Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (25 page)

Wilder’s
revision of the basic story of
Ariane
is ingenious. We meet Ariane (Audrey) first. In the opening scenes, the wildly
fantasizing daughter of private eye Claude Chavasse (Maurice Chevalier) is
surreptitiously paging through her father’s marital files and becomes enamored
of Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper).

Flannagan
is a man-and-a-half about town, indulging in numerous relationships with
married women, the better for him to avoid commitment.

As
Ariane reads on, she discovers that one of her father’s clients plans to catch
Flannagan in the act with his wife and shoot him on the spot.

She
decides to intervene, rushing to Flannagan’s hotel bedroom and replacing his
lady friend just as her jealous—and perplexed—husband appears.

He
is captivated by his mysterious young savior, and the two begin to meet during
the afternoons over the next couple of months. Their relationship develops
slowly and believably, until it’s clear it has come to a full boil.

The
trouble is, Flannagan doesn’t know anything about his secretive lover,
including her last name. He hires private eye Claude Chavasse to uncover her identity.

Wilder
had wanted to make the movie for years, primarily because it explored a theme
he enjoyed: the way a free-spirited woman can draw a self-absorbed man out of
his shell. But casting had always presented a problem for him.

With
his three leads, he achieved a perfect mesh of romantic love tempered by
fatherly concern. Cinematographer William Mellor’s muted lighting and use of
haunting silhouettes contrasted with the frothy comedic elements of
Love in the Afternoon and gave the movie
heft, while set designer Alexander Trauner worked with real Parisian sites,
including the Ritz Hotel, even somehow enhancing their historic beauty.

It
is a stunning achievement, and a movie that is inexplicably underappreciated.

“Once
we got going, we all had a wonderful time making the movie,” Audrey
recalled. “We’d all go out for drinks after a hard day of filming, and
unlike
Sabrina,
everybody on this set
got along famously. We’d go to a place that made the best martinis in the
world—dry and cold as can be without freezing. Wilder would tease me
mercilessly.

“In
the movie, there’s this running gag about Flannagan’s private gypsy band that
follows him on all his escapades playing `Fascination‘ every time he meets a
new woman. Well, Wilder told me he chose that song because it was playing the
first time he ever made love. That made me so embarrassed, even though I later
found out he made up the whole thing, that I couldn’t look at him if he was
giving me some advice when that song was playing. And it seemed `Fascination’
never stopped playing. I think Wilder wanted me to gain some self-confidence,
learn to rely more on my own instincts than his.”

During
the making of the movie, Audrey did begin to branch out a little, to test her
wings. She openly enjoyed the caresses from Cooper, telling Wilder that she
felt guilty for accepting a paycheck for so sweet an assignment. Cooper echoed
her delight. “I’ve been in pictures for thirty years,” he said,
“and I’ve never had a more enthusiastic leading lady than Audrey. She puts
more life and energy into her acting than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Although
they enjoyed and respected one another, there was never a hint of romantic
involvement, despite the fact that Audrey was alone at night for the first time
since she had married.

Ferrer
was away during the week, filming
The
Vintage
in the south of France, and Audrey finally began to see she could
live very nicely, and less stressfully, when they did not spend twenty-four
hours a day together.

He
had often engineered her interviews with the press and controlled them to such
a degree that Audrey came across as an aloof, almost stupid, woman, but now she
was observed by several reporters cursing and kicking up her heels at a little
drinking party organized by Wilder.

When
Ferrer got wind of her behavior, he chastised her royally. “You are
ruining all I have created,” he said. “I think it’s time you take a
little rest.”

Chapter 18

“You
must learn to bend a little, or you will break,” says one of the older
nuns to the character Audrey would next portray, the headstrong Sister Luke in
The Nun’s Story.

It
was a lesson Audrey would try to learn, without lasting results, for her entire
life.

For
although she felt stronger and more confident than ever while she worked on
Love in the Afternoon and saw her
husband only on weekends for some relaxing times in Saint-Tropez, Audrey also
felt guilty about the physical distance between them.

“I
know it was foolish, but it’s just the way I’m built,” she recalled.
“We were getting along beautifully when we saw one another less
frequently, there were none of the daily tensions and annoyances, but I still
felt something was wrong with us if we couldn’t be at each other’s side all the
time. And I think Mel agreed with me. I think that’s why he worked so hard to
get
Mayerling
[in which they
costarred] off the ground.”

So
almost as soon as she had tentatively begun to cut the cord to her husband,
Audrey rewrapped it even tighter, afraid that their marriage was an
all-or-nothing-at-all proposition.

In
the beginning of 1957, at the height of her popularity, Audrey announced that
she was taking a year off. She turned down incredible movie offers:
The Diary of Anne Frank, what would
eventually become
The Sound of Music,
and
A Certain Smile,
a film based on Francoise
Sagan’s bittersweet novella. The stage beckoned as well. She was asked to
replace Diane Cilento in the London West End musical
Zuleika,
based on a novel by Max Beerbohm, before it transferred to
Broadway, but she turned down that offer as well. Instead, in Burgenstock, she
planted roses, cooked Ferrer simple meals, and rested a lot while news of her
continuing popularity slowly filtered into Switzerland.

Society
photographer Antony Beauchamp included her in a photo essay called “The
Ten Loveliest Women.” The New York Dress Institute voted her the
sixth-best-dressed woman in the world.
Daily
News
columnist Cholly Knickerbocker named her one of the ten most
fascinating women in the world.