Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (40 page)

Writers
are notorious for disliking the portrayals of the characters they create. How
can human flesh approximate the god- and goddesslike characteristics of an
artistic creation? But Audrey’s portrayal of the long-suffering—but certainly
not silent—wife in
Two for the Road
caused Frederic Raphael to rave about her. “I am somewhat biased,” he
said, “but I don’t think I have ever seen a performance more manifestly
worthy of the Oscar, if that matters, than Audrey’s in
Two for the Road.
”

“Of
course, we don’t touch as much as the marriage is failing,” Audrey said.
“You will notice that on a second or third viewing. There are all sorts of
clues as to what stage of the relationship we’re in.”

There
were also clues that the intimacy she shared with Finney on-screen had seeped
into their leisure hours as well.

Finney
was more forthcoming than Audrey about the nature of their friendship:
“Audrey and I met in an atmosphere conducive to romance, and from the
moment we met, we got on famously. Doing a scene with her, my mind knew I was
acting, but my heart didn’t, and my body certainly didn’t!” he told
journalist Charles Higham. “Performing with Audrey was quite disturbing,
actually. Playing a love scene with a woman as sexy as Audrey, you sometimes
get to the edge where make-believe and reality are blurred. All that staring
into each other’s eyes.”

According
to Donen, who had directed Audrey in both
Funny
Face
and
Charade
, she was a
changed woman on
Two for the Road.
“The
Audrey I saw during the making of this film I didn’t even know. She overwhelmed
me. She was so free, so happy. I never saw her like that. So young.”

Two for the Road
was Audrey’s metamorphosis. She
was shedding the skin of domination both of her husband and her look, and the
liberation made her giddy. Gone was the severely simple Givenchy style from
which she had rarely deviated; in its place was a softer hairstyle, freer
clothing, and dresses right off the rack for the first time in her life.

After
a day of filming in Paris, she and Finney would avoid the hot spots in favor of
an obscure bistro off the beaten track. They would order heaping plates of food
(which Audrey barely touched) and bottles of cheap wine and just laugh and tell
jokes until the waiters started to pack up.

What
happened next on those evenings doesn’t really matter. Audrey had broken her
bond with Ferrer, whether or not she had broken her vows.

At
the cast party on the final day of shooting, every male member of the crew
(there were actually two crews, one English and one French) wanted to dance
with her. “She danced until she had blisters on her feet,” said
costar William Daniels. “She must have been exhausted—but she made sure
they all got their dance.”

“It
was no secret that Audrey’s marriage with Mel was not a happy one,” said
Henry Rogers, her former publicist. “It seemed to me that she loved him more
than he loved her, and it was frustrating for her not to have her love returned
in kind. She had confided these feelings to me and a number of other intimate
friends many times. She never complained, but I always saw the sadness in her
eyes.”

Ironically,
she would have to erase all emotions from her eyes for her next role,
which—marriage on the rocks or not—would be produced by her husband. In
Wait Until Dark, Audrey would play a
blind woman terrorized by three thugs.

In
Lausanne, she studied with Wilhelm Streiff, a physician who specialized in
treating the blind at a clinic he had founded several years earlier.

“I
threw myself into the task,” Audrey said. “There were all sorts of
rumors flying about Mel and Marisol [the shapely Spanish performer with whom he
was working on several projects], and I was extremely hurt by them.
Wait Until Dark provided me with a real
outlet; it was quite a task, learning to walk without seeing, and I don’t think
if my home life were more tranquil I would have thrown myself into learning to
move as the blind move with quite so much fervor. It took my mind off the
sadness at home, and it helped me feel good about myself. I guess I also wanted
to prove to Mel that I was a fine actress still, that I could do it, that I could
make him proud.”

Ferrer
helped negotiate Audrey a $1 million salary for
Wait Until Dark,
an astounding sum for a movie that was not an epic
or a musical. They agreed to try to put their marital difficulties aside during
the filming; both Audrey and Ferrer rightly felt that their problems could
adversely affect the other cast members and ruin the movie.

“I
gave a tea for the press,” Audrey recalled with distaste. “We had
loads of reporters and photographers over to the house we’d rented in Beverly
Hills and made it perfectly clear we were perfectly happy. It was a very trying
time.”

In
fact, Audrey was so ambivalent about working with Ferrer that she tried to
persuade Warner Brothers to allow her to film the movie in Europe, where at
least she could be close to her beloved son. A harshly worded telegram from
Jack Warner made it clear the entire movie would be filmed in the United
States, “where it [the story] took place.”

Based
on the highly successful 1966 Broadway play directed by Arthur Penn and starring
Lee Remick,
Wait Until Dark
was a
thriller, like
Sorry, Wrong Number
and
Gaslight,
that derived its scariest
moments by exaggerating the vulnerability of a woman alone and playing on what
could happen to her.