Her beauty seems to have given her little personal confidence: during Charade, the ageing Cary Grant advised her to learn to like herself a little more. He certainly set her a prime example in that domain. An uncited story is of his being denied entry to a Hollywood charity ball because he failed to bring his invitation. He told the severe lady at the door, ‘I’m Cary Grant’. She looked up and said, ‘You don’t look like Cary Grant.’ In his (often imitated) inimitable way, he said, ‘Nobody does.’ Nor did they look like Audrey, but she never relished her own beauty.
Spoto, who is, as his name suggests, very nearly spot-on, sees her attachment to Mel, an older man of sophisticated worldliness and affected refinement, as a sublimation of her craving for an appreciative father. Mel did act as counsellor, but never a self-effacing one: he dragooned her into one of her few flops, Green Mansions, which he directed. He was as indefatigable as he was untalented. Her other directors were more carefully selected father-substitutes beginning with Willie Wyler.
Spoto says that Roman Holiday had a particularly witty script, but when I saw it recently only Audrey’s charm, as a Princess Margaret on the lam, continued to sparkle, while Greg Peck walked through the piece with the handsome effortlessness his profile deserved. After reprising her ingénue in the joyless Sabrina, with a sulky, too old Bogart and an all too realistically boozy Bill Holden, Audrey played a fallen version of the same angel in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, otherwise a fairly silly piece, apart from Hank Mancini’s Moon River, of which — depend upon it — the Paramount Head of Production, one Martin Rackin, said ‘That f***in’ song’s got to go.’ Audrey said, it had got to stay; and it did.
She played a variant on the virgin role in Nun’s Story, to which the Catholic Church lent its imprimatur, but abandoned it, at last, for Two for the Road, in which, in 1966, she dared to play a wife who takes a lover, before returning to her husband, Albie. Audrey thought it the best performance of her career, and I am unlikely to disagree. In my vanity, I thought the radiance she displayed during shooting was on account of the script; I now know it was Albie.
Two for the Road is now much taught, though Spoto gives it little space, since it made only a modest amount of money. Years later, I tried to persuade Audrey, then in retirement, to do a script from my novel, Richard’s Things, in which a dead man’s wife and mistress end up in bed together. She wrote to me that she loved it, but couldn’t possibly do it, because her public would never forgive her (she had played a girl ‘accused’ of lesbianism in The Loudest Whisper, but she was — of course — innocent of such then literally unspeakable iniquity).
The last time I talked to ‘little Audrey’ was after a chance meeting in Australia, where she was on the last of her self- punishing, philanthropic Unicef tours. She seemed as youthfully unspoilt as ever. A few months later, her death, from colonic cancer, at the age of 64, proved she was all too human. Her improbable star continues to shine fixedly.
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