Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (37 page)

“I
was having a devilish time with the guttersnipe stuff,” she recalled.
“I never could get the intonation quite right. It has nothing to do with
some innate aristocratic air, as some silly critics once said. I think it’s
because I learned English from my father at a very young age, and his was
perfect. He made a big to-do about speaking correctly, and every time I dropped
an
h
, I would stop myself and think
of him.”

The
stress of wanting to give the performance of her career was overwhelming Audrey.
“I knew myself very well, and I knew the kind of pressure I worked best
under was the self-imposed kind. When everybody else thought I was great, that
it was going to be a piece of cake, I disciplined myself to give more, do
better. But when people were unsure of me, I often fell apart. That’s what I
felt like on
My Fair Lady
. I needed
their confidence first before I could find my own. And I got the distinct
impression everybody had grave doubts about me.”

According
to an assistant to Alan Jay Lerner, he had been devastated when Julie Andrews
was passed over for the role, and he took out his disappointment on Audrey,
virtually ignoring her for the whole shoot. In addition, he knew from the start
that Marni Nixon had been hired to dub Audrey’s singing voice, but he never let
Audrey know.

That
task was left up to audio music director Ray Heindorf. “I was angry that
she had been left in the dark for so long,” he said. “I’d watch her
in the sound booth, going over and over a phrase. She was so intent. You could
see her straining to make it perfect. It killed me. I asked them to tell her
about Marni for so long. When I finally got the go-ahead, as difficult as it
was, I felt relieved.”

Audrey
was crushed. She had worked so hard and so long, often rising at 5:30 A.M. to
get an extra hour of practice. She knew her voice was not as strong as a
professional singer’s, but she had sung the whole score to selected members of
the cast and crew, including director Cukor, and they had praised her efforts.
The duplicity of keeping Nixon’s involvement a secret is what bothered her
most.

“In
looking back,” she said, “I can see everybody was trying to protect
my feelings from being hurt. Nobody thought I could take the news that my voice
wasn’t strong enough. Well, I’ll tell you, that would have hurt for an hour,
but what they did hurt for much longer. I felt used. And I was angry. I was
really angry. But I didn’t show it outright. I just kept it inside and became
more and more difficult on the set.”

Audrey
demanded that every cast and crew member completely avoid eye contact with her
while she was working. She wanted to be in her own little world. She forbade
still photographers from being on the set. Several times, she would stop a
scene before Cukor yelled “cut” and cry to herself about how
impossible the role was. Black scrims were set up throughout Warner’s
soundstage twelve, where the majority of filming took place, and crew members
were asked to crouch behind them every time Cukor yelled “roll ‘em.”
The makeup artists and hairdressers cringed when Audrey appeared each morning
because she was so demanding about how she looked. Alberto di Rossi, the artist
who devised the special kohl-heavy eye makeup that made her eyes appear to be
two dark crystals, found her perfectionism on
My Fair Lady
nearly impossible. “I’d worked with her for
years,” he recalled, “but this time, nothing we did was ever right. I
think she felt insecure about the part, and thought if she looked exactly
right, that might compensate for her fears about pulling it off.”

The
only person involved in
My Fair Lady
with
whom she developed a real rapport was Cecil Beaton. “I trusted him
completely,” Audrey said. “He worked extremely long hours to insure
the authenticity of the costumes and to also make sure, in the second half,
that they were beautiful on me. A lot of beautiful clothing does not look so
beautiful on me, and Cecil’s eye was impeccable in gauging what would and would
not work. He helped me get over my fear of looking too ugly in the early scenes,
too. I remember crying when I first put on that ratty old coat for the flower
girl scenes. I felt they were going a little overboard with the dirt-and-grime
bit, but Cecil persuaded me the worse I looked in the first scenes, the more
dramatic the transformation would be. Of course, he was right.”

But
no matter how seamless the whole movie looked when it was finished, no matter
how many audiences it delighted around the world, Audrey never got over the
anguish she felt in making
My Fair Lady.

“You
know that expression, `Don’t wish for something too long, you might get it‘?
Well, that’s how I feel about
My Fair
Lady.
I wanted it so much, and afterward, I felt it was cursed.”

Perhaps
only she was. At the Academy Awards ceremony that year, Audrey was the only
principal actor from
My Fair Lady
who
was not nominated for an Oscar.

“I
wrote my first and only fan letter to her when she was in
Ondine
on Broadway,” recalled the singer Eddie Fisher. “I
loved her dearly. I was her biggest fan. Once, I happened to have a room next
to hers at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. I was having a rough time, and
she sat up with me and talked the whole night.

“Years
later, when she wasn’t even nominated for
My
Fair Lady
, I wanted to shoot every member of the Academy for hurting her
feelings. I saw her at a dinner party, and she came over to me with tears in
her eyes and asked, `Are you still my number one fan?‘ `Of course I am,’ I
said. `I always will be.‘ She was just too precious to hurt.”

“There
was a lot of speculation that I wanted to keep Marni Nixon’s involvement in the
movie a secret,” Audrey said. “Nothing of the sort. For the longest
time, I didn’t know what her involvement was. Then I think somebody told me my
voice would be heard about half the time, but it would be blended with Marni’s.
I told that to some reporter, who conveniently left out the blended part. Then
it turned out her voice was used for almost all the singing. Well, it looked
like I wanted to deny her her due. Nothing like that at all. But the backlash
was incredible.”

On
April 5, 1965, Audrey screwed up her courage and attended the Academy Awards at
the Santa Monica Civil Auditorium, on the arm of George Cukor. Mel was so angry
at the Academy for overlooking his wife—and so fed up with having had to
placate her for a year as a result—that he refused to go to the ceremony.