piquante and cast her on the basis of that alone. “Her only line was, ‘Good afternoon, this is the Regency Hotel.’ That’s all.”
Was he surprised by the speed of her subsequent fame?
“Surprised and bloody annoyed, quite frankly,” says Saunders. “We tried hard but we just didn’t have the means at that time to get her under contract.”38
In the gentle hands of Saunders and Zampi, Audrey’s film work thus far had been pleasant. She would be exposed to a very different kind of director in her next film, Young Wives’ Tale, a static romantic comedy about England’s postwar housing shortage. Its stars were Joan Greenwood, Helen Cherry and Nigel Patrick. Its director was the tyrannical Henry Cass, and Audrey, in the minor role of a typist, somehow ran afoul of him.
“I was his whipping boy, that was for sure,” she said. “Half the time I was in tears, but adorable Joan Greenwood and Nigel Patrick—the stars—were very sweet and protective.39 [It was] the only unhappy picture I ever made because Cass had it in for me, and I was miserable. I didn’t like Henry Cass.”40
She had her revenge of sorts when Young Wives’ Tale opened in New York in November of 1951. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther berated it for being as “dismal [a comedy] as ever leaked from an uninspired brain” but, even so, made it a point to mention “that pretty Audrey Hepburn.”41
By now she had signed a contract and, after Young Wives’ Tale, ABC loaned her out to Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios, which specialized in sophisticated, irreverent comedies. Kind Hearts and Coronets was its most recent success. The Ealing film at hand was Lavender Hill Mob, directed by Charles Crichton and starring Alec Guinness as a timid bank clerk who conceives and executes a most daring robbery. It would be one of Eating‘s—and England’s—finest comedies, and Guinness, who had met Audrey through Felix Aylmer, ihelped her obtain a small part in it. She is “Chiquita” in an airport lounge, where Guinness calls her over and hands her a wad of bills. “Oh, but how sweet of you!” she coos, and deposits a thank-you kiss on his forehead.
Lavender Hill Mob was named the best film of 1951 by the British Film Academy, but Audrey’s contribution was unnoticed. “I paid no particular attention to her,” said Balcon.
But Alec Guinness did.
“She only had half a line to say, and I don’t think she said it in any particular or interesting way,” Guinness recalls. “But her faunlike beauty and presence were remarkable.”42
Audrey had just tested for the lead in ABC’s Lady Godiva Rides Again. Guinness now recommended her to director Mervyn LeRoy, who was then in London to cast the MGM epic Quo Vadis?. She duly made that test, too, in full Roman costume. But there were no callbacks. Audrey was judged too thin for the first part, which went to Pauline Stroud, and too inexperienced for the second, which went to Deborah Kerr.
“Quo vadis?” indeed. Where to go from here?
HEPBURN WAS ambitious and focused on her career, but she was also, privately, a very traditional and romantic woman determined to avoid the disastrous experience of her parents. After Marcel le Bon’s departure, she continued to seek a serious relationship and, in summer 1950, she found it in the person of James Hanson.
They met shortly after she finished Lavender Hill Mob and immediately hit it off. She was twenty-two. He was twenty-eight, six-foot-four and the multimillionaire scion of a Yorkshire trucking industry family. He served dynamically in World War II from 1939 (at age seventeen) to its end, with the Duke of Wellington’s regiment, among others, in North Africa, Italy and Greece. Nowadays he was a horseman, yachtsman and master of foxhounds, and a trustee of the D’Oyly Carte opera company.
Hanson was an elegant socialite and a dashing lover of the good life. He dressed impeccably, commanded a fleet of expensive cars, owned his own plane, and frequented the best nightspots of London and New York. He adored beautiful women—beautiful actresses in particular—and they invariably returned the favor. In recent months, he had been Jean Simmons’s escort in London, but she was quickly forgotten when Audrey entered his life.
