The Jaguar #02

ICONS
Impossibly elegant
and always endlessly chic,
Audrey Hepburn carved
out a piece of fashion history
to call her own.
RICHARD WILLIAMS takes
a look at how we all
came to love the iconic actress
and the style she invented
“Pretty,
isn’t
she?”
...asks Peter O’Toole, and for a split-second we’re not sure
whether he’s talking about the primrose E-Type roadster
at the kerb outside a mansion in Paris or about Audrey
Hepburn, who is turning her large eyes from the car to
O’Toole and back again with an expression of distinct
scepticism as she tries to reconcile the idea of the English
smoothie she has just caught burgling her father’s art
collection in the dead of night with this beautiful sports car.
“She’ll do more than 150 miles per hour,” he assures her.
“Useful for getaways, you see.”
“Hmm. The robbery business must be pretty good,”
Hepburn says, as she slides into the driver’s seat. She
is wearing a magenta satin jacket over a short pale pink
negligée with ivory lace trimmings. And gumboots.
She looks like a dream.
They carry on discussing the Jaguar. “It’s stolen,”
he says. “I can’t drive a stolen car,” she responds. “Same
principle,” he says, “four gears forward, one reverse.”
She’s doing the driving because, a few minutes earlier,
she accidentally grazed his arm with a ball from a flintlock
pistol she’d snatched from a wall display to protect herself
against the unknown intruder. Now she’s been charmed
EXCERPTS FROM ‘HOW TO STEAL A MILLION’ ©1966 COURTESY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. WRITTEN BY HARRY KURNITZ. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
52 THE JAGUAR