CHAPTER 6

Fair and Unfair Ladies (1963-1964)

“Did Rex Harrison want Julie Andrews instead of Hepburn? No. He didn’t want anybody. He felt whatever fuss was made about Audrey or Julie was pointless, because nobody was interested in the girl. They were only interested in him.”

—ANDRÉ PREVIN

IT WAS THE BEST OF ROLES, IT WAS THE WORST OF ROLES.... “You’ve got My Fair Lady!” shouted Kurt Frings triumphantly to Audrey Hepburn via long-distance telephone in Bürgenstock, where she had returned for some rest after Charade.¹

It was the call she had been awaiting for months—or years or perhaps her whole life. “I had to share the magnificent news with somebody close to me,” she said. “Mel was away. But there was Mother upstairs, taking a shower. I banged on the bathroom door and screamed something unintelligible about the movie I was to star in and Mother came out soaking wet, wrapped in a towel, thinking the house was on fire.”²

Ferrer was in France at the Cannes Film Festival, and Audrey immediately placed a call to him there but had to hang on the line for half an hour until he could be located. By the time he got to the phone, she was in tears. When she told him her news, he asked why she was crying. “Because it’s such an important day and we are hundreds of miles apart,” she replied.³

Eliza Doolittle was one of the greatest stage roles of all time. She was created by George Bernard Shaw, whose favorite subject was women—far more sane and loving than men, he believed and best asserted in the title, Man and Superman. Of his many influential plays, Pygmalion was the greatest success. In the Greek myth, that sculptor detests women for their wicked ways and vows to remain a bachelor but makes the fatal mistake of carving a statue which is so beautiful that—when Aphrodite brings it to life—he falls in love. Ovid treated the same subject in his Metamorphoses, as did several Elizabethan writers and eventually, in 1871, Sir William Gilbert. His play Pygmalion and Galatea was seen and much admired by the fifteen-year-old Shaw.

It took forty years and the inspiration of Mrs. Patrick Campbell for Shaw to produce his own Pygmalion—a fussy phonetics professor named Henry Higgins. His Galatea was the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle—“perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older.” “It would be better if I was twenty-five years younger,” Mrs. Campbell wrote Shaw, “but thanks for thinking I can be your pretty slut.” She was forty-nine when she created the role on the London and New York stages in 1914.

It was a sensation from the start. Audiences gasped at the end of Eliza’s first scene with Freddy. “Are you walking across the park, Miss Doolittle?” he asks. “Walk!” she exclaims, “Not bloody likely!” If not the first, it was the most celebrated utterance of that word on the London stage to date.

Subsequent Elizas included Lynn Fontanne in the 1926 Broadway revival, Wendy Hiller (opposite Leslie Howard) in the 1938 British film version, and Gertrude Lawrence in the Broadway production of 1946. Inevitably, it was a candidate for musical treatment—which it repeatedly defied. “Dick Rodgers and I worked on it for over a year, and we gave it up,” said Oscar Hammerstein in the early fifties. “It can’t be done.”⁴

Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe took their first crack at it around 1952. “It seemed one drawing-room comedy which just resisted expansion,” said Lerner, who worked on it for six months but then set it aside. When it finally started to gel a few years later, not everyone was impressed. Mary Martin and her agent were among the first to hear what was then My Fair Lia, after which the agent told Lerner, “You boys have lost your talent.” The boys kept working but, as late as the show’s opening in New Haven, still hadn’t settled on a title.... Lady Lia, My Lady Lia, Come to the Ball, Fanfaroon?

The nod finally went to My Fair Lady, a pun on the cockney pronunciation of “Mayfair lady.” On March 15, 1956, with Julie Andrews as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins, it opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and stayed there for an astounding 2,717 performances, the longest run of any musical to that time. It won every award and became the biggest hit in musical theater history, ultimately produced in eleven languages and twenty-one countries.

A fierce bidding war for screen rights was eventually won by Warner Brothers: at $5.5 million plus 50 percent of gross revenues above $20 million, it was the most expensive stage-to-film deal ever made in Hollywood.^as With a budget of $17 million, it would also be the most costly Warners movie ever.

My Fair Lady was the last great Broadway musical to receive lavish screen treatment. It was Jack Warner’s extravagant swan song—his last production at Warner Brothers. Everything about it would be on a grand scale, starting with the casting. Warner wanted nothing but top-of-the-line stars in the leads, and he knew exactly which three he wanted most: Cary Grant as Higgins, James Cagney as Doolittle and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.

Normally, if a great studio mogul set his sights on certain stars and the stars were available, that was it. No other input was needed. But neither Warner nor the industry reckoned on the unprecedented kibitzing of a group whose casting preferences were rarely heard or heeded: the public. Many of those thirty-two million owners of the original cast album were staunch fans of—and clamoring for—Julie Andrews. One of the staunchest was Alan Lerner who, after seeing her in The Boy Friend, had selected Andrews for the Broadway role and was now 100 percent behind casting her in the film. But Lerner had no contractual say in the matter.

Warner was criticized ever after for not giving Andrews the part, but he discussed it with her at least once by phone. “I’d love to do it,” she reportedly told him. “When do we start?” Warner asked when she could come out for a screen test, to which Andrews replied, “Screen test? You’ve seen me do the part and you know I can do a good job.” He said, “Miss Andrews, you’re only known in London and New York. You’ve never made a movie and I’m investing a lot of money in this. I have to be sure you photograph and project well. Films are a different medium.” But Andrews refused. Thenceforth, after Warner let it be known that he would hire a film actress, show-biz columnists around the country took up the standard, lamenting and lobbying for Julie.

No one was following the controversy more closely than Audrey. “I understood the dismay of people who had seen Julie on Broadway,” she said later. “Julie made that role her own, and for that reason I didn’t want to do the film when it was first offered. [But] I learned that if I turned it down, they would offer it to another movie actress [and] I thought I was entitled to do it as much as the third girl, so then I did accept.”⁵

Audrey herself never revealed the name of that “third girl,” of whom she was very fond: Elizabeth Taylor. (“Get me My Fair Lady,” Taylor allegedly commanded Eddie Fisher and Kurt Frings—as if either of them could.) But as soon as Audrey entered the race, she won it. Never before had Jack Warner felt obliged to justify a casting decision, but such was the outcry in this case that he publicly—and candidly—stated his explanation:

With all her charm and ability, Julie Andrews was just a Broadway name, known primarily to those who saw the musical. But in thousands of cities and towns throughout the United States and abroad, you can say “Audrey Hepburn” and people instantly know you’re talking about a beautiful and talented star. In my business, I have to know who brings people and their money to a theatre box-office. I knew Audrey Hepburn... had given exhibitors a big money shot in the arm with The Nun’s Story. For that picture, we gave her a guarantee of a quarter of a million dollars against ten per cent of the gross, and she came out with nearly one and a half million dollars—in other words, the film grossed $14 million, and that was remarkable.⁶

Audrey was Warner’s idée fixe. Her name alone would ensure the film’s success, he believed. The box-office difference between Andrews and Hepburn he calculated to be $5 million. A notoriously tightfisted man, he shocked Hollywood by agreeing to pay her $1 million for the role. Only three other stars belonged to the million-per-film club: Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. Frings arranged for seven annual installments of $142,957, to help Audrey with her taxes and to make the payout less draining on the studio’s cash flow.