“When I met her, she had just finished with [Marcel le Bon],” he recalls today. “I got lucky and found her when she was on her own.” Hanson—now Lord Hanson—is one of the wealthiest men in England. Still trim and engaging, he sits back in the London headquarters of Hanson PLC, his $17-billion global conglomerate, locks his hands behind his head, and smiles at the recollection of Audrey:
We met at a cocktail party in Mayfair at Les Ambassadeurs, a very popular place, and we were attracted to each other right away. I invited her for lunch next day, we soon fell in love, became engaged a few months later. She was a one-man woman, and it was a relationship of that kind. We became extremely good friends. Everybody saw in her this wonderful life and brightness and terrific strength of character. She was a very strong young woman who clearly had the determination she was going to need in order to achieve what she did. She had done a couple of small parts in movies, and her career was just about to blossom. There was no doubt about that by anybody who saw her.43
The Hanson family’s transport business, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, had thrived for a hundred years. But in 1948, the Labour government nationalized all railways, airlines, trucking and shipping companies, and Hanson found himself out of a job. At that point, he bought a trucking firm in Canada, shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic thereafter.k
During that time, he did not neglect romance, as one of the all-time authorities on that subject—Zsa Zsa Gabor—confirms:
“Audrey and I started together in London. She was a beautiful Dutch girl, engaged to James Hanson. I was making my first movie, Moulin Rouge. His partner Gordon White was chasing me, and Jimmy was chasing her. They were dahling-such a handsome couple. Jimmy was not only rich, but charming.” 44
Audrey thought so, too. “Jimmy,” for his part, observed his girl closely and remembers her as “not particularly strong” but largely recovered from her postwar debility. He debunks the claims that she suffered from any kind of anorexia at the time.
“She had dancer’s legs and a dancer’s upper body, which is often wasted because of the perspiration from all that practicing,” says Hanson. “I would have thought that she might have difficulty with her health in the future. But she was an extremely healthy young girl then, apart from the fact that like many dancers, she looked as if she should be built up a bit. Yet she ate well and enjoyed her food. She could eat like a horse! Any problem that developed certainly wasn’t evident then.”
One evident problem, however, was her mother. Though impressed with Hanson’s social and financial status, Ella was reportedly horrified at the thought of Audrey’s marriage and exile to the Yorkshire boondocks, just when her career was at the takeoff point. Such, at least, was the story repeated in most later books and articles about Audrey—but quite untrue.
“I liked Ella very much,” Hanson insists. “It was certainly not true that my relationship with her was poor. She was always very encouraging about me with Audrey. She felt the age difference—about six years—was right and that somebody in a solid business was right for somebody on the artistic side. She would be marrying somebody with his feet on the ground, not in show business, with all its uncertainties. We talked about it many times. We’d already worked that out: Audrey was going to make one movie a year with the option to do a play whenever she wanted to—pretty much the pattern Audrey followed anyway. That was partially because she wanted to have a life also as my wife.
“We were a very happy ‘family’ in the two years we were together. I spent a good deal of time with Ella. She thought we were well suited. She had no reservations about my being in business and Audrey being an actress. Ella was not fond of show business people. I did a lot for her, as I would a future mother-in-law. I tried to develop a relationship, and it worked.”45
Audrey often described her mother as “a lady of very strict Victorian standards.” But Dutch Victorian was different from British Victorian, and on the subject of sex, at least, her liberal attitude astonished Hanson a year or so later in Rome.
“I must have been twenty-nine or thirty at the time,” he recalls. “It was the first time in my life I had ever slept in the same bed as my fiancée—with her mother bringing the breakfast in. That was something I had never experienced. There was always a rather furtive dashing back to your room. But Ella was completely different. I remember her bringing the breakfast into that room. She was a very earthy woman.”
AUDREY’S FILM ROLES to date were small, and so were the films. Now, for the first time, she was about to play a major supporting role in a major movie by a major British filmmaker.
Director Thorold Dickinson had seen “the girl with the eyes” in Sauce Piquante and tucked her away in his mind. A former supervising editor at Ealing Studios, he was a significant figure in British cinema. His brilliant Gaslight (1940) was made four years before the Ingrid Bergman version and was far better. His most recent picture, Queen of Spades (1949), was a tour de force for Edith Evans and both a critical and commercial success.
