CHAPTER 3

Stardom Beyond Belief (1951-1954)

“I think sex is overrated.”

—AUDREY HEPBURN

IN THE WEE HOURS OF OCTOBER 3, 1951, BROADWAY PUBLICIST Arthur Cantor dispatched an “Urgent” release to the New York newspapers and wire services: “New British actress named Hepburn arriving this morning at Pier 90 to appear in Broadway play. She is a great find. Suggest you send reporters and photographers.”

The response was much like that which greeted Greta Garbo at the same location in 1925. “Without benefit of telepathy,” wrote Martin Abramson for Cosmopolitan, “every editor who received the communique impaled it on a spike reserved to useless trivia, and Miss Hepburn arrived in New York harbor to be greeted by a crashing yawn. The anxious Mr. Cantor scurried around the dock, found one ship-news reporter with time on his hands, and begged him to ask the new arrival a few questions. ‘Nah,’ the reporter told him. ‘I’d rather go have a cup of coffee.”’¹

Morton Gottlieb, general manager of the Gigi company, was the only other person there, and even he went grudgingly:

“I had to get up at six in the morning to make the boat and I’d been working most of the night. I was bleary-eyed. I had a splitting headache, the weather was nasty.... Even Lady Godiva on her horse would have made a negative impression on me. Yet when I saw this girl standing on the dock, tired out from her trip, wearing only a plain two-piece suit, I said to myself, ‘Ye gods, this is Garbo, this is Bergman!’”²

Audrey recalled that “the first thing I saw when I came to America was the Statue of Liberty. The second—Richard Avedon.” She was stretching the facts, but only by a little. Gottlieb took her straight from the dock to a photo studio where, “before I knew it, I was in front of Avedon’s cameras, lights flashing, music going, Richard snapping away a mile a minute, darting from one angle to the other like a hummingbird, everywhere at once, weaving his spell.”³ Avedon was then working for Bazaar, which wanted first crack at any new and noteworthy face.

From Avedon, she was taken to modest accommodations ($125 a week) at the Blackstone Hotel on East Fifty-eighth Street and given just enough time to check in and change clothes before being whisked off to a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, where she cheered happily in complete ignorance of what was going on.⁴

She got a restrained reception the next day in Gilbert Miller’s lavish Rockefeller Center suite, where the producer was not pleased to find her appearance changed from London.

She had gained fifteen pounds on the ship and when Miller saw her, “He was appalled,” said Anita Loos. “He had engaged a sprite who had suddenly turned into a dumpling. Gilbert, as a gourmand, couldn’t believe that his Gigi could ever get down to weight. Rehearsals began, with Gilbert regarding his ingenue’s weight with a skeptical eye. But Mortie [Gottlieb] put her on a diet of steak tartare at Dinty Moore’s, next door to our Forty-sixth Street theater. Her pounds slowly began to melt.”⁵

Not so slowly, in fact. She shed all fifteen pounds in two weeks, and was soon looking emaciated. Miller now wanted the pendulum to swing back, and called in his wife Kitty for help: “I want you to come over and watch a rehearsal with little Audrey,” he told her. “She seems to conk out in the afternoon.” Kitty went, watched and then took her by the hand, saying, “You’re going to have a good square meal and don’t let me hear any of this dieting nonsense! How about a fat, juicy steak?”⁶

Audrey never tried—or needed—to lose weight again.

Miller had his thin Gigi back, but still no director. He wanted Raymond Rouleau, a forty-seven-year-old Belgian who had recently staged the successful French version of A Streetcar Named Desire-but who spoke no English. Loos volunteered a solution: If Miller could persuade Rouleau to come to America, she would facilitate by translating her adaptation into French. Loos, Hepburn, Cathleen Nesbitt and most of the rest of the Gigi cast were fluent in French. Rouleau agreed and was soon in New York.

As dramatized by Anita Loos—in both languages—Gigi is a two-act play set in the Paris of 1900. Gilberte—Gigi for short—is the gawky adolescent daughter of a mediocre soprano at the Opera Comique. They come from a long line of grandes cocottes, in whose footsteps Gigi is expected to follow. Luck has provided them with a new and fabulously wealthy young man-about-town to whom Gigi’s grandmother Madame Alvarez (Josephine Brown), and Aunt Alicia (Cathleen Nesbitt) are the “consultant bawds.”⁷ But high-spirited Gigi is more interested in her schoolwork, despite the relentless efforts of her grandma and aunt to interest her in the lucrative tricks of the cocotte trade:

MME. ALVAREZ: You see, my Gigi, lessons can give a girl ideas of a career. And a career is the ruination of any woman.... How often must I tell you to keep your knees together when you’re sitting on a stool? ...

GIGI: But I’ve got my drawers on, Grandma.

MME. ALVAREZ: Drawers are one thing, and decency is another. It’s all in the point of view....

GIGI: ... With my skirts so short I always have to remember to bend my knees in the shape of a Z, on account of my you-know-what.

MME. ALVAREZ: (shocked to the heart) Gigi! Where did you ever hear such language? ...

GIGI: But what do you call it, then?

MME. ALVAREZ: (a pause) Nothing! It has no name.... Can’t you keep your legs together? When you stand like that, the river Seine could flow between them....

GIGI: (studies a gem) Mmmmmm—a—topaz!

ALICIA: A topaz! A topaz, among my jewels!

GIGI: I’m sorry, Aunty ...

ALICIA: It’s a jonquil diamond, you little barbarian. (holds ring closer to Gigi) Study it closely for color, or you’ll wind up your career with topazes.... You must learn never to accept a second-rate jewel, even from a king. [Men] are not as intelligent as we are. So it’s only good manners to play the fool for them.⁸

All the “arrangements” are explained to her, but at the moment of truth, Gigi balks. The moral: It pays to say no.

The role wasn’t simple. A subtle sophistication was required to portray innocence, and Hepburn lacked it. She tended to scamper about frantically, either shout or whisper her lines, and exhaust rather than pace herself. “She didn’t have much idea of phrasing,” said Nesbitt. “She had no idea how to project, and she would come bounding onto the stage like a gazelle.”⁹

After five days of rehearsals, said Gottlieb, “Miller fired her. By the next morning, he realized it was too late to replace her, so he gave her another chance, and then he fired her again a few days later. This went on up to opening night. Poor Audrey was on the verge of a nervous collapse. They were working her eighteen hours a day, sneaking into the theater at night because Gilbert didn’t want to pay the union technicians overtime.”^10o

Years later, in a letter to biographer Charles Higham, Raymond Rouleau’s widow attributed the problem to extracurricular activities, and the solution to her husband:

She was acting extremely badly, totally failing to understand the meaning of the text, going out late at night and arriving very tired at the theater in the mornings. [Raymond] on the eighth day took Audrey aside and told her quite firmly that she must improve, or else. She must work with more dedication, obtain enough sleep, eat properly, devote herself to the text and, in a word, become properly professional, or he would decline all responsibility for her future.... He was very severe with her....

From that moment, she progressed steadily and became better and better every day, using every bit of advice Raymond had given her, as though he had been in charge of a childbirth.... When Raymond was inspired by an artist, he became a magician. ¹¹

Perhaps so—but Rouleau had some crucial assistance from Cathleen Nesbitt, who was once again enlisted by Miller. The veteran Nesbitt, who first played New York in works by Shaw and Yeats in 1911, would celebrate her sixty-third birthday on Gigi’s opening night. She agreed to take Audrey to her country place on weekends for additional coaching on vocal projection, among other things. Progress was rocky. Even with rehearsal audiences, Audrey kept pushing too hard. “I didn’t get my laugh,” she would lament after a scene. “What did I do wrong?” But Nesbitt had confidence because “she had that rare thing—audience authority, the thing that makes everybody look at you when you are on stage.”¹²

Anticipation was heightened by an extraordinary amount of pre-opening publicity and the “vibration” that something theatrically important was in the works. New York World Telegram and Sun interviewer Norton Mockridge went so far as to predict that “within a few weeks, or months at most, Miss Hepburn’s elfin features and gamine hair-do will be known and acclaimed throughout the country. Her hair, snipped short and scraggly, is virtually a mess. But most people, who see it for the first time, sigh and say something like: ‘How breathlessly enchanting.’”

Mockridge further observed, during his luncheon meeting with her, that she “is always hungry. And after being starved for years for a taste of fresh meat, she eats almost nothing else over here. ‘Look,’ she’ll say to a waitress. ‘The tenderloin steak, please, but very rare. You know what I mean? Raw rare. With the blood in it. Dripping. Very rare. Almost raw.’ ... Some of the meat Audrey eats is rare enough to have walked into the restaurant five minutes before.” In between bites, she expressed her own high state of anticipation:

“Right now, I am living only for the opening night of Gigi. It’s my whole life. There is nothing else. I live or die. [The cards] are on the table, and we don’t know if there is an ace among them.”¹³

Previews started November 8, 1951, at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, where Rouleau kept her prisoner for the forty-eight hours before the opening, still trying to cajole the right moves from her.¹⁴ Miller wanted to fire her again, restrained only by the lack of a replacement. He hated her first-night performance, telling Loos after the show that he would either fold it or find another Gigi, but he was persuaded to hold off at least until he saw the morning reviews.

They were raves.

“The acting find of the year,” declared one critic. “She gives a wonderfully buoyant performance which establishes her as an actress of the first rank,” wrote Henry P. Murdoch in the Inquirer. There were more raves in New Haven, where the show had its three final trial runs.

On to New York, where Audrey discovered another young imported actor with the jitters back at the Blackstone. In that amazing Broadway season of 1951—52, no fewer than forty-four new plays and nine new musicals were premiering. One of them was called Nina, starring Gloria Swanson and David Niven and set to open within a week of Gigi, with which it was often confused.

“Audrey and I shook with fear as our opening nights on Broadway grew inexorably nearer,” Niven recalled. “We met when a body crashed down from the eighteenth floor and bounced off Audrey’s windowsill on its way to the ground. Anyway, she rushed into our room and we later discovered that some poor man had committed suicide.”¹⁵

It seemed a fairly bad omen.

“I’m frightened,” she told a reporter, with excessive candor, a few days before the opening. “I have no stage training whatever. Why, others spend their lives at it before they get anywhere.... I’ll have to act by intuition until I learn.”¹⁶

The out-of-town success had not much calmed either the star or the producer. “Everybody still worked on poor Audrey,” Loos remembered. “Cathleen Nesbitt helped ... Gilbert stepped in and hindered. By opening night we were all on tenterhooks.” To make matters worse that November 24 evening, Audrey had acquired a bad cold. Backstage, someone in the cast got a hold of the Fulton’s Gigi Playbill and read aloud: “In the event of an air-raid alarm, remain in your seats and obey the instructions of the management. Signed, Arthur H. Wallander, Director of Civil Defense.” After a glum silence, he deadpanned, “They’ve got to have some way of making people stay for the second act.”

The second act was the problem, all right, and it went none too smoothly. “On the final scene rested the whole reason for the play being a play,” Audrey recalled, “and right at the climax I forgot my lines and everything stopped. A whole speech was missed out. But I managed to pull round and last out until the final curtain.”¹⁷

As she left the stage after her last bow, stage manager Dick Bender told her, “I don’t know how you’re going to get inside your dressing room. It’s full of flowers.”¹⁸ It was also full of celebrities, including Marlene Dietrich and Helen Hayes (for whom the Fulton Theatre would later be renamed), many comparing her with Maude Adams and suggesting she was the new Peter Pan. But as always, everything hinged on “The Seven Butchers of Broadway”—Anita Loos’s term of endearment for the all-powerful newspaper critics. In a split decision, the majority of them gave low marks to the play but kudos to Audrey.

