Audrey Hepburn (9 page)

More than once before leaving, Ida told Audrey, “You must not stay in Holland—you must go to England. You'll have a lot more opportunities there, and you don't have to ask to come in because you are half English.”
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As an afterthought, she added that Audrey could also get movie parts in London, which was “an easy way to make some money.”

Immigration into Britain was then quite difficult indeed, requiring much documentation and a work permit. But Ida was right: With a British father and British passport, Audrey could go there if she chose, and after almost three years with Gaskell, she finally decided to do so. During a short preliminary visit to London with her mother, she auditioned for the celebrated Marie Rambert ballet school and was accepted, with scholarship.

The bad news was that she would have to pay her own living expenses. That, combined with Ella's current financial crunch, meant her enrollment would have to be postponed, and Audrey was hugely disappointed. But the goal was in sight.

CHAPTER 2

“I can't stand it! I know I've got the best tits on stage, and yet they're all staring at a girl who hasn't got
any.”

—AUD JOHANSSEN,
chorine

 

 

 

L
ONG AFTERWARD, AUDREY WAS ASKED IF SHE FELT HER CAREER had been carried along by some predestined momentum. The romantic question got an unromantic reply. No, she said—simply “by the need to work.” She had a desire “to wear a tutu and dance at Covent Garden. That was my dream, but not a plan. I never thought I'd make it.”
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She later said she realized, even in Holland, that she was “a little too old” for the rigors of becoming a ballerina, and that any human or divine momentum nudging her toward London was “because I wanted very much to become a choreographer and Rambert was known for developing young choreographers. So I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn and a choreographer as well.”
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But London was on hold due to the cash shortage. She would stay put in the present for an interlude that heralded her art form of the future.

Elsewhere in Amsterdam in 1948, a pair of Dutch freelance filmmakers had a clever idea—on paper, at least. Director Charles Huguenot Van der Linden (1909-1987) and his associate Henry M. Josephson were making a low-budget travelogue about Holland for Britain's Rank film company. With KLM “celebrity pilot” A. Viruly at the controls, they had flown over the country and, from the cockpit, shot scenes of the meadows, farmlands, Golden Age houses and modern Amsterdam below. They now concocted a thin story—for export—about a British cameraman who has seven days in which to learn Dutch. Some loose farce and as many pretty girls as they could find would be intercut with the landscape footage they already had in the can.

There are multiple versions of every legendary “discovery,” and Audrey's case was no different. By one account, the two filmmakers came to Gaskell's studio on their talent search and instantly agreed on “the tall, thin girl with the
eyes.”
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Over the years, Van der Linden and Josephson squabbled about who saw her first. Most likely, she just showed up at their office under the watchful eye of her mother, who stated the obvious: Audrey needed work. Could they find some little role for her?

“I saw a dream coming into the room,” Van der Linden recalled. She was fetchingly dressed in a little print frock, gloves and hat, and he decided to do a screentest then and there. She was taken outside and directed to cross a street and walk toward the camera. She did so, stopping in close-up. A voice behind the camera asked if she wanted to be in a movie. She smiled a bit quizzically and nodded. That was it. Smitten by her fresh look, Van der Linden and Josephson offered her a job on the spot. They were amused—though Ella was not—by her response: “I am not an actress. You will regret it.”
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There would be no reason to regret Audrey, if many to lament the film. She played the KLM stewardess who welcomes cameraman “George” to Holland. That starring role went to Wam Heskes, a radio comedian better known as “Koes Koen”—a sort of Dutch Will Rogers—on his down-home broadcasts. This would be his screen debut as well as the stewardess's.
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Van der Linden had been so pleased with Audrey's little test that he recycled it, in thrifty Dutch fashion, to help establish the premise of his self-conscious film-within-a-film:
Nederlands in Zeven Lessen (Dutch in Seven Lessons, or Dutch at the Double),
“A G-B Instructional Production,” opens with George arriving in Amsterdam from England. He has only a week to make a film about Holland, and he keeps getting distracted by all the pretty Dutch girls—starting with Audrey, whom he spots on the street. In their exchange of pleasantries, we hear Hepburn's first words on screen, spoken softly (and incongruously, to American ears) in that odd “foreign” language called Dutch.

