Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (12 page)

He
made an astounding announcement to the press. He said he had hired to portray
Gigi “a young actress whose two years’ stage experience had been confined
to dancing bits in topical revues, a young actress whom we have never seen on
stage.” This was too good a story to pass by. Journalists were then
desperate to photograph and interview this amazing creature who had so
captivated the veteran producer.

Naturally,
Audrey was not altogether pleased by the attention.

“They
wanted me to stand in so many different silly poses,” she recalled.
“I felt like a cow at the country fair. But Mother encouraged this
nonsense. She was ahead of her time in that she knew the value of publicity
long before most people did. It’s funny: She was a very serious woman; my God,
she had spent her time saving lives! And maybe because of that, she knew innately
that entertainment was going to take on unbelievable importance. I guess she
basically knew that life wasn’t so much fun, that it was filled with heartache,
and that getting away from your problems, being entertained, would become a
major leisure-time activity. She loved the performing arts as much as I did.
She instilled in me a deep love of culture. But when the three-ring circus of
Broadway and movies came beckoning, she knew that’s where the money was.”

Yet
the new pressures, however exciting, instilled a real sense of dread in Audrey.
Children who lose a parent at a young age through death or divorce, as Audrey
had, often have an overwhelming fear of abandonment and loss. When life was
going well for Audrey, she would frequently anticipate the end of that
happiness. She’d fret about it so much, in fact, that it became a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Life had a way of complicating itself in spite of
Audrey’s best intentions.

That’s
precisely what happened after she was given the part of Gigi. Days later,
emissaries of director William Wyler caught Audrey doing a public appearance to
promote a face cream she was paid to advertise and quickly cabled their boss
that she should be considered for his upcoming movie,
Roman Holiday.

Once
again, she was conflicted about the good fortune. “I worried that if I
expressed too much interest in the movie, [
Gigi
producer] Gilbert Miller might change his mind about me for the play. I got the
sense he wasn’t completely confident that I could do the part, and I wasn’t
either. 1 figured he wanted my complete attention.

“Then
I worried about how 1 could do the play if the movie had to be filmed. I had
never had one starring role; now I was faced with having two at once.

“And
of course I worried about James. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure I still
wanted to get married to him, but I certainly didn’t want to get out of it,
either! I just didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to make anybody
unhappy.”

The
couple had long discussions about their future together. Audrey had a difficult
time explaining why she wanted to do the Broadway show, and how she could even
consider
Roman Holiday.

“It
was hard for me to make sense of it myself,” she said. “It wasn’t as
if I craved the attention. I didn’t. I never did. It wasn’t as if I wanted to
prove to myself I could act. Frankly, I never felt I really could be anything
more than adequate. But I realized, at that time at least, that other people,
directors and casting people, felt differently. They had faith in me. My mother
had faith in me. She often talked about wasting my talents. I didn’t want to
waste a single thing. My attitude was, `I should give this a try. Everybody
else thinks it might be the thing for me to do.‘

“It’s
interesting that the only person objecting was the man I was supposed to marry.
I guess even subconsciously, as much as I wanted to go along with him on the
surface of things, I had to face the fact that part of me wanted to try this
exciting thing. It would be an adventure, it would mean financial reward, and I
would be forced to come out of my shell a little. Plus, and this is hard to
admit, I could use it to postpone the wedding.”

Gilbert
Miller suggested that Audrey take a leisurely sail from
London
to
New York
in order to learn her lines. The
ship she chose made the journey in eighteen days.

She
was twenty-two years old. Except for the month she had spent hiding from the
Nazis, she had never before been alone. She didn’t handle it well. She gorged
herself on chocolates during the entire passage. When she arrived in
New York
, ready to begin
rehearsals but petrified nonetheless, she was fifteen pounds heavier.

Chapter 10

Her
arrival in
New York
went completely unnoticed, exactly the way Audrey always liked it.

But
press agents for
Gigi
who picked her
up at the pier immediately set out to rectify that. They dropped her off at an
unobtrusive midtown hotel, the Blackstone, and instructed her to change for a
ball game. She had no idea what that was. Thankfully, she was always a simple
dresser, and when she was captured by photographers cheering at Yankee Stadium
for the last game of the World Series, she at least looked the part.