Dickinson and producer Sidney Cole were now readying Secret People, a downbeat melodrama of prewar political intrigue. It was the furthest thing in the world from ABC’s fluffy comedies. The screenplay, written by Dickinson and novelist Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth), was the tale of Maria Brent, living in London in 1937 with her little sister Nora—a very young and very beautiful ballet student. They are exiles from an unnamed foreign country, where their pacifist father is murdered. Maria abandons his ideals and turns violent revolutionary—but with deep guilt and a desperate desire to protect the innocent Nora.
Secret People’s broad, political scope was the talk of British film circles—so much so that a young film intern decided to chronicle it from start to finish. The result was a full-length book, Making a Film: The Story of “Secret People, ”by Lindsay Anderson, who would become an important director himself in the sixties. Anderson’s behind-the-scenes account makes it clear that casting went down to the wire. Both Maria and her radical boyfriend Louis had to have believable accents, but the budget ruled out the major English-speaking Europeans in Hollywood.
The eventual choices were two talented but little-known Italians, Valentina Cortesa and Serge Reggiani—a Paul Muni lookalike. But the perfect Nora still eluded them. “An actress would have to be found who could dance, or a dancer who could act,” said Anderson, whose journal for October 30, 1950, reads:
Interview with Audrey Hepburn, possible Nora. With [Cortesa and Reggiani as] the leads, the height of potential cast members begins to assume importance. Neither of them is tall, so to a certain extent the rest of the cast must be scaled to them. This applies particularly to Nora—a slight discouragement to Audrey Hepburn. From now on all actors interviewed are sternly measured against the office wall.
On November 10, the cameras turned for the first time on Secret People— still without a Nora, even as composer Roberto Gerhard finished the elaborate ballet music to which Nora would dance in the most violent, climactic scene. In all his films, said Dickinson, he liked to have at least one sequence “of pure and unmistakable cinema,” and Nora’s ballet was going to be it.
Various candidates for Nora had been rejected. Valentina Cortesa was now responsible for the breakthrough.
“There were four girls that did the test,” says Cortesa today, “and I saw at the barre this beautiful little thing, like a little deer, with this long neck and those big eyes. She looks at me and says, ‘Do you think I have a chance?’ I was so touched that I went to the director and said, ‘Listen, if you really love me, I would like to have as the sister that little girl.’ They said, ‘We were going to look at some others.’ I said, ‘No, I beg you—I want her.”’46 In the follow-up test, Cortesa further assisted by suggesting Audrey remove her shoes and by playing the scene herself on tiptoe, to minimize their height difference.
Hepburn got the role of Nora on February 26, 1951, and art imitated life in almost all of her scenes. She’s the ingenue of ingenues, a gay wisp of a girl always rushing to or from an audition. Her barre exercises are those of her Rambert days, her dance form is marvelous, and her dialogue with Charles Goldner (as Anselmo, the landlord) might have been taken from her life:
ANSELMO: Now you are British. You feel different, Nora?
NORA: I’ll say! No more labour permits! ... I might get some cabaret work in the autumn.
ANSELMO: Cabaret work? What for?
NORA: (calling back as she jumps on a bus) Money! For more classes! For more cabaret work!
The big challenge, aside from nine grueling days filming the ballet sequence, was her greatest dramatic moment in the film—in fact, the first tragic scene she had ever played: an emotional encounter with her sister after a terrorist bomb produces mayhem and death at the party where Nora has just finished dancing. The scene and its graphic dialogue unnerved her, bringing back nightmares from Arnhem. “I just can’t seem to say it,” she told Dickinson. “Don’t bother about how you’re going to say it,” he advised. “Just think of the experience that lies behind the words. During the war, perhaps you saw something like that.... Get the feeling right, and the words will look after themselves.”
While the stand-ins were being lit, Audrey went off by herself to a corner. “By the time we come to the take,” wrote Anderson, “the words have become spontaneous and heartfelt and tears come naturally to her eyes.”
