Audrey Hepburn (69 page)

“Often the kids would have flies all over them, but she would just go hug them. I had never seen that. Other people had a certain amount of hesitation, but she would just grab them. Children would just come up to hold her hand, touch her—she was like the Pied Piper.”

Cole Dodge was the UNICEF representative in Bangladesh, and it was his job to show Audrey and Rob the health-related projects connected to UNICEF. At one stop, he recalls, a crowd surrounded Audrey—as always—when she stepped from her car:

“She smiled at the children, and some of them came forward to stroke her arm and hold her hands as we walked through the village. To the side of the path, just ahead, a small girl sat by herself under the shade of a coconut tree. The little one caught Audrey's attention, and she asked, ‘Why doesn't she join the others?' Walking over, Audrey knelt down and spoke with her. Then, picking her up, she hugged her close. The child's legs, crippled by polio, dangled uselessly. Carrying the little one, Audrey walked towards us, her eyes filled with tears. None of the rest of us had taken notice of that child.”
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A few weeks later, back in the United States on
Larry King Live,
a caller asked, “How do we know when we send money that it actually gets there?”

“I know it gets there because I've seen the results,” she said. “UNICEF money goes straight to projects and never to governments.
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I just came back from Bangladesh [where] contaminated water is the biggest killer of children. In the last eight years, we have sunk 250,000 tube wells there.... It's not enough to know there's been a flood in Bangladesh and 7,000 people lost their lives.
Why
the flood? What is their history? How are they going to survive?”
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Isaac was most struck by the fact that, at any given moment, “she dealt only with what she was doing. Audrey had no color, no race. She went to Bangladesh at a time when the main crisis was over, but it was still an ongoing thing. ‘I want people to be reminded,' she said. Today, we forget what happened yesterday with all the satellite technology. Today you are here, tomorrow there, the next day, somewhere else. How soon people forget the previous tragedy. But she never did.”

 

 

RISKS HAD TO BE weighed before every trip—even to the United States. After the Pan-American disaster over Lockerbee, European fears of airline terrorism reached panic levels. But Audrey had agreed to a six-city American fund-raising tour for UNICEF, including Atlanta, where former president Jimmy Carter was to give her an award. She and Rob flew first to Los Angeles to see Connie Wald and there, at dinner one night, they met former ambassador Anne Cox Chambers and her good friend William Banks. Chambers, the publishing heiress and daughter of 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James M. Cox, turned out to be chairperson of the Atlanta UNICEF event—a pleasant coincidence with a pleasant outcome: She offered Hepburn and Wolders a “lift” in her private plane, to spare them another commercial flight.

“Audrey asked what time,” recalls Chambers, “I said, ‘Oh, around noon, but there's no hurry. Just come when it suits you.' When we arrived at noon, she was already there—this radiant creature standing at the top of the steps in the doorway with that lovely smile, saying, ‘Welcome aboard your own airplane!'” As the plane was revving up, William Banks said half-facetiously, “I always say a prayer at takeoff,” and Audrey replied, “Oh, I just hold Robbie's hand.” The Hepburn-Wolders friendship with Chambers and Banks was instant: All four of them had not only UNICEF in common, but also gardens—and dogs.
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At the Atlanta ceremony, Jimmy Carter presented her with her award and said, “When I was young, guess who I wanted to be? You may think Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson—not at all. I wanted to be Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire or Cary Grant, I was so filled with envy of them being kissed by Audrey Hepburn.” Audrey replied, “I'll fix that,” and gave him a big kiss. They would often work together later on UNICEF causes.