Not
so when she arrived the next day at the
Gigi
production offices at
Rockefeller
Center
. Gilbert Miller
was already feeling some misgivings about having hired an unknown, and an
inexperienced unknown at that, and he had a tendency to be cruel when he was
feeling anxious. “Put a little meat on your bones, eh?” he said,
sizing her up. “Don’t forget, we hired you for your bones.”

In
fact, Audrey, at five feet, seven and a half inches, looked wonderful at 116
pounds, better than she had looked in her entire life. Insecure as she was,
however, she vowed to stop eating until she lost the weight.

“And
in my mind, I decided to also lose a few extra pounds, as insurance,” she
said.

Although
in remission for several years after the end of World War II, Audrey’s anorexic
tendencies were reignited during the grueling rehearsals for
Gigi.

After
some initial embarrassing attempts to deliver her lines with a modicum of ease
and inflection, Audrey sensed her days were numbered. She could see in the eyes
of her fellow cast members that she was painfully bad. What made matters worse
was that she could also see how much they were rooting for her success. But it
seemed hopeless.

Cathleen
Nesbitt, who had been hired to portray Aunt Alicia, Gigi’s mentor in the play,
was also givers the part-time task of coaching Audrey in diction and delivery.

Every
day after stage rehearsals with Michael Evans, Josephine Brown, Bertha Belmore,
Francis Compton, Doris Patson, and the rest of the mostly British cast, Audrey
would take a forty-five-minute train ride for further instruction at Nesbitt’s
country home.

“She
would run like a deer down the platform at the train station calling, `Hello,
Cathy dear, I’m here! Let’s get started,‘ in the sweetest, softest voice I’d
ever heard,” Nesbitt recalled. “That was the trouble. She couldn’t
project. No matter what I tried, Audrey just didn’t have it in her to amplify
her voice.”

After
a week without improvement, producer Miller began to entertain the notion of
firing Audrey. He put out feelers for possible replacements. At the same time,
he decided to fly Audrey to
Paris
for extra tutorials with Raymond Rouleau, the Belgium-born
actor-turned-director who would become Audrey’s most important ally on the
production.

“To
my utter surprise, he spoke very little English,” Audrey recalled.
“We conversed in French. Now in French, I felt like a great actress, isn’t
that strange? The language gave me confidence. So while I was over there, I
felt I was finally doing well. I thought to myself that all I needed was a good
director.”

That
respite of self-confidence would not last long.

Once
the director met with the whole cast in
New
York
, it became clear to everyone that the language
barrier would prove to be a major obstacle. Although everyone could speak
French with varying degrees of competence, the process of rehearsing in one
language and actually conversing in another was tedious and energy-sapping.

Audrey
became bored at the pace. She made matters worse, however, by exaggerating the
stage directions. If she were instructed to walk across the room, she’d
hurriedly skip. If she were told to laugh, she’d become hysterical. Throughout
her life, she exhibited a tendency to go overboard in trying to please people.
In this instance, she had been told by producer Miller to act more animated. So
she became a clown. In addition, she was lightheaded from barely eating. The
combination made her appear on the edge, about to slip over into mania.

Kitty
Miller, the producer’s empathetic wife, sensed the insecurity raging within
Audrey, and insisted on taking her to lunch. “She just let me be,”
Audrey recalled. “She touched my hand a lot from across the table. I have
no memory of what she said, but I was able to eat a little bit of steak that
day, and I felt enormously better. I had lost nearly twenty pounds in a very
short time, and looking back, I guess I was starving myself as punishment for not
being the best actress ever to grace the stage.

“But
it’s funny: After I ate a little, I felt less judgmental. From then on, I was
able to concentrate on my lines and modulate them. My nervousness lifted. Once
that happened, I was able to give it my best shot.”

In
Philadelphia
,
where
Gigi
opened in its pre-Broadway
tryout, Miller dreaded the reviews. He was sure the critics would pan Audrey
and consequently kill his show.

But
she astonished Miller, and herself. In the pivotal scene where she rejects the
debonair Gaston, she was finally able to do so with authority rather than the
whiny petulance she’d shown throughout rehearsals. It was as if the character
Gigi had finally jelled with the actress Audrey to become a radiant entity.