With Valentina Cortesa, Audrey developed a warm, big-and-little sister relationship off the set as well as on. “We used to go out in London at night, all dressed up,” Cortesa recalls. “Once we went to a very chic restaurant and both of us smoked a cigar. Like little idiots, we smoked a cigar and laughed. Well, why not? I adored her.”47
But by mid-March, Cortesa was greatly agitated. For one thing, she was secretly pregnant by actor Richard Basehart, whose current visit to the set was creating much tension. (A few weeks later, they would marry.) Besides that, she was annoyed and besieged constantly by publicity requests. One day in the presence of Anderson and Hepburn, Cortesa unloaded:
“We must be allowed to have our own lives. In Hollywood it is terrible; they expect you to be their slave; you have to be ready to do anything for them, at any time, not just when you’re making a picture.” She shuddered and turned to Audrey: “Think hard before you sign a long-term contract. Liberty is the most wonderful thing of all.”
At this embryonic stage, Audrey was thus alerted to the danger of overexposure and the contempt bred of familiarity. That very week she was booked for a photo session at South Downs, feeding ducks and paddling in the village pond, followed by some “breast skyline” pictures for a cover story in Illustrated —too much publicity before her “serious” work had even been seen by the public. “They’ll get sick of it,” she fretted. “I’d much rather wait until I have [more] to show.”
By its final reel, Secret People becomes a metaphor for the Cold War. Maria, threatened by both sides (“You wouldn’t want anything to happen to Nora, would you?”), breaks down and turns state’s evidence. It is then Scotland Yard’s turn to manipulate her until her final confrontation with Louis, in which she is stabbed to death and the sobbing Nora is led away.
The rough cut of Secret People ran almost two hours, twenty minutes of which were chopped before its premiere in November of 1951. Cortesa’s underplayed performance was acclaimed, and photographer Gordon Dines praised for his moody, high-contrast lighting in the postwar neo-realist style. The film’s gritty feel and restraint were remarked. But all in all, the critical response to Secret People did not fulfill Dickinson’s hopes.
Variety called the script “hackneyed” but said Hepburn “combines beauty with skill” in the fine ballet scenes.48l Indeed, forty-five years later, Secret People provides our last glimpse of her as a young, working dancer.49
Though her part was small, Hepburn received above-the-title credit, just below Cortesa and Reggiani—“which reflected how pleased we were with her performance,” said producer Cole. Dickinson, convinced of her star potential, tried hard to persuade Ealing to sign her up, but in vain. She would soon go the way of Cary Grant, James Mason, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Boris Karloff, Deborah Kerr, David Niven and a host of others lost by England to Hollywood.50
But first, she would be temporarily lost to France.
IN THE MIDDLE of Secret People production, while she was still very much “an unknown,” Audrey’s new agent Kenneth Harper went to director Terence Young in London and told him she was someone special and to be reckoned with.
“From the moment she came into my office, I realized he was right,” recalled Young, shortly before his death in 1994. “But she was the last person in the world I needed for the role of a tough Lapland woman in the wilds of Norway, who had to move around all day on skis. I told her she was completely wrong for the picture [Valley of the Eagles] and said, ‘I bet you can’t even ski.’ Her reply was, ‘But I can learn.’ She was utterly enchanting and she stayed on in my office talking for half an hour. I told her I’d certainly remember her for something else. I even added that I thought she was going to make it, and I hoped one day she would remember me, and get me to direct.”51m
Around the same time, writer-editor Alfred Shaughnessy—later a cocreator of the Upstairs, Downstairs PBS-TV series—suggested her for a comedy film called Brandy for the Parson. Shaughnessy gave her a copy of the screenplay, which she soon returned with a mischievous smile. “Lovely,” she said, “but I couldn’t play Scene 42. The censor wouldn’t allow it.” He grabbed his “thoroughly wholesome” script, turned to Scene 42 and read: “Petronilla is awake, dressed in Bill’s pyjamas. She is peeing out of the porthole.”52 A crucial “r” had been omitted.
