As My Fair Lady celebrates its 60th birthday next year, Aubrey Malone traces the history of this musical phenomenon and recalls a meeting with the film’s star Audrey Hepburn
Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in the 1964 film of My Fair Lady
Audrey Hepburn nearly died 80 years ago. It was when she was suffering from jaundice and anaemia in Belgium as World War II was coming to an end. She was saved by an injection of penicillin. If you ever wondered why she was so thin in adulthood, think back to these years of malnutrition she endured as a young girl when she was a courier for ‘The Resistance,’ carrying anti-Nazi messages to the front.
I was privileged to speak to her when she was in Dublin in the 1980s to talk about her work as a goodwill ambassador with UNICEF. She gave a moving lecture about the suffering and poverty in Ethiopia.
After she finished she kindly gave me a half hour of her time for an interview. I wouldn’t have asked for more because she looked so tired. As she began to talk, however, a spiritedness came into her features. For that brief time I was transported back to the time when she played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Julie Andrews had been essaying the role for over three years on stage at this time and getting rave reviews for it. She expected to be asked to play Eliza in the film version in 1964 but she wasn’t as big a star as Audrey at this time. Warner Brothers had paid over $5 million to acquire the screen rights to ‘My Fair Lady’ and the film itself was going to cost $17 million. The studio couldn’t risk her in such a big budget production with so much riding on it. Being English also came against her, which was ironic considering Eliza was English. Hollywood preferred to ‘Cocknify’ Audrey so in the end she got the nod.
Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle in the London production of My Fair Lady which was first staged at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in1958 and ran for three and a half years
Apart from her nationality and not being a ‘name,’ some people had problems with Julie’s ‘sweetie pie’ image. She did her best to disabuse them of this by using the occasional four lettered word.
Julie was a much better singer than Audrey, which made the ‘My Fair Lady’ decision rankle with her. As a consolation prize, Julie was offered a role in ‘Mary Poppins’ that year instead. ‘It was that celebrated ill wind,’ she said resignedly, ‘Mary softened the blow of Eliza.’ She actually won an Oscar for playing the flying nanny in ‘Mary Poppins.’
Audrey was not even nominated for ‘My Fair Lady’ so in that sense it was sweet revenge for her for being passed over. Julie looked at Jack Warner with a victorious sneer during the Oscar ceremonies. He’d poured so many millions into ‘My Fair Lady’ and Audrey went home empty-handed. The film won Best Picture and George Cukor won Best Director for it as well as Rex Harrison winning Best Actor. The glaring omission from the winner’s emporium was Audrey. Julie actually felt sorry for her as she liked her as a person. ‘If it was anyone else who took Eliza from me I’d have been blazing mad,’ she said.
‘Losing the part of Eliza hurt me a lot,’ she revealed, ‘and I let Jack Warner know that, but in retrospect it did me good to have other films on my CV besides ‘My Fair Lady.’ Besides ‘Mary Poppins’ I also got to do ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘The Americanisation of Emily.’ These films would have clashed with ‘My Fair Lady’ if Jack Warner had been willing to take a chance on me.’
Audrey Hepburn, “My Fair Lady” 1964
Some people had problems with Julie’s ‘sweetie pie’ image at this time. It wasn’t totally taken away by the four-lettered words, or someone pinning a card on her back saying, ‘Mary Poppins is a Junkie.’ Christopher Plummer, her co-star in ‘The Sound of Music,’ said that acting with her was ‘like being hit over the head every day with a Hallmark card.’ When she started dating the director Blake Edwards, he said, ‘On our first date I didn’t even know she had to go to the bathroom.’ Richard Burton, her co-star in ‘Camelot,’ told her she was the only actress he’d never tried to bed.’ ‘Don’t let that get out,’ she warned him, ‘It will make my “Mother Teresa” image even worse.’
Julie was nominated for an Oscar for ‘The Sound of Music’ after winning one for ‘Mary Poppins’ so this was a very fruitful time in her career. Audrey, of course, also went on to have a prolific career after ‘My Fair Lady’ but it was long over when I met her.
Her main focus at this time was her social work. I felt ashamed drawing her away to speak about her film career but she appreciated that this would be what most people would like to hear about. ‘I’ve been going from Eliza to Givenchy all my life,’ she joked, referencing the rags to riches progression of her life from message courier to film star, and the progression of her character roles from Cockney urchin to Grande dame.
Had she any bitterness towards the Nazis? ‘I saw people put up against a wall and shot by them,’ she said, ‘but I danced for the Nazis as well. And a German soldier actually saved my life once when British airplanes were shelling us and he pushed me under a tank. I didn’t know where my loyalties lay at that time. I was too young. Both of my parents had pro-Nazi leanings. It was only when my uncle was executed by firing squad that I became politicised.’
