Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (36 page)

“JFK’s
been shot,” he said. “The president’s gone.”

As
in all times of true emotional devastation, Audrey was stronger than people
expected her to be. When Cukor could not get the words out, it was she who took
his place at the jerry-rigged podium and borrowed a bullhorn from one of the
sound engineers. “The president of the United States is dead,” she
told the stunned workers. “All we know is that he has been shot in Dallas.
I think we should have two minutes of silence to pray or do whatever you feel
is appropriate.”

After
she announced the news, she provided a shoulder to lean on for all the shocked
cast and crew members of
My Fair Lady.
“May
he rest in peace,” she told them. They wanted to take the rest of the day
off, but Jack Warner, the head of the studio, insisted that they continue
working.
My Fair Lady
had been in
trouble for weeks, he reasoned, and despite the pain of the news, they all had
to keep going. Audrey went along with the decision, but to help herself do so
she tried to remember a time when she had really wanted to go to work on
My Fair Lady.

It
was before she’d even begun. The day the call had come from her agent, Kurt
Frings, telling her to sit down, she’d won the part, was the happiest moment of
her career.

“I
was in Burgenstock and the connection was so poor,” she said. “I had
a hard time hearing Kurt. And he usually was such a booming man.
`My Fair Lady is all yours,‘ he kept
repeating. When I finally got it, I whooped. Mother was upstairs showering and
she rushed down covered in a towel, thinking something awful had happened.
Well, little did she know it, or I know it, but she was right!”

Based
on George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion,
Alan
Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s
My Fair
Lady
was the hit of the 1956 Broadway season when Jack Warner started
negotiating for screen rights. The wrangling took nearly five years and cost
$5.5 million—at the time, the most expensive screen rights in the history of
the movies.

>From
the beginning of its run, and despite her rave reviews, there were rumors that
the studio would not ask newcomer Julie Andrews to reprise her role as Eliza
Doolittle, the cockney flower girl who is taught to behave like a duchess. It
was not that Jack Warner didn’t think she was supremely talented, but after
spending $5.5 million, he wanted a star with marquee value.

Kurt
Frings closely followed the negotiations. Audrey had never asked him for
anything except the starring role in
My
Fair Lady.
The large, loud, tough, German-accented agent, who at times also
represented Elizabeth Taylor, Lucille Ball, Brigitte Bardot, and Cary Grant,
would do anything to please his Audrey. He pounced when the time was right and
he landed not only the role of a lifetime for Audrey, but a $1-million-plus
contract to go with it.

Warner
was far from sold on Rex Harrison (who starred in the play on Broadway) for the
role of Professor Henry Higgins, the curmudgeonly phonetics expert who drills
Eliza in pronunciation to win a bet. Laurence Olivier’s name came up as did
Rock Hudson’s and Cary Grant’s. But Grant told Warner the role belonged to
Harrison, and the studio head actually listened to him.

In
May of 1963, Audrey arrived in Hollywood ready to conquer the film. She,
Ferrer, Sean, and Sean’s nanny checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and two
days later rented a stately white-columned mansion in Bel Air.

“Everything
was so rushed from the moment I arrived,” she recalled. “I had just
finished unpacking in the hotel—my candlesticks and framed photos and
such—when Mel walked in with the news that a house had been found for us!
Never did we find one so fast. We moved out of the hotel, I unpacked all over
again, and that afternoon, the big shots came to call.”

Director
Cukor arrived at Audrey’s home with Alan Jay Lerner and costume designer Cecil
Beaton.

“It
was all very friendly on the surface,” she continued, “but I knew
they were looking me over, and it made me very self-conscious. I felt like a
piece of property. But I did get along famously with Cecil. I was so nervous
about working with someone other than Givenchy on such an important movie, but
Cecil put me completely at ease. He was a lot of fun—a schoolboy imp,
really.”

Audrey’s
main concern was extracting a promise that her voice would be used in the
movie. She was adamant about wanting to do her own singing, and felt that her
guests were on her side.

“There
was some mention of mixing my voice with another voice, like what they did for
Leslie Caron in
Gigi
, and I was fine
with that. Look, I would have been fine with whatever they decided, as long as
they were honest about it. I was under the impression that I would be doing
most of the singing, so I worked night and day to improve my voice.”

She
worked twelve to fourteen hours a day rehearsing, from early June until
shooting began in August. “I had singing lessons all morning with Susan
Seton. In the late afternoons, I would have an hour of diction, trying to get
the cockney accent down with a professor from the University of California
[Peter Ladefoged]. There were dancing lessons with Hermes Pan. Work with Andre
Previn. Constant fittings with Cecil. And of course, learning my lines.”

By
the time shooting began, she had every line down pat, even if she was a little
stiff in her delivery. Rex Harrison, however, who had played the part millions
of times, could not remember his lines. His problems only added to Audrey’s
frustration.