William Banks was as impressed with Rob as with Audrey and, even more, with their relationship. “It was obvious that he adored her and she adored him,” says Banks, a courtly southern gentleman. “I've never seen a better marriage, even though they were not married. When the cameras converged on Audrey, Rob always stepped out of range in the most graceful way. He basked in the admiration people felt for her. He was self-effacing but not self abnegating, and she looked up to him so.”
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Rob was always there, says John Isaac, in every way:

“She would see him running around and say, ‘Isn't he wonderful? I don't know what I'd do without my Robbie.' Always ‘my Robbie.' Day in and out, he made sure everything was right.” Audrey often declared, “I could never have done all this work with UNICEF without Robbie.... He does a million things.”
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Jeffrey Banks summed it up: “The overwhelming thing about Audrey was that men wanted to protect and shield her from all the bad in the world. That was my instinct at age eleven, for instance. But Rob's the one who truly did it.”
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Wendy Keys enjoyed watching their “sense of playfulness” together: “At the Peninsula Hotel after they'd just flown in, Rob and I were talking across a coffee table. She was busy unpacking, but he said, ‘Audrey, could we move these flowers? I can't see Wendy.' She swept them away and then plunked down a teeny little flowerpot instead and said,
‘Now
can you see Wendy?' She took advantage of the moment and the prop. It was delicious.

“Another time, she and I were gossiping with our legs swung over our respective sofas, yakking away. Rob came out of the shower in a terry-cloth robe and sat down to reveal a beautiful leg. She winked at me, and the two of us started to giggle. One of those moments—that constant twinkle in her eye.

“They shared a lot of things—their commitment to other people and to UNICEF. Rob's own enormous UNICEF commitment was rarely acknowledged, and he didn't want it to be. But he was certainly the best man in her life. The others were appalling, or normal, depending on your point of view. What a wonderful thing that she and Rob found each other.”

The press, meanwhile, kept asking the same old question: Were they going to get married?

“Why bother?” she replied to one reporter. “It's lovely this way ... more romantic. It means we're together because we want to be, not because we have to be. It's a slight difference, but maybe it's a very good one.”
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Of all Audrey Hepburn's remarkable UNICEF journeys, the least remembered is her visit to Vietnam. Unlike the others, it received little coverage except in France, whose ties to Vietnam were historic. For America and the American media, more recent wounds were still unhealed. Audrey was too apolitical to get the virulent criticism dealt to Jane Fonda for going to Vietnam during the war itself. Instead, she got the silent treatment.

The Vietnam trip had been suggested in 1987 by UNICEF's Jack Glattbach, who now accompanied her on what turned out to be a highly useful mission. As in Bangladesh, the main purpose was to get the government behind the UNICEF-supported immunization and water programs. And as in Bangladesh, Audrey went everywhere.

At Mo Vang Commune in Hoang Lien Son Province, the children handed her flowers and performed a martial-arts demonstration in her honor. “How do you say thank-you in Vietnamese?” we hear her ask in the video documentary footage. “Ka-mun,” she is told—and thereafter uses it freely. A child hands her a rose, whose stem pricks Audrey's finger. “All roses have thorns,” she smiles. Priming a new pump, she splashes water on her face and proudly proclaims that UNICEF supplied the materials but that the wells “have all been made by the Vietnamese themselves.”

The tour was going so well that, midway, Glattbach briefed her on Vietnam's unique “structural adjustment” policies and asked if she would emphasize that in the documentary they were shooting. “Oh, that's too complicated for me,” she replied. “Really, if I don't understand it, I can't speak it.” Glattbach said fine, never mind. But soon after, he recalls, “watched by a few hundred Vietnamese villagers and with absolutely no ‘fluffs,' she spoke four minutes to camera and covered every point from the discussion she ‘didn't understand.' It was one of the best summaries I ever heard. It got seven minutes on ABC prime-time news and incredible TV pickup around the world.”
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The video footage shows it clearly: Everywhere she goes in Vietnam, Hepburn is greeted lovingly and the mood is upbeat, with no recriminations about the war. She meets the heads of several unions, all of them women. But her most important meeting is the last—a “summit” indeed, with General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam's deputy prime minister and great war hero, the field commander most responsible for defeating the mighty United States.

