Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (16 page)

But
Skolsky was still impressed with her demeanor, despite the cliches he relied
upon to tell his readers about Audrey. “You sit up and take notice,”
he wrote, “because her arrival is like a blare of trumpets. This is an
actress in the grand manner: another Garbo, Bette Davis, Katie Hepburn, Greer
Garson, Joan Crawford, or who-have-you. This is IT!”

That
assessment was not shared by costar Humphrey Bogart. Probably out of jealousy
over the fact that his love, Lauren Bacall, had been turned down for the title
character of
Sabrina,
and coupled
with the insecurity bred by binge drinking, Bogart resented the attention being
heaped on Audrey.

“How
do you like working with that dream girl?” Clifton Webb asked him one day
on the
Paramount
lot.

“‘She’s
okay,” he said ruefully, “if you like to do thirty-six takes.”
He deemed her an obsessive lightweight who continually tried to do better
without much talent to go on.

And
he didn’t keep his opinion to himself, sharing his intense dislike of Audrey
with all who would listen. People familiar with the facts assumed that Bogie
was miserable himself.

He
was actually a replacement for Cary Grant, who had had to pull out of
Sabrina at the last minute. No amount of
script tinkering save for a complete rewrite could make Bogart feel comfortable
in the part of a debonair tycoon. But his character’s personality really could
not be revised to fit the more gruff Bogart if the plot of the movie were to
advance as written.

Like
Roman Holiday, Sabrina
relies upon
the believability of its central character undergoing a complete change. In
this case, the time-honored traditional plot line of an ugly duckling turning
into a swan was enhanced by an emotional transformation that paralleled the
physical change. Audrey based her career on portraying just such
characters—impish waifs who become the epitome of elegance before the final
credits.

Edith
Head, who was hired again to work with Audrey, almost quit the picture when she
was told that she would only be working on costumes Sabrina would wear before
her trip to
Paris
.
A leading young designer, Hubert de Givenchy, would be given the task of
creating Sabrina’s sophisticated post-European wardrobe.

Audrey
met with Givenchy in
Paris
in 1953. He was twenty-six, just two years older than she, and they immediately
fell in love with each other’s sense of style. She would become his muse; he
would become her staunchest supporter and creator of the minimal look which
defined her appearance. “Audrey knew herself perfectly,” he said,
“the qualities as well as the flaws. I think that’s why she was so loyal to
me. I didn’t hide anything of hers. I let her be. But it just so happened, I
didn’t really believe she had many flaws in her appearance—and certainly not
in her personality. But I humored her. In that first movie, she was terribly
insecure about her bust line. But I told her people would look at her eyes
first no matter what size her breasts were. Her eyes were that important. And I
believed that. And I think I persuaded her of that, too.”

Billy
Wilder, the brilliant Austrian director of such tough movies as
The Lost Weekend, Stalag 17, and
Double Indemnity, tackled the comedy of
Sabrina with the same kind of intensity.
He strengthened the humor by tailoring his screenplay (cowritten with Samuel
Taylor and Ernest Lehman) to the female perspective. And unlike the many movies
about the coming of age of young men,
Sabrina
makes clear that the process of sophistication a young woman endures is not
because money or success is the anticipated reward. For a young woman’s coming
of age, romance is the payoff.

Sabrina
wants to better herself and her situation because she has fallen in love with
someone in a higher social order. It’s simple, and certainly a more romantic
story line than the usually more prosaic accounts written from the male
perspective.

The
plot is ingeniously simple: Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey), daughter of the
Larrabee family chauffeur on
Long Island
, has
aspirations above her station. As part of her grand ambition, she develops a
crush on David Larrabee (William Holden), the younger Larrabee son. A
quintessential playboy, he is disdainful of her attentions, deeming her a mere
girl, not at all like the women he has been attracted to in the past, three of
whom he married.

Because
she is nearly invisible as the daughter of the chauffeur, Sabrina is able to
spy on young Larrabee with unabashed nosiness. Wilder makes a great point of
showing just how easily the ruling class ignores its underlings, and his
documentary-style camera angles in these scenes—in which Sabrina is clearly in
the frame but David Larrabee doesn’t see her-points out the sad inequity of
class without seeming polemical.

In
one such moment, she watches David as he woos a young woman one evening on the
family tennis court. Sabrina is so distraught over the hurtful reality that her
attraction is not mutual that she attempts suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning
in her father’s garage.

But
David’s older brother, Linus (Humphrey Bogart), saves her.

Her
father (John Williams) has begun to recognize that his daughter’s fantasy life
is encroaching upon his territory. He decides to send her away.
Paris
is chosen, not for
its image as the City of
Light
or a center for lovers, but because it has some of the best cooking schools in
the world. The chauffeur naturally expects his daughter to become a cook.

Sabrina
turns out to be a hopeless cook, a stroke of great fortune for the rest of the
movie, an inevitability, much like the wonderful luck that follows. An aging
baron (Marcel Dalio) takes a benign interest in changing her image and begins
to educate Sabrina in the ways of the cultured, wealthy, European aristocracy
of which he is a leading member.

The
make-over is complete. In an unabashed tribute to
Pygmalion
, when Sabrina returns to
Long Island
a poised and elegant young lady, David drives by the train station where she is
patiently waiting for her father—and doesn’t recognize her.

In
one of the most enticing scenes of the movie, he gamely offers to drive her
home—an obvious attempt at a pickup. Wilder highlights David’s by now tired
lines of seduction, while contrasting Sabrina’s refined style and
accomplishment in the art of conversation. Not until he pulls up in front of
the family’s palatial estate does he realize who Sabrina is.

The
tables are turned; in fact, David is now so taken with Sabrina, it is as if
there had been no tables before this. She is demure now, noncommittal, as he
attempts to interest her in seeing him again.

Just
as she is about to capitulate, older brother Linus—Sabrina’s
lifesaver—reappears and makes his intentions known. On the surface, he is the
perfect suitor: wise, a trifle dull, but oh so reliable.

Curiously,
Wilder interferes with the natural course of events here and introduces a plot
twist that seems jarring and, ultimately, unsatisfying.

As
a guest of David’s at a party at the Larrabee mansion, certainly still
“the big house” in Sabrina’s eyes, she charms all the guests—most
especially the gentlemen—with her quiet wit and undivided attention.

But
David makes clear he doesn’t want to share his “find,” an unusual set
of circumstances for the normally happy-go-lucky playboy. This change does not
go unnoticed by Linus, who hovers around the party, always on the periphery,
silently and quietly—almost sneakily—trying to arrange things in his own
grand plan.

And
he has one for brother David. In order to increase the family’s holdings, Linus
has arranged for David to marry a sugar heiress. He feels no remorse in pushing
this outcome; after all, his brother has never exhibited a long attention span,
never—current infatuation included—seemed truly in love.

But
in order to effect these results, Linus decides he must make a play for Sabrina
himself, to distract her from his more flamboyant brother. He is banking on the
fact that his well-known reputation as a trustworthy fellow will now begin to
appeal to the newly sophisticated Sabrina.

Linus
plays the part well.

Sabrina
slowly becomes smitten, and his stodginess begins to seem appealing after the
rather unreliable David. Yet Linus has no plans other than aggrandizing the
family business. He pretends to want to marry Sabrina only to concoct an
elaborate plan to get her out of the country. On the pretext of a honeymoon
trip, he tells her he’s booked passage on a ship bound for
Europe
;
in reality, he doesn’t show up and she sails alone.

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