Audrey Hepburn (67 page)

One of those people was UN photographer John Isaac, a soft-spoken veteran of many such hardship missions, with whom she and Rob formed a deep bond. This was Isaac's fifth trip to Ethiopia in four years, and during their week together in Eritrea and Tigré—the areas hardest hit by drought and civil war—she soaked up every tidbit of information he gave her, educating herself on the technical problems of food transport and water.

Isaac explained to her that the drought was due to the lack of dams to hold rainwater, and that a new one was being constructed. Audrey wanted to see it.

“Ethiopians are very proud,” says Isaac. “They don't want handouts. This was a very good program where they would do a day's work for a certain amount of grain. We watched thousands of people carrying water and rocks on their backs, mixing the mud and building this huge dam with their own hands. The pictures from there are very biblical.”

Isaac had traveled with Harry Belafonte and Liv Ullmann and other fine UNICEF ambassadors, but Audrey and her sense of humor were different, he says: “I told her, ‘When the plane lands, I want to get out first to get a shot of you.' I was nervous—it was my first big ‘event' with her—and as I was getting out, my camera fell with the battery pack and wires and everything connected to me. Audrey was behind me and said, ‘John, you dropped your—equipment. Well, thank God it's still attached. Can I get it up for you?' Everybody cracked up.”
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The fact that Hepburn met John Isaac early on “is what colored much of Audrey's feelings towards UNICEF,” says Rob Wolders. “He really inspired her. He spoiled us. We were looking for more people like that, and they don't exist.”

Isaac, a native of India, had been one of the UN's most brilliant photographers for twenty years. His first assignment was the war in Lebanon; his second, the Vietnamese boat people, followed by ten years of work in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Ethiopia. His personality and philosophy had a profound impact on Audrey:

“For me, human dignity is more important than getting that ‘great' picture,” he says. “I try not to take anybody's dignity away. One of the boat people in Thailand was a little girl who was raped by twenty pirates, her father was shot, her mother committed suicide. I saw her washed up on the shore. A nurse said, ‘She hasn't spoken a word. She just stares at me.'

“I didn't want to photograph her. I went back to the hotel, bought some chocolates. I had some Vietnamese music and brought back my tape recorder, sat next to her, and played the music for her. After about ten minutes, she put out her hand and I gave her some chocolates. To me, that was worth ten thousand pictures. I told some nuns, ‘You have to rescue this girl,' and they took her to California. A lot of people said, ‘That's not your job.' Well, I'm a human being first. I don't care about the Pulitzer prize.”

Audrey, too, had to adjust to the emotional as well as physical stress, and to the political constraints of the job.

“Working with the UN is sometimes very frustrating,” says Isaac, “because you're in the middle. You can't support this or that side. Initially, she was flustered by that. You want to sympathize. But she took a stand on a lot of things. She was so worried about her first UNICEF press conference.”
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In preparation for that, back in Addis Ababa, “she was determined to master every nuance of the labyrinthine politics of war and drought,” says John Williams, who spent hours drilling questions and answers with her.“
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Videotapes of the press conference show she was not only nervous but on the verge of tears—hands shaking visibly when she sipped a glass of water—as she tried to explain to the media what she had seen. In the end, she was powerfully articulate and moving.

The only one who thought she could have done better was Audrey herself. Everyone else sat up and took notice, including the Marxist government of Ethiopia, which found reason to criticize her, thus provoking a second round of international publicity during which she declared, “A child is a child is a child, whether his parents are Marxists or Nazis.”

The challenge was just beginning. Preparing to leave her Addis Ababa hotel, she suddenly realized she had sent down the bags containing all of her clothes. She was in her underwear, recalls Rob, who obligingly gave her his raincoat, which hung down to her ankles. She wore it on the plane home and during her press conference at the Rome airport. Italy was the first stop of an exhausting postmortem press tour of America, Switzerland, Finland and Germany, talking about Ethiopia in as many as fifteen interviews a day. “I think,” she said, with typical modesty, “it made people aware that there were needs.”
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WHETHER IT WAS a two-minute speech at the Oscars or a two-hour one for UNICEF, “it scares the wits out of me,” she said.
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“My stomach goes to pieces and my head starts to ache.” She had such stage fright, says her daughter-in-law Leila, “that you could literally see her knees knocking behind the podium.”
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While accepting her Golden Globe award in 1990, “I was terribly concerned that the mike would pick up the thumping of my heart while I was speaking,” she said. “My epithet will be, ‘It's nerves what done her in,' as Eliza Doolittle would say.”
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Even so, she was getting better at it fast, and at thinking on her feet. In her first BBC interview, asked for proof that UNICEF's food distribution efforts ever succeeded, she thought a moment and replied sweetly, “If a famine is
averted,
you don't hear about it, do you?”
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Cannily, she and Christa Roth began to refine her dealings with the press. “Many times,” says Roth, “people would ask for an interview about UNICEF when they really just wanted to talk about movies. She would talk an hour about, say, Ethiopia and five minutes about films, but the story would be 10 percent UNICEF and 90 percent movies. It bothered her a lot. So we started to restrict the interviews to publications that gave her solid footage. It worked out quite well. She got a lot of a coverage.”
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More coverage than any other UNICEF ambassador before or since. That convinced her to be even better prepared and to write all her own speeches. As her conscientiousness increased, so did her impact. She told a Congressional subcommittee:

“In Ethiopia, I went to the orphanage in Mecalee ... five hundred children, whose parents died in the drought of 1985 ... which is run by Father Chasade of the Catholic Church. It was he who in desperation said, ‘If you can't send me food for my children, then send me the spades to dig their graves.' ”
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UNICEF, she said dramatically, chose to send the food.

“There is a science of war, but how strange that there isn't a science of peace,” she declared, paraphrasing Maria Montessori. “There are colleges of war; why can't we study peace?”
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She articulated that more passionately in replying to a question about how Ethiopia had affected her personally:

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was based on the “Declaration on the Rights of the Child,” proclaimed by the UN in 1959, calling on all nations to guarantee children's rights to health, education and protection in time of war. It was to be adopted into national legislation everywhere. She talked it up wherever she went and confronted the cynicism head on. In New Zealand, for instance, a patronizing interviewer praised its idealism but doubted that politicians could ever be convinced to care and do something about it.

“If you and I are convinced, they're going to be convinced too,” she shot back. “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘You know, it's really senseless, what you're doing. There's always been suffering, there will always be suffering, and you're just prolonging the suffering of these children [by rescuing them].' My answer is, ‘Okay, then, let's start with your grandchild. Don't buy antibiotics if it gets pneumonia. Don't take it to the hospital if it has an accident.' It's against life—against humanity—to think that way.”
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Hepburn's next trip, to Turkey, coincided with an international children's festival there and a shift in UNICEF's agenda from food to health. The priority in Turkey was immunization against the six main child-killing diseases: measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. UNICEF and the World Health Organization had set a joint goal of universal child immunization by 1990, and their high-gear efforts were now saving three million young lives each year.

Audrey called Turkey “the most lovely example” of UNICEF's ability to provide brilliant organizational skills in partnership with cooperative nations:

“We notified the government that their infant mortality was very high. The Turkish government sent a group to New York to study the program we had completed in Colombia. The group went back, and a total immunization program was planned in four months. The Turkish president and prime minister went on TV, the school teachers spoke from their desks, and the imams from their pulpits. The army gave us their trucks, the fishmongers gave their wagons for the vaccines, and once the date was set, it took ten days to vaccinate the whole country. Not bad.”
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Not bad at all. Good consolation for the local TV programming in Ankara. “Because it was a state visit, they had an Audrey Hepburn festival,” Rob Wolders recalls. “One night we turned on the television, and there was
My Fair Lady.
I had never seen it and was looking forward to it. But it was in Turkish. The combination of Audrey speaking in Turkish and Marni Nixon singing was too much. I had to turn it off.”

Street children and education were the focus of her South American tour a few months later. In Venezuela and Ecuador, she later told Congress, “I saw tiny mountain communities, slums, and shantytowns receive water systems for the first time by some miracle—and the miracle is UNICEF. ”I watched boys build their own schoolhouse with bricks and cement provided by UNICEF.“
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Most intently, she studied projects designed to aid children living on the street. That situation appalled her as much as it did Roger Moore, her friend and fellow UNICEF colleague (she had helped to recruit him), who was now viewing the far worse “violence of neglect” in Brazil. “First they ignored the street kids,” said Moore, “and now they've started killing them.”

He had met thirteen-year-old prostitutes, living in the streets, who used the money they earned to buy toys. So relentlessly grim was his report that he felt obliged not to end it on a totally depressing note: “I get one dollar a year for this—a whole dollar—but I have to wait a year to get it. UNICEF is receiving that interest on that dollar, you realize.”
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Audrey found it harder to leaven her remarks with humor. Her ferocity could be frightening. When she learned something shocking, she demanded that the world learn it, too. “Do you know how many street children there are in South America?” she would later ask in New York. “All over the world? ... But especially in South America and India? It's something like a hundred million who live and die in the streets.”
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She had met many dignitaries on her previous trips but had not been drafted for “summit meetings” until now, on the most upbeat UNICEF journey she ever made, in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In Central America—while Colonel Oliver North covertly stoked Nicaragua's Contra war with arms from Iran—Audrey pleaded the case for children in many forums, but most remarkably in a series of meetings with the chief executives of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

“¡Bienvenida Audrey Hepburn,”
read hand-lettered signs all along the way,
“los niños te saludan!”
(Welcome—the children salute you!) She was everywhere at once, it seemed, weighing babies at a new maternal-care clinic, turning on the spigot for the first time at a mountain village's water project, handing out press awards for excellence in covering children's issues in Tegucigalpa. No frown troubles her features in the documentary footage—just joyous scenes of gorgeous, fairly healthy and happy children, whom she snatches up for hugs.