Warner faced rebellion on his choice of male lead, as well, but he at least kept that controversy from spilling over into the press. When director George Cukor approached Cary Grant about Higgins, Grant said, “There is only one man who should play this, and that’s Rex. Any other actor would be a fool to try it.... Not only will I not play Higgins, if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it, I won’t go and see it.”⁷ Warner, amazingly, had also sounded out Rock Hudson on the role. At the opposite extreme, Cukor had spoken with Laurence Olivier and Peter O’Toole about it, but neither was available.

It was little known that Rex Harrison was actually the fourth choice for Higgins on stage (after Noel Coward, Michael Redgrave and George Sanders all turned it down). Nowadays, he was in England, in a comfortable position. He was not a man to get overly excited about behind-the-scenes casting maneuvers.

“I sat tight,” Harrison recalled. “One evening George Cukor telephoned on a crackly line from California and asked me to make a photographic test for the part. I laughed. ‘I’m not making any tests,’ I told him. ‘If you want me to play the part, then I’ll come.’ As a joke, I then sent him some Polaroid photos which had been taken while we’d been fooling about on my boat, in which I appeared stark naked, holding, in one picture, a Chianti bottle in front of me, and in another, a strategically placed copy of the New Statesman. ‘You wanted a test,’ I told him.... They saw that I was not as decrepit as they feared.”⁸

Harrison was in, and for more compelling criteria than his beefcake Polaroids. But Cagney was out. He took the opportunity to pay back Warner for past injustices and refused the role of Alfred Doolittle, which was then offered to Stanley Holloway, who accepted. So two of the three top stars would be the Broadway originators of the parts—their presence making Julie Andrews’s absence even more noticeable.

Cukor had a nervous vibration. “The first time I talked to Audrey,” he said, “she called me overseas from Switzerland and told me she was working on her cockney. She tried it out on the phone for me. ‘Ao-ow-ow,’ she said. I told her it sounded okay to me.... Actors always worry about the wrong thing.”⁹

THE OVERALL technical challenge of My Fair Lady could be summed up by the word “look,” and the specifics summed up by the word “Edwardian.” Edward VII reigned just nine years, from 1901 to 1910. Pygmalion and now My Fair Lady were set in that dynamic era of Cubism, the Suffragettes, and the fall of Oscar Wilde. But it was the English king’s personal style—everything from his eating habits to his effete Bohemianism—that defined the day, above all in fashion and manners.¹⁰

Flamboyant designer-photographer Cecil Beaton (1904—1980) had created the dazzling costumes for the show’s New York and London stage productions and was engaged to reprise those designs for the film. This time, he would design the sets, too. Alan Lerner said of Beaton that, “When you looked at him, it was difficult to know whether he designed the Edwardian era or the Edwardian era designed him.” ¹¹

Beaton and his ferocious ego were bursting with new energy. “It’s a most exciting job, this,” he said, “and one that I would very much have hated anyone else to have done!”¹² He was thrilled to be in charge of the whole of the visual production, and, in his compulsively kept diaries, left an almost minute-by-minute account of events, starting with the day in September 1962 when George Cukor tornadoed into his London house to research the period and to gloat that Audrey was “dying to do Eliza.”¹³

Beaton flew to Hollywood and started work in February 1963, months before Hepburn and the rest of the cast arrived. He and Cukor were getting along swimmingly, exploring every aspect of the picture together. Most of all, they discussed the quality and quantity of costumes to be made—one thousand! Some four hundred of them, all black and white, were required for the Ascot Gavotte and ball sequences alone. Each one would be lovingly re-created from museum sources with the attention given to a principal’s clothes.

Beaton took special care with the designs for Gladys Cooper as Higgins’s mother. “We have decided not to make Mrs. Higgins into the conventional Marx Brothers dowager,” he said, “but into an ‘original,’ a Fabian, an aesthetic intellectual.” He wrote his friend Lady Diana Cooper, asking what her mother, the late great Duchess of Rutland, would have worn at Ascot. Lady Diana’s reply was firm: “Certainly cream.”¹⁴

On May 16, 1963, Audrey and her family flew to Los Angeles and set up housekeeping in a large rented villa in Bel-Air. Beaton, like everyone else, was excited and energized by the leading lady’s arrival, as he recorded two days later:

“George, Alan and I went to pay a formal call on Audrey Hepburn Ferrer at tea time. Sean, her [three]-year-old son, was present, and it is obvious that this is the love affair of her life, and she of her son’s.” He could hardly wait ‘til after tea to show her his designs:

She and Mel each sat with a book of sketches on their laps, and suddenly Mel held up a sketch of Eliza as the flower girl. “Look at that, Audrey! That’s got it all. That’s what it’s all about.” ... Audrey closed her eyes and smiled.... “Oh, it’s more than I thought it possibly could be. It’s too much!” Such genuine enthusiasm thrilled me.

[Later] Audrey and Mel came with me to Wardrobe where they gasped at the first things they saw.... The combination of Audrey and these exaggerated clothes created comic magic. She wanted to pose for photographs in every one of them. “I don’t want to play Eliza! She doesn’t have enough pretty clothes. I want to parade in all these.” And she did.... in a gay mood, making rubber faces, speaking in Eliza’s cockney accent, joking with all the adoring helpers.¹⁵

A few days later at the studio, a lilting voice invited him to, “Come on in and see my secrets.” It was Audrey in the Makeup Department. “Now, you see, I have no eyes!” she told Beaton. He didn’t agree: “Without the usual mascara and shadow, Audrey’s eyes are like those in Flemish painting and are even more appealing—young and sad. Yet it was extraordinary to see that it is simply by painting her eyes she has become a beauty in the modern sense. But having seen her without these aids, I will try to prevail upon her to do away with them in the earlier sequences for this will give an entirely new and authentic look—different from any we have seen before in her pictures. Her appearance without [eye makeup] will be a revolution and, let’s hope, the end of all those black-eyed zombies of the fashion magazines.”¹⁶

NIGHT AND DAY, all that mattered to Beaton was costumes and sets. But the director and studio executives were far more worried about Audrey’s songs and the recording process.

“When she began,” said Cukor in a mid-production interview, “it was an agony for that girl to sing. But she is not afraid to make an ass of herself. She has the courage to do it, do it wretchedly at first, but do it.”¹⁷

As a vote of confidence in Audrey’s singing ability, that faint praise seemed a bit damning. But she was indeed working extraordinarily hard on every facet of her performance, often spending twelve hours a day in rehearsals. In addition to memorizing lines and sitting endlessly for costume fittings, she attended Hermes Pan’s grueling dance rehearsals and took cockney lessons from UCLA phonetics professor Peter Ladefoged (“an American who probably knows London like I know Peking,” she remarked).¹⁸

Most of all, she was working on her voice, determined as she was to perform and record all of her own songs. Singing coach Susan Seton was imported from New York and led her through vocal lessons for five weeks, sometimes five or six hours a day. But there were rumors that the studio was casting about for a dubber.

Audrey had been nervously aware of it—and in a kind of denial—from early on, as Beaton’s diary entries of mid-May indicate: “After lunch, we accompanied [Lerner] to listen to a girl singing Eliza’s songs, in case Audrey’s voice proves to be too frail for one or two of the most operatic arias, and a few notes have to be dubbed.”¹⁹ Two days later, he wrote, “Suddenly Audrey asked, ‘Are you going to use my voice for songs at all?”’

Beaton’s analysis of the remark was upbeat to the point of delusional: “This was disarming and removed any awkwardness in approaching a difficult subject.... It was now easy to say that, quite probably, Audrey’s voice will be used for many of the songs, but certain notes might be interpolated from another voice.” Nevertheless, he was superstitious, and it “worried me when she said, ‘This picture is one we must all remember. Wonderful talents, everyone right, everyone happy.’”²⁰

Pre-recording now began, and on July 4 Audrey sang her first solo, shut up in a cubicle, while the orchestra played outside under André Previn. For Audrey, it was “an ordeal,” said Beaton, “but if her voice is not up to standard she will be the first to admit it. Previn may appear as sleepy as a tapir, but coaxes the best from everyone with his intelligence and patience.”²¹

Music director Previn was enthralled with Hepburn and did everything he could to help. He knew her musky mezzo voice was no finely trained instrument, but she had used it to good musical and emotional effect in Funny Face. The trouble now was that, since Rex Harrison was the master of parlando—a kind of half-spoken singing style—his Eliza had to trill like a bird.²²

“Audrey’s voice was perfectly adequate for a living room,” Previn says. “If she got up around the piano with friends and sang, everybody would rightfully have said, ‘How charming!’ But this was the movie to end all movies, with six giant surround speakers. Even so, I was of the opinion that if you had bought Audrey Hepburn to play it, so she didn’t sing so hot—it wasn’t such a crime. But you can imagine how Lerner and Loewe felt—much more strongly than about Paint Your Wagon or Brigadoon. This was their statement for the ages.”²³

Hollywood dubbing was time-honored but erratic. In Paint Your Wagon (1967), for instance, Jean Seberg couldn’t sing a note and had to have a substitute. It is claimed by some (and denied by others) that Lauren Bacall’s voice double in To Have and Have Not was young Andy Williams.²⁴Kitty Carlisle, a trained opera singer, had to sob loudly in Louis B. Mayer’s office before MGM would let her sing her own songs in Night at the Opera. Juanita Hall, the original Bloody Mary in South Pacific, was dubbed in the film version for reasons not even director Joshua Logan understood. And Previn is still incensed that Ava Gardner was not allowed to sing in Show Boat. “When you heard her do ‘Bill,’ she broke your heart,” he recalls. “But they couldn’t see it.”²⁵

Previn thought the system was screwy, but he was stuck with it. So was Audrey, and so was one of the most “unsung” singers of the era, Marni Nixon—Dubber to the Stars. Nixon had sung for Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) and An Affair To Remember (1957), and for Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961). She performed symphonic vocal repertoire as well, in concerts with André Previn and Leonard Bernstein.

“I did a lot of different people’s voices in those days,” Nixon recalls. “It was something one did to subsidize one’s ‘real’ career. Audrey had been signed and everybody was upset Julie didn’t get it. People kept calling me and saying, ‘You’d be perfect—tell your agent to get you in!‘ But those things don’t come from agents. They come from the music director.”²⁶

Previn knew Nixon was “a much more serious singer than people realized. I first heard her do an evening of Ives songs that was absolutely remarkable. She also had this peculiar, chameleonlike quality: She could ’do’ everybody. You could hand her a piece of music and say, the first four bars are cockney, then it gets French—it made no difference, she could do it.”²⁷

Previn arranged for Marni to audition in Hollywood, telling her, “You’ll have a number, and they’re not to see you. We don’t want any other information except the voice.” She came, she sang and she got the job. What she did not get was a clear notion of whether she’d be singing all or only part of the songs. “I think Audrey knew ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ would probably be all me,” says Nixon, “but if anything else was decided, we didn’t know about it.” Exactly when Audrey learned of Nixon’s hiring is unclear, but it was a big blow to her self-confidence when she found out. So was the process itself, which Nixon describes:

Sometimes I would rehearse with her directly and hear what she was trying to do with the songs. Eventually, we both went into the recording studio and recorded what we had planned to do. We knew in some numbers, she was going to start, and I was going to carry on.... I would record and then she would record her portion of those songs. She kept going back to re-record certain parts and would say, “I can do these measures better now. Put my voice in.”

It was painful, almost pathetic. Audrey’s stepson Chris Ferrer remembered Audrey “coming home each day totally exhausted and discouraged because she was trying so hard to do it right, but she could tell that it was really not quite good enough.”²⁸

Did Hepburn ever turn to Nixon for vocal advice? Would she ever say, “How should I sing this?” Or, “Am I forcing?”

“There was some of that,” says Nixon. “They wanted me to help her as much as possible. [But] I wasn’t sure that what I would have told her was any better than what Sue was telling her. It was a matter of me singing it with her accent, and then her imitating me. I was imitating her personality and trying to sing it as I thought she would have, then she would correct my pronunciation. It was really a technical thing. She had to have a lot of trust in me. The thrill I have is that I was able to pick up on her. I really felt fused with her.”

But Audrey was the victim of a lot of false hope along the way. “They were all happy enough with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ so that she actually filmed that whole song to her track,” Nixon recalls. “But I was always doing the high notes for her, even in that. Later they decided it just wouldn’t match up. You couldn’t have one voice for one song and one voice for another. So they threw out her track, which was very discouraging to her. In ‘The Rain in Spain,’ it wasn’t clear how much would be me and how much would be her [until] the last minute. Lerner was there. It was his choice, not mine.”²⁹

Lerner was there, indeed—with some dubious brainstorms. He now summoned his music director with what he thought was a surefire solution to the Audrey vocal dilemma, as Previn recalls:

“Lerner said, ‘She is extremely intelligent about herself. So I want you to record her with the full orchestra, make her a beautiful arrangement. And when she hears it back on those six surround speakers, she’ll say, Holy Jesus, and she won’t do it.’ I said, ‘Alan—’ He said, ‘Trust me, I know actresses.’ I said, ‘No, you marry actresses, but you don’t know them.’

