Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (35 page)

On
the set, the mood was tense. Holden would often arrive drunk. Yet he’d insist
upon working, trying to prove he was man enough to get through anything.
Audrey, on the other hand, was going through a period of overwhelming
insecurity, a classic midlife crisis, fearful that Ferrer was losing interest.
She became so unsure of herself, she began to believe she was really ugly and
insisted that renowned cinematographer Claude Renoir be fired because he wasn’t
able to compensate for her flaws on camera.

Noel
Coward and Marlene Dietrich were invited to do cameo bits, as was Ferrer, whom
Quine hoped could calm his wife. Instead, he made matters worse, exacerbating
her insecurities by not overloading her with affection.

“This
was without a doubt the worst film experience of my career,” Audrey
admitted. “It was as if we all let our worst instincts get the best of us.
I realize now I was being manipulative with Bill, that I needed him to pay
attention to me to boost my ego. But he was being pathetic, really, and angry,
and Richard Quine couldn’t control either of us. Though he did try, poor man.
He moved next door to Bill just to keep a lid on his drinking. But it didn’t
work. Bill would invariably outsmart him and then show up under my window,
serenading like a hyena. He bought this sporty Ferrari during the shoot and I
was always petrified he was going to smash it up.”

After
Holden’s wife arrived on the set, she persuaded him to go to a rehabilitative
center for a short stay. Filming was suspended while he underwent treatment for
alcoholism.

Audrey’s
mood improved considerably—and with it the rest of the cast’s—when she
received word from Burgenstock that a twenty-two-year-old science student,
Jean-Claude Thouroude, had turned himself in for breaking and entering her
home.

“He
had moved to Switzerland to be near me,” she said. “He had stolen my
Oscar for
Roman Holiday,
but I didn’t
know it. He had written so many fan letters that my secretaries had stopped
answering him. When he went to the police station, he told them he was in love
with me, and if I only could meet him, I would be in love with him, too.

“I
was so very relieved that he gave himself up. It’s a terrible feeling to sense
you’re being followed, without really being certain. A big weight lifted off my
shoulders. I felt I could breathe again.”

Audrey
was so buoyant she decided to stay in Paris for several more months, extending
the lease on the Bourbon chateau on the road to Fontainebleau she had rented
for herself and Sean. “It’s funny—the house was extremely secure, with a
locked gate and high walls surrounding it,” she recalled. “But I
never felt safe in it until after they caught that man who followed me. After
that, I felt it was impenetrable.”

It
was this newfound sense of security which encouraged Audrey to accept her next
offer from Stanley Donen: to play a cool, calm, unflappable character,
completely unlike herself, in
Charade.

A
stylish romantic mystery that perfectly showcased Audrey’s charms,
Charade tells the story of a young
widow, Reggie Lambert (Audrey), who tries to make sense of her husband’s life
after his death and a convoluted series of events lead her to believe he may
have been a crook. Cary Grant and Walter Matthau aid her in her quest, and the
marvelous cast also includes James Coburn and George Kennedy.

“I
wouldn’t have done the movie without Cary or Audrey,” said director Donen.
“And they felt the same way, even though they hadn’t acted together
before. When I showed the script to Cary, he looked at me wistfully and said,
`It could be great, if only we could get Audrey for Reggie.‘ She said the same
thing about his part. Uncanny! Although I had always talked each of them up to
the other, until I saw them on-screen together in the first dailies, I really
didn’t know how right I was. The chemistry was organic—it just was. I have
never had so confident a feeling about a movie as I did about
Charade after the first day of
shooting.”

A
comedy as well as a thriller, Peter Stone’s intelligent, witty screenplay
manages to depict the development of a believable romance between Audrey and
Cary without a single kiss being exchanged. But the innuendoes tickled. “How
do you shave in there?” Audrey asks, pointing to the famous cleft in
Grant’s chin.

“Cary
was extremely sensitive about our age difference,” Audrey said. “I
think he was fifty-eight when we got started, and I was thirty-three. But I had
often played younger than my years, and he was afraid he’d be accused of cradle
snatching if we had a full-blown romance. He just had this innate sense of good
taste. Peter Stone was wonderful about it. He changed his script—and each word
of it was marvelous—to reflect Cary’s concerns. He made it even funnier. I
remember one line he added. Cary says to me, `At my age, who wants to hear the
word
serious?‘
And I was always
chasing him, don’t forget. I chased him around Europe in that movie.”

What
the movie lacked in plausibility, it made up for in charm. When it was released
in 1964, critics and audiences alike adored it. “A debonair, macabre
thriller—romantic, scary, satisfying,” wrote Pauline Kael. “If
Hitchcock could only laugh at himself, this is the movie he’d make,” said
Rex Reed.

Paris When It Sizzles,
on the other hand, fizzled when
it opened. “All I could think about when I saw it was how crooked my teeth
looked,” Audrey said. “They are the same teeth in
Charade, but I didn’t notice anything
wrong with them there!”

Chapter 22

On
November 22, 1963, Audrey had just finished recording “Wouldn’t It Be
Loverly” from
My Fair Lady
when
director George Cukor abruptly pulled her aside.