Audrey Hepburn (70 page)

Somalia, torn to shreds by war and famine, was hell on earth—eight million people in a land the size of Texas, most of them starving to death. Hepburn had wanted to go there a year earlier but the New York office thought other assignments more urgent and Somalia too unsafe. Now, as she and Rob left Switzerland, Somalia was still on the back pages of the papers. But Audrey Hepburn's last mission was about to rivet the world.

“Apocalyptic,” she called it. “I walked into a nightmare.... I have seen famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, but I have seen nothing like this—so much worse than I could possibly have imagined. I wasn't prepared for this. It's so hard to talk about because it's unspeakable.”
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Among many images that haunted her was the first, from the air, as they flew into Kismayu from Nairobi over the desert:

“The earth is red—an extraordinary sight—that deep terra-cotta red. And you see the villages, displacement camps and compounds, and the earth is all rippled around them like an ocean bed. And those were the graves. There are graves everywhere. Along the road, around the paths that you take, along the riverbeds, near every camp—there are graves everywhere.”
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Kismayu's huge displaced-persons camp held 20,000 people, but it took a while for it to dawn on Audrey that there was something missing. “There were no babies and practically no infants, because they are the most fragile,” she said.
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“They were just all snuffed out like candles.”
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At the feeding center in Baidoa, “One of the first sights I saw was that they were loading the bodies of that night onto a truck, and most of them were very small. Just one night's dead. Around a hundred. Children were sitting around waiting to be fed, but they were beyond wanting food. Some of them had to be more or less force-fed with little tiny spoonfuls. They are just totally spent.”
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Many of the children and adults were maimed. Those who could still walk looked like ghosts, caught between the worst drought in history and a horrifying civil war that had destroyed whole families, whole villages—the whole country. There were no highways, no phones, no sanitation. You didn't need a visa to get in because there was no government to care. “There's nothing left,” Hepburn said. “The cattle are dead, the crops are gone, whatever there was has been looted. Anarchy. It's a country without a government—a mayhem of marauding bandits who are likely to hold up a convoy or loot a storehouse.
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“This is the first in history that a country has been totally held together by individuals, by relief workers, these incredible, heroic people [from] Save the Children, Care, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières. But there are very few of them.”

Hepburn's presence in Somalia coincided with that of her journalist friend Anna Cataldi, who confirmed Audrey's assessment in the story she sent back to Milan:

“The volunteer workers with Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders] look at us with dazed expressions. Clearly, they are in a bad way. Malaria, amoebas, and now that they've had so much contact with blood, they are testing them for AIDS as well. These brave people stayed in Somalia even during the bombardments, when everyone else had left.”
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The brighter side was that food was now arriving under the protection of UN peacekeepers and the U.S. Navy. Audrey was profoundly moved during a visit to the USS
Tarawa
aircraft carrier and its 2,400 sailors and Marines. “We were there for less than an hour and at the end were handed a check for $4,000, which the boys had collected,” she said, weeping at the recollection. “You see, there I go again. But I don't want people to feel helpless. Everything is needed—blankets, clothes. The rains are coming now. Rain brings more death. In one camp where one night the death toll was sixty, it rose to over one hundred the next night because of the rain, because they're so fragile, and the chill—it's just too much for them.”
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Bryant Gumbel on the
Today
show later asked if, in view of the anarchy, any amount of assistance was more than just a Band-Aid?

“Survival means much, much more than a Band-Aid,” she said. “I wouldn't call a good doctor that saves your child from dying a Band-Aid. You may say that only tiny numbers of people can be helped. But the numbers are getting bigger. I go through my soul-searching. What can I do? What am I going to go and do there? But for all of us there's something we can do. It's true you can't take care of 1,000. But finally, if you can save one, I'd be glad to do that.”

Among her challenges was to try to explain a complex colonial history—the difference between Somalia and Somaliland, for example, so named by the territory's Italian and British conquerors, respectively. “Are we not reaping the mess we made so many years ago when we enriched ourselves?” she said. “We didn't do a hell of a lot for those people, did we? That's why it's right that we do now.”
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Audrey was asked not to dwell on that with the press, as UNICEF was now getting money from both the Italian and British governments. But Cataldi was able to be more fierce about the politics of it: “We Italians are responsible for Somalia,” she wrote, as a result of which, hundreds of thousands of people were now dying “without even knowing
why
they are dying. They can't comprehend the ocean of rhetoric surrounding them, because this people of poets doesn't know how to read. Illiteracy in Somalia is the highest in the world: 95 percent.”
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Why had the world been so slow to react? Audrey made a telling comparison. “People in Florida complained bitterly when aid took five days to get to the area hit by the hurricane,” she said. “We've always been too late. In Ethiopia—a million people were dead before the BBC ever showed those pictures. In the Sudan, a quarter of a million died. Perhaps we're too late in Yugoslavia.... You could not get into Somalia to know really what was going on—to get inland and see the extent of the devastation.... You can't show pictures or write stories until you can go there and tell the world about it.
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I came to Somalia because there cannot be enough witnesses.”

Before leaving Africa, she held a press conference in Nairobi on September 22 and then granted a private interview to Nairobi TV reporter Katherine Openda—perhaps the most poignant she ever gave. “Somalia is one of the worst tragedies ever,” she said. “It has gone over the edge. I want to be very careful how I say this. I don't want to sound overly dramatic. But you really wonder whether God hasn't forgotten Somalia.”

Openda asked how she personally coped with it, and she replied, “Perhaps I don't. I give in sometimes. It is heartbreaking.... You never walk away from it, ever again. It's an image you carry with you for the rest of your life.”