“The delightful Miss Hepburn obviously is not an experienced actress,” said Richard Watts, Jr., in the Post. “But her quality is so winning and so right that she is the success of the evening. [She] is as fresh and frisky as a puppy out of a tub. She brings a candid innocence and a tomboy intelligence to a part that might have gone sticky.”

Walter Kerr, writing for both the Herald-Tribune and Commonweal, doled out the brickbats first. Anita Loos, in his opinion, “has no style at all. She follows the Colette outline patiently and perfunctorily.” Director Rouleau “is a belligerent stylist” who “comes close to dashing the play’s brains out.” But Audrey Hepburn was “a young actress of great charm ... who pulls the whole thing into focus.... Instead of shifting styles with her colleagues, she manages to wrap them all into a simple, coherent, and delectable pattern of her own, and this is a major achievement for a fledgling performer.”¹⁹

In The New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs confessed that “I, for one, was quite disappointed when ... a purer kind of love intruded itself into the proceedings and the young couple decided to get married. [But] Audrey Hepburn, who has never acted in New York before, is nearly perfect as Gigi.”²⁰

Newsweek’s dry conclusion was that “Nothing, really, happens on the stage of the Fulton Theatre except a gradual rapprochement between Michael Evans and Audrey Hepburn (no relation to Katharine).”²¹

The Theatre Arts critic, however, was especially rough on Audrey: “[Rouleau] has propelled her into such a jumping over furniture and such a breathless sprinting about the premises as would better suit a trained dog act. The girl’s personal acting qualifications leave me much in doubt.... She acts innocence in accordance with the script’s demands, but she never for a moment is successful in suggesting it.”²²

A private pan came from Noel Coward to his diary: “Went to Gigi—an orgy of overacting.... Audrey Hepburn inexperienced and rather too noisy, and the whole thing badly directed.”²³ He was more diplomatic to her face. “Noel Coward came backstage to tell me something he found wrong with my performance,” she said, “and I was terribly flattered.”²⁴

By and large, however, the collective assessment concurred with the December 10 Life headline, “Audrey Is a Hit”: “The only trouble was that the authors and producer had set their sights too low. They had once thought of making Gigi a musical but were convinced that they would never find anyone who could sing and dance and also act the difficult role. It happens that Audrey can dance and sing as well as act. Broadway hopes to see her sooner or later in a triple-threat role in the style of Gertrude Lawrence.”²⁵

Funny they should mention that. When Gigi was still in its embryonic stage, composer-lyricist Frank Loesser (Where’s Charley?, Guys and Dolls) had asked Gilbert Miller to consider coproducing it as a musical. Miller rejected the idea instantly, and Lerner and Loewe would later prove him wrong. Now, several performances into the run, Lawrence herself came backstage after the show to tell Audrey that if her own life were ever filmed, she would want Hepburn in the role.^26p

Hepburn was surprised and truly modest about her success and generous as always in dispensing the credit for it.

“I find out more about the part all the time,” she told a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. “Dick Bender is the person I rely on completely. He’s our stage manager, a wonderful person. I have to have a master I can go to and ask if my sums are correct. He keeps close watch on the show, since the director isn’t around anymore and he’ll say, ‘This was good,’ or ‘You’re starting to miss out there.’ He’ll say, ‘It’s strange, but for two nights you didn’t do this, and it was so attractive before, but you’re not doing it now.’”²⁷

But she was not too humble to savor the day they moved her name from below to above the title—in hghts—on the Fulton’s marquee. Photographers snapped away as Miller held the ladder while Audrey climbed and lifted up the “A.” (The other twelve letters were already in place.) Yet she gave the news-men only the most self-deprecating little quote when she climbed down: “Oh dear, and I’ve still got to learn how to act.”²⁸

Little known, in the wake of her “triumph,” is that she not only continued coaching with Nesbitt but now renewed her dance instruction—at the Tarassova School of Ballet on West Fifty-fourth Street. It was run by Mme. Olga Tarassova and her eccentric husband, Vladimir Bell, whom Audrey knew three years earlier when Tarassova was located in Amsterdam.²⁹ In Saturday Review, Audrey sang the virtues and importance of dance to an actor:

[Dancers] do a lot of technical things out of good habit. When we relax we never get sloppy. In my case that’s because when my ballet teacher, Madame Rambert, would catch us folding our arms or slouching our shoulders she’d give us a good rap across the knuckles with a stick.... Dancers learn to feel when their posture is not graceful....

Our director, Raymond Rouleau, used to be very amused at the way I stood with my toes pointing out and my legs stiff whenever I’d lean down to pick something up. [She jumps up and demonstrates the bending action.] I wasn’t conscious of doing it. It just came automatically.

I’m halfway between a dancer and an actress. I’ve got to learn. Ballet is the most completely exhausting thing I have ever done. But if I hadn’t been used to pushing myself that hard, I could never have managed the tremendous amount of work necessary to learn in three weeks how to play a leading role in my first real acting job.³⁰

She was smart enough to know it and honest enough to say it. Though she was frequently mentioned as a contender for the Best Actress Tony Award, it was won by Julie Harris for I Am a Camera. Audrey was not disappointed.

Neither was Colette. Across the ocean, she congratulated herself and sent her discovery an autographed photo inscribed, For Audrey Hepburn, a treasure which I found on the sands.³¹ Ah, how Colette adored her. But there is no confirmation of the report that, when Colette died three years later, she left her personal jewels to Audrey. She didn’t adore her quite that much.

ACROSS THE same ocean, James Hanson also adored Audrey and was also congratulating himself. During his three-day surprise visit to New York for the Gigi premiere, she had accepted his diamond ring and they had formalized their engagement.

“I didn’t know he was coming over,” said Audrey to a nosy reporter. “I left the theater a few hours before the opening performance to get into a car and there he was. Actually, we have been informally engaged for some time. There is nothing definite about a wedding date as yet.”³²

Both restrained and strained, the reply suggests she might not have appreciated the unexpected distraction of her fiancé just before the most important and frightening night of her professional life. But she confirmed the marriage, if not the date, and an announcement appeared almost immediately in The London Times’ “Forthcoming Marriages” on December 4, 1951:

Mr. J. E. Hanson and Miss A. Hepburn: The engagement is announced between James, son of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanson, of Norwood Grange, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and Audrey Hepburn, daughter of Baroness Ella van Heemstra, of 65, South Audley Street, London, W.1.

Subsequent updates said the wedding was scheduled for spring 1952, between the end of the Gigi run and the start of Roman Holiday shooting in Italy. Bridesmaids names were given out, and it was suggested that, after Roman Holiday, Mr. and Mrs. Hanson would take up residence in Huddersfield. That came as a shock to Ella—but was never really the couple’s intention. They were too cosmopolitan by then, and Hanson was more often in his New York or Toronto office than in Britain.

“Our engagement and affair had mainly to do with New York,” Hanson recalls. “I worked there and had a flat in New York and was able to spend a lot of time with her when she was in Gigi.

“The great thing about Audrey was her international ability. She spoke many different languages. Once I went with her to see my parents, who had an apartment in the Ritz Tower at Fifty-seventh and Park when they were in America. We were going up in the lift with two women. You know how older women sometimes look down their nose at a young beauty? Well, they were talking in Dutch about her, assuming that nobody else in the world, let alone in the elevator, would speak Dutch. Audrey looked at me and gave me a wink. We didn’t say a word to each other, but just before we got out, she rattled a stream of Dutch at me as if I was just as much a native speaker as she. They had been talking about her in a rather bitchy way, and they were in shock as we got out. She was very amusing and very good at that sort of thing.”³³

Hanson’s own internationalism was useful to Audrey. He introduced her to his lawyer Abraham Bienstock in New York, who helped improve upon her contract arrangements. He suggested that she avoid making films in England or the United States, if possible, in favor of other countries where the tax rates weren’t nearly so high. When Audrey called him in Canada, much perplexed about the need to convert and merge her ABC option with the option Paramount had on her, Hanson rang up his friend Lew Wasserman in Beverly Hills and arranged to organize it along beneficial lines. From then on—long before she became one of his major clients—Wasserman took a personal interest in her.

“The only advice I was able to give her was financial,” says Hanson. “It was just a natural thing that, with my knowledge, I could do. By knowing the people that I did here and in the U.S., I was able to make personal contact for her with them. That possibly helped to advance her career in a very small way.”

Was there a plan for him to become her business manager?

“That was never the thought. Obviously, if you marry a successful businessman, it might come up. But I was careful not to interfere. I only planned to run my own career.”³⁴

All was well, in Hanson’s view, but a certain “if and when” hesitation was detectable in Audrey. “When I marry James, I want to give up at least a year to just being a wife to him,” she told her journalist friend Radie Harris. “James is being wonderfully understanding about it. He knows it would be impossible for me to give up my career completely. I just can’t. I’ve worked too long to achieve something. And so many people have helped me along the way, I don’t want to let them down.”³⁵

An ominous report said she had removed the framed picture of Hanson from her dressing-table at the Fulton. Asked why, she replied, “So many people whom I hardly know asked me what was his name and when were we going to be married, that I simply had to put the picture into a drawer. My private life is my own.”³⁶

Her professional life was not. Paramount was champing at the bit to get started on Roman Holiday and had given Miller a $50,000 incentive to release her from Gigi at the end of May, though she was still committed to do the road-show tour that fall. Thus on May 31—after a short but wildly successful run of 217 performances—Gigi closed in New York.

Shortly before, while Gigi was still on the boards, Hollywood costume czarina Edith Head met with Audrey for a preliminary discussion of her Roman Holiday wardrobe, and a warm friendship between them began. Head later told Charles Higham:

“She would laugh and curl up on the floor (which she always preferred to a chair) and tuck her legs under her like an adorable, naive, utterly innocent schoolgirl, and then she would say, with a sweetness that cut like a knife to the heart of the problem, ‘I don’t think the princess [in Roman Holiday] would be quite so shrewd, Edith, darling, as to use that particular décolletage!’ and I would think, ‘Oh, my God, if she doesn’t get to the top I’ll eat Hedda Hopper’s hats.’”

Her personality dazzled or melted everyone. She could just as easily conduct a conversation with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as with visiting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. A friend summed it up: “It broke my heart. Just the look of that girl. It’s one of those magic things.”³⁷

SOMETHING WAS happening on a grander scale, and “the look of that girl” was making it happen. It had to do with the changing standards of beauty and with film and fashion overall, but perhaps most with the era itself.

