Audrey Hepburn (66 page)

Once on stage, her words were no less gracious and rather more humorous than usual. She thanked all the directors, costars and technicians who made a “marketable commodity out of a skinny broad.”

The post-tribute dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park presented a dilemma. The restaurant's tables held a maximum of ten, but many times that number had come to pay tribute to her and she was worried that there wouldn't be enough room for them all at her table. “If there was a chance of their feeling slighted, Audrey would not allow it,” says Professor Richard Brown, one of her favorite interviewers, who was a guest and witness.
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On this night above all others, says Keys, “She had to make sure that everyone who had come long distances sat close to her, but she couldn't bear to decide who should or shouldn't. So she had us make one tremendous table by pushing ten together into a giant oval that went on for miles. It was perfect. Nobody's feelings were hurt. It never happened before or since at one of those events, because most people don't care. But Audrey did.”
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Keys felt that quality carried over onto the screen:

“One thing she portrays on film so sharply is hurt feelings. You're so overcome by her beauty you don't really acknowledge the acting that goes on behind it. In
My Fair Lady,
when Higgins abuses her, you can see her hurt feelings and how honest they are. It was something close to her surface, that vulnerability I saw Rob react to in private. He would be so devastated when he saw that wounded expression—that look in her eye when she was struck down by something.”
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RALPH LAUREN'S blunt, sometimes confrontational way of dealing with Audrey not only didn't alienate her but seemed to draw them closer. His enormous affection for her was known by all, and Hepburn was the obvious choice to present him with the Council of Fashion Designers' Lifetime Achievement award on February 3, 1992 in New York. Audrey's was the most emotional of many emotional tributes to Ralph Lauren that night:

“You've not only created a total concept of fashion and style, but by your consistency and integrity, protected it, always reminding us of the best things in life. As a designer, you conjure up all things I most care about—the country, misty mornings, summer afternoons, great open spaces, horses, cornfields, vegetable gardens, fireplaces and Jack Russell terriers.

“As a man, I respect you for your total lack of pretension, for your gentleness, kindness, sincerity, simplicity. And as my friend, I love you.”
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When Lauren's turn came at the end, he said, “You want to know the lifetime achievement?” Then, addressing his best pal from boyhood, “Steve, remember we went to the movies in the Bronx thirty years ago? Remember the princess? I got her!”

As noted, Hepburn graced no fewer than four tributes to Gregory Peck.
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“How much could they say about each other?” asks Rob Wolders rhetorically. But Audrey always found something more, notably at the Kennedy Center in December 1991:

Six months later, she was honorary chairperson of the American Cinemathèque's tribute to Sean Connery. Their mutual friend Terence Young, who directed Connery's great James Bond hits, sent regrets by telegram: “There are only two great stars in my recollection who've not been changed by great, massive success: Sean Connery and Lassie.”
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Said Audrey:

“Like every actress in the world, for years it was my dream to work with Sean Connery—marvelous—looking, superb acting, warm, versatile and wildly sexy. I got my wish. But I was cast as a nun. Nevertheless, once Robin was back from the crusades in all his splendor, the nun's veil just seemed to melt away.”

At the Academy Awards that year—1992—Hepburn substituted for Mother Teresa in presenting an honorary Oscar to the ailing Indian director Satyajit Ray. Audrey got a standing ovation when she appeared in her Indian-style, off-the-shoulder Givenchy dress to introduce Ray's pre-recorded acceptance speech from his hospital bed in Calcutta.
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A few months earlier, when honored in Dallas by the U.S.A. Film Festival for her own contribution to motion pictures, she was asked how she felt about all the lavish praise.

“It's wonderful,” she replied, “but at the same time ... you just die in a way. I mean, all those compliments. You wish you could spread it over the year. It's like eating too much chocolate cake all at once. You sort of don't believe any of it, and yet you're terribly grateful.”
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She was deeply immersed in her “second career” with UNICEF by then, and—she told Dominick Dunne in
Vanity Fair
—she felt the same about the praise she was receiving for her UNICEF work:

“It makes me self-conscious. It's because I'm known, in the limelight, that I'm getting all the gravy, but if you knew, if you saw some of the people who make it possible for UNICEF to help these children survive. These are the people who do the jobs—the unknowns, whose names you will never know.... I at least get a dollar a year, but they don't.”
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On the other hand, she said, “I'm glad I've got a name because I'm using it for what it's worth.”
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“HER CAREER can be split into two chapters,” says her friend Leslie Caron. “In the first part she received all the glory she could hope for, and in the second part she gave back, in spades, what she had received.”
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On the heels of the Allies' liberation of Arnhem in 1945 came UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, forerunner of UNICEF, bringing desperately needed food, medicine and clothing. Audrey, we know, was one of the first beneficiaries, and her emotional commitment to that agency began then and there. “There is a moral obligation,” she would say, “that those who have should give to those who don't.”
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The death of actor Danny Kaye in March 1987 left a void at UNICEF. For the previous twenty years, he had roamed the world as its most popular Goodwill Ambassador. Only someone extraordinary could replace him or, at least, take over part of his work.

