Audrey Hepburn (41 page)

Beaton flew to Hollywood and started work in February 1963, months before Hepburn and the rest of the cast arrived. He and Cukor were getting along swimmingly, exploring every aspect of the picture together. Most of all, they discussed the quality and quantity of costumes to be made—one thousand! Some four hundred of them, all black and white, were required for the Ascot Gavotte and ball sequences alone. Each one would be lovingly re-created from museum sources with the attention given to a principal's clothes.

Beaton took special care with the designs for Gladys Cooper as Higgins's mother. “We have decided not to make Mrs. Higgins into the conventional Marx Brothers dowager,” he said, “but into an ‘original,' a Fabian, an aesthetic intellectual.” He wrote his friend Lady Diana Cooper, asking what her mother, the late great Duchess of Rutland, would have worn at Ascot. Lady Diana's reply was firm: “Certainly
cream.”
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On May 16, 1963, Audrey and her family flew to Los Angeles and set up housekeeping in a large rented villa in Bel-Air. Beaton, like everyone else, was excited and energized by the leading lady's arrival, as he recorded two days later:

“George, Alan and I went to pay a formal call on Audrey Hepburn Ferrer at tea time. Sean, her [three]-year-old son, was present, and it is obvious that this is the love affair of her life, and she of her son's.” He could hardly wait ‘til after tea to show her his designs:

A few days later at the studio, a lilting voice invited him to, “Come on in and see my secrets.” It was Audrey in the Makeup Department. “Now, you see, I have no eyes!” she told Beaton. He didn't agree: “Without the usual mascara and shadow, Audrey's eyes are like those in Flemish painting and are even more appealing—young and sad. Yet it was extraordinary to see that it is simply by painting her eyes she has become a beauty in the modern sense. But having seen her without these aids, I will try to prevail upon her to do away with them in the earlier sequences for this will give an entirely new and authentic look—different from any we have seen before in her pictures. Her appearance without [eye makeup] will be a revolution and, let's hope, the end of all those black-eyed zombies of the fashion magazines.”
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NIGHT AND DAY, all that mattered to Beaton was costumes and sets. But the director and studio executives were far more worried about Audrey's songs and the recording process.

“When she began,” said Cukor in a mid-production interview, “it was an agony for that girl to sing. But she is not afraid to make an ass of herself. She has the courage to do it, do it wretchedly at first, but do it.”
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As a vote of confidence in Audrey's singing ability, that faint praise seemed a bit damning. But she was indeed working extraordinarily hard on every facet of her performance, often spending twelve hours a day in rehearsals. In addition to memorizing lines and sitting endlessly for costume fittings, she attended Hermes Pan's grueling dance rehearsals and took cockney lessons from UCLA phonetics professor Peter Ladefoged (“an American who probably knows London like I know Peking,” she remarked).
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Most of all, she was working on her voice, determined as she was to perform and record all of her own songs. Singing coach Susan Seton was imported from New York and led her through vocal lessons for five weeks, sometimes five or six hours a day. But there were rumors that the studio was casting about for a dubber.

Audrey had been nervously aware of it—and in a kind of denial—from early on, as Beaton's diary entries of mid-May indicate: “After lunch, we accompanied [Lerner] to listen to a girl singing Eliza's songs, in case Audrey's voice proves to be too frail for one or two of the most operatic arias, and a few notes have to be dubbed.”
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Two days later, he wrote, “Suddenly Audrey asked, ‘Are you going to use my voice for songs at all?”'

Beaton's analysis of the remark was upbeat to the point of delusional: “This was disarming and removed any awkwardness in approaching a difficult subject.... It was now easy to say that, quite probably, Audrey's voice will be used for many of the songs, but certain notes might be interpolated from another voice.” Nevertheless, he was superstitious, and it “worried me when she said, ‘This picture is one we must all remember. Wonderful talents, everyone right, everyone happy.'”
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Pre-recording now began, and on July 4 Audrey sang her first solo, shut up in a cubicle, while the orchestra played outside under André Previn. For Audrey, it was “an ordeal,” said Beaton, “but if her voice is not up to standard she will be the first to admit it. Previn may appear as sleepy as a tapir, but coaxes the best from everyone with his intelligence and patience.”
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Music director Previn was enthralled with Hepburn and did everything he could to help. He knew her musky mezzo voice was no finely trained instrument, but she had used it to good musical and emotional effect in Funny Face. The trouble now was that, since Rex Harrison was the master of parlando—a kind of half-spoken singing style—his Eliza had to trill like a bird.
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“Audrey's voice was perfectly adequate for a living room,” Previn says. “If she got up around the piano with friends and sang, everybody would rightfully have said, ‘How charming!' But this was the movie to end all movies, with six giant surround speakers. Even so, I was of the opinion that if you had bought Audrey Hepburn to play it, so she didn't sing so hot—it wasn't such a crime. But you can imagine how Lerner and Loewe felt—much more strongly than about
Paint Your Wagon or Brigadoon.
This was their statement for the ages.”
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Hollywood dubbing was time-honored but erratic. In
Paint Your Wagon
(1967), for instance, Jean Seberg couldn't sing a note and
had
to have a substitute. It is claimed by some (and denied by others) that Lauren Bacall's voice double in
To Have and Have Not
was young Andy Williams.
²⁴
Kitty Carlisle, a trained opera singer, had to sob loudly in Louis B. Mayer's office before MGM would let her sing her own songs in
Night at the Opera.
Juanita Hall, the original Bloody Mary in
South Pacific,
was dubbed in the film version for reasons not even director Joshua Logan understood. And Previn is still incensed that Ava Gardner was not allowed to sing in
Show Boat.
“When you heard her do ‘Bill,' she broke your heart,” he recalls. “But they couldn't see it.”
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Previn thought the system was screwy, but he was stuck with it. So was Audrey, and so was one of the most “unsung” singers of the era, Marni Nixon—Dubber to the Stars. Nixon had sung for Deborah Kerr in
The King and I
(1956) and
An Affair To Remember
(1957), and for Natalie Wood in
West Side Story
(1961). She performed symphonic vocal repertoire as well, in concerts with André Previn and Leonard Bernstein.