“I remember the fifties as a time of renewal and of regained security,” Audrey would later write. “There was a rebirth of opportunity, vitality and enthusiasm ... a return to laughter and gaiety—the world was functioning again. Above all there was a wonderful quality of hope, born from relief and gratitude for those greatest of all luxuries—freedom and peace.”³⁸

It was this brave new world that Audrey was somehow coming to epitomize, and in which she would set the pace. Nobody looked like her before the war, Cecil Beaton had written in Vogue, but now there were “thousands of imitations [and] the woods are full of emaciated young ladies with rat-nibbled hair and moon-pale faces.”³⁹ When she was young, Audrey said later, “I wanted to be a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. I didn’t do either.”⁴⁰

Instead of some “cross,” Hepburn and her look were original. To embryonic feminist Molly Haskell, she was “alert, full of the ardor of an explorer, with nothing of the lassitude or languor of such voluptuous and earthbound sex goddesses as Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren or ... the overeager Monroe. The qualities that made her more desirable to us were precisely those that made her less desirable to masses of red-blooded American men.”⁴¹

More about those physical qualities and the fashion phenomenon they inspired later. For now, suffice to say that she was unique among her contemporaries in refusing to pose for cheesecake photos, and that her private view was both unusual and refreshingly simple. “I think sex is overrated,” she said.⁴²

ROMAN HOLIDAY would be shot entirely “around” Audrey. Filming was to begin in Italy in June 1952, after Gigi closed in New York. She and Hanson were to be married in the interlude, but as it turned out, there was no interlude, and the wedding had to be postponed. Paramount’s schedule was so tight that she was required to go straight from the closing night of Gigi to Rome.

The film she was about to make was Cinderella in reverse. Some say it derived from an old Ferenc Molnar story. Others insist it was inspired by a telephoto-lens shot of Princess Margaret in a swimsuit on Capri. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, working under the pseudonym of “John Dighton,” with Ian McLellan Hunter.

Roman Holiday was a bit reminiscent of Capra’s It Happened One Night, with a big difference in tone: It was no screwball comedy of the thirties, but a sentimental escape of the fifties, unlike such other “realistic” new films as A Place in the Sun.⁴³ Director William Wyler’s brilliant credits included Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives. Paramount had approved his request to make it on location for self-serving reasons : It could be financed with “frozen” lira earned in (but not removable from) Italy. For economy’s sake, Wyler agreed to shoot Roman Holiday in black and white, “and by the time I’d realized my error it was too late to get enough color stock over to Italy,” he said.⁴⁴

“He was the classiest filmmaker that ever lived,” says his friend Billy Wilder, who was determined not to cry during Best Years of Our Lives but did so throughout. “And I’m not a pushover. I laugh at Hamlet. There was a finesse in that guy that you would never expect, sitting across from him at a card table.”^q

With Roman Holiday, Wyler first had to finesse Gregory Peck, a major star at thirty-six, thanks to his performances in The Keys of the Kingdom (1945), The Yearling (1946) and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)-all of which had earned him Oscar nominations.

“When he told me that an unknown girl, a little dancer from London, was going to play the princess, I said, ‘Well, Willy, no one has better judgment than you, but have you seen her on film?’” Peck recalls. “He said, ‘Let me show you something.’”⁴⁵

Wyler showed Audrey’s screen test to Peck, who had read the Roman Holiday script and realized now, more than ever, that “it was not going to be about me, it was about the princess.” On that basis, he rejected it. But Wyler knew just what button to push. “You surprise me, Greg,” he said. “If you didn’t like the story, okay, but because somebody’s part is a little better than yours, that’s no reason to turn down a film. I didn’t think you were the kind of actor who measures the size of the roles.“⁴⁶

Peck capitulated. Moreover, he phoned his agent George Chasin to say, “The real star of this picture is Audrey Hepburn. [Tell] the studio I want Audrey Hepburn to be billed on the same line.”⁴⁷ It was an unusually generous gesture, and the Paramount executives were initially much opposed. But soon enough, says Peck, “We all knew that this was going to be an important star and we began to talk off-camera about the chance that she might win an Academy Award in her first film.”⁴⁸

Audrey knew no such thing. “Willie was a great, famous director when I met him,” she said, “but I didn’t really know much about directors [and I was] not really aware of his importance.”⁴⁹

Neither Hepburn nor Wyler was aware of the hazards of filming in Rome: The noise was incessant, the summer heat was intense, and the logistics of clearing the crowded streets for shooting were a nightmare. Bribes were paid all around but provided no insurance against political violence: Fascists and Communists battled in the streets, as if the Christian Democrats’ election victory in May had never happened. At one point, five bundles of explosives were discovered under a bridge over the Tiber River, where filming was about to take place.

Wyler, undaunted, adhered to his perfectionist ways and made countless takes of each scene—modified only by the hordes of Roman gawkers who were always on hand, as Gregory Peck recalled:

One of the first scenes we shot was at the Piazza di Spagna.... There were at least 10,000 people assembled at the foot of the Spanish Steps and in the street. The police couldn’t stop them from whistling and heckling. For Audrey and me, it was like acting in a huge amphitheater before a packed house of rowdies. I asked her if she didn’t find it very intimidating. “No, not at all ...” She took it as calmly and serenely as a real princess would have....

Italians are all born film actors [and] were quite hands-on about the whole thing.... Wyler would say, “Good, that’s it, print it.” They might say, “No, no, no, let’s have another one.” Or Wyler would say, “Let’s do it again,” and they’d say, “No, no, molto bene!”—they wanted to print that one. And Wyler usually followed their advice.⁵⁰

The single most famous scene in Roman Holiday is the one in which Peck and Hepburn dare each other to stick a hand inside the mouth of an ancient Roman cave dragon: To get a spontaneous reaction, Peck resorted to an old vaudeville trick—drawing his hand up into his cuff so that it looked severed. Unforewarned, Audrey reacted perfectly, with a shriek. “It was the only scene Wyler ever did in one take,” she said.⁵¹

Peck recalls “a girl who was good at everything except shedding tears—wacky and funny, a very lovable girl who was always making faces and doing backflips and clowning around. But when it came to a poignant scene, she couldn’t find that within herself; she just couldn’t find the right kind of emotion.” ⁵²

He was referring to one of the most touching final scenes in which the princess must leave the journalist and return to royal imprisonment.

“I don’t know how to say goodbye,” she says. “I can’t think of any words.”

“Don’t try,” he replies, as the music swells.

It seemed straightforward, but “I had no idea how to come by those tears,” Audrey recalled. “The night was getting longer and longer, and Willy was waiting. Out of the blue, he came over and gave me hell. ‘We can’t stay here all night. Can’t you cry, for God’s sake?’ He’d never spoken to me like that, ever, during the picture. He’d been so nice and gentle. I broke into such sobs and he shot the scene and that was it. Afterwards he said, ‘I’m sorry, but I had to get you to do it somehow.’”⁵³

Years later, when a BBC interviewer asked how much she had learned from Wyler, Audrey replied, “I’d say almost everything. His attitude was that only simplicity and the truth count. It has to come from the inside. You can’t fake it. That is something I long remembered.”

Then and thereafter, Audrey did not watch the rushes, but Wyler did: “She was every eager young girl who has ever come to Rome for the first time and I, crusty veteran that I was, felt tears in my eyes watching her. Audrey was the spirit of youth—and I knew that very soon the entire world would fall in love with her, as all of us on the picture did.”⁵⁴

Gregory Peck was first among them. “It was my good luck,” he said, “during that wonderful summer in Rome, to be the first of her screen fellows, to hold out my hand, and help her keep her balance as she did her spins and pirouettes. Those months [were] probably the happiest experience I ever had making movies.”⁵⁵

Peck, her screen lover, was friendly with James Hanson, her offscreen lover, who was present and accounted for on the Roman Holiday set. “I was able to spend time with her in the flat that the company found for her and her mother on the Via Boncompagni,” says Hanson. “They would do shots of Audrey, and Greg would be in a trailer waiting to do his stuff. He and I would go into the Caffé Greco on the Via Condotti and play gin rummy for hours. I enjoyed being there, encouraging her and watching her. We were going to be married as soon as Roman Holiday was finished. All the plans were made.”⁵⁶

But once again the best-laid plans went awry. When Roman Holiday filming ended in September 1952, there was not even a hiatus let alone a wedding for Audrey, who had to go directly into the American road tour of Gigi. She returned to the United States, opened at the Nixon Theater in Pittsburgh on October 13, 1952, and continued for eight months, through Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Washington and Los Angeles. She was exhausted long before the tour was over and, according to Cathleen Nesbitt, under heavy pressure from her mother to break off the engagement. Midway during the tour, she announced it was over.

“When I couldn’t find time to attend to the furnishing of our London flat, I suddenly knew I’d make a pretty bad wife,” she told Anita Loos. “I would forever have to be studying parts, fitting costumes and giving interviews. And what a humiliating spot to put a husband in ... making him stand by, holding my coat, while I signed autographs for the bobbie soxers!”⁵⁷

Pestered endlessly by the media, she gave variations on that theme—some more diplomatic than others:

“I felt it would be unfair to James to marry him when I was also in love with my work.”

“It was a mutual decision and a very personal matter about which I have nothing more to say.”⁵⁸

“The time will come when I can afford the luxury of a husband. Just now, I haven’t got the time.”

“When I get married, I want to be really married.”⁵⁹

Zsa Zsa Gabor says Ella wasn’t the only one pressuring Audrey to get unengaged : “When she got the part in Roman Holiday, the studio advised her not to get married.”⁶⁰ Indeed, Paramount and most film companies encouraged “romances” but generally opposed star marriages (especially to non-stars) in the belief that millions of lovestruck fans would be disappointed thereby.

Forty years later, Lord Hanson reflects on the breakup in his candid, magnanimous way:

[After Roman Holiday], she came to me and said, “I really don’t think I want to get married at this time. I hate to do this to you. I love your family....” She made her decision as much based on what she felt would be best for me as what would be best for her. I said, “Fine, okay.” If somebody makes a decision they think is best for them, I say one of two things: “Think it over,” or else, “I agree with you—do what’s best for you.” There was disappointment, yes. But there was no rift or rupture, just a natural decision made by both sides.

So I went my way and started to build up businesses, while she went her way and continued to build up her career. Had she married me, Audrey would have continued with her career. No doubt about it. I believed in that. There was never any “either/or” [marriage/career] problem. She was somebody whose star and whose destiny had been set by her talent. It would have been pointless to try to persuade her to do anything else.... I loved Audrey very much. I’ve not loved very many women in my life in that way. Yet I have no regrets whatsoever about her decision.⁶¹

If anyone, Audrey was the one with regrets. The amicable nature of their split was proven by the fact that they continued to see each other. In December, Hanson went to visit and spend Christmas with her in Chicago:

“I got the impression Audrey had reflected upon it and wanted to take it up again that Christmas. But I believed she had made the right decision and that it wouldn’t be right to backtrack on it—not for any reasons of spite. You couldn’t be spiteful about Audrey. She was just too delightful. She tried to make a reconciliation but by that time, I felt I could not go back. We spent a happy Christmas together in Chicago, after which we parted as good friends.”^62r

The subject of her romantic life remained a hot topic for many months, even after the Gigi road show came to a close, on May 16, 1953, in San Francisco. When no-nonsense columnist Dorothy Kilgallen asked her if she had always had “beaus buzzing around her,” Audrey replied, “Well, I’ll say this. I’ve never wanted for one—not since I was seventeen, anyway.”⁶³

They came in all shapes, sizes and ages. The day after she accepted a dinner invitation from sixty-two-year-old Groucho Marx, the newspapers wasted no time in speculating on their betrothal.

“Nonsense,” replied Groucho. “I don’t want to be ungallant, but Audrey’s too old and wrinkled for me.”

UNTIL NOW, nobody but the studio had seen Roman Holiday. When it finally opened, in August 1953, audiences and critics alike loved it. Mostly it was the doe-eyed little star they loved. In the opening sight gag, the princess’s shoes are killing her during a royal reception; she kicks one of them off beneath her floor-length gown and then can’t find it.

Audrey’s performance captivated throughout. Irate about being a royal prisoner, the princess throws a tantrum and is given a tranquilizer—but sneaks out of the palace before it takes effect. Journalist Gregory Peck finds her snoozing in a public square and promises his editor a scoop. Peck and the film are aided by the beautiful cinematography of Franz Planer and the romantic background music of Georges Auric.^s

But most of all, they were aided by the face and mesmerizing voice of Audrey Hepburn—a soft mezzo that turned soprano in excitement. And everyone was caught off-guard by the film’s conclusion—perhaps the first romantic comedy with an unhappy ending. Molly Haskell called it a “heartbreaking moment of renunciation.”⁶⁴

Roman Holiday turned out to be strangely relevant to the moment. Nineteen fifty-three was a busy year for English royalty: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the “commoner” romance of her sister, Princess Margaret, had both received saturation news coverage. Paramount denied any connection but slyly exploited the similarities between Princess Anne’s love for a reporter in the film and Princess Margaret’s involvement with Captain Peter Townsend in real life. In publicity terms, there could have been no more fortuitous a coincidence.

The picture earned back a third of its production costs in Japan alone (where it is the no. I favorite foreign film of all time, ahead of Gone With the Wind). There and in Europe and America, Audrey and her “look” became the rage.

The trade papers were talking of a great new star, but the tabloids were talking scandal. The New York Mirror said Peck’s wife Greta was “giving him the bounce because of his affection for the sylph-like nymph, a willowy boyish miss” named Hepburn.⁶⁵ Audrey bristled: “I saw her coming out of Romanoff’s the other day and she asked me to spend next Sunday swimming in the pool at her home. Does that sound like I’m a home-breaker?”⁶⁶

There was, in fact, never any romance between Hepburn and Peck, whose marriage was dissolving before he and Audrey ever met. He would soon be divorced and, a year later, marry French journalist Veronique Passani, with whom he has remained.

But in truth, few cared about Gregory Peck these days. They cared about Audrey Hepburn. Young Senator John F. Kennedy was among many declaring Roman Holiday to be his favorite film and Hepburn his favorite actress. September 7, 1953, found her on the cover of Time magazine—never before occupied by an unknown star of a newly released film. Peck was temporarily left in the dust, but never resented it. Three decades later, returning from a trip to China, he gave her a grand cross-cultural tribute:

“When we climbed out of the airplane [in Beijing], to my amazement I saw about two hundred little Chinese Audrey Hepburns waiting at the airport. Roman Holiday was playing in China for the first time—thirty years after we made it—and attracting enormous crowds. Everywhere we went we saw little Audrey Hepburns with the bangs and the long skirts.”⁶⁷

“SHE WAS A one-man woman, very loving,” says Lord James Hanson. “Once she gave up one man, it was then the next man. She didn’t play the field.”⁶⁸ To the disappointment of the tabloids, the “next man” was not Gregory Peck—but he was a close friend of Peck’s. It was party time in London, where Audrey returned in July 1953 for the British opening of Roman Holiday. One of those fêtes was hosted by her mother, at Ella’s South Audley Street flat, where Cecil Beaton met Audrey for the first time and that night recorded in his diary:

“[She has] a huge mouth, flat Mongolian features, heavily painted eyes, a coconut coiffure, long nails without varnish, a wonderfully lithe figure, and a long neck.... She appears to take her wholesale adulation with a pinch of salt, and gratitude rather than puffed-up pride.... Without any preliminaries, she cuts through to a basic understanding that makes people friends.” Beaton added that the other guests included American actor Mel Ferrer—“a charming, gangling man, [who] described A.H. to me as ‘the biggest thing to come down the turnpike.”’⁶⁹

Ferrer’s invitation had come through Gregory Peck, who was in London making Night People and had hosted his own party for Audrey in his Grosvenor Square flat. Ferrer was likewise in London at the moment, shooting MGM’s Knights of the Round Table at Pinewood Studios.^t Mel was the twice-divorced father of four by then. But Peck wanted him to meet Audrey and gave him her phone number at Ella’s.

“She answered herself and said, ‘This is Audrey,’” Ferrer remembers. “When I told her Greg had suggested I call, she answered very cheerily, ‘Oh, I loved you in Lili!”’⁷⁰ That lovely musical, released just a few months before Roman Holiday, starred Ferrer as a lame carnival puppeteer and Leslie Caron as the orphan girl with whom he falls in love.

“My first impression of Audrey when we finally saw each other was how simple and direct she was,” says Ferrer today. “She was gentle, delicate and sensitive. But full of life and sparkle.“⁷¹ The chemistry between them was instant.

Nearly six-foot-three in height, Mel was “gangly” indeed, as well as handsome, and his prospects for serious leading-man status and film stardom were on the rise. But he was not “just” an actor. He was also a stage and film director, producer and cofounder of the pioneering La Jolla Playhouse. Some thought of him—and he perhaps thought of himself—as the next Orson Welles.

Actor James Coburn first knew Ferrer at La Jolla, where Coburn and many other prominent young actors got their Actors Equity cards. A decade later, during a break on the set of Charade, Coburn and Audrey had an intimate discussion that was rare for both of them.

“She told me about first meeting and falling in love with Mel,” Coburn recalls, “and I asked, ‘What was the attraction?’ She said, ‘The way he looked me in the eyes—the way he just penetrated me with his eyes.’ That was the thing that really got her, she said.”⁷²

MELCHOR GASTON FERRER was born a dozen years before Audrey Hepburn, in Elberon, New Jersey, on August 25, 1917, and spent most of his early life in New York City. His father, Dr. José Ferrer, a prominent Cuban-Spanish surgeon at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, died when Mel was four. His mother was Irene O’Donohue, whose family was socially important in Manhattan and Newport.

“She was a Gibson-girl type, spoilt, arrogant, opinionated and tactless,” says Joseph J. O‘Donohue IV, who was her grandnephew and godson. The cousins were great friends, and when Mel once ran away from home, it was to Joe’s big summer home near Newport that he fled. “He stayed about a week before returning to the fold,” O’Donohue recalls. “In those days Mel wrote very agreeable poetry, surreptitiously, which he let me read.”⁷³

Upon graduation from Canterbury Preparatory School in 1935, Mel entered Princeton, where he immersed himself in theater and, in his sophomore year, won an award for best original play. In the summers, he stage-managed at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, and played the lead in Our Town there. When a Princeton friend tried to convince Mrs. Ferrer of her son’s talent, she replied haughtily that writing and theater were out of the question “for one of ^Mel’s breeding.”⁷⁴

After two years, Mel left Princeton and spent a year in Taxco, Mexico, struggling to write a novel but ending up instead with a successful children’s book, Tito’s Hats, published by Doubleday Doran, which sold out its edition of 20,000. Thus encouraged, he took a job at Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the hope of making it as a professional writer.

“I drove a bookwagon all over New England for the first few months and then got promoted to editing,” Ferrer recalls. While there, he was fascinated by a collection of New England graveyard epitaphs that had been assembled by Robert E. Pike. He took all the photos and chalked all the inscriptions and epitaphs himself, compiling them—uncredited—for the whimsical Stephen Daye book, Granite Laughter and Marble Tears, in 1938.

The previous year, he had married Frances Pilchard, an artist-sculptress he met at Princeton. But it was soon clear that he couldn’t support a family as an editor. At that late date in the Depression, the theater was hardly a more secure occupation—but it was the one he’d always wanted and would now pursue in earnest. As a result, “his money was cut off and he had a hard time of it,” says Joseph O’Donohue, who had provided crucial assistance by introducing him to actor Clifton Webb.

“When Fran and I lost our first child,” Mel recalls, “I took a long weekend off, went to New York and landed in a Shubert musical You’ll Never Know with music by Cole Porter,” starring Webb and Libby Holman. It was his first Broadway job—and first ever as a hoofer. Webb advised him to acquire “the rudiments of the dance before opening night,” says Ferrer, and taught him “a few basic steps as a tap dancer so I could keep the job.”⁷⁵

One critic called Mel “the only Social Registerite chorus boy,” which did not amuse his mother. “Mrs. Ferrer removed Mel’s listing in the S.R.,” says O’Donohue, who always respected him for not giving a hoot. “I was fond of Mel and still am.”⁷⁶

The Porter show brought more dance work in the Marc Connelly musical, Everywhere I Roam (1938). Next came Mel’s acting debut in Cue for Passion (1940) with Otto Preminger, recently returned to New York as an actor—in some disgrace—from his rocky first stint as a director in Hollywood. And then came disaster.

“Toward the end of the Cue for Passion run, I contracted polio,” Ferrer recalls. “No doctor—of the many I consulted—diagnosed it correctly, and I lost the use of my right arm and shoulder. Not until two years later, after I had gone into radio (which required only one hand), did I meet the remarkable Sister Kenny. She finally explained that I had been crippled by polio. And she helped me restore the use of my arm and right side.”⁷⁷

His recuperation was slow and painful, but Ferrer was never a man to give up. He had divorced Pilchard, by whom he had a son and a daughter, and married Barbara Tripp, by whom he had another son and daughter. Soon, he would divorce Tripp and remarry Pilchard! During that period of marital confusion, radio work took him to Longview, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas, before he got back to where he wanted to be—New York—in 1943.

There, he was hired by NBC as a producer-director for some of its best radio programs: The Hit Parade, The Durante-Moore Comedy Hour, Mr. District Attorney and Dr. I.Q. He helped create NBC’s first jazz program and won a Peabody Award for The Eternal Light series he directed and produced for the Jewish Theological Seminary. And then came the call of the movies:

“Columbia Pictures approached me with an offer to come to Hollywood, do an apprenticeship as a dialogue director and then graduate to directing. It meant a big salary boost and preparation for what I thought would be my future—television.” He wanted to direct teleplays and felt films would provide good training. Instead, he became hooked forever on film.

One day early on, in Los Angeles, Columbia publicist Herb Sterne asked Mel if he wanted to be introduced to the director he most admired. “That,” says Ferrer, “is how I met D. W Griffith. We had Orange Blossoms with him at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, his habitat. D. W. befriended me and I was lucky enough to sit next to him every Saturday night for the next few months while he screened his oldest and rarest prints for us.”⁷⁸

Asked if it’s true that Orson Welles was his role model in those days, Ferrer replies that he considered Citizen Kane one of the ten best pictures ever made, and still does: “I admired Orson and I laughed at his jokes, which meant we became friends.”

Ferrer’s first shot at directing was a low-budget remake of Gene Stratton Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost (1945) in the Columbia “B” unit. On the last day of Limberlost shooting, he got a call from actor José Ferrer in New York.^u José was directing a stage version of Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, a controversial novel about miscegenation and racial prejudice in the South, and was calling to offer Mel the lead in it. “I informed Joe—loftily—that I was directing my first film and that I intended to keep on that course,” says Ferrer, but he agreed to read the script—and loved it. “Naturally, I flew to New York a few days later and went straight into rehearsal.”

So much for Columbia. Strange Fruit turned out to be a wise career move, as a result of which Mel was offered several new Hollywood contracts. He chose the one from David O. Selznick, obtaining a delay in its starting date long enough for the two Ferrers to switch positions again. “I decided that Joe should become our American Olivier,” says Mel, “and I proposed he do Cyrano de Bergerac.... He said he would but he wanted me to direct, and I’m happy to say that José Ferrer’s Cyrano was the biggest step forward in his career. He became our flag-bearer.”

