Read Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait Online
Authors: Diana Maychick
Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (3 page)
For most of her life, Audrey had a love/hate relationship with food. As
a toddler in Brussels, on the secluded estate her father owned before his
marriage, she so enjoyed the ubiquitous Belgian chocolate that her mother told
the kitchen help to hide the candy bars to prevent her daughter from gorging.
“Chocolate was my one true love as a child,” Audrey said.
“It wouldn’t betray me. I’ve always said it was either chocolate or my
nails in those years. There was a lot of anxiety.” While living at her
mother’s family’s home at Arnhem during World War 11, after the Nazis forced
her into hiding, she nearly starved to death in a dark cellar, and felt twinges
of survivor’s guilt for the rest of her life. “Why was I spared when so
many others were not? I asked myself that over and over, and I always tried to
find an answer that wasn’t there.”
Having survived near-starvation, food became a luxury to Audrey, not a
necessity. Save for a few tulip bulbs and dirty rainwater, she had done without
it for a month. In her mind, she didn’t need it. For the rest of her life, in
times of great stress Audrey would just stop eating. Like many women with
eating disorders, it was her way of attempting to exert power over her
problems.
Then there was her mother’s tendency to be overweight. As controlling
as the Baroness was in most areas of her life, she could not get a handle on
her weight, and spent most of her life trying to hide twenty-five excess
pounds. She blamed her size for a host of problems, including her husband’s
roving eye. Audrey noted how unhappy her mother was and, at least subconsciously,
also attributed it to her weight. She made a vow to herself never to exceed 103
pounds. With the exception of her pregnancies, she succeeded. But the cost was
sometimes enormous.
As a child, Audrey was always trying to keep things together, to make
them perfect in the hope that her parents would stop fighting. “I often
thought that if I could be a better daughter, pay more attention to the rules,
get to the dining room on time, Mother and Father would have less to worry
about. But I was a big daydreamer, and I forgot my promises as soon as I made
them.” She also read the Bible religiously, as a sort of penance to make
up for her nonexistent sins, and promised baby Jesus she would do anything he
asked as long as her parents stopped fighting.
She was also just a child, too young to realize that her parents’
incompatibility was not her fault. Her father, Joseph, born in
comfortable family, but he always had to work for a living. His relatives were
commoners. Audrey’s mother would put him down for his relatively humble roots
whenever they fought about money, which was their major area of disagreement.
Like the Baroness, who was twelve years his junior, Joseph had been divorced
before their union, and felt an overwhelming social pressure to make his second
marriage work.
Finances interfered from the start. On
of England had stationed Joseph as an investment counselor. The Baroness was
eager to return to
not ready to transfer Joseph home until he had paid his dues at one of their
less important outposts like
The Baroness intervened, and won. She persuaded her father to allow her new
husband to manage his money, thereby insuring his swift return to the
Continent.
In
where the family settled, Audrey’s father became the managing director of the
Belgian branch of the Bank of England. He had lamented returning to
lifestyle of
and he began drinking rather heavily. “My father was in over his head, my
mother said,” Audrey recalled. “He wasn’t really up to the
responsibility of his job or his instant family. Don’t forget, he inherited my
brothers, and they were rambunctious young men. He had his hands full.”
Her half brothers, Alexander and Jan, virtually ignored their baby
sister and spent their days in the rolling hills behind the tall, gray
slingshots at birds and roughhousing with one another. Practical jokes were
another favorite diversion and Gerda, their beloved and long-suffering cook,
was often the brunt of their teasing. She took the blame for them when their
jokes backfired, including the time they broke a priceless hall mirror and
their baby sister cut her thumb. They were muscular boys, full of adolescent
energy, and the Baroness didn’t encourage them to include their baby sister in
their exploits.
That was just the way Audrey liked it. Unlike her robust, hale Dutch
relatives, she was a retiring child who liked to retreat into her room with a
book. With no childhood friends to speak of, she was perfectly content to be
alone, and happier still in the company of animals. Audrey felt uncomfortable
only at dinnertime, when the family convened around an old, heavy mahogany
table and her mother would start picking on her father.
Their jabs at one another were relentless. By 1931, her father began
spending more and more time away from home with his boss, Mantagu Norman, the
governor of the bank in
good friend of Hitler’s, and the sister-in-law of Sir Oswald Mosley, the
figurehead of the Fascist movement in
regularly in support of Nazism. Audrey’s father was in complete support of
Hitler and eventually joined Mosley’s Black Shirt Brigade. Joseph often came
home spouting all sorts of hateful propaganda, and the children became fearful
of his raised voice. “I still loved him, though,” Audrey said.
“I loved my father more than any other man in my life.”
When he left the family, he instilled in Audrey a fear of abandonment
that she would never outgrow.
Chapter 3
Life in the Hepburn-Ruston household became as quiet as a monastery
after Audrey’s father left in 1935 and moved to
inner turmoil Audrey was experiencing over the breakup of her family.