She married Mel Ferrer in 1954 and had a child by him, Sean. He guided her career and even directed her in a film, Green Mansions, but the marriage didn’t last. He was unfaithful to her on a number of occasions. She turned a blind eye to his infidelity for years before they drifted apart.
I began by asking her about the time she broke four vertebrae in her back during the filming of John Huston’s The Unforgiven. It resulted her miscarrying a baby. ‘I always wanted to be a mother despite my physical unsuitability for bearing children,’ she said – I presumed she was referring to her small hips – ‘so my misery was doubled. The horse once belonged to Batista, the Cuban dictator, so I should have been weary of it. It was called Diablo. The name was appropriate.’
The set had to be closed down for six weeks as she recovered. ‘I blamed myself for it all,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t trained to be an equestrian. They wanted me to use a double but I refused.’
Her most famous film was The Nun’s Story. She was dubious about making it at first, imagining the fact that her character leaves her Order at the end would turn people against it as a religious tract.
Her fears proved unfounded. It became her most financially successful film and perhaps her most loved. She received an Oscar nomination for it, as she did for Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Wait Until Dark. She won an Oscar for her first major role, Roman Holiday, but was relegated to the runners-up podium afterwards.
I was aware that Truman Capote, the writer of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, had wanted Marilyn Monroe to play her part. Did that bother her? ‘No. I saw his point. He thought I was too squeaky clean for Holly. What bothered me more was not being able to use my own voice for the singing. Marni Nixon did that.’
Had she not a good singing voice? ‘It wasn’t good enough obviously,’ she said, ‘The same thing happened to Natalie Wood on West Side Story. Natalie had a better voice than me but nobody could match Marni.’
She fell in love with William Holden on the set of Sabrina. He was married at the time but wasn’t happy. She told her he wanted to divorce his wife to marry her. She might have done that if he could have given her children but she learned to her chagrin that he’d had a vasectomy so that was the end of that. She married Ferrer on the rebound.
After divorcing him she married the psychiatrist Andrea Dotti. Dotti, like Ferrer, had a wandering eye. He gave her another child, Luca, and accelerated her move away from Hollywood. She spent years living as a virtual recluse with him in Italy before being lured back to Hollywood for Robin and Marian, in which she co-starred with Sean Connery.
She eventually found a faithful man in Robert Wolders, a small time actor who’d been married to Merle Oberon for four years before she died of a stroke. He consoled her about her failed marriage to Dotti and gave her the love she failed to really get from her first two husbands. The two of them had many happy years together but never married.
I knew she wouldn’t want to speak about her personal life. She’d never been one to ‘kiss and tell.’ I spoke to her instead about her career. I heard she was considered for the role of Anne Frank in the film, The Diary of Anne Frank. Did she feel tempted to take it?
‘She suffered so much more than me, she said, ‘It would have been wrong for me to take the role. But yes, there were similarities in our childhoods. I met her father in the late 1950s. He was a lovely man.’
I asked her about her status as a style guru, the elfin waif who graced so many magazine covers. “Women hate me because I never put on weight,” she joked. She was even more skinny than usual now as she went around the world lecturing on poverty and deprivation. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
‘There have always been rumours about me being anorexic,’ she said, ‘I can assure you they’re not true. If you don’t believe me you should see me wolfing down a box of chocolates in one sitting.’ I said I found that hard to believe.
‘I don’t know where the food goes,’ she said, ‘I eat as much as everyone else most of the time. In my youth I did eat less. That was when I thought I was going to be a dancer.’ Her first ambition was to be a ballerina.
Audrey made being skinny sexy. She was said to be so flat-chested she could iron her blouse while it was still on her. A famous story tells of the director of Roman Holiday saying to her one day, ‘Audrey, I think we need you to wear a lift in your bra for this scene.’ She replied, ‘I’m wearing one!’ She never minded hearing jokes like that against herself.
It was only after I met her that I learned her father had lived in Dublin for most of his later life. He abandoned her as a child. Such an experience perhaps prepared her for the ill-treatment of her two husbands. Maybe her habit of marrying men older than her was a subconscious search for a father. Ferrar was eleven years older than her and Dotti even more than that.
The abandonment of her father probably also drew her closer to her sons. Even when she parted from Ferrar and Dotti she insisted on keeping Sean and Luca as close as she could to them. She well knew what the absence of a father could do to a child.
Her parting words to me were, ‘I never regretted anything in my life. I nearly died of whooping cough as a child. Merely to survive was enough for me then. It’s even enough for me now. And then there were all those great things that came my way afterwards.’
It was her positive spirit that saw her through all the tragedies in her life. It also helped her empathise with those of others. After visiting Ethiopia she saw even worse devastation in Somalia and Bangladesh. Then she was struck by cancer.
She bore that bravely too. Today she’s remembered as one of the great ladies of the screen, someone nobody ever fell out with in Hollywood or out of it. Of how many people can that be said?