Back on the West Coast, Selznick gave Mel wide-ranging assignments as an actor, director and producer of screen tests. (No lesser legend than Joseph von Sternberg had shot Mel’s own first screen test for Selznick, and now Mel shot Patricia Neal’s initial test.) Selznick soon loaned him to John Ford as an assistant director on The Fugitive. “Ford was another of my idols,” says Ferrer, and “taught me a great deal.... A gruff, hidden, tortured and inspired director.”

These were Hollywood’s “glory days,” he recalls. By 1947, he, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy McGuire, Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck were all working successfully under Selznick. “But there was one definite void which each of us felt acutely,” Mel felt. “We had all come from the legitimate theatre and [hankered] for an audience. We wanted to start a summer theatre where we could get back ... with audiences, people who would laugh out loud, whom you could hear applaud, whose presence you could feel.”⁷⁹

Gregory Peck, born and raised in La Jolla, made a brief reconnaisance trip there and came back with the report that the high school theater was available, and the local Kiwanis Club would help them build a list of subscribers. A budget was worked out: It would take $15,000 to open the doors for a nine-week season. Ferrer and Peck went to Selznick and left his office with a check for $15,000. Selznick had a few shrewd reasons of his own for bankrolling the effort. His best performers were pining for live stage work in between films. This outlet would keep them happy and might also become a recruiting ground for future film talent.

The La Jolla Playhouse now began an ambitious season of ten shows a summer. Ferrer staged many himself and, in 1948, Norman Lloyd was also hired to direct. The group’s prestige increased steadily with such productions as The Cocktail Party with Patricia Neal, Vincent Price and Estelle Winwood; The Lady’s Not for Burning with Marsha Hunt; I Am a Camera and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ferrer recalls Summer and Smoke (1950) with special fondness: “Dorothy McGuire gave a moving performance and Tennessee came all the way from Florida to see it. He hugged me with tears in his eyes when the curtain came down and told me it was ‘the best production of mah play I ever had.”’

Personally, says Mel, “the biggest romp I had there was our version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Hurd Hatfield and I played opposite Jane Wyatt and Dorothy McGuire. Constance Collier played Lady Bracknell. Hysterical.”⁸⁰ Eventually, he turned over the administrative reins to John Swope, McGuire’s photographer-husband, and a fund was established that led to a new facility for the La Jolla Playhouse, which continues to this day.

“Greg and I ran it for nine years,” Ferrer reflects, “and we never took a cent.”⁸¹

His management of the operation had been brilliant: By 1953, all of David O. Selznick’s initial loan had been repaid—a rare occurrence in Selznick’s professional life.

In those days, says Mel, “David was busy going broke, so all of us under contract were happy to do loan-outs so that he could make a little money.” Howard Hughes now called Selznick looking for a director to do three days of shooting for a new ending of a Preston Sturges film, Vendetta, and Mel got the nod. “It took me two years to execute Howard’s directives,” says Ferrer. “A long three days! During that time, we remade the entire film and Howard negotiated for and bought RKO. I was the first person he signed to a contract. [By that time,] David was bankrupt. He graciously gave me a release, and I went to work for Howard Hughes as a director, producer and midnight chum.”

Ferrer worked daily with his billionaire boss in the reorganization of RKO. When Hughes asked for suggestions for top executive posts, Mel proposed his friends, producer Jerry Wald and screenwriter Norman Krasna: “Once the studio had two such capable people at the helm, Howard promptly sold RKO to General Tire Company and betook himself to the desert and other remote outposts” to concentrate on his aircraft and oil interests.⁸² Mel, too, now departed RKO temporarily for something new and daring—something akin to Strange Fruit a few years before: The offer to make his film-acting debut—as a black man.

Lost Boundaries (1949), based on a Reader’s Digest article by William L. White, was the true story of a light-skinned Negro doctor who passed for white for twenty years in the little town of Keene, New Hampshire. Louis de Rochemont, creator of The March of Time newsreels, had bought the story and would turn it into one of the first important American racial films, starring a number of fine Negro stage performers, including Canada Lee. Ferrer was cast for his indeterminate ethnic swarthiness.

Under Alfred L. Werker’s clear-eyed direction, Boundaries treated its theme bluntly. The blacks in med school trade bleak jokes about their job chances. “If we can’t be doctors, we can always be Pullman car redcaps,” says one. Another recites the ruling verse of the day:

“If you’re white you‘se all right,

If you’re brown you hang around,

If you’re black you stand back. ”

Ferrer’s character, Dr. Scott, is proud of his race and objects to “passing.” But he and his wife have a baby on the way and, desperate for a job, he gives in: “For one year of my life I’m gonna be white.” It stretches into half a lifetime.

Ferrer’s understated portrayal of the hero got glowing reviews, as did the film. “De Rochemont almost lost his home and his career—he had to mortgage his house to do it,” says Mel, “but he was vindicated. It was produced for $250,000, and in two years it grossed over $5 million.”⁸³

Mel had done it out of conviction—and a total salary of $7,500. The film was screened at the White House for President Truman, who was influenced by it to initiate legislation permitting blacks to become officers in the U.S. Navy. Ferrer calls it “a ground-breaker and a ‘moving’ picture in every sense of the word, light-years ahead” of the other racial-theme movies that year, Intruder in the Dust, Home of the Brave and Pinky.

“I still consider it the best movie I was ever lucky enough to be in,” he says today. “I had never appeared on the screen before, only directed, so I could not be identified as being white or black. Career-wise, it was a huge risk. But the end result was spectacular and I cherish it.”⁸⁴

It also fueled his personal interest and activity in the civil-rights movement—convictions soon shared and combined with the humanitarian concerns of Audrey Hepburn.

BACK AT RKO after that loan-out, Ferrer next directed Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan in a melodrama called The Secret Fury (1950). But with such positive reinforcement for his Lost Boundaries performance, he now wanted to concentrate on acting. His next role would be another stunning one—back at Columbia, on loan-out again—as a Mexican matador in The Brave Bulls (1951), directed with gritty realism by Robert Rossen.

“Rossen had just done All the King’s Men and had made an exciting prize-fighting picture before that, and I wanted very much to play the bullfighter,” says Ferrer. “Rossen’s response was that I was the first candidate he’d met who could fit his behind into the taleguilla [breeches]. I got the part.”⁸⁵

The praise for Ferrer and the movie alike were lavish. Newsweek put The Brave Bulls “squarely alongside such milestones as Citizen Kane” and observed, “for his professional good, it is perhaps a pity that so superb a young actor should find his first great part in so superb a film; he is not in the film, he belongs to it, along with the dust and bells of Mexico.”⁸⁶ Many thought Ferrer’s performance worthy of an Oscar, but he and the film fell victim to a radical past: Rossen once belonged to the Communist Party, and during Bulls filming in Mexico, the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt had heated up in Hollywood.

“I felt Bob had a good chance of winning the Academy Award for [the previous year’s] All the King’s Men,” says Mel, who persuaded Rossen to fly to Hollywood for the Oscars. “He felt sure that Harry Cohn would prevail against him but he went, reluctantly, [and] it won Best Picture. It was a triumph for Rossen. But Cohn got his revenge when Brave Bulls was released. In spite of outstanding notices, Cohn issued the edict that no funds would be available for promotion, ads or publicity. [So it was] a critical success, but a financial failure.”

Ferrer finished his much-loaned-out RKO contract by costarring with Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious (1952). At that point, MGM signed him up as an actor, using him first in the hit swashbuckler Scaramouche and then in one of the most successful “sleepers” in that studio’s history.

Lili (1953) was the unpretentious little musical in which Audrey had seen and loved the thirty-five-year-old Ferrer at his sexiest. It was directed and choreographed by Charles Walters, based on a Paul Gallico story. In its title role was Audrey’s only real screen “rival,” Leslie Caron.^v At its outset, orphan Caron arrives, forlorn, in a little French village. A carnival has just arrived, and she encounters the lame, unfriendly puppeteer Paul (Ferrer). “He’s always angry,” Jean-Pierre Aumont tells her, “—a disagreeable man.” Aumont, in real life, was a Free French war hero (whose wife Maria Montez had recently died under mysterious circumstances in her bathtub). Here he is “Marcus le Magnifique,” a magician with a sexy sidekick, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Paul’s puppets (their voices all truly Ferrer’s) are his alter egos: Carrot Top, the nice guy; Reynardo, the Fox; Golo, a villain; Marguerite, the diva-forerunner of Miss Piggy. Through them, unhappy Paul talks unhappy Lili out of suicide. Together, they sing the lovely “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” theme song—without dubbing—that became popular throughout the world.^w

Caron is thoroughly enchanting in her fantasy dance sequences, trading places (and slinky red-sequinned dresses) with Gabor.^x In the final number, the puppets come to life for a cross between “Yellow Brick Road” in The Wizard of Oz and the great Caron-Kelly dream ballet of An American in Paris.^y The result is a naive, charming romance, with Ferrer at his most appealing—Au—drey told him she saw it three times.

“Mel is a very complex person,” says Leslie Caron, guardedly. “On the one hand, he was very generous and very paternal to Audrey and to me when we worked on Lili. On the other hand....”⁸⁷

She trails off and declines to finish the sentence.

Charles Higham calls Ferrer a man of too many parts—“adept in so many fields that no single achievement placed him quite in the first class”—fragmented by the range of his own abilities, and thus volatile and high-strung. “He lacked the warmth, sheer animalism, and brute force” to cross the great divide between leading man and star. “He did not provoke sexual longings in millions of women; he did not evoke fantasies.”

Except in Audrey Hepburn. She had fallen in love with the sensitive, soulful character in Lili and projected it onto him in real life. She also loved his voice, and the way he jokingly signed his name—“Mellifluous.” Clearly, her notion of Mel Ferrer was romanticized from the start.

AUDREY WAS evoking similar fantasies in her own adoring fans, who clamored for scraps of information about her. Her publicist, scrambling for a few new factoids, sent her a questionnaire and hastily released her answers when he got them:

“Still finds it exciting to buy food....

“Has a large collection of long-playing records—from classics, Broadway musicals, to hot jazz. Believes one of the greatest things about the U.S. is the long-playing record....⁸⁸

“Speaks seven languages in faultless diction, lives in a New York apartment-hotel with her mother....

“Likes rain....”⁸⁹

Favorite films? She listed her own Lavender Hill Mob, Les Enfants du Paradis —and Lili. Asked for her opinion of TV and radio, she responded, “I miss the audiences. ”⁹⁰

“TV” was not a pleasant set of initials for Paramount, which like all big studios, was beset with antitrust suits and the devastating competition of the new medium. Paramount had again tried unsuccessfully to buy out Audrey’s Associated British Pictures contract and was now paying even more for her services. But since its other “major” female players were Arlene Dahl, Rhonda Fleming, Polly Bergen, Rosemary Clooney and Dorothy Malone, there was no choice but to be grateful to have Audrey, whatever her cost, for top projects.⁹¹

The top project at hand, in September 1953, was a Samuel Taylor stage hit known in Britain as Sabrina Fair, shortened to Sabrina in America to avoid confusion with Vanity Fair. Audrey had recently seen it on Broadway, starring Margaret Sullavan and Joseph Cotten, and asked Paramount to buy it as a vehicle for her. The studio did so, agreeing to pay her all of $15,000.

“It’s the second big film,” said Audrey, “which will prove if I was really worthy of the first.”