In April, while still filming Secret People, Audrey had received a call from Harper saying he had an offer for her to play in a film with bandleader Ray Ventura, who was also its producer. The part was small but the money was good, she would get to wear a Dior dress, and—best of all—the picture would be shot in Monte Carlo, which meant a month in the sun.
Audrey went immediately to Valentina Cortesa, asking whether she should take it. Cortesa’s response was unhesitant, as always: “I said, ‘Listen, if the cast is number one, if the director is number one, even if the part is not number one—do it. Maybe something else comes out of it.”’53
Nous irons à Monte Carlo [We Go to Monte Carlo] was a sequel to Ventura’s mildly successful Nous irons à Paris (1949). Audrey was cast as much for her bilingual fluency as for her charms: The film would be made both in French and English (with the snappier title Monte Carlo Baby). It was a series of skits loosely—very loosely—connected by the musical appearances of Ventura and his band. Audrey played a movie star chasing after her missing baby.
Compared with her serious role in Secret People, it was absurd. Her misgivings were compounded by a report that the jazz musician who would be her leading man was a notorious womanizer. She mentioned that to Nick Dana, her High Burton Shoes pal, who replied, “It’s true, but Frenchmen are usually not as good as their words.” At that point, says Dana, “She looked at me and smiled and said, ‘What do you think I should do?’ I said, ‘What did they offer you?’ She told me. I said, ‘Ask for fifty pounds more.’ She went back and said, ‘If I have to work with this man, I need more money.’ And she got it.”
Three days before departure, she showed up at Dana’s apartment in the St. John’s Wood section of London with an announcement: “I feel like I should look different if I’m going to do a French movie.”
Dana, who had a few salon skills of his own, reflects on that moment with delight at his home in Rochester, New York, and is not too modest to deny credit for what happened next:
“I said, ‘You have the kind of face that needs a gamine haircut. I would almost take the ends of your eyebrows off so that you have a quizzical look. You have the kind of face for it—a pixie face. Let’s make it a pixie.’ So we did the eyebrows and I gave her a gamine cut. It was that simple.”54
Thorold Dickinson was accommodating, too, moving up her dialogue post-synching session for Secret People to May 28, since she had to leave for France that very evening.
“Everything significant in my life has happened gloriously and unexpectedly—like the trip to Monte Carlo tomorrow,” she told writer Radie Harris the previous night. “I’ve always longed to go to the French Riviera, but I could never afford it.”
A day later, she was installed at the Hotel de Paris, the most splendid Belle Epoque structure on the Riviera, and ready to start shooting Monte Carlo Baby under the direction of Jean Boyer. Boyer, one of France’s most prolific directors, was a master of mass-audience fluff. His next assignment would be to direct Brigitte Bardot in her first film, Crazy for Love (1952). His current stars were less titillating: The biggest name in Monte Carlo Baby was sad-faced comic Jules Munshin. He was supported—not hugely—by Cara Williams, Michelle Farmer (Gloria Swanson’s daughter) and John van Dreelen. Audrey would appear in the film for a total of twelve minutes.
Monte Carlo was released in France and England in 1952, and poorly received. There was no interest in American distribution until May 1954, after Hepburn had become famous, when producer Collyer Young and his wife Ida Lupino bought the U.S. rights and exhibited Monte Carlo Baby in a few art houses, where confused American audiences could not understand why such a big new star was appearing in such a small part.55 The New York Times called it “as witless a film exercise as ever was spewed from an ingenuous camera.” Audrey’s role of the film star? “She made this film before she became one in reality. It is rather astonishing how she stands out in that seared desert of mediocrity.”56
THE HOLLYWOOD “star search” was typically full of sound and fury, most often signifying nothing other than publicity. The more dignified theater world usually disdained it—with the exception of Gigi. It was the last fiction work of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873—1954), written during the Nazi occupation of Paris. When published in 1945, it was just the sort of escapist fare Europeans wanted to read, and a huge hit. In 1948, it was made into a pleasant French film starring Danièle Delorme, which in turn led to the idea of a stage version.
