Audrey Hepburn (2 page)

The final sections on Audrey Hepburn's dynamic labors for UNICEF could not have been written without the insights of Robert Wolders, Christa Roth, John Isaac, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Jack Glattbach, Ian MacLeod and many other UNICEF personnel, as well as Senator Nancy Kassebaum, Anne Cox Chambers and William Banks. And I am grateful to G. P. Putnam's Sons for agreeing to donate a portion of this book's revenues to UNICEF and the Hepburn Estate's “Hollywood for Children” foundation.

It was a great loss to be deprived of George Coleman, the Putnam editor who conceived this book. But it was a privilege to have the ongoing support of Phyllis Grann and editors Laura Yorke, David Groff and especially David Highfill. Ian Trewin and Allegra Huston at Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and Martin Appelmann at Bosch & Kuening (Netherlands) gave valuable assistance in Europe.

No such sweeping, intercontinental project as this is possible without enormous domestic and moral support. In my case, it came from Robert (“le Diable”) Gottlieb, ace agent Dan Strone, the Deco duo of Charles Busch and Eric Myers, Jack Larsen, Wallace Potts, Rick and Deborah Geary, Ron Wisniski, Albert French, Stephen Baum, Rose Hayden, James and Queen Christina O'Toole, Pamela and David Loyle, Wyoming B. Paris I, Merica Paris and Wyoming B. Paris III.

The most crucial come last: Writer-researcher Maria Ciaccia is simply the best in the business, and the most devoted. John Barba (with the long-suffering Margie's support) is my brilliant friend, closest advisor and, in many ways, the coauthor of this book. And finally, Myrna—Diva and pillar of strength—whom I thank and love, as ever.

 

BARRY PARIS
Pittsburgh
March 7, 1996

CHAPTER 1

“I had an enormous complex about my looks. I thought I was ugly and I was afraid nobody would ever marry me.”

—AUDREY HEPBURN

 

 

 

O
N THE DAY OF THE GREATEST AIRBORNE INVASION IN HISTORY, Audrey Hepburn was a skinny girl of fifteen—stunned and exhilarated by the prospect of imminent liberation from the Nazis and incredulous that it was taking place in her own provincial Dutch town of Arnhem. Now, on September 17, 1944, Arnhem found itself the scene of the single most daring Allied gambit of World War II. That day—combined with 1,800 other days under the Nazi occupation—would have repercussions on her life forever.

Strange circumstances had brought her there, and even stranger circumstances would turn the teen who stood watching that invasion into the most beautiful icon of her era. “Audrey Hepburn looks like every girl and like no girl,” said a friend. “She doesn't even look like Audrey Hepburn.”
¹
She was a ballet dancer, who never performed a full ballet. She was the world's highest paid film actress, who never studied acting.

The pessimists said no new feminine ideal could emerge from the war, wrote Cecil Beaton, but the rubble of Holland, an English accent, and an American success would produce a wistful child who embodied the spirit of a new day. “Nobody ever looked like her before,” said Beaton, except maybe “those wild children of the French Revolution.” She had enormous eyes and thick eyebrows, an incredibly long and slender neck, and was “too tall” by the standard of the day. And yet, like a Modigliani portrait, “the distortions are not only interesting in themselves but make a completely satisfying composite.”
²

She would come to represent not just a new look but a new femininity—the diametric European opposite of the American sex goddess. Diva Maria Callas, and a few million others, would use her as a model.
³
“She comes at an historical moment,” wrote critic Molly Haskell, “just before feminism, easy divorce and the sexual revolution.” She was the vulnerable waif, discreet and ambiguous to the end. That persona in
Love in the Afternoon,
said Stanley Kauffmann, was typical: “The sign of her preparing to take the plunge was when she removes a glove.”