“I never played with dolls,” she said. “Mother would
often lament this fact, since I was her only daughter and she liked the idea of
my dressing up the things and combing their awful blond hair. But the real
reason I didn’t like them is that I felt I had to play house with them, and I
didn’t want to bring up all the pain of what my own home life was like. We went
from loud screaming matches that were never resolved, to utter silence, like a
cloistered existence. It was extremely perplexing. It hurt too much. I didn’t
want to talk about it. I preferred to ignore it.”
She also began to eat away her sorrows, counting on a chocolate bar or
afternoon pastry to ease her loneliness. “It was a frighteningly awful
time, especially since I refused to tell anybody how low I was feeling. There I
was, just about six years old, and I know now I was clinically depressed.”
What gave Audrey a sense of hope—and made her smile for the first time
since her father left—was going to the ballet with her mother. “She began
by taking me to concerts, which I adored. I remember hearing Mozart for the
first time and thinking that there was a glimmer of hope. Life finally offered
up a good surprise. Music! I felt good while I listened. Then she began taking
me to the ballet, and that was even better. For that hour and a half, I forgot
my troubles. I got lost in the sheer beauty of bodies moving in time to
music.”
Soon, Audrey’s extreme shyness and reserve started to crack a little.
She began expressing interest in something other than her fantasy world of
perfect families. She told her mother she wanted to take up dance.
“Mother was ecstatic,” Audrey recalled. “Not only was I
fulfilling one of her secret desires to go on the stage, she also hoped I’d
lose some. of my baby fat. A tummy had plagued her ever since she’d had
children. Excess weight was looked down upon in her circle-it meant peasant
stock. My mother was a bit of a snob, and the last thing she wanted was to
perpetuate a legacy of fatties.”
Curiously, her ballet lessons only served to encourage even more weight
gain. “I wasn’t really used to sustained physical activity,” she
recalled. “My brothers didn’t play with me, and I had no close friends as
a child. I wasn’t the type to run and climb trees and hike the mountains
either. So when I took up ballet, I developed an enormous appetite. After a
class, it felt like there wasn’t enough chocolate in all of
Looking back on that time from the perspective of adulthood, Audrey
attributed her hunger to hidden feelings of inadequacy. “I was always
berating myself for things that I couldn’t change. So I ate to compensate.
“My teeth also used to bother me an inordinate amount of time, for
example. They were crooked. In fact, they’re still crooked, but I am used to
them now. However, with orthodontia work, they could have been straightened.
But that was never offered as an option when I was a girl. I don’t think my
mother thought it would be worth the expense, and I never asked her why. I
didn’t want to know really if she didn’t value me as much as my brothers. In
any case, there were so many things I, myself, couldn’t change about myself,
and they all conspired to make me feel inadequate. I suppose it all went hack
to my father leaving. After that, nothing felt right.”
Audrey so missed her father that she persuaded the Baroness to allow
her to spend as much time as the courts would allow with him in
nothing at all like what she expected. “He worked all day, went out with
lady friends for dinner, and I rarely saw him,” she recalled. “And I
was jealous of everyone who did. I had this wonderfully prim governess for a
while, extremely straitlaced, and I used to begrudge her the ten minutes a week
she spent with my father discussing my progress.”
At the day school she attended, she felt more like an outsider than
ever before. Her classmates taunted her because of her thick Dutch accent, her
poor command of English, and her thorough lack of interest in sports like field
hockey. “For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It’s not the
most social pastime.”
For the next couple of years, Audrey still harbored a hope that her
parents would reconcile. “The only times they really talked was about me,
so I figured if I gave them trouble, they’d have more and more communication.
The trouble was, I was afraid of trouble. As much as I wanted them together, I
was petrified of being naughty to achieve that goal. I was definitely a ‘don’t
rock the boat’ girl, even though I knew that the more they had to talk about
me, the more they had to talk.”
Audrey still gave them both a lot to worry about, even if they each did
their fretting alone. “I wouldn’t talk at all for days on end,” she
recalled. “I think I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, I would start
to cry. And 1 knew if I started to cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
At the age of nine, while in her father’s care, she began taking a
weekly ballet class in
Again, her perfectionism became obvious, but for the first time in her life, it
began to work in her favor. “I was overweight, uncoordinated, awkward, and
sloppy. My sense of timing was off. Yet by sheer will, I did well,” she
recalled. “It was the one thing that held me together when my parents’
divorce came through.”
In mid-1938, three years after filing the papers, the marriage of
Baroness Ella van Heemstra and Joseph Hepburn-Ruston was officially dissolved.
Although the Baroness rarely laid blame, she would obliquely allude to her
ex-husband’s involvement in the pro-Hitler Black Shirts as the contributing
cause. But Audrey herself discovered later that her father may also have mismanaged
the van Heemstra fortune he was entrusted with upon his marriage. “There
were even whispers about embezzlement,” Audrey said. “It made me
suspicious of men’s motives when they professed their love. I was always
wondering if they were after my money.”
