Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (24 page)

“I
am fairly proud of my voice in
Funny Face
,”
Audrey said. “A lot of people don’t realize the movie wasn’t dubbed. But
Kay [costar Thompson] persuaded me I could hold my own. I’m so glad she did. I
was so afraid of performing with Astaire that I felt I couldn’t do anything.
But I always went through enormous insecurities before I actually got to work
on a picture. Once I got started, they would always melt away.”

Pounds
also melted away during the grueling summer shoot. Audrey had again stopped
eating. By the end of production, she had lost seventeen pounds and weighed
only ninety-two. The Baroness flew in from London and brought with her bars of
chocolate like the kind that were given to Audrey by the United Nations rescue
team after World War II.

She
refused to eat them.

Chapter 17

Almost
as soon as she finished
Funny Face,
Audrey
began
Love in the Afternoon.

Exhausted,
malnourished, and worried about how independent-minded director Billy Wilder
was going to take to her husband’s constant “advice,” Audrey couldn’t
help but recall that the last time she’d worked with Wilder, on
Sabrina, she had fallen in love with
Bill Holden.

Meanwhile,
Wilder was a little concerned about Audrey’s weight. “She’s a wispy little
thing,” he said, “but you’re really in the presence of somebody when
you see that girl.”

It’s
a pity Audrey didn’t feel the confidence in herself that she generated in
others. “I kept having this premonition that Gary Cooper, whom I had
always admired, was going to turn out to hate me like Humphrey Bogart,”
she said. “I was working myself into a frenzy. Mel wasn’t much help
because frankly, he was incensed that I was even thinking of the time when I
met Bill Holden. Mel was a jealous husband, and I always loved that about
him.”

The
story of
Love in the Afternoon
was
the most explicitly sexual Audrey had ever done. As the Parisian schoolgirl
Ariane Chavasse, Audrey had to bring to the part a knowing flirtatiousness that
would help seduce the aging American roué Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) without
making her appear like an out-and-out Lolita.

“I
was more worried about how I looked when I started this movie than any other
film of my career,” Audrey recalled. “I don’t know—maybe it was
because I lost so much weight during
Funny
Face,
but I felt particularly ugly when we began filming.

“Everybody
kept telling me not to worry, since my costar was so much older, but I thought
Coop’s crags gave him character, while I just looked washed-out and
hollow-eyed.”

Wilder
recalled the first week of filming. “You looked around and suddenly there
was this dazzling creature looking like a wild-eyed doe prancing in the forest.
Everybody on the set was in love with her within five minutes.”

Still,
she did not love herself. Herb Sterne, the publicist on the movie, remembered
that she drove him crazy with demands. “She wanted approval on all the
stills that we sent out, which was not unusual, but she nearly refused to sit
for any stills!

“I
remember we had to almost hold her down to take some shots, and I had to bring
a whole rack of clothes out for her to decide. Then we’d paint the backdrops
for the photos as she was getting changed. It was just awful. She was in a
dreadful state, fretting and fussing all the time. At one point, she became
obsessed with her nostrils and was convinced they flared too wide in some of
the early scenes. She begged us to reshoot, but of course we didn’t. I must
admit, we did try to humor her, though. We led her to believe we would reshoot
at the end. She was so upset, there was very little else we could do.”

Aware
that his wife was indulging in one of her bouts of neurosis, Ferrer ingeniously
gave her a gift to take her mind off herself. When she walked into their suite
at the Hotel Raphael one day, a tiny dog yelped from a bed Ferrer had made from
Audrey’s old stockings and underwear.

Mr.
Famous, known to his intimates as “Famous,” had the desired effect on
Audrey. The little Yorkshire terrier terrorized the staff at the hotel with his
insistent bark, but he would spend hours licking the soles of Audrey’s feet
while she petted his head. It was, by all accounts, a mutual admiration society
unmatched in history.

I
lavished attention on that puppy,“ Audrey recalled. ”I am a frugal
person, but I bought Famous the most expensive collars, the best cuts of meat,
the most gentle shampoos. I was out of my mind with love for that little dog. I
guess it took my mind off my fears about meeting the great Gary Cooper.“

She
really had nothing to worry about. Wilder, aware that Audrey was intimidated
about meeting the legendary star of
High
Noon,
scheduled their first meeting to coincide with the filming of a
fox-trot sequence.

Coop
couldn’t dance. “His stumbling around was the best thing that could have
happened in the beginning of the movie,” Audrey recalled. “I had to
help him. Wilder suggested he take dancing lessons. The whole episode just put
me at ease.”

Although
he dressed beautifully in Savile Row-tailored suits and paisley ascots, Cooper
looked much older than his fifty-six years and scared Wilder into worrying that
censors would balk at his screen romance with Audrey.

Based
on Claude Anet’s sophisticated, witty novel
Ariane,
Love in the Afternoon
was revised by Wilder and coscreenwriter I.A.L.
Diamond to include a chaperon character of sorts. They wrote in the character
of Ariane’s father Claude Chavasse (Maurice Chevalier), who plays a private
investigator delving into the life of the millionaire playboy with whom his
daughter is infatuated.

Given
that Audrey had just come off
Funny Face,
another movie about a May/December romance, and knowing that she had played
a similar role of a somewhat calculating ingenue in Wilder’s
Sabrina, it’s interesting to note that
Wilder had some real trepidation this time around.

“It
all came down to Coop’s astounding good looks,” Audrey recalled. “He
was just so great-looking, I think Wilder thought the audience might hold it
against him; they wouldn’t believe my character engineered the whole romance.
For once, I understood why good looks could be a liability.”

Relying
on his background as a coscreenwriter for the great director of comedy Ernst
Lubitsch, Wilder paid tribute to his mentor here, going so far as to cast
Cooper, the star of Lubitsch’s 1938 film
Bluebeard’s
Eighth Wife.