Child-women have fascinated film audiences since Lillian Gish, but Hepburn's version came with a paradoxical glamour and sophistication. Most glamour queens began as waitresses or shop girls and had to be groomed for the throne by their studios. Not Audrey Hepburn. She arrived more or less in complete form, like Botticelli's Venus on the half-shell. Beauty and glamour may coincide but are by no means the same thing. Beauty is visual—necessary but not sufficient for glamour, which is more abstract. And if glamour is a form of mass hypnosis, Hepburn was the finest film hypnotist of her time.
⁴

Of the great movie goddesses, only Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor decorated more covers of
Life
than Audrey Hepburn, and only Garbo held more aloof from Hollywood. Over forty years, she starred in just twenty films but imbued them all with a remarkable, original presence. When she sings “Moon River,” softly confiding her melancholy to her guitar, “she is not an actress we judge but a person we know and love,” wrote one admirer. “That face would have excused a lot of awkward performances and bad movies. Happily, it didn't have to.”
⁵

What shined through, too, was her regal aura. “She is one of us,” Queen Mother Elizabeth reportedly told her daughter after they met Hepburn. It seemed to Haskell “as if she dropped out of the sky into the fifties, half wood-nymph, half princess, and then disappeared ... leaving no footprints ... a changeling of mysterious parentage, unidentifiable as to nationality or class.”

Perhaps, then, it is no surprise to learn that she was the daughter of a real-life baroness.

 

 

AUDREY HEPBURN'S MOTHER belonged to an ancient family of the Dutch nobility. Her grandfather, Baron Aernoud van Heemstra (1871-1957), was a lawyer and familiar figure at the court of Queen Wilhelmina. His ancestors had held high positions in the Netherlands as statesmen and soldiers from the twelfth century. Audrey's life had its share of problems, but she would never suffer from an identity crisis: Portraits of her ancestors hung in museums and aristocratic homes throughout Holland.

The van Heemstras' original wealth derived from colonial trading, but Baron Aernoud preferred government service to commerce. In 1896, he married Elbrig van Asbeck, who bore him five daughters and a son. Ella, the third child and future mother of Audrey, was born in 1900 in the province of Gelderland.

Ella wanted to study for the opera, but the stage was out of bounds. “Whatever you do, don't associate with actors and actresses,” the Baron decreed. “You'd bring disgrace on the family.” Ella's friend Alfred (“Freddie”) Heineken III, of the Dutch brewery family, calls her “a born actress, very dramatic, highly emotional, with a great sense of fun. But in those times, a daughter of the nobility was forbidden to have a career. She was expected to marry well and have lots of children.”

Ella would lament that she “grew up wanting more than anything else to be English, slim, and an actress.” The dutiful daughter forsook those yearnings but vowed that if she ever had a talented daughter, she would encourage her. Her own comfortable childhood was spent at several family estates—notably Doorn Castle near Utrecht (now the Huis-Doorn Museum), a gorgeous manse surrounded by beautifully landscaped grounds and a swan-filled moat. But Ella's generation of van Heemstras did not occupy it for long.

Dwarfed by the powerful memory of World War Il is World War I: Few recall that Holland was neutral in that conflict, at the end of which Kaiser Wilhelm II fled Germany for the Netherlands. The victorious Allies declared him a war criminal, but the ever-clement Dutch declined to hand him over. The van Heemstras were obliged not only to accommodate him at Doorn but, in 1920, to sell it to him. There he fantasized about his restoration and, in noxious Prussian fashion, cut down a tree a day “for exercise.” Joseph J. O'Donohue IV—a future in-law of the future actress Audrey Hepburn—recalls visiting Doorn in the early 1930s at the invitation of the Kaiser's grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand:

The last of the kaisers lived at Huis-Doorn until his death in 1941 (when Hitler granted him a military funeral). The van Heemstras, long before that, had taken up residence at another of their estates just outside the western Dutch town of Arnhem: Zijpendaal, a pristine mini-castle, dating to 1743, was nestled in a picturesque rustic setting with stables and a water mill and out-buildings for the keepers of its well-manicured park and horses.
^a
The Baron and his brood lived there in aristocratic fashion from 1910 through 1920, during which he served as the burgomaster—or mayor—of Arnhem.

