Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (7 page)

“There
was not enough food,” Audrey said. “But that’s a wild understatement.
There was no food at all. Oh, we managed to get some black-market flour to make
a gruel for all our houseguests, but the stuff was full of bugs. Actually, we
were secretly delighted: It was the first protein any of us had had in a long
time.

“And
by this time, everybody had learned to share. War forces people to be magnanimous.
It’s the one good thing. Six slightly injured airmen landed not far from where
we were living, and Mother took them in. Thank heavens the underground network
was still operating, even though its ranks had been diminished. We heard the
gestapo was coming to make a surprise inspection. We had to hide the men, so we
put them in Mother’s big closet.”

Five
of the men were able to leave soon after; the sixth, Lt. Col. Anthony
Deane-Drummond, remained with the van Heemstras for another two weeks, hidden
in a smaller closet until he was fully recovered.

Allied
reinforcements arrived in the next several days, but because the weather was
foggy, they were late, and the Germans were again ready for them. More than
seven thousand soldiers were lost in the weeklong battle at
Arnhem
, and the residents themselves were
suffering equally devastating losses.

The
Nazi leaders had ordered the majority of residents to leave
Arnhem
to prevent German soldiers from
starving. The town’s downtrodden citizens mingled with the recently arrived
penniless refugees in a chain of human misery. Everybody wanted to get out.
Roads were packed with the sick and dying carrying their infants, whatever warm
clothing they had left, and a few pitiful possessions.

According
to eyewitness reports, they cried as they walked, some silently, some with a
wail of desperation. Deathly ill patients were released from hospitals and
forced to crawl. Pregnant women gave birth at the side of the road. This was
the war invisible to the outside world. This was the war at home, the battle
for life of ordinary citizens who just happened to be caught up in the
crossfire of soldiers. Of the estimated ninety thousand people who left
Arnhem
, three thousand
died.

Audrey
and her family lived far enough away from the center of town to avoid the
enforced exodus, but they certainly were not immune from the further ravages of
the Occupation. Soon after Lieutenant Colonel Deane-Drummond left to go back to
England
,
the house in which Audrey’s family was living was bombed. The impact of the
explosion was so great that nothing survived. Thankfully, the van Heemstras
were out trying to help their less fortunate neighbors at the time. They
escaped the blast with only the clothing they were wearing.

Looting
was rampant. German soldiers stripped houses of their silver, linens, fine
furniture, and paintings, sometimes burying their booty in hopes of returning
after the war to collect it. The road bridge over the
Rhine
was completely destroyed. So, too, was the medieval town square.

“We
arrived at friends of Mother’s whose house was still intact,” Audrey
recalled. “I guess there were only about two hundred or so houses
throughout the area that were not razed. So where we were was very crowded. Jan
was so quiet; I remember that vividly. I don’t think he said a word during that
whole long trek to yet another safe refuge. There had been so many, and none of
them were safe. We were vagabonds. I wonder if he thought that’s the way it
would be for the rest of his life—just wandering from one place to another,
avoiding tragedy by the skin of our teeth.”

While
they were at their latest way station, the van Heemstras barely averted another
deadly mishap. The Germans had installed a radio transmitter on the third floor
of the house in which they were staying. When the British discovered the
telltale electronics, they immediately suspected that the inhabitants of the
house were collaborators.

“Don’t
forget, my mother had spent every one of the war years pretending to be a Nazi
sympathizer. So when the British soldiers stormed the door with their long guns
pointed at us, I calmly told them the story. `Your English is so good,‘ they
said, `we’ve just got to believe you.’ They all pulled out packets of
cigarettes then and lit up. Freedom to me smelled like English
cigarettes.”

In
April 1945, Audrey heard from a friend who had access to a radio that the
Allied forces were on their way to
Arnhem
.
The news spread fast. Emaciated and ill, the townsfolk defiantly came out of
hiding to greet their liberators. Audrey was among them.

The
Germans surrendered on May 5. When the British soldiers assembled again, this
time to sweep
Arnhem
for deadly mines, Audrey helped them, giving them tips about the terrain of the
countryside. Skin and bones, she refused to let the liberators out of her
sight. Years of being forced to fend for herself had helped erase some of her
shyness. “Thank you,” she said to the soldiers. “Thank you so
much for saving my life.” She even kissed a few in gratitude.

The
family soon had a personal victory to celebrate. As the Baroness was mending
some embroidered linens that she had managed to hold on to during her
peripatetic war years, she saw a thin, tall young man hesitantly walk up the
cobblestone path. She put down her sewing and went to the door.

“The
whole scene took place in utter silence,” Audrey recalled. “Words
would have ruined it.” The surprise homecoming of Alexander van Heemstra,
the Baroness’s eldest child, was the answer to the family’s prayers. Although
he had suffered unspeakable tortures in the German labor camp, he was strong
enough at the end of the war to walk all the way home.