Sabrina was Cinderella redux: a chauffeur’s daughter becomes a sophisticate. She loves both sons of her father’s employer, despite Dad’s warning that “Nobody poor has ever been called democratic for marrying somebody rich.” Director Billy Wilder—after Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17—would complete his Paramount contract with this film.

Sabrina was filmed on location at the Glen Cove, Long Island, estate of Paramount chairman Barney Balaban in just nine weeks, between September and November 1953, plus a few trips to Hollywood for retakes. William Holden played the younger brother. The role of the debonair older brother had been rejected by Cary Grant. It was accepted by Humphrey Bogart, who had spent most of his career at Warner Brothers but was now finishing up his own three-picture contract with Paramount.

Bogart’s hectic schedule that year included Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny and The Barefoot Contessa. When shooting began on frothy Sabrina, he had just finished playing Captain Queeg in Caine Mutiny and seemed to carry over Queeg’s paranoia. Bogart “was in totally unfamiliar territory,” said Wilder, “and very uncomfortable.” He had “the occupational insecurity of most actors,” said Lauren Bacall, the last of his four wives. “He was never sure when he would work again.”⁹²

Bogart’s insecurities were aggravated by Wilder’s jocular comment to a reporter that the reason Bogart, not Holden, wound up with Audrey in the end was “because Bogart gets $300,000 a picture and Holden gets $125,000.” Despite (or because of) that, Bogart fussed and worried. “I’m gonna get fucked,” he told a friend. “Billy’s going to throw it to his buddy Holden.”⁹³

Holden (real name: William Franklin Beedle, Jr.) was thirty-five and at the peak of his career, having just starred in two of Wilder’s greatest pictures— Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. He and Bogart had fallen out years earlier while making Invisible Stripes (1939). Nowadays, Bogart referred to him as “Smiling Jim,” mocked his bleached-blond look in Sabrina, and called him a “dumb prick” to the press. Bogey had a special loathing for Holden’s macho display of rolling Gaulois cigarettes with one hand. Audrey smoked English Gold Flakes—in a long, filtered holder—and Bogart smoked heavily, as well. The air quality on the set was as woeful as the interpersonal relationships.

If Holden and Bogart did not get along, Holden and Hepburn certainly did—so much so that it may have constituted an affair. Holden was married to actress Brenda Marshall (real name: Ardis Gaines) but was notoriously promiscuous and had an odd habit of bringing women home to meet his wife.⁹⁴

Audrey was infinitely more prim and proper. Back in California after the Long Island shooting, she lived alone in a modest two-room apartment ($120 a month) on Wilshire Boulevard. There, she said, her biggest joy was “to unlock my door and find the new record that the store down the street delivered during the afternoon. I get into old, soft, comfy clothes and then I play the new music while I cook.” She boasted of having over a hundred records—from Brahms and Beethoven to “a mess of good jazz like Benny Goodman, Mel Powell and Jerry Mulligan.”⁹⁵

In those days, Holden and Audrey were often seen at fancy restaurants, after which they would repair to her apartment. But Audrey’s most intimate friends doubt she ever went to bed with Holden, and her journalist acquaintance Henry Gris claims she had “very little sexual drive” in general.⁹⁶All such opinions, of course, were speculative: Did she really love Holden? Was she expecting him to get a divorce?^z And what about Mel Ferrer? But there was no doubt that Holden passionately adored her: “She was the love of my life,” he later declared.

Audrey, for her part, was at least infatuated with the warm, demonstrative side of Holden’s personality—when it was not submerged in alcohol. Holden’s biographer Bob Thomas quoted her as saying she and Bill could “make beautiful babies together.”

Baby-making was, in the end, the issue. Compounding Holden’s obsession with sex was a secret he eventually had to tell Audrey: A few years before, at his wife’s insistence after the birth of their second son, he had undergone an irreversible vasectomy. When Audrey learned of it, she dropped all thought of marriage. Her deepest desire—even above career—was to be a mother.

Another Audrey—Billy Wilder’s wife—knew the score long before. The Wilders and Holdens were friends, and Audrey Wilder recalls a down-to-earth talk she had with Holden’s wife: “Brenda said, ‘The doctor told me I can’t have any more children, so I had Bill have a vasectomy.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you have your tubes tied? The minute you do that to a guy, he’s going to try to screw everybody.”’⁹⁷

Holden was already trying—though he claimed to exempt his leading ladies: “I just don’t want anything in a relationship with an actress to be misunderstood at the time,” he told Donald Zec, the biographer of Sophia Loren, with whom Holden starred in The Key (1958). “You have to work with them terribly intimately, particularly in the love scenes, and unless you play it neutral you may have a situation on your hands. I’ve had that difficulty with Jennifer Jones, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak.”

Zec observed that such a problem was better than being held prisoner by the Viet Cong. But Holden continued:

“In all the relationships I’ve had with leading ladies, I found that the less involved I was with them, the better. [Two or three of them] I absolutely adored ... and if they had ever been willing to change their way of life and say ‘I’ll go with you,’ it would have been fine. But we never stepped over the boundaries. So after all these years we have the same kind of respect for each other that we had in the beginning. I’ll tell you, it’s worth a lot more to me than a piece of ass.”⁹⁸

Holden’s satyriasis was matched by his compulsion to talk about it. Even in reference to the greatest screen beauties, he could never discuss women in less than batches of half a dozen. At the moment, in the wake of his vasectomy confession, he was distraught about Audrey’s reaction and rejection of him. “I was really in love with Audrey but she wouldn’t marry me,” he said. When Sabrina shooting ended, he set out on a ’round-the-world publicity tour with a private plan of action that was typical:

“I was determined to wipe Audrey out of my mind by screwing a woman in every country I visited. My plan succeeded, though sometimes with difficulty. When I was in Bangkok, I was with a Thai girl in a boat in one of the klongs [canals]. I guess we got too animated, because the boat tipped over and I fell into the filthy water. Back at the hotel I poured alcohol in my ears because I was afraid I’d become infected with the plague.” He poured alcohol into more than just his ears, and, “When I got back to Hollywood, I went to Audrey’s dressing-room and told her what I had done. You know what she said? ‘Oh, Bill!’ That’s all. ‘Oh, Bill!’ Just as though I were some naughty boy.”⁹⁹

SABRINA was supposed to be a romantic comedy, but there were more dramatic than comic moments on the set, and no romance between Humphrey Bogart and anyone. Everyone said Bogart hated Holden. Some said Bogart also hated Audrey—for her inability to do a scene in less than ten takes, and for “conspiring with Holden against him because she was giving Holden a tumble.”¹⁰⁰

Audrey never spoke negatively about any of her leading men. The closest she came was, “I was rather terrified of Humphrey Bogart—and he knew it. [But] if he didn’t like me, he certainly never showed it.”¹⁰¹ She later told Rob Wolders “how reasonable Bogart was with her, a little rougher with other people around—but a jovial roughness.” Bogart himself once paid her a rare if backhanded compliment: “You take the Monroes and the Terry Moores, and you know just what you’re going to get every time. With Audrey it’s kind of unpredictable. She’s like a good tennis player—she varies her shots.”¹⁰²

The final authorities on the subject are the redoubtable Billy and Audrey Wilder, jointly interviewed at their Wilshire Boulevard home in 1995.

“He did not hate Hepburn,” says Wilder. “Nobody could hate Hepburn. He did not hate Holden. He hated me! Why? Because he knew that I wanted to have Cary Grant but I couldn’t get him. Bogart did me a favor [by taking the role]. Holden I had made pictures with before, and Holden fell in love with Hepburn, so that was kind of a nice cozy arrangement. But Bogart we got at the last minute, and so I did not know what to do with him.”

One of many sources of tension was the script:

“It was written for Cary Grant and we had to rewrite a lot. One time, I handed him a new page and he looked at it and said, ‘You must be kidding. Who wrote that, your five-year-old daughter?’ He said it loud, for the gallery of electricians and everybody. But they were all my pals. He didn’t get a laugh.” ¹⁰³

But the worst problem between Bogart and Wilder stemmed from a social faux pas. One day after shooting, Wilder invited Holden, Hepburn and several others over for drinks—either consciously or unconsciously excluding Bogart. “At the time,” says Audrey Wilder, “I said to Billy, ‘You can’t do that. He’s a big star. You can’t have Audrey and Bill and not ask Bogart. He’s going to be furious.’ And he was.” She turns to her husband and adds, “You just didn’t get it. I did right away.”

Billy shrugs and pleads nolo contendere: “I got it, but it was too late.”

In fact, Bogart was often left out of the after-hours fraternizing, simply because he wasn’t much fun to have around. Feeling ostracized and offended, he became even more irritable—and downright offensive to Wilder. “Kraut bastard” and “that Nazi” and various anti-Semitic epithets were said to be his pet terms for Wilder. But the Wilders say they don’t remember it.

“Billy is a kraut,” says Audrey Wilder with a laugh. “Anyway, a kraut isn’t a Jew. Neither is a Nazi.”

Says Billy: “He hated me so much—everything, my German accent—but ultimately, when he got sick and was lying there in his house, dying of cancer [in 1957], I went up to him and he was wonderful. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s make up’ or anything like that, but he was absolutely wonderful. He completely changed.”

Mrs. Wilder elaborates on the last Mrs. Bogart’s theme: “Bogart was insecure. They’re all insecure about something. He was insecure about Billy’s love for Audrey and Bill Holden.” ¹⁰⁴

There was no doubt about the Wilder-Hepburn love affair—as real and as sweetly platonic as that of any director for any actress in Hollywood history. Says Billy Wilder today:

The very first day, she came on the set prepared. She knew her lines. I did not have to squeeze it out of her. She was so gracious and graceful that everybody fell in love with her after five minutes. Everybody was in love with this girl, I included. My problem was that I am a guy who speaks in his sleep. I toss around and talk and talk.... But fortunately, my wife’s first name is Audrey as well.¹⁰⁵

The most famous of all Billy Wilder statements about Hepburn was made midway in Sabrina shooting: “This girl, singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past.”¹⁰⁶ Henceforth, he later added, “The director will not have to invent shots where the girl leans way forward for a glass of Scotch and soda.”

Life magazine called her “the director’s joy” and quoted Wilder’s comment that, “She gives the distinct impression that she can spell schizophrenia.”¹⁰⁷ She was so diligent that—with Wilder’s approval—she insisted on doing her own singing. The Sabrina script called for her to croon a few verses of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in English and the pretty “La Vie en Rose” in French. She often spent two hours a day with a vocal coach. “I had to,” she said. “I had no voice at all. It was terribly monotonous, shrill and inflexible.”¹⁰⁸ But Sabrina’s breathy little singing voice would be perfect, and very much her own.

In Hollywood, Wilder gave her a fancy green chrome-and-aluminum bicycle, on which she careened back and forth across the Paramount lot thereafter. In New York, he hovered around her—uncharacteristically—even off the set, as on the October day in 1953 when New York Herald reporter Otis Guernsey interviewed her in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel.