But Colette’s New York agent was having trouble trying to sell Gigi as a Broadway play: The first dramatization by a French playwright called for nineteen sets and a cast of thirty-eight-much too much. The agent now asked Anita Loos (of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fame) to streamline it, and she duly produced a version with just eight actors and four sets. But there were other obstacles.
“First of all,” said Loos, “the stage rights were acquired by Gilbert Miller, who hadn’t the least intention of producing Gigi. Gilbert’s main interest in life was to be an international playboy. At the same time, he didn’t want some other producer to acquire a likely property, so he followed his usual custom: paid me an advance of a thousand dollars, tossed my script into the lower drawer of his desk, and went merrily off to Europe.”57
Miller was a powerful theatrical czar on both sides of the Atlantic. Victoria Regina, What Price Glory? and The Cocktail Party were among his hits, and he was a millionaire long before marrying the additional fortune of heiress Kitty Bache. He had his own airline, bank, estates in four countries, and was hugely fat. In London, he and Kitty lived royally in their Savoy suite overlooking the Thames.58 He was there now, laying plans to produce both Cleopatra plays—the Shakespeare and the Shaw—with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
Before leaving New York, Miller had asked an ambitious young assistant named Morton Gottlieb to look after his affairs. Gottlieb found Loos’s manuscript and took it upon himself to put it into production. Miller returned, furious to learn that Gigi had been announced in the trade papers.
“Gilbert then thought of one more chance to ditch the production,” said Loos. “Colette herself might possibly come to his aid by turning down my adaptation.” Miller sent Loos to the ancient Palais Royale apartment in Paris where Colette had long been bed-ridden with arthritis. “I presently realized that Colette’s mind was wandering,” said Loos, “and her gaze was directed toward my feet.... ‘Where did you buy those adorable shoes?’ she asked. From that moment on we hit it off.”59
Loos came away with Colette’s approval of her Gigi script. That delighted Gottlieb as much as it annoyed Miller, who was now obligated to move forward—but there was still no Gigi:
With Miss Loos I combed the roster of Equity for a young American actress who could meet the requirements—without result. We must have seen at least two hundred girls in New York. For a time we considered the Italian actress Pier Angeli, but her accent seemed too high a hurdle to surmount. Briefly we pondered the potential of Leslie Caron, but Miss Caron was too French.60
They were about to compromise “on a none-too-pristine Hollywood starlet,” said Loos, when a telegram arrived from Colette via her husband Maurice Goudeket in Monte Carlo, where they regularly spent their summers as guests of Prince Rainier at the Hotel de Paris: “Don’t cast your Gigi until you receive my letter.” The letter that followed told a remarkable tale:
Colette, seventy-eight, was being propelled through the hotel lobby—sipping a liqueur and resplendent in her red corkscrew curls—when her wheelchair was blocked by a group of actors, technicians and their film equipment. The chair got tangled in some wires, and director Jean Boyer was cross about the interruption. But he fell respectfully silent when he recognized Colette, and shooting was halted while he went over to pay his respects. During that interaction and the time it took to get her chair sorted out, Colette studied the activity with her usual curiosity. Several cast members came up to meet her, but her attention was drawn to one who did not: A girl in the background, oblivious to Colette, was taking advantage of the unplanned break to frolic with two of the musicians off to the side. She was dancing around them in playful fashion; she seemed graceful and awkward at the same time; she was extremely pretty. The old author’s eyes narrowed. Suddenly she announced, “Voilà! There is my Gigi!”
“What author ever expects to see one of his brain-children appear suddenly in the flesh?” she would later add. “Not I, and yet, here it was. This unknown young woman was my own thoroughly French Gigi come alive!”61
Colette thought the girl might be fifteen or sixteen—far younger than her twenty-two years—and summoned a crew member to enquire about her. “She’s here with her mother, the Baroness van Heemstra,” the man reported. Ella, it turned out, knew Colette’s novel well and was thrilled by the idea of Audrey in its title role.