“I did a lot of different people's voices in those days,” Nixon recalls. “It was something one did to subsidize one's ‘real' career. Audrey had been signed and everybody was upset Julie didn't get it. People kept calling me and saying, ‘You'd be perfect—tell your agent to get you in!‘ But those things don't come from agents. They come from the music director.”
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Previn knew Nixon was “a much more serious singer than people realized. I first heard her do an evening of Ives songs that was absolutely remarkable. She also had this peculiar, chameleonlike quality: She could 'do' everybody. You could hand her a piece of music and say, the first four bars are cockney, then it gets French—it made no difference, she could do it.”
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Previn arranged for Marni to audition in Hollywood, telling her, “You'll have a number, and they're not to see you. We don't want any other information except the voice.” She came, she sang and she got the job. What she did not get was a clear notion of whether she'd be singing all or only part of the songs. “I think Audrey knew ‘I Could Have Danced All Night' would probably be all me,” says Nixon, “but if anything else was decided, we didn't know about it.” Exactly when Audrey learned of Nixon's hiring is unclear, but it was a big blow to her self-confidence when she found out. So was the process itself, which Nixon describes:

It was painful, almost pathetic. Audrey's stepson Chris Ferrer remembered Audrey “coming home each day totally exhausted and discouraged because she was trying so hard to do it right, but she could tell that it was really not quite good enough.”
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Did Hepburn ever turn to Nixon for vocal advice? Would she ever say, “How should I sing this?” Or, “Am I forcing?”

“There was some of that,” says Nixon. “They wanted me to help her as much as possible. [But] I wasn't sure that what I would have told her was any better than what Sue was telling her. It was a matter of me singing it with her accent, and then her imitating me. I was imitating her personality and trying to sing it as I thought she would have, then she would correct my pronunciation. It was really a technical thing. She had to have a lot of trust in me. The thrill I have is that I was able to pick up on her. I really felt fused with her.”

But Audrey was the victim of a lot of false hope along the way. “They were all happy enough with ‘Wouldn't It Be Loverly?' so that she actually filmed that whole song to her track,” Nixon recalls. “But I was always doing the high notes for her, even in that. Later they decided it just wouldn't match up. You couldn't have one voice for one song and one voice for another. So they threw out her track, which was very discouraging to her. In ‘The Rain in Spain,' it wasn't clear how much would be me and how much would be her [until] the last minute. Lerner was there. It was his choice, not mine.”
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Lerner was there, indeed—with some dubious brainstorms. He now summoned his music director with what he thought was a surefire solution to the Audrey vocal dilemma, as Previn recalls:

“Lerner said, ‘She is extremely intelligent about herself. So I want you to record her with the full orchestra, make her a beautiful arrangement. And when she hears it back on those six surround speakers, she'll say, Holy Jesus, and she won't do it.' I said, ‘Alan—' He said, ‘Trust me, I know actresses.' I said, ‘No, you marry actresses, but you don't know them.'

“Anyway, we did it and we played it back and it was not good and she said, ‘I love it.' We were cooked. It didn't sound bad, but you wanted it to sound good. It was the musical film of the decade—the last great operetta—you wanted it to be perfect.”
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Beaton recorded an uncomfortable moment in June when Audrey sang part of the score to the assembled company—“a mistake,” he said. “Audrey, seeing the brave smiles on everyone's face, had the feeling she was drowning.”
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Harper McKay, Previn's assistant musical director, said one of his tasks was to help Audrey improve “despite the fact that the decision had already been made to have Marni dub her voice. Audrey dutifully worked on her vocalises for a half hour or so every morning, and the weeks went by.... Lerner, Previn or Cukor would drop by occasionally, listen to Audrey's singing and compliment her extravagantly on how well she was sounding. Audrey, unfortunately, began to believe them.”

During the last day of rehearsal on the Covent Garden set, Audrey sang “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” herself, and the extras and crew broke into loud applause. Afterward, during a meeting to discuss the next day's work, Audrey came in flushed with emotion. “Did you hear it?” she asked Cukor. “They actually applauded!”

“Audrey,” Cukor said, “they thought it was you.”

“George,” she said, “It was me,” and tears came to her eyes. The playback operator had mistakenly used her track instead of Marni Nixon's. Cukor, Lerner and Previn hadn't noticed.
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From that point on, says Previn, “it became a passing-the-buck thing. Warner wouldn't tell her. Lerner wouldn't tell her. Loewe was never around at all. They came to me and I said, ‘Listen, fellas,
I'm
not the one to tell her.' So finally Cukor had to go. She was very hurt because she felt that if she had taken Julie Andrews's place and then couldn't sing, it would reflect very badly on her. But she never said a word. I'm sure she had tears about it, but not so you'd know.”
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