Audrey Hepburn (3 page)

The allure of Java did not include its oppressive heat or its limited social excitement, and the couple soon opted for Europe again. But Ruston's transfer to Maclaine Watson's London headquarters lasted only for a year. Always restless, he next joined an Anglo-French credit society dealing in home loans and the like. That company armed him with the title of vice president and deputy administrator and sent him to open a new branch office in Belgium, where he, Ella and the two boys settled down in the Ixelles district of Brussels.

Half a century later, most chroniclers would characterize Audrey Hepburn's father as a “banker” who was employed in the Bank of England's Brussels branch and who, after marrying Ella, handled the van Heemstra family's properties and finances. Late in life, Audrey bluntly denied it: “They speak of my father having been a banker, which he wasn't at all. He never really held down a job.”
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The Bank of England was an exchequer or treasury, not a conventional bank, and in fact had no foreign branch in Brussels or anywhere else. Ruston's initial interest in Ella was enhanced by his incorrect assumption that her family had vast wealth, but he was sadly if not bitterly disabused of that notion early on.

The term “international banker” described him less well than “international adventurer.” The term “pregnant” now described his wife.

 

 

AUDREY KATHLEEN VAN HEEMSTRA RUSTON was born in Brussels on May 4, 1929. “Audrey” was a feminine form of “Andrew,” which was to have been her name if she'd been a boy. Her birth certificate omits the hyphenated “Hepburn” before Ruston; Ella allegedly added it later to spiff up her own and her daughter's future calling card. According to biographer Warren Harris, it was the only aristocratic name Ella could find in Ruston's family tree—the surname of his grandmother, who was descended from James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Since the baby's father and Dutch mother were both British citizens in the eyes of the law, the new baby was likewise certified by the British consulate in Brussels.

“If I were to write a book about myself,” Audrey once told her son Sean, “it would start like this: I was born on May 4, 1929, and I died three weeks later.” At twenty-one days of age, she contracted such a terrible case of whooping cough that her heart stopped. Ella, who was a rather strict Christian Scientist and had not called a doctor, revived her by spanking. “There was no giving up on this baby,” said Sean. “I think that had an effect on her whole life, [as if she'd been given] a second chance.”
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Her early years were chaotic, with constant traveling back and forth between London and Brussels, Arnhem and The Hague. Alexander and Ian stayed often in those days with Ella's parents and saw little of stepfather Hepburn-Ruston. Ella was as restless as her husband and, when Audrey was a toddler of two, insisted on moving the family from Brussels to a small estate called Castel Sainte-Cecile in the nearby village of Linkebeek.

Baron van Heemstra had by then resigned as Governor of Surinam and returned to live with his daughter Mies and her husband, Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, at Zijpendaal Castle, where Audrey often visited and roamed the gorgeous grounds. But, by and large, she did not recall her early childhood fondly. She was a puny, introverted little girl who had trouble making friends and preferred the tomboyish companionship of her much older half-brothers. She cared much less for dolls, which “never seemed real to me,” she said, than for animals.

Her happiest moments by far were in the country. “I had a passion for the outdoors, for trees, for birds and flowers,” she said—and for Rudyard Kipling, inspired by brother Alexander, “the original bookworm.... When we were children he was devoted to Kipling [and] I read all Kipling's books because I wanted to be like him. I followed everything else he read, too. Before I was thirteen I had read nearly every book by Edgar Wallace and Edward Phillips Oppenheim, who wrote a long series of romantic mysteries about secret international documents, shifty diplomats and seductive adventuresses.... To me as a girl they had far more appeal than books like
Topsy Goes to School.
”
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Reading became a lifeline for her. She spoke of
The Secret Garden
as one of her favorite books and of the fact that, at the age of nine, her mother gave her a copy of
Heidi
just before they embarked on a train trip from Holland to Italy. She started it instantly and, by the time she finished, they were in Italy without her having seen a glimpse of Switzerland.
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Ian was also a voracious reader, and also close to his little sister. “We were very naughty,” he said. “We did a lot of tree climbing.” Ella would reprimand sharply and “threaten to disown me,” Audrey recalled:

Several of her aunts encouraged Audrey to begin piano lessons, which she did. But there would be no escaping her mother's overbearing presence. Robert Wolders, the soft-spoken Dutchman with whom Audrey spent the last dozen years of her life, knew Ella well as “a superior woman, very humorous, extremely well read and well educated—but critical of everyone, including Audrey. Biased, intolerant.”
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Audrey's childhood was fairly cloistered and indeed full of nannies and private tutors. Though never wanting for a thing, she was keenly aware of the tension between her parents, who fought incessantly over money and other matters. She became increasingly withdrawn and hypersensitive, often seeking refuge in the fields of her family's estates. Hiding and eating became preoccupations: “It was either chocolates, bread or my nails.”

Her father's work took him abroad a great deal, and only when he was away did the child seem to find moments of peace. But when he returned, the bickering resumed, and so did Audrey's introversion. To draw her out, her mother decided to try the “shock” treatment: She sent Audrey, at age five, to a boarding school in England.

