This Day in Film History (Audrey Hepburn’s “Sabrina” Debuts, After Nightmarish Production)

September 21, 1954—The original screenwriter withdrew from the project; his successor had a nervous breakdown; the male lead, a second choice, sulked most of the time; and the director, leaving his movie studio after 18 years, was writing and shooting scenes on the fly.

Naturally, Sabrina, a modern Cinderella story created by Billy Wilder with Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and a radiant young Audrey Hepburn in the leads, became one of Hollywood’s best-loved romantic comedy classics after premiering on this date.

Anyone seeing the coziness among Wilder, Holden and Hepburn were would have mistaken this for the happiest set in the world. It’s true that William Holden got along great with Wilder—the expatriate from Nazism had lifted the actor from pretty-boy hell with edgy roles in Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17, the second of which netted him an Oscar.

As for Audrey Hepburn, everybody seemed to adore her. In particular, Wilder admired her for her professionalism and loyalty. Holden really fell for her—the married star began a love affair with her that matched their sparks onscreen.

All this left Humphrey Bogart as the odd man out, a perception that came to a head when Wilder invited Holden and Hepburn in for drinks but forgot to include Bogie (or so the director said). Whether the trio consciously excluded him or not, he never felt comfortable on the set, a situation worsened by the following factors:

* Wilder had written the part of older, stick-in-the-mud tycoon brother Linus for Cary Grant, a longtime friend. The two had long talked about making a film together, but, now that he had the chance, Grant rejected the part. In fact, he never ended up collaborating with Wilder, which the director felt was a hole in his filmography. Inevitably, that disappointment translated into how he viewed Bogie. (It didn’t help that Wilder really wanted this film to succeed; Paramount had irritated him into leaving after an 18-year association.)

* Bogart had less control over the film than his contract stipulated. In addition to $200,000, his agent won the actor script approval—a concession that turned out to be meaningless, because to secure all the leads, principal photography was moved up and accelerated. Samuel Taylor, who had contracted to adapt his play Sabrina Fair, pulled out of the film because of all the changes Wilder made in his script. His replacement, Ernest Lehman, churned out page after rewritten page until he suffered a nervous breakdown. Wilder was writing on lunch breaks during shooting, and Hepburn, at his urging, flubbed lines or feigned sickness to buy him more time.

So here you have Bogart, an established star, a professional, coming to a set where chaos reigned without the finished script. That meant he might have to read lines cold, as they’d only just been written. The star was not at all happy.

* Bogart had to endure take after take—more torture for the veteran. Wilder often required multiple takes, not because he longed for especially arty camera angles but because he demanded much of actors. Seven years later, after Wilder made James Cagney do more than 30 takes of his rat-a-tat-tat dialogue in One Two Three, Cagney decided that was his last film—until Ragtime lured him out of retirement in 1981.

With the Sabrina script a mess, Bogie was asked to do the same thing as Cagney. Oh, and one more thing: those takes increased because of his tendency to spit when speaking. How on earth could Wilder tell the actor, after a pitch-perfect line reading, that his great expectorations had ruined the backlighting?

* The difference in age and experience between Bogart and Hepburn was obvious, hideous, and unbridgeable. While solving one potential age-related problem in its leads, Paramount Studios only added another. Marvelous throaty-voiced Margaret Sullavan (perhaps best known nowadays for her collaboration with Jimmy Stewart on The Shop Around the Corner) might have been fine on Broadway in Sabrina Fair, but film cameras would have cruelly wrecked the illusion that the 43-year-old actress could play a chauffeur’s daughter.

Unfortunately, in casting the 55-year-old Bogart, Paramount had simply found another variation on the same dilemma. Bogart was a half-decade older than both the Linus of Broadway, Joseph Cotten, and the perennially youthful-looking and healthy Grant. Worse, he looked every bit his age, and more. It was said after his death in January 1957 that Bogart had refused to see a doctor about the cancer that took his life until it was far too late. Perhaps he felt the first intimations of something wrong now.

At the same time, Bogart expressed annoyance at Hepburn. It should be remembered that this was only the second starring role for the actress (who had won the Oscar the year before for Roman Holiday) and that she was only 25 years old. She admitted years later that she was “terrified” of Bogie, and he used that fear to make her feel as uncomfortable as he was, complaining about her to Holden (who took umbrage at the treatment of his lover), openly carping about her and Holden to the press, and delivering the malicious line, “She’s okay if you don’t mind 20 takes.”

* Following a period of one acting triumph after another, Bogart found himself miscast. Over the last dozen years, Bogie had expanded his range shrewdly, from murderous gangster (The Petrified Forest) to sympathetic gangster (High Sierra) to tough private eye (The Maltese Falcon) to romantic lead (Casablanca) to scruffy but lovable misfit (The African Queen). Now, he obeyed his inner siren voice advising him it was time to do comedy. Maybe it was, but not this one. An aging, unhealthy leading man would not only not look good next to the gamine Hepburn, but might even be blamed for the film’s failure. That had to rankle the justly proud actor.

* Bogart insulted Wilder and Hepburn. Wilder restrained Holden from have it out with Bogart, but felt hard pressed when Bogart turned his nasty tongue on himself and Hepburn. Hepburn’s British accent and Wilder’s Viennese one provided fodder for Bogart’s impressionistic skills. Bogart’s ultimate insult—“kraut bastard Nazi son of a bitch"—became too much to stomach for Wilder, a Jew who had lost family members in the Holocaust. Bogie forget an important rule: never insult someone who makes his living through words, particularly one with a rapier tongue himself. Now Wilder trained it on the actor, saying he had examined all the “valleys, the crevices, and the pits of your ugly face.”

Whew! It’s a miracle the family got made without people getting killed. It's a further miracle that it became a success. Four decades later, when Sydney Pollack released his remake, most critics couldn’t bear even to compare it with Wilder’s original, and quickly (and unfairly, I think) dismissed Julia Ormond’s performance in the Hepburn role.

For all the animosity between Wilder and Bogart, the two managed to end their relationship on a grace note. Wilder’s visit not long before Bogart’s death led the actor to apologize for his behavior on the Sabrina set, explaining that he was going through a difficult time.

Years later, in recalling the star’s painful but stoic exit, Wilder praised him as memorably as he had once insulted him: “he was very good, better than he thought he was. He liked to play the hero, and in the end, he was.”