George Groves The Movie Sound Pioneer

In a career that lasted almost half a century, George Groves was involved in hundreds of Warner Brothers pictures in either an operational or supervisory capacity. However, as far as George was concerned there was one film that he had the most affection for. That was My Fair Lady, which was made during 1963-4 and starred Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Holloway and Wilfred Hyde-White, with George Cukor as director.

In his oral history interviews, George devoted 78 minutes to the making of My Fair Lady (MFL), considerably more than any other picture. When the interviewer, Irene Kahn Atkins, first mentions MFL, George said: My Fair Lady had been a big hit on Broadway and Warners paid a record $5.5 million for the film rights to Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical. Julie Andrews had played Eliza Doolittle on stage but the film role went instead to Audrey Hepburn. George felt that Jack Warner had reservations about Andrews as a dramatic actress.

The film was in pre-production for quite some time and George picked the best sound crew that he had, including stage mixer Fran Scheid. It was decided that the film would be shot in 70mm with six-track stereo. With a production budget of $17 million, Warner Bros. were determined to pull out all the stops and there was a buzz of excitement at their studios in Burbank: As Warners did not possess any 6-track recording or dubbing equipment, the pre-scoring was instead done at the Golden Studios in Hollywood. George commented how Rex Harrison did "a good job" and how Wilfred Hyde-White was "very, very funny...the whole pre-scoring operations sessions were very pleasant and went off very well”.

However, Rex Harrison suddenly dropped a bombshell. Despite completing the pre-scoring sessions, he surprised George by declaring his unwillingness to mime to a playback of his voice. He said every theatrical performance he'd given of Henry Higgins had been different and he didn't want to be an "automatic device mouthing in sync". Fortunately in the pre-recording George had ensured isolation between Harrison's voice and the orchestra, so there were clean orchestrations to work with. George's first thought was a low playback of the pre-recorded orchestra on each set with a microphone to pick Rex up live. It was after all standard practice for performers to mime or sing live to a pre-recorded backing track. However, some sets were going to prove extremely problematic, especially Henry Higgins' studio. This had a metal stairway and a balcony containing Higgins' library. It would be impossible to photograph Harrison on that balcony and coming down the stairway without getting the microphone in shot. So George had a dilemma.

He remembered watching Sophia Loren on television conducting a guided tour around Rome using a radio microphone, which had worked quite successfully. However radio mics were in their infancy and not employed in large-scale productions as they were bulky, limited to a very low power transmission and suffered badly from interference, as George explained: George made test recordings of Rex Harrison on a scoring stage using radio microphones borrowed from a broadcast station to see whether it could be a practical solution and to determine how low orchestral playback could be. They realised that they would have to equalise the radio speech so it matched the standard microphone recordings. They also identified difficulties in disguising a bulky microphone under Rex’s clothing. George presented this problem to the wardrobe department and to Rex, because he was so enthused about the preliminary test that they'd made: 

The radio microphone was one-inch in diameter and the tube containing the pre-amplifier, which fed the transmitter, was two inches long. "It was a bulky thing", said George. So the wardrobe department created a course-knit tie, completely transparent to sound and the radio mic and its pre-amp were concealed within it.

Rex was very patient with the time involved in being dressed and in being sound-checked on the set. As George Groves put it, he thought: "This is God's gift to Rex Harrison". This profile still of Harrison (right), taken from the film, reveals the stockiness of his tie containing the microphone.

Disguising the radio microphone for other scenes involved some creative thinking on George's part. When Henry Higgins returns to his home from the embassy ball where Eliza Doolittle makes her debut as a lady, he's wearing a dress suit and black cape with a white silk scarf around his neck. George Groves' oral history again: At the end of the film Rex Harrison walks down the street to his house and sings I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face. This created a further difficulty for George due to the very low power of radio microphones at that time. George explained how they: Rex was absolutely delighted with the recording of I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face. He told George that the radio microphone allowed him to perform it much better than when he'd sung it on stage. Rex said he could "never in all of his life" have mimed to playback, as he was emotionally in the mood for a live rendition. According to one of Rex Harrison's biographers, Alexander Walker, the song held special memories for him. During the original Broadway run, Harrison used to sing it to his wife Kay Kendall, who would watch his performance from the wings. Harrison later said that when he sang the song in MFL he was thinking all the time about Kendall, who'd died from leukaemia a few years earlier. George said that they were very lucky that they were able to record it in a single take: Warners did not have six track dubbing facilities so the sound was edited at Todd AO. Jack Warner would check with George at the end of each day as to what progress had been made. He made a trip over one evening to view six reels and simply said: "keep up the good work".

Attention to detail with the sound in MFL extended to non-synchronous sounds. Director George Kukor asked George to "Do what you can to get real sounds of the real thing". So for Henry Higgins' elocution recordings of Eliza, they took old phonograph machines – or as George dubbed them "wonderful old relics" – and recorded the sounds onto phonograph discs.

In order to get authentic sounds for the Covent Garden vegetable market scenes, George wrote letters to the BBC, Warners' studio in Elstree and EMI in London requesting recordings. Then the sound of Bow Bells and other background atmos was mixed in with the "cloppety-clop" of horses' hooves and the dragging of carts to create a live atmosphere. It was important that the audience could suspend its disbelief that it was a studio set. "We went to a lot of trouble to get this stuff", said George.

Attention to detail was everywhere in the making of MFL. An electric tram conveyed the actresses to the studio stages to save their long dresses touching the studio streets. Audrey Hepburn extensively rehearsed her script with Cockneys to ensure that her dialect and inflections were authentic. Rex Harrison was very fussy about the material used in his costume and hat. George said: The radio microphone enabled a natural performance from Rex, creating all the atmosphere and feel of one of his live performances and established a great friendship between him and George Groves. Whether they talked about their origins is not known, but they were both "Lancashire lads", as Rex had been born in Huyton near Liverpool, just six miles away from George's birthplace in St Helens.

Rex Harrison presented George with a spirit measure in the shape of a thimble in appreciation of his efforts. The inscription around its perimeter reads: "ONLY A THIMBLE FULL, GEORGE M.F.L. 1963 REX".

On April 5th 1965, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Warners Sound Department the Best Sound award for My Fair Lady. It was one of eight awards the picture scooped that evening.  The ceremony was hosted by Bob Hope and held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. George accepted his Oscar from Claudia Cardinale and Steve McQueen with considerable pride: