Read Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait Online
Authors: Diana Maychick
Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (2 page)
In truth, the kids fidgeted a lot and seemed a little bored with the
whole affair. Adults had various affairs of the heart and other matters to keep
themselves occupied. Presenters Elizabeth Taylor and her husband, Michael
Wilding, appeared to vie with each other for the shortest haircuts of the
evening. Best Supporting Actress nominee Grace Kelly showed up on the arm of
her
Mogambo
costar, Clark Gable.
Folks wondered about their relationship, but wondered more about a newcomer
named Kim Novak, who, according to gossip columnists, posed as provocatively as
Marilyn Monroe for anyone who cared to look.
Even though she had to view most of the hoopla on a monitor, Audrey was
getting an overwhelming dose of
of phoniness and pretension, her mother seemed to enjoy the overblown affair.
For the Baroness, the glamorous ritual of Oscar night represented the security
of having made it in a new country. For Audrey, it meant the beginning of
competition with her peers, which she always loathed.
Laconic leading man Gary Cooper, on location in
Best Actress award. He had filmed the sequence long in advance. “Folks
down here in
out a blank sheet of paper. “Shall I read it?” Donald O’Connor asked
from
Fredric March stepped onto the stage in
is—Audrey Hepburn!” Her victory had been expected by everyone except
Audrey herself. At that moment, her charming inexperience revealed itself like
a blinding smile. She darted up the aisle, taking the steps to the stage two at
a time, and then in her excitement completely lost her sense of direction. She
turned left instead of right, and nearly walked off the stage into the wings.
The audience roared. Was she also a comedian? Audrey righted herself and
pranced back to center stage, making a self-deprecating little face to the
audience, as if to say, “Please forgive me. I’m a little out of my mind
tonight.” She nearly knocked March over in her enthusiasm. “This is
too much,” she said, by way of thanks.
“I meant that,” she said years later. “It was too much.
I was a dancer really until that night. Until I won, I thought of myself as a
dancer who acted. The Oscar changed all that. And I don’t know that I was
really ready for that.”
In fact, she was completely unprepared. On her way to the press
conference after the ceremony, she lost her Oscar and was unable to pose for
pictures until somebody provided her with a substitute. “They found mine
later in the ladies’ room,” she said. “I must have left it there
after I looked in the mirror and realized how awful I looked.”
For the rest of the question-and-answer period, Audrey’s behavior was
wildly out of character and overly demonstrative. She kissed onetime actor and
Academy president Jean Hersholt on the lips.* When she was asked how she
planned to celebrate the evening, she giggled and said, “At home with
Mother.” In fact, she and Ferrer dropped the Baroness off and joined
Deborah Kerr and her husband for drinks at the Persian Room at the Plaza.
“It was a pleasant evening,” Ferrer recalled. “We were really a
bunch of theater people laughing at the contrivances of Hollywood.”
*Decades later, in 1993, she would posthumously be given the Hersholt
Humanitarian Award at the Oscar ceremony.Three days later, Kerr would stop
laughing as Audrey beat her again, winning the Tony Award for Best Actress. In
the history of the Oscars and the Tonys, only one other actress had received
both honors in the same year. That happened the year before, when Shirley Booth
captured both for Arthur Laurents’s play
The
Time of the Cuckoo
and the movie of
Come
Back, Little Sheba,
based on William Inge’s drama. But Booth was already a
seasoned veteran of the stage; Audrey was a newcomer.
Although she shrugged off her acclaim because she really didn’t believe
in the artifice of awards, some of her peers interpreted her response as
disdain—-or worse, ingratitude. “From the moment of my first success,
people got the wrong idea about me,” Audrey said. “And a number of
people never really bothered to figure out that although I had great respect
for the art and craft of acting, I never really cared for the business. They
thought me inconsiderate. The fact is, I cared too much, but only about the
things that really counted.”
And unlike so many of her peers, Audrey always knew what they were.
Chapter 2
The most startling news is that she was a chubby baby, with fat cheeks
and roly-poly thighs, and a tummy that protruded from her organdy pinafores.
She was as round then as she would be thin later, transforming into the svelte
mannequin who made extra flesh seem vulgar. But when she was little, her
dimpled knees drew praise.
Edda Kathleen van Heemstra Hepburn-
certificate, was born on
4, 1929
and from the moment she came wailing into the world, she exhibited an enormous
appetite. “Mother always said I was forever hungry,” Audrey recalled.
“I drank more milk than my two [half] brothers put together, but
apparently, I was never satisfied.”
It may well have been that even as an infant, Audrey was attempting to
compensate with food for what should have been forthcoming in love. Long before
the term was current, it was clear that Audrey was the product of what we now
call a dysfunctional family. Class differences between her mother and father
only added to the domestic turmoil, as did the presence of Audrey’s two half
brothers, Alexander and Jan, offspring of her mother’s first marriage.