Audrey
always attached great significance to her sixteenth birthday falling on the day
before liberation. “So what if my present was a day late?” she would
ask. “I got the greatest present in the whole world. And the end of the
war was the greatest present to the whole world!”

She
was so happy, in fact, that she actually wanted to eat. While working in a rest
home for Dutch soldiers in an effort to repay her compatriots for their
sacrifices during the war, she received a cache of milk chocolate bars in
gratitude for her solicitude. “I ate all of them at once,” she said.
“Seven total. And then I got sick. I wanted to eat all of them, actually
felt I deserved all the candy ever made, but then I felt guilty. Too many
scenes of the war were still with me. They’d always be with me. Anytime I got
too happy, there they’d be.”

Her
initial exhilaration at the end of the Occupation was marred by flashbacks of
her more gruesome memories. “It was never really over, not if I had
nightmares and daydreams about the torture. That astounded me. I could never
get rid of this war. I had to live with it.

“But
then I tried to make the best of that. There was nothing else I could do, save
for self-pity, and that never got anyone anywhere. So I used what I witnessed
to form a philosophy of life. It’s simple. I saw people die, I saw loved ones
separated, I saw cruelty and hunger on a daily basis. All that proved to me
that nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s
suffering. Nothing. Not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not
status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with
dignity.”

Chapter 6

Now
that safety was no longer a pressing concern, the bare necessities of food,
clothing, and shelter became the major hurdles for the van Heemstra clan. They
moved to
Amsterdam
,
hoping that a new place would offer a fresh start.

Jobs
were scarce. The Baroness took work as a cook, maid, and housekeeper for a
family whose pedigree was minor compared to her own. But the job came with
housing, which was a major consideration. The family lived in a dank basement
apartment below the big house. Psychologically, the adjustment from aristocracy
to working class was devastating.

The
Baroness had lost everything during the war, but now that the war was over, she
felt these losses more acutely.

“Mother
became maudlin remembering a painting or a candlestick from the old
house,” Audrey said. “She didn’t have time to get nostalgic during
the fighting, but once things were calm, there was time for regret. It was one
thing to sacrifice during a crisis, quite another to realize you had to
sacrifice for the rest of your life.”

Audrey
decided that in the long run, she could best ease the financial burden if she
improved her only skill, so she got out her dancing shoes and began taking
classes with Sonia Gaskell, an innovative Russian teacher who incorporated jazz
and Latin rhythms into her classes.

“Mother
and I were some pair at the end of a day,” Audrey said. “I would get
home exhausted, utterly spent, aching all over so much that I usually skipped
dinner. Mother would be tired, too, from cooking and cleaning all day. But
there was a certain perverse satisfaction in concentrating on our goals. Mother
was trying to earn enough to support my lessons and I wanted to excel so that I
could support Mother. There were no complications.”

Except
one. Audrey’s teacher was not confident she could make a career as a prima
ballerina. Although her technique was flawless, her teacher felt she was tall
without being strong, a paradoxical aesthetic combination that ruined her look.

But
she did impress a film director who stopped by one day. Charles Huguenot van
der Linden was Audrey’s Schwab’s Drugstore, the man who first discovered the
actress who would enchant the world for decades to come.

He
arrived unannounced at Sonia Gaskell’s class one day with the express purpose
of finding a beautiful, brainless dancer who would fill to bursting a
stewardess’s uniform for a bit part in a travelogue he was shooting,
“Nederlands in Zeyen Lessen (Dutch in Seven Lessons).”

Instead,
he found Audrey.

>From
the moment the war ended, after a month of bedrest and force-feeding had
eliminated her hollow look, Audrey captivated most everyone with whom she came
into contact. At eighteen, she had already become the beauty who would enchant
the world: doe eyes, aristocratic cheekbones, tiny waist and hips, regal
carriage.

Her
awkward, funny face was stunning now. Her perpetually startled look became
startling. In photos at the time, she looked like a fawn in the midst of a
seamless metamorphosis into a woman. The frightened wildness in her eyes was
vastly appealing, so much so that director van der Linden decided to change his
mind and cast against type.

In
the film, Audrey was given two words to say: “Who, me?” It was a
question that revealed her lack of confidence and one she would repeat for the
rest of her life, although never more than in those early years of show
business.

“I
tried to get other films after that in
Rotterdam
,
but I was turned down for all of them,” she recalled. “It’s not so
much that I thought of it as a career, but more an easy way to make money. In
lots of ways, that’s what being an actress is all about. But in those very
first years, I was still a dancer at heart.”

Overwhelmed,
driven, and frightened, she was determined to make good on all the sacrifices
her mother had made to provide her with the dance lessons, the six-month season
ticket to the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the series of Beethoven concerts. It was
time for action. With her brothers off to the
Dutch East
Indies
to try to find fame and fortune, Audrey decided to try to
persuade her mother to move to
London
.
Marie Rambert ran an important school for dancers in Notting Hill Gate, and
Audrey was sure she could get a scholarship.