“This general and UNICEF—we have a lot in common,” she said formally, in his presence. “We have both fought many battles for children. I just hope we will be as triumphant as you have been, and conquer all the children's diseases.”

Giap said UNICEF's help was crucial to a country that had suffered so many years of war. In response, she said, “I find your country miraculous, and I think UNICEF has never had a more ideal situation to take care of children because you always have given children the priority in spite of war.... Your education and literacy are very high, and immunization almost completed.”

Clearly charmed, General Giap smiled and said, “You have so many praises! But we feel we have so much more work to do.”

 

 

AUDREY'S OWN WORK took many forms, including the artistic. A UNICEF Christmas card these days was adorned with her sketch of an Ethiopian mother carrying a baby, simply but beautifully done. The original was donated to the Finnish UNICEF committee and sold at auction in Helsinki for $16,500.

“It was a fund-raiser for camels,” says Rob Wolders. “For the vaccination campaign in Chad, they used camels with solar-energy panels in order to keep the vaccine refrigerated. They could buy a lot of camels with that $16,500.”

The following year, she launched the UN's “Rights of the Child” postage-stamp series in Geneva with a first-day philatelic envelope of her own design.

In August 1990, she went to Oslo, Norway, to cohost the “Concert for Peace,” sponsored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation, with Jimmy Carter, François Mitterrand and Nelson Mandela among the participants. Audrey introduced Václav Havel and James Galway, and conductor Lukas Foss led the Oslo Philharmonic. Havel made a great impact on her and, soon after, she deftly worked his significance into her remarks at UNICEF's Universal Child Immunization kickoff ceremony in Rome:

“I didn't think I'd live to see the end of [the Cold War]. I had grown up with it and it was part of all our lives. Then the world changed dramatically. Like the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire, the old order has come tumbling down. We now have something that is so rare in the course of civilization: a second chance....

“UNICEF and the World Health Organization [have] achieved their goal of universal child immunization by 1990. This is the miracle of this decade. It does not mean we have immunized every child. It does mean that 80 percent of the world's one-year-olds have been immunized against the six major child-killing diseases—four out of five children on the whole planet! ... In 1974, only 5 percent of the developing world's children were vaccinated.

“The day people can count on having two children survive, they will have two instead of having nine in hopes that two will live.... China, Indonesia, Thailand and Mexico have proven that population can be slowed [through] education and family planning. Letting children die is not the remedy to overpopulation.”
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The immunization campaign had been the most monumental global mobilization in the history of UNICEF—if not the history of the world. But ironically, she told Harry Smith on CBS
This Morning,
the immunization rate in America was
decreasing.
In North Africa, 79 percent of all children were now vaccinated against measles; the figure was 58 percent in Houston and 52 percent in Miami! When her time was up, she would not let Smith cut her off. “May I tell you one more thing?” she pressed. “Rotary International has raised three-quarters of a billion dollars for immunization over ten years—an extraordinary example of what people can do.”

A sweet smile of triumph crossed her face: She had managed to slip in one last plug.
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In view of those measles statistics and the fact that one in five American children lives in poverty, Smith asked if we should be more concerned with our own kids, rather than the world's. “I think we can do both,” she replied. “Sure, we take care of our own children first. Charity begins at home. But there's no reason why we can't have love or time or money or food for children in Africa.
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It's the endless wars that have destroyed what we've tried to do [there]. Adults fight and children die. Peace is what I'm pleading for, because until there's peace we won't be able to construct.”
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That was the message she took to Washington once again in June 1991 for her second congressional appearance, at the invitation of senators Philip Leahy of Vermont and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, to urge a boost in aid for Africa.

“We tried to plan a time when she and I could both be in Africa together,” recalls Senator Kassebaum, “but we never could get it worked out. She was very shy, and she looked very frail. She did such a tremendous job of calling attention to the plight of children in ways that nobody else could.”
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