“Anyway, we did it and we played it back and it was not good and she said, ‘I love it.’ We were cooked. It didn’t sound bad, but you wanted it to sound good. It was the musical film of the decade—the last great operetta—you wanted it to be perfect.”³⁰ Beaton recorded an uncomfortable moment in June when Audrey sang part of the score to the assembled company—“a mistake,” he said. “Audrey, seeing the brave smiles on everyone’s face, had the feeling she was drowning.”³¹

Harper McKay, Previn’s assistant musical director, said one of his tasks was to help Audrey improve “despite the fact that the decision had already been made to have Marni dub her voice. Audrey dutifully worked on her vocalises for a half hour or so every morning, and the weeks went by.... Lerner, Previn or Cukor would drop by occasionally, listen to Audrey’s singing and compliment her extravagantly on how well she was sounding. Audrey, unfortunately, began to believe them.”

During the last day of rehearsal on the Covent Garden set, Audrey sang “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” herself, and the extras and crew broke into loud applause. Afterward, during a meeting to discuss the next day’s work, Audrey came in flushed with emotion. “Did you hear it?” she asked Cukor. “They actually applauded!”

“Audrey,” Cukor said, “they thought it was you.”

“George,” she said, “It was me,” and tears came to her eyes. The playback operator had mistakenly used her track instead of Marni Nixon’s. Cukor, Lerner and Previn hadn’t noticed.³²

From that point on, says Previn, “it became a passing-the-buck thing. Warner wouldn’t tell her. Lerner wouldn’t tell her. Loewe was never around at all. They came to me and I said, ‘Listen, fellas, I’m not the one to tell her.’ So finally Cukor had to go. She was very hurt because she felt that if she had taken Julie Andrews’s place and then couldn’t sing, it would reflect very badly on her. But she never said a word. I’m sure she had tears about it, but not so you’d know.”³³

Her good friend Doris Brynner, wife of Yul, dissents. One of very few visitors allowed on the set, she denies Audrey was upset. “She had to be dubbed,” says Brynner. “All that high soprano singing—how could she have done it? She never had any intention of singing.”³⁴ But nobody else remembers it that way.

On hearing the bad news from Cukor, she said, “Oh!”, and walked off the set. All the weeks of coaching, practicing and matching were down the drain: Virtually all her songs would be dubbed. The next day, she came back and apologized to everyone for her “wicked” behavior, saying she understood it had to be. “That was her idea of being very wicked,” says Marni Nixon.³⁵

“I’D DONE the show for so long in the theatre with Julie that any new leading lady was going to be a problem,” said Rex Harrison. “Audrey also had to weather a great deal of adverse press publicity about how much she was being paid, for most of the press had sided with Julie, and had wanted Julie to get the part. Audrey is a very sensitive person, and could not fail to feel all this. It quickly leaked to the press that she was being dubbed [and] wasn’t ‘really’ singing the part she’d wrested from Julie and for which she was being so highly paid.”³⁶

The sympathetic tone contained a certain amount of crocodile tears. Harrison, in fact, was in no mood to accommodate his “new” Eliza after discovering that, at $250,000, his salary was only a quarter of hers. In his opinion, it was he who had been responsible for the stage (and potential film) success of My Fair Lady, and he was incensed by the inequity. Even Cukor was getting more than himself ($300,000). Though he was hostile to Audrey at first, their relationship gradually warmed as he realized that her difficulties would enable him to dominate the film.³⁷

Harrison’s “outward self-assurance was only a cover-up for an even greater self-assurance underneath,” said Previn. “There seemed to be only two ways to approach any problem: his way and the wrong way.... When Rex heard I had been engaged by Warners to serve as musical director, he flew into a rage. ‘I won’t have it, I don’t want him,’ he hissed at Alan Lerner. ‘For the entire run of the play, both on Broadway and in London, we had Franz Allers conducting the orchestra. Franz knows exactly how I sing and how I speak, my cadences and my rhythms. There’s no one like Franz, that’s who I want, that’s who we must get.’ ...

“Alan persuaded Rex to try—‘just try’—recording a number with me. [If] it didn’t work out, Rex could go to Jack Warner and have me replaced with Franz. [So] we scheduled the recording of ‘Let a Woman in Your Life.’ It went perfectly.... Rex had no problems, the orchestra and I had no problems, and the song was finished ahead of schedule. That night, Alan called Rex from New York: ‘How did it go? Did you get any of it finished?’ Rex interrupted him, ‘Yes, yes, dear boy, it was terrific. I get along fine with André, and he followed my singing without the slightest trouble. In fact, he was certainly better than that Germanic son of a bitch we used to have in the pit!’ ”³⁸

Previn today smiles at the recollection before delivering his final verdict: “Rex Harrison, who gave one of the most transcendental performances ever, was—and I don’t say this lightly—the most appalling human being I ever worked with. He was charming and funny and a great raconteur but, Jesus Christ, what he did to people. Rex didn’t like Audrey very much. He was mean about her, not to her. That was very much more his style.”

He wanted Julie Andrews?

“No, he didn’t want anybody. He felt whatever fuss was made about Audrey or Julie was pointless, because nobody was interested in the girl. They were only interested in him.”³⁹

Others with firsthand experience confirm that appraisal. “I’d known Rex since I was twelve,” says Roddy McDowall, who costarred with him on the New York stage and in two films, Midnight Lace (1960) and the calamitous Cleopatra (1963). “He was emotionally unstable, like a wanton child. You always had to approach him with a firehose. He was an exquisitely impeccable actor but a basic hysteric—and unconscionable to his fellow actors.”

Evidence of that was provided by their joint appearance in Jean Anouilh’s The Fighting Cock on Broadway. “Rex was all wrong for the general because he just viscerally could not be a victim,” McDowall recalls. “Everything in him revolted against it. We had a great scene in which my character made a total ass of his character. It was imperative that he be humiliated in the second act so that he could be triumphant in the third. But he couldn’t and wouldn’t play it correctly. He was never where he was supposed to be, and I never knew what he would do next. He’d go downstage and mug and try to distract me—primi—tive tactics. It was his first Broadway appearance after My Fair Lady, and it ran for a month because of the advance sales. But it was agony.”⁴⁰

The My Fair Lady film script closely resembled the one he performed exactly 2,717 times on stage. But he insisted that all his musical numbers be performed and shot live—an unheard-of practice in Hollywood—and, as usual, he got his way. Harrison claimed he never sang a number the same way twice; he scorned the lip-synch technique. Thus a microphone was set in his tie and a transmitter strapped to his leg, so that his singing could be recorded over and mixed with the pre-recorded music—a technical problem of such magnitude that two unions demanded extra pay for it.⁴¹