That's the test footage. It cuts sharply from Audrey the pedestrian to Audrey the flight attendant. Her character's name? “Audrey.” She shows George around the Amsterdam airport, then glances at him coquettishly and says “Goodbye”—in English, for some reason—with a wry look in her almond eyes. “The drinks he had later with Audrey were his own personal business,” says the narrator, hinting at naughty doings.

A tedious train tour is followed by more aerial footage shot from KLM's new state-of-the-art “PH-TAF” commercial craft, while the narrator relentlessly dispenses facts: “The Dutch live four hundred people to the square mile....” The conclusion is a cheesecake sailing sequence in swimsuits.

It was Dutch-British corn of the stalest kind. The premiere took place May 7, 1948, three days after Audrey turned nineteen.
Dutch in Seven Lessons
survives in both the seventy-nine-minute Dutch original and a mercifully truncated thirty-eight-minute English version. Audrey's dialogue was of course cut out of the latter, and she was not mentioned by the reviewers of either. Most charitable was the
Handelsblad's
critic, who called it “no masterpiece.”

Van der Linden had hoped to get in on the ground floor of the postwar Dutch movie industry and European coproductions. He also hoped to develop the talents of young Audrey, signing her up to a half-year contract with the intention of starting a new picture in six months. But when
Dutch
flopped on both sides of the channel, Van der Linden wasn't able to raise the money.

By her own admission, having been isolated in Nazi-occupied Arnhem for so many years, she was still ignorant of (and largely disinterested in) the “real” film world of America, Britain and France. But however modestly, her screen career had begun—even though she herself was hardly aware of it.

 

 

SHE WAS more aware of modeling and more interested in the one or two beneficial results of her stint with Van der Linden: a part-time modeling job at Tonny Waagemans fashion salon in Amsterdam, and a chance to sit for artist Max Nauta, portraitist to the queen.
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Both engagements were prestigious, but neither produced any work in her field, which was dance. It was time to get serious and get to England, to partake of that Rambert scholarship. The pooled resources of Audrey and her mother were about one hundred pounds, sufficient to get them there and not much more.

They finally made the crossing in late 1948, but the London that greeted them was grim compared to Amsterdam, and so was the British economy, compared with the faster Dutch recovery. Ella was shocked to find that one and four-pence-worth of meat was the weekly ration per person. It was almost as bad as wartime. The déjà vu specter of hunger was worrisome again, as was Audrey's health. She had arrived in one piece, “but I had no stamina.”
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Ella had hoped to unlock some funds left behind in 1939, but all attempts to get at her money failed.
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She and Audrey found no help from Ruston—nor did they find
Ruston.
In view of Ella's pride and the fact that he was in great disrepute, she probably did not look hard for him. But Audrey did, in spite of her strong and lingering feelings of rejection:

“I never heard from him or knew anything about him during the war. But after the war, curiosity took over. I wanted to know where he was, whether he was still alive, and through the Red Cross I found out that he lived in Ireland. But it took me many years before I could write to him, before I could say, ‘I want to see you.”'
^9
j

Ruston's release from internment on the Isle of Man had been a long time coming and, by the time it was accomplished, he was ill, broke and unemployable. It was years before Audrey learned that he obtained sanctuary at a monastery in County Waterford, Ireland, where the Trappist abbot eventually helped him find a job with an insurance brokerage in Dublin.