Anita Loos was in New York with Paulette Goddard, getting ready to leave for a vacation in Paris, but after Colette’s letter arrived, they arranged for a stopover first in London. There, at the Savoy, Colette’s discovery paid them a visit:
“The girl came in, dressed in a simple white shirtwaist and skirt, but Paulette and I were bowled over by her unusual type of beauty. After talking for a moment, we arranged an audition for her to read for Gilbert the following day. But after she left, Paulette said to me, ‘There’s got to be something wrong with that girl!’ I asked, ‘What?’ ‘Anyone who looks like that would have been discovered before she was ten years old.’
“There was nothing wrong, except the strange fact that perfection is almost impossible for the ordinary eye to see.... She had been in full view of the London public for two years, [but] it had taken Colette to see Audrey Hepburn.”
When Miller heard her read for the part, he was unimpressed. But such was Colette’s insistence that he engaged her anyway and called on his old friend Cathleen Nesbitt for help. Nesbitt, a veteran character actress (formerly a leading lady and lover of Rupert Brooke), agreed to critique Audrey’s delivery. Audrey did a reading. Nesbitt couldn’t hear her. Serious coaching was in order, and Nesbitt told Miller she’d provide it if the girl would come regularly to her country home outside New York City.
No one was more aware of her deficiencies than Audrey. “I’m sorry, Madame, but it is impossible,” she told Colette the day they met. “I wouldn’t be able to, because I can’t act.”
Valentina Cortesa had told her something might come out of Monte Carlo Baby, and it did. “Fortuna!” Cortesa called it.62 And now, while Audrey waited for Miller and ABC pictures to sort out the business arrangements, more fortuna was on the way.
RURITANIAN PRINCESS visits foreign country, eludes her guardians, goes madcap for twenty-four hours, falls in love with American journalist, returns to her senses in bittersweet ending.
Dalton Trumbo and Ian McLellan Hunter had come up with that screenplay idea in the mid-forties and sold it to Frank Capra, who wanted but failed to make it at Paramount with Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant. William Wyler read it in 1951 and told Paramount he’d do it, but only if he could shoot on location in Rome. The studio agreed, Capra released the property to Wyler, and casting for Roman Holiday began. Everything hinged on the princess.
Wyler’s first idea was Jean Simmons, but Howard Hughes—who owned her contract—refused to make her available. The search continued on two continents through July 1951, when Paramount’s London production chief Richard Mealand wrote the home office: “I have another candidate for Roman Holiday—Audrey Hepburn. I was struck by her playing of a bit-part in Laughter in Paradise.”
At the time, said Audrey, “I had no idea of who William Wyler was [and] no sense of what Mr. Wyler could do for my career. I had no sense, period. I was awfully new, and awfully young, and thrilled just to be going out on auditions and meeting people who seemed to like me.”63
She was busy enough trying to prepare for Gigi, and it boggled her mind to think of making a movie—before, during or even after. But if Paramount of Hollywood wanted her to do a screen test, she could hardly refuse. Upon returning to London from Monte Carlo, just prior to leaving for America, she acquiesced to Mealand’s hasty arrangements.
“I wanted a girl without an American accent to play the princess, someone you could believe was brought up a princess,” Wyler recalled.64 He was in London and “sort of picked out a few girls but didn’t want to stay and do the tests,” said Audrey. “So he put Thorold Dickinson in charge of testing me because I’d worked with him in Secret People, and he understood me.”65
Her Roman Holiday test took place at Pinewood Studios in London, September 18, 1951, under Dickinson’s direction. “We did some scenes out of the script,” he said, but “Paramount also wanted to see what Audrey was actually like not acting a part, so I did an interview with her. We loaded a thousand feet of film into a camera and every foot of it went on this conversation. She talked about her experiences in the war, the Allied raid on Arnhem, and hiding out in a cellar. A deeply moving thing.”66
All of which was a prelude to the real test: In order to assess the spontaneous Audrey, Wyler had instructed Dickinson to keep the film rolling when she thought she was finished. After a scene in which the princess flings herself onto her bed, Audrey was told she could relax and leave. But she stayed put.
“I didn’t hear anybody say ‘Cut!’” she said. “Only one man here has the right to say ‘Cut’ [and] I won’t move until I hear him.”
