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"The only time she panics is when she's left with nothing to do," says Lerner, who figures she must get her energy from "simplifying her life. She has 20 pairs of beige slacks, white shirts and black sweaters. When she gets up in the morning, she knows what she's going to wear. She never considers what she's going to have for dinner because her cook knows she eats very simply. All the decisions that exhaust the normal person, she has eliminated."
"Dressing up is a bore," says Hepburn. "At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I'm past that age." This spareness carries over into her profession. "Addition can make an enormously interesting artist," says Kate, "but the elimination makes a great artist. Simplifying, simplifying, simplifying." She relaxes by playing tennis or taking long walks. When she and Director Michael Benthall worked on The Millionairess, she used to insist that he run around the Central Park reservoir with her every morning. "It nearly killed me," he recalls. "This time I refused. I'd have a heart attack."
In the play taking shape at the Mark Hellinger Theater, Kate plays the Coco of 1953—the Chanel who, at age 70 and after 15 years in retirement, decided to make a comeback by reopening her salon. The plot is as simple as a Chanel suit: Yes, she'll open; No, she won't; Yes, she'll open; No, she won't; Yes, she'll open; Yes, she opens. Her collection is a flop with the Paris fashion world, but not (aha!) with the fresh-eyed buyers from across the Atlantic. Paris may have hated the dresses, and
Gave them all the ax.
But everything's fine
Right down the line
For Ohrbach's, Bloomingdale's
and Best and Saks.
There are a few adornments to the story. Through a series of flashbacks using filmed sequences shown on mirrored screens, Coco's past love affairs are recalled. She develops a motherly feeling for one of her young mannequins and becomes one of the angles in a rather flimsy triangle involving herself, the mannequin and the girl's lover. The Lerner script makes a stab at smart-set language, but at heart Coco is an old-fashioned musical. It stands or falls on its star and its music.
No Sweat. Of the 18 Lerner-Previn songs, eight are Kate's, full of self-doubt, self-confidence, self-satisfaction and self-recollection. Previn has played a schmalzy Loewe to Lerner's Lerner. As for Hepburn's voice, Previn thinks she's got it. "There's been an enormous improvement just since I heard her last summer," he says. As Adler sees it, "She's like Rex Harrison, only she out-Rexes Rex: you never quite know when the singing stops and the talking begins." It's probably just as well; who else but Hepburn could make a rhyme of the first stanza of her opening song,
Turn on the Lights?
Life when you retire.
It's better to expire
The moment you retire
You're Mademoiselle Pariah.