“It made it much easier for him,” says André Previn. “A lot of people said, ‘That son of a bitch!’ But he had a point. I was in his corner. What it left me with was that insane delivery of his without any accompaniment except the piano, which was fed into his ear. So I had this madman with the up-and-down voice and I had to put on earphones and chase him with the orchestra. That was hard work. Which he never acknowledged.”⁴²

PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY on My Fair Lady began August 13, 1963, and continued for four and a half months on the majority of Warners’ twenty-six soundstages. Only Mel, Doris Brynner, and Hubert de Givenchy were allowed onto the closed set. In Garboesque fashion, Audrey could not tolerate anyone in “eyeline” range while she was in Eliza mode. “Seeing a strange face looming beyond the cameras dispels the mood I’m trying to set,” she said. “It throws me off balance.”⁴³

Obligingly, Cukor set up a series of black baffles with peepholes, screening off the action from all but the minimum necessary technicians. “Cukor always closed his sets off for those big lady stars,” says Previn. “I don’t think it was a device just for Audrey. He did it for Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Garbo before.”⁴⁴

Her husband complained that “she wouldn’t even let me visit her on the set while she was in that bedraggled flower-girl characterization. But even at her dirtiest, she sprayed herself with a $100-an-ounce perfume, Joy. ‘I may look dirty,’ she’d say, ‘but I aim to smell pretty.’ ”⁴⁵ Mel thought that was charming, but some thought it an indication of her subliminal unsuitability for the role.

Theodore Bikel, the film’s sole surviving supporting star, thought Hepburn not just suitable but “the most enchanting figure that ever graced the screen.” As diplomat Zoltan Karpathy, Bikel’s one big moment was the ball scene in which he dances with Eliza. But the real-life Bikel was none too light on his feet.

“I was terrified,” he recalls. “I said to George Cukor, ‘I want dancing lessons. There can’t be the slightest danger that I step on this gorgeous creature’s toes.’ But she was easy as pie—gracious and collegial and lovely. A true aristocrat.”

Bikel’s outstanding memory of the filming?

“Cukor asked me before we shot my first entrance, ‘How would Karpathy greet Professor Higgins?’ I said, ‘Karpathy is a Hungarian, Mr. Cukor, and between the two of us, you’re the Hungarian.’ He said, ‘Yes, but you’re the actor.’ So I said, ‘All right, if you ask me, I would come in and kiss him on both cheeks.’ And that’s how it came about that I was the only male actor ever to make an entrance kissing Rex Harrison.”⁴⁶

The grimmest moment of the ballroom shooting occurred when veteran character actor Henry Daniell, a close friend of Cukor’s and brilliant featured player in Camille, among other Cukor films, suddenly keeled over dead on the set.

My Fair Lady contained 165 scenes and seventeen musical numbers, each seeming to pose more difficulty than the one before. In a short early scene with just two lines of dialogue, for example, Higgins says to Pickering, “Shall we ask this baggage to sit down, or shall we throw her out the window?” Eliza yowls, “I won’t be called a baggage when I’ve offered to pay like any lydee.” It took twelve takes before Cukor was satisfied. Tempers were growing short all around, Previn recalls:

“Marni, after many days of recording ..., became rather difficult and resistant to Alan Jay Lerner’s instructions. To be fair, he gave six directions per syllable, so her reticence was not entirely unwarranted. But on this particular day, she took off the earphones, bridling, and snapped, ‘Are you aware, Mr. Lerner, that I have dubbed the voice for Deborah Kerr and Natalie Wood and dozens of others?’ Alan’s reply was prompt... ‘And are you aware, dear, that all those ladies dubbed your face?’”⁴⁷

Audrey herself had outbursts of temperament unprecedented in her career. During one August rehearsal of “Loverly,” while dancing on the non-skid rubber cabbage leaves and mouthing the words to the song, she did the unthinkable: She stopped the scene twice herself, instead of letting director Cukor do so, stamping her feet in frustration and bursting into tears.⁴⁸

On July 19, Beaton recorded:

This past week has been a swine.... Audrey, George and I watched the latest tests. Deeply depressing.... Eliza’s Ascot dress gave me a nasty jolt; the poppies on her hat became orange. But who would have guessed that in the long shots the black-and-white striped lacings and bows would appear green and yellow? As for today’s attempt at glamour, Audrey’s elaborate cloak is not suitable, as I had expected: on the screen it looks as if it were made of a tarpaulin. Her Ball hairdress looks like a bird’s nest, while her makeup assumes the color of canned salmon.

It did not cheer him up to learn that the bill for the costumes he had made so far was $500,000.⁴⁹ “Everyone’s nerves are explosive,” said Audrey. “Everyone’s on edge.”⁵⁰

Even so, Beaton grew more and more impressed with her characterization. On August 21, he observed that the flower girl was no longer just “sweet little Audrey Hepburn, dressed as a cute cockney with a dab of dirt becomingly placed on her nose: this was a wraughty guttersnipe, full of fight and determination, a real ‘rotten cabbage leaf.’ ...

“Every dawn Audrey has to have her hair covered with grease, then with a lot of brown Fuller’s Earth. The effect is really dirty, and psychologically must be very depressing. Tiring, too: it takes another hour to wash out the dirt before going home. Audrey said she was beginning to warm up in her part, but was sad that on the first day’s shooting she didn’t get into the right groove; had been too strident, her eyes bugged.... ‘I see what it should be now that it’s too late,’ she laughed, wistfully.”⁵¹

GEORGE CUKOR, meanwhile, was having serious difficulties with Cecil Beaton. Through their mutual friend Greta Garbo, they had known each other for years but deeply mistrusted one another. After their initial “honeymoon” on the project, both of them came to regard Audrey as their personal property and began feuding over her. They were of clashing gay types—Cukor the closeted perfectionist, Beaton the extroverted egomaniac—and their struggle for control of Audrey and her affections escalated.

“George had a bungalow on the set,” recalls André Previn, “and almost every day, one or the other would go slamming out of the screen door saying something that ended in ‘cunt.’ ”⁵²

The catalyst of the blowup was Cukor’s order, in mid-production, restricting Beaton’s access to photograph Audrey on the set. Beaton fumed; his monumental vanity was easily wounded. He had a keen sense of Hepburn’s importance as a fashion icon of the mid-century, and of his own importance in packaging and marketing her. By this time, he had taken more than a thousand pictures of her in My Fair Lady costumes for lavish photo spreads that he sold to virtually all the major American and British magazines. Those pieces had generated tremendous advance publicity for the film and tremendous fees for himself. But he had a voracious appetite for more.^at

“The reason George got so angry at him is because Cecil stored every person and experience in his life to exploit then or later,” says Roddy McDowall, who knew both men well and observed them with a sharp eye. “He used people, and he was profligate.” Greed headed the list of Beaton’s character defects and offended Cukor’s private and professional scruples. Two thousand photos to date? Enough was enough! Publishing intimate details of his sexual encounters with Greta Garbo? Unconscionable! Yet Cecil could boast of such affronts.After hearing him do so once during the 1959 New York run of Look After Lulu (designed by Beaton, costarring McDowall), Roddy asked, “‘Cecil, you’d sell your grandmother’s fingernails, wouldn’t you?’ His reply was, ‘Of course I would, dear.’ He didn’t see it as betrayal.”