“May I present the female Mickey Mantle?” said Wilder to the writer, with a light pat on Audrey’s head, adding that, like the Yankee switch-hitter, “She can do anything.” But when the talk turned to stardom, he said, “Shhh! Don’t wake my Sleeping Beauty. She doesn’t know how big a star she really is.”¹⁰⁹

Her rapport with Wilder was lasting, and so was her relationship with the two great designers who worked with her on Sabrina. Edith Head’s costumes for Roman Holiday would soon win an Oscar. She and Audrey had enjoyed each other throughout that production, often shopping and dining together. (Head marveled at Hepburn’s ability to consume five chocolate eclairs at a time, or a jumbo banana nut sundae.) Naturally enough, Head had been re-hired for Sabrina. But early on, Wilder made a daring move: Audrey’s high-fashion costumes would be designed by the young Parisian couturier Hubert de Givenchy. Edith Head’s work would be limited to the “Cinderella clothes” before the transformation. With abject apologies to Edith, Audrey now flew to Paris.¹¹⁰

At twenty-six, Givenchy—a devotee of Cristobal Balenciaga—was already challenging Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent to inherit the fashion throne of Chanel and Lanvin. Givenchy’s designs reflected his love of classic Greek lines. His wealthy family, owners of the Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry factories, had recently financed the opening of his salon on Avenue Georges Cinq, where he and Audrey met in the summer of 1953 and a legendary association began.

“One day,” Givenchy recalled, “someone told me that ‘Miss Hepburn’ was coming to Paris to select some clothes [for her new film]. At that time, I had never heard of Audrey Hepburn. I only knew of Katharine Hepburn. Of course, I was very happy to receive Katharine Hepburn.” When the confusion was cleared up upon her arrival, he tried to hide his disappointment. “My first impression of her was that she was like a very fragile animal. She had such beautiful eyes and she was so skinny, so thin.... an adorable young girl with large hazel eyes. She was wearing a sweater, straight slacks and flats; she was charming.”¹¹¹ But however charmed, he was a busy man, as he recounted to Warren Harris:

I told her the truth: I was in the midst of putting together my next collection and didn’t have the time to spend with her. She insisted. For the sake of peace and quietude, I said she could choose anything she liked from my current collection. That satisfied her and she selected several.... She knew exactly what she wanted. She knew perfectly her visage and her body, their fine points and their faults. [Later] I tried to adapt my designs to her desires. She wanted a bare-shouldered evening dress modified to hide the hollows behind her collar bone. What I invented for her eventually became a style, so popular that I named it “décolleté Sabrina.”¹¹²

Audrey’s angular figure was perfectly suited to the austere, geometric simplicity of Givenchy’s lines and to his preference for black, off-whites and subdued pastels. She loved what she saw and flew back to Hollywood with a portfolio of Givenchy sketches that Edith Head was now asked to execute. According to folklore, Head was furious. The Wilders deny it.

“She was one of the great dames of all time,” Audrey Wilder says. “There’s no real truth to that. Maybe she was hurt a little but—” Billy interrupts:

“Did you know that Edith Head won the most Oscars, with the exception of Walt Disney? Even when he had nothing to do with the picture, it was always ‘Walt Disney, the producer,’ and he got the Oscar. The same with Cedric Gibbons, who was listed on every MGM picture as the set designer, whether he did it or not. It was in his contract. The same with Edith Head.”

Audrey Wilder recalls her excitement the day Hepburn brought Givenchy’s sketches and left them at the house for Billy. “I saw one and took it over to my mother, who was a fantastic seamstress and worked in the studios,” says Aud Wilder. “She ripped it off right away, and I wore it one night a few days later. Billy said, ‘That’s not fair! The picture isn’t even out!”’¹¹³

Everyone went gaga over Givenchy’s designs, and Hepburn went gaga over Givenchy. She found him the epitome of cultivation and politesse. “He’s my great love,” she would say. “He made the first dresses I ever wore from a good fashion house. I consider him one of my best and most important friends.”¹¹⁴

Toward the end of shooting on Long Island, a humorous moment helped relieve the tension of the dueling designers and leading men. The visiting king and queen of Greece wished to see the set. Wilder borrowed two thrones from the Bob Hope film Monsieur Beaucaire and set them up at the top of some stairs, with a red carpet leading up to them. As the embarrassed royal couple was being led to their thrones, an electrician shouted, “Hey, Queen, where were you last night when I needed you to fill a straight?”

Audrey would call Sabrina “a dreamer who lived a fairy tale, and she was a romantic, an incorrigible romantic, which I am.” Otis Guernsey in the New York Herald pegged the young star’s forte: “Fairy tales are her natural element.” ¹¹⁵

Enter Prince Charming.

MEL FERRER, once called that “nerve in perpetual motion,” had not only fallen in love with Audrey but had been pondering how to advance her career—and his own. The answer came to him in the form of a prewar French play he now discovered.

Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine had been a great success when first performed in Paris in 1939 and his status as France’s preeminent dramatist secured by The Madwoman of Chaillot, which not only dazzled Europe but won the New York Drama Critics’ Award as best foreign play of the 1949-50 Broadway season.

Ondine, based on an early nineteenth-century German fairy tale, was later turned into two operas, symphonic works by Debussy and Ravel, and—in 1958—Frederick Ashton’s definitive ballet for Margot Fonteyn. It was a fable of man’s inability to comprehend and need to destroy innocence. The mythological “undine” is a water sprite who can only acquire a soul by marrying a mortal. In Giraudoux’s play, the knight she chooses is unfaithful and—by virtue of a sacred pact—he must die and she must return to the water, never to remember him. The knight charges that she “adored him beyond endurance.” Ondine’s view is whimsical. “So it takes twenty minutes to catch a man,” she muses when he proposes. “It takes longer than that to catch a bass.”

When Ferrer sent Hepburn the script, she loved both the play and the obvious casting. She told him she’d do it and instructed her MCA agent Kay Brown to approach the Playwrights Company, which jumped at the chance to land her: She was offered a minimum guarantee of $2,500 per week against a percentage of the box office, a big improvement on her $500 a week salary for Gigi. She secured Mel as her costar and—in appreciation of his suggesting the idea—insisted not only on sharing cobilling but also on splitting her percentage with him.

“If this isn’t love,” said her friend Radie Harris of the arrangement, “what is?”¹¹⁶

When the word got out, she was deluged with questions about the nature of the role.

“It’s a wonderful part,” she told an interviewer, “the kind I feel would be good for me. As opposed to Gigi, which was a comedy, and Roman Holiday, which is a light comedy, too, this is a very serious dramatic part, and an unusual one.”¹¹⁷ It was the closest she would ever get to Peter Pan—the role everyone wanted her to play—a combination of Ariel and Miranda.

In her two-week “vacation” between the end of Sabrina and the start of Ondine rehearsals, she packed up and moved to New York, where her mother would arrive three days later. “I want everything to be perfect,” she said. “I’ve ordered tickets for all the new plays, and I’m going to lay it on real thick—New York, that is. I want mother to love it as much as I do. I plan to spoil her as she’s never been before!”¹¹⁸

She accomplished that in and around her reunion with Ferrer and their rapidly intensifying relationship. Soon after Ondine rehearsals began, she and Mel began living together in Greenwich Village, and Frances Ferrer once again consulted her lawyers. Mel was said to believe he and Audrey could become the next Olivier and Leigh, or Lunt and Fontanne.

There was coincidence and irony in that: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne had scored a great triumph in Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 in 1937. Before he died in 1944, the playwright reportedly “entrusted” the English debut of Ondine to them, and they had since tried (and failed) to persuade Olivier and Leigh to do it.¹¹⁹ Beyond that, in London the previous year, Radie Harris had taken Audrey to see Fontanne and Lunt in Noel Coward’s Quadrille, “and when I took her to the dressing room to meet them,” said Harris, “she was like a wide-eyed child meeting Santa Claus for the first time.”¹²⁰ Now, to Audrey’s joy, Lunt accepted the Playwrights Company’s offer to direct Ondine.

In addition to Hepburn and Ferrer, Ondine’s cast included Marian Seldes, whose initial problem was similar to Givenchy’s. When she auditioned for Princess Bertha, Ondine ’s haughty rival for the knight, all Seldes knew was her agent’s description of the part: “It’s the heavy in a play with Hepburn.”

“I thought he meant Katharine Hepburn,” says Seldes. “But when I worked with Audrey in Ondine, she behaved in such a way that my admiration for her was on a par with what I felt for my early idols. I expected so little, I got so much.... I loved watching her rehearse and act. How beautiful [she made] other people feel! That was her magic on and off the screen. [And] how obediently she followed Mr. Lunt’s suggestions.”

That was more than could be said for Ferrer.

“The gossip in the company was that since she had fallen in love with Mel Ferrer, he was giving her different directions after the rehearsals,” says Seldes. “I did not believe it.... He did not respond to direction as Audrey did, was ungracious to the older man in front of the company at times, but the production of Ondine had been largely Mel’s idea and it would have been ridiculous for him to sabotage it by redirecting Audrey.

“Lynn Fontanne came to many rehearsals to watch her husband direct.... Occasionally [Lunt] would show Mel how to play part of a scene and step into his place. He would become Hans, the knight who loved the water nymph Ondine, and for a few moments I would be acting with this marvel. Afterward he would mutter to Mel, ‘I am doing this badly, of course.’ By that time Mel’s attention would have wandered....¹²¹

“Mel was in a difficult position. Lunt made a much greater connection with Audrey and the others. Because Mel was somewhat cool, distracted, he didn’t really work on the part from his inner self. At the time I thought he was rude, but looking back, perhaps he felt a little out of his depth in Ondine waters.”¹²²

The Playwrights Company had engaged him with an ulterior motive. “We bought Hepburn and the price was Ferrer,” said a staff member. “It turned out to be much too expensive.”¹²³ There was tension from the first day of rehearsal: Ferrer thought Lunt’s direction dull and resented Fontanne’s presence. He reportedly asked for revisions in the play to expand his own role, but Robert Sherwood refused to alter a word, even when it was suggested that Ferrer might quit and take Audrey with him.

Inevitably, Hepburn was drawn into the fray. One night after rehearsals, she showed up unexpectedly at Sherwood’s apartment, upset and fearful of the show’s failure. She and Mel were to be married, she told him, and she could hardly remain neutral in the conflict. She offered to withdraw from the production, but Sherwood reassured her, and she agreed to stay on.¹²⁴

Less serious but vexing up to the last minute was the matter of Audrey’s hair: Lunt felt it should be blond, since Ondine was a creature of the washed-out, watery deep. Just before previews opened in Boston, she gave in, allowed her hair to be bleached—and quickly regretted it. She then had its real color restored and switched to a blond wig. But the wig felt “stiff and hot and horrible,” she said. The eventual solution was to tint her hair with gold dust each night and wash it out after every show.

Her costumes were built by the great Valentina Schlee, designer for Fontanne in Idiot’s Delight, Norma Shearer and the Duchess of Windsor. Audrey spent days in Valentina’s East Sixty-seventh Street studio, standing six hours at a time to supervise the sewing of her costume, which consisted of fishnet and a few strategically placed leaves—censorable on anyone but Audrey, whose innate decorum gave even the scantiest outfit an almost Quakerish propriety.

All trials and tribulations were vindicated when Ondine premiered—with incidental music by Virgil Thomson—on February 18, 1954, at the Forty-sixth Street Theater in New York.

“Hepburn moves with the fleet freedom that testifies to her ballet training, and she speaks with a voice of strange and vibrant beauty,” said Variety. “Largely because of her personal incandescence ... , Ondine is a resounding hit.”