He would soon be called to a more exotic locale but first attended to the matrimonial disposition of his nineteen-year-old Ella. She was married in Arnhem on March 11, 1920, to Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford, Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. A former lieutenant in the Queen's equerry, he was now an oil executive of Bataafsche Petroleum (later Dutch Shell), newly assigned to the Netherlands East Indies. He took his bride to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia's capital) where, precisely nine months after the wedding, their son Alexander was born.

The Dutch empire was far-flung, and Ella's father now headed for its most remote outpost: In 1921, he was appointed Governor of Surinam (Dutch Guiana) on the northeast coast of South America. It was a territory roughly the size of Georgia, running from the Caribbean seaboard to Brazil, received in a 1667 trade with Britain in exchange for New Amsterdam—the present state and city of New York. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

Nearly half the colony's population of 300,000 lived in Paramaribo, the capital. In the colorful Asian market area near the waterfront were several Hindu temples and the Caribbean's largest mosque, peacefully located next to a synagogue. All in all, Paramaribo was an ecumenical city, unmistakably Dutch in character despite its bizarre population mix.
^b
The relative lack of racial tensions was due largely to the tradition of Dutch tolerance: Surinamese knew how to get along with one another.

Paramaribo boasted many beautiful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial buildings in the Dutch neo-Norman style. Not least of them was the Governor's Mansion, situated on a plaza with the impossible Dutch name of Onafhankelijkheidsplein. As Baroness Elbrig was often ill, her seventeen-year-old daughter Jacqueline took her place as hostess, serving in that role for the length of her father's administration. In the future, she would become lady-in-waiting to Princess (later Queen) Juliana; for now, Surinam would provide her with a perfect—and perfectly beautiful—training ground. The official residence, surrounded by orchids that grew twelve feet tall, greatly impressed the van Heemstras from the moment they laid eyes on it.

The Surinamese, in turn, were impressed with Baron van Heemstra. He was the first governor to travel deep into the interior, where white Europeans seldom penetrated. His purpose was business, not pleasure: He was scouting new ways to exploit the country's extraordinary natural resources, including its huge deposits of bauxite. Soon, Surinam's bauxite/aluminum industry would account for 72 percent of its exports.

The atmosphere of Paramaribo was charmed. Among its customs were birdsong competitions in the public parks. People routinely carried their pet songbirds in cages when out for a stroll, and even to work. Life was good, and so was the cuisine—as exotic as Surinam's ethnic makeup—featuring
pom,
a puree of cassava, and peanut soup with plantain dumplings. The climate was moist but not terribly hot, thanks to the northeast trade winds year round. It was truly, in many ways, a tropical paradise.

But there was trouble in another paradise, halfway around the globe in Batavia, where Ella's marriage was not going well. The constant quarrels between her and Quarles van Ufford ended in 1925, a year after their second son Ian was born, when they were divorced in the Netherlands East Indies. Divorce was quite rare for an aristocratic Dutchwoman of that time, said a friend, “but she preferred that to taking a lover, like most.”
⁷
Ella was a strong-willed, energetic woman who loved the good life and had a fatal weakness for good-looking men. She took herself and the boys to join her family in the colonial splendor of Paramaribo—but not for long. For Ella, unlike sister Jacqueline, the novelty of Surinam wore off in less than a year, and after returning briefly to Arnhem, she went back to Indonesia.

Her real agenda was to renew and pursue her relationship with an Anglo-Irish businessman, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, whom she had met there earlier. He, too, had recently been divorced—in San Francisco, of all places. In Ella's set, marriages and divorces were more easily conducted in exotic locales: On September 7, 1926, she and Joe were wed in Batavia.

Ruston was born in 1889 in Slovakia, where his British father had business.

His claims to have studied at Cambridge and served in the British Army during World War I are unverified, but after the war he did join the diplomatic service and was assigned to the Dutch East Indies as vice-consul at Semarang, a town between Batavia and Surabaja. He later gave that up for a job with the Batavia arbitrage house of Maclaine Watson & Company, which handled trading in East Indian tin.