But Cukor did. He felt that Beaton had become a kind of monster, shamelessly abusing his well-paid position to make lucrative side deals; and that his intrusive presence on the set was distracting Audrey. “Cecil was Talleyrand, full of art and craft,” says McDowall, “whereas George was a very just man-but if you did him dirt, he was unforgiving.”⁵³

Once Cukor came to believe that Beaton was taking advantage of him, the tension between them increased and so did the director’s restrictions. During a set break in October, Beaton asked Audrey to pose and she agreed. But as soon as they began, assistant director Buck Hall informed Cecil, “Mr. Cukor doesn’t want you to take pictures of Audrey while they are fixing the lights.” Then when? he asked. “Mr. Cukor does not want you to photograph her on the set during any of her working days,” said Hall. “All her days are working days,” Beaton snapped. Looking very pained, Audrey said, “I can’t be in the middle of this.”⁵⁴

By November, Beaton was having as much trouble capturing her with his palette as with his camera, and she was having troubles, too: “Audrey has no spare time to pose for a painting, so I suggested that [she] sit during her lunch interval. A great effort to slash paint on canvas while she ate her salad and talked of the sad things that happened to her over the weekend. Her son had been ill with a temperature of 103 degrees, the canary had flown away, and somebody had stolen from her mobile dressing-room a bag with her diamond wedding ring in it.... My painting just passable under the circumstances.”⁵⁵

On November 18, Mel called Beaton to say that “Audrey was completely depleted and was taking three days off to sleep and rest, and be treated by a doctor.”⁵⁶ She returned to work on the blackest day in twentieth-century American history.

“We were filming the part where Eliza returns to Covent Garden with Freddy,” recalled Jeremy Brett, when someone rushed up to their carriage with word that President John F. Kennedy had been murdered. “We sat in the carriage with the blinds down, holding each other and crying on stage seven at Warner Brothers.”⁵⁷ George Cukor was too distraught to make the announcement. When no one else would do it, Audrey stoically volunteered.

For millions, America’s innocence and idealism died with Kennedy on November 22, 1963. For Hepburn and her colleagues, it was the day the joy went out of My Fair Lady once and for all.

Shooting finished a few days before Christmas. Beaton bid a fond farewell to Audrey a week earlier: “They were shooting the scene where Eliza returns to Covent Garden Market after the row with Higgins ... the sort of scene Audrey can do to perfection. She is at her best when portraying sweet sympathy and compassion.... I crossed the cobblestones towards Audrey. She had put a Shetland shawl around her shoulders, and looked forlorn.”⁵⁸

MARNI NIXON remembers watching Hepburn the actress at work, “listening and carefully taking all their directions and then, after they were through, doing it exactly the way she wanted. Everybody around the room said, ‘Oh, isn’t she wonderful, she took what I said to heart.’ But to me, all she did was thread it through herself. She was just placating everybody.”⁵⁹

A legendary characterization of Hepburn is attributed to Dory Previn: “Audrey has a whim of iron.” Hollywood folklore is a marvelous but often erroneous thing.

“The ‘whim of iron’ statement is wonderful,” says Dory’s ex-husband André, “but it was said by director Robert Mulligan—and not about Audrey but about Natalie Wood. Of course, it’s true that what Audrey wanted, she got. The fact that she beguiled you into giving it to her, as opposed to bullying you like Joan Crawford, doesn’t make much difference.

“One time on the set she went to Cukor and said, ‘George, darling, could I possibly leave a little early after lunch?’ She came up with some extraordinary reason and asked so circuitously. George said, ‘Listen, honey, you’re a big star. You want to fucking get out of here? Just say so.’ She thought it was terribly funny. She always got what she wanted.”⁶⁰

Except—on My Fair Lady—what she wanted most. Before, during and after, she was never convinced that, except for a few high notes, she could not have sung the whole score.⁶¹

“There’s a lot of her in ‘Just You Wait, ’Enry ‘Iggins,”’ says Previn. “Every time it was humanly feasible, I would cut her in to the finished track. In ‘Loverly,’ there were a couple of things, and off and on in ‘Show Me.’ We used as much of her as we could. I used more than they were aware of at the time. But I couldn’t get away with too much.”⁶²

In the final product, perhaps 10 percent of Eliza’s singing, at most, was Hepburn’s. When some publications claimed Audrey had sung “almost half” of the role, Nixon’s husband issued an indignant denial, at which point Cukor lost patience and replied, “The whole thing is a great bore to me. It is mischievous and unattractive to make a Federal case out of it.”⁶³

Thirty years later, the evidence suggests that at the top level there was never any question about dubbing Hepburn’s voice and that it was duplicity all along to let her think she would sing it herself. Testimony to that effect comes from Rudy Fehr, the executive in charge of post-production music and sound editing at Warner Brothers. Hepburn was allowed to make “a couple of tracks for her own satisfaction,” says Fehr—essentially just to humor her—but as for any serious intention to use her voice, “Never. Nobody ever said anything about that, and I was with Jack Warner all the time.”⁶⁴

Asked if in fact they were just leading her on, Previn replies, “Very likely. But ‘they’ did not include anybody on such a low level as me. ‘They’ was probably Jack Warner and Rudy and some other executives, maybe George. We went through the same charade with Leslie Caron on Gigi. She was absolutely sure she was going to do it, and they knew bloody well she couldn’t. Since she and I were close friends, they gave me the unenviable duty of saying, ‘Leslie, you’re not going to do it.’ ”⁶⁵

“That was a disappointment,” Caron reflects. “I tried to do a recording, but my voice was not trained and the studio unfortunately didn’t take care of training me.”^66au

Lost in the My Fair Lady dubbing shuffle was Jeremy Brett. “I know exactly how Audrey felt because the same thing happened to me,” he said. “When I arrived on the set, I found to my horror that someone else [Bill Shirley] had sung my song [‘On the Street Where You Live’].⁶⁷ What Audrey really had to contend with was the ghost of Julie Andrews.”⁶⁸

She was still contending with that ghost as late as 1991 on Larry King Live: “I did think the part of Eliza was right for me,” she said, “but it was Julie Andrews’s, so I had sort of an aching heart about that.” When King asked her who did the singing, she replied—disingenuously or not—“I’ve forgotten her name, a lovely girl,” and then added with a touch of real or mock irritation, “I sang a bit of it, Larry!”⁶⁹

THE LONG-AWAITED, $17-million My Fair Lady—nearly three hours in length—was released with great fanfare in October 1964. Audrey agreed to a heavy round of promotional appearances, attending premieres in ten cities on four separate trips to America.