“Cut!” said Dickinson. But the camera kept rolling as Audrey sat up in her royal bed, stretched sexily, clasped her hands around her knees, smiled and asked how she’d done.
Lionel Murton, who played the Gregory Peck part for the purposes of the audition, was also smiling. “This little doe-eyed charmer is a very smart cookie,” he thought to himself. “She knows perfectly well that the camera is still running—and is giving it the works.”
The test results were flown to Rome, where Wyler found them irresistible: “First, she played the scene from the script, then you heard someone yell ‘Cut!’ but the take continued. She jumped up in bed and asked, ‘How was it? Was I any good?’ She saw that everybody was so quiet and the lights were still on. Suddenly, she realized the camera was still running and we got that reaction, too.... She had everything I was looking for—charm, innocence and talent. She also was very funny. She was absolutely enchanting, and we said, ‘That’s the girl!’”67
The studio fired off a cable to Mealand: “Exercise the option on this lady. The test is certainly one of the best ever made in Hollywood, New York or London.” Even Don Hartman, Paramount’s tough-as-nails production chief, was impressed: “We were fascinated,” he said. “It’s no credit to anyone that we signed her immediately.”68 Mealand now received a routine follow-up telegram: “Ask Hepburn if okay [to] change her last name to avoid conflict [with] Katharine Hepburn.” The answer was not routine: Audrey politely but emphatically refused; if Paramount wanted her, they’d have to take her name, too.n
“I tried to explain to all of them that I wasn’t ready to do a lead,” said Audrey,“but they didn’t agree, and I certainly wasn’t going to argue with them.”69
For Gigi, she would be getting $500 a week, from which she would have to pay her own living expenses in New York. The Roman Holiday offer was $12,500 with an option for a second picture at $25,000. Paramount wanted a seven-year contract, but she balked at such length and—with a little help from her fiancé—negotiated a shrewder deal. James Hanson is modest about it. “The only contribution I made,” he says, was to help her get around her long-term obligations to ABC. As an old friend of Jack Dunfee and Lew Wasserman of MCA, “I was able to put in my two cents’ worth to improve on her contract with Paramount.”
The final result was a two-year movie deal with a clause allowing her to act in stage plays as well. With Hanson’s help, she also fought and won the battle with Paramount for permission to do television work, too, if and when she chose.
“Heaven help me live up to all this,” she wrote Richard Mealand in London. 70
So she was in—signed up to do Roman Holiday after the run of Gigi, regardless of how long that might be. It was a big risk for Paramount. The play could have run for years, and Gregory Peck had been signed only for a very narrow window of shooting time the following summer of 1952. Cautiously, in view of those uncertainties, the studio decided to hold off a bit on announcing her contract. Everything now depended on Gigi: if it worked, Paramount would have a star; if it flopped, they’d have an unknown London failure on their hands.71
The pressure was on, personally and professionally. Gigi rehearsals began in October 1951. In late September, Gilbert Miller sent her a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary. For the first time on any momentous occasion in her life, her mother would not be with her: Ella couldn’t leave her apartment manager’s job in London. James Hanson, kind as always, promised to fly both Ella and himself to New York for Gigi’s opening.
The press had the Hanson-Hepburn relationship thoroughly confused at this point: One magazine, for example, in a big feature called “Audrey, the New Hepburn,” ran their photos with the caption: “They were married last month.” For that matter, Hanson himself was a bit confused. Throughout all her amazing career breaks of the last eighteen months, their mutual affection remained strong—if anything, it had grown stronger. He’d been supportive in every way, and Audrey had been grateful and reliant on his support. But she seemed less willing than ever to fix a firm wedding date, and though they never argued about it, Hanson was privately upset at the ongoing delay.
Audrey was upset, too, but not about that. During the leisurely eighteen-day crossing to America—her first and last such leisure for many years—it crossed her mind that, at twenty-two, she was the first girl signed simultaneously to star in a Broadway play and a Hollywood film without ever having set foot in either place—and with virtually no experience in either medium.