Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (22 page)

In
March of 1955, Audrey experienced premature labor pains and suffered a painful
miscarriage. “I wanted to cancel the movie,” she said. “I wanted
to cancel my life. But I moved forward for Mel. He thought that
War and Peace would help me get over my
grief and I felt it would help him recapture his career. I’m not sure it
accomplished either of those goals, but it helped pass a desolate time and
brought us closer together.”

The
kinks in the new wide-screen technique, VistaVision, were not ironed out by the
time director King Vidor began filming
War
and Peace,
and the magnitude of the venture—six screenwriters, four
thousand guns, six thousand rifles, seven thousand costumes (requiring more
than one hundred thousand buttons) and enough artificial snow for two
blizzards—added to the difficulties. Consequently, intimate scenes of personal
interchange were often lost in the maze of props, settings, and visual effects.

Although
the battle scenes between the French and Russian armies are stirring and
faultlessly executed, the small moments shared between major characters are
lost in the wide-frame technique.

“I
had such high hopes for
War and Peace
after
we finished filming,” Audrey recalled. “But in an epic, the
characters are less important than the historical sweep. In many frames, it
seems we humans are lost in the vistas. And there was just so much going on,
you almost need a map to follow it all.”

Vidor
had a hard time eliciting strong emotion from Audrey in
War and Peace.
She seemed to have no problem at all with the scenes
in which she depicted a somewhat bratty, self-indulgent young woman, but when
she was called upon to portray desolation, it was extremely difficult for her.

“I
was uncomfortable with so much going on within one film,” she said, by way
of explanation. “I was still in profound mourning for the loss of my
child, and I wasn’t able to exhibit too much emotion. I was afraid it wouldn’t
stop coming. I wanted to feel in control of my life. Maybe Vidor knew this,
because he downplayed the emotions anyway. He kept telling us the whole point
of this movie was to prove that movies were still contenders, that television
couldn’t compete on every level. Television clearly couldn’t compete in the
area of visual effects back then, and
War
and Peace
was made as a kind of showcase for big effects. I got the
impression the characters were secondary to the big battle scenes.

“We
couldn’t compete with those anyway. I mean next to a mammoth battle, a few
tears, however heartfelt, are going to look piddling anyway.

“For
me, of course, the movie grew boring when Mel’s character died,” Audrey
recalled. “But that speaks more about my desire to see him fully utilized
on-screen than anything about the success of the movie. This was a film I
decided to do because we could act in it together. It helped pass the time when
time was interminable.”

“Too
much war,” wrote one critic, “not enough peace.” The same could
be said for Audrey’s marriage. Audrey found that her desire to share her
success with Mel could not overcome the very real problems in their marriage.
Matters were not helped by the fact that the multimillion-dollar blockbuster
War and Peace was an incontrovertible
dud with critics and the public alike.

Chapter 16

As
so often happens, Audrey was feeling extremely low while her fans were putting
her higher and higher on the stardom pedestal. In a poll conducted in fifty
countries, the Foreign Film Association had voted her the most popular actress
in the world. Movies offers poured in. She had to hire two parttime secretaries
just to open the fan mail. But underneath the glittering exterior, Audrey was
in pain. She was still distraught over the loss of her baby, which she finally
admitted accounted for her distracted performance in
War and Peace.

“I
really never thought I’d be able to act again,” she recalled. “Mel
and I were experiencing a lot of tension at home, until I realized I really had
no desire to do anything. People always get the impression that he ruled my
life. But to some extent, and especially during my `down‘ days, I asked him to.
I couldn’t make decisions at all after the miscarriage. I wanted to be told
what to do. He told me. He was my husband, and I trusted him.

“Tennessee
Williams and [producer] Hal Wallis flew to Rome, where we were renting the
Alban Hills villa, to try to persuade me to do
Summer and Smoke.
It was too sad a role for me at the time, this
spinsterish schoolteacher who finally discovers love and doesn’t realize it.
But I didn’t know how to let them know. I had been leading them on. So when
they arrived, I desperately wanted Mel to turn them down for me. It was just my
luck that he was very late that night, and I was stuck talking a blue
streak—talking about anything and everything but the subject—until he got
home. He was pretty abrupt with them. He suggested I choose something light for
my next role. The truth is, it [his suggestion] sure sounded good to me.”

Audrey
made up her mind about
Funny Face
in
two short hours. “I felt I didn’t sing well enough, or dance well enough,
but the idea of working with Fred Astaire clinched it for me.” Her first
movie musical, it would become a cult classic with the fashion industry and
insure her popularity for years to come.

Paramount
had bought a property called
Wedding Day,
developed by Leonard Gershe about his friend, photographer Richard Avedon.
The studio retitled it
Funny Face,
the
name of a 1920s stage musical starring Fred Astaire and his sister Adele.

In
the 1957 movie version of
Funny Face,
Astaire
plays fashion photographer Dick Avery, and for verisimilitude, Avedon was hired
as a “visual consultant.” He insured that the movie was not
“painfully silly,” he said, “and it was not. I made sure most of
the things that happened could at least have really happened. But I found the whole
piece so charming, so light and refreshing, that I didn’t have too many
objections. How could you, when you got to see Audrey Hepburn every day?”

Astaire,
too, would only consider Audrey for the part. But there were many
complications, including the sale of the option on the property to different
movie companies over the years. Eventually, the entire production wound up
where it began, at Paramount. Stanley Donen, veteran director of musicals, was
chosen to oversee the effort.

“I
was worried about filming in Paris,” Audrey recalled. “I wanted so
much to do the movie, but I didn’t want to leave Mel for an extended period.
Eventually, he got
Elena et Les Hommes
with
Jean Renoir, so everything worked itself out,” she said. “Everything
was always working itself out, but sometimes the effort was enormous.”

In
Hollywood, where she traveled to bone up on dance classes and shoot the
interior scenes, Audrey and Ferrer rented a small house in Malibu owned by
director Anatole Litvak and furnished it with candlesticks, cachepots, silver
framed photos, and blue glass vases from Switzerland. “I always took as
many of my possessions with me when we had to rent places,” she recalled.
“It made me feel secure. This time around, I really needed that feeling. I
was only twenty-seven, but I was a little creaky. I mean, I hadn’t been at the
barre for years, and my out-of-practice showed.”

Audrey
worked with dance director Eugene Loring on technique and stamina, but the real
creative influence was Astaire himself.

Thirty
years later, at the celebration of Astaire’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his
contribution to movie musicals, Audrey recalled their first meeting. It was at
one of the early rehearsals of
Funny
Face.