Read Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait Online
Authors: Diana Maychick
But
they came. Alfred Lunt, the epitome of an English gentleman, was also a
director, and in that capacity he was required to tell his cast members what to
do. According to wife Lynn Fontanne, whenever he gave direction to Audrey, she
would look to Ferrer to get the final okay. Not only did it infuriate Lunt, it
slowed down rehearsals and alienated Audrey from the rest of the cast and crew.
But
still she was devoted to putting on the best show she could. On the evening
Ondine opened in
sent word that the first preview of Sabrina in
audience. When Ferrer congratulated her on the news after the first act, she
was nonplused for several minutes. “That’s all very nice and very
fine,” she finally said. “But don’t you think the first act ran
rather long and too slowly?”
Ferrer
agreed that it was too long, and he took it upon himself to mark some dialogue
he thought could be cut and show it to director Lunt. Lunt had not bargained on
having a codirector on
Ondine,
and he
bridled at Ferrer’s interference. But when it came time for curtain calls every
evening, there was Ferrer at Audrey’s side. She insisted he share the limelight
with her. Although audiences were aghast that he took his bows with her, Ferrer
wanted to bask in Audrey’s acclaim. It felt good. He had never received such an
outpouring of warmth for any of his performances.
When
the play opened in
all kinks had been ironed out. But the stress had wreaked havoc on Audrey’s
health. She had lost ten pounds since rehearsals began and had developed such a
bad cold, she feared she would have no voice to recite her lines. But the same
willpower that had seen her through the devastation of war guided her through
the paces of her official opening night.
It
was all a blur to her. “I don’t remember getting onstage or saying my bits
or even the final curtain call,” she said. “All I can picture is the
tons upon tons of floral arrangements packed into my dressing room when I
returned. It was beautiful really, a garden in
flowers.”
The
drama critics threw bouquets as well. While Audrey and Ferrer and her mother
attended a party in her honor at the French Embassy, Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times rhapsodized about Audrey
in his office. “She is tremulously lovely,” he wrote. “She gives
a pulsing performance that is all grace and enchantment, disciplined by an
instinct for the realities of the stage.”
He
described the production as “ideal from every point of view. Ideal
literature, ideal acting, ideal theater-it hardly matters how you approach it.
We are lucky. There’s a magical play in town.
“Everyone
knows that Audrey Hepburn is an exquisite young lady, and no one has ever
doubted her talent for acting. But the part of Ondine is a complicated one. It is
compounded of intangibles—of moods and impressions, mischief and tragedy. See
how Miss Hepburn is able to translate them into the language of the theater
without artfulness or precociousness.”
There
was no doubt about it: Audrey had been embraced by one of the toughest theater
critics around. Yet she was curiously unfazed by the praise. Asked soon after
opening in
Ondine
for her definition
of success, she said, “It’s like reaching an important birthday and
finding out you’re exactly the same. All I feel is the responsibility to live
up to it. And even, with luck, survive it.”
Her
personal definition of success would not change. Throughout her life, Audrey
looked upon accomplishments as responsibilities which complicated her life.
There was the momentary thrill, and then a return to hard work. She really
didn’t know how to relax, until it was too late and she had gotten herself sick
with exhaustion.
A
month after she had won the Tony for
Ondine
and the Oscar for
Roman Holiday,
Audrey
was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Yet she never missed a performance of
Ondine. Every evening, after being feted
with multiple standing ovations, she left the
apartment. Her mother and a doctor would try to force-feed her, at least making
sure that she drank enough water to prevent dehydration. The effects of
success, celebrity, her love for Ferrer, and her mother’s hatred of him
combined to nearly push her over the brink. Her inability to eat had caused
malnourishment, and now she was suffering from anemia.
Gossip
columnists everywhere were busy trying to scoop one another with announcements
of Audrey’s imminent engagement to Ferrer, but her mother kept them just as
busy with her demands for retractions. The Baroness was adamant in her refusal
to accept the thrice-married Ferrer as a suitable suitor for her daughter, and
she and Ferrer engaged in an awful push-and-pull with Audrey, the woman they
both reputedly loved. Audrey suffered mightily.
“I
loved my mother with one-half of my heart,” she said. “And I loved
Mel with the other half. There was no room for compromise. It ate away at me
that they couldn’t get along.”
The
doctor who had been treating Audrey advised that she take a long rest cure. He
was worried about both her physical and emotional well-being. Headlines
bannered the news: “Audrey
Hepburn Rests Between Shows.” In May, her doctor ordered her to leave
Ondine. She worried about disappointing
the play’s producers, and worried more about having to immediately fulfill
obligations at
which had kindly granted her a sabbatical on her contract.
But
then she became too sick to worry. Although she had tried for months to please
everybody she encountered, it was finally time to think of herself.
The
producers of
Ondine,
fooled by the
fact that she had not missed a single performance in the show’s run, tried to
persuade her to stick with it through the summer. Then Associated British
Pictures chief Robert Clark arrived in
York
novelist Graham Greene, for Audrey to consider to fulfill her obligations to
the Elstree Studios in
the place that had launched her career.
In
late June of 1954,
the highest figure to that date ever bid on a foreign movie star. Ironically,
just as she was beginning to command a megastar salary for the day, like the
$2,500 a week she was paid on Broadway (plus a percentage of the profits) for
Ondine, Audrey had to drop out of the
scene for health reasons. Sadly, after she returned from
she could never quite recapture the financial footing she had achieved before
she left.
“Money
never made anyone happy in and of itself,” she said. “But it always
gave me a real sense of security, so it enhanced my ability to be happy. But I
always worked with what I had, hiding away my acorns just like the squirrels.
Sometimes there were more acorns, sometimes less. But I was never without at least
one nut!”
Chapter 14
What
Audrey publicly called “the agony of recharging the battery” was in
effect a medically mandated period of rest and recuperation necessary, in the
view of her doctors, to prevent a complete nervous breakdown.
In
Switzerland, where she went in late summer 1954 to escape the penetrating gaze
of a public hungry for anything to do with one of the world’s most popular
stars, she was ordered to stay in bed.
The
pain of facing herself was almost worse than the physical and mental anguish
that had brought her to this point. “Here I was, newly crowned a big star,
applauded for giving pleasure to so many people, and I finally woke up to the
fact that I didn’t know how to please
myself.
I was gravely unhappy, miserable really. I guess they would call it now a
severe depression. I should have been on top of the world—in fact, high on the
mountains in Burgenstock I was—but my morale was shot.