“Ondine was worth writing, translating and producing just to place Miss Hepburn on stage,” wrote Eric Bentley in The New Republic. “It is not time to speak of a great actress, yet no one would doubt the possibility of greatness.” ¹²⁵

Most critics cited her amazing leap—from a standing position into Ferrer’s lap—as one of the show’s most memorable moments.^aa Her smash success in Roman Holiday, released just a fortnight earlier, made Ondine’s opening night even more the gala event of the season. “The box-office lines are a block long,” said Newsweek. “The reason is Audrey Hepburn.”¹²⁶

James Hanson was sitting next to Baroness Ella van Heemstra on opening night. As with the Gigi premiere, he had flown over from London to surprise Audrey, even though he was no longer her fiancé. Neither Hanson nor the Baroness failed to notice the subtext at the end of that night’s performance: The audience cheered on and on, demanding a solo curtain call by Audrey. But with every bow, Mel appeared at her side. Finally, the house lights were turned on, and Mel held up his hand to hush the crowd for a speech—surely to acknowledge Audrey. “Instead,” said Radie Harris, “we heard a flowery expression of thanks to Alfred Lunt,” which most everyone knew to be insincere.¹²⁷

After the premiere, Hanson disappeared and Mel accompanied Audrey and her mother to a supper party sponsored by the cultural attaché of the French Embassy. There, someone made the mistake of asking Lunt, “Did you learn anything from working with a movie star like Mel Ferrer?” Yes, he replied, “I learned that you cannot make a knight-errant out of a horse’s ass!”¹²⁸ In New York theatrical circles, it was a mini-scandal that Ferrer would not let Audrey take her last curtain call alone. One critic called him “churlish” for not doing so. The late Eva Gabor was in that opening-night audience and remembered it vividly:

I can still see this beautiful wisp of a girl come on stage and the whole audience gave a big sigh—‘Ahhh!’ She was incredibly beautiful, captivating. In the curtain call, she came out first but turned to the wings and waited till he came out, because it would have been a terrible letdown for him to come out alone, after her. I never forgot that look on her face: The audience went wild, applauded, screamed—but she would not turn until he came out. I don’t know of another actress who would have done that. She was in love with him.¹²⁹

Most of the bouquets for Audrey came with thorns for Mel.

“Occasionally, during the times when Audrey Hepburn was absent from the stage of the Forty-sixth Street Theater, it occurred to me that Ondine had the makings of a quite majestic bore,” wrote Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker. “On each of her entrances, however, [Hepburn] set about creating a queer, personal miracle.... Her performance [is] a beautiful and astonishingly intelligent piece of work, and I don’t believe there is an actress in our theatre physically or mentally equipped to duplicate it.”

And Mel Ferrer?

“Reasonably attractive,” said Gibbs, “but I don’t believe he has quite the style, of either conduct or diction, that this difficult part demands. It is a heavy task to oppose the kind of acting Miss Hepburn is offering, and I can think, offhand, of nobody except perhaps Olivier and Gielgud who could manage it, and Mr. Ferrer is certainly neither of these men.”¹³⁰

The harshest verdict was Lunt’s, in a private letter to Sherwood: “All the medals and praise in the world will never convince me that beautiful play comes off.... She jumps on his lap & he holds her like a potted palm—he sits beside her at the table & treats her like a tired waitress at Child’s.... If he played his scenes on top of her, you’d have the feeling he was laying a corner stone. Personally, I’d call the whole show a fucking failure.”¹³¹

Audrey was much praised—“too much indeed,” Commonweal dissented. “She is not yet a very accomplished actress [and] must learn to manipulate her voice with some of the grace and variety she brings to her body movements.”¹³²

In “Nymph Mania,” the Ondine review in Saturday Review, the perceptive Henry Hewes said Audrey was giving “a performance and not a piece of acting. This is not to discredit Miss Hepburn [but] rather to clarify what it is that this clever youngster does.... Perhaps if she could join a repertory company, as Claire Bloom has, she would gradually acquire the acting skill to go with her performing talents. As it is, she is faced with being a star rather than becoming one.”¹³³

A variation on that theme was Harold Clurman’s “Open Letter to Audrey Hepburn” in The Nation, which began by observing that the response to her Ondine performance was “as if everybody were asking for your telephone number”:

[You are] a wonderful instrument with a soul of your own. But, said old Grandpa Ibsen, talent is not just a possession, it is a responsibility. You are at the beginning of your career; because this beginning is so dazzling you must not allow the beginning to become the end. You do not yet know how to transform the outward aspects of a characterization into an inner characterization....

You can learn to be a real actress if you do not let the racket, the publicity, the adulation rattle you away from yourself. Keep on acting, studying, working.... Play parts that are risky, parts that are difficult, and do not be afraid to fail! Above all, play on the stage.... Do not trust those who tell you that screen and stage acting are the same species or of equal artistic value.¹³⁴

For Audrey, that was both a concrete and a cosmic issue of major importance. Just the day before Ondine opened, she had filled out a new questionnaire from her publicist:

Any special role you most wish to play?

“One day I would like to try the classics, yardsticks by which an actress’s technique and variety are measured.”

What is your greatest ambition as an actress?

“To some day be considered as good an actress and as faithful to her public as was Maude Adams or is Helen Hayes.... A stage and screen career each benefits from the other.”

Now, as if to confirm that, came the news that she had been nominated for an Academy Award for Roman Holiday.

“ONDINE AND GIGI were entirely different,” says actress Celeste Holm, who saw Audrey in both. “Gigi was an American version of a French farce. Ondine was almost a ballet. In both cases, she had something that couldn’t be manufactured. People who are very definite are more interesting than the paste-ups. The effects of the war, her dancer’s sense of communicating physically—all that carried through to her work. So many people in theater have no specific idea of what they’re communicating, just a vague idea of showing off. But not Audrey. The moment you saw her, you realized she was an artist.”¹³⁵

Two Broadway hits and an Oscar nomination were proof of her spontaneous romance with the public, but still, “I wouldn’t say I’ve learned to act yet,” she said during Ondine. “Often I think I’ll never learn anything. Some of the things I do on stage depress me beyond measure.”¹³⁶Compounding that angst, she was emotionally drained—by Mel Ferrer as much as Ondine.

“It often happens that actors and actresses fall in love during a play that moves them deeply,” says Celeste Holm. “They think it’s the other person, but it’s really the play.”

Audrey and Mel really fell in love because of Ondine?

“I think so,” says Holm. “Look at Gary Merrill and Bette Davis—the same thing.”

While Ella was issuing statements that her daughter and Ferrer were not romantically involved, they were, in fact, seriously discussing marriage. And as those marital pressures mounted—pro and con, from Mel and her mother—so did the extravagant attention of the media, in anticipation of the Academy Awards. “Not since Garbo has a new actress been welcomed with such fervor and adulation,” declared Cosmopolitan.¹³⁷

The Oscar ceremony of March 25, 1954, was a bicoastal affair, dually hosted by Donald O’Connor at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles and Fredric March at the NBC Century Theater in New York. When Audrey arrived breathless and very late at the latter place, a great shout of “Hepburn’s coming!” rose from the media area, and all the photographers rushed to the door.

“Hepburn, still wearing makeup of water nymph in Ondine, did the fastest dash I’ve ever seen,” wrote one reporter, “straight through the animal pack to a small room off the inner lobby.” As she was rushing to change clothes, she ran into fellow nominee Deborah Kerr, just arrived—equally breathless—from her own Broadway hit, Tea and Sympathy. They wished each other luck and agreed Leslie Caron was going to win for Lili.¹³⁸

“Ladies predominantly blond this year,” continued the reporter, “hair drooping and matted, like seaweed.... Hepburn emerged. Vision of loveliness in white lace dress. Animal pack, momentarily bowled over by beauty, soon regained composure and screamed for pictures.”¹³⁹ Audrey briefly obliged, then ducked into the theater just in time to join her agent, Jack Dunfee, and her imperturbable mother before the moment of truth.

From Here to Eternity dominated the awards, winning Best Film, Director (Fred Zinnemann), Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra), Supporting Actress (Donna Reed) and four other awards, tying the all-time Gone With the Wind record. The odds were in Deborah Kerr’s favor. But the Oscar went to Audrey. ^ab

“I was so surprised when they called my name that I didn’t know what to do,” she said the next day. “Mother and I wanted to celebrate, so we bought a bottle of champagne on the way home. It was warm—but it was the best champagne I ever tasted!”¹⁴⁰

From then on, she regularly gave Ella credit for her achievement—seri—ously and humorously—at every chance: “My mother taught me to stand straight, sit erect, use discipline with wine and sweets, and to smoke only six cigarettes a day.”

Ella just as regularly demurred: “I can really take no credit for any talent that Audrey may have. If it’s real talent, it’s God-given. I might as well be proud of a blue sky, or the paintings in the Flemish exhibition at the Royal Academy.”

Neither of them knew how important the Oscar really was. “Having lived in England for some time,” Audrey said years afterward, “I wasn’t extremely familiar with the Academy Awards. I knew it was a coveted prize, but I didn’t realize until later what an honor it was to win it for the first time out.”¹⁴¹

Paramount production chief Don Hartman was cautious. “There is no evidence that Audrey is a full star yet,” he said a few days after the ceremony. “The question which has to be answered is: ‘Can she hold up a picture on her own?’ Audrey has been called a star after Roman Holiday, and she has certainly had a lot of publicity. But we haven’t tested yet whether the Hepburn name by itself, above a film title, will fill cinemas.”¹⁴²

It was a candid, pragmatic statement. But Audrey was even more candid. Mel once read her a list of adjectives that had been applied to her Ondine performance—words like “coltish,” “gazelle-like” and “otherworldly.”

“What they mean is tall and skinny,” she replied.

Her eyes had been described as “lake-haunted,” he told her.

“Maybe I need some sleep,” she said.

Beauty experts hailed her innovative “bat-wing” eyebrows.

“I wish I had the courage to tell them that I just don’t pluck them,” she remarked. ¹⁴³

Exactly three days after the Oscars, before the shock had worn off, came yet another stunning prize: the Antoinette Perry (“Tony”) award for best stage actress in Ondine. There were no announced “nominees” for the Tonys until 1956, but Hepburn had been chosen over Deborah Kerr in Tea and Sympathy, Geraldine Page in The Immoralist, and Margaret Sullavan in Sabrina Fair. Only one other actress had ever managed to win an Oscar and a Tony in the same year—Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba and The Time of the Cuckoo.^ac

“How will I ever live up to them?” she told a throng of reporters. “It’s like being given something when you’re a child—something too big for you that you must grow into.”

Now and in the future, she would keep her distance from the social whirl of both the British and the American film-theater worlds—to concentrate on her work, she said: “Acting doesn’t come easy to me. I put a tremendous amount of effort into every morsel that comes out.”¹⁴⁴ One of her non-fans complained: “This training thing is a pose. She’s made it—why doesn’t she relax and have fun? ”¹⁴⁵

A year after her arrival in America—just six years from her start in the chorus of a London musical—she was at the top. At twenty-four, she had vaulted into the public heart and was generating more excitement than Marilyn Monroe. It was unbelievable. It was nerve-wracking. It might suddenly disappear at any time.

“I believe in fixing a goal for myself and not being diverted in any way from pursuing that goal,” she said the night she won her Roman Holiday Oscar. “I can’t allow this award or all this public acclaim to turn my head or induce me to ease up.”

A veteran Hollywood producer summed her up a bit ominously: “She charts each day’s schedule like a timetable so there will be no wasted minutes or wasted energies. She operates more like an engineer with a slide rule than a young, single girl turned loose in this emotional world of show business.”¹⁴⁶