At first, “I was terrified about being away from home,” said Hepburn in adulthood. She was teased for being shy and plump, unlike her hockey-playing peers, and for her imperfect English. She missed her mother terribly. Her father, nearby in London, made little effort to see her. Even so, she concluded stoically, “it turned out to be a good lesson in independence.”
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The school was run by the six unmarried Rigden sisters in Elham, Kent. To immerse the girl further in English customs and language, Ella arranged for her to spend holidays with a coal miner's family in the country, where she learned the names of all the flowers—and never forgot them.
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“Those people had a remarkable effect on her,” says Wolders. “She always kept a picture of their terrier on her dressing-room table.” Many years later, she went back to look them up and helped their son adopt a child through the UN.

 

 

AUDREY WAS adjusting well to England, but English politics and the gathering storm over Europe were now compounding the maladjustment of her parents. In mid-1930s Britain, the growth and appeal of fascism were by no means universally condemned. Sir Oswald Mosley, once a top minister in Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government, had formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF). His companion and future wife was Diana Mitford, whose sister Unity was also sympathetic to the movement. Ella was friendly with the Mitfords and evidently encouraged her rabidly anti-Communist husband to join up.

As the BUF grew in strength, the Hepburn-Rustons were openly involved in its fund-raising and recruitment. Ella was so devoted to Mosley that she publicly endorsed him in the April 26, 1935, edition of BUF's weekly paper,
The Blackshirt,
a glamorous photo of herself accompanying her article:

A few weeks later, in May, Ella and her husband joined Mosley's BUF delegation to Germany to observe conditions under the Nazis. They toured autobahns, factories, schools and housing developments, and had the heady honor of meeting Hitler himself at the Nazis' Brown House headquarters in Munich. A group photo taken there—showing the Hepburn-Rustons with Unity Mitford, her sisters Pamela and Mary, and others—was long enshrined in a silver frame on Ella's mantelpiece.

The extent to which Ella's fascist involvement was sincere or merely in misguided support of her husband's ambitions is still unknown. Her article and the Brown House photo are the only clear pieces of evidence, and she never elaborated to her daughter in later years. In any case, the thrill of meeting the Führer had no magical effect on their domestic situation. Almost immediately after their return from Germany, in that same month of May 1935, Ruston walked out on his wife and six-year-old girl.

Dutch sources claim Joseph Hepburn-Ruston was a heavy drinker and that he and Ella argued about it.
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But more compelling reasons for departure were contained in his increasing radicalism: He soon quit the BUF to join an even more violently anti-Semitic splinter group. Ella's father was said to be incensed not only by his son-in-law's politics but by the belief that Ruston was mismanaging the van Heemstras' money and—worse—channeling some of it to fascist causes. By one account, Queen Wilhelmina herself urged the old Baron to silence Ella and pay off Ruston, if necessary to get him out of the family.
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Audrey called her father's disappearance “the most traumatic event in my life” and “a tragedy from which I don't think I've ever recovered. I worshiped him and missed him terribly from the day he disappeared.... If I could have just seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me, and I would have felt I had a father. But as it was, I always envied other people's fathers, came home with tears, because they had a daddy.”
¹⁸
Equally painful was her mother's reaction and the haunting memory of it:

There was a frightening physical manifestation of the disaster, too. When her father left, she said, “my mother's hair turned white overnight. [But she] never ever put him down.” Instead, “of necessity, my mother became a father too.”
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Ella began to spend more time in England with Audrey, who, despite her parents' breakup, made the school's honor roll and was making friends more easily. Most important, one of the many Miss Rigdens—a disciple of Isadora Duncan—was now helping her discover the art form that would captivate her for life.

“I fell in love with dancing,” she recalled. “In this village in Kent where I stayed, there was a young dancer who would come up from London once a week and give ballet classes. I loved it, just loved it.”
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Her life now settled down into a rather pleasant routine, largely undisturbed until the formal divorce of her parents in 1938. Ella got primary custody of nine-year-old Audrey. Hepburn-Ruston insisted that she remain in England and that he be given visitation rights. Ella resisted the second demand but gave in when Audrey pleaded for it. It turned out to be a moot point, in view of his subsequent failure to exercise those rights.

A year later came another upheaval for Audrey in the monumental upheaval of the world. Her mother came to collect her one day from school and was chatting with the dance instructor, who wanted to develop the girl's talent. Audrey overheard their conversation: “The teacher said, ‘Would you let me take her to London?' ‘No,' she said. ‘I'm taking her back to Holland.'”
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Ella and her sons had been visiting relatives in Arnhem when England declared war on Germany, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, in September 1939. Travel could be curtailed at any moment; she might be separated from her daughter for years. Ella returned in panic to Britain and hastily obtained court approval (over Hepburn-Ruston's objections) to remove Audrey to Holland.

“She thought London was about to be bombed and that she and Audrey would be safer in Arnhem,” recalls Freddie Heineken.
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The notion seems foolish in hindsight but was not at the time: Holland was neutral and certain to remain so. Ella and most of her countrymen clung to the naive belief that Hitler would respect the neutrality of his “Dutch cousins.” Very few commercial planes were still permitted to fly, but Ella pulled strings to get Audrey on one of them.

“Somehow she had contacted my father and asked him to meet me at the train in London where I was coming in [from Kent],” she told writer Dominick Dunne half a century later. “They put me on this bright-orange plane [the Dutch national color], and it flew very low. It really was one of the last planes out. That was the last time I saw my father.”
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