Audrey’s mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, never forgot that she was
born into a long line of Dutch nobility and, despite her fluctuating bankbook,
never let anyone else forget it. Raised in
the
Ella spent vacations, occasional weekends, and every summer at the ancestral
estate at Doorn, in
the smallest of the Dutch provinces. The central castle was surrounded by a
wide moat, which Ella used to think of as her private river. Thousands of
tulips could be seen from her window and she learned the rudiments of
arithmetic by counting the flowers. In this idyllic setting, nannies and maids
indulged Audrey’s mother, who never had to lift a finger. She would have a
difficult time taking care of herself later when her circumstances changed
drastically.
According to Audrey, Ella’s own mother was aloof, spending a lot of
time overseeing the running of the household, but her father shamelessly
spoiled the child, giving in to her every whim—except for one.
“My mother desperately wanted to become an actress,” Audrey
recalled. “Yet my grandfather strictly forbade her to go near the stage.
He was adamant. He felt the occupation was beneath his daughter, and might
reflect badly on the van Heemstra heritage. 1 don’t think my mother
ever got over her disappointment in
obeying him.” Her encouragement of Audrey’s career—some would call it the
unrelenting pushiness of a stage mother—-is perhaps more understandable in
light of her own thwarted ambitions.
Ella never fully recovered from her father’s edict. By the time she was
twenty, she had come to realize that she was supposed to marry, and marry well,
and again she acceded to her father’s wishes. The “good Dutch boy”
she agreed to wed, the Honorable Jan Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford,
Knight of the Order of
snobbish and exacting in private, someone who rarely enjoyed an unscheduled
moment in a life devoted entirely to upholding the monarchy. >From the
start, Ella often argued with her husband, failing to accept that she was meant
to be subservient to her mate, and that her wishes were not immediately
granted.
In the first three years of her marriage, she attempted to leave her
husband three times, but each time her father persuaded her to try to work
things out for the sake of their two young sons. In 1925, after five years of
marriage, Ella could stand it no longer, and she was granted a divorce. The
public disagreements between the couple and their final rift scandalized Ella’s
family, and may have contributed to the van Heemstras’ move to
The
Queen Wilhelmina had offered Ella’s father a diplomatic post of his choosing,
and the fact that the Baron had decided upon the underdeveloped, primitive,
South American country that was bordered by the
judgmental eyes.
As governor, the Baron enjoyed the perquisites attached to the post,
especially the deference shown him by the English inhabitants of the
commonwealth, who overlooked his daughter’s unseemly divorced state and invited
Ella to all their parties when she visited with her two sons. It was during
these extended vacations that she began calling herself “Baroness,” a
title to which she was entitled, but one that struck many of her South American
friends as a bit pretentious.
During one trip to a nearby island, she met Joseph Victor Anthony
Hepburn-Ruston, an ordinary-looking banker of English-Irish descent who made up
for his looks with a personality that could charm even the disillusioned Ella.
He lavished attention on her, handpicking orchids to make a bouquet, and wiring
back to the Continent for the silk scarves she missed and the satin bed jackets
she decided she could not live without. Given his slavish devotion, there was
no doubt Joseph was the man for Ella. Even the Baron, who had previously
disdained any non-Dutchman who came calling, saw immediately that Joseph
catered to Ella’s desires and would indulge her in the manner to which she’d
become accustomed, and gave his blessing.
The trouble was, Joseph expected to spoil Ella with her own money.
Hepburn-Ruston’s decision to live off his wife was just the first indication
that their relationship would not run smoothly. Another cause for their marital
discord was the move to
Ella found the stolid, bourgeois atmosphere of the Belgian capital stifling in
the extreme.
From the beginning of their courtship to the end of their bitter
marriage, Audrey’s mother and father displayed a prodigious disregard for
anyone but themselves. Their incessant squabbling took its toll on the only
child they had together. “There wasn’t much time for me,” Audrey
recalled. “And in some ways, I guess I missed the early attention for the
rest of my life.”
An extremely willful woman, Audrey’s mother was clearly inhibited by
the stifling attitudes toward women at that time, particularly in
city of
birth and perhaps the most straitlaced of all European capitals. “My
mother would have been better off in
or anywhere in
where music and art were of equal importance to food and drink,” Audrey
recalled. “She stood out a little, just a little, in
frivolous. You’ve got to realize that even the aristocracy of
basically bourgeois. My mother’s minor rebellions made her something of an
outcast.”
Yet Audrey strongly identified with her mother, and was also
perpetually torn between conventionality and creativity. They remained
unusually close until the Baroness died in 1984, often sharing the same home,
and when not, speaking on the phone every day. The Baroness was the single most
important influence in Audrey’s life, certainly more powerful than any of her
husbands or lovers, and her overbearing personality had a devastating effect.
An extremely private person, Audrey refused to publicly admit the damage, but
friends and relatives acknowledge that the Baroness kept tight control of her
daughter, and inadvertently encouraged Audrey’s latent eating disorder.