Now that her sons were grown, in 1988, instead of retiring in comfort to the jet set, Hepburn began the job that would occupy the last five years of her life: Special Ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund. “I auditioned for this job for forty-five years,” she would say, “and I finally got it.
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I always felt very powerless when I would see the terrible pictures on TV. But I was offered a wonderful opportunity to do something [and it is] is a marvelous therapy to the anguish I feel.”
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How long did it take her to accept the position?

“About two minutes,” she said. “I've always had an enormous love of children. When I was little, I used to embarrass my mother by trying to pick babies out of prams at the market. The one thing I dreamed of in my life was to have children of my own. It always boils down to the same thing—of not only receiving love but wanting desperately to give it.”
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There was an even simpler way to put it: “It's something I'd do for my child, so why not for others?”

The waters she first tested were in Macao, where UNICEF Portugal asked her to be guest of honor at a benefit concert in October 1987. In the beautiful Church of St. Lorenzo there, she delivered brief remarks—exactly two minutes—gently reminding her audience that 40,000 children die every day from preventable causes. She sat down briskly at the end, turned to Rob and asked, “Did I do all right?” It was her first real appearance for UNICEF, Wolders recalls: “She knew little about what was expected of her and was pacing outside in her evening dress beforehand because it meant the world to her.”

She had done all right, indeed.

Back at Macao's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Audrey shed her evening gown in favor of jeans for a late-night meeting with Jack Glattbach, UNICEF's Regional Information Officer. (“Why did I think she looked better in T-shirt and jeans?” he wondered to himself.) She told him she was content in Switzerland and didn't really want to travel much but would be glad to help UNICEF again—“if they ask me.” He made sure that she was asked, and over the next five years she often said, “It's all Jack's fault for getting me into this!” That, says Glattbach, “is the best thing I've been blamed for in all my years at UNICEF.”
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Indeed, he helped launch her on the course that would redefine her life.

Two months later in Tokyo, she was the “warmup act” for UNICEF director James P. Grant at a benefit concert by the World Philharmonic Orchestra—musicians from fifty-eight countries, under the baton of Giuseppe Sinopoli. It was there that she met Christa Roth, chief of UNICEF's Geneva office, who soon became one of her closest friends and helpmates.

“She had a tremendous following in Japan,” Roth recalls. “It was mind-boggling. In Tokyo we organized a press conference in a normal hotel room. We thought maybe a few journalists would come, but there were tenfold—we had to change rooms to accommodate them all.”
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For Roth, as for so many, Hepburn had been a role model. “I'm fifty-four,” she says, “so when I was a teenager, it was the time of Brigitte Bardot—and I was as skinny as Audrey. I thought, if it's not wrong for her, why should I feel bad about looking like that?” From now on, back in Switzerland, it was Christa who assisted her in a hundred ways, taking care of logistical details and helping her fight for the things she wanted.

After her successes in Macao and Japan, requests began pouring in from the UNICEF committees of Turkey, Finland, Holland, Australia—“and in our enthusiasm, we accepted all of them,” says Wolders, including one from Ireland. Dublin was a melancholy place, and after accepting the invitation, they had misgivings based on the memory of the previous sad visit with her father. But it turned out to be a cherished experience.

When they arrived there on September 30, 1988, the Irish committee chair-woman told her, “There's a lady who says she knows you from your childhood. We didn't want to tell her to go away.” It turned out to be the elderly Greta Hanley, Audrey's nanny in Brussels half a century before—a woman she adored. Their emotional reunion was the first of many, through UNICEF, that brought her closer to her “extended family” all over the world.

Hepburn's commitment to UNICEF grew stronger, and quickly. “It's hard to be too late, to see a child that already has polio,” she said. “It shouldn't happen anymore, [nor should] a child be a victim of war. That's why we have to get on with it. It is a question of time for so many children. They don't have time to wait.” She often quoted Charles Dickens: “In the little world in which children have their existence, nothing is so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”
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In later years, the powerful images of Audrey Hepburn in the Third World would leave the rest of the world with the impression that she made dozens of UNICEF pilgrimages. In fact, over four years, there were just eight missions—but of increasingly profound impact.

Audrey's first field-trip assignment for UNICEF was designed “to attract attention, before it was too late” to the poorest country in the world. Ethiopia was in dire distress. Millions were starving from famine, drought and civil war. One in four Ethiopian children was dead by age five. Those who survived were grossly malnourished, many of them blind from vitamin A deficiency. The refugee centers, filled to overflowing, were potential death camps due to epidemics.

The logistics were complicated by many stops and unreliable transportation. “We flew across the country in comfortless, clattering transport aircraft,” said UNICEF board member John Williams, who went along. Audrey would sit next to the pilot, gazing down at the dry riverbeds, naked mountains and occasional patches of green, teeming with people. “She was awed. By the second day she knew the name and background of each of the twenty people accompanying her—European pilots, Ethiopian minders, American journalists and UNICEF officials.”
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