Needing sanctuary of their own, Audrey and her mother spent their first few weeks with old friends in Kent before Ella got down to finding the series of humble jobs that would sustain them in London—a virtual repetition of her experience in Amsterdam: first, in a florist's; next as a cook and beautician; then some interior decorating and door-to-door cosmetics peddling. But she soon found the “situation” they really needed—a job combined with a flat—managing a block of Mayfair apartments at 65 South Audley Street, off Park Lane. The neighborhood was elegant; their unpretentious walk-up was not. But Ella had extraordinary faith in her daughter's future and a commitment to it that dwarfed all sacrifice. There was joy as well, Audrey recalled:

“My mother was delighted [to be] in London because we had a room together and could be together.... To be able to buy a pair of shoes when you wanted to, or to take a taxi when you wanted.... We always took undergrounds and buses [so] that if it rained we could afford a taxi or go to the movies.”
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With the memories of Arnhem still fresh, one counted one's blessings and was thankful for such luxuries.

One was even more thankful for Marie Rambert (1888—1982), whose assistance and inspiration to Audrey were typical in the three generations of dancers she cultivated. To describe Rambert is to describe the history of British ballet. Agnes de Mille called her “Queen hornet, vixen mother.” By age sixty, when Audrey met her, she was legendary, her credentials dating to the days when she coached Nijinsky in
The Rite of Spring.
With Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton, Rambert had founded the companies that would evolve into the Sadler's Wells and the Royal Ballet. Diaghilev himself came to watch her dynamic rehearsals.

In 1931, Rambert and her playwright husband, Ashley Dukes, opened The Ballet Club in a former church hall (vintage 1840) near Notting Hill Gate, part of which they would later rent to the famous Mercury Theatre. It was the first permanent ballet center in England—a theater, company and school—where the tiny production budgets went hand in hand with tiny salaries.

Rambert was ever short of money but ever generous. She not only gave Audrey a scholarship to study but also took her into her home, housing and feeding her there for six months. That arrangement was a lifesaver for Ella and Audrey both.

“They'd had a rotten time during the war,” recalls Rambert's daughter Angela Dukes Ellis, “and mother took pity on them. My sister and I had already left home, and the enormous house in Camden Hill Gardens had plenty of spare rooms.

“When the war came, the ballet theater closed down, and after the war, it became difficult to run because the unions were much stronger and you had to pay West End fees. The theater only seated 120 people and was impossible commercially, so it was turned once again into a studio and run as the Rambert School of Ballet until 1979.”
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There, Audrey took her lessons in a drafty practice hall with a Dickensian coal fire and a battered upright piano, around the corner from Rambert's house to which she returned in the early evening. Angela called around often to visit:

“My mother had no idea whatsoever about running a house, cooking, or anything like that. This wonderful woman Helen Welton was with her for forty years did all that for her. When I would pop in to see Helen, Audrey and her own mother would be sitting in the kitchen talking to her.... My mother had always complained about the size of my feet, but Audrey had the same as mine—size 7. I bought a marvelous pair of warm, fur-lined shoes from her, which we'd never seen in England. She had had them for the Dutch winters, and I had them for many years.”

Angela was struck by Audrey's “lovely, elfin quality.” But Audrey was struggling with a variety of inferiority complexes beyond just her shoe size.

“My technique didn't compare with that of the girls who had had five years of Sadler's Wells teaching, paid for by their families, and who had always had good food and bomb shelters,” she later said, in a rare expression of resentment.
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“I also sensed that I was very tall....”
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Her sense, put more bluntly on another occasion, was that “I was an Amazon, towering over the boys,” and she was tremendously self-conscious about it.
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“I tried everything to make it an asset. Instead of working on allegro—little small tight movements—I took extra courses in adagio, so I could use my long lines to advantage.”
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Ida de Jong, her petite colleague at Gaskell's in Amsterdam, had been particularly aware of it: “Audrey's big handicap for the ballet was her height. If I was sitting next to her, my head only reached up to her shoulders. Tall people have a hard time in ballet, because it's very difficult to find a proper partner.”
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