The dubbing controversy would not go away. At the New York opening, she looked constrained but put the best face on it for the press: “I took singing lessons from a New York vocal coach and pre-recorded all of Eliza’s songs,” she said, ”but the final result is a blend.⁷⁰ I must say, I take my hat off to the marvelous people in Hollywood who twiddle all the knobs and who can make one voice out of two.“⁷¹

The critics did not let up. “Although miming to a canned voice has long been a tradition of film musicals, I still find the sight of a beautiful dummy singing someone else’s head off rather less than enthralling,” wrote Philip Oakes in the London Sunday Telegraph.

“With Marni Nixon doing the singing,” wrote Hedda Hopper, “Audrey Hepburn gives only half a performance.” Others criticized not so much the dubbing itself as the fact that Nixon received no screen credit for it and the implication that Warner Brothers was trying to hide the truth.^av “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Jack Warner replied. “We’ve been doing it for years. We even dubbed Rin-Tin Tin.”^aw

Even so, Hepburn received praise from many quarters. But when the thirty-seventh annual Oscar nominees were announced in February 1965, My Fair Lady’s twelve nominations did not include one for Best Actress, and the news was treated as a scandal. “JULIE ANDREWS CHOSEN, AUDREY HEPBURN OMITTED,” said the page one Los Angeles Times headline. Variety was blunt about the reason why: “Hepburn did the acting, but Marni Nixon subbed for her in the singing department and that’s what undoubtedly led to her erasure.”

Warner called it “outrageous” and took it as a personal affront. In typically quirky fashion, he thought it was due to the quality of Nixon’s singing and released a statement saying, “The next time we have some star-dubbing to do, we’ll hire Maria Callas.” Julie Andrews, when tracked down by the press, said, “I think Audrey should have been nominated. I’m very sorry she wasn’t.” Rex Harrison said the same. Katharine Hepburn sent her a telegram saying, “Don’t worry about not being nominated. Some day you’ll get another one for a part that doesn’t rate.”⁷²

Audrey was in Spain when word of the Oscar snub reached her, and immediately attributed it to the dubbing.

“The trouble was, Marni blabbed all over town that she was going to more or less ‘save’ the movie,” says André Previn. “George Cukor, who along with all of us worshipped Audrey, got very angry. He said, ‘Listen, you’re getting a lot of money for this and you’re going to get a lot of money from the recording. Why don’t you shut up about it?’ Marni got a little too much mileage out of the publicity. Audrey is the only one who never said anything negative about her. That was beneath Audrey.“⁷³

Nixon denies and bristles at the “blabbing” charge, as well as the subsequent reports that she was “blacklisted” for revealing her dubbing of Hepburn in My Fair Lady:

“I was upset that people thought Audrey didn’t get nominated because I did the dubbing and [that] I was purposefully trying to push that knowledge out.... I did say that during the filming of The King and I, the PR department threatened that I would ‘never work in this town again’ if I let anyone know. But that was King and I. My Fair Lady was the last film dubbing job I did, but not because I was ‘prevented’—only because that era was over and pictures like that weren’t being made anymore.”⁷⁴

In fact, the main source of information about the dubbing of Hepburn was not Nixon but, rather, the aggrieved friends of Julie Andrews. No one particularly cared when Nixon dubbed Deborah Kerr or Natalie Wood; but they cared when she dubbed Hepburn, considering it insult to the injury of depriving Andrews of her rightful role. In any case, the beneficiary of the dubbing fracas was Julie Andrews, now the highly favored Oscar nominee for her performance in the saccharine Mary Poppins.

The ordeal, for Audrey, wasn’t over. She was now faced with the Awards night itself—to go or not? If she didn’t, Warner and Cukor would be upset and everyone would accuse her of bad sportsmanship. The decision was soon made for her: By tradition, Patricia Neal, the previous year’s Best Actress winner for Hud, should hand out the current year’s Best Actor award. But Neal was still recovering from a devastating stroke, and Hepburn was asked by the Academy to stand in for her. Under those circumstances, there was no way she could decline.

Cukor, the front-runner for Best Director, was her escort on the night of April 5 in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and he won as expected—his first Oscar victory in five nominations over the decades. In his acceptance speech, he thanked “Miss Audrey Hepburn, whose magic makes it so easy for us to win these awards.” Most of the other My Fair Lady winners did the same in the course of the evening.

All night long, the TV cameras took every opportunity to scrutinize and juxtapose the faces of Hepburn and Andrews, building up the “tension” over Best Actress. It was won by Andrews, who thereby achieved the instant (and lasting) film success that Warner believed she could never attain. After accepting the statuette from Sidney Poitier, Andrews delivered the most acerbic remark of the night: “My thanks to Mr. Jack L. Warner, who made all this possible.”⁷⁵

Her mellower assessment came later. “I’ll never know to this day whether it was sentiment that won it for me or whether the performance in Poppins really did,” she said in 1993, adding with a smile, “I think it was the sentiment, myself.” ⁷⁶

Andrews’s triumph and Hepburn’s humiliation were now complete, it seemed. For Audrey, at least the worst was over. Next up was the Best Actor award, and she got a warm “consolation” reception when she stepped out radiantly—in gorgeous Givenchy gown—to present it. The name in the envelope was Rex Harrison’s, and she read it out beaming with real joy, kissing him repeatedly when he reached the stage to take Oscar from her hands. Harrison seemed as pleased by Hepburn’s pleasure as by the award itself. In his thank-you, he said, “I should actually divide the statue in half ” to share it with her, ending diplomatically with, “I admire both my fair ladies.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whether Audrey was in jeans and a bandanna or all dolled up for the Oscars—she was so beautiful that you couldn’t bear it. Audrey coming up and saying hello wilted strong men. Along with everybody, I would just drown in those eyes. I discussed this I suppose in a locker-room fashion with a few of my contemporaries, but there was almost never anything carnal in it. You wouldn’t look at her and say, ‘Boy, would I like to—’ She didn’t provoke that. My wife once said to me, ‘How close were you to Audrey?’ I said, ‘I was hopelessly in love with her.’ She said, ‘Good,’ because she knew it would never come to anything....

“Audrey knew how to handle flattery when it was not connected with a come-on. Once we were talking, and I kept looking at her until she said, ‘What’s the matter, what are you looking at?’ I said, ‘Audrey, you’re just so beautiful, I can’t stand it.’ She giggled and took my hand and said, ‘Come to dinner.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ It was wonderfully done.”⁹⁴

Her vulnerability was no longer childlike—but still very much a part of her. During one My Fair Lady recording session, Previn recalls going up to her and saying, “Audrey, when I turn to cue you in, you look like you’ve been caught in a deer snare. Could you keep the terror out of your eyes? You look like a fawn that’s about to get shot.” At the end of filming, she presented him with a heavy, silver ceremonial baton from Mendelssohn’s day inscribed, To André, Love from a Fawn.