Hepburn's Somalia mission was followed by press conferences in London, Geneva and Paris and a host of television appearances in the United States. Not least of her skills was that she could speak with reporters in a variety of languages. More than any other, this round of interviews generated an unprecedented amount of international coverage and captivated the world. In all of them, she looks a bit tired but otherwise healthy, betraying no hint of the fact that she had just fifteen weeks to live.

Some of the news media, flippantly but fondly, called her “Mother Teresa in designer jeans.” Columnist Liz Smith was one of the first to refer to her as “Saint Audrey.” Sally Jessy Raphael recalled the day she appeared on Raphael's program to talk about Somalia: “The people who work with me are pretty tough cookies. But during the interview with Audrey, [everyone] showed such love and such respect. The crew lined up afterward and she went down the line shaking hands. I've never seen anything like it. Those hardened men and women almost wept. It was as if they knew they would never see her again.”
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Shortly afterward, the United States military went into Somalia in full force. “She was very glad when they did,” says Christa Roth. “I think that was something she prompted.”

 

 

NEVER BEFORE in film history had so great a star lent herself so vigorously to such an urgent crusade. But the toll was enormous. “She suffered terribly inside,” said Elizabeth Taylor. When she saw the things she did in Somalia, “she didn't reflect that to the children,” says Roger Moore. “She hid from them what was going on inside her. It doesn't do to show a person who is suffering that you're terribly upset by it.”
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She spoke of that agonizing problem herself:

“There's this curious—embarrassment or timidity that comes over one when you walk into a feeding center like that. I feel I shouldn't be there. I think I should leave them alone. It's like walking into somebody's room who is dying, and only the family should be there. [You long] to pick up one of those children and give it some kind of warmth.... They're so frail that I worry I am going to break their little body and—and it's unbearable. It just is so totally unacceptable to see small children die in front of your eyes.”

Somalia was the worst. “She came back and said, ‘I've been to hell,'” says her son Sean, “and every time she spoke about it, she had to relive it. Nothing ever prepared her for going to a camp and meeting a little kid and coming back the next day and he wasn't there anymore. You're supposed to go back to your hotel room and drink bottled water? Get on a plane and go back to your regular life? It throws your whole world out of balance.”

In the end, says Anna Cataldi, “she had this rage. The more she saw, the more rage she had. In Somalia, she was really furious with what she constantly was seeing.”
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Audrey used the same word: “I'm filled with a rage at ourselves. I don't believe in collective guilt, but I do believe in collective responsibility.”
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Buckminster Fuller, the great philosopher-inventor, once said, “Politics is simply a function of the inequitable distribution of food and other basic life necessities.” It was Hepburn's principle as well.

“Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics,” she would say. “Politics has nothing to do with one's helping a dying child. Survival, that's what it's about.
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... I think perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics.”

She and Rob were “closet politicians” in many ways. During the Gulf War, while most Americans were tying yellow ribbons on their mailboxes and celebrating the fact that only seventy-five Americans died, Hepburn and Wolders were concerned about the enormous brutality and the real statistics—concealed by both Saddam Hussein and George Bush—that 150,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians and many of them children, were killed in the American bombings.

A week after that conflict began, Audrey and Rob attended a meeting of the UNICEF national committees in Geneva, where Jim Grant spoke optimistically about what could be done for Iraqi children once the war was over.

“He didn't talk about the horror of the war or what the overall results might be from a historical perspective,” Wolders recalls. “We were aghast. It was as if he were talking about Grenada. Audrey was as close to depression as I'd seen her over the whole situation, and when it came her turn to speak, she said it was UNICEF's duty to speak out against the injustices that
caused
such misery, and not simply to help out after the damage was done. There wasn't a single person who didn't come up to thank her. They thought there was something wrong with Jim for making no mention of the significance of the war, which we felt was going to interfere immensely with UNICEF's work.”

In 1992, when asked to identify UNICEF's single greatest problem, Hepburn's one-word answer was, “War.” Currently, she said, “the developing countries spend about $150 billion on arms each year. Meanwhile, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council sell 90 percent of the world's arms.”
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She was no figurehead ambassador. “The work Audrey does for UNICEF is imperative for us,” said Lawrence E. Bruce, Jr., the president of the United States Committee for UNICEF. Under Bruce's leadership, the U.S. Committee had more than doubled its fund-raising revenue, from $18 million in 1985 to $46 million in 1992. Audrey was extremely fond of him.
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“He was very warm and generous,” says Jill Rembar, who worked for him for four years. “He had much to do at UNICEF, but Audrey always came first with him because she was so important to fund-raising, and because, personally, he just adored her.”

Bruce died at forty-seven, on Christmas Eve 1992, of AIDS.

Rembar remembers the video footage of Audrey's first UNICEF trip with Bruce, to Ethiopia: “Audrey was walking around the refugee camps, reaching out to people. Emaciated babies, flies on their eyes. She's picking them up, kissing them, without knowing what diseases they might have. I said to Rob, ‘It looks like Audrey didn't care what was the matter with them. She had no thought for herself.' Rob said, ‘Well, you'd be the same.' A chill went through me. I thought, ‘I don't think so.' But that's how he was—and that's how she was, too.”
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THE HORROR OF SOMALIA was indelible. But, even so, it would be wrong to think that Audrey Hepburn saw only misery in her last years. “It wasn't all heartache,” says Rob. “We weren't endlessly traveling for UNICEF. We'd always come back to the haven at home. UNICEF took over a certain part of our lives, but that didn't mean there wasn't time for the other things we enjoyed. In the last year, we spent a great deal of time in Gstaad in the mountains, where Audrey had a small condominium-chalet. We had missed going there for a few years, but during that summer, Audrey was bursting with energy and we took walks that we had planned to take for years.”