Hepburn’s friend John McCallum, the Australian actor, opined that “Sex starts in the eyes. A film close-up of an attractive woman’s face is far sexier than a close-up of naked breasts. There is an expression to the effect that men make love to women’s faces, and I think there is a good deal of truth in it.”

Audrey agreed, and once expressed her own opinion on the subject with a surprising lack of self-effacement: “Sex appeal is something that you feel deep down inside. It’s suggested rather than shown.... I’m not as well-stacked as Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, but there is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much appeal fully clothed, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.”⁹⁵

Loren and Lollobrigida were hardly comparable to Hepburn. Leslie Caron was. Their gamine personas were similar, despite which, says Caron, no rivalry existed between them:

“I’m not somebody who’s jealous. I truly thought Audrey was magnificent, and I thought she had many qualities I lacked, and perhaps I had one or two she didn’t have. I thought she was so gorgeous, so elegant, so refined, and so adorable. But I thought perhaps I had more sense of drama than she had.”

In their twenties, Hepburn and Caron played many of the same parts, from Gigi to Ondine, but at this point, as actresses, they and their roles had totally diverged: Caron seemed to change. Hepburn seemed not to.

“It was partly a financial thing,” says Caron. “She wasn’t under contract. She was free. She earned a great deal more money than I and didn’t need to adapt so much to circumstances, whereas I really did have to go on working out of necessity—and I’m glad of it. I developed a sort of second career as a sometimes outrageous, frivolous, middle-aged woman, and sometimes the opposite type of modest, subservient woman, as when I played the wife of Lenin. I was forced to become more versatile.”⁹⁶

There were reports that Hepburn had wanted the part of the pregnant French girl, superbly played by Caron in The L-Shaped Room (1963), but Caron says, “No, I don’t think that’s true.”

Audrey and her image didn’t need it.

THE ISSUES of Hepburn’s image and publicity were now causing problems with Mel and with her friend Henry Rogers. One of Hollywood’s top publicists, Rogers had met her during War and Peace and, in the years since, had guided and protected her and played a large role in molding the public view of her. Rogers, in his memoirs, recorded intimate impressions of both Ferrers:

She never had the burning desire to ... remain a movie star, as do most actresses, but instead cared only for personal happiness, peace, love, her children, a husband whom she loved and who loved her. Rarely did I ever see her happy. It was no secret that her marriage with Mel was not a happy one. It seemed to me that she loved him more than he loved her, and it was frustrating for her not to have her love returned in kind. She had confided these feelings to me.... I always saw the sadness in her eyes....

She wanted to work less and spend more time [with Mel and Sean]. She was filled with love. Mel was filled with ambition, for his wife and for himself. [He] had pushed her into the relationship ... with me, and although we became close friends, she always bridled when I mentioned the need for an interview or a photo session.... I performed a constant balancing act between Mel’s insatiable desire for Audrey’s new publicity and her reluctance.⁹⁷

The beginning of the end of the Hepburn-Rogers professional relationship came on a Sunday at the Ferrers’ home in Switzerland where Audrey, Mel and Henry engaged in a heated discussion of her career. At issue was the new Givenchy perfume, L’Interdit.

“Mel,” said Rogers, “resented the fact that she had given Givenchy her name and likeness to launch his first venture into the fragrance business. Vogue, Harper’s Baaar, Town and Country and other mags all over the world were carrying a magnificent portrait of Audrey, indicating that the fragrance had been created exclusively for her. Givenchy had built a multimillion-dollar business using Audrey—without compensating her.”

At Mel’s request, Rogers had stopped in Paris to meet with Givenchy’s brother Claude and discuss compensation for the use of Audrey’s likeness. Mel had said, “For Christ’s sake, Henry, she doesn’t even get a discount on the clothes he designs for her. As for the perfume, wouldn’t you think he would send her gallons of it as a gift? She buys it herself—retail!”

Rogers now told the Ferrers about his meeting in Paris and said the Givenchys were agreeable to some payment. But Audrey said, “Neither of you seems to understand. I don’t want anything from Hubert. I don’t need his money. He is my friend. If I have helped him build his perfume business, then that’s exactly what one friend should do for another.... Yes, I even want to walk into a drugstore and buy the perfume at the retail price.”

At that tense moment, according to Rogers, the doorbell rang and yet another crisis presented itself in the form of Favre Le Bret, director of the Cannes Film Festival, with whom Audrey, Mel and Rogers had been friendly for years. He had come to ask Audrey to attend the opening night of that year’s festival.

“Mel had asked me what I thought about it,” said Rogers. “I told him I was opposed, that there was no reason for Audrey to attend the opening ceremonies. She didn’t have a film that was being screened. She did not need or care about the publicity she would get out of it. [But] Mel kept insisting I talk to him.”

Audrey left the room. “I’m going upstairs to see Sean,” she said. “You fellows decide what to do.” Rogers told Le Bret there had to be a reason for Hepburn to attend—and soon came up with one himself. The festival, he proposed, should create a new annual award—“a special tribute to one person, an actor, an actress, a producer, or a director who has made an outstanding contribution to [film]. This year it could be Audrey.” Le Bret said he’d think about it. The next morning, Rogers’s hotel phone rang and the sobbing voice at the other end was Audrey’s.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is something wrong with Sean?”

“No, Henry, it’s you. You know how much I care about you—how much I value your friendship. I’m crying because I have decided that I don’t want you to represent me anymore.... I just can’t stand any more of this. I just don’t like what is happening to me, and my life and my friends.... First you embarrassed me with Hubert, [and last night] Favre Le Bret told me you had tried to blackmail him, that you told him the only way I would go to the Cannes Film Festival would be if he gave me some kind of phony, trumped-up award. Henry, I don’t want you to work for me anymore. Will you still be my friend?”

Rogers was stunned. “Here was a lively, sensitive person, genuinely sobbing her heart out,” he said. “She really did not want to be involved in the complex world which is part and parcel of the motion picture industry—the intrigue, the deals, the negotiations that go on behind the scenes.” Of course they would remain friends, he told her, but “you must understand one thing. You have known me for many years. You know how I work. You know very well that I never tried to blackmail Le Bret. If he is stupid enough to interpret my proposal [that way], I never want anything to do with him again—and you shouldn’t either.”⁹⁸

Hepburn and Rogers did remain friends. But the man who really instigated Rogers’s dealings with Le Bret and Givenchy was Mel Ferrer—and he